A shiver of response rippled through her. But her troubled gaze was fixed on the ceiling, not on him.
“I’m a loyal American, born in Manhattan to an American mother.” She sighed. “Admittedly, with my family history, it wasn’t easy to persuade Diplomatic Security when I applied for my clearance. I’m probably the only diplomatic passport holder in history whose father made the cover of Newsweek for smuggling chemical weapons to North Korea.”
That was the third time in five minutes she’d referred to Dane Rossi. She wanted to talk about him, whether she knew it or not.
Delicately he tapped ash from his cigarette. “You made the news yourself, didn’t you, when they appointed you to head your organization in Moscow? The arms dealer’s daughter turned chemical scientist, the ex-Mafia princess who atoned for her father’s sins.”
She managed a shaky laugh.
“It wasn’t my father’s sins I intended to atone for.”
He waited a beat.
“There was a great deal of speculation, as I recall, about what happened to you in Bangkok. I’ve always wondered how much of it they managed to get correct.”
A haunted look shadowed her sculpted features. Nikolai ignored an unaccustomed stab of reluctance that felt uncomfortably like guilt. His damn emotions, so long suppressed, were all over the map for some reason.
Unless he’d gone off his game entirely, she still had nightmares about Bangkok. And here he was, raising those old ghosts—exhuming the bodies, as it were—to haunt her again.
Her mouth thinned, as though she were steeling herself to face down an uncomfortable truth. She didn’t shrink from it, and his estimation of her grit just kept climbing.
“The reporters got nearly all of it correct.” Her voice thickened. “My father died in a warehouse in downtown Bangkok in a chemical arms deal gone sour. The resulting gunfight punctured a canister of sarin gas.
“Papà survived the gunfight, but died of exposure within the first two minutes,” she said steadily, like a child reciting a memorized lesson. “Along with his bodyguards and the North Korean agent who’d come to close the deal. But there were conventional explosives stored in that warehouse as well. When one of those went off, the explosion contaminated ten city blocks with nerve agent.”
He knew the gospel of truth that the reporters had published. He’d clipped every article for his Skylar Rossi scrapbook. Kirill had died in that warehouse, but the coroner ruled the cause of death a .22 caliber bullet to the brain.
His brother had been executed with his own handgun. Then all hell had broken loose.
Kirill would never tell his story to Nikolai. The Bangkok police had found him dead on the scene. The sole survivor of the warehouse massacre was the woman lying beside him. So Nikolai had pieced together his own narrative of his brother’s death.
Since that day, Skylar Rossi, the pampered Mafia princess, had been front and center on his hit list.
She rolled on her side to face him. Her long lashes were still damp and spiky, but her eyes were dry. He’d given her too much time to regain her balance.
You’re definitely losing your touch, Maestro.
“Back at the dacha,” she said, “you were asking me about—my first boyfriend. He was Russian, of course. Like you. At times, you actually remind me of him.”
A prickle of alarm tightened his skin. He’d had complete reconstructive surgery twice in his lifetime, from the best plastic surgeons money could buy. He looked nothing like his brother now.
Kirill had been cavalier to the point of carelessness, a compulsive gambler and a ladies’ man. He’d selectively ignored the elements of their KGB training that didn’t suit him, seen little need to separate business from pleasure, and his tradecraft had been sloppy.
But he’d been Nikolai’s little brother, his responsibility, just like Irina and Misha. Kirill’s involvement with the woman at his side had killed him.
The familiar rage burned in his chest, but he tamped it down.
“You must have a weakness for Russian men,” he said lightly, one finger tracing the satin line of her jaw. “How fortunate.”
Ignoring this minor distraction, she studied him far too thoughtfully, her cobalt eyes searching his face.
“You don’t really look alike—similar hair, I suppose, although your eyes are entirely different. But you have the same blend of European sophistication and Russian secrecy, the same amalgam of elegance and danger.”
Her face turned rueful. “I wasn’t exactly planning to fall for another Russian.”
