Oops. Maybe she should have played the supernatural card more carefully?
She refused to move. “You won’t find any of my things. I just appeared here, in your bathroom. Think about it. You don’t even remember bringing me home.”
“No, but I’m certainly ready for you to go.” He tugged her, but she dug in her heels.
She had to make him understand.
Chapter 2
Nikolai stared at the dainty little feet glued to his bathroom floor, their toenails painted with sparkly blue polish. He didn’t want to look at her cute little pixie face now that she’d revealed herself to be off her rocker.
“Really, I know it’s hard to believe, but I am a ghost.”
Shit. He needed a cup of coffee before he could handle this level of crazy. That’s what he got for picking up a bleach-blonde with purple and blue stripes in her hair.
Maybe she’d forgotten to take her medicine last night. Did she have a bottle of antipsychotics in a purse somewhere?
The small, steamy bathroom seemed to shrink around him. He tugged her again. “Come on.”
Those tiny feet didn’t give an inch. They narrowed at her ankles into shapely calves, and his gaze followed them up of its own accord, inch by luscious inch.
For such a small woman, she seemed to be all leg, miles of soft-as-sin skin. At the V of her thighs, she still wore those white cotton bikini briefs, the ones she’d shoved to the side when she’d speared herself on his cock. She crossed her arms tightly over her chest, hiding her breasts behind a thin tank top and covering up that ugly wound. Finally, he forced himself to look again at her face, composed of delicate, doll-like features and surrounded by that halo of platinum-blond hair with aquamarine streaks. Pretty, if not exactly his type.
“Think about it, Nikolai. Where did I come from?”
His name in her mouth sent shivers through him. And hell if he knew hers. When had he become such an asshole, to spend a whole night with a woman fucking like rabbits, and not even know her name?
He scratched at the patch of stubble he hadn’t yet shaved off his jaw. Where had he picked her up? His memory only supplied images of him at home, working on the Lisko case. He didn’t remember drinking himself stupid, but one rarely did. Though no matter how much he’d had to drink, he would never really call a sex-line or an escort service.
“You tell me. Where did you come from?”
“Last night, I put the dream in your mind.”
Yep. C-R-A-Z-Y. At least there was none of the auditory equivalent to a blowjob in her voice anymore, and oral was pretty much the only position they hadn’t tried out last night.
“Right. A dream.”
She didn’t reply beyond a nod, as if his addled brain would eventually catch up with her. Great, she was a patronizing, crazy pixie.
And she thought it was all a dream, the way she’d ridden him hard and then rocked him slow. Confirming the possibility of too much vodka, a hazy, surreal quality blurred his memories, but many details remained hyper-vivid. Light brown curls had escaped her askew underwear. The feel of her slippery, hot desire on his cock and her need to fuck him for what had felt like a dreamy forever. Her breasts were more pointy and pendulous than the ones his imagination had concocted in his fantasies, and all the more beautiful for it.
He was getting hard just thinking about it. He adjusted the towel around his waist. Time to get rid of her fast, before his dick sweet-talked his good sense again, and he bent her over the bathroom sink, regardless of the screw loose in her brain.
Was there any chance a good hard fuck would knock that particular screw back into place?
She shivered, and all that soft skin pearled up in goose bumps.
“Come on”—he took hold her elbow—“let’s get you dressed.”
“I told you. I have no clothes.”
He sighed. She was as infuriating as Dariya. “Fine. I’ll bite. How exactly did you put the dream into my mind?”
“I’m a mara.”
Okay. He felt a little better, knowing what she was called. But a Mara? Why would she introduce herself like that, with an article before her name?
He crossed his arms over his chest. “Right, and I’m the Nikolai. Pleased to meet you.”
Her bow-shaped smile revealed small, white teeth and seemed somehow sad, hinting at ironies he hadn’t yet grasped.
“Mara isn’t my name.” She spoke slowly, as if he’d revealed himself to be an imbecile. “It’s what I am.” She annunciated each word carefully. “A dream spirit, a nightmare. But I’m called Katya, Katya Dvoynev.”
