NIKOLAI (Her Russian Protector #4) (21 page)

"It won't be a problem for long."

Liam laughed harshly. "Oh, that will be a hell
of a conversation starter at the holidays."

Nikolai didn't answer him.

"You'd better be careful. A man like Romero
doesn't snitch on his outfit. Knowing that wily bastard, he's
probably playing the government against the motorcycle club against
the cartel. He's found a better angle—and he'll come out on
top."

"No doubt," he agreed quietly.

After dropping Liam a few blocks from his
hotel, Kostya drove to the Vietnamese restaurant tucked away in a
rundown shopping center so Nikolai could make his meeting with Mr.
Lu. He went in alone and was directed to a table in the rear where
the older man waited. Understanding Nikolai's paranoid nature, Mr.
Lu had left the seat facing the front entrance for him.

"Lu," Nikolai greeted.

"Russian," the white-haired man
returned. "I've already ordered. You like
Muc Rang Muoi
?"

"Squid isn't a favorite of mine."

"Then you'll eat the
Bo Nuong Xa.
"

Nikolai decided it was a damn
good thing he liked the lemony beef dish because he clearly wasn't
going to have a choice in his dinner. "You know why I am
here."

"Of course." He sipped his warm
beer. "And you know what I want."

"A way out of that rather nasty
little sideline you've gotten mixed up in, I
expect."

Mr. Lu smiled. "I'm
listening."

Nikolai sat back as the
waitress delivered their tray of food. He waited for her to leave
before addressing the old man. "You first."

"A man calling himself J.P.
came to see me about a year ago. He wanted to arrange cargo
shipments between Cyprus and here. He had the money ready, and I
wasn't particularly concerned about the cargo
until…"

"Until what," Nikolai
prompted.

"In July, a couple of my
workers called me to the warehouse. They were all in a panic. The
moment I stepped close to the container, I knew what it was. The
smell…" Mr. Lu's voice grew tense. "Once you've smelled
decomposition, you never forget it."

Nikolai's stomach knotted. "The
heat?"

Mr. Lu nodded. "They had those
girls packed in those containers like cattle. There wasn't enough
ventilation or water for them. They cooked to
death."

Whatever appetite he'd had
fled. Nikolai pushed his plate forward to escape the citrusy scent
of the beef. "Why didn't you stop it then?"

"This wasn't the type of
agreement a man could just end." He hesitated. "The money and main
contacts came from a nice-looking guy. That J.P. was clean cut. The
crew who picked up the shipments? Not so much." He shook his head.
"They're the type who like to cover themselves in lightning bolts
and runes…"

Nikolai blinked. "You got into
bed with the white supremacists?"

"As I said, it wasn't done
deliberately."

Drumming his fingers on the
table, Nikolai wondered aloud, "But how are they getting women from
Cyprus? The skinheads around here are locally based. They have few
connections to anything international."

"Oh, they have a connection to
someone very powerful." The older man smiled wryly. "Someone from
your past."

Nikolai's eyes narrowed.
"Who?"

Mr. Lu shrugged. "I don’t know
his name. I can't even tell you what he looks like. All I know is
that J.P. was working with a Russian from the Moscow syndicate. He
gathered up the girls from Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia and
had them funneled into Cyprus where my contacts picked up the
containers and brought them here to Houston. The skinheads took the
shipments and that's all I know."

Reeling from Mr. Lu's
revelation, Nikolai began to form a better picture of the
situation. Vivian's kidnapping and the attack on him wasn't about
her father at all. It was about
him
. It was about someone
from Moscow trying to push him out of the way. They'd taken Vivian
and tried to kill him to show his weakness, to make his men doubt
him.

And this trafficking mess was
an inroad. The man trying to usurp his position was laying the
foundation for his takeover by setting up sidelines of earning,
including killing Afrim Barisha and taking that heavy loan sharking
action.

"Where can I find this
J.P.?"

"A cemetery."

"He's dead?"

Mr. Lu looked rather amused.
"Got himself shot. I was dealing with a man named John—but from
what I hear, he got himself shot too. Seems to be a risky
business."

Nikolai held Mr. Lu's gaze. "I
want you to stop the shipments."

Mr. Lu raised one thin eyebrow.
"It's a lot of money."

"It's a lot of risk. Too much
risk for a man like you," Nikolai added.

"And you?" Mr. Lu jabbed the
air with his chopsticks. "You've become rather risk averse during
the last few years. When I first met you, there wasn't a job you
wouldn't take if the money was right. Now I hear you're giving
action away to the Hermanos and Albanians to smooth over the Afrim
Barisha hit."

Nikolai ran his finger along
the edge of the table. "A man has to reevaluate his strategy every
now and then."

"And your new strategy
is?"

"Less risk, more money,"
Nikolai said, thinking of Vivian and the life he wanted with her.
It was a life that didn't include another stint in prison or
worse.

Mr. Lu gestured to Nikolai's
plate. "Eat. Talk. Let's do business…"

It was nearly eleven by the
time Nikolai left Mr. Lu and the Vietnamese restaurant. His belly
full, he slid into the front seat with Kostya. As they drove across
Houston, Nikolai stared out his window. He wanted to ask Kostya if
he'd heard about someone from back home trying to muscle in on
their territory but he kept his questions to himself. There was
nothing to be gained by revealing his hand this early in the
game.

