Dangerous Secrets

Four

Parker’s Ridge

Da Emilio’s

To Nick Ames.

Nick lifted his glass and drank to himself. Or rather to Nicholas Ames, jolly retired stockbroker, nonexistent though he might be.

Ames had a pretty good deal, sitting here in this elegant restaurant across the table from one of the prettiest women he’d ever seen in his life.

It sure as hell beat his last undercover job, as Seamus Haley, former PIRA fighter who was hiring himself out to the highest bidder as an enforcer after peace broke out in Belfast. Nick did a very credible Northern Irish accent—it was probably in his DNA—even if Guillermo Gonzalez couldn’t tell the difference between an Irishman and a Frenchman. As far as Gonzalez was concerned, Nick was one more corrupt gringo he paid to break legs and deliver packages.

Nick had spent twelve very long months rising through the ranks in Gonzalez’s organization, step by step. Living and breathing and acting the part of a scumbag.

He’d even had to fuck Consuelo, Gonzalez’s sister. Christ, that had been hard. Not because she was ugly—no, Consuelo was a looker. Worked at it, too. She spent more than the education budget of some third world countries on clothes, jewelry, and cosmetic surgery.

The instant she’d laid eyes on him, she’d staked her claim. Guillermo found it funny. He’d once walked in on Consuelo giving head and had stayed to watch, critiquing her style.

Nick had had more sex in that twelve-month period than a teen pop star and every second of it had been sheer, unadulterated vomit-inducing hell. Consuelo was heavily into pain—her pain, not his, thank God. He drew the line at that.

Still, her pain had been bad enough. She was into bondage and whips, with a hellish range of sex toys and sex paraphernalia she kept in a big red chest. She liked her sex so rough he sometimes spent the rest of the night driving the porcelain bus when he finally crawled back into his small, spare bedroom.

Nick never got used to it, never found it got easier. When he fucked her hard, knowing he was hurting her, her face got red, her eyes glassy, grunting then screaming while she came, urging him to hurt her even more.

It had been the hardest thing he’d ever done in a hard lifetime.

He’d seen quite enough pain during his childhood. Stopping people from hurting others was what he was all about. Being forced to hurt a woman made his gut clench, turned him inside out.

He was seriously contemplating quitting when all of a sudden, in a flurry of activity, Gonzalez put together a guns-for-cocaine deal that was the biggest Nick had ever seen. Two tons of cocaine for enough firepower to keep an African civil war going for years, which had been the point.

They had a system in place for Nick to get the word out and Gonzalez had gone down in the raid, caught in a crossfire so vicious the only thing left of him on the warehouse floor had been human hamburger.

The cocaine had gone into a warehouse instead of up yuppie noses, the arsenal had been destroyed, and fifty-seven people slapped in jail. Enough work to keep an army of DAs busy for the next ten years. Not bad for his first mission in the Unit in terms of results. It had been hell, though. The mission had lasted a year, but it had felt like a century.

This was a better mission. Way better.

The waiter rolled a cart to their table and started plating the food. It smelled otherworldly. Nick took in a deep sniff and Charity smiled at him. “You’re in for a treat.”

“Smells like it.”

He waited until she picked up her fork, then dug into what looked like a plump ravioli that the menu called a fagottino. When he brought the fork to his mouth, he nearly moaned. Cream, mushrooms, and truffle shavings in featherlight pasta. God.

Charity had her eyes closed, too, chewing delicately. She’d chosen a mushroom risotto.

Charity had the daintiest manners he’d ever seen. She enjoyed her food and didn’t treat it as if it were radioactive like other women did. But though her pleasure was visible, every movement was delicate.

Nick watched her smooth, slim white throat work as she swallowed and swallowed heavily himself. He caught himself watching her next bite avidly. His eyes were riveted on her fork as the tines speared the morsel of mushroom and followed it every inch of the way into her mouth. That lovely, delectable, soft pink mouth.

He flashed suddenly on a vision of Charity opening that pretty mouth over his cock. It was a disturbingly intense vision and very, very detailed. He could see it, as clearly as if it were happening right now. Right in front of his eyes.

They were naked, stretched out on a carpet in front of a fire, exactly like the one in the big dining room. Nick was stretched out on his back and Charity was bent over him, the smooth shiny bell of her hair tickling his thighs, watching him out of her witchy, upturned light cat’s eyes. That soft mouth opened. He could feel the heat of her breath against the sensitized skin of his cock. She licked him once and…

Goddamn! What the hell am I doing?

Nick shook himself out of his fantasy—a fantasy so lush and enticing his cock had twitched in his pants, hard. Jesus. Of all the places and times…getting a woody in a fancy restaurant while dining with a woman he needed to pump for information.

