He winced. Actually it had been “Best restaurant in Sydney” and La Mer had come up as first choice on nine out of ten lists.
He’d checked out the floor plan and the promise of an extra 150 dollars had ensured a table at the far end of the room, close to the doors and the wonderful view.
Seated, he sat back and watched Grace order for them. He didn’t care what the fuck he ate. It would be good. And it was just so wonderful watching her as she concentrated on the menu with a ferocious frown.
“I hope you like what I ordered for you,” she said finally, after endless discussions with their friendly, patient waiter. It had taken Drake less time to negotiate a ten million dollar sale of arms to an Abkhazian warlord.
“All fish,” he said with a sigh. He would have preferred meat, but she had him on a strict meat quota and he’d eaten his quota for the month last week. “I’m sure I’ll enjoy it,” he added politely. “Maybe they will have to catch the fish and it will take so long to catch it and cook it that we will be late to the opera.”
She laughed and he smiled at the sound. He loved hearing her laugh.
A wine steward with spiked dyed-blond hair poured them the wine she’d ordered. A South African Chardonnay.
Delicious.
It was a sign of his ease that he would drink alcohol in public. Something he would never have done in his previous life.
That was how he was starting to think of it. A previous life. Another one entirely, not his, not any more.
Thiswas his life now. Walking down a shopping street full of people. A delicious meal in a beautiful restaurant. Later, the opera. His pleasure dimmed a little at the thought, but who knew? Maybe the new Drake—Manuel Rabat—might actually enjoy it. He knew he’d certainly enjoy his wife’s delight.
A life of—of enjoyment.
Unthinkable before.
Quite possible now.
The waiter slid appetizers in front of them. Fried baby octopus, oysters wrapped in prosciutto, hot clam dip. Some fish he didn’t recognize with a ginger and chili sauce. Fried focaccia bread triangles with brie mousse.
“Oh God,” Grace moaned as she spread the mousse and popped a focaccia in her mouth. “This is delicious!”
He would have smiled if his own mouth hadn’t been full.
Grace looked around again once the appetizers were gone. “It’s so strange to have all this Christmas spirit in summer. A hot weather Christmas.”
It was. Jazz renditions of Christmas carols played softly in the background. A huge Christmas tree made of lit glass cylinders glowed in a corner. Palm leaves studded with tiny lights were twined around the balustrade of the iron and glass staircase leading up to a loft.
A fat Santa Claus waddled through the entrance, fake beard moving in the breeze generated by the ceiling fans.
It was Christmas but unlike any Christmas he’d ever seen. Hot and sunny. Perfect beach weather.
Australians were an informal people and most of the diners even in this expensive restaurant were in sundresses and Bermudas, with acres of suntanned skin showing.
Grace touched his hand. “We’ll get used to it.”
“Oh yes,” he said softly.
Yes, they would. He hated the cold. He’d spent his entire childhood on the streets of Odessa. In winter, he’d desperately tried not to freeze to death, huddling in doorways and over grates. If he was never again cold in this lifetime, he’d be a happy man.
And… well, he was. He was a happy man. The thought still stunned him.
“We can make this a Christmas tradition,” he told Grace. “Christmas in Sydney. My Christmas gift to you.”
“The opera,” she sighed and rolled her eyes at his expression. “Verdi, Puccini, Wagner.”
Drake shrugged and drank another sip of wine to help make the thought go down.
The piped-in music segued to a lovely saxophone rendering of Do You Hear What I Hear?One of the few carols he recognized. The soulful music, gentle and soft in the background, filled his head.
Nearby, a flame ignited at a table as the waiter threw cognac over some kind of creamy dessert and lit it. A woman at the table with the flambé dessert threw her head back and laughed.
Santa Claus was making the rounds of the tables shouting Ho! Ho! Ho! Merry Christmas!
The maître d’hôtel stepped away from his station frowning.
Their waiter slid a steaming oval platter of seafood risotto in front of a diner at the table next to them. Drake looked over with interest because he’d ordered it. Or rather, Grace had ordered it for him. It looked excellent and—
Ice hit his stomach.
His head lifted. He was suddenly alert.
Music, food, wine instantly forgotten.
What he was in his essence—an animal under constant threat—came instantly to the fore.
He looked carefully around the restaurant, no longer happy, no longer relaxed. If he’d been a submarine, the torpedo signal would be going off. He scanned the restaurant as a sniper would—in quadrants, careful to take in every single element.
Happy diners, innocuous-looking serving staff. A fat Santa Claus wishing everyone Merry Christmas.
What was wrong?
The frowning maître d’ was conferring with the head waiter, heads together.
Drake started slowly hyperventilating. Whatever was wrong, his body knew it needed extra oxygen to deal with it.
He’d had his hand over Grace’s and now removed it. He would need both hands.
