We Wish You A Naughty Christmas: A Christmas Collection

by Skye Warren

“You’re stealing Bianca Moreland’s mail?” Mira says. “You can’t do that.”

  “He’ll do that and more. Tell them,” Viktor says. “Tell them about our fake family back in Moscow. Tell them about the Vostovs.”

  “This isn’t like the Vostovs.” I feel the blood trickle down my chin. I let it trickle. I have other shirts, other suit jackets. I take an apple from the bowl, flick out my pika, and slice into it. I keep the blade nice and sharp and it goes in like butter.

  “When we were at the orphanage,” Viktor explains, “The Vostovs were our imaginary family. We’d spy on them. Pretend they were ours. That’s what he’s doing with Bianca.”

  “It’s not the same,” I say. “It’s different.”

  “That’s what we thought about the Vostovs,” Viktor says. “We saw them at a market once. We were hungry, pathetic eight-year-old orphans. The Vostovs looked so happy. We’d follow them. Later we’d sneak into their home and sit on couches like we belonged. Steal their mail.”

  I glower out the window, remembering sad Christmas cards taped to a painted block wall. Cards we stole from the Vostovs. We pretended they were ours.

  “Tell how it ended.”

  I slice into the apple, silent as a ghost. The same blade I killed Bianca’s attacker with. Sterilized, of course.

  “What happened?” Mira asks sadly.

  I don’t bother answering.

  “The Vostovs set a trap for us. They sent us to jail,” Viktor says.

  “The difference is, Bianca didn’t tell the police anything,” I say. “She’s protecting me.”

  “She doesn’t remember, that’s all,” Viktor says. “The Vostovs hated us. We thought they would feel the connection we felt, but they hated us. It’s the same with Bianca.”

  I turn the phone back over. Look at the photo. She hired a guard to pose as her boyfriend. Frightened. It drives me crazy.

  “Let me see.” Mira says softly, taking the phone. She enlarges the image with two fingers. “She looks sad.”

  “She’s not sad,” I say. “She’s frightened. Scared of something.”

  Mira furrows her brow at the picture. “This was taken at the will reading. At the death of her father. She’s sad, Yuri, not scared of something.”

  “I know when Bianca is frightened,” I say. “I know.”

  Viktor wants to hit me again, but Aleksio and Kiro hold him off. They’re blood brothers, the three Dragushas, but they’ve made me feel like family. We went bowling the other night, the four of us and a few others. Kiro nearly threw the ball through a wall. Apparently that’s how you bowl when you grew up in the wild.

  “Do you hear yourself?” Viktor demands. “How deluded you are?”

  “She’s frightened,” I say. “I know.”

  “You’re an enforcer, a pit bull. You can’t have her, and if you care about her, you won’t try for her.”

  I keep my face neutral, not caring if he hits me again. I don’t mind being hit. I might like it, right now.

  “Acting as if,” Viktor spits. “There’s nothing more pathetic than orphans acting as if.” Viktor wants to wreck something, but his brothers have him.

  He’s being an asshole, but I know it hurts him to remember how much the Vostovs hated us.

  It hurts me, too.

  “Nothing more pathetic than orphans acting as if,” he growls.

  I simply slice my apple.

  Bianca

  Susan and I let the caterers in to set up at the Moreland mansion at three. People start arriving at four, Bennett among them.

  My fake bruiser boyfriend Brad is an hour late. People are curious, stealing glances at me as I sip champagne by the massive stone fireplace.

  I overhear Bennett suggesting my “boyfriend” will probably end up cancelling at the last minute. He uses air quotes.

  He thinks my boyfriend doesn’t exist.

  At five twenty the chimes go. It has to be him. I smile and wave off the butler. “I got it.”

  I go to the door, heavy wood with beveled glass windows that show a dark, blurry form on the other side. Bigger than Brad the bodyguard. And all in black.

  I swing it open and find myself face-to-face with a brutishly beautiful man.

  He has hard, wide cheekbones, a hard, bumpy nose, and lips in a hard frown. Even his neck is corded with steel, it seems. He’s a dark, unpolished jewel.

