by Leslie North
If she felt it, what were the odds Dmitry felt it as well?
The kiss deepened unexpectedly. The pressure of his lips intensified—this time, Harper definitely knew that Dmitry was responsible—and his hands came up from where he had kept them casually at his side. One hand ran down the small of her back, pulling her in against him; his other glided up her hip, mapping the curves she had already seen him memorizing on more than one occasion. He pressed his body against hers, aligning them together as one, his head bent to easily accept her eager mouth.
She had to go slow. It would be no use getting swept up by Dmitry Karev. She suspected he was working more than just his body against her; surely her kiss wasn't so good he had forgotten he had his own point to prove.
Right?
She had taken him by surprise so far, but the infuriatingly sexy bookseller appeared to have more than a few tricks up his cashmere sweater sleeves. Assuming she hadn't knocked every thought of their conversation out of his head, she needed to resume control of the kiss. Harper drew one hand back to cup the back of his neck, before allowing her fingers to slide up into his hair. She stroked and teased the base of his skull, enjoying the silken sensation, and exploring the messy knot that so intrigued her. When was the last time she had been with a man with long hair? Had she ever? She wanted, no, yearned to see it down in tumbling blond disarray around his face. She wanted to see him naked and flushed with fever, she wanted—
Apparently Dmitry wanted things, too. The hand on her waist flexed as he tightened his grip on her, and all at once Harper found herself turned around on her feet and thrust back against the trunk of the tree. Her back hit the hard surface, but she didn't register any pain. If anything, the thrill that raced up her spine at the display of force was better than anything he had done to her so far. It took her back almost instantly to that first moment in the bookstore, back to the moment when Dmitry had lost his temper and let her know that there were limits to the control he was willing to give her.
She let him pin her now, let him think he had assumed full control of the kiss. Then, she parted her lips against his and allowed her tongue to slip free, to delve along the hard seam of his mouth like a letter opener seeking an opening in an invitation. With a deep groan, he let her slide past his remaining defenses, and Harper lost herself in the sensation of him. Dmitry's tongue thrust to parry hers, but it wasn't a true deflection; after meeting in a brief tangle of hot breath and teeth, he won the battle and claimed her for his own.
But Harper had other, freer appendages at her disposal, and Dmitry had other areas that would benefit from her enthusiastic attention. He gave an explosive, wordless groan as her hand found its way down the inside of his thigh. When she found her intended target, she nearly broke off contact altogether, but she kept her surprise as tightly-lidded as she could. Dmitry had not been exaggerating when he said the condom she kept with her wouldn't be up to the task. Compared with what she was feeling now, it seemed almost laughable she would have made the suggestion in the first place.
"Mmm," she hummed against his lips, letting him know just how much she appreciated this discovery. She flattened her palm against his leg and reveled in the thick heat of his length. "Feels like you're concealing a weapon down there," she whispered as she ran her fingers along the rigid imprint of his cock. She gave a light gasp when Dmitry's only response to this was to slip his hand up beneath her shirt. She hadn't been expecting him to take that next step on his own, but no way in hell she was complaining. The deep, enduring intimacy of their kiss had already caused her nipples to tighten, and they ached to be touched and massaged by a skillful hand.
Dmitry's roving fingers didn't hesitate. They slid against her skin and beneath the underwire of her bra, exploring the heft of her left breast worshipfully. The pads of his fingers caught on her nipple, and Harper would have shot through the roof if they weren't outside beneath an autumnal afternoon sky.
Outside. Outdoors. She had completely forgotten that they were in a very public place, engaging in a very torrid, public display of… whatever-this-was. To outside eyes, they must have looked like genuine lovers who couldn't keep their hands off each other.
Something in Harper's chest clenched as a result of this thought, and she pulled back slightly from Dmitry. He leaned in as if to pursue her, as if her lips were an intoxicating drug and he was in desperate need of a hit. God, that expression of helpless desire looked so good on him. She wondered if he could identify anything in her face that mirrored what she saw in him. She hoped not.