Fuck. He was without weapons. He was a superb shot but he was without any firepower whatsoever. It had been an executive decision. His jet had a disassembled long gun and a Beretta in a lockbox camouflaged as a first aid kit on his jet, but he’d decided to enter Australia clean. If he bought an apartment here, he’d stock it with weapons. Just in case.
A woman laughed and clinked glasses with another woman at a table ten meters away. They were obviously celebrating something.
His stomach twisted, muscles readying themselves for action.
What was wrong?
“Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas!” the Santa Claus cried, edging his way through the tables along the wall.
The maître d’ was talking into a cell phone.
“Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas!”
It was delivered in the exact tone and cadence as before.
Drake looked at the Santa Claus more closely. There was something about the tone of the voice… at the next ho ho hohe got it.
It was a recording, the words on a loop every two minutes or so. He was wearing an excellent Santa Claus outfit. Even Drake, who’d never celebrated Christmas, could see that. The suit excellently tailored, made of expensive material. Snow white, blood red. Big black belt around a huge belly.
Santa Claus was making his way around the perimeter of the room, waving his hands covered in white gloves, wishing everyone a Merry Christmas in a recorded voice on a loop.
He was coming closer to Drake’s table now. Drake could observe him more clearly.
All Drake’s senses went on overdrive. The smells and sounds became acute. His vision sharpened. He’d swiftly eliminated all the diners as the source of his sharp sense of danger and now focused on Santa.
The suit, the felt cap, the fake beard—they all looked very hot on this warm evening. Sweat fell down Santa’s face. Taking with it pale makeup. Beneath the makeup, Santa’s skin was very brown.
The sweat was removing the pale makeup entirely, falling to the red jacket in pale streaks.
Santa’s belly looked lumpy, as if full of hard things and not soft stuffing.
The maître d’ finished his phone call, closing the cell with a snap, and headed Santa’s way.
Santa saw him coming. His dark brown eyes opened so wide the whites showed and Drake’s highly evolved danger signals overloaded.
Time slowed down almost to a stop.
Santa pulled at his jacket, closed with Velcro, the ripping sound preternaturally loud to his ears.
The maître d’ was twenty meters away, raising his hand to Santa, palm out. The universal stop sign.
The panels of the red Santa suit were slowly pulled apart by Santa’s white-gloved hands and instead of cotton stuffing there was a vest with black cylinders attached, a string with a round pull hanging from the cylinders.
In this time out of time, Santa’s hand slowly moved up to tug at the dangling string while the maître d’ shouted and Drake picked up the silver charger from his table with one hand and a sharp filet knife from a nearby serving tray with the other and hurled both at Santa with all his strength.
The charger and knife slowly, slowly made their way to Santa’s throat just as Santa’s hand closed around the string.
“Allahu akhbar!” Santa screamed.
Again, in that slow-motion state of time during combat, as soon as the charger and knife left Drake’s hands, he slashed upward, knocking over the heavy wooden table so it was between him and Santa and pulled Grace to the ground, covering as much of her as he could, while Santa fell into the infinity pool.
Then time came roaring back.
There was a huge explosion, the sound making his diaphragm vibrate. Drake hunched over Grace, wishing he could punch her into the ground to give her more protection, his arms around her head.
A red rain fell while screams started up all around them. Horribly, a severed white-gloved hand thumped to the floor an inch away from him, bouncing once then rolling away.
“Grace,” he shouted above the screams, still slightly deaf from the explosion. He lifted slightly and touched her frantically all over, face, torso, legs. “Are you all right?”
She was in shock, eyes wide in a completely white face. She nodded and swallowed heavily.
He chanced a look around, taking his attention away from Grace for just a second.
The diners, so happy and content only seconds ago, were screaming and scrambling for the door, tables and chairs overturned, slipping and sliding on the platters of food that had been dashed to the floor.
The infinity pool was red, bits and pieces of human being floating to the surface.
Drake took in the situation in a flash. There was confusion and a number of people were bleeding, one woman stared at her red hand and started screaming. Several people walked around, dazed.
But there was no one on the ground in the unmistakable sprawl of death. Everything Drake saw was minor—cuts and contusions and shock. The water had absorbed most of the blast.
The only dead man was the fucker in the suicide vest and he was now safely in that special hell reserved for people who killed in the name of God.
A siren started up outside, then two.
“My darling!” Drake kissed Grace, held her tightly. He could have lost her but he hadn’t. His miracle of a wife, safe.
He was trembling. Drake had spent his entire life in combat, he had learned to keep his head in combat, otherwise he’d have been long dead.
But now he trembled as he embraced his wife.
Under him, Grace stirred, her arms snaked around his neck, hanging on to him as tightly as he clung to her.
Her rapid breaths of shock sounded loud in his ear, her heart hammered against his chest.
All wonderful signs that she was alive.
She gasped, as if she’d stopped breathing, took in a huge breath that sounded like a sob.
“Drake,” she whispered, and he knew how shocked she was to use the name she’d forbidden herself to ever pass her lips.
