“Yes.” I trailed her through the modest house to her surprisingly large kitchen. The smell of vinegar and spices filled the air and made my mouth water. I moved closer to the old wooden table covered with dozens of steaming hot jars. “Are you canning your produce?”
“Pickles,” she said, filling a kettle with water. “Beets, cabbage, peppers.” She waved her hand. “Whatever I had in the garden that needed to be processed or eaten in the next few days.”
“I’ve always wanted to learn to can,” I admitted, bending down to inspect the curious contents of the jars.
“It’s easy enough.” She set the kettle on the stove and fired up a burner. “I learned from my mother as a little girl, but I forgot most of it and had to reteach myself with a cookbook and lots of Googling.”
Deciding to be a bit nosy, I asked, “Did you live abroad? Is that why your English sounds British?”
“My mother and I moved away when I was four, and we didn’t come back until I was almost thirty.” She opened a cabinet and glanced back at me. “Do you like soup? I planned to reheat some for dinner.”
“Oh, yes, that’s fine.” I didn’t want her to go out of her way to feed me, but I also knew that the culture here was to be hospitable and generous. “Can I help with anything?”
“Sit,” she ordered. “And tell me what brought you to Albania.”
“Wanderlust,” I said, pulling out a chair. “Curiosity.”
She made a sound of disbelief and plunked a couple of stoneware bowls onto the counter. Narrowing her eyes, she insisted, “A man.”
“What?”
“You heard me. You’re here because of a man.”
“I’m not!”
“You are.” She wagged her finger at me. “Don’t try lying to me. I know that look on your face. It’s the same one that brought me back here.”
I swallowed the instinct to argue. She was right, of course. I was here because of a man. It was pathetic, really. I had traveled all this way to forget my infatuation with him, and yet, here I was, in his homeland, traipsing around the countryside trying to find answers to questions I was too afraid to ask.
“What’s his name?”
With a sigh, I finally confessed, “Besian. His name is Besian.”
Chapter Two
Thousands of miles away, Besian jolted awake from a nightmare that wouldn’t leave him alone. Night after night, he dreamed some version of the same nightmare. Auburn hair. Blue eyes. A scream. Blood. Blood everywhere. His mother cackling like the mean witch she was that he was useless and had killed Marley.
He rolled onto his back and blew out a noisy breath. He rubbed his face with both hands and glanced at the clock on his bedside table. The blackout curtains made it difficult for him to gauge the time, and he groaned when he realized he hadn’t been in bed more than four hours.
Fuck.
Certain he wouldn’t fall back asleep, he angrily sat up and swung his legs over the side of his bed. He detoured to the bathroom and then made his way to the kitchen. He winced at the bright morning sunshine blazing through the floor to ceiling windows of his penthouse apartment. Like a vampire trying not to get burned, he skirted the edge of the living room to stay in the shadows and shielded his dry, tired eyes.
The late nights overseeing his growing empire of nightclubs and strip joints were getting to him. The lack of sleep wasn’t helping. Tense and stressed the fuck out, he made a cup of coffee and poured an obscene amount of half-and-half into the mug along with enough sugar to short-circuit his pancreas. He gulped down half of it, not caring that it was still too hot, and then set aside the mug.
With both hands on the counter, he leaned forward to stretch out his aching back. He closed his eyes and tried the breathing techniques he had read about, but they didn’t work. Nothing worked. He’d tried everything—alcohol, black market Xanax and Ambien, even sex.
He cringed at the memory of his failed attempt to enjoy the long-term friends with benefits situation he had with one of his best dancers. Everything had gone right until it went embarrassingly wrong. Never in his life had he struggled to get hard. Sinnamon had been nice about it, but he’d seen the judgment in her dark eyes.
It didn’t make sense. He’d been celibate for months. He hadn’t had sex since before the shooting that had nearly killed him. Not because he wasn’t physically healthy enough or because he didn’t have urges or needs.
No because of her.
Marley.
She was the only one he wanted, but she was the one he couldn’t have.
His heart, his mind, his body—they only responded to her.
And he had fucked it all up.
After saving her for the second time, he could have easily made his move. He could have gone to her hospital room, brought her flowers after her heart procedure and confessed his feelings. He could have done the right thing, the romantic thing, and finally claimed her.
But he hadn’t.
He had run away like a coward. Seeing her so weak had rattled him. It had driven home the reality that she was too good and pure and sweet for the horrible man he was. She needed a man who could protect and love her, give her everything she deserved. A man who worked a respectable 9-to-5, drove a safe sedan, went to church and wanted to coach little league games.
Not me.
Definitely not me.
Because if he brought her into his life, she would end up getting hurt again. She would end up dead or worse. He grimaced at the thought of her being taken, hurt and abused because she loved him. He couldn’t do that to her. He refused to do that to her.
His phone rang back in the bedroom, interrupting his troubled thoughts. He left his coffee on the counter and returned to his room. His phone had fallen onto the floor at some point during his very short rest, and he crouched down to pick it up. The call had ended, but he knew better than to call that number back on his personal phone.
Instead, he grabbed a burner from a bedside drawer and powered it up. When it had a signal, he dialed a number he had memorized and waited for Nikolai to answer on the other end. Gruffly, he asked the Russian, “What’s wrong?”
“ATF raided the MC at dawn. There was a shootout. Two Feds are dead. Another Fed and two Harris County deputies are in the hospital.”
“Shit.” Besian pinched the bridge of his nose. The Calaveras motorcycle club handled most of the narcotics and gun trafficking for the Houston underworld. “Were they sitting on a shipment?”
“Possibly.”
“Fuck. Did they get all of them?” He didn’t ask the obvious question. Did they get Spider? He might have pushed Marley away for her own safety, but he didn’t want her to be hurt if her stepfather was arrested.
“Most of them,” Nikolai replied, “but Spider and a few others were able to run.”
“Did they get far?”
“Spider is still in the wind. As far as we know, he’s alive, but he may have been shot.”
Besian set aside his worry for Marley for now. There were more pressing concerns at the moment. “How exposed are we?”
“You’re not as exposed as I am or the others,” Nikolai growled. “You should be careful. If anyone in the MC knows your business, they’ll flip if they think it will get them out of the pen early.”