Again, he dropped to her ankle and gritted his teeth as she slid on the lacy rose-colored panties sent by Sonya, who’d thought of everything. Even if he was damned curious to see the shadow of her pubic hair through the lace, to know just how the line of the lingerie would fall against those sharp hipbones.
Will. Not. Look.
“Sergey.”
He glanced up.
Fuck. Flat, fair belly. The faintest blue veins underneath her skin. The undersides of her small breasts, nipples proudly pointing upward as haughty as her chin.
He looked down again, his body flaring like the noonday sun had just emerged from behind a cloud to radiate heat upon him. “Yeah?”
“Maybe it’s just memories, but I have this feeling.” She touched her belly and winced. “Stas is here in Odessa.”
The hairs on the back of Sergey’s neck rose up. This was quite possibly his day of reckoning. Finally, he might ask his father what he’d done to Oksana, and then maybe he could throttle the son of a bitch for two women’s sakes. Or just let Anya have at him instead.
Her stomach growled something fierce, and she laughed. “Or maybe I’m just hungry.”
“Okay. Breakfast first. Then we’ll go to the office of records.”
They brushed their teeth side by side, Anya using a brush Sonya had sent along with other basic toiletries and cosmetics. Then he sat on the counter while she applied a little make-up. He’d never watched a woman besides his mother do it, and there was something so ordinary and mundane about it. He could almost pretend they were a normal couple heading out for a brunch date. Not like he did brunch dates normally.
They left the room hand in hand. Two doors down, Anya stopped suddenly, mid-step. He kept going and almost lost his grip on her hand.
“What’s wrong?”
“I can’t…” She leaned forward, but some invisible force yanked her backward with enough power she almost lost her balance. Her free hand clawed at her neck and her mouth twisted in anger. “Ugh.” The guttural cry of frustration came from deep in her little body. “I hate that slipper!”
Shit. How could he have forgotten?
She closed her eyes and squeezed his hand, drawing in deep breaths, seemingly as shocked as he was that for a moment they’d both forgotten what she was--a ghost, and dead, and stuck to a ballet shoe until she had her revenge.
“It’s okay.” He pulled her close and murmured into her hair, which smelled of the flowery hotel soap. “We’ll get you free.”
She sniffed, nodding and wiping her nose with the back of her hand. “Let’s go get it.”
Back in the hotel room, among the new clothes hanging in the closet, Anya found a purse to match the boots. Sergey spotted a label dangling from its strap. The tag read, For your slipper. It seemed Sonya had indeed thought of everything. Wordlessly, they worked as a team, him holding the leather handles open while she slid the shoebox inside.
They walked through Center City, which bustled with tourists and commuters. A line snaked around the outside of Vadim’s bistro, but when little Rita spotted him through the kitchen door, she skipped outside and brought them in through the rear entrance. Vadim cleared extra menus and boxes of sugar packets away, making two places at the kitchen-end of the bar. He shook Sergey’s hand and slapped him on the back, then grinned at Anya like she was the first girl Sergey had ever brought around, which she was.
When all this was over and she went gallivanting off with a bunch of wild vilas, he would have a hell of a time explaining to his pal why he let this one get away.
Chapter 17
Someone had discarded a newspaper on the counter. Anya grabbed it and traced her finger over the date. She’d felt each one of those days tick by, and yet it still seemed impossible they were already so far into the twenty-first century. The headline read Brothers Found Dead. She began to skim the article, which described how the three men had drowned, shackled to a cinderblock and sunk in the harbor near the lighthouse sometime yesterday. Fishermen discovered their bodies at low tide. The article’s photograph showed them being loaded into an ambulance in black body bags. Anyone with information about the crime was requested to call the local politsiya.
How horrible. Anya pitied the men and their watery deaths.
Sergey cleared his throat and tugged the newspaper away, replacing it with a menu. “I can hear your stomach rumbling.”
