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  She’d run. The first chance she’d got, she’d run again. He would have gone after her, but Caroline caught his arm before he could.

  “Lex, what’s going on?” she asked. Even seasoned mistresses didn’t expect to come out of the bathroom to find their dates on the verge of an orgasm with someone else.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, turning back to her, despite wanting nothing more than to hunt down Eva, throw her on the ground, and bury himself inside of her. One of his business rules was he could be an asshole all he wanted to his peers and rivals, but he treated those who worked for him with respect.

  Caroline didn’t necessarily work for him, but he did have the upper hand in terms of their relationship. He’d bought her a two-bedroom on the Upper East Side in a building with a doorman, and put a substantial sum of money in her bank account each month to keep her in designer clothes, gourmet meals, and whatever other luxuries she wanted. In exchange, she made herself available as his date or bed partner wherever and whenever he wanted her.

  But standing there in the hallway with her in the wake of what had just happened with Eva, he knew that they would be spending the rest of the evening together.

  When their limo arrived back at the hotel, he said, “I’m sorry, but some unexpected business has come up. I won’t be available tonight. You can stay in the hotel and I’ll send the jet to take you back to New York first thing in the morning. Call Emilio. He’ll set it up.”

  She cut her eyes, obviously stuck between the understood terms of their relationship and her own confused annoyance. “Are you dumping me?” she asked, disbelief ringing in her voice. For Caroline, who could have just about any man she wanted due to her looks and general mien, it was probably hard to fathom being dumped for a random black woman in a yellow party dress. “Who is she?”

  “She’s unfinished business. And I’m not dumping you for her. I want to take care of this tonight, but Emilio will call you when I get back to New York and we’ll go out to dinner.”

  Caroline gritted her teeth. He could tell she craved answers, but didn’t want to press for them for fear of talking herself out of the set-up she had with him. But he knew she would cave to his commands. All women could be manipulated with money. Eva had taught him this the hard way.

  “Fine,” she said. “I’ll call your assistant when I get back to the room.”

  He nodded to the hotel’s doorman who had been standing patiently on Caroline’s side of the limo for a few minutes. He opened the door for her, and that was it. She was out of his space, leaving him free to deal with Eva St. James.

  It only took his assistant, Emilio, about thirty minutes to track down Eva’s reservation at a chain hotel just a few blocks away from the one he’d just abandoned Caroline in. But a few minutes later, Emilio informed him she’d already checked out and a few minutes after that, Alexei found out she was on a plane back to Dallas.

  Hearing this made Alexei’s usual scowl deepen. Just like eight years ago, when Eva ran from him, she really ran. Back then he hadn’t been able to track her down, as much as he had embarrassed himself trying, calling her closest friends over and over again and haunting the School of Social Work outside his shift hours, hoping to catch her on her way in or out. But she never showed up and a few weeks later one of the social work students took pity on him and let him know she had transferred to another program.

  After that, he couldn’t study. He couldn’t sleep. If not for Emilio, who was back then his fellow minimum-wage security guard and three years his junior, he would have gotten fired from his job and kicked out of the MBA program. But after the third time he’d shown up for their shift switch, hungover from the night before because he’d drunk himself into a stupor over Eva, Emilio had abandoned the front desk, taken him to his nearby dorm room, and thrown him in a cold shower. From that point on, he made sure Alexei ate and studied and didn’t keep any liquor in his apartment until the worst of the heartbreak passed and he could move on.

  But not forget. No, Alexei would never forget that condescending note she left on his refrigerator door. He eventually had it framed, and he kept it in the bottom drawer of his work desk in his New York offices. Whenever he felt his energy wane for the legitimate business world—which turned out to be in some ways even more cutthroat than his former crime world—he took the letter out and re-read it. That was all it took to feel his angry ambition spike again.

  “I want Drummond Oil,” he told Emilio over the phone. “Set that in motion.”

  A long silence came from Emilio’s end. “Are you sure about that, man? You’ve come a long way, buddy. She’s not worth going off the deep end again.”

  “I know she’s not,” Alexei said. “That’s why it’s the perfect time to get my revenge. Now make it happen.”

  Emilio sighed, but didn’t say anything else before hanging up. He now made more money than he could have ever dreamed of back in the day when he and Alexei had been unarmed security guards just trying to scrape by. Like most people in Alexei’s life, he didn’t poke the dragon if he didn’t have to.

  Alexei hung up, just as the driver pulled into the private field from which his jet would be taking off. Oh, yes, Eva might have run, but this time she definitely wouldn’t be able to hide.

  Chapter Three

  EVA ended up spending more to get on the last direct flight of the night from Pittsburgh to Dallas than she had on her entire Pittsburgh vacation package. And she’d also have to deal with the three-hour drive back to Drummond when she got in, but it was worth if it meant she’d be back with Aaron tonight.

  Guilt gnawed at her, making her desperate to see him, to remind herself how much she loved him and what a wonderful life they had built together.

  An image of Alexei lifting her leg around his waist suddenly seared through her mind. Without warning, she felt her pussy moisten at just the thought of him bringing her to release with her arms pinned above her head like that.

