Smoke and Mirrors (6 page)

She shrugged impatiently, then sipped her whisky, very aware of his continuing attention, and decided to change tack. “So how much danger am I actually in?” she asked. “From this—Gadarin.”

“I don’t know,” he said with apparent honesty. “Probably, since you drove off with me, he will make an attempt to find out who you are. And if he did, you would
not
be safe. On the other hand, since no one in the criminal world knows anything about you, he might never find out.”

She cheered up, very briefly, then frowned. “The police know me now. So does your lawyer.”

“I’ll take care of Gadarin.”

She dragged her hand through her hair. “That does
not
make me feel better! Get this through your overactive brain, Rodion Andreyevich, I am
not
a thread in your revenge plans. I can’t and won’t help you find your treasure.”

“Fair enough.”

Too easy. She eyed him with overt suspicion.

His eyes twinkled disarmingly. “But since you’re here, you might as well tell me anything you remember from your dreams. Until it’s quite safe for you to go home.”

Which was when Nell decided to throw her whisky over him.

Chapter Five

She was fast. She almost succeeded.

But Rodion was quicker, grabbing her wrist just as it jerked upward. The whisky slopped up the side of the glass but didn’t spill. He lifted one brow in challenge, the spark of laughter just fading from his curiously dark blue eyes. Perhaps that was what caused the butterflies to dance in her stomach. Only the feeling seemed to come from her wrist, grasped firmly in his strong, lean fingers.

It was another of those moments, like when he took her phone, when the world faded and nothing mattered, not identity or crime or fear, only the electric attraction sizzling between them. Although his warm fingers on her wrist were less obviously erotic than his palm on her breast, this touch was somehow more intimate: deliberate, skin on skin. And irritation melted into utter desire. She could drown in his eyes, blocking everything else except the exciting, insidious music; drag his hands all over her body; feel them on
all
her skin. She could touch
him
; she could lean forward and kiss his not-quite-smiling lips.

The butterflies plunged lower. How did he kiss?

I really,
really
don’t need to know that.
Because she had the strangely exciting feeling that his kiss would end the last control she had of this situation. As if he read her thoughts, his gaze dropped to her mouth. One finger stroked her wrist, and she shivered.

The moment was too long. She should have broken it before; she had to break it now. Why didn’t he? Unless he really meant to kiss her?
Oh Jesus…!

From his pocket came the muffled tones of a phone receiving a text message. His eyes acknowledged it, yet still they didn’t release her immediately. Instead, they grew more considering.

“So what bothers you about these dreams? Why don’t you want to think they’re a ‘second sight’?”

His fingers slid off her wrist so slowly she could almost have imagined he did it with reluctance. She could imagine so much with this man, as elusive as her dreams and certainly no more trustworthy.

She drew in a shaky breath, which she hoped he didn’t hear. “Because I’m a realist. I know the difference between dreams and reality.” She took a sizable gulp of the whisky, relishing the steadying pain of its pleasurable burn down her throat. “Do you?” she finished aggressively.

“Yes, but I can still dream.” Another flicker of his eyes to her mouth, a faint quirk of his lips. “So what did you dream of in my spare bed?”

She tore her eyes free. “Nothing.”

“Liar. You just don’t want to tell me. Why not? Did you dream about me?”

She couldn’t will it away. A flush of heat suffused her body. “I didn’t have any nightmares,” she retorted, but he wasn’t fooled.

“What was I doing?” he asked softly. “Was it sexy?”

Oh fuck, yes.
And yet even that wasn’t sexier than the real thing sitting beside her, not even touching her.

“Hardly,” she said coldly, giving him her best glare.

“Then you did dream about me.” His lips curved; his eyes had grown cloudy, like the dark of some tropical storm. Her pulse galloped so hard she could barely breathe. “And it was. Sexy. I can live with that future.”

I can’t.
She finished her whisky. “Unfortunately, it’s one of those alternative futures that never comes to pass in the real timeline. You know? Like in
Star Trek
.”

“How do you know?”

She set her glass on the table with a small clunk. “Because I still have free will.”

“It was a serious question. How
do
you know the prophetic dreams from the ordinary crap that the rest of us see all the time?”

“I don’t.” That much was complete truth, so she took the opportunity to sit back and look him in the eye once more. His face had changed again. The thrilling, hot cloudiness had faded to be replaced by something much sharper. And yet, the veils were down. He was hiding something.