“Right. Look, Katya the mara, I need a cup of coffee, and then I need to get to work. If by some crazy turn of events I can’t fathom, you truly have no clothes, I’ll find you something to wear.” Maybe Dariya could donate an outfit to the cause.
Katya sniffed, tears suddenly shimmering in her eyes. She fisted her small hands at her sides and shook like one of those tiny Mexican dogs, a bundle of raw, nervous crazy.
With one trembling hand, she pointed at the strip of stubble he hadn’t yet shaved. “You missed a spot.”
He’d been fingering the same place on his jaw. And he should at least finish the shave before he headed to the office. He turned back to the mirror, applied a dab of cream, and scraped off the whiskers. She watched him intently in the mirror, her sad gaze eerie, almost spectral. A chill rose up at the base of his spine and sped up to the back of his neck, raising up the hairs there.
He stood and met her gaze. There was something haunting about the forlorn expression she wore. And here she was, claiming to be a ghost.
Could that be a coincidence?
He’d moved into this building to investigate reports of supernatural activity. Residents had posted photos online of messages written in fogged up mirrors. Dmitri Lisko is a murderer. Others said they’d woken from nightmares to find they’d scrawled the same message on notepaper. Someone had even phoned in to Nik’s newspaper, reporting a poltergeist that’d shattered dishes and screwed with the elevator. All the strange occurrences had one thing in common—they fingered the man Nikolai intended to bring down. The man responsible for his sister’s death.
Nik’s editor at the paper considered the whole ghost thing a hoax, and Nik agreed. Except there was a possibility the person wearing a bed sheet over his or her head had real info. Facts Nik needed if he wanted to bring down Lisko.
He splashed water on his face, dried it with a hand towel, and turned to look at the woman. Could Katya, the mara, be the witness he was looking for?
Shit. If only he’d thought of that before he’d fucked her every which way. Don’t sleep with your source made journalism’s top-five-rules list.
He secured the towel. “So you’re a nightmare?”
She grimaced, nodding.
“Dirty job, but somebody’s gotta do it?”
“It’s unpleasant, yes. But it’s my only chance for vengeance.”
Yes, she had to be the one he was looking for. He’d thought maybe the whole ghost act was a way to hide from a dangerous man. But she sounded so earnest, so outright delusional. Maybe she’d been traumatized by this murder she felt obliged to bring into the light. Which meant he’d screwed a mentally unstable source.
His head throbbed. Fuck. He needed coffee. And from now on, he needed to play this nice and cool.
“Vengeance against Dmitri Lisko?”
Her eyes widened and filled with tears. “Oh, thank God. Someone finally understands.”
His heart kicked, some primal part of himself warning that pretty and crazy was a dangerous mix for any man. But Nikolai wasn’t any man. He was the man who would bring down Lisko Enterprises and its crooked CEO, and this wannabe ghost was going to help him.
“Maybe I do. But tell me anyway, just to be sure.”
“Lisko killed me and Fedir right here.” She lifted her chin, pressing her palm over that scar he’d inexplicably failed to notice l
ast night. “Justice must be done.”
Bingo. She was absolutely the ghost he’d been looking for.
“When did this murder happen?”
“Eleven months ago. I’m sure you can find the militsya’s report.” Her pretty cherub lips pulled to the side wryly. “I’ll be wearing this underwear in the crime-scene photos.”
He’d spent his whole career as a journalist investigating cover-ups, could find two breadcrumbs a hundred kilometers apart and unearth the trail connecting them, and he’d turned up zilch on anything to do with this apartment building. He had to find out what she knew and whether it was enough to do some serious harm to Lisko’s reputation.
“Will you help me?” She caught her lower lip between her teeth and hugged herself tighter, goose bumps covering her dainty limbs.
“I’m hoping we can help each other. I want Lisko to pay for his sins too.”
For the first time, she really, truly smiled, her eyes awash with hope. Then her teeth chattered.
