Dangerous Secrets (16 page)

Then the fucker reached out an arm and put it around Charity’s shoulders and her smile widened. Worontzoff bent down to whisper in her ear and Charity’s bright laugh rose clearly in the air, audible all the way across the room.

Every cell in Nick’s body screamed and jangled. He had to actually stop and take a breath, because what he wanted to do was to rush forward, break Worontzoff’s arm, throw Charity over his shoulder, and get out of there, just as fast as was humanly possible.

His entire system buzzed with the need to
get Charity out
. Hand reaching for a gun that he couldn’t use, adrenaline flooding his body with no outlet possible.

Usually, his hunches were fairly subtle—a vague feeling that he should
zig
instead of
zag.
But there was nothing subtle about this. This was full out red alert, the siren in the submarine booming remorselessly just before the incoming torpedo hits.

Part of it was jealousy, of course. Two hours ago, he’d painted kisses across Charity’s shoulders, right where Worontzoff had his arm. That pretty breast pressing against the jacket of Worontzoff’s tux—he’d kissed it and suckled it so often he felt like he owned it.

So, yeah. He was jealous. Jealousy wasn’t anything he’d ever felt before, so it took him a second to recognize it.

He hated another man’s hands on her, another man making her laugh, another man inside her space.

But it was more than jealousy. There was terror bubbling right underneath, sharp and electric. Worontzoff was obsessed with her, with the woman who could have been his Katya reborn.

But it was make-believe. Charity only looked like Katya. She was another woman entirely and when Worontzoff finally figured that out—that his Katya was forever dead and Charity could never take her place—God only knew what kind of revenge he would take.

Worontzoff moved. Nick’s whole system jolted, another layer of sweaty fear added to the mix. Worontzoff had shifted so he could come closer to Charity, in profile to Nick. Who could now clearly see what had been hidden before.

A hard-on. The fucker had a
hard-on
. It was lightly hidden by his jacket but it was unmistakable. Thank God Charity didn’t notice anything, smiling upward into Worontzoff’s face, chattering away. Knowing her, she was talking about a good book she’d read, the upcoming concert, her garden. She was clueless.

Clueless people ended up dead around monsters, and they died badly. Charity’s pretty head was filled with literature and music, love for her aunt and uncle, and kindness toward her friends. She had no idea what the outside world was like. She had no idea that the man she was probably discussing concerto movements with could have her strung up on a meat hook, as one of the women who’d testified against Worontzoff’s proxy in Belgrade, Milic, had been.

Nick was the one who’d lifted the woman off the hook and down to the floor. The man who ran that prostitution ring answered directly to Worontzoff.

When Worontzoff’s madness ebbed, when he finally realized that Charity really and truly wasn’t his Katya come back to life, but a nice little American librarian, his revenge would be swift and terrifying.

Nick’s feverish imagination could conjure up any number
of horrifying scenarios. Someone might lift Charity’s body off a butcher’s hook one day.

The thought drove him crazy wild, made his whole system buzz with terror, made his heart thud.

He wouldn’t be there to protect her. One way or another, he’d be gone soon, leaving Charity staked out like a lamb for the wolves. There would be nothing between her and some of the most ruthless men on earth.

Nick’s fists clenched and for a second, he forgot to hold his wristwatch in a position to record his surroundings. He watched Charity and willed her to leave. To just turn her back on this monster and walk away.

He could protect her now. Break cover, then put her in protective custody until they’d put the scumbags away. Even if that meant ripping her from her life forever, it was worth it. Once the image of Charity’s broken, lifeless body bloomed in his mind like a poisonous flower, he couldn’t get rid of it.

Leave him
, Nick told her from across the room, sending her screaming mental vibes.
Get out of here. Run for your life.

As if sensing danger, Worontzoff’s back stiffened and he turned his head swiftly. Too fast for Nick to look away, or wipe the expression of hatred from his face. Their gazes met, and locked.