He was always hiding something, always pretending, lying. She had to remember that. And yet it was oddly exciting to think that she’d begun to know him, to be able to tell when he was being honest, even if she didn’t know why.

He probably was being honest about wanting to take her to bed. Most men in her experience would fuck anything not physically abhorrent. And at least when she’d first seen him, she’d taken some care about her personal appearance. Even now, in Anna’s rolled-up trousers and sloppy sweater, she knew she didn’t look too bad, in an ultracasual sort of way. And why the hell should she be thinking about how she looked to him?

“I wish we were in Zavrekestan,” he said, surprising her all over again.

“I suppose you wouldn’t be being pursued by the police and drug lords,” she allowed.

“That’s where you’re wrong. But I said ‘we.’ There’s an old lady in my village—the village where I was born—who could help you with your dreams.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, I don’t
need
help with my dreams! I can’t help you find your sodding treasure, and frankly I wouldn’t if I could.” She stood up, aware it was more than time to end this tête-à-tête.

“Even if you knew it was a good thing to do?”

She jerked around, frowning. “I
couldn’t
know that, could I? I don’t trust you.”

His lashes came down. “No, I don’t suppose you do.”

The phone in his pocket emitted a well-known Russian folk tune. He smiled at her quizzical look.

“Maybe it’s time to answer,” he observed, reaching into his trouser pocket. “You don’t need to run off. I won’t beat you. Or kiss you,” he added, lifting the phone to his ear while he watched her reaction.

She made the effort to curl her lip but she had the lowering feeling her blush belied the contempt too obviously.

“Gadarin,” he said into the phone, with apparent fondness. “How are you?”

****

Rodion held the phone away from his ear and switched it to loudspeaker. Oh yes, he’d really pissed Gadarin off. Nell, the delicious blush beginning to fade from her cheeks, stared at him as if unsure whether she should be sharing such a joke. Well, it was only a joke if you didn’t think of Irina.

When the incandescent flow of Russian paused for long enough to let Gadarin breathe, Rodion said, “Of course I know about the fire. The police arrested me on suspicion of causing it. I just hadn’t realised you relied on them for your intelligence.”

That shut Gadarin up for all of two more seconds. Then: “What do you mean?” he said aggressively.

“I mean, I’m barely out of the police station before people are trying to kill me. They
were
your people, weren’t they?”

“You burned my heroin.”

Not “my people.” “My heroin.” “Why would I burn your heroin?” Rodion asked patiently.

Nell turned away from him with another curl of her expressive lips. But it got him another two seconds. Gadarin knew his operation had been upset, and somewhere he knew it had to be Rodion who’d shafted him, but in fact there was no motive for it that Gadarin could possibly think of. Rodion, and therefore the Bear, had been paid for the heroin. Why would he then burn it and upset the trade they’d just bought into?

“You stole some of it back for your own personal business,” Gadarin snarled at last. “Shafting the Bear as well.”

“Sure I did. That’s why the police let me walk without charging me. How they laughed at my boyish pranks as they pulled bag after bag of narcotics from my pockets.”

“All right, who’s the girl?”

“What girl?” he asked innocently. Interestingly, although she’d turned her back and even taken a step or two toward the door, Nell hadn’t gone. And now she twisted round again to face him, listening quite blatantly.

“Your partner,” Gadarin snarled. “The girl who met you outside the police station.”

“She met me inside first. She’s the police translator, and your guys nearly blew her head off.”

Nell jerked at the brutal words, almost as if she was being shot at again. She really wasn’t used to this stuff. He was genuinely sorry for that.

“So what the fuck were you doing with the police translator in a café?” Gadarin demanded.

“Have you seen her?” Rodion demanded.

Nell’s eyes widened. That was a better look. She was an intriguing mixture. Sometimes he had the impression she was using her looks to charm him; only then she seemed so damned surprised when it worked.

After another two-second silence—Gadarin really wasn’t quick on his feet; the Bear would have him for breakfast—Gadarin said blankly, “You wanted to fuck her?”

Nell’s face flamed all over again. It was dangerously fun to hold her wide, startled gaze and say with perfect honesty, “Of course I wanted to fuck her. But you’ve ruined any chance of that. Getting your head nearly blasted off plays havoc with the libido of ordinary women.”

“Serves you right, you bastard. I want my heroin back.”

“Well, that’s not going to happen, is it? You need to be thinking about how to get some more and get it fast before the Scots go elsewhere.”

Gadarin got it at last. “To the Bear?” he said in a hard voice.