His chest squeezed tightly and he turned to the door. “Come on, let’s get dressed. We can talk more over a cup of coffee.”
“But I don’t have any clothes, remember?”
That little detail still made no sense. How could she possibly have gotten into his apartment wearing nothing but a pair of panties and a tank top thin enough to make out the tiny bumps at the edge of her rosy areolas? Will not look at the source’s mouthwatering nipples.
Right. Well, regardless of the mystery of the missing outfit, he needed her breasts covered if he was going to think straight. He waved her along and crossed the hall toward his bedroom. “You can borrow something.”
He’d crammed a frayed sweatshirt from his university into the bottom drawer of the dresser. It would fit her like a dress and was bulky enough to mute her eye-grabbing, shapely lines.
The wannabe ghost moved into the corner of his vision, keeping the width of the bed between them. When he faced her, she appeared fixated on it.
With a scorching blast of heat, he recalled their sweaty bodies straining together there, where she stared. Christ. He looked around for condom wrappers and saw none. Hopefully, whatever inaccessible part of his brain had been steering last night had possessed the good sense to use them and then clean up the evidence so Dariya didn’t find it.
He tossed the sweatshirt at Katya. “Here.”
She caught it. “Thanks. Could I also borrow some socks? My toes are freezing.”
He rummaged in the appropriate drawer, contemplating a fine merino argyle pair his sister, Sofiya, had given him for Christmas. But the socks were the last gift his sister had given him before she died, and what if this Katya, the mara, walked off with them? They didn’t match the sweatshirt, anyway. He tossed her a pair of athletic socks.
She’d already pulled on his journalism school sweatshirt, which reached as far down as he’d hoped it would. She dropped onto the bed and pulled on the socks. So big the stretched-out heels protruded from behind her Achilles’ tendons. As long as she didn’t open her honeyed mouth and start in with the sticky-sweet-like-sex voice, he should be able to resist her.
Then she smiled up at him with her small, shy grin. “I’d die all over again for a cup of coffee.”
Shit. He had injustices to set right, public opinions to sway. He had no business having a hard-on for a crazy-pants source.
Chapter 3
Sensations freewheeled through Katya’s racing mind and churned in her empty gut. She’d gone so long without feeling a damn thing, and now every sensory neuron she possessed screamed constant news at her.
Cold.
The comforting squeeze of clothing over bare skin.
The drone of a TV on in the next-door apartment.
The irrational desperation of a starving belly.
And the even more irrational desire to wrap her whole body around the gorgeous but skeptical bear of a man pouring her a cup of coffee.
The odds were about one in a hundred that Nikolai, with his tense jaw and perpetually narrowed eyes, actually believed she was a ghost. She tried not to take his disdain personally, to keep calm and appear to be extremely sane. She would convince him somehow. Insisting on the most improbable of truths wasn’t going to work. Maybe the militsya’s reports would be the ticket.
She sat at the kitchen table—which stood exactly where Fedir’s had been when she’d moved in, and where it had remained for the four months she’d lived with him—under a row of bright windows that provided a view of the busy boulevard below.
Nikolai set a steaming mug of coffee in front of her. “Cream? Sugar?”
“No, thanks.” Normally, she took both, but her empty belly roiled from the rich odor of the dark brew—far better than the generic stuff Fedir had preferred. Her recently dead stomach gnawed and grumbled at her, but the sensations didn’t precisely translate into hunger, more like outrage.
Still, the warm cup felt heavenly on her fingertips, numb with cold. She plastered her icy hands to the ceramic vessel. In spite of the sweatshirt and socks, she grew more and more frigid by the second.
With a coffee mug in his left hand, Nikolai dragged a chair out with his right, scraping its legs on the tile floor.
He’d pulled on jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, no socks. His feet were remarkably masculine—both wide and long, with barely an arch to them, and they were worlds easier to look at than his face, which was disarmingly handsome and currently distorted by a skeptical scowl that resembled his orgasm expression.