She hoped she wasn't the only one actually feeling that spark between them. Dmitry was obviously attracted to her, but that was the point of this exercise—to prove to someone even as unassailable as he was that he could still fall victim to her physical charms. That there might be more to it was a dangerous road to let herself go down.
Dmitry stared into her eyes. He slowly withdrew his hand from beneath her shirt, although he never pulled his gaze away from her. Before he could collect himself to say anything, Harper held the condom up between them. She grinned for good measure, and watched as his eyes rounded.
"When did you—?" he began.
"While you were distracted." She laughed a little breathlessly. She couldn't help but ride the high of his astonishment at her skill—it was almost as good as the high of his affection. Almost. "You underestimated me, Dmitry." She wagged the condom at him. "I advise you not to do it again."
"You're not the only one I underestimated." He stepped back to allow them both some breathing room beneath the tree. His comment confused Harper; it seemed self-reflected, but what else was there to reflect on? If anything, Dmitry had overestimated his ability to hold out against her… right? Or had he possibly underestimated something else—something like his feelings for her?
Harper shook her head to clear it. If there was one thing she wasn't going to let this encounter inspire, it was thoughts like that.
"Do you need a moment to readjust yourself?" she offered benevolently. She kept the deprecating smile on her face as Dmitry glanced down at his downstairs situation. By the looks of things from where she was standing, his situation wasn’t likely to recede any time soon.
"I'm going to need more than a moment." Dmitry sighed. "Later."
He took her up on her offer, though, and adjusted the front of his pants a little to disguise his erection. Harper's face warmed at a dozen implications she could draw from his words. Did he mean he would need to get the memory of this moment between them out of his system later, in private, or did he mean that he wanted to revisit the possibility of continuing it with her?
"Where did you learn how to do this?" he demanded eventually. The exasperated almost-glare had returned, and Harper thought they had a shot of returning to real normalcy. Harper relaxed a little herself, although the tension between them was obviously there to stay. "Clearly you were trained somewhere," he said.
She had a feeling he was joking, but he had no idea how close to right he was. "Burlesque clubs." She shrugged as if it was nothing, all the while secretly enjoying the new way Dmitry blinked and looked at her at this revelation. "I've worked at a few of them around the city part-time," she explained. "When you're blessed—and cursed—with curves like mine, it's important to learn how to protect yourself… to weaponize yourself. I learned how to put my body to good use, all while retaining my autonomy. I really enjoy it, actually. It's a lot of fun."
"I meant the pickpocketing… however, that does explain a lot," Dmitry mused.
The silence that settled between them was so thick that she could have cut it with a knife—or released them both with a kiss. She was certain their impromptu make-out session weighed as heavily on Dmitry's mind as if did her own, otherwise being in one another's proximity wouldn't feel this way. It was like watching a Hollywood bomb count itself down to zero and bracing yourself for the explosion that never came.
"So we agree to go with my plan?" she asked him.
"We're in agre
ement that you have a plan," he said finally. "Even if I don't like anything about it. Just promise me the moment anything more than your hand starts to go south, you abort the mission. You get out. Whatever Boris has on him isn't worth blowing your cover over. If anything feels amiss, we'll find another way to get the info."
Harper grinned and gave him a thumbs-up. She was confident nothing would go amiss—especially not after her success seducing the unseduceable Dmitry Karev. She’d had no honest idea going in how that would turn out, and look how well she had succeeded in working over her target.
As he turned away from her, however, her smile diminished, and she grew thoughtful. She followed him to the car. They still had work to do, and she couldn't afford to be distracted with thoughts of how she might have expanded her objective while Dmitry held her in his arms.
Some victories she couldn't allow herself to taste.
Harper sank deeper into the furry hood of her jacket as she hurried across the street from Mari Vanna. It was evening, just an hour or two after the dinner rush. Dmitry was waiting for her by his car.