“We can get you some.”

“And will it go up in flames too? I’m not stupid, Kosar. I won’t keep paying for the same few kilos of heroin, and I’m well aware of your untraceable incendiary skills.”

“I’m not that good,” Rodion said modestly. “And I’m not that devious. But I am an opportunist.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I didn’t cause your bloody fire, but I can see benefits for my current organization in the fact that it happened.”

Another two-second pause. Rodion smiled into the phone. The girl watched him, still and hard-eyed.

“Your current organization,” Gadarin repeated.

Clever boy.
“Let me speak to my current organization and see if we can do some deal by way of sympathy and good will.”

This time it was three and a half seconds.

“You’ve got until tomorrow morning,” Gadarin barked. “And then I’ll kill you.”

It was an empty threat and they both knew it. For one thing, Gadarin didn’t know where he was. And for another, Gadarin wasn’t averse to employing Rodion’s unique services. But the clear words escaping from the phone reached Nell, and he couldn’t help being touched by the start of fear in her eyes. Fear for him. It blazed only an instant, and then it was gone.

If he’d left the café alone, would they still have gone after her? It didn’t matter now. That was one of the many things he couldn’t change. What he had to do was to make her trust him. And he didn’t underestimate the difficulties of that.

The disgust in her eyes as she whipped away from him was like a lash, reminding him.

He disconnected and shoved the phone back in his pocket. “So what do you think I achieved there?” he asked with deliberate mildness.

“A change of drug lord? From a scary bastard one to a slightly more stupid if erratic one that you can more easily rip off? Maybe he’ll get your treasure back for you.”

She was certainly perceptive. As much as she could be in the circumstances.

“He doesn’t know about my treasure, and he never will,” Rodion said. He walked toward her, wondering what it would be like to see that eternal suspicion on her face melt into welcome and trust. And passion.
Dream on, asshole.
He knew to keep his goals achievable, and for Nell, he aimed at trust in one particular area. It was the best he could possibly do.

He said, “For the rest, that’s certainly what I want Gadarin to think. My next step is to make the Bear distrust Gadarin, and with a little nudge, they will, hopefully, take each other out.”

“And the drugs?” she said harshly. “To say nothing of the guns and all the other crap? What else do you do? Extortion? Protection? Prostitution? Christ.” She swung away from him, but he couldn’t let it end there.

She wasn’t immune to his touch. And besides, he wanted to touch her. He liked touching her. So he did, closing his hand on her rigid shoulder and turning her. He placed his other hand on her other shoulder and looked into her eyes. She had rather beautiful brown eyes, soft, mysterious, and naturally warm, even though they glared defiance and anger at him.

She had no business in this shit. And yet he couldn’t let her go.

“The Bear does all of those things,” he admitted. “I don’t.”

“You’re complicit,” she said harshly. “You work for him.”

“I have to.”

“Why?” she demanded without softening in the slightest. “Because he got you out of prison? You think he’ll somehow get you back in if you cross him?”

That wouldn’t be excuse enough for her. Nor for him as it happened, even though he’d been in prison and never, ever wanted to go back there.

“Because he has my treasure.”

A frown twitched between her eyes, which searched his face in bewilderment. It was enough for now. He didn’t want her to think he was plucking deliberately at her heart strings. And besides, he’d got into the habit of telling no one, because the fewer people who knew, the fewer people there were to covet or damage his treasure by accident or design.

He said, “The heroin, if I can arrange it, will never get onto the streets. It doesn’t really matter, of course, because someone else will always be there with more, but what the hell? It makes me feel better if I can hold my hands up and say with any truth, ‘It wasn’t me.’”

She got it, of course. She’d already realised he was leading Gadarin on about something.

“That’s how you operate, isn’t it?” she said. “You mix up the truth with the lies until you get people to believe whatever it is you want them to. How does anyone ever trust you?”

Stupidly, it hurt.

“Not many people do,” he admitted. “And most of those only trust me in very small, attainable bursts. Usually, it’s all I need.”

Through her shoulders, he felt indrawn breath. “And what do you need from me?”

He moved his fingers, gently rubbing her shoulders over Anna’s sweater. He wished it was skin. “I need your dreams. And I might need you to talk to our friend D.S. Lamont.”

Unexpectedly, silent laughter vibrated her shoulders. “At least this time you left fucking me off the list. Did Gadarin really buy that?”

“I mix the truth with the lies,” he reminded her, and something leapt in her eyes that drove straight to his nether regions.