  She cursed herself and her treacherous body, but it had always been like that with Alexei from the very first kiss.

  She could still remember being taken by surprise when she stopped by his security desk the night before Christmas break.

  “Hey, Lexie,” she’d said, tapping on his business book to get him to look up at her. She’d had to use this tactic often, because Alexei was almost always studying whenever she saw him. Unlike her, who only cracked open her books a couple of nights before a paper was due.

  “I can see you’re studying and I don’t want to disturb you…” she started to say.

  “You disturb me every night with the tap, tap, tap on my book while I am attempting to make study,” he pointed out. “I think this is maybe hobby for you.”

  She continued on like he hadn’t said anything. “…but I know you’re going to be here all alone over the holidays, and I wanted to give you your Christmas present before I left.”

  “My Christmas present,” he repeated, his usual scowl deepening even further.

  “Yes,” she answered. “I’m sick of seeing you sitting around here looking like an angry bear all the time. So this Christmas I’m going to give you a hug. It’s more than obvious you need one.”

  He looked up her from his sitting position, his hulkish body completely eclipsing the tiny rolling chair he sat in. “You want to give me hug.”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “No, we will not hug.”

  “Boy, I am Texas born and raised. We do not take “no” for an answer,” she informed him. “Now you can either get over here and let me give you this hug, or you can argue with me. But if I were you, I’d just give in. That way you can get back to your book.”

  “I am not boy.” Alexei slammed his book shut and came around the desk to confront her.

  “You are friendly,” he said, pointing at her in a way that made his observation seem more like an accusation than a compliment. “You come here to say good night and ma
ke, what is it called? Small talk every night because maybe you want to be friends. You are not like me. You have many friends. And I see you also talking and smiling to other guard, Emilio, too. Maybe you are girl who does not like when man not friendly to you. But I am a man, and I do not want to be your friend. No hug.”

  For a moment she stared at him in shocked silence. “Okay,” she said, drawing out the word. “Well, I think this proves two things. One, you’re really rude in a way that goes way beyond all that stuff we learned about in my Cultural Sensitivity seminar and two, you really, really need a hug.”

  Before he could offer any more protest she slipped her hands under his arms, which were clenched into fists at his sides, and wrapped her own arms around his wide torso. She laid her soft head against his massive chest and squeezed as a hard as she could given their size difference and the fact that he was built like a stone statue. “Merry Christmas, Lexie—“

  And that was when she felt his insanely large erection press into her stomach. She froze, her eyes popping wide.

  “I told you, I do not want be friends,” he said above her, his voice quiet and furious.

  For some reason, she still felt compelled to cling to him, if only to prove her point. “I still maintain that you really needed this hug,” she said, from the relative safety of his chest.

  They stood there like this, her hugging him, him not hugging her back, neither of them saying anything, his erection filling the silence louder than a scream.

  “You are adult woman but like kotenok, you do not listen. Like kitten, you do what you want and are surprised when your actions make trouble.”

  She kept her face pressed to his chest, even though this position had become more than awkward at that point. “Am I in trouble?” she asked, her voice as shaky as her nerves.

  “If you had listen when I say no, you would not have to know what you know now,” he pointed out.

  “Listen more, yes. Less kitten, more listening.” Finally she mustered up the courage to draw away from him. “I’ll keep that in mind for the future, Lexie.”

  She began to take back her arms, but he kept them pinned underneath his own and said in that stern way of his, “I do not think you have really learned this lesson. I must teach you.”

  He lowered his face and kissed her hard and sure, cueing the all-consuming passion that would become the hallmark of their relationship. The kiss soon turned into groping and the groping turned into stumbling into a nearby supply closet where they consummated their fledgling attraction just five minutes after she accidentally found out that it existed. That had led to a less frantic session back at his place. And then Eva lost count of how many times Alexei initiated another session and how many times he sent her over the edge with his deft fingers, his tireless tongue, and his heavily muscled body that just kept going and going and going…

  She’d woken up late the next afternoon to a cell phone filled with angry messages from her father. Where was she? She was supposed to have arrived late the night before and he and her mother were worried sick. According to the last message, they were thinking about sending her perfect older brother, Steve, to Dallas to make sure she was all right.

  She shook Alexei awake, and then playfully squirmed out of the way when he reached up to pull her back down on the mattress. “I’ve got to go, Lexie,” she said. “I was supposed to drive home last night and my parents are mad as a house of cats.”

  Alexei regarded her through hooded eyes, heavy with sleep. “This is fine. When I see you next, we will be at your apartment. You will cook dinner for me and I will thank you for food all night long. We will sleep together and next morning we will fuck again in shower.”

  He then kissed her mouth, which had fallen open with shock and said, “Go to your family. But come home to me, kotenok.”

  The sharp ding of the captain turning on the seatbelt light jolted Eva out of this memory. They were beginning their descent into Dallas. With another spike of guilt, she performed a mental scrub, wiping away the memory, and instead concentrating on Aaron’s handsome face. He was the one she loved, the most important person in her life, she told herself.