"Well?" he prompted her before she'd even touched down on the sidewalk. "Did you get the flash drive?"
He was parked under a broken streetlight several blocks down from the restaurant, leaning against his unlit vehicle with his arms crossed. Harper moseyed up beside him and fell back against the car, her shoulder brushing against his. She expelled a long sigh.
"I thought I told you to wait in the car," she stated. "I'm pretty sure I saw you stalking outside the window at one point. I told you I'd give you a full rundown of everything that happened when I got back! Why couldn't you just trust me?"
"I trust you," Dmitry said. "Forgive me if I don't trust Boris." He pushed off from the car and turned to stand over her. Without the street lamp to illuminate him, his presence seemed somehow bigger in the darkness, somehow inescapable—not that she wanted to escape. "And forgive me if I don't think it's your place to tell me to wait in the car for you when you might be in danger," he murmured.
"I know, right?" Harper moved slightly with an idea to get out from underneath him, but she gave that up. Dmitry was blocking her from going anywhere, and besides, she wasn't sure there was any place she would rather be than facing off against the handsome Russian in the darkness. She was still coming down off the adrenaline rush of her mission; having him this close to her only prolonged it.
"Can you imagine one of us grown adults instructing the other to wait in the car like a child?" she mock-whispered. "I can't even wrap my head around telling you what to do and expecting to be listened to! Sounds like something you'd say to me!"
"Point taken," he muttered.
"Flash drive also taken," she supplied.
"I'm sorry." He didn't appear to have heard her. "You think I'm doubting your competency, Harper, but I'm not. I was worried about… what? That was fast," he interrupted himself mid-explanation as she produced the flash drive.
Harper smiled wryly. "I'm a fast girl when I want to be. Let's plug this puppy in and see what we can uncover."
They both got into the car. Dmitry started the ignition as Harper pulled her laptop from out of the backseat and unfolded it. They drove in silence toward the park as she booted it up and typed in her various passcodes.
"Did you kiss him?" Dmitry asked her.
The question came out of nowhere. Harper actually paused mid-typing and turned in the passenger seat toward him. Now she could see Dmitry's face illuminated by the blue light of her laptop screen. Despite her roaring success, he did not look happy. His eyes were fixed on the road ahead, and the muscles in his gorgeous angular jaw were clenched harder than usual.
"What the hell has that got to do with anything?" she demanded.
"I just want to know if you put into practice everything you used against me," he said. "We made a plan. Did you stick to it?"
"You know I didn't kiss him." She was trying very hard to feel annoyed with this invasive line of questioning, but somehow she couldn't bring herself to be genuinely irritated. It felt completely out of character for him to be giving her the third degree about her personal decisions. Hell, if she was being honest, it felt a little like navigating a conversation with a jealous middle school crush.
"You were hovering out there half the time watching me through the window," she reminded him yet again. "What do you think you saw?"
"I didn't see your conversation with him. I stayed out of sight." At least now Dmitry was starting to sound like his usual cranky self. Scratch that. He might be cranky, but this isn't his usual anal-retentive self at all. What's the deal?
"I told you, I wanted to be close in case something went wrong," he continued.
"You're jealous," she stated. "Just admit it already."
"I'm not jealous."
"It's fine! Dmitry, it's okay to be jealous!" Harper said quickly. "For the record, if our situations had been reversed—if you were the one tasked with going in and feeling up some hot mafia chick—I would probably… well, it's not like I think you haven't in the past." This was a hell of a lot harder to get out than she had anticipated. Was it worth making Dmitry feel better if it meant exposing her own feelings on the subject? "But if the roles had been reversed in this scenario, then yeah. Even if it was for a good cause, I would feel a little bit grouchy about you kissing someone else so soon after that… after you had practiced so recently with me."