And fuck. The instant his mind thought the word pump, his head was filled with another vision. This time it was a picture of Charity stretched out under him while he pumped in and out of her.

It was like he was on the ceiling, looking down. He saw everything. Her slim thighs twined around his hips, slender arms around his neck, his butt working as he moved in and out of her….

He swelled fully erect.

Right there, in Emilio’s elegant dining room, in the middle of at least fifty other patrons happily eating and drinking, unknowing that there was a woody in the room. How fucking lame was that? Luckily his lap was covered by the peach linen tablecloth, but he didn’t dare move.

If he’d had on his stiff jeans, maybe he could have hidden it, but he had on very expensive lightweight pure virgin wool pants that outlined him completely.

If someone yelled fire! he was a dead man.

This was unheard of. His cock obeyed him at all times. When he said go, it went. When he said stop, it stopped. When he said down, it went down and stayed down.

And Christ, he wasn’t hurting for sex. True, he hadn’t had a woman for a couple of weeks, except for one girl who’d picked him up in a bar the night after the takedown, when he was still pumped full of adrenaline. Four whiskeys and he was more than ready for the brunette who’d sidled up to him and told him exactly what she wanted. Waking up next to her had been depressing, though, particularly since he couldn’t remember her name.

All the sex he’d had in the past year had been depressing, come to think of it.

Sex with Consuelo had been creepier’n hell and with what’s-her-name had been completely unsatisfactory, like being given wax food when you’re hungry.

Sex with Consuelo had felt like one of those sexual perversions in psychiatric manuals, like fucking dead people or something. It took a lot to put Nick off sex, but Consuelo had done it. The memory of sex with her made him nauseous.

The thought of sex with Charity Prewitt, now that was something else entirely. Another activity altogether.

Everything about Charity was delightful—her skin, her voice, her manner, her smell. Feminine and elegant. Totally enticing.

No wonder his dick was standing to attention, like a divining rod that had finally found a cool, fresh spring after panning over mud flats for a year.

“You’re staring,” Charity said dryly. He met those amazing eyes—like looking directly into a pale summer sky at noon.

“Yes, I am,” he confessed. “But then that’s what men do—stare at pretty women. It’s what makes us different from, say, trees.”

She smiled. Charity didn’t seem to have the coy gene most beautiful women were born with. She didn’t simper, she didn’t flutter her eyelashes—though they were so long she could probably blow candles out at twenty paces just by batting her eyes—she didn’t breathe deeply to showcase her breasts. Nick had been on the receiving end of every single one of those ploys and could write the script.

Charity simply kept on eating serenely.

Nick had to get his head out of his ass and start pumping—no, don’t think of that word! — for intel. There was a reason he was here, and it wasn’t to stare into Charity Prewitt’s beautiful eyes and fantasize about being inside her. And he sure as hell wasn’t here to eat Emilio’s delicious fagottini, though that was a lucky fringe benefit, too.

By all rights, Nick should be with his partners in a freezing cold surveillance van, washing his socks and briefs out in a bucket of cold water, pissing in a jar, shitting in the woods, just like the bears. The reason he wasn’t was because he was acknowledged as being good with the ladies.

And, of course, because he was a really, really good liar.

Tough job, but someone’s got to do it.

However, having all the blood rush down from his head straight into his blue steeler was not good news. He needed that blood above his neck so he could pry information out of her. Hard to do that with a hard-on that hurt.

Think Worontzoff, he told himself. Think what a scumbag the man is.

Vassily Worontzoff. Man of letters, novelist, the last of the Russian intellectuals sent to the Gulag. The Soviet Union was dying, but like a scorpion that still has a sting in its dying tail, it lashed, sweeping Worontzoff away.

It wasn’t supposed to be like that. The air had been full of perestroika and glasnost. Newspapers blossomed, the Berlin Wall came down. Intellectuals were the flavor of the month.

But something went wrong somewhere and Worontzoff and his lover Katya were sent to the place humanity forgot—Kolyma. The most notorious of Stalin’s camps, where the prisoners were used as slave labor in the gold mines. Where so many died that the road to Kolyma was called the Road of Bones. Where it was said every ounce of gold mined cost a human life. It certainly cost Katya’s.

Nick could almost feel sorry for the poor fuck, except for the fact that in the prison camp he joined the vory v zukone, the thieves-in-law. A criminal underclass sworn to revenge against society. The vory rejected everything about society—its mores, its laws, its affections.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the vory roared to power, an engine that had been idling, waiting for the brakes to come off. Post—Soviet Russia was a giant that had been felled, its prone body ripe for gutting. And gut it they did.

