Page 92 of Dirty Grovel

“Fuck,” he mutters. “Fucking fuck.”

“We’re going to have this baby together, Oleg. We’re going to be co-parenting together. Wouldn’t you rather get along while we do it?”

He takes a deep breath. “You might be a lot smarter than I am, princess.”

I smile. “There’s no ‘might’ about it.”

He snorts with laughter, pulling me into his arms. “You’re not going to distract me this time,” he growls before his lips come down on mine like a storm.

Just as he pulls off my t-shirt, we’re interrupted by the sound of an alarm.

I bounce back, my pulse racing with panic. “What the hell is that?”

He curses and charges into the control booth.

I follow him to an innocent-looking phone settled beside the steering wheel. He answers and the alarm goes silent.

At first, Oleg says nothing at all. Then he growls something in Russian and hangs up.

“Was that actually a ringtone?”

“It’s the emergency ringtone,” Oleg explains. “It was designed to get my attention.”

“And scare the bejeezus out of everyone on board.”

Oleg doesn’t crack a smile. “I’m sorry, Sutton, but we’re going to have to turn this boat around. There’s been a situation back on land.”

“Is everyone alright?” I gasp, immediately jumping to the worst-case scenario, imagining Jesse or Teo, Mara or Sydney.

“It’s not what you think,” he says as though he knows exactly what I’m worried about.

“Then—”

“It’s Boris.”

28

OLEG

Sutton disappears into the bungalow as Artem delivers the news that has forced us back on land.

“… he’s in the hospital.”

I force my attention to Artem, though all I want is to go back to Sutton and pick up where we left off. “Or is that just what he would like for us to believe?”

Artem lifts a skeptical eyebrow. “You think this is some sort of ploy?”

“I wouldn’t put anything past the old fucker. What else do we know?”

With a shrug, he glances down at his phone. “The housekeeper found him in his study. There were signs of forced entry and he had been badly beaten before being bludgeoned across the back of the head.”

“But he’s alive?”

“According to my source, yes, he’s alive. But barely. He’s in critical condition. They’re monitoring him in the ICU as we speak.”

That gives me pause. Even if Boris was insane enough to orchestrate a scheme like this, he’d never commit to the bit so hard.

If there’s one thing I know about my uncle, it’s that he’s a fucking coward.

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