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  “Yes, I like your idea. Let us do this. From now on we are Alexei and Eva, a normal couple on a normal vacation with much sex involved.”

  She smiled against his chest. “Can I call you Lexie?”

  “I never liked that name. You are pushing a button.”

  “Okay, okay. But Lex feels so villainy.”

  “You used to call me baby, too,” he said, keeping his voice light. “I will not mind if you use this term of endearment.”

  She thought about it and said, “Okay, baby, can we go eat? Nothing fancy though. Let me tell you, I could murder a cheeseburger right now.”

  “I believe we have cheeseburgers in this hotel,” he said, a smile lighting on his lips. “While we pride ourselves on being a five-star experience, we also cater to families with small children.”

  “No, I’m sick of being cooped up in this hotel. Let’s go out. Let’s go find a cheeseburger and then let’s hit the beach. That ocean’s been calling me ever since we got here.“

  She disentangled her body from his and disappeared through the door that connected their two bedrooms. “I just have to find a suit and some kind of wrap.”

  He got out of the bed, standing up to zip his pants.

  “Look in the top left drawer,” he called to her, once again getting caught up in her enthusiasm, even if it was for something as run-of-the-mill as a cheeseburger. He couldn’t remember the last time he had bothered with such a plain meal.

  “No, you didn’t!” she screamed. Two minutes later came running back into the room, dressed in a yellow polka-dot bikini. “I can’t believe this still looks good on me! Though, thank the heavens you got it in a few different sizes. I’m definitely not as skinny as I was in grad school.”

  “I like your body even more now,” he told her, his eyes clouding over with lust. “We will go find your cheeseburger, but when we get back to the room, I will take you with this bikini on. In the Jacuzzi or in the pool. I have not decided yet, but you will leave the suit on while I am inside of you. I will make you come twice, once with my hand and once with my cock. Then I will bring you to the bed, pull the bikini bottom aside like this....” He made a gesture of pulling the crotch of her bikini aside with two hooked fingers. “And I will make you come a third time with my tongue.”

  The smile faded from her face and she adjusted her stance. “Alexei?”

  “Yes?”

  “If your goal is for me to stay constantly turned on for the rest of this vacation, then it’s working, baby.”

  He smiled again. Her candidness about sex used to be one of the things he loved about her. One of the many things he could admit he missed about her now.

  “Come,” he said, holding his hand out to her. “Let our real vacation begin.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  OF ALL the deals they had struck, the last couple of ones turned out to be the easiest to stick to. Eva found it scarily easy to pretend she and Alexei were any other couple, as opposed to people engaged in a two-week affair compelled by blackmail. The first couple of days there were a few “you are pushing a button” moments on both their parts, but by the end of the first week, those had died off and they’d really started to simply enjoy each other.

  It helped that they were running all over the island like twenty-somethings on Spring Break as opposed to an international businessman and a small town social worker. Neither of them were used to taking vacations like the ones offered by South Padre Island. Alexei had told her prior to this, he didn’t “believe” in vacations. “You do not become a successful businessman by taking vacations.” And the few vacations Eva had gone on since their break-up had involved Aaron and places more geared toward kids than adults.

  But they’d both managed to keep up their side of the bargain, and she’d found being with Alexei in this way made it very easy to forget who she was in real life. Just like in grad school, he treated her like she was the sexiest woman on the planet. He listened to her stories and really seemed to respect what she did for a living even though it paid so much less than what he did. He’d even stopped shaving, and within a few days, he looked like a slightly older version of the bearded man she’d fallen in love with.

  The days flew by and before she knew it, they only had forty-eight hours left before she was due back home.

  Alexei seemed to realize their time together would soon be coming to a close, too. He didn’t say anything, but kept them in the room more, making love to her in long, intense sessions that suggested he was attempting to get his fill of her before they parted ways.

  She didn’t mind, since she was also having trouble with the sun setting on their time in paradise. But no matter what scenario she ran in her head, there was no way to keep the relationship going that guaranteed her and Aaron’s safety.

  If she told Alexei about his uncle, who she had heard him talking to on the phone at least three times during their vacation, he might not believe her. If he did believe her, it might not be enough for him to want to come back to her. For all she knew, Ms. Threesome was primed and ready and waiting for him back in New York.

  If she did tell him, and he did believe her, then there was still the chance he’d want nothing to do with Aaron. He’d had a vasectomy, for heaven’s sake, which didn’t exactly scream, “I want to be a dad.” Even if he could tolerate Aaron, she couldn’t see any scenario in which he didn’t flip out because she’d kept his son’s existence from him.

  Emilio had visited the suite a few times to have him sign contracts and receive instructions about how to handle a few business problems that had come up. From what she could see, Alexei was in the habit of using whatever weapon he needed in order to win his business battles. And if it came down to a battle with her, she had no doubt he’d use Aaron to get back at her.

  “Eva?”

  Eva jerked out of her thoughts and came back to the present in which she and Alexei were lying on their stomachs, side by side, on a large beach towel facing the crashing surf just a few yards in front of them. “Did you say something?”