The Russian Mafiya exploded. In a little over a decade and a half, it had become more powerful than the state. It owned factories and railroads and telcos and oil wells. It held the power of life and death over something like two hundred million citizens. It signed contracts and treaties, with almost the dignity of a separate country.

Powerful Vors—Mafia dons—arose from the ashes of the Soviet Union, the stuff of legend. The thieves-in-law weren’t talking, but Chechens and Azeris weren’t sworn to secrecy, and slowly intel leaked out. The greatest Vor of all was a kulturny chelovek—a man of culture. He’d been a zek, had survived the Gulag. His hands were useless, scarred beyond repair.

There was only one possible man who fit that description, Vassily Worontzoff, a man revered inside Russia, a legend throughout the world. The writer whose Dry Your Tears in Moscow was considered one of the classic novels of the twentieth century. After the Gulag, he never wrote another word for public consumption. Many speculated why this was so, but Nick knew why. The thieves-in-law swore they would never again toil at legal work. So Worontzoff’s legend grew while he pulled the strings of an increasingly powerful Mafiya network.

As his power and reach expanded, so did the legend. His name was spoken only in whispers on street corners. He was insulated by layers and layers of lawyers and flunkies. Few knew his real identity.

One of them had been a Russian former Special Forces operator Nick had worked with trying to run down Khan’s nuclear network in Uzbekistan, Sergei Petrov. Brother-in-arms. Straight-up guy who was handy with his GSh-18, was a good man to have at your back and who liked his vodka just a little too much.

They’d been on a mission in Waziristan, tracking down possible al Qaeda nests when Sergei stumbled onto a drug operation his contact in Peshawar said was run by the Russian Mafiya. Sergei had sniffed around a little, was given Worontzoff’s name, which he passed on to Nick. One more sniff, and it turned lethal. Forty minutes after giving Nick the name over a cell phone, his throat had been slashed so deeply the knife nicked Sergei’s spinal column. His penis had been sliced off and stuffed in his mouth—the universal symbol for keeping your mouth shut.

The memory of kneeling in Sergei’s blood helped get Nick’s dick down.

There are two ways to be a bad guy and Worontzoff covered both. You could do bad things to things or to people. Nick didn’t really give a shit about crime against property, though Worontzoff was in the hit list of top ten men doing damage to the world economy. Thanks to him, the Russian economy was starved of cash, several banks had crashed, and a couple of third world economies had gone bankrupt while their presidents for life played with their dicks and their money in Geneva.

Bootleg gas scams, laundering billions, reselling stolen Mercedes—it was all bad stuff, sure, but Nick could live with it. What he couldn’t live with—what he’d dedicated his life to fighting—was people being hurt.

As far as Nick could tell from the file, Worontzoff had gone into prison camp a writer and had come out a monster. Over the past fifteen years, he’d been personally responsible for death and misery on an unimaginable scale.

Twelve-year-old Moldavian girls kidnapped and sold into the sex trade, used brutally on an industrial basis and dead by twenty. Mountains of AK-47s put into the hands of Sierra Leonean child soldiers barely big enough to carry them. Cut heroin guaranteed to kill the poor sick fucks shooting up on the streets of a hundred cities.

Nick was going to take him down. Oh yes. It was what he did. What he lived for. He’d dedicated his life to taking down the bad guys and Vassily Worontzoff was as bad as they come.

Pity the road leading to the destruction of Worontzoff ran right through this beautiful woman sitting across the table, smiling at him.

“So.” He put his fork down and leaned forward slightly. He could feel the heat of the candle flame against his face. “What do pretty girls do in Parker’s Ridge? What are the local attractions?”

Charity shook her head. It was physically impossible, but it felt as if her scent covered him when she moved, as if it were a fine, pearly powder.

Head. Out. Of. Ass. Now!

“Parker’s Ridge isn’t Manhattan, Nick,” she said, with a gentle smile. “The pleasures here are more provincial than you are perhaps used to. Still, we do have some attractions. And there’s always Vassily Worontzoff’s musical soirées. He manages to attract world-class musicians to our little corner of the world.”

Not by a flicker of his eyelashes did Nick betray any emotion. He furrowed his brow, clueless businessman trying to place a name he knew he should know, but didn’t. “Worontzoff,” he said, frowning. “Isn’t he that Russian…Russian what? Musician? Dancer?”