Now he was the one distracted. Was she really falling for him? Falling in love with him?
Or was that a diversionary tactic on her part? Who was playing whom in this interrogation?
He’d better put an end to this dangerous exercise, the comparisons she was drawing between her Russian lovers. Fortunately for him, he knew the perfect way to do it.
Cupping her jaw, he eased a thumb along the full curve of her lower lip. When he heard the ragged catch of her breath, lazy satisfaction curled through him.
“Is that what’s happening here, Dr. Rossi?” he murmured. “Are you falling for me?”
Her mouth was made for seduction. He wondered what it would take to get those lush lips wrapped around his cock.
“Don’t be alarmed, Mr. Markov,” she said huskily. “You’re a one-night stand.”
He could have accepted that, he told himself, if she hadn’t followed the words by sweeping her marvelously versatile tongue across his thumb. For an instant, as she gazed up at him, her face was pure mischief.
But he had an interrogation to conduct.
“Clearly,” he murmured, “young Danilovich was in over his head.”
Her momentary playfulness vanished, and he regretted the loss. But that was nonsense.
“Actually,” she said tightly, “the person over her head in that relationship was me. I was seventeen, innocent and very sheltered. He was my father’s mysterious, exciting houseguest. When he started pursuing me, I could hardly believe my luck.”
Nikolai frowned. The way Kirill described it, the last time he phoned in before boarding Rossi’s private jet for Bangkok, his host’s spoiled daughter was a young seductress, sneaking into his room at night.
She colored and glanced away. “You probably think I was a little fool to get involved with one of my father’s business associates. But I’d been raised not to ask questions about Papà’s work. I actually thought he worked for the government, maybe the CIA. I thought his secretive nature, all those late-night conclaves in his study with questionable characters who spoke Chinese and Arabic and Russian, the security cameras and bodyguards and peripatetic nature of our lives, were all part of his cover for the intelligence community. That’s how much of a little fool I was.”
Bitterness tinged her voice as she rolled onto her back and gazed blindly at the ceiling.
“Then I compounded my foolishness by falling in love with Kirill—or so I thought. I was shy and bookish, with a life that discouraged the usual teenage friendships. We moved every six months. By high school, I was studying with a series of private tutors.”
Her throat moved as she swallowed. “Of course, I was completely inexperienced. Seducing me must have been child’s play for him.”
That wasn’t what Kirill had said. He’d claimed Rossi’s adolescent daughter had thrown herself at him, that she was a randy little bitch and it would take a saint to turn down what she was so eagerly offering.
Afterward Kirill had given her the brush-off, and she’d thrown a temper tantrum. He’d only hoped the brat wasn’t going to follow him to Bangkok.
The memory filled Nikolai with cold fury—the same black need for vengeance that had sustained him for eighteen years. Twenty-four hours ago, he’d have thought she was lying to him, too embarrassed to own up to her past mistakes.
Yet he saw nothing but misery, held tightly under rein, in her tear-filled eyes.
“When he dumped me, I was heartbr
oken,” she said softly. “I couldn’t believe he meant the hurtful things he’d said—that virgins bored him, that I was too much the good girl, too brainy and bookish for his taste. So I booked a commercial flight and followed him to Bangkok.”
That much, Nikolai had pieced together. But nothing else she was saying made any sense—unless Kirill had lied to him. Which would hardly be the first time. When both your father and your brother were KGB agents, there wasn’t much honesty at the supper table. They’d all put up a front for his oblivious mother and his kid sister.
“Bangkok,” he said. “Where Dane Rossi was scheduled to deliver several tons of sarin from the aging Soviet stockpile to a buyer for the Korean People’s Army.”
“Yes.” Her mouth twisted. “Moscow didn’t need a stash of twenty-year-old sarin. The CMA had upgraded its arsenal with the highly toxic and far more persistent VX, produced in bulk by places like Khimgorod.”
“With which you remain obsessed eighteen years later,” he observed. “Kirill Danilovich was the seller.”