Nick could feel the cold blast from across the room and his stomach clenched as Worontzoff turned back to Charity and, smiling, held out his arm. From the next room came the sounds of musicians tuning their instruments. Worontzoff gave a look to one of his thugs dressed as a servant and a brass bell was rung.

Worontzoff raised his voice. “Ladies and gentlemen, the concert begins in five minutes. Take your seats, please.”

With one last, murderous glance at Nick, he waited until she laid her pretty hand on his arm, and then escorted Charity into the music room.

Teeth grinding, sweaty hands shaking, Nick followed.

The concert had been exquisite. Cha had outdone himself, his bow weaving magic in the room. As always with great art, the world had fallen away. He felt as if there were just the two of them, Vassily and Katya, listening to great music, just like in the old days.

He was in his sitting room. Though the big hearth was ablaze, the fire was barely able to leaven his perennial chill. Vassily lifted his glass of vodka and sipped, letting the memory of the music go through him, tapping out the rhythm on the heavy silk brocade of the arm of the sofa.

Ah, money and power. There was nothing like it. It could buy everything, including bringing Katya back from the grave.

Vassily took his stylus and lightly pressed a button on the table next to him. As always, it only took a moment.

There was a soft knock on the door and at Vassily’s command, Ilya walked in.

“Come in, my friend,” Vassily urged. “Pour yourself a drink.”

Ilya did, refreshed his own, then sat down on the armchair next to the sofa.

He had changed out of his livery and was dressed casually. He gulped the vodka down in one swallow and poured another large measure. Vassily knew what a solace alcohol was for his friend and employee and never begrudged him his release. Ilya had a lot to forget. They both did.

Vassily knew Ilya understood him, through and through.

“What did you find out tonight?”

Ilya answered promptly. “Nicholas Ames. Thirty-four years old. Retired from an American corporation, Orion Investments. Drives a Lexus with a New York State license plate. Property in Manhattan, a condo on Lexington Avenue. Value a little over two million dollars. No criminal record. That’s all I have for now.”

It was enough. Bravo, Ilya.

“I need wetwork done,” Vassily said. Wetwork.
Mokrie dela
. Murder. The KGB’s specialty. “But not by one of ours.”

Ilya nodded.

“Someone untraceable to us. Someone efficient, who can make it look like an accident. And I want it done tomorrow.”

Ilya looked at him. “I know someone in Brooklyn who can help us, Vor.”

“Use a cutout,” Vassily said sharply. “Nothing must ever be traced back to here. Is that understood?”

Ilya nodded. “I understand, Vor. This man I am thinking of is not one of ours. He is a free agent. Nothing will ever be traced back to us.”

“Make sure you get the best. Take what you need from the vault. Give the cutout ten percent of the final amount. Keep everything clean.” Behind a false wall in the basement of the mansion was a bank vault with twenty million U.S. dollars in cash, another several million dollars’ worth of foreign currencies, and the other intangibles of the trade, useful for barter—drugs, diamonds, ingots.

Vassily imagined that a job like this, using a top pro who had to make it look like an accident, would cost at least two hundred thousand dollars, plus twenty thousand for the cutout. Over and above that, he would make sure Ilya was
sufficiently recompensed with a bonus, that went without saying.

Nothing. It was nothing. It was what his enterprises in the Caribbean earned in a morning. More than worth it for Katya.

Katya.

Vassily stared into the fire, his heart beating hard and fast. He wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. This time he’d marry her. He hadn’t done it before, more fool him. He’d thought they had all the time in the world. He and Katya had been golden. Their future held only glory and fame in the new Russia.

Instead, the past had clawed them back, drawing them down into a pit full of vipers and monsters. He hadn’t had time to marry Katya, but this time he would.

This time he’d get it right.

This time, he wouldn’t lose her.

This time, Katya would be his. Forever.

Friday
November 25

“So, what are we doing here, Nick? And why couldn’t I go to work today?”

Charity looked worriedly over at her lover. He had white stripes of tension around his mouth, jaw muscles clenched, big hands clutching the wheel so tightly the knuckles were white. He was looking grim and tense, as if privy to very bad news, though she couldn’t imagine what.