She never would have guessed a man could have sexy feet. Fedir’s had been pale, narrow, and peppered with black curly hair, rather like the rest of his body.
“So, why don’t you start by telling me what happened to you?” Nikolai had gentled himself and spoke in soothing tones. The skepticism in his voice had almost vanished. Almost. He would be an expert at drawing stories out of people—she’d overheard he was a reporter in his conversations with his niece, just as she’d learned his name, his routine of swimming laps before work, his habit of buying takeout and frozen meals.
His longish chestnut hair was still damp, and a lock had fallen rakishly against the tortoiseshell glasses, leaving a bead of water on the lens.
Her heart beat a little faster. Apparently, roguish geek was her type. Too bad she hadn’t known that when she’d been alive.
He took off his glasses and rubbed the lens with his T-shirt. “Well?”
“You first,” she insisted. “What sins did Lisko commit against you?”
His nostrils flared as he sucked in an impatient sigh, his focus on the action of cleaning his glasses. “Fine. His company held the contract to monitor radiation at a village bordering a nuclear waste site in Ivanikyn Raion. But they didn’t track the levels. Nearly two hundred people died of radiation-related cancers because of their neglect. My sister was one of them.”
His grief dragged at Katya like a lead weight pressing on her suddenly corporeal body. He must miss his sister terribly. And the girl—Dariya—she’d lost her mother, poor thing. Not that Katya missed hers at all.
Nikolai slid the glasses back on and pinned her with his sad, blue gaze. “Lisko recently became CEO, after the death of his uncle. Anything that damages his public image makes it harder for him to bribe his way out of the lawsuit.”
“CEO? I thought he was just a thug.”
“Believe me, a man can be both in Ukraine these days.”
A dry laugh squeezed out of her throat unbidden. “And we too shall rule, brothers, in a free land of our own.” She quoted the verse from “Ukraine Has Not Yet Died,” one she’d always found tragically ironic, as her beloved country still struggled for true democracy and freedom from corruption.
He quirked one corner of his mouth upward. “Shall I thank you for not singing it in your blowjob voice?”
A blush blazed over her cheeks. “No need for that.”
“Then it’s your turn.”
She s
hivered, drew the coffee mug to her mouth, and took a small sip of the black brew, hoping it would warm her from the inside.
Emboldened by the bitter swallow, she began. “Fedir Antipin, my boyfriend, and I were shot in your bathroom.”
His mouth pursed in disapproval, as if she were a child fibbing about her classmate pulling her pigtail. But then he wiped it away and assumed that open, interested posture, along with the neutral tone of an interviewer. “Dmitri Lisko pulled the trigger?”
She nodded, swallowing down memories, and the tense knot his skepticism squeezed in her throat.
“Why?”
“Fedir got caught up in something. I don’t know the whole story, but he’d gotten jittery, anxious. He said he didn’t want to worry me with the details, but finally he admitted some bad guys thought he’d stolen a lot of money.”
“But he hadn’t?”
After everything Fedir had done for her, the question inspired outrage. “No. He was one of the good guys.”
“Then why was he involved with the bad guys?”
“He wasn’t really. He sold pharmaceuticals, traveled around the country to visit hospitals and doctor’s offices, persuading them to prescribe the company’s products. But he learned another rep was funneling the medicine to a gang run by a pair of brothers named the Belovs.”
“The sex traffickers?”
“Yes.” She managed a hoarse reply, even though her stomach twisted into a tight knot. The pigs had kidnapped her, planned to sell her. But sweet Fedir had found her, rescued her before anything too awful could happen, and for that she owed him everything.
Find Lisko. Kill him.
The mara’s insistent whisper grew louder in her mind. Shame and fury simmered inside her, bringing another hot blush to her skin. How could she be sitting here admiring Nikolai’s sexy feet when she had to avenge Fedir?
Only she’d decided to go and have dream sex with a stranger, and now she was living the most awkward morning after in the history of one-night stands. Hi, remember me. I’m really a ghost. Can you help me find my murderer?
The Siren's Dream Page 2