With This Ring

“This country does not welcome me.” He laughed cynically. “It is better I leave before they tie me to some trouble. What about you? You’ve been finished with University a year. When are you planning to return to Moscow? Soon?”

“America is my home now.”

His eyes flashed. “America is not for you. Your homeland is Russia.”

I could have talked about the fact that my mother was American, which made me an American, but I knew that would only serve to encourage him to fly into a murderous rage. The last thing I needed was to make him feel the need to punish me. I played the only card powerful enough to reduce his interest in my return. “You know Moscow is dangerous for me at the moment, Papa.”

‘No one would dare touch you,” he said, his face stone cold, but I had hit home. His enemies were plenty and vicious and not even the president of America is immune to assassination. Fortunately, his phone rang and he picked it up.

“Good. You are here,” he said in Russian. It seemed the guest he’d been waiting for had arrived.

I looked down at the snow-white tablecloth and wondered why he was sharing our table with a guest. My suspicion went to the demon I had run into last night. Our families were bitter rivals so why then had he been the one tasked with asking me to call my father?

“Why did Maxim Ivankov come to see me yesterday?”

My father rose without responding, and with my heart suddenly hammering hard, I turned. As I had suspected, it was none other than the devil himself.

Chapter Five

Maxim

She was impossible to miss, especially with that hair, a brazen auburn, wild and cascading in tousled waves all the way down to her waist. It was the first thing I’d noticed when I first laid eyes on her more than a decade ago. She was fifteen and I seventeen, and I had saved her from breaking a few bones in Moscow.

She had been hanging from one of the branches of an oak tree in my father’s estate, mere seconds away from falling to the hard ground. I had stopped to watch her as she struggled vainly to keep her hold from slipping. I couldn’t help wondering why she hadn’t thought to call for any help whatsoever. I stood underneath her.

“Why are you not calling for help?” I asked curiously.

“I don’t want to be found.”

“So paralysis is a better option?” I was genuinely curious for her response.

She snapped at me then, “Get the hell away if you’re not going to help.”

My mood had been sour until then, but at her bark I had felt a smile stretch my lips and something warm fill my chest. So there we were, she struggling uselessly and I just watching the show. When she eventually fell, I had caught her in my arms.

The momentum of her fall sent us both toppling to the ground. It was strange to feel the warmth of her body on top of me. I remained in that state until she recovered enough to raise herself on her elbows and look down at me. The sun beyond seemed to create a fiery halo around her hair as she glared at me with the bright green eyes of a witch. They were nothing like mine. I knew mine were a cold, detached blue. Hers were alive with green fire.

For a few seconds neither of us moved. We just stared into each other’s eyes. Then I felt my cock grow suddenly hard and press into her flesh. Color flooded her cheeks. She jumped up and raced away, her hair flying in the wind.

It was another three years before I saw her again.

Right now, she was glaring at me with those same bright green eyes that never failed to hold my attention. Scowling, she swept her gaze between me and her father. Clearly, she had not been filled in about what was going on.

As my three bodyguards scattered around the room, the other patrons sensed a rise in tension with the security detail that accompanied both me and Igor. No doubt they could sense from the severity of our profiles that we were not ordinary men who had come to eat half-a-teaspoon of Beluga caviar carefully balanced on a quail’s egg.

I reached Igor Federov’s table and I held out my hand to him. Many had heard about him and his brutal reputation, but few had ever seen him in person, or even knew what he looked like. He was a simple enough man, bald, with a strong nose, and dressed in a rust colored pin-striped suit. A gold necklace hung from his thick neck. He would have been a caricature of a Mafia don, a joke, if not for his gaze. It was ferocious.

At this moment though, he had a handshake and a smile for me, albeit a watchful one, full of effort.