Just looking at him made her tense, too.

Nick had been enigmatic and distant all morning, yet feverish with some secret plan. Mysterious and rushed. He’d insisted that she put on her prettiest dress and call in sick, which she’d refused. Nick pressed, and normally Charity would have given in, but she drew the line at pretending to be sick. It was dishonest. She was a lousy liar, even if she wanted to lie, which she didn’t. The words would have choked in her mouth.

However, she did have tons of time off coming, so she finally caved in to Nick and phoned Mrs. Lambert to ask whether she could replace her for the day.

They were parked near Adams Square, in the courthouse parking lot, waiting for…something. Charity had no idea what and no idea why.

Nick’s lovemaking last night had been…intense. Wild, actually. He’d pushed her into new territory, a place where she had hardly recognized herself. If she shifted in the car seat, she could still feel him inside her. It seemed as if he’d touched every inch of her body last night. She could still see his beautiful face, a lock of black hair falling over his forehead, gorgeous blue eyes staring into hers. His gaze never wavered from hers as he pumped in and out of her, claiming her in every way there was.

Charity had felt turned inside out, so strongly attuned to him that she knew what he wanted from her before he asked. They’d moved almost as one together, all night. A new creature, a fusion of two bodies. She’d fallen asleep in his arms only in the early morning and had been appalled when she’d woken up at nine. The library opened at nine thirty.

Before she could jump out of bed, Nick had tightened his arms around her, rolling her over and entering her in one smooth movement. They’d made love so much during the night that she was still wet. Pinning her down with his weight, Nick refused to move until she promised she’d skip work today and come with him for a surprise. No amount of wriggling budged him. It was so frustrating, she finally agreed and with a hot gleam in his eye, his hips finally started moving. He laughed when she came immediately.

But laughing Nick was gone and grim Nick had taken his place. He had been completely silent on the drive into town
and now he simply sat there in the driver’s seat, holding on to the steering wheel as if to a lifeline and staring silently out the window.

What could he possibly be looking at? The sky was pewter gray, so overcast it looked more like evening than late morning, bestowing a dull cast on everything. To the left, lost in the fog, was the Parker’s Ridge equivalent of Fifth Avenue—Revere Street, three blocks of old-fashioned shops, with nary a boutique or a chain in sight. To the right was Kingsbury Square, the snow making the rhododendrons look like huge puffs of pink-white cotton. Ahead was the gray cement wall of the new courthouse, a 1960s monstrosity everyone hated.

Should she tell Nick the story of spearheading the campaign to have it torn down? He usually loved her Parker’s Ridge stories, as if she were an anthropologist telling exotic tales of life in a tribe in a faraway country.

No, maybe right now he wasn’t in the mood for Parker’s Ridge stories. Not with his jaw muscles jumping so hard it was a miracle he didn’t crack a tooth.

One of the many things that had happened last night, and that had changed her forever, was that Charity had completed the process of becoming attuned to Nick and his moods. The intense sex, the blinding pleasure, his body in hers for hours, had transformed her. It was as if she were made of iron filings and he was the magnet. She was sensitive to every breath he took, every move he made.

Right now she could tell he was in the grip of some strong emotion. The very air molecules in the car were buzzing with it. Nick was radiating something and she couldn’t quite pinpoint it. Anger? No, that wasn’t it. Sadness? Not quite. Whatever it was, it disturbed him deeply.

His hands unclenched and fisted once more around the wheel, as if he were bracing himself against something.

She repeated her question. “What’s so important I couldn’t go in to work this morning? And it better be good because I’ve never missed a day of work in my life.”

His jaw muscles worked heavily as he turned to her, face serious.

“Charity, I—” He stopped. It was the first time she’d ever seen him at a loss. So odd, her graceful, articulate Nick, searching for words.

And then it hit her, a sledgehammer blow to her heart, followed by an icy chill that left her shaking.