Everything on the menu sounded divine. But last night’s lavish order of room service, most of which they’d wheeled right back out into the hall, had taught Anya that her imagination was far bigger than her stomach.
Oh, but restraint didn’t come easy. She’d eaten two meals in fifty years. Could she really be expected to decide between an omelet with fresh parsley and gruyere, or French toast with apple compote? She pinned a finger to each item on the menu and scanned to see if there was anything even more tempting that she’d missed on her first pass.
“We could share, if you’re having trouble deciding.” He leaned close enough to whisper, and she shivered with the pleasure of his warm breath in her ear. “And neither really require a knife, so they’re pretty easy eating.”
Sergey’s friend Vadim rested his elbows on the countertop, and he didn’t have to stoop much to do it. He had a wide, pockmarked face and a dark, scraggly beard, but his smile could increase the wattage in any room. Anya liked him the moment she saw all his even teeth on display behind that beautiful grin.
He pulled a pencil from behind his ear. “What’ll it be?”
Sergey raised his brows, and she nodded her assent to the plan.
“French toast, a cheese omelet, and--”
The little girl called Rita appeared with a glass so full it sloshed its impossibly green contents over the side. “Look, Sergey. We added fresh juices to the menu. This one is wheatgrass, celery, and apple.”
“Mmm,” Anya muttered. “Sounds like something Stas would have made me drink until I lost two pounds.”
Sergey cleared his throat. “One for me, please, but not for Anya. She’ll have a hot cocoa, extra whipped cream.”
Rita smiled at her, the girl’s round cheeks so full and cheery the expression actually raised her pink-rimmed eyeglasses up a few millimeters. “I’ll tell them to put extra chocolate shavings on for you too.” The girl skipped off, and Vadim followed.
“She’s his daughter?” Anya asked, searching for some resemblance between the fair girl and the cafe’s olive-skinned owner, who was clipping their order up in front of the cook.
“Yeah. Lucky kid. She looks like her mom.”
She tugged at her dad’s apron, and he’d turned down and smiled at her warmly. Anya’s father had never looked at her with such unabashed affection. It was hard not to envy the girl.
“You know her mom?”
“I met Vadim through Natasha.” It seemed like the opening to a story, and yet instead of continuing, he arranged his napkin in his lap.
“Well…?”
He actually blushed. “It was just a work thing.”
Had he dated her? If so, it seemed unlikely he would be a close friend to her husband.
“What kind of work thing? She’s an investigator?” Anya had been impressed to see a few women detectives in his department. “Or a secretary?” Which had been a typical job for a woman even in 1968.
“No. It was on a case.” His color deepened, a streak of strawberry across each high cheek.
She wanted to kiss them both, to tell him she wouldn’t judge him if he’d messed something up at work. What ground could she stand on, she who had proven to be inadequate at achieving her dreams? Instead of kissing his embarrassed cheeks, she rested her free hand on his knee. “I want to hear the story.”
“It happened back when I was a beat cop. I didn’t even know she was pregnant with Rita at the time. She wasn’t showing yet. And really, I was just doing my job, anybody--”
“What happened?” He was rambling, as if she migh
t forget the point of his story.
“She worked at a little corner grocery. A junkie--a drug addict--came in with a gun, wanted the contents of the register and the safe, but she didn’t have the combination. He held her hostage, demanded she call the manager. That’s when I showed up, started talking to the guy…” He wiped at a non-existent smudge on the counter.
Inspector Effortlessly Charming had negotiated her release. No wonder they got to skip to the head of the breakfast line. “So you’re a hero?”
He shook his head. “Maybe to Vadim, but officially, I was reprimanded. Protocol said I had to wait for the official hostage negotiator, but Natasha was so scared. And the guy was an open book, what he wanted, what he feared--it was all on display. I knew I could talk him into handing over his weapon.”