  Tea-colored eyes are the only soft thing soft about him. Ruffled with brown lashes.

  Him.

  My mouth hangs open. I can feel the air move in. A long, hard gasp.

  You came, I think wildly.

  He wears a black suit and tie. Dark. Severe. Nothing like the soft brown cashmere I got for Brad the security guard.

  “You should let me in,” he says simply.

  “I don’t understand.”

  A low rumbly voice. “Your guard was detained, little rabbit.”

  My pulse races. If I didn’t recognize the eyes, I’d recognize the accent, the way the r in rabbit has just a roll to it. Liddle r-r-rabbit.

  His cheekbones seem to widen. Not quite a smile. Is he happy I remembered or does he want to kill somebody?

  “Fine.” He walks in and shuts the door himself, like it’s his own place.

  “I-I don’t understand. I mean…I don’t understand this.”

  “Where is he?” My Russian asks.

  “Who?”

  “The one who threatens you. Your bodyguard said a family member is being threatening toward you.”

  “I don’t understand. You work for the security firm?”

  “Do I look like I work for a security firm, Bianca?”

  My heart pounds at the way he says my name. Biannnkkkka. Like he’s caressing my name with his mouth. “Then how…”

  He lowers his voice. “I protect what’s mine.”

  “What? How? You can’t—”

  He closes in. “They sent a boy to do a man’s job.”

  I come to my senses finally. There’s no way this guy can pull it off. “You can’t just—uh! This is crazy!” He moves closer and I shove him back.

  He allows it, slumping back against the Italian marble wall, as if my push actually did something. As if he isn’t controlling everything.

  He smiles. Like a lazy lion, he reaches out a paw and pulls me to him, taking my elbows in a steel grip. He pulls my face to his. The gleam of the chandelier lights the short, dark hairs of his beard scruff. I can feel the tickle of his breath and the brush of his battered nose. “I’ll play your boyfriend tonight. You understand?”

  Electricity shoots through me. You understand? What does he mean by that?

  I say, “What happened to that kid? To Brad? We had a whole routine worked up. What did you do to him?”

  “He’s not happy, but...” the man shrugs.

  “It needs to be him.”

  “It needs to be me.”

  Crap. Voices sound from the interior room. “Do you even have my present?”

  “A jeweled iPhone case?” he snorts.

  “What—you opened my present?”

  He growls low and rumbly. “A man like me doesn’t give a woman like you a tech present.”

  My heart pounds as he presses a finger to the center of my chest, right where the pearl buttons of my fuzzy sweater start. He runs his finger down the cashmere, down between my breasts, gliding over each button, increasing the melty feeling in me. He might as well be undoing the buttons.

  Close to my ear, he whispers, “They come. Hurry and tell me which family member is the problem. Brad didn’t know which person he was supposed to scare.”

  “Because I didn’t tell him,” I whisper. “I didn’t hire him to hurt anybody. Just to be a strong presence.”

  He pulls back and gazes at me. I think how he kissed my scar that night, and suddenly I know he’s thinking it, too.

  “I’ll figure it out,” he says.

  “This is insane,” I whisper. “You can’t possibly pull this off.”

  I see a
flicker of uncertainty in his eyes. Then he slides a finger over the place where my scar was. Shivers run over me.

  “Don’t worry, rabbit. I’ll pull it off,” he says. “I’ll make them believe. And I’ll make him so afraid, he’ll piss his pants at the thought of hurting you. And then I’ll leave. Okay?”

  Somebody calls out something about needing to send out a search party for me.

  It’s too late to change anything. “Did you get the sheet with the facts about my life?”

  “You think I need a sheet to know you?”

  “Umm…” I can’t decide if it’s psycho or the hottest fucking thing ever.

  The clack of high heels sounds from nearby.

  “Bianca! My goodness, you…” Susan goes speechless when he turns to her. I can’t tell if it’s because he’s so hot in his rough way, or because he’s glaring at her like a fucking animal. Shit, he thinks she’s the threatening one?

