Her eyes widened and he didn’t have to look down to see what was shocking her. He could feel it. His cock rising, lengthening, thickening. Color rose in her cheeks and her nipples turned a deeper pink. His cock rose higher on a thick pulse of blood at the sight. A vein pounded in her neck, bringing the blood that now flushed brightly down to her breasts. Breasts he’d touched, kissed. At the memory, his balls tightened, drew up while his cock burned.
They were seducing each other across ten feet of space.
Her stomach growled again. “Food,” she said weakly.
“Food,” he agreed, turning back around.
Fifty thousand dollars. So much, for so little. Andrew Peters, born Andrei Petrov, continued peeling potatoes while thinking it through.
Peeling potatoes as the kitchen
commis
was not where he wanted to be, in his tenth year out of cooking school. By rights, he should have been the chef, or at least the sous-chef, in a decent restaurant, socking money aside for his own place.
And he knew exactly what he wanted. He’d had his eye on the place for a while. A small place, a thousand square feet, in Chelsea. It would be decorated like the dining room in Tolstoy’s town mansion, serving pre-Revolutionary Franco-Russian haute cuisine, what the czars and barons ate before the Soviet monsters came and ransacked Mother Russia.
The Petrovs had been aristocracy in St. Petersburg, the family fortune and nearly all the family members wiped out by Stalin.
But books and photographs had somehow survived the monsters, ah yes, and had come down to the last Petrov. Andrei had an entrée into the lives of his forebears. Though he read the books and pored over the photographs in a small room with plyboard walls which hid nothing his drunken neighbors said or did, though he lived in a small, cramped fourth-floor walk-up in Brighton Beach, that wasn’t his life. His life was in another place and another time. In his imagination, Andrei was Prince Petrov, a grandee in nineteenth-century St. Petersburg.
He lived on Nevsky Prospekt in a palatial Italianate mansion, which had been his great-great-grandfather’s town house. As a young boy, before his parents emigrated, he used to stand in the street, small hands clutching the bars of the elaborate wrought-iron fence guarding the building, and imagine that the building now housing the state archives was still his. The mansion of Prince Petrov.
He knew every detail of his great-great-grandfather’s life. The number of servants, the coaches and the horses, each horse with its own groom. The social calendar filled with balls and concerts and parties. The elaborate meals with fifty guests eating off the one-thousand-piece gold-trimmed set of Limoges china.
And the food! He’d come across a set of menus for meals during the Christmas season of 1904 and his boy’s mind swam with the grandeur of it all. Borscht and
kvass, kholodets, pelmeny,
twenty different types of
pirozhki,
kebabs from woodland game hunted on Petrov land,
sudak
fished from the well-stocked ponds of the country
dascha.
Fruits and berries collected by the serfs, an enormous
Sharlotka
carried in on a two-foot-long silver serving tray borne by four servants. Washed down by the finest imported French champagne. Fifty guests, one hundred servants.
Andrei’s young heart thrilled at the images. Russia’s finest, at the Petrov table by candlelight, a quartet playing Mozart on the balcony overlooking the immense mirrored dining hall, an army of servants in livery, quietly serving the
ton.
His parents applied to emigrate to
Amerika
when he was eleven, and he thought yes, perhaps
Amerika
would be the place where he would make his money and return in triumph to Russia, where the Petrovs would take their rightful place amongst the rich and mighty.
It didn’t turn out that way. Andrei’s father, an engineer, could only find work as a cab driver, working fourteen hours a day for a company that paid him a pittance. Andrei’s mother developed breast cancer and the two Petrov men watched helplessly as she died a fast, painful death.
When they buried her, his father died, too, except his body. He could barely work with his grief. So it was all on him—on Andrei, now Andrew. His shoulders had to bear the burden of the Petrovs.
He’d had such huge dreams of returning to the motherland, dreams with the solid feel of destiny to them. A Petrov picking up after seventy years of the barbarity of the Soviets. Yet with each passing year, as he grew taller, the plans grew smaller, shrinking steadily, until he was reduced to applying for aid to enroll in a second-rate cooking school.
It might have been his way out. A quick rise through the ranks, a few years at the top. Celebrity chefs could pull in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in salary and millions in sponsorships. But not him.
