Page 13 of Captured Solace

Her eyes widened and her pupils dilated, her body pressing against mine. Through her dress, her nipples tightened, making little bumps beneath the fabric. Whether it was my words or having my mouth against her neck, something had turned her on. All the way. She shifted her hips almost desperately as we walked into the reception area.

I’d made sure I had all of the paperwork filed beforehand so it took all of ten minutes for us to be legally married. Sienna was unusually quiet through all of it, signing her name and sealing her fate without a word of protest. When it came time to exchange rings, I slipped the simple, gold band and single diamond onto her finger and gave her a moment to study it.

She turned it back and forth, watching it catch the light. It was only a carat and a half, but it was a high quality stone and it glittered beautifully on her slender finger. Finally, she gave a quick nod of approval and held her hand out for my ring. She took my palm in her soft fingers and the hair on the back of my neck rose, sending a bolt of heat down my spine.

Then she slipped the ring on my finger and I was a married man. After forty-four years of being single, I’d finally done it. I had a wife. The feeling was strange, but not wholly unpleasant and not suffocating as I’d anticipated.

She was quiet, thank God, on the way home and I was lost in thought. When we stepped into the house, my right-hand man, Leonid Orlov stood in the kitchen talking on his phone. I pulled Brenda aside as we entered the kitchen and had her take Sienna out to the porch to have dinner with her so Leonid and I could discuss business in private.

“So you’re married then?” said Leonid, in his native tongue. He had a plate of Brenda’s peach cobbler in front of him and he was shoving it into his mouth between words.

“It’s official,” I said, shrugging.

“How do you like her?”

I glanced up, meeting Leonid’s bright blue gaze. He was a good looking young man with an innocence to his face that stood in stark contrast to his proclivity for calculated violence. Perhaps that was what made him such a good right-hand. No one ever suspected him until it was too late and they were laid out in a morgue.

“She’s…interesting,” I said slowly. “Lucien was right when he said she was headstrong. But she’s fucking hot so I guess that makes up for it. A bit.”

“What will you do now? Let her live here so you don’t have to deal with her?” Leonid emptied his coffee cup and set it aside.

“No, I need this alliance, you know that, so I have to put in some effort with her,” I said, forcing my tone to remain casual. “ We can’t move forward with our plans in Boston unless we have Lucien’s support. I need my marriage to work out.”

“So what are you going to do?”

I leaned back in my chair, swirling the bourbon in my glass thoughtfully. “I like her enough to live with her. I think I’ll stay here for the next few months and work on our Boston plans. No one would anticipate an attack from the middle of nowhere South Carolina, so it’s an ideal spot.”

“That’s true. Travel back and forth is a bitch, but probably best you stay out of sight and out of mind until we pull this off.”

I nodded. “Let’s plan on that then.”

Leonid scraped another giant spoonful of cobbler up and put it on his plate. I watched impassively, not feeling particularly hungry even though it was past lunchtime. There was a restless ache, but it wasn’t in my stomach.

“Do we still have that meeting tomorrow?” Leonid asked.

“Which one?”

“The Boston contact is meeting us with the information he gathered over the last month or so,” Leonid said. “We were supposed to see him at twelve, as long as he get in safely tonight.”

“Oh, yes, we’ll have it. And make sure you go over every inch of that man to make sure he’s not bugged. And take his phone. I trust him, but not that much.”

“I’ve got it handled.”

“Good, because I just got married,” I said tiredly. “And I’ve got a lot on my plate right now.”

“Congratulations,” Leonid said, a boyish glint in his eye.

I stood and pushed in my chair. “Don’t even start with your bullshit, Orlov.”

“Don’t be nervous for your wedding night, she’ll know what to do,” Leonid called after me as I strode across the kitchen to the steps.

“Fuck you.” I paused at the bottom of the stairs. “Oh, and next month, I’m going to Cairo for a week to meet with Ahmed Salah and Duran Esposito. Is that something you want to be involved in? It’s just a simple operation—gunrunning and the like, but I need to get a feel for what the Italians have accessible to them before we make any further moves in Boston. I need to know what they can do.”

“I have to be in Europe in the middle of the month,” Leonid said, flipping his digital watch to check the calendar. “I leave on the fifteenth.”

“We should be back by the tenth.”

“I’ll go then.”

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