Page 88 of Lethal Obsession

My men on the beach are biting their lips in an effort not to laugh. I give them a look dark enough to shut them up, temporarily at least, but they’re still grinning as I start the engine.

Motherfuckers.

“Hold on, ladies,” I say, smiling evilly at the dragons. The contemptuous scowls I get in response make my smile even wider.

Oh, this is going to be fun.

I settle on the seat behind Ofelia, one arm curving around her waist with my hand resting on her damp thigh, and suddenly the word fun seems entirely inadequate.

As I start the tender and head for open water, she glances over her shoulder at me. Unable to stop myself, I drop my lips to her shoulder, allowing them to linger there for a moment, my eye behind my sunglasses not leaving hers.

She sucks in her breath, the late sun turning her eyes to blue fire, and her hand slides over mine, her fingers twining through my own. We stay like that, hands joined, our bodies barely inches apart, taut with tension, for the entire journey out to the yacht.

“Drink?” I covertly watch Ofelia from the bar. She’s hovering uncertainly by the railing, one long leg twined about the other, her hands gripping the metal like it’s holding her upright. The white dress is still damp enough to cling to her legs. Her hair is tousled by the journey out, her face kissed by the luminous rays of the dying sun. I wonder if it’s only my imagination that senses something darker behind the almost celestial vision.

And maybe that’s just your dick talking, asshole. I suppress the urge to knock back a large shot of Graf, not without difficulty. Don’t try to justify what you’re about to do by coloring her in the same mud you drowned in.

The thought acts like the ice shower I need, so that when she tentatively asks for a gin, I’m able to mix the drink and turn back to her with at least the appearance of my customary composure.

“Here.” Painfully aware that touching her has a catastrophic effect on my self-control, I’m careful not to let our fingers touch as I hand her the drink.

“The Quantum Drift.” She smiles shyly, her eyes ducking away from mine. “Was that one of Lars’s jokes?”

Her affectionate reference to my oldest friend pisses me off far more than it should. “Actually, the name was my idea.” I touch my glass to hers to take the sting out of my words. “Za zdorov’ye, Ofelia.”

Her eyes fly up to mine, widening in a way that makes me instantly regret making the traditional Russian toast.

Russian is home.

Family.

All the things we’re both pretending don’t exist.

But instead of looking away, her eyes deepen, sparkling with that inner fire that makes my every fucking nerve sing. “Za zdorov’ye, Alexei.” Her Russian is rich and soft, a reminder that we share more than just a native tongue. Ofelia’s grandfather was raised in the same gulag as my own father, two best friends who carried one another across the vast steppes. That one simple phrase reminds me that we are joined by more than her scars, my knife, and the sadistic bastards who forced us into that concrete hell.

“Does your father ever talk to you about it?” she asks, as if I’d spoken my thoughts aloud. “About Russia, I mean?”

“Not a lot.” I lean against the railing beside her, resisting the urge to stroke the bronze arm lying barely inches from my own. “When I was a kid, back before the Orlovs came, sometimes he would tell Darya and me lighthearted anecdotes. If he ever told us more serious stories, they always had a purpose.”

“Like what?” Ofelia shifts slightly, turning side-on so her eyes search my face with that still, focused intensity that always seems to cut through my emotional defenses with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel. “Tell me.”

“Once, when I was very young, Papa was teaching me to swim.” I turn my vodka in my hands, staring at the golden sunlight streaming across the water below. “I couldn’t have been more than four. I’d been going into our family pool since I was a baby, but I still had those yellow inflatable things on my arms. I remember I was absolutely terrified of taking them off.”

The memory is like a distant echo: laughter and the acrid scent of chlorine, the clear blue water of that long-ago pool seeming to my four-year-old self as vast as the sea in front of me now.

“My father kept trying to take the inflatables off my arms. He was telling me I’d be fine, that the only way I’d learn to swim was by trusting myself. But I was convinced that I’d sink, and so I kicked and screamed, until eventually I accidentally kicked him in the eye.”

“Oh!” Ofelia’s hand covers her mouth in shock, but when I glance up, her eyes are brimming with laughter. “I’m sorry,” she gasps. “But just the thought of Deda Sergei getting kicked in the eye . . .” She shakes her head. “He’s so . . .”

“Stern. I know.” I smile wryly. “If you think he’s that way now, you should have seen him when I was a kid. He was already over sixty back then, an old man by most people’s terms. But he was so tall and tough. He was what the gulag raised him to be, I guess, and it showed. Even so, he was always slow to anger, so when I kicked him, he just laughed. But I could still tell, by the way he plucked me out of the pool, that there was no way I was leaving that day until I swam.

“He carried me over the tiles, far away from my mother and Darya, and sat me down in front of him. Then he asked if he’d ever told me about the time he and his friend Ruki crossed a frozen river.”

Ofelia’s eyes widen.

“Now, of course, I know it must have happened during that long trek he made with Roman’s father, from Russia to Switzerland. But back then, Ruki was little more than a storybook character to me, and in Miami in summer, it was hard to even imagine something being frozen.

“He described them standing on the edge of this river, arguing about whether or not it was frozen enough to hold their weight. They could see the current moving beneath it. They’d both grown up in the gulag and didn’t know how to swim. They knew that if the ice cracked, they’d fall in and likely die. But they were very hungry, and they also knew that on the other side of the river they would find food. So eventually, my father decided that he would walk out onto the ice first and test it. He was more than halfway across when the ice cracked, and he fell into the freezing river.”