  “Um—” I grab his arm. “This is Susan. I’ve mentioned her. My cousin and dear friend Susan.” I give the man—whose name I don't even know—a hard look that he’ll hopefully understand as a message that it’s not Susan.

  Amazingly, he reads it. He knows how to read me.

  Of course…because he’s been watching me. Like my own personal pit bull, watching for cues and commands. I’m awash in conflicting emotions—outrage mixed with something else that has me curling a hand around his rock-hard arm.

  He holds a hand out to Susan.

  “I’m Yuri,” he says. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “You’re…” Susan is staring at him like he’s from outer space. “…Russian.” Russian in this case is a euphemism for hard and scary in a brutish thug way that she can’t see little Bianca with at all.

  I smile. “Didn’t I tell you he was Russian?”

  Susan looks at me suspiciously. “No, you didn’t. Not at all.”

  Crap, I think. We’re not going to pull this off.

  Yuri gazes down at me, takes a strand of my hair. “My Bianca is very private. I love that about her. Always sitting back and watching. Never saying all she thinks and knows.”

  I gaze up at him, stunned, vaguely aware that Susan is staring too. Also stunned.

  “It’s how she is with the animals,” Yuri continues. “Watching. Caring. She sees them in a way others don’t.” He takes even more hair. His knuckles brush my neck. It’s the hottest touch I’ve ever experienced and it’s just my neck.

  He lowers his voice to a deep rumble. “Thinking nobody knows the depth of her.” He lowers his voice even more. “But I do.”

  Susan looks like she’s in a trance. I’m pretty much in one, too.

  With one utterance, this scary thug of a man has revealed a deep, true thing about me. Like he really knows me.

  “Wow.” Susan’s eyes travel up and down the length of him. “Well…yeah. Bianca was always the observant one. Especially with animals.”

  Yuri takes my arm. “Liddle r-r-rabbit?”

  Susan widens her eyes at me when he’s not watching. It’s 92 percent approval and 8 percent utter amazement. “Come on. You guys are going to miss the shrimp canapés. The kids are inhaling them.” She turns and leads the way out.

  There’s no going back.

  “You can’t hurt anybody,” I whisper. “Promise.”

  He smiles and pulls me forward. We pass under the row of chandeliers through the richly carpeted receiving hall. He’s strangely at home in this environment.

  “I’m serious, Yuri.”

  “Tell me who.”

  “Promise you won’t hurt anyone.”

  “Who am I here to scare?”

  “Just being here is enough.”

  Yuri

  It takes me ten minutes to figure out who scares her. A dark-haired man a few years older than her. She tells me by the way she glances at him, so very aware. Even if she didn’t tell me with her glances, I’d know from the way he studies me, sizes me up. I’d know it from his flat eyes.

  He’s killed before. One killer always recognizes another. Bennett is high on something, though. He’s a speedball guy—that’s my guess. Speedball has a type. Every drug has a type, just the way crime has a type. Just the way jobs have a type, I suppose, if you live in the regular world.

  We are talking to a pair of aunts. They tell me about a cruise upon the Black Sea. They ask me about Russia. I am quite an exotic bird, a Russian here.

  “Introduce me to five men in the corner,” I say when they walk off.

  She swears under her breath.

  I grip her hand and pull her there. She has no choice.

  She introduces me first to a man named Winston. He seems attracted to her. He shakes my hand, grip too tight. He asks me what I do.

  “Import export.” It’s true. I export arms, drugs, and jewels. I would like to hurt this Winston, but he is not the one.

  I turn to the one who scares her.

  “This is my brother Bennett Moreland the third,” she says.

  Brother?

  “Half-brother,” Bennett says.

  I give Bianca my phone and put my arms around Bennett and Winston. “Take our picture.”

  Everybody is surprised.

  Bianca stares at me strangely. “You want a picture of…you three guys?”

  “Go ahead, rabbit.” I grin. I’m the crazy Russian here.

  She takes the photo. I take back my phone.

  My rival Winston talks loudly of investment, always an eye on my Bianca.