Oh my God! Of course. Foolish, foolish Charity. How on earth could she have missed the signs? It would have been immediately clear to any woman with a little more experience than she had in beginning and ending affairs. She was going to pay a very heavy price for being so out of the dating scene.

He’s leaving
, she thought, and her heart gave another sharp blow in her chest.
He’s leaving today and he doesn’t know how to tell me. He’ll be gone by nightfall
.

Nick was a gentleman. No wonder he hadn’t wanted her to go into work. He hadn’t wanted to say his good-byes on the library steps. Perhaps he wanted to take her out to lunch, break the news to her gently, and now he was finding it difficult. Probably more difficult than he’d bargained for.

Just as she was finding it difficult to take in a breath. Something big and heavy was pressing in on her chest. She had to choke back the grief rising in her throat.

She’d known all along he’d leave. It was inevitable, the way of the world. She’d even steeled herself to be stoic when the
time came. It’s just that she never thought the time would be quite so…soon.

Today was Friday. A week ago, he’d shown up in her life and they’d been practically living together ever since. The incredibly intense sex had hurried things along in her heart, but racing alongside the blinding physical pleasure had been all the small things that had made her fall in love with him.

A kind of steadiness, a—a manly kind of inner calm that she’d associated only with her father and her uncle, two men of a different era, never with a virile, sexy, relatively young man. A man with a strong internal compass, with no need to impress and, by the same token, no need to put others down. A careless kindness, which he wouldn’t even recognize as such, but she did. He had an old-fashioned male courtliness that delighted her.

And the biggie—the way he’d completely come through for her with Aunt Vera. If she lived to be a hundred she would never forget the sight of him coming out of the swirling snow with her aunt in his arms, and the tender way he handled Uncle Franklin, quietly ensuring that the house would be alarmed without alarming her uncle. Few men would have been capable of that.

In her experience, modern men didn’t do things like that. They stepped away from responsibility, not toward.

Then, of course, his looks. An entirely male beauty she’d never had the pleasure of encountering before. You had to put that on the scale, too. She was as susceptible to eye candy as the next woman. The incredible pleasure of touching him, all over. Running her hand along that perfect cheekbone, tracing the beautiful line of his mouth, the strong line of his jaw. Those had been moments of perfection, forever
embedded in her heart, which would fade away only when she closed her eyes for the last time.

Maybe she had known it wouldn’t—
couldn’t
—last, but though the knowledge had been right there in the back of her mind all along, like low dark clouds on the horizon, it had been oh-so-easy to forget it. Forget that this was a passing thing.

It wasn’t a passing thing for her. She’d fallen hard and fast and deep. And this was It.

It had taken her twenty-eight years to find love, and she couldn’t even begin to imagine lightning striking twice. It wouldn’t come again in her lifetime.

The Prewitt curse. In the three hundred years of Prewitt history she was aware of, there’d never been a divorce, never been a second marriage. Prewitts were like wolves. Or pigeons. Or voles. They mated once, and for life. This was good, unless you were twenty-one and widowed and spent the next seventy years mourning your husband, as her great-great grandmother had done.

Nick would go back to his Manhattan life, which was no doubt exciting, fast-paced, full of fascinating people and things, and she would stay here, tending Uncle Franklin and Aunt Vera and the library, growing older year by year, with only her memories of this remarkable week to sustain her.

Inside, she felt as gray and bleak as the weather outside. But she was a Prewitt. And, if nothing else, Prewitts had pride. Whatever else Nick had given her, he hadn’t given her promises and she had no right to expect them. She would meet the end of this affair with dignity. There would be plenty of time later to cry.

The rest of her life, in fact.

And so, when she turned to him, it was with a bland smile completely hiding her shattered heart.

“Whatever’s bothering you, Nick, you can tell me.” She even managed a smile. “I’m a big girl. I can take it.”

He paled. The ruddy, healthy color in his cheeks went. Oh God. This was going to be bad. He knew exactly how much he was going to hurt her, and it hurt him.