He’d been interviewing for the lowly job of
garde manger,
the fucking
pantry supervisor,
in a third-rate restaurant in Rockaway, when he’d heard of a job opening for a Russian speaker. In Manhattan, the heart of fine cuisine. And it paid three times the going salary.
It was a good job, in a superbly well-equipped kitchen, but his talents went unnoticed. Well, what could he expect? He was cooking for Russian
thugs
. Men who knew the best gun to use in a firefight, but who had no clue how to judge the fineness of crepes or the smooth consistency of a good béchamel. Or even appreciate the fine porcelain they ate on or the heavy crystal of the glasses they drank out of.
Andrei wouldn’t have cared one way or the other, except that they spoke the language he worshipped. The language of his forefathers. The language of Pushkin and Tolstoy and Yevteshenko.
Only this wasn’t the Russian he’d been taught by his parents. The language the thugs spoke was rough, ungrammatical, provincial, the Russian of illiterate goons. Gutter Russian, fit only for guttersnipes.
Yet the money was so good, he was forced to stay, even though every day was an assault on his senses, another day amongst the barbarians. He considered it a form of indentured servitude, the exorbitant salary he could never hope to duplicate elsewhere, like a noose around his neck, slowly choking him.
He studied his surroundings, seeking a way out. He was a prince among swine. It went without saying that he could outwit them all.
The kitchen fed forty-five men twice daily, like a small restaurant. It was also open whenever necessary, as men came and went at all hours of the day and the night. The food was copious, fresh and good, without any attempt at sophistication. After a week in the kitchen, Andrei realized that any decent housewife could do what he did. Only it had to be in Russian, since almost the entire staff was Russian or Ukrainian.
He worked for a mystery man everyone called Drake. Andrei knew very little about him and no one talked, ever. The closest Andrei could come to information on Drake was a friendship with the butler, a Russian-Ukrainian called Shota. Shota was fanatically faithful to Drake, though Andrei couldn’t understand why. The mystery man kept to himself on the top story of the building, rarely interacting with the staff except through intercom messages.
It wasn’t until Andrei had spent a couple of months working for Drake that he understood that he was working for an international criminal, one of the most powerful men in the world. A frisson had run up his spine. Surely there would be a way to use this information. An enemy to sell information to.
It wasn’t easy, because this Drake was mysterious as hell. It was an impregnable fortress up above, the domain of a powerful, untouchable ruler. Very few people knew Drake’s comings and goings. The man was like smoke—impossible to grasp, impossible to pin down.
And then Andrei had two strokes of good luck. Fabulous luck, actually. Shota developed a crush on him, and a Russian came to Drake as a friend and left as an enemy.
Shota was easy to lead on. He was a romantic, and was deliriously happy with soulful looks and stolen kisses in the pantry. Andrei had no interest whatsoever in fucking Shota, but he did want to string him along as much as possible. It was through Shota that he learned that Drake disappeared two Tuesday afternoons a month. It was through Shota that he learned that Drake was buying the entire production of an artist called Grace Larsen. Finding the gallery that sold Grace Larsen had been a snap. He waited in a coffee shop across the street on the right Tuesday afternoons and—
voilà!
—the mysterious Drake, slinking in an alley.
Hard info on a billionaire running a crime empire was worth money, big money, but you had to find a buyer for it. Then he overheard that a Russian was offering fifty thousand dollars for information on Drake. None of Drake’s men was willing to cross their dangerous boss for half a year’s salary. But then none of Drake’s men had any ambitions, other than to be a thug for hire.
Andrei did.
There was a Hotmail account. It had all been so easy.
If you want information on Drake, transfer $50,000 to this bank account.
The response, and the fifty-thousand-dollar payment, had come fast. Someone wanted the information badly. Andrei had sent the information and the money went into his savings account.
For a sweaty couple of hours after the attempt on Drake’s life, Andrei expected a tap on the shoulder and—well, fuck, Drake was a mobster, after all—two bullets through the back of the head, Soviet style. But as the hours ticked by, Andrei’s hands steadied and the sweat along his spine dried. His exquisitely sensitive antenna told him that no one suspected him. He was a sous-chef, a kitchen servant, off everyone’s radar.