  Later by the fire, after many more introductions, I pull up the photo. I crop it so that it is just this Bennett. I enlarge his face.

  “Oh my God,” she breathes. “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “Handling your problem.”

  “You can’t hurt him.”

  I ignore her.

  “Yuri, I’m serious. He just needs to know I’m protected, and you’ve done that.”

  I run a finger over her lips. She lets me.

  She has to.

  Here in the bosom of her family, we are pretending at being a couple. I could kiss her and she would have to let me. I watch her breath speed as I bring my finger down her throat. I feel her follow my finger with everything in her body. I remind myself she can never be mine—it’s true what Viktor said—but the feel of her beautiful skin gets me hard as rock. I don’t care if anybody sees.

  “Your scar is healed.”

  She puts her finger to her cheekbone.

  “You were beautiful with it.”

  She swallows. Hoarsely, she says, “You can’t hurt people. That’s not why I hired you.”

  “You didn’t hire me. You hired the boy I have tied up in a van down the block.” I text both photos to Viktor with a message to get Bennett’s street name. If he’s buying drugs, he has a street name.

  “Yuri.”

  I pocket my phone, enjoying the sound of my name on her lips. I slide my hand around her waist. This really is like the Vostovs, our fake family. Pretending. In a home where I don’t belong. Touching a woman who is not mine.

  Her pretty lips part again. I imagine them parting for my cock. I could make her suck me if I wanted.

  I slide my hand over her hair, burning with desire. Her hair is smooth and beautiful under my scarred and ruined hand. More like a paw than a hand. I pull her head to mine and fit my lips over hers in a kiss. My breath shudders as I take her mouth. I kiss her hard until she softens to me, gives to me. I pull her body in until she softens against me, up and down.

  When you’re an orphan, you get used to taking.

  She tastes of champagne and silky warmth.

  She pulls away, pulse thudding in her neck.

  “Your boyfriend kisses you, does he not?” I whisper.

  “Not like that,” she hisses.

  “Then you need a new boyfriend.”

  Her eyes widen. Outrage. But also excitement, I think. “When it comes time for presents, we’ll have to make something up. Why you don’t have a present.”<
br />
  “My job will be done by then.”

  She frowns.

  “Yuri!” People call my name from across the place. “Yuri! Yuri!”

  “No,” she says under her breath. “Say no.”

  I turn. The Moreland men are in two groups at the end of the room. Calling my name. Like they want me to go to them. “What’s happening?” I ask her.

  “Just a stupid tradition. They want you to play football. Snow football. The women drink wine and talk while the men play snow football and then we do gifts and dinner.

  “He’s not playing,” she calls out.

  “Bennett is playing, though.”

  “What? No, Yuri, You can’t.”

  I pull her close, give her a kiss on her cheek. “What can’t I do? Tell me one thing I can’t do right now.”

  Of course there are many things I can’t do. I can’t belong here. I can’t be part of her world or her family. But I can protect her.

  I eye Bennett. He eyes me.

  She sees it. “Oh my God! You guys are already in a thing? Don’t. Please.”

  “You would beg for the scum who threatens you? He will learn.”

  Bianca

  I ordered a security guard and I got somebody far more dangerous.

  “You already have even numbers,” I call over to them.

  Yuri loosens his tie, baring more of his thick neck, eyes on mine. “Whatever team I’m on will need less men.”

  For a split second, I imagine putting my lips to his neck. It would feel warm. Taste like man.

  “I feel like taking somebody down,” he whispers.

  It sounds sexy as hell, and a whisper of electricity thrums between my legs. It’s like he’s holding the whole party hostage, including me. “Promise me not to hurt anyone,” I beg.

  “Relax.” He grins. “I have everything under control.”

  Somebody calls out something about a lover’s quarrel. We’ve effectively convinced everyone here that we’re a couple. Or Yuri has, anyway.

  “You didn’t bring the right clothes,” I point out. “See how everyone changed?”

  He pulls off his suit jacket. Muscles bulge under his white dress shirt. “You Americans think you have to have special clothes for every activity. There’s nothing I can’t do in this outfit.”