“Hello Sarah? This is Ian Blackmon. Is my grandfather home?”
The genteel voice on the line sounds pleasantly surprised. “Ian! So nice to hear from you. I know your grandfather will be pleased but I’ll let you be the one to surprise him. Hold the line for a moment.”
A minute of muffled static buzzes in his ear and then a booming voice travels across the miles of fiber optics. “Hello?”
“Hello, Edward? It’s Ian. Ian Blackmon.”
“How many Ians d
o you think I know, young man? For God’s sake, I’m your grandpa. Out of all my grandchildren, you’re the only one who calls me by my given name. Why, pray tell?”
Ian laughs spontaneously, overjoyed to hear his grandfather sounding hale. “Because I’m a freak, as my sister is so fond of reminding me.”
Thunderous laughter is his response. “No, it’s because you’re what used to be known as a stuffed shirt. Means too conservative—you have to loosen up. What did they used to say in Hawaii? Hang loose. So why do I merit a phone call? Miss my scintillating presence?”
“Always. How are you feeling, Grandpa?”
“Uh, can’t complain. Since the accident my back aches all the time but other than that, things are pretty fine. Sarah takes good care of me.”
“Marry her already, Grandpa. Grandma would have wanted you to be happy. You know Sarah’s always had a hankering for you—probably her only flaw.”
More deep-throated chuckles follow. “Indeed? I don’t know about all that. What’s on your mind, son?”
“Do you remember the woman I used to date years ago? Natasha Yenin?”
“Blond, right? And very tall, or the more polite way to say it is statuesque?”
“Yes, that’s right. I met her in high school and then later went into business with her. We had a falling out—essentially she tried to destroy my holdings and I never knew why.”
The jovial quality of the older man’s voice disappears and the stern judge emerges from his sudden absence. Even the down-home idiom vanishes; it’s as if another man gets on the phone. “I see. Have you subsequently learned her reasons for doing so?”
“Only partially.” He sighs. “She directed me to you.”
“To me? Does it pertain to one of my cases?”
“Apparently. Her grandfather. According to Natasha, you deported him and thereby ruined his life. I’m trying to learn more about it and I have a private investigator on the trail now. I just wondered if you had any recall…”
“Do you perchance know the name?”
“No. Not yet. Her name is Yenin but I highly doubt they kept the same name if they shared one. She told me there were people back in the mother country who were only too glad to welcome him home. She claims now, after they seriously injured him, he’s left in a persistent vegetative state.”
“Well, I had a multitude of cases involving some nasty pieces of work from the Russian mob element, I can tell you. It could be any one of them. Can you get me the name and I’ll do a bit of research?”
“Sure. I’ll have my investigator poke around and see what he can come up with. Then I’ll get back to you. Did they ever catch the guy who ran your car off the road?”
“No. One would think with all the camera surveillance everywhere one goes these days, it would be easy to find anyone. The price we pay for safety is not buying us all that much of it. The police continually inform me they have leads but I don’t believe them. Why? Do you think it could be connected to your Natasha?”
The possibility strikes him like a left hook, a sudden revelation that causes his guts to seize up. “God, Grandpa, it didn’t even cross my mind. I truly hope not.” Silence drops over the phone line on both ends as each man contemplates the possibility. Ian is the first to speak again. “Just to err on the side of safety, you should be extra cautious at least until I get more information.”
“I’m always cautious, Ian, but I will bear it in mind. Please get me the name as soon as you have it.”
“I will, Grandpa. Please take care of yourself and Sarah.”
After the conversation with his grandfather, Ian understands his dire necessity for more information—and lightning fast. He also needs Ella to remain safe. Knowing how stubborn she can be, he realizes that he must impress upon her the gravity of the situation: the Russian mob is not something with which to tangle and walk away whole. He’ll have to be truthful with her…
again
. This candor rests uneasily with a man used to keeping things extremely close to the vest but he’ll just have to breathe through the discomfort. He laughs to himself as he recalls telling his sexual partners the very same every time he’d deliver erotic pain to them during the course of their play.