“Right here,” he answered back. He kissed her temple. “It’s over now. It’s all right. We’re fine.”
Her arms tightened even more, then relaxed slightly. “Drake?”
He lifted his head, able now to smile into his wife’s eyes. “Hmm?”
She drew in another breath, and let it out shakily.
“Your pickle?” Grace lifted her head and kissed him. “Best. Gift. Ever.”
If you enjoyed RECKLESS NIGHT, see where Grace and Drake’s story began in
Dangerous Passion
Available Now
And don’t miss the other books in Lisa Marie Rice’s Protector’s Series
Dangerous Lover
Dangerous Secrets
Available Now
D ANGEROUSP ASSION
Alleyway outside the Feinstein Art Gallery
Manhattan
November 17
F eelings kill faster than bullets, that old Russian army saying, raced through Viktor “Drake” Drakovich’s mind when he heard the noise behind him. It was barely audible. The faint sound of metal against leather, fabric against fabric and the softest whisper of a metallic click.
The sound of a gun being pulled from its holster, the safety being switched off. He’d heard a variation of this sound thousands and thousands of times over the years.
He’d known for a year now that this moment would come. It was only a question of when, not if. He’d been barreling toward it, against every instinct in his body, completely out of control, for a full year.
From his boyhood living wild on the streets of Odessa, he’d survived the most brutal conditions possible, over and over again, by being cautious, by never exposing himself unnecessarily, by being security conscious, always.
What he’d been doing for the past year was the equivalent of suicide.
It didn’t feel that way, though.
It felt like… like life itself.
He could remember to the second when his life changed. Utterly, completely, instantly.
He’d been in his limousine, separated from Mischa, his driver, by the soundproof partition. In the car he never talked, and used the time to catch up on paperwork. It had been years since he’d driven anywhere for pleasure. Cars were to get from A to B, when he couldn’t fly.
The windows were heavily smoked. For security, of course. But also because it had been a long time since the outside world had interested him enough to glance out the windows at the passing scenery.
The heavy armor-plated Mercedes S600 was stopped in traffic. The overhead stoplight continued cycling through the colors, green-yellow-red, green-yellow-red, over and over again, but traffic was at a standstill. Something had happened up ahead. The blare of impatient horns filtered through the armored walls and bulletproof glass of his car, sounding as if coming from far away, like the buzzing of crazed insects in the distance.
A motorcycle eased past the cars like an eel in water. One driver was so enraged at the sight of the motorcyclist making headway, he leaned angrily on his horn, rolled down the window and stuck his middle finger up in the air. He shouted something out, red faced, spittle flying.
Drake closed his eyes in disgust. Even in America, where there was order and plenty and peace—even here there was aggression and envy. Humans never learned. They were like violent children, petulant and greedy and out of control.
It was an old feeling, dating from his childhood, as familiar to him as the feel of his hands and feet. Humans were flawed and rapacious and violent. You used that, profited from it and stayed as much out of their way as possible. It was the closest thing to a creed he had and it had served him well all his life.
Oddly enough, though, lately this kind of thinking had made him… impatient. Annoyed. Wanting to step away from it all. Go… somewhere else. Do something else. Besomeone else.
If there were another world, he’d emigrate to it. But there was only this world, filled with greedy and violent people.
Whenever he found himself in this mood, which was more and more often lately, he tried to shake himself out of it. Moods were an excellent way to get killed.
Strangely out of sorts, he looked again at the spreadsheets on his lap. They tracked a 10-million-dollar contract to supply weapons to a Tajikistani warlord, the first of what Drake hoped would be several deals with the self-styled “general.” There was newfound oil in the general’s fiefdom, a goddamned lake of it right underneath the barren, hard-packed earth, and the general was in the mood
to buy whatever was necessary to hold on to the power and the oil. When this deal went through smoothly, as it certainly would, Drake knew there would be many more down the line.
Years ago, if nothing else, the thought would have given him satisfaction. Now, he felt nothing at all. It was a business deal. He would put in the work; it would net him more money. Nothing he hadn’t done thousands and thousands of times before.
He stared at the printouts until they blurred, trying to drum up interest in the deal. It wasn’t there, which was alarming. What was even more alarming was the dull void in his chest as he reflected on his indifference. Not being able to care about not being able to care was frightening. Would have been frightening, if he could work up the energy to be frightened.
Restless, he glanced to his right. This section of Lexington was full of bookshops and art galleries, the shop windows more pleasing, less crass than the boutiques with their stupid, outlandish clothes a block uptown.
And that was when he saw them.
Paintings. A wall of them, together with a few watercolors and ink drawings. All heartbreakingly beautiful, all clearly by the same fine hand. A hand even he recognized was extraordinary.
Though the car windows were smoked, the gallery was well lit and each work of art had its own wall-mounted spotlight, so Drake got a good look at them all, stalled there in a mid-Manhattan traffic