The BlackBerry in his chef’s pants vibrated. Andrei took a bathroom break and checked the screen.
$100,000 for further information
.
Andrei’s breathing speeded up, his heart raced. One hundred thousand dollars—100K per pop. Oh yes, this was it, his moment. In a day, maybe two, he could accumulate more money than in a lifetime of working hard in shit jobs in other people’s kitchens.
He was smart. He could feed the information in tiny incremental bits, string this Rutskoi along. In a couple of days, Andrei could have five hundred thousand dollars. Maybe more.
Five hundred thousand dollars would allow his father to retire, would allow Andrei to open up Troika with enough style to guarantee its success. This was opportunity knocking at the door, what everyone said would happen in
Amerika
. All he had to do was answer.
OK,
he typed into the tiny keyboard. He combed his long blond hair, dabbed some Hugo Boss cologne on his pulse points and went off looking for Shota.
Though Grace was starving and though her stomach was making embarrassing noises, it was hard to keep her mind on food with Drake walking naked across a room.
The man was simply magnificent. There were no words to describe him. Luckily, Grace didn’t need words. Her artist’s eye told her everything she needed to know.
She’d studied human anatomy all her life. During art school, she’d drawn literally thousands of human backs, but had never seen anything like the musculature of Drake’s back. It was immensely broad, rippling with muscle, tapering to a lean waist. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on him. It almost looked as though he didn’t have any skin, either, the muscles underlying it were so prominent. Clothed, he was impressive. Naked, he looked lethal. The pristine white bandage over the enormous ball of his left shoulder looked almost like a decoration. It was impossible to think that he’d taken a bullet only the day before. He looked completely fit and moved with utter ease, like a huge panther.
It was hard to imagine what kind of exercises he put himself through to maintain a body like that. Bodybuilding exercises pumped muscles up, made them rise. These weren’t built muscles: they looked…forged. Out of iron and steel.
He didn’t move like a bodybuilder, either, with that muscle-bound waddle they developed. No, he moved like water, smoothly flowing across the floor, like a force of nature.
She remembered the feel of him in her arms. Amazing. Like holding a warm, perfectly proportioned rock. No, that wasn’t the right analogy. Though he’d been hard as stone, what had come through her fingertips had been
life.
As if the man had a greater proportion of life force in him than others. She’d felt her fingers sizzle with electricity when she touched him, a connection to something almost superhuman.
Everything about him was outsize. His physique, his fighting ability, his…wow. Yeah, that was outsize, too. Grace didn’t have that much experience with male members, but even so, she understood that she’d just held a champ in her hand.
It wasn’t that she didn’t like sex, it was just that sex involved men, and a goodly portion of them turned out to be unlikeable jerks. She’d tried, she really had. Done her best to relax, go with the flow, all the other clichés, but she never quite managed it.
With Drake relaxation hadn’t been a problem. Her muscles had turned to mush. All he had to do was touch her, and her entire body softened for him.
Drake opened the door and walked back to her, pushing an enormous trolley carrying covered plates, cups, cutlery, a Thermos. She could smell the rich aroma of coffee, buttery croissants and juicy meat from across the room.
Grace sat up against the headboard cross-legged, pulling the sheet up under her arms, covering her chest. Drake parked the trolley next to the bed and poured two cups of steaming coffee from the Thermos.
He held a cup out to her, while the other hand tugged down the sheet. “Don’t cover yourself up,” he said softly. “You’re much too beautiful.”
She could have put up a fight, but of course it would have been ridiculous, thinking she could win a tussle against Drake. She was naturally modest. Even in the locker room, the few times she made it to the gym, she preferred dressing in the toilet cubicles. Not out of prudery, but out of shyness.
Which, clearly, had taken a hike, because she let him tug down the sheet without a murmur. It might have been the molten heat in his eyes that convinced her to just let go of the sheet instead of clutching it to her. No one had ever looked at her like that, like he wanted to eat her up and was restraining himself with difficulty.
Once the sheet was down to her lap, he handed her the cup and curled his hand around her breast, his thumb lazily twirling around her nipple. Grace could barely hold on to the coffee. What he was doing made her shake, made her muscles lax, made her vagina contract so hard, even her stomach muscles clenched.
