Total pages in book: 90
Estimated words: 85156 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 426(@200wpm)___ 341(@250wpm)___ 284(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 85156 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 426(@200wpm)___ 341(@250wpm)___ 284(@300wpm)
Dmitri rises from my chair but doesn’t go far. He leans back on my desk and crosses his arms, a smirk pulling at one corner of his mouth.
What am I so grumpy about? That I can’t get a certain pair of dark brown, almond-shaped eyes out of my head. I can’t forget that deep-honey color I could fall into and never want to come up for air. That I’d almost fallen into last night. I can’t get the way her skin felt against my lips, or the way her full, kissable mouth took up residence in my dreams, out of my head.
It was a mistake letting the mystery woman go last night. I should have insisted on going home with her, or taken my own car, or even had her up against the wall in one of the bathrooms. Anything to get her out from under my skin and out of my head, orbiting my thoughts like the sun.
The woman is torturing me, and we were together for all of half an hour.
Fairy tales aren’t real, and neither are rom-coms. Except I felt the world shift the moment I looked into her eyes.
Damn it. Now I’m thinking about her again instead of focusing on far more important matters.
“Kirill found something big and dirty on Councilor Sharp.”
In a snap, Dmitri has my attention again as I drop into my chair. “How big and how dirty?”
Dmitri’s smirk only grows, his eyes glittering with something almost frightening. “Big and dirty enough to turn his resistance into all the support we need.”
That gives me pause and a great deal of satisfaction.
“I tell you, brother, this development will pay off in a big way. No one will be able to touch Kucher Enterprises after this.” Dmitri’s smile matches my own satisfaction, a feeling I smother as quickly as it appears.
“We still have to be awarded the actual bid. It’s not done until it’s done,” I growl, turning on my computer as I reach for the plain manila folder my assistant, Anya, left on my desk. On it, she’s placed a sticky note that says only “Found Him” in her neat handwriting.
Dmitri’s grin falters, and then he rolls his eyes as he pushes himself up from my desk. “You can’t give yourself one moment of peace, can you?”
“My job isn’t peace. My job is to ensure the continuation of the Bratva.”
Dmitri doesn’t look surprised by my response, and just as he’s immune to my glare, he more often than not knows what I’m going to say before I say it. There are only two others in the world who know me as well.
“Okay, well, on that note—”
I’m about to flip open the folder from Anya when Dmitri reaches behind him and slides another under my nose.
“What’s this?”
“It’s the information on the shitheads fighting in my club last night,” he says.
I set the first folder aside for the second.
“The two guys we know, the guys who started all the shit according to the cameras, are Sokolinaya. The third guy is just some random kid.”
Dmitri summarizes what’s in the folder while I leaf through it and the included images, containing black-and-white stills of the fight, the two Sokolinaya lowlifes with the kid. The three of them are tangled in a brawl on the dance floor, and a figure is streaking toward them.
It’s her.
“We checked on the kid just to make sure he wasn’t part of something.”
Dmitri’s voice pulls me back from thoughts of soft, warm skin beneath my palms, and a spark shoots straight to my already-tented crotch.
“He’s from East LA. His father is a defector, came here in the seventies and owns a bookstore now. The kid has a few siblings.”
The only saving grace I had was thinking I would never see the mystery woman again, and in time, these obsessive cravings would fade. But now I have her name, address, and far more information about her and her family than I ever thought I would know.
Eva Volkova.
“The bookstore is in one of our properties, and they’ve been behind on rent. We’re close to kicking him out, and I know Sergei is looking forward to fixing it up and renting it for double or triple the price.”
I know where the bookstore is, right in the middle of an urban renewal zone. Our numbers guy, Sergei, must be salivating at the thought of what he can do with the property once the bookstore is out.
“The kid appears to be tied to Tsepov. He owes him money. A lot of it.”
Something stirs and stretches in the back of my mind, my hackles rising in warning. The woman had seemed innocent enough, trying to save her brother. But what if it was all some kind of play to get under my skin and do damage from the inside out? What if she’s working with Tsepov to clear her brother’s debt to him?