He folded the corner of his napkin. “I’m lucky that black mark didn’t keep me from the promotion to investigator, but when I applied, a couple of my buddies spun the story to make me look like the hero, and Lisko put in a good word, said more or less the same thing. When a guy like him calls you valiant, people listen, whether it’s true or not. So, like I said, I got lucky.”
A waiter slid an enormous mug across the bar toward Anya, the swirl of cream deflating atop the steaming cocoa. She picked off a chocolate shaving and popped it into her mouth, letting it melt on her tongue. “Does your luck ever run out?”
His exhaled breath made his lips buzz. “Oh, I get lucky all the time, but rarely about stuff that matters. Natasha and my promotion are definitely the exception.”
The little blonde angel skipped by again with a pair of salt and pepper shakers. “But you saved her. And just look how much her papa loves her.” Her voice cracked.
He squeezed her fingers as she took a sip of the hot cocoa. She closed her eyes. It was hard to say what was better. The decadent cashmere of her sweater, the rich sweetness of chocolate in her mouth, or the gentle warmth of Sergey’s calloused hand holding hers.
A prickle of heat on her cheek told her he was looking at her.
“What?”
He lowered his voice to a growly whisper, the sound of which deserved to be on her list of sensual pleasures. “I like watching you eat.”
The heat spread down her neck, her chest, and into her belly.
She didn’t want this meal to end, didn’t want to go hunting for Demyan when she could pretend to be alive with Sergey. She waited for the vila to rage at the prospect, to begin the insistent chant about finding Stas and killing him. Nothing.
“Were you scared, when you were negotiating with the junkie?”
He nodded. “I was shaking like crazy, my body scared as fuck. I’m lucky I didn’t piss myself. But it all stayed down here.” He thumbed his chest and then tapped his forehead. “I didn’t let it up here, where it could cloud my thinking.”
“I wish I was as brave.”
He chuckled. “Are you kidding? You’re the toughest little scrapper I’ve ever met. You’re fearless about going after what you want.”
“If I were brave, I would have been able to stand up to my grief. I would have fought for my life instead of drowning in that river.”
He frowned. “Damn, ghost. You could figure out a way to blame yourself for the weather.”
She spun her finger in the shape of a tornado. “Yep.”
“Oh, right.” He grinned. “Bad example.”
Unable to resist his smile, laughter slid out of her mouth. But she couldn’t let that go to Inspector Effortlessly Charming’s head. She popped another sliver of chocolate into her mouth before it could sink into the hot drink, and tried to scowl.
He stole a shaving off her mug, leaving his vile chemistry experiment of a drink untouched.
“No juice?”
He shook his head. “I know that recipe. It needs lemon and parsley.”
“You’re a real weirdo, Yuchenko.” But he wasn’t. Just an all around nice guy who drank juice instead of coffee or Bloody Marys like everybody else in the cafe.
“Probably so.” He kept on grinning like he’d heard the compliment in her heart, rather than the barb in her words. No one else had seemed able or willing to listen to her so closely before. She leaned nearer to him, so their upper arms touched.
He didn’t pull away or stop smiling until Vadim passed by, balancing an impressive number of steaming plates straight from the kitchen. “I know what you mean about Vadim and Rita. She’s lucky to have a father like that.”
“My dad looked at Sonya like that, but always blinked at me like I was a stranger who’d just appeared in his house.” The old sorrow settled on her, grief she’d disappointed Papa, and bitterness fate hadn’t blessed her with a family who embraced her. “What about your father?”
“My dad left my mom before I was even born, and I’ve always suspected that’s what tipped her over the edge.” He tapped his temple, indicating which edge he referred to. “The doctors say she can’t help it. But when I was a kid and had to take care of her on my own, it always seemed like she’d just given up.”
“Does she love you, though?” Anya asked. “Just a little bit of that light in Vadim’s eyes would have gone a long way for me.”
Sergey rested his chin on his knuckles, watching the little girl. “Yeah, she does. And she always let me know it, even in the darkest days. I probably don’t give her nearly enough credit for that.”