“Writer.” Charity laughed. “Russian writer. A very great writer, the author of Dry Your Tears in Moscow, one of the great masterpieces of twentieth-century literature. Each year he is nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. And he would undoubtedly have won if he had continued writing, but he never did. He was one of the last of the dissidents sent to a Soviet prison camp. After he was released, he never wrote another word.”

Her face and voice had turned serious. She looked down at the tablecloth, tracing a pattern with a pink-tipped fingernail. She looked up at him, gemlike eyes gleaming with emotion.

“And he won’t talk about it, either. He’s a wonderful man and we’ve become friends since he’s moved here. As a matter of fact, he’s having a musical soirée this Thursday evening.”

Oh God. Nick felt his heart nearly stop. Friends. What the hell did that mean? Was she fucking him? It was bad enough that she’d spend next Thursday in Scumbag Central, without him having the image of Charity spending time under Worontzoff, those slender legs wrapped around the fuckhead’s hips…

This was bad shit. He didn’t even want to think about it. This was worse than Consuelo’s chest of toys, way worse.

Nick looked at her carefully. She met his eyes, her gaze calm and serene. He relaxed. If she’d been Worontzoff’s lover, she’d have shown some sign. A little blush, evading his gaze, a slight smile. Something. But there was nothing.

So, she wasn’t fucking the bastard. Good.

Not that he cared.

Much.

Jesus. Oh, shit.

The short hairs on the back of Nick’s neck stood up. He’d just been handed an opening—an honest to God opening wide enough to drive a Humvee through—to insinuate himself into Worontzoff’s house, as Charity’s guest. It was a goddamn huge window of opportunity, it was why he was here and not in the smelly surveillance van and the first thing that flashed through his mind wasn’t How do I wangle an invitation into Worontzoff’s house but Is Charity fucking the guy?

He’d been completely sidetracked from the mission. Pow! It had been punched right out of his head. Being sidetracked went against every single ounce of training he’d ever had, not to mention it being an excellent way to get killed.

Undercover work is like proctology. You poke and prod around assholes, looking for something bad, and then you zap the bad things you find. His line of work required utter concentration, day and night.

If Nicholas Ames made a big mistake, he lost money. Nick Ireland paid for his mistakes in blood.

Time to get back on track, fast.

“I haven’t read anything by him, sorry. How long has this guy—what’s his name? Worontzoff?”

Charity nodded.

“How long has this guy Worontzoff lived here in Parker’s Ridge? It seems a strange place for a Russian exile to settle down in.”

“Well, maybe not so strange. I’m told upstate Vermont is much like the area around Moscow, only our beech trees have larger leaves. And Vassily isn’t a Russian exile. He got out of prison camp more or less in the same period the Soviet Union fell. In Moscow, he was greeted like a king when he was released. I remember it still. I’d just read Dry Your Tears in Moscow and I followed what happened to him in the newspapers.”

Nick did some fast calculating. “Good God, you must have been—”

“Twelve.” She shrugged, more of that fairy dust coming his way. “A very precocious twelve. And…that summer I had…a lot of time to read.”

Damn straight. In the summer of 1993, when Worontzoff was released to return like a conquering hero to Moscow, Charity Prewitt had been in the hospital. Her father had thrown her out of a third-story hotel bedroom window in a desperate attempt to save her life during a hotel fire. The two Prewitts, man and wife, perished, and Charity suffered a T12 fracture. She’d had three operations and spent that summer and most of the winter in a full body cast.

Nick waited for her to tell her story, but she didn’t.

Interesting.

In Nick’s experience, people who have been through trauma are almost always eager to talk about it. It was like a badge of honor—look what I went through, look at what I survived.

Charity’s story was particularly dramatic. Fire started by a disgruntled employee breaking out on the fifth floor of the five-star hotel in Boston where she was staying with her parents. Her father wrapping her in blankets and throwing her off the balcony in a desperate attempt to save her, then rushing back into the room to try to save his wife. It took two days for the room to cool down enough to collect the charred bones for a funeral. Charity never got to attend the funeral. By that time, she’d already had two operations and was sedated.

Why wasn’t she telling him all about it?

But she wasn’t, and she wasn’t uncomfortable with silence, either, like most women were. She sipped her wine and watched him calmly.

Nick finally broke the silence.

“So he leaves Russia and moves to the States? Why? I mean the Soviet system fell, after all. Why didn’t he just stay? Particularly since apparently he was a big shot there.”

This was bullshit. Nick knew exactly why Worontzoff was here and he was looking at it right now. Charity Prewitt. A dead ringer for a woman long dead, Worontzoff’s lover, Katya Amartova, who had perished in the labor camp.