Drake was watching her closely. He understood exactly the effect he was having on her. She chanced a glance at his lap. Well, it was mutual. He was fully aroused again, his penis flat against his stomach, thick and dark, with ropy veins running up the column.
His dark eyes were hot.
“Drink the coffee,” he growled.
Coffee. Right. She had to hold the cup with both hands, otherwise she’d spill the hot coffee all over herself and all over this beautiful bed. She tipped her head back against the headboard and sipped.
God, it was delicious. Sharp, yet with a smooth smoky taste. Some outrageously expensive blend, no doubt. She took another sip. Perfect.
His hand continued stroking her breast, movements lazy. “Good?” he asked.
“Wonderful.”
“Give me a taste,” he said suddenly, stretching over to cover her mouth with his. Oh lord, she could simply sink into his kisses. This one was long, languid, the strokes of his hand on her breast echoed by his tongue in her mouth. He lifted his head for a second, then moved in more closely, tongue deeper in her mouth. He lifted his head again and smiled down at her. “It
is
delicious.”
“Mmm.” Grace was too shaken to talk. It was the first time she’d seen a full-fledged smile from him. She’d made a study of faces and knew by the lines in his that he rarely smiled. Perhaps it was for the best, because he became frighteningly attractive when he did. She drew in a deep breath to steady her nerves. His hand was caressing her left breast, and she was certain he could feel her heart thumping away, as if she’d been running.
Drake’s hand left her breast to run down her side. He frowned as he felt along her rib cage. “But you must eat. You are too thin. I’ll take care of that.”
He sounded like an imperious third-world dictator and she had to work to suppress a nervous laugh. “Ah, Drake, I hate to break this to you, but I am not considered too thin here. If anything, I’ve been told I could stand to lose some weight.”
The frown deepened. “Fools, such fools here in America. American men like their women with their ribs sticking out. They have never known hunger, known women whose ribs are visible because they are starving, otherwise they wouldn’t be so foolish. Healthy flesh is a blessing and relatively rare in this world. So here, open wide.”
He was perfectly right. Grace obediently opened her mouth then moaned. She closed her eyes and tipped her head back. Oh God, there was a little explosion of pastry softer than an angel’s wing, butter and sugar on her tongue. The faintest hint of vanilla and cinnamon. Heaven.
“Again.” Drake’s imperious voice.
She opened wide and the second bite was even better. She washed it down with some more of that ambrosial coffee. Drake didn’t give her any relief. The instant she swallowed a bite of the pastry, he had another piece ready for her, watching carefully. As if she were fool enough to spit out the best pastry she’d ever eaten in her life.
His mouth was on hers again, tongue licking deep in her mouth, his taste better than that of the pastry.
After that, it was two perfect soft-boiled eggs, brown-shelled, with the rich yellow yolk of very fresh eggs. Whole wheat toast with salted, freshly churned butter and homemade black-currant jam.
“Open,” Drake said, again and again. And she did.
More was opening than just her mouth. It was like being a pampered princess, sitting naked, cross-legged on a fur blanket, fed from the fingers of a man who looked like a conquering warrior from some primeval steppe.
Every time her lips closed over his fingers, he stared directly into her eyes, the gaze hot and direct. Pure, unadulterated sex. And then when she swallowed, he’d allow that small smile to crease his face.
“And now,” he announced, whipping the silver cover off a huge porcelain plate,
“voilà!”
Slices of cooked ham and lean grilled sausage. “
Le petit dèjeuner à l’anglaise.
Enjoy.”
Grace propped her chin on her fist and observed him. “How many languages do you speak, Drake?” To her ears, admittedly not expert, the short French phrase had sounded perfect.
“A few. Some better than others. My business dealings are with the world, and I’ve learned at my expense not to depend on interpreters.”
She imagined that he spoke them perfectly. His English was nearly perfect, with only a faint accent. He looked like the kind of man who did things well or didn’t do them at all.
“I’ve always wanted to see Paris,” she said dreamily, opening her mouth for a bite of the sausage. It was delicious, with fennel seed and pepper. She waved away another bite.
“Have you now?” Drake narrowed his eyes. “Open up.” Sighing, she took in another bite of pure, lip-smacking cholesterol.