When he stepped inside his home
a quarter of an hour later, Nikolai consciously pushed all the
dirty business dealings he'd accomplished today into a mental box
and shoved them to the very back of his mind. He didn’t want any of
that to touch Vivian. Though their relationship was far from
typical, he hoped to give her some sense of
normalcy.

Not surprisingly, he found
Sergei eating in the kitchen. The spread he'd arranged from Samovar
had been neatly laid out upon the island. From the looks of it, the
food had been very much enjoyed. Of course, Sergei had probably
vacuumed up half of the delivery himself.

"You keep eating like that and
we're going to have to put you on a diet before your next fight,"
Kostya warned and swiped the heaping plate from Sergei's
hands.

"When you can survive one of
Ivan's workouts, I'll let you tell me when to stop eating." Sergei
stabbed another piroshky with a fork and transferred it to the
plate he'd tugged out of Kostya's grip. "She's in the media room,
Boss."

Nikolai grabbed a bottle of
beer from the ice-filled sink and popped the top. He flicked it in
the trash and left behind the two bickering men. When he entered
the media room, he discovered Vivian on the sectional watching one
of those of New Year's Eve countdown shows. It was the second time
in as many nights that he'd arrived home to find her dressed for
bed and looking relaxed. He had to admit that he rather liked
it.

He wrinkled his nose at the
biting scent of toenail polish remover. She had a dozen bottles of
toenail polish in different colors lined up on the coffee table
along with a handful of manicuring tools. When he came into the
room, she smiled up at him and motioned toward her beauty shop. "I
hope you don't mind."

"I don't." He peeled out of his
jacket, unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled up his shirt sleeves before
kicking off his shoes.

She patted the space next to
her. "Sit with me?"

"Where else would I sit?"
Amusement colored his voice as he settled onto the cushion next to
her. Relieved to finally be able to act on his desires, he leaned
over and kissed her long and deep and hard. Her shuddery breaths
tickled his cheek when he pulled back enough to gaze into her pale
eyes. "I like coming home to you."

"I was really sad to be away
from you all day—but if you're going to kiss me like that every
evening, I think I'll learn to deal."

Her mischievous grin warmed him
down to the very core. He took a sip of his beer before setting it
aside. Staring at the paint colors, he asked, "Which
one?"

She wiggled her bare toes. "I'm
torn between the purple and the pink."

"Then we'll use
both."

Surprise rippled across her
face. "We?"

He picked up the purple bottle
and gave it a shake. "I painted all the walls in this house. How
hard can it be to paint ten little toenails?"

She bit her lip to keep from
smiling. "Um…okay. Just so you know—there are plenty of cotton
balls and swabs right there to clean up your
mistakes."

He scoffed playfully. "You're
not the only artist in this house."

"Uh-huh," she said with a
laugh.

He changed his position on the
couch and dragged her dainty feet onto his lap. She'd rolled up the
bottoms of her pajama pants to her knees so her calves her totally
bared. Despite the fact that he was only supposed to be painting
her toenails, he couldn't let this chance to stroke her soft skin
pass him by.

Heat curled low in his belly as
he trailed his fingers up and down her slim, toned calves. Very
soon, he wouldn't have to content himself with merely touching her
skin. In a few short weeks, her body would be his to discover and
enjoy. The myriad ways he could make her sigh and moan and cry out
her pleasure made his cock throb.

Ignoring his baser thoughts,
Nikolai unscrewed the polish lid and wiped the excess polish
against the glass rim before dabbing at her big toe. He planned to
paint every other toe purple and then do the others in
pink.

"Kolya?"

"Yes?"

"I think…I think I saw my dad
today."

His head snapped right up at
her shocking statement. He smeared purple polish all over her toe
but neither of them hurried to clean it away. "You think or you
did?"

She gulped. "I was sitting at
the window in the library after I called Lena. It was sort of
misting, and I couldn't see very well. There was this blue truck
coming down the street, and it slowed down right in front of the
house. The window rolled down—and I saw a man's hand. It wasn't
waving. It was just…there. It only had four
fingers."

"Which four?" Romero Valero had
lost his forefinger after a drug deal gone bad many years ago.
Lorenzo Guzman's father had chopped it off with a damn machete to
send a message to anyone else who tried to short him. Years later,
when Lorenzo was ready to lead a coup against his father, it had
been Romero who killed the elder Guzman—with that same
machete.

She wiggled her forefinger.
"This one was missing."

He put down the bottle of
polish, picked up a cotton ball and soaked it in the remover. As he
wiped her skin, he said, "Don't let him rattle you. He's only
trying to push your buttons."

"Well, it worked, Nikolai." She
wrung her hands. "What does he want?"

"Who knows," he grumbled. "He's
not an easily understood man."

"Was he threatening me? Was he
threatening us?"

"It's
possible."

"What more does he want with
me? Hasn't he done enough to hurt me?"

Thinking of his discussion with
Mr. Lu, Nikolai revealed, "He's not the reason you were taken or
the reason I was attacked."

"But…"

"I think it's probably a
coincidence that all of this happened right after your father was
popped from prison. It's two separate issues. Whatever your father
is doing, I don't think it really concerns us much
anymore."

"What about the hit the
Calaveras put out on me?"

"I doubt it had any teeth
behind it." He dried her skin with a paper towel and opened the
polish again. "It suited Lorenzo Guzman to use it against me, and I
let him do it so he would think he was winning that
round."

"But he
wasn't?"