Page 104 of Lethal Torture
“Yep. Take the morning off, Charlie. It’s all good here.” I hang up before she can ask anything else.
Good,Luke?
Goodis the most egregious understatement of my life.
Goodcomes absolutely nowhere near describing a night that still has every nerve ending in my body tingling.
I flick on the kettle and pull out the French press and coffee, unable to think of much past caffeine and Zin’s naked body.
The roar of the kettle disguises the sound of her bare footsteps on the floorboards.
“Hey.”
I turn to find her standing uncertainly in the middle of the room, naked but for one of my sheets. Her hair is a tangled, disheveled mess, her face entirely scrubbed clean of its normal impeccable makeup.
She looks so fucking gorgeous I just want to throw her back down on my bed.
And I can read her well enough to know that despite having spent the past six hours gasping under my hands and mouth, she’s now ready to bolt at the first wrong move.
“Hey yourself.” I pour water into the press and lean against the counter as it steeps. “Coffee?”
She glances toward the window, pulling the sheet closer around herself. “I should probably get going.”
“I just spoke to Anatoly and Charlie.” I ignore her last comment as I pull kiwifruit and pomegranates out of the fridge. “Busy night, apparently.” I turn back, grinning. “Half of the rooms are still full, including the Blue Room, where Mak spent the night.”
“Mak?” She frowns. “Weren’t you just with him in Spain?”
“I was. He flew back for a meeting at the Quartier last night, with an ambassador from some North African hellhole. It must have gone well, given that he’s still entertaining four women, at last count.”
“Typical Mak.” Zinaida’s eyes shift everywhere in the room except to me. “That man is a walking red flag.”
I start cutting up the kiwifruit, not looking directly at her. “Charlie says he’s caused so many missed shifts that we should put him in the induction training manual under workplace hazards.”
That at least gets a small huff of something like laughter. She edges slowly toward the counter. I keep my head down, which is dangerous, since it puts the breasts I so recently had my mouth around directly at eye level, albeit covered by a sheet. I turn back to press the plunger on the coffee, fighting the urge to throw Zin down and plunge into her instead.
I don’t want to give her an excuse to run. She’s still standing, shifting from one foot to the other.
“The problem is,” I say, keeping my back turned and tone casual, “that Mak’s so fucking charming he gets away with it. The only people who can’t stand him are the husbands of the wives he’s seduced.”
Zin gives a burble of actual laughter this time. “Roman always says that with two daughters, he’s extremely grateful that Mak chooses to spend most of his leisure time in London instead of Spain. And after seeing how stunning his eldest daughter is, I’d say he has a point.”
“Ofelia’s a special kid. Masha too.” My body temporarily, at least, under control, I turn back and push a steaming-hot cup of Australia’s best across the counter, then keep chopping fruit.
“That’s right,” she says, eyeing the coffee on the counter and the stool right in front of her. “Darya was telling me about howyou were involved in that whole Miami shitstorm with Roman’s kids.”
“Yup.” From the corner of my eye I watch her inch toward what I happen to know is her kryptonite. “I got to know them all pretty well. You’re right about Ofelia being stunning, but I don’t like anyone’s chances of getting within a red-hot mile of her, not unless they fancy facing down Spain’s most powerfulpakhanand his entire army ofvor.”
“Pakhan,huh?” The kryptonite finally wins, and Zin sits down on the stool, pulling the coffee toward her. “Andvor.Someone has had a decent education in Russian bratva organizations.”
“That’s because ‘someone’ had to dispose of several dozen members of them during the fight for Roman’s kids, and the battles that came afterward. I’m sure you heard about Alexei Petrovsky taking back his compound from the Orlovs?” I push a bowl of kiwi over to her with a fork and pull up a stool on the other side of the table. She picks at the fruit, her eyes still downcast. She’s tucked the sheet in as best she can, but it still keeps slipping.
I want to tear the fucking thing off.
“Everyone from Miami to Moscow heard about that,” Zin says dryly. “Worst-kept secret in the criminal world.” She looks at me directly for the first time, her eyes curious. “So you were really in the thick of all that, with the Orlovs.”
I grin at her and lift a shoulder. “I had nowhere better to be at the time.”
That gets a reluctant smile from her. She spears a piece of kiwifruit and sips her coffee.
