Page 4 of Brooklyn Bratva

The ones I’d met who were closer to my age were all designer suits, deep bronze tans and Gucci loafers, surrounded by women with inflated breasts, spray on jeans and flawless makeup. Oligarch’s sons I guess. And that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted a real man who wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. A man who’d worked to get where he was in life and who’d been through things that no one growing up in America could ever really understand. A man with eyes that switched from steely hardness to match his face, to a softer warmth when he thought no one was watching.

A man like Detective Kovalenko.

CHAPTER 2

Ivan

The timing was bad, given the teething problems with Ruslan’s fledgling operation, but I promised Joe that I would let his daughter stay in the condo with my mother, so I would just have to work around her. A promise was a promise.

The job couldn’t stop or Ruslan wouldn’t be the only one who had to worry about Moscow. I’d find a way to keep her out of it.

Mama had been in poor health since before we’d come over. Too many sacrifices for her son in the cold winters back in Moscow when we had no hot water in our home and nowhere to move to even if we’d had the money to pay for a better place, along with the bribes needed to secure it.

It would bring me some peace of mind to know that there would be someone around to look out for her that she couldn’t turn away. It was perfect. Becca needed a place to stay, so Mama could view it as a favor to her, rather than the live-in assistant she’d been rallying against, and her pride could stay intact. I was glad of that. But it meant I would have to be very careful about how I carried on business.

I’d arranged to meet her by the station. Now that the Uzbek had left, I’d come out from the back and taken a seat by the window, where I could see the crossroads the subway steps came down onto.

It wasn’t only Russian places in the area now, and while that was causing a problem for one side of me, the other side of me was happy to enjoy the dark, bitter coffee and sticky squares of syrup-drenched pastries with nuts.

I remembered her as a kid with a sweet tooth. I was expecting to see the kid I’d waved goodbye to seven years earlier, but instead I watched the most beautiful woman I’d ever laid eyes on turn onto the street, her dark hair snarled into curls that were being whipped about by the wind that always zipped along the cross roads here, underneath the bridge for the train.

I had to do a double take. But there was something about the way she walked, the way she held herself that told me it was her, even from a distance. She had to be Becca. The strap of her oversized bag pulled down one of her slim shoulders. She had on high-waisted jeans, ankle boots and a plain white t-shirt, oversized sunglasses and a dark blue leather jacket.

Right now Becca looked tastier than any morsel on display in the glass topped counter, ambling down the street towards me with a sway in her hips that she couldn’t have known was so provocative, and it floored me.

Why hadn’t Joe told me she was all grown up? I should’ve realized. Of course she wasn’t a kid anymore, but I hadn’t expected this.

My cock twitched in my pants, like it knew the only place it belonged was buried deep inside her and I wanted to leap out of my seat and race to her side. I wasn’t the only one staring. I wanted to pulverize the rest of them.

Like a crackle of electricity zapping through me, she made my whole body jolt to life. It felt like I’d been resuscitated, only I never realized I’d been dead. I must have been, because I couldn’t remember the last time I’d looked at a woman and felt anything other than bored disinterest.

But I was salivating over her.

My eyes bored into her, through the glass of the window, and I tried to steady my breathing. The animal side of me wanted to stalk out there, pull her to me and make her mine, but I had to get a grip. She was my best friend’s daughter. I was fifteen years older than her.

She tugged one of her headphones out of her ear, looking around as she slipped her cellphone out of her pocket, looking like she was checking directions, or maybe looking up my number.

I shook myself, downing the rest of my coffee ready to go out to meet her.

And that’s when someone shoved her.

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