“Mm-mm. But my real dream is to see Rome. The Caravaggio, the Titians. The Sistine Chapel.” She watched his face as she recited the sights she’d always dreamed of seeing. “But you know Rome, don’t you? You’ve been there.”
“I know Rome very well, yes. Another bite, that’s a good girl. I lived in Rome very briefly some years back. But the Rome I know has nothing whatsoever to do with Titian or the Vatican. So why haven’t you been to Rome? It’s only about a six-hour flight.”
“I know.” She sighed. “It’s my fault. It never seemed to be the right time. And I only finished paying off the last of my college debts two years ago. And of course, over the past year I’ve been busy working hard for a patron who never seemed to have enough of my work and never gave me any respite.”
Drake’s hard mouth lifted in a half smile. Her heart skipped a beat. God, he was attractive when he lost that hard, harsh look.
“I had no idea I was keeping you from your dreams.”
“No, no, you don’t understand.” This was serious. Grace put her hand on his arm and dropped the teasing note. “You weren’t keeping me from anything, Drake. You were…you were saving my life. I’d tried so hard to earn my living from my art, but it wasn’t working. So I tried everything else. Waitressing, temping. None of it worked. I’d do my damndest, but somehow I always came up short. I don’t seem to be programmed for the world, only for painting. So the fact that you were buying me up meant that I could do the one thing in the world I loved.”
He dipped his head. “Delighted to be of service.”
Speaking of service…“You need to eat, too. You’ve done nothing but feed me. Now it’s my turn. In the meantime, drink your coffee.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He sipped obediently, watching her carefully out of dark eyes.
She clambered over him to get a croissant, trying to ignore the large hand that briefly cupped her bottom. The warmth of his hand jolted her. Somehow, once she was perched on the side of the bed, she was in his embrace, one long arm around her waist, a big hand resting at her hip.
The embrace brought her close to him, so close her breasts touched his chest. There was absolutely no need for the pajamas, his body emanated as much heat as a blanket. He took another sip of coffee. “Aren’t you curious?” he asked, voice low.
“Curious about what?”
“Whether the coffee tastes just as good from my mouth. Why don’t you try it?”
Curious wasn’t quite the word.
Fascinated
was. Everything about the man was fascinating, mysterious. Enticing.
Another long sip and he put the coffee cup on the tray, bringing her closer to him with one huge hand to the back of her head.
Grace had been on literally hundreds of dates in her lifetime. She was pretty, she got asked out on a lot of first dates. Not so many second dates. There was always something wrong. Sometimes something big, like a total inability to relate to any of the man’s interests, sometimes something small, like being made to feel she was a raging eccentric because there was a music group she hadn’t heard of or a TV show she didn’t watch.
Most of the time, there was a great deal of physical incompatibility. The man made all the wrong moves, touched her wrong, at times hurt her. More times than she could count she wished she were a lesbian, because at least then she might be able to work up some kind of a love life. But no, darn it, she wasn’t a lesbian. She liked men. In theory anyway.
There wasn’t anything uncomfortable or awkward about touching Drake. Or kissing him. She moved her head until she was close enough to smell the coffee on his breath, and as naturally as breathing, their lips met.
His lips were warm, surprisingly soft for such a hard man. They moved together perfectly, Drake tilting his head just so to gather a deeper draft of her.
She was the one who had kissed him, but he’d taken control of it immediately, one arm holding her tightly to him, the hand at the back of her head holding her steady for his kiss. Her breasts were crushed against his chest, the wiry hairs faintly tickling. His erect penis was a warm, hard column of heat against her stomach. It pulsed every time their tongues met. Her sheath answered with a long, hard pull of her internal muscles.
It was almost too intense, too deep.
She broke the kiss to move back an inch and take a deep, shaky breath.
“So?” he asked, eyes gleaming. “How was it?”
She blinked, barely able to understand his words.
How was what?
A long finger flicked her chin, the calluses scraping her skin. “The coffee, little one.” He bent forward for another kiss, a light one this time, just a light touch of his tongue. “Does it taste good from my mouth?”
The taste of him was hot and dark. It might have been the coffee. It was probably just him.