Nick had seen the photos of Amartova, and the resemblance to Charity was uncanny. A normal man wouldn’t ever expect that a woman who merely looked like the woman he’d once loved could be her, but Worontzoff had gone well beyond normal years ago.

She was silent another moment, then rested her chin on her fist. “I don’t really know why Vassily moved here. He’s never actually talked about it. I just assumed he wanted a clean slate and immigrated here to wipe out the past.”

Well, to set up a criminal empire here, too. There was that.

“We don’t really talk about these things,” she continued in her soft voice. “Mainly we talk about books. Vassily has a great mind. It’s a privilege to spend time in his presence.”

Fuckhead, Nick thought sourly, then caught himself again, appalled. The secret to undercover work is to stay in character, even inside your own head. Especially inside your own head. He’d been carrying on an internal monologue all this time and if he’d been chatting with someone a little less harmless than Charity Prewitt—with, say, Guillermo Gonzalez, who’d shoot a hole in anyone’s head at the least suspicion that someone was double-crossing him, blow your kneecap out for the hell of it and your elbow off for target practice—then he’d have been a goner.

This never happened. Ever. Nick was as focused as the laser beam that every morning was aimed at the window of Worontzoff’s study. Always. As a soldier and now as a member of the Unit.

He had to get his head out of his ass and pretend he was dead from the belt buckle down from now on.

Charity turned her head to the big picture windows. Snow had started gently falling, dusting the big spotlit evergreens in the sloping lawn outside the restaurant, a scene straight out of a Christmas card. She sighed and pushed away her half-eaten tiramisú. She dabbed her mouth with the big linen napkin and placed it on the table.

She needn’t have bothered wiping her mouth. Nick couldn’t even imagine her being sloppy with her food. Her moves were all so graceful, just watching her was a pleasure.

Head. Out. Of. Ass. If he kept repeating it enough to himself often enough, it might just happen.

“Nick.”

His head snapped up. She’d pushed back from the table, body language clear. Oh God, he hadn’t pumped her at all for enough intel on Worontzoff. Again, at the word pump, his cock leaped in his pants.

Jesus.

He let his left hand drop to his lap, wondering whether he should surreptitiously pinch himself. Maybe if he hurt himself enough, it’d go down.

“Yeah?”

She smiled at him. “It’s starting to snow. I don’t have snow tires, so I should get to my car before the streets become too slick.”

A drop of sweat ran down his back. He didn’t want this evening to end. Of course, he hadn’t gotten as much info as he wanted, but he also…didn’t want the evening to end. This was the nicest evening he’d spent in…shit. Since before the Gonzalez job, which had lasted a year. And before that had been Afghanistan. We were talking years, here.

He relaxed his face. “I’ll drive you home, don’t worry. And I have snow tires and they’re brand-new. We can still have coffee. Or would you like a brandy?”

Her eyes were so clear, it was like looking into limpid pools of water. That pale pink mouth tilted up. “That’s very nice of you to offer, but I’ll need my car tomorrow. So if you’ll just drive me back to the library, that’ll be fine.”

With bad tires? Nick balked. No way.

But that pretty, pointed little chin looked just a little stubborn so he couldn’t just say, Hell no, I’m not letting you drive home in lousy weather with the wrong tires. Much as he’d like to.

He glanced out the window himself. The snow was falling more thickly now. He turned back to her.

“Tell you what. I really like my java after a meal. Offer me a cup of coffee at your house and I’ll not only drive you home, but I’ll stop by in the morning, pick you up, and drive you back to the library.”

She blinked. A moment of uncertainty.

Nick was really good at finding even small chinks to make people do what he wanted. It was a gift and he’d had it forever. He leaned forward.

“Please,” he said softly. “I really can’t stand the thought of you driving home alone in the dark in bad weather with the wrong tires. My mom drummed that sort of thing into my head and she’d turn over in her grave if I let you do it. And I’d just drive right behind you to make sure you got home safely, anyway, so you’d be doing me a big favor if you’d let me drive you home.”

Charity gave a half laugh. “Well, if you put it that way….”

“I do. And you just tell me when you want me to pick you up and drive you to the library to get your car tomorrow, and I’ll be there.”

She shook her head, the soft dark-blond bell of her hair swinging and sending some shampoo scent full of pheromones his way. “Don’t you have things to do tomorrow?”

He looked her straight in the eyes. “Not important things,” he said softly. “Not as important as this.”

It was his first overt move. His meaning couldn’t have been clearer if he’d written it in Day-Glo letters on the wall. I’m putting the move on you.

To her credit, Charity didn’t simper or blush or look away. She watched his eyes for a long moment, then finally spoke in a soft voice.

“Okay.”

Fucking A!