Breathe through it
. Well, he’d do well to take his own advice.
He picks up the phone. “Scott, Blackmon. I’ll need the plane for a trip to New York. We leave in the morning for two days. Any problems? Very good; I’ll see you in the a.m.” He buzzes his assistant next. “Claudia, I want you to pull the report we ran on Lucien Phillips. Copy it and leave the original in the file. Bring me the copy as soon as you have it. Thank you.” He doesn’t wait for a reply before he disconnects.
“Ella,” he snuggles up to her back, sweeping her long hair away from her neck so he could nuzzle it.
“Mmm. Stop that,” she mutters into her pillow, “or I’m not going to let you go to work on time.”
He coos, as he relentlessly kisses and sucks the sensitive areas of her neck and throat. “Promise?”
She whips around, encircling his neck with both arms and hitches one leg around his waist. “Promise. Now what?”
Reluctant to share his news, he distracts her by leaning in closer to kiss her. He’d rather stay in bed with Ella all day, only getting up for necessities. But Scott was already at the hangar, readying the plane for the trip. “I have to make a quick trip to New York.”
Ella unravels herself from him and sits up in a flash, a thousand questions flashing across her face in milliseconds. “Why?”
Frowning, he internally debates the wisdom of telling her too much truth. She’ll worry herself sick and she may try to accompany him. Wouldn’t it be better to prevaricate this
one time? Or perhaps lie by omission? “I have to meet with someone, Ella. I’ll be back by no later than tomorrow evening.”
“W
ith whom are you meeting, if I may be so bold to ask?”
His eyes flare with amusement. “Tsk, tsk, so suspicious, aren’t we? It’s not a woman, I assure you. Now…what about that delaying tactic you promised?” He yanks her back down; she lands with a thud onto his chest and his fast hands begin to roam.
“Oh, no you don’t, Blackmon. First tell me whom you’re meeting with and then you can distract me.”
Ian cradles her face in his large hands. Can she possibly know how much he loves her? Pushing her hair away, he looks—really looks—at every inch of her beautiful face. Her forehead, neither too high nor too low, that gently slopes toward elegantly arched brows. Almond-shaped eyes, large and china blue, watch the world with a clarity that always robs him of breath when they’re trained on him intently, her straight nose, the size in harmony with the rest of her face, and finally her luscious, luscious lips, so full and red, the most kissable he’s ever seen.
Holding her in his embrace, he knows unequivocally that he no longer could live without her. If something happened to Ella, he’d shrivel and die: she is that precious. He leans in and kisses those lips over and over, barely allowing her a breath in between. He slides his mouth across her jaw to her neck, running his tongue down to the nape and on to her shoulder. Between the two points, he clamps down his mouth—so she feels the warm and wet… and then the sharpness of teeth as he bites down. Whereas she used to protest such pain, she now welcomes it from him—her thready gasp confirms he’s stirring her passion.
He doesn’t want to talk right now.
Ella’s response is primal. She throws her head back to allow him full access to her throat, while straddling his legs. Flexing her hips, she can feel the swelling bulge through his thin drawstring pants and it serves to stoke her passion higher. She begins moving her body against his more aggressively—she has no panties on and the friction and heat he’s releasing is sending her body into a frenzied impatience.
Growling in response, he reaches down to pull up her nightgown and slide down his pants. She’s so wet that his cock is bathed in her, seeping right through his clothing. With a moan rumbling from deep in his chest, his arms reach up to hold her shoulders in place as he thrusts up into her. Normally there are no words between them, just rhythmic motion and punctuating sounds. This time he speaks to her, whispering in her ear, dirty things that make her control slip away faster until she shrieks, high and loud, and all her muscles clamp down on him. He tries to fight it,
marshaling every resource accessible to him, but to no avail: her body forces him into the whirling vortex with her and they both reach the end of it as one, exhausted.