With the encouragement of the KGB, he added silently, who were never averse to turning a profit.
“And my father was the middleman.” She sighed. “Needless to say, I knew none of that when I climbed into a taxi and followed them to that warehouse. All I wanted was the chance to speak with Kirill alone.
“Instead…” She swallowed hard. “I walked in on the handoff to Papà’s North Korean clients.”
She seemed to have forgotten where she was. Face white as her pillowcase, eyes shadowed and staring, she’d journeyed eighteen years into the past. And she’d taken Nikolai there with her.
“They discovered me, of course,” she said, voice brittle to the point of shattering. “And then Papà wanted an explanation. I tried to protect Kirill, but Papà was no fool—whatever else he might have been. He was very traditional, very old school, a devout Roman Catholic like any good Mafioso. When he realized what had been happening right under his nose, that his houseguest had seduced his virginal daughter, he—”
Her hands clenched in the sheets, drew the linen tight to her chin, like a child who fears the dark.
“He—” She blinked rapidly, brows drawing together in a fierce scowl of determination he was coming to recognize. “He ordered his bodyguards to disarm Kirill, who threatened and blustered to no avail. When I realized what Papà meant to do, I started screaming, begging, clawing at them. But they were holding me too. Then Papà—merda! Why is this still so difficult? Papà—blew my boyfriend’s brains out—with his own pistol.”
Nikolai could hear the beat of his own heart, the slow, remorseless heartbeat of a great white shark gliding through the deep. No part of this story had made it into Newsweek. He’d had to surmise what happened in Kirill’s last minutes. He’d believed Dane Rossi had ordered the execution to satisfy his spiteful bitch of a daughter, to salve her damaged ego.
It had never occurred to him that Skylar fought to save her lover.
“I screamed my throat raw,” she said softly. “I screamed until I couldn’t breathe. In my nightmares, I’m still screaming.”
A tear streaked slowly down her cheek.
“When Papà tried to—comfort me, as if he possibly could, I tore free and bolted for the street. All I wanted was to escape, pretend none of it had happened. But my father’s North Korean clients had other ideas.”
“They must have had no clue what sort of family crisis they’d blundered into.” Nikolai was numb with disbelief, but none of it showed in his voice. While eddies of shock rippled through him, he glided through on autopilot—the perfect interrogator.
“Their colonel spoke some English. He was concerned that I’d seen his face, heard his name. He didn’t want me to escape. When he drew his gun, my father fired at him. Then there were bullets flying everywhere. Someone grabbed another Soviet weapon that was part of the shipment—a flamethrower.”
Her fingers knotted in the sheets.
“Then the explosion happened. A canister broke open, and sarin sprayed everywhere. It was pure happenstance that the seller had thrown in some chemical protective gear as a bonus. There was a gas mask right next to me. I was in shock, of course. I felt oddly calm as I pulled it on.”
“With a presence of mind rather impressive in a seventeen-year-old girl,” he murmured.
Stiffly she shrugged off the compliment.
“My tutor and I had just finished the AP Chemistry curriculum. I’d completed my practicum in the research laboratory of a major chemical company. I knew how the gear worked and how to use it.”
“But the others couldn’t reach their gear in time,” he supplied. This, too, had been in the press coverage. And he too felt oddly calm. By this point, his brother had been dead, his troubles over.
Skylar Rossi’s had just begun.
She drew the sheets tight beneath her chin. Her pupils had widened until they nearly swallowed the blue irises.
“As the warehouse burned, I watched my father and his bodyguards die. With sarin, it doesn’t take long. It’s readily absorbed through inhalation or absorption.” Her speech quickened, the rapid recitation of a scholar at oral exams. “One microgram droplet causes drooling, nausea, loss of bodily functions, twitching, jerking, unconsciousness. It’s the convulsions and the resulting asphyxia that finally kill you. You see, sarin is an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor—“
“Skylar.”
“Its mechanism of action is similar to an insecticide—“
“Skylar.”
