The Double

I shook my head, clutching him tightly. But my heart was booming in my chest. He’d done plenty to me. I was a wreck, scared and shocked and turned on and... God, did that really happen? Had I...connected with the guy we were meant to be bringing down?

He’d nearly kissed me. Hell, when he was standing there with his leg between my legs...I felt my face go hot, just at the memory of it. And I’d wanted him to. I still wanted him to.

I squeezed my eyes closed. Idiot! I was lucky to have got out alive. What I still didn’t understand was why he’d let me go. What had he seen in me that made him soften?

I’d thought that I knew him, after watching him for two years, but I’d been utterly wrong. For a few minutes in that hotel room, I’d glimpsed a different man. One I didn’t understand at all.

5

Konstantin

I STOOD in the hallway of my suite, staring at the door without seeing it. I was seeing her, tracing the soft curve of her neck in my mind, seeing over and over again that sudden flash of half-nakedness when her robe had slipped open outside my door, that hypnotic valley between her breasts, leading my eyes right down to the shadowy curls between her legs.

With any other woman, I would have assumed it had been a deliberate move. A seduction. But with Hailey….

I’d never met anyone quite like her. She was so different to the preening, conceited women I usually met. I loved her shyness, her awkwardness, and the way she pushed her glasses up her nose was just preléstnyj—what the Americans would call adorable. The innocence, the goodness radiating off her was so strong, I could taste it. It was why I’d let her into my room. Why I’d had to work so hard to stop myself from just grabbing her and kissing her.

There’s no better temptation for the devil than an angel.

But I’d held back. Twice. And God, the second time, when I could feel the warmth of her naked pussy caressing the head of my cock…. Pulling back from her had taken all the strength I had.

I told myself it was because I was faithful. And it’s true: unlike a lot of Russian men, I don’t cheat.

But I knew that was an excuse. Christina and I are together for convenience. A mutually beneficial arrangement. I don’t love her and she certainly doesn’t love me. The real reason I hadn’t kissed Hailey, the reason I’d warned her away from me, went much deeper.

To build an empire like mine, you must be hard. Nothing but hard. I’ve seen the consequences of allowing innocence and love into your life. There must be no weakness.

And Hailey? I knew it. I could feel it.

Hailey made me weak.

6

Hailey

I WAS NEVER meant to be in the FBI. My life started out on a completely different path.

I grew up in a little town in Wisconsin. My mom was a seamstress and ran a dress shop selling her handmade dresses. My dad was an artist who painted landscapes. We weren’t rich, but we were happy, and lived in a rickety old house with a big garden that backed onto fields. I ran around barefoot in grass that came past my knees and made friends with the rabbits and birds. My mom was pretty, with long golden hair, and my dad had a prickly, dark brown beard and played the guitar under the stars. When I painted pictures of our family at kindergarten, I always knew I could make the color for my muddy brown hair by mixing their two hair colors together. I got my freckles from my dad, and my short sight. But I didn’t inherit his artistic ability. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t paint like him. “You just haven’t found your thing yet,” he used to tell me. “You will.”

Then one night, when I was eight, my dad went out to pick up milk and didn’t come home. The police arrived an hour later to tell us he’d been shot dead by a guy who’d robbed the convenience store.

It was like my mom’s heart had been ripped out. For two years, she got thinner and paler, and I got more and more worried about her. Then a guy called Tanner stopped at the dress shop to ask directions, and everything changed.

They went out for three nights in a row, but then Tanner had to go: he lived in New York and had only been passing through. A week later, he was back, and then it was every weekend, and that unsettled me because I wasn’t sure I trusted this guy. He drank, and he made jokes about everyone in our little town being bumpkins. And when he got mad, he’d yell and curse and kick stuff in a way that scared me. But my mom’s face lit up whenever she saw him and I just wanted her to be happy. So I smiled and kept quiet.