After a few moments their panting winds down, and Ian accepts the obligation he has to come clean with her; he doesn’t want to undermine the new currency of their relationship. Inhaling a bolstering breath of oxygen, he prepares himself for the argument.
“Ella, sweet, I have to go have a heart to heart with Phillips. It’s critically important that I do so, and I need to know you’ll respect my wishes and stay here, guarded by Mason at all times. Can you allow me that one less worry? Please?”
The information shocks her. “Lucien? I don’t want you going there alone, Ian. Remember what you did to his face. I’m sure he’d like nothing better than to pay you back, despite what he said about being a pacifist.”
“He’s not the one I’m worried about—it’s his two protectors who concern me. But I’m not going alone, Ella. I promise. I’ll either take Daniel Butler with me or some of his back-up. I swear to it.” He bends down to peer into her eyes, his gaze penetrating any barrier. “Do I have your word, Ella?”
Ella knows she can’t fight him on this front: Natasha is too dangerous. “Okay.” Her thoughts run to her conversation with Maya St. Sauveur. She sharply sucks in her breath. “You know, if you had told me about Natasha sooner, I could have told you about her connection with Lucien. I just remembered that Maya told me that someone named Natasha took Lucien away from his longtime girlfriend.”
“Really.” His comment wasn’t an interrogative, but merely a punctuating statement.
“Yes. You might try speaking to his ex. Her name is Eliza, I believe, but I don’t know her surname.”
“I believe it’s in the initial report I had run on Mr. Phillips when you first began your employment with him. I wonder if you might consider starting the conversation with her while I’m in New York?”
She reaches up to stroke his face, stubbled from a five o’clock shadow. “I can do that.”
“Good. I’ll have Claudia contact you with her telephone number. Thank you, Ella. To know you’re safe is one less thing on my mind.”
She reaches her hand down and begins to stroke him. “We work better as a team, don’t we?”
His voice drops to a deeper register as his hands begin to reciprocate, “We certainly do, Ms. Strong.”
Meanwhile, Scott waits at the hangar, the Gulfstream ready to go.
Natasha Yenin is rarely conflicted: once she makes up her mind to do something, she sees it through. The whole idea began with Ian’s grandfather, Edward Blackmon, the man who ruined her family by domino effect. He deported her grandfather back to Russia where the men he double-crossed waited to taste the sweet nectar of vengeance.
Two years before the Yenin clan emigrated to the States, a gang of ten criminals banded together, pooled their financial resources, and entrusted the money to her grandfather. He was the only one who was clean enough to obtain a visa to the States. Once there he was to broker deals for their cache of stolen Soviet-era weapons they had stockpiled in a warehouse outside of St. Petersburg. The money was to be used to grease palms and to acquire drugs to sell—diversification was always a smart move for any kind of criminal, be it a Wall Street type or a Russian mobster.
Instead, Gregori Greshenko pocketed all the money and made a life in the U.S. for his wife and children. They took his mother’s maiden name of Yenin and proceeded to prosper using the stolen cash as seed money to finance more lucrative operations stateside. He knew if he ever got sent back to Russia, he’d be in very deep shit.
Judge Blackmon knew a wormy apple when he saw one and Greshenko was the worst kind of bad. Not only did he allow the deportation, he also expedited it. The criminal element surging into the U.S. from the former Soviet Union was overwhelming the streets and the courts, dumping more heroin and guns on the streets of big cities than ever before.
Even though the U.S. would not allow a DNA database, Natasha knew the CIA covertly maintained one on foreign nationals; in fact, now U.S. citizens would enjoy the same right to violation since the Supreme Court just recently gave the police the right to take DNA sampling of arrested citizens. But back then it was only the foreigners who were infringed upon in this indelible manner. Natasha knew that if any of her family were caught doing anything against the law, their DNA would be captured through nefarious methods and added to the growing secret database. She could not risk being among that data for it would follow her forever, marking her as a criminal element and preventing her legal residency in the U.S.