Page 47 of Dangerous Lover

You have to let go of your mourning. You must get on with your life, Caroline. Grieving is a process and you’re not processing your emotions at all.

It was true. At times, she felt mired in a deep black hole, a bottomless, airless well with only the faintest of light at the top. The words other people spoke could barely reach her.

So he knew not to give her words. He gave her something better—the comfort of his body. With all the thousands and thousands of words her friends had offered, nobody had thought to hug her, to let her cry her fill in someone’s arms, as Jack was doing.

Finally, the tears stopped and she lay still under him, trying to catch her breath. Slowly and so gently she wanted to weep, he withdrew from her and, still holding her tightly, turned them over. Now she was lying in his warm, tight clasp, her head on his shoulder. His very wet shoulder. She couldn’t control her muscles or her thoughts, as ravaged as if she’d been in a bad accident.

“I’m sorry,” she said, dazed.

He wiped her face with something. “I know about loss,” he said quietly. “Do you feel better?” He reached under her hair to massage her scalp.

“Yes, thank you,” Caroline said politely in a water-sogged voice, then stopped. Shedidfeel better. It felt as if the crying jag had coughed up a ball of black bile that had been poisoning her system for a long, long time.

He wiped her face again. She gave a half-laugh. “I can’t believe you came to bed with a handkerchief.”

“It’s not a handkerchief,” he said matter-of-factly. “It’s the sheet.”

Caroline blinked, appalled. “I’ve been crying and blowing my nose into mysheet?”

“That’s okay.” Oh God, how she loved his voice. So deep, so calm. If only it could be bottled and sold as a tranquilizer. Better than Prozac. “We can change the sheets.”

We. One small word and it meant so very much.We can change the sheets.

Caroline realized that it was the very first time since her parent’s death that someone acknowledged that she wasn’t alone with a problem. Friends, the occasional date, and the very occasional lover—somehow, they were always up for an evening out or a night at the theater, but she was always alone with her problems. This particular one was stupid and minor. She had plenty of sheets, but something in his voice told her he’d stand by her for more than sheets.

“You wouldn’t have run away from Toby,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“No.” His hand tightened in her hair. “I wouldn’t have.”

She lifted her head away from his shoulder to examine his face. “I wish I’d known you earlier.”

Something—some strong emotion—crossed his face. The grooves around his mouth deepened and the skin across his cheekbones grew tight.

“I wish I’d been around earlier, too.”

Brighton Beach

Brighton Beach ispart of Brooklyn, a community of 150,000. Its nickname is ‘Little Odessa’ because most of its inhabitants are Russian immigrants.

Deaver appreciated the irony because he’d met the man he was going to see in Big Odessa—the real thing. He’d first met Viktor ‘Drake’ Drakovich December 2021, when everyone on the ground, with two eyes in theirhead and a working brain, knew that Russia was going to invade Ukraine.

Drake at the time was the biggest arms dealer in the world, operating out of a nondescript high rise in Odessa, supplying arms to forward-looking Ukrainians as fast as he could funnel them in. Deaver’d been a young Special Forces soldier and had been tasked with supplying money to Drake, in briefcases containing half a million dollars at a time. He’d once calculated that the US government had poured at least ten million dollars into Drake’s hands.

It was value for money, too. Drake was known for his quality goods. He had four former Russian soldiers who’d been armorers on his payroll and when you bought weapons from Drake, you got exactly what you had paid for, in good working order, clean, oiled and ready to roll.

When the US government stepped in officially, Drake moved. He was smart and he knew where to pick his battles. A month later, he was based in Ostende, Belgium, supplying arms to Ashad Fatoy, the Congolese rebel leader, where Deaver’d crossed his path again. When he could, he threw work Drake’s way and he once was able to warn him that agents of the Belgian Flemish state security agency, the Staatsveiligheid, were closing in on him.

Deaver had kept tabs on Drake, knowing he would always land on his feet, knowing he’d need him one day. That day had come.

“Here,” he told the cab driver as he thrust what the meter showed, plus a ten dollar tip, over the seat and got out. It was early in the afternoon, but the sky was so sullen with snow, it wasas dark as evening. Inside a minute, Deaver had disappeared from the taxi cab driver’s sight.

Five minutes and two city blocks later, he was ringing a bell in an anonymous high rise, not unlike the building Drake had lived in in Oostende.

It didn’t matter what name was on the bell, he knew which button to press. The top one. Drake arranged little booby traps on the lower floors that would slow down any assault troops on their way up, and the roof was a helipad. It was his MO and it hadn’t changed, in Odessa, in Ostende, in Lagos and now in Brighton Beach.

A security camera swiveled on its pivot when he rang the bell and Deaver raised two fingers to his brow in ironic salute. Drake had three levels of security and it took a quarter of an hour to pass through the scrutiny of two very large, very efficient guards in full combat gear outside the nondescript door on the tenth floor. Frisked quickly and impersonally, Deaver was ushered into a large foyer where he waited for a few minutes, certain that he was being subjected to a full body scan.

Drake had a lot of enemies and there had been at least five assassination attempts, that Deaver knew of. None of them successful. Drake was a very hard man to kill.

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