  Four hours later she arrived home at the sprawling villa she and Aaron shared with her parents. No one knew she was coming home early, so no lights had been left on. It didn’t matter, she had grown up in this place, and she easily picked her way through the living room and up the stairs in the dark. She took off her heels at the top of the stairs and padded past her parents’ room to the second door on the floor.

  Though she’d tried to be as quiet as possible, Aaron must have heard her because he was sitting up in bed when she opened his door.

  “Mama, is that you?” he asked, his little voice sleepy but strong in the darkness.

  “Yes, it’s me.” She walked into the room and turned on the bedside lamp so she could see him and he could see her.

  He spoke to her with half-mast eyes, just like his father used to when he was tired. It was even more eerie, because though Aaron inherited most of Eva’s facial features, including her full lips, high cheekbones, and wide nose, his eyes plainly revealed who he really was, the son of Alexei Rustanov.

  She hugged him to her with fierce love.

  “Mama, I’m sleepy,” he said, disengaging from her overly cloying hug after about thirty seconds.

  She chuckled. She had probably only gotten that long of a hug because he was tired. Lord knew he didn’t put up with too much affection from his mother when he was awake, especially if they were out in public. Like most boys his age, he spent a lot of energy trying to prove to the world he didn’t need a mother, even if he did.

  “Do you want a glass of water?” she asked, though he was already beginning to curl back up under his X-Men sheets.

  “No, thank you,” he said. “Night-night, Mama.”

  “Night-night,” she said.

  She turned off the bedside light and left, but as she did, she looked back at her beloved child and reminded herself how hard she had worked to keep him a secret from Alexei, and of all the reasons she must continue to do so.

  Chapter Four

  Six months later.

  EVA’S father called just as she was finishing up the paperwork from the Rodriguez’s home study. After years of trying for a third child, the two Drummond Oil employees were hoping to complete their family through adoption, which meant a qualified professional had to assure the Dallas-based adoption agency they’d chosen to work with that they were responsible people, with steady jobs, and the ability to take on another mouth at their dinner table.

  In a big city like Dallas, this kind of thing would be handled by someone affiliated with either an adoption agency or a formal home study service. But in a town that only existed because it was where the Drummond Oil headquarters was located, Eva had to take on home studies along with her many other duties. These duties included handling all counseling for the local school district, following up on any domestic disturbance calls reported by the police, providing any child protective services needed, and handing out social security checks to the folks who preferred to pick them up at Drummond’s one-woman Social Service & Welfare office.

  That day she was particularly rushed because she needed to get the Rodriguez’s paperwork in the mail by three o’clock to meet their adoption agency’s cut off date, or else she’d have to drive all the way to Dallas to hand deliver it. It was already two forty-five. Luckily the post office, like every other civil service in Drummond, was on Main Street, albeit at the opposite end as her building. If she walked really fast, she could get there in under ten minutes.

  She thought about not answering when the phone rang just as she was getting out of her chair to leave. But when she saw her father’s extension pop up in the caller ID box, she knew she would have to. The mayor’s office was only two doors down from hers. He knew she was in the building, and if she didn’t pick up, he’d just make the small walk to talk to her in person, delaying her even further.
r />   “Hey, Daddy,” she said, picking up the phone. “I can’t really talk right now. I’m handling some important paperwork.”

  “That can wait. I need to see you in my office.” Cleveland St. James’s voice rung through the phone line with austere authority.

  Eva rolled her eyes, resenting how her father always made it seem like she should drop everything at her “little social work job” and come running whenever he called.

  “It can’t wait. It’s adoption paperwork, and if I don’t get it in the mail by three, it won’t get to Dallas on time.”

  “Finish it up after we meet, then I’ll have Berta overnight it for you.”

  “You’re going to let me overnight it?” Now he really had Eva’s attention. Her father was notoriously stingy about allowing anyone who worked for the town to overnight anything on Drummond’s dime. “That’s why all these small towns are going broke,” he’d said the last time she had asked to overnight something, as if every small town fiscal crisis had less to do with businesses closing down or moving away and more to do with frivolous local employees.

  “Is everything okay?” she asked him. She dropped her voice to a whisper. “Daddy, do you think you’ve had a stroke and just don’t know it? I hear that can happen.”

  An irritated beat. “Eva Janelle St. James, get in my office. Now.”

  Less than a minute later, Eva dropped into one of the brown, leather guest chairs in her father’s office. Just like the home they lived in, Cleveland’s office was large and stuffed to the gills with leather furniture, hunting trophies, and framed commendations from political, social, and community organizations.

  He scanned her outfit of jeans and a neon-pink T-shirt with frank disapproval but didn’t say anything. They’d already had many discussions about her refusal to wear a suit or even business casual in her position as Drummond’s only social worker, until they had both agreed to let the issue lie. Eva liked to be comfortable and she wasn’t going to budge. Still that didn’t keep her father from wearing his blatant disapproval all over his face every time they met during the course of a work day.