Anya could well believe she did. Even if he looked exactly like his dead-beat dad, he would be impossible not to love, the kind of son any mother would delight in, versus the disappointing daughter who only cast her angelic sister in a more perfect light.
Her eyes stung and she blinked, hoping to high heaven she wasn’t going to start crying.
Thankfully, the food arrived, and they both settled in. Last night over cake, Sergey had proven himself ambidextrous enough to wield a fork with his left hand, and so he’d sat on that side of her again for breakfast, their clasped hands between them. He meticulously cut the omelet in half and ate only his share, even though with his size he probably had the appetite to match a ghost running on empty for fifty years.
In spite of his good example, she was not so generous with the French toast.
They ate, and he told her about moving to Odessa at the age of ten, his friends, another of which owned a gelato shop at the waterfront, the one who’d become a harbormaster and navigated ships into port. Sergey asked her when she’d started dancing, where she’d studied, what she’d truly loved about it.
He listened so intently, his focus like a gift. His rapt look could make a girl feel special and treasured, but it was probably just a cop thing, paying close attention for clues about Stas.
He asked about the hours spent dancing as a girl. The question catapulted her back into the past--how strong she’d felt, developing her technique, training her body to defy nature and become ever more graceful, more flexible, more precise. Slowly, ambition had squeezed all the joy from dancing, and very little about her time as a ghost had called her old delight to mind.
But with his questions, Sergey did.
After breakfast, they caught a taxi to the state archive on Zhukovskoho Street. The gray stone building might have once been a church, with its leaded windows curving into gothic peaks. They found their way into a bright and sunny reading room, where records could be requested from a librarian. Behind the prim, gray-haired woman a sign was posted stating records retrieval took seven business days, upon completion of proper forms. Sergey filled out a slip of paper with the address of the Académie de Ballet. Anya wasn’t sure if it was his badge or his smile that persuaded the woman to pull the records immediately, but she scurried into a back room hastened by one or the other.
While they waited, Sergey showed Anya the computers available for research. There were cardboard-thin screens and flat keyboards and printers that could produce documents instantly, and they were hooked up to all the other computers in the world and could therefore tell a p
erson almost anything.
Then he gave her a tutorial on how to use his phone, the maps, the photographs, and a dozen other functions that made very little sense to her. But there was a telephone with numbers listed, and he explained that if she pushed the green button next to a name, it would call that person, such as Dmitri, who he’d most recently spoken to, and a message could be typed and sent in the same way. Anya had never cared for speaking on the phone, so the appeal of an instantaneous message, like a pocket telegram, held a lot of appeal.
After some time, the librarian returned, walking in the shadow of a man who extended his hand. “Inspector Yuchenko, I’m Deputy Director Tsobenko. It’s most curious, but neither Veronika nor I were able to find any records for that building. There is, in fact, no deed for the property. It’s as if the Odessa regional government does not know the address 109 Pidzemnyy Street exists.”
“That’s impossible. Census takers went door to door just a few years ago when the property tax was passed. A prominent storefront in Center City wouldn’t have been overlooked. It’s next door to--”
“Plotkin’s Timepieces. Yes, I just searched the Internet for the street view of the address. I can assure you I will alert the proper authorities of this oversight. But I’m sorry to say I have no records of use to you.”
Anya’s breakfast had turned to a brick in her belly. If the ballet studio had seemed like a dead end yesterday, this mysterious lack of records made it anything but. Stas Demyan, who did not exist on paper--or on that Internet thingy, for that matter--had run a business out of a building that also did not exist according to the city of Odessa.
Sergey sighed but shook the man’s hand. “I sincerely appreciate the expedited effort.” He bowed his head toward the one Tsobenko had called Veronika. “Madam.”
As soon as they were out of earshot, Anya said, “We have to go back.”
They took another taxi the kilometer and a half to Pidzemnyy Street. The studio was dark, and no one answered the door.
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