Though her stomach clenched in despair, she sketched a smile. Dignity. It was going to be the only thing left to her. She wrapped herself in it, forcing her hands not to tremble, forcing herself to look him straight in the eyes, forcing herself to breathe around the boulder in her chest.

He took in a sharp deep breath and she barely stopped herself from flinching when he opened his mouth.

“Charity…I have something to say to you.”

She nodded her head gravely. “Yes, Nick?”

“Charity, will you—”

He was going to ask a favor before leaving? Well, whatever it was he wanted, there was only one possible answer.
Yes.
He’d barged into her life, seduced her, and was now leaving, but she wouldn’t change a second of the past week. She’d lived more intensely, felt more deeply in the past seven days than in her entire life. He’d given her love. Even if only for a week, it was more than many people had. Anything in her power she had to give him was his for the asking.

He turned his head and looked her straight in the eyes, the muscles in his jaw working. There was a buzzing energy around him she couldn’t understand, but it was jarring, completely foreign to his calm nature.

Another sharp breath and it came out in a rush. “Charity Prewitt, will you marry me?”

It was the only thing Nick could think of, to keep her safe. Or as safe as he could manage.

His entry into Worontzoff’s lair had changed things, had somehow disturbed a pool that was deeper than he thought, with monsters residing on the bottom. He’d been expecting to enter, carry out a recon, then exit. Nothing he hadn’t done hundreds of times before. It was, after all, what he did.

But something was deeply wrong and he didn’t know exactly what. All he knew was that it involved Charity and that it scared the shit out of him, a man who didn’t scare easily.

He didn’t mind the feeling of danger encroaching. He’d chosen a risky path in life and this subliminal awareness, the kick to his senses, had saved his life more times than he could count. It was a tool he used, often and well, and he kept it shiny and well honed.

So the hot boiling feeling of things bubbling beneath the surface was fine. Worontzoff and his minions were dangerous men, and he was as ready as he could possibly be to deal with them, on 24/7 alert. He had the tools, the skills, the training and the will to strike back. What he was absolutely unequipped to deal with was a threat to Charity.

Worontzoff’s look, his possessive arm around Charity, the cold glance he’d given Nick, that fucking woody—it was clear that, in Worontzoff’s head, Charity was his. The fuckhead had actually convinced himself that Charity was Katya come to life. That Nick’s presence had made Worontzoff come out in the open and stake his claim made it even creepier. Nick’s presence had brought something to a head. Something cold and evil, which would roll right over Charity and leave her crushed and broken.

Last night he’d made love to her as if he could tuck her body into his, make her part of his flesh. As if all he had to
do was fuck her hard enough, and she’d be safe for all time. But of course, he couldn’t, and morning came, bringing with it not only a clear-eyed analysis of the situation but this buzzing, itching, nagging feeling in his bones that something was going to come down soon. That someone was about to die.

There’d been a sickness in Worontzoff’s house, for all the elegant people, fine works of art, exquisite music. None of it, none of the beauty and culture mattered. It didn’t mean shit with the cold hand of death closing its gelid fist around it.

Since before he could talk, Nick could recognize evil, and it had been strong in that house.

He’d felt his death, or at least the possibility of his death. It wasn’t the first time he’d felt it, but it was definitely the strongest death vibe he’d ever had.

The vague feeling he would die young sharpened, came into focus.

For the first time in his life, Nick was afraid to die. Terrified, even. If he went, Charity would be alone. He’d spent enough time with her to know that she was not protected in any meaningful way. Christ, even her house was unprotected. There was absolutely nothing around Charity, nothing to shield her from the evil of the world. From Worontzoff or his minions, when he turned on her, as he inevitably would.

Her family was an elderly, very frail couple who relied on her to help them. She wasn’t equipped in any way to save herself, if he wasn’t around. She didn’t have the mental tools to sense danger and defend herself.

Charity was light itself—goodness and grace, the very qualities which were the first to go when evil stepped out from the shadows. Bad guys focused in like a laser beam on people like Charity, wanting to wipe them from the face of the earth. Because they could, because the Charities of
this world represented something they could never have and never control.