“Because chemical weapons are just that—insecticides for people—“
He stopped her panicked recital the only way he knew—the only way short of violence. He gripped her head in his hands and kissed her. The raw cocktail of violence, sex, and denial poured through him. He channeled all of it into kissing her—this woman whose downfall he’d coldly plotted for half a lifetime, with a diabolical creativity that now chilled him.
The Maestro didn’t make mistakes. Yet he’d been utterly wrong about Skylar. She hadn’t been responsible for his brother’s death. Kirill had made his own mistakes.
But it was Skylar who’d suffered for them, who was still suffering.
She met his kiss with equal frenzy, gasping for air, clawing at him, as if she were drowning and he alone could save her. He got a hand between her thrashing legs and she opened for him, hot and slick.
“God, Skylar.” He groaned. He was iron-hard for her, ready in a heartbeat, aching to fill the gaping void of his life, to obliterate his darkness with her blazing light. He was nothing but a machine, programmed to lie and kill on command, hard-wired to hate her by a misunderstanding that staggered him.
His entire life had been a lie. Without the cold fire of vengeance that had kept his ice cube of a heart beating for years, he had nothing.
Nothing except her, writhing and desperate against his fingers, her sinuous body meeting his rhythm, her mouth hot and hungry with need.
“More,” she panted between kisses. “Mio Dio, I want more! Nikolai—make me forget.”
Her hand closed around his cock and worked him. He almost came in her hand. It was all he could do to climb on top of her, subdue her frantic struggles, get between her thighs and sink deep into her heat.
The way she rippled and clenched around him felt like heaven, or as close to heaven as a man like him would ever get. He gritted his teeth as the orgasm roared toward him like an avalanche.
She held his gaze like a lifeline as it slammed into him. As she came apart in his arms, she clung to him and looked deep into his soul.
If only he’d had one to show her.
_____________________________________
I must be dreaming, Skylar thought.
She lay tangled in the arms of a killer, a man without a conscience or a soul, and floated replete in the only true sense of safety she’d ever known. Her body ached and stung in a dozen places in the aftermath of a violent passion that left her flabbergasted.
For this brief
interlude—drifting unanchored in time and space, miles above the vast landmass of the Eurasian continent—she felt at peace.
She didn’t want to ponder what that might mean.
No, it was all very simple. Her frantic recital of the memories that never left her, the day her father died and her life changed forever, followed by the purging fire of a climax that wiped her clean of guilt and grief—she’d been riding an emotional roller coaster all night.
Sexual catharsis had exorcised her demons. It meant nothing more than that.
And her seatmate on this roller coaster ride through madness now lay beneath her, one hand splayed comfortably through her tangled hair, the slow drum of his heart like a metronome against her cheek.
“Feeling better?” he murmured. A tiny flame flared in the darkness as he lit up.
The expensive perfume of French tobacco curled through the air. Clearly the Russian oligarch who owned this plane had disabled the smoke detector.
“It’s ancient history.” Her fingers swirled lightly across the taut ripple of his abdomen, the faint groove of the knife scar that snaked across his ribs. Goose bumps rose along his skin, and a flicker of feminine satisfaction curled her lips.
“You know the rest of the story, I suppose,” she said. “The whole world knows the rest of the story. My father’s warehouse burned to the ground. Ten city blocks of downtown Bangkok were contaminated with nerve agent. Eight of the first responders died before the paramedics smartened up and found gas masks.”
His cigarette flared in the darkness, chest rising as he inhaled. “And the paramedics found you, still wearing your gas mask, huddled unconscious in the ruins.”
“Apparently I managed to stagger outdoors before I passed out. But I don’t remember that.”
She tilted back her head to gaze up at him. From this angle, oddly, he looked even more like Kirill. But the shape of his patrician nose and elegant jaw were entirely different. She must be losing her mind.
“So now you know,” she finished, “why I chose this career. My father’s shortcomings were his own doing. It wasn’t his sins I needed to atone for. It was my own.”
The Russian Temptation (Book Two) (Foreign Affairs 2) Page 20