Dmitry was silent for a long moment. Harper kept her eyes fixed forward on her computer screen, watching the circular ball spin around and around as her desktop loaded. Finally, he broke through with a pertinent question.
"You think Boris is hot?"
She couldn't help it; she burst out laughing at this. After a moment, Dmitry's mouth flexed a little ruefully, and the tension between them eased somewhat. Despite his every denial to the contrary, he had just let her win the argument. He was admitting defeat. He was jealous of Boris. Harper decided to cut him some slack.
"He tried to go in for a kiss," she admitted as she stuck the flash drive into her computer. "I had to keep my face close enough to his to block him from seeing where my hand was going. I made up some excuse about not liking the smell of vodka on his breath… not liking vodka in general. When he turned to order me a glass of wine, I disappeared back into the crowd. Not saying I wouldn't object to being taken on an actual date there," she mentioned casually. Then, "Shit."
"What is it?" Dmitry asked.
"I'm not sure." Harper squinted at the information printed across the screen, turning it over in her brain. "It's not … wait, I do know what this is. God damn it."
"All the swearing from the passenger seat isn't exactly inspiring my confidence," Dmitry mentioned as he turned them down a back street and slowed. "We got a problem?"
"Just a little one. Nothing I can't handle."
He shot her a disbelieving look, and Harper smiled weakly. She tried the thumbs-up again, but could see he wasn't buying it this time. "It's just that… in order for me to log into this information, I have to use a different computer."
"What computer?" Dmitry asked.
"I have to access it from one of the terminals Boris has used already. I have to use a mob computer," she explained. "That's the only way we're going to be able to get anything off it. The good news is, it doesn't look like they planned for someone with my skillset to get ahold of this—it's not like the automated retaliation we dealt with the other day. It's not a purposeful, or even a sophisticated security system on their part, but it's definitely a roadblock I wasn't expecting." She shook her head in defeat. "If I try to force my way in with a decryptor, or even a virus, I risk damaging the files irreparably—the information would be scattered and unintelligible. It would be beyond recovery."
"So we don't have any other options," Dmitry surmised.
"I'm afraid not." She peered at him out the corner of her eye, but he wasn't looking at her. "Think you can get us in somewhere?"
Dmitry was silent for a
long moment. Harper, whose talkativeness normally increased when faced with unfilled air, kept quiet. As much as she had uncovered about the man sitting beside her when she was acting alone as Belvedere, there was so much about him she still didn't know. What would it mean to a man like Dmitry—a man who had left the darkness of his old life behind him to start anew—to return to that world? Even if it was just for appearances' sake, and even if Harper thought she needed him, she couldn't ask him to make that sacrifice. She just couldn't.
"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I can get us in somewhere."
"It doesn't have to be 'us'," she whispered. "Not if you don't want it to be. I can go in alone for you. For Sergey."
Let me protect you, Dmitry… the same way I know you want to protect me.
"Out of the question," he said. "And not open for discussion. This time when we go in, we go in together."
Harper sank back into the chair and sighed.
"That was easier than I thought it'd be," Dmitry muttered
Something about this latest leg of the operation made Harper more wary of just how many things could go wrong.
She allowed Dmitry to escort her through the doors of the club to the coat check, her heartbeat hammering away beneath the pressure of his grip. It wouldn't surprise her if he could tell how wired she was by taking her pulse alone, but if he thought anything of it, he said nothing. He took his hand away, and she shrugged out of her coat, moving her shoulders sensuously as she got into character.
This wasn't like her, and she knew it. She was a fly-by-the-seat-of-her-pants, no-holds-barred kind of gal, a woman energized by danger as much as she was male attention. So why was it so hard to remember that now? Thoughts of Dmitry filled her brain until she could scarcely concentrate on the task at hand.
Would the return of the prodigal son to mob territory increase their chances of being picked up on? How much danger was he in now that Sergey was dead, and his other brothers had followed him out of the mob? There might be plenty of people who suspected he had gone soft and felt they had a score to settle.