  “Yes, I was saying I’d like to go to The R for dinner tonight.”

  “That’s fine,” she said. “You’ve got to be sick of all the non-gourmet food I’ve been forcing on you.”

  He ignored her quip and said, “I would like to know where you were just now.”

  She shrugged and told a half-truth. “Just thinking about all the stuff I need to do when I get back to Drummond.”

  He nodded. “I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how well the business runs without me. Emilio has run our office well in my stead. But perhaps this is not the case with your office.”

  Eva shrugged. “Berta’s supposed to be my assistant, too, but she always puts the stuff I give her on the backburner. I’ve never come back from vacation and not had to do all the stuff I asked her to do when I was away.”

  “You just saved the entire town of Drummond from ruin. She should be grateful.”

  “Um, well, we told a cover story about me going on vacation with Layla, so she doesn’t exactly know what all I’m doing for Drummond. And in any case, my dad and her pretty much blame me for getting them into this position in the first place.”

  He went quiet for a while, contemplating something with that deep scowl of his before he asked, “How long did you say your father’s been mayor?”

  “Almost thirty years. One of my first memories was his inauguration.”

  “And he still has not found another source of industry other than Drummond Oil? That is not good business. As far as I am concerned, it was your father who got your town into this position, not you. He is lucky it was me who bought Drummond Oil. If someone else had purchased it, they might not have been as…” He pulled her closer and pressed a lingering kiss into her shoulder. “…open to negotiation.”

  Eva hadn’t really thought about it that way before. A little bit of the guilt she’d been feeling about getting Drummond into this mess started to subside and a wave of contentment washed over her. S
he leaned in closer to him, loving the way the bristles of his new beard brushed against her shoulder. He smelled like suntan lotion and beach, the exact opposite of the way he smelled when they first arrived and he took her in a frenzy of anger and reproach.

  This version of Alexei, she noted, was much more into PDA than the one she used to know. Back at UTD, it had always been her initiating any displays of affection outside of the confines of their bedroom. But on South Padre Island, he was constantly surprising her with kisses or pulling her closer and a few times, even sweeping her off her feet in the playful way of lovers way younger and more carefree than themselves.

  She couldn’t get over what a good time she was having with Alexei. In the months it had taken her to get over him, she had managed to convince herself that the love and companionship she thought they had shared had been a fluke. After their break-up, she’d done fieldwork hours at a Dallas shelter for domestic violence victims. How many women had she met who told her their boyfriends or husbands had also refused to talk about their past? Only for them to find out later that the secretive men had a criminal record, which they’d been hiding.

  His lips moved to her neck, and he easily found its most erogenous spot, sending tingling sensations all the way down to her toes with his kisses. And she once again wondered how he had done the things he’d done and still managed to sleep at night. She also wondered how she could know herself what he’d done, what he was, what he still might be for all she knew, and still hunger for him the way she did.

  The worst part of this vacation had been constantly having to stay on guard against falling back in love with him. And really, she wasn’t sure she was doing such a crack job of that.

  “If you keep on kissing my neck like that, we’re going to end up breaking some of Texas’s indecency laws.“ Then, when he kept on kissing her neck anyway, she asked. “Aren’t you supposed to be meeting with Emilio at five?”

  He groaned and looked at his Rolex. “Yes, we should get back. ” He turned her face toward his to give her a few more soft kisses. “But trust we will finish this after dinner.”

  * * * *

  Eva was unusually quiet during the ride home, Alexei noted. Albeit, they spent most of the return trip on a Vespa—Eva had seen the scooter on their third day there and insisted on renting one. She’d expressed so much enthusiasm for tooling around on the back of it with him, Alexei had arranged to have one purchased and delivered to the hotel for their everyday use. The truth was, Alexei liked having Eva hugged up against his back everywhere they went together. She had a way of laying her face on his shoulder that made it feel like she was happy to be there with him as opposed to compelled.

  She usually said one or two things while they were on the scooter even if it was just to point out a restaurant or activity they might enjoy the next day. Even though it had been Alexei who commanded they spend two weeks together, so far they’d gone kiteboarding, windsurfing, dolphin watching, night clubbing, and even driving along the beach in all-terrain buggies, all at Eva’s request. And to his surprise, Alexei had enjoyed everything. He only ever went to vacation destinations on business, and it had never occurred to him to bother with such touristy activities.

  But Eva acted more like someone who had truly missed out on doing these type of things, and she seemed determined to vacation just as hard as some of the younger college students the island was known to attract. This made him wonder about Aaron. Did he never take her anywhere? Why would she be so dedicated to him if he couldn’t even provide her with something as simple as an in-state beach vacation?

  It would have been different if Eva hadn’t left him because he didn’t have enough money. But seeing as she had, it made her attachment to this Aaron, who was apparently not rich and definitely not satisfying her sexual needs, all the more confusing.

