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“Where are we going?” I asked when he got in and started the engine.
“It’s a surprise.”
“I don’t like surprises, Spider.”
He backed out of the driveway and drove in the direction of the gate. “Trust me.”
Trust was an issue for me. The only man—only person besides my parents—I’d truly ever put my unfailing faith in was Beau. After he was killed, from all accounts by friendly fire, any belief I’d had in anyone protecting me, putting my best interest ahead of theirs, ended.
I suppose I had a modicum of confidence in the leaders of the two private security and intelligence firms I contracted for, but the idea that I was expendable—like my husband had been—never left the back of my mind.
“Raspoutine,” Spider said, looking over at me while we waited for the exit gate to open.
“Wow,” I responded, raising a brow. Beau had taken me to another restaurant by the same name in Paris. It had opened in the mid-sixties, but was more of a nightclub than a restaurant. I still had no idea how my husband had secured a reservation since it was the kind of place celebrities, dignitaries, and other billionaire types frequented.
The Miami Beach location was affiliated with the one in Paris, but I’d never been. I’d heard it was known as much for its dinner club as for the party scene it transitioned into at the stroke of midnight.
While I was a third-generation American, my family on my father’s side was Russian—a fact Spider would’ve discovered in the dossier I had no doubt the FBI had provided him. How he knew I was a sucker for smoked fish, salmon roe, homemade blinis, and pavlova was a mystery. And maybe he didn’t.
“Have you been before?” I asked as he navigated his way seemingly without a map, made more impressive because he knew to stay off the main drag, which would have turned the ten-minute drive into an hour.
“I haven’t, but I’ve always wanted to.”
When he pulled up to the entrance, two valets approached the car.
“I’ll escort the lady,” I heard him say to the man who opened the driver’s door. Mine remained locked, to the apparent chagrin of the second guy.
“Welcome, Mr. Vaughn,” the Russian-accented maître d’ said when we walked through the door the second valet held open for us. “Please follow me. Your table is ready.”
“I thought you said you’ve never been here before.”
As with my comment about his car, Spider flushed. “I haven’t.”
I waited until we were seated and he’d accepted our host’s offer of two shots from the bottle submerged in ice he’d set on the table, before I mentioned it. “You seem embarrassed.”
“My mother and father are regulars.”
“And?”
“I asked my dad to secure the reservation.”
“Again, why does that embarrass you?”
He sighed, rested his arms on the table, and leaned toward me. “I try not to take advantage of my parents’ largesse.”
“Poor little rich boy?” I’d meant to tease him, but it fell flat. “Sorry,” I mumbled.
“It’s okay. It’s just…I caught a lot of flack for it when I first joined the bureau. As if I wouldn’t take my job seriously since my parents were wealthy. So, yeah, poor little rich boy.”
The size of my bank account bothered me more than embarrassed me. The CIA had, for all intents and purposes, bought my silence after the circumstances of Beau’s death were uncovered by the Invincibles, the team whose Christmas party I was refusing to attend. The current director of the agency, Kellen “Money” McTiernan, had arranged for the “settlement,” not just for me but for all the families who’d lost loved ones during the years the intelligence community was rife with corruption and abuse of power.
Rounding out my net worth was the value of the house Beau had first inherited, then left to me. When his family had bought the land and built it, they probably paid under ten grand for it. Now it was worth upwards of five million, according to the most recent appraisal.
I realized I’d been lost in thought, but when I looked over at Spider, it didn’t appear he’d noticed. Conversation, or lack of it, had been easy between us since we first met, and tonight was no different.
We quietly sipped our vodka—rather than downing it like a shot as was Russian tradition—each taking in the opulence of our surroundings. The dimly lit main room was awash in red. The bar and windows were backlit in the color, as were the chairs, tablecloths, and candles. The only things that differed were the carpeting, which was floral-patterned red and ivory, and the gold chandeliers with warm-white bulbs hanging above the tables. It was hard to imagine that in a few short hours, the space would be transformed from a restaurant to a dance club.
I studied the man sitting beside me. I couldn’t explain my willingness to accept a friendship with Spider when my modus operandi was to push people away. Maybe it was because he never asked much of me besides company. Maybe it was because he sensed, like I had, that neither of us quite fit in with the team of agents with whom we’d worked our last mission.