  He was once again hit with the urge to break his promise to Eva and get a full dossier on this man. But he tamped it down, knowing there would be no need. His publicist had more than come through on the publicity angle. She’d expanded upon his original idea by not only pitching an entire South Padre story to her Dallas media contacts, but keeping on the photog so he could covertly take pictures of Alexei and Eva all over the island. She’d manage to get the Dallas Times to run a special feature in their travel section on South Padre Island from the point of view of a Russian billionaire, vacationing there with his Texas-born lover. So Alexei didn’t have to seek this Aaron out, because their relationship would be blown to pieces in less than seven days, when the Dallas Times piece ran, letting her boyfriend know exactly where she had been and who she had been with when she said she was in the Bahamas with Layla. In less than a week, this boyfriend would no longer be in Eva’s picture.

  Still, her sudden quiet disturbed him. Was she thinking about Aaron? Wishing she were on South Padre with him instead of her Russian ex? The thought of her having sex with another man after she left in two days caused his heart to beat faster with jealous anger.

  “What would you like to do tomorrow?” he asked, just to get his own mind off the subject of her and Aaron.

  She wrapped both her hands around his large one, an affectionate habit she’d picked back up over the last few days. It bothered him that it felt so natural and that he liked when she took his hand like this, as if they were still really together.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s our last full day, so maybe you should pick. I’ve been kind of monopolizing all our out-of-bed time with stuff I wanted to do.”

  “I do not mind,” he said. “Your version of vacation is much better than my version of vacation.”

  “Oh yeah? What do you do when you have a few days off?”

  “I usually visit my family in Russia. My aunts overfeed me.” He thought about how there was usually some mess to clean up regarding his Uncle Sergei, who still liked to use violence to solve both his business and personal problems. Often bridges had to be mended and certain officials paid off to look the other way. But to Eva, he said, “And I pay my respects to my uncle, who is semi-retired now but still involved with a few of our divisions.”

  Her grip on his hand tightened and he felt her stiffen against his arm. “Are you all right?”

  She let go of his hand and shook her arms out. “Yeah, I sure am. But I think my arms might still be a little stiff from windsurfing. Who knew it would require so much upper-body strength?”

  They arrived at the elevators, and Alexei resisted the temptation to take her hand back, chastising himself for even having such desires.

  “Um, your semi-retired uncle in Russia….is this the same uncle you used to get in arguments with every week back when we were at UTD?” she asked.

  “You have a good memory.” As they stepped into the elevator he settled his arm around her shoulders, and tried not to think too hard about the fact that he had only made it a few seconds before needing to touch her again. “Yes, this is the same uncle, but we do not argue anymore. We are for the most part on the same page.”

  “Oh, that’s nice,” she said. But again it felt like she had gone stiff beneath his arm.

  Perhaps she could sense what he’d just said about his uncle and he being on the same page wasn’t fully true. He didn’t bother arguing with his uncle anymore, just let the older man do as he pleased and cleaned up the mess afterwards. Though, he couldn’t say he wasn’t annoyed by the fact that Sergei had called three times in the last two weeks to suggest Russian oil companies they might want to invest in. He’d humored him and given the names to Emilio to research, but as he suspected, all the companies were either owned or managed by ex-Russian criminals, who had not done nearly as much to clean up their act as Alexei had. After Eva left on Sunday, he’d have to call his uncle and make him understand once and for all that despite his Drummond Oil purchase, Rustanov Enterprises would not be getting involved in oil on the Russian end.

  But right now, he was more concerned with the woman who was holding herself rigid underneath his arm.
r />   “You are not okay,” he said, sensing it even if she would not admit it.

  She gave him a smile he could tell was forced. “Okay, you got me. I’m a little cold, but I didn’t want to complain about it since I’ll be changing soon.”

  No, that wasn’t it. He could tell she was lying to him, but he also had a feeling he didn’t want to know what was really bothering her—especially if it had anything to do with the boyfriend waiting for her at home.

  She nuzzled into his chest and wrapped her arms around his waist, saying, “I’m just going to take advantage of some of this heat you’re kicking off if you don’t mind.”

  “I do not mind,” he said. He didn’t mind at all. And that was the problem.

  “Just got the beach photos from your guy and sent them on to the publicist,” Emilio said, when Alexei came down to meet with him in the suite he was occupying a few floors below his own. “She said that should be enough for the feature, so you don’t have to worry about showing off in public anymore.”

  A twinge of sadness on Alexei’s part greeted that statement. As much as he hated to admit it, these past ten days with Eva had been the best he’d had since their break-up. He’d liked pretending to just go along with her outside plans in crowded places, when really he’d known she was making it easier for the photog to get pictures of them together. And though he’d never been a fan of PDA, he’d welcomed the excuse to kiss and hold Eva close for seemingly no reason.

  “I will keep acting in this manner, just so she does not get suspicious.”

  Emilio raised his eyebrows. “Oh, I doubt she’ll suspect you’ve been doing all this stuff in public with her, just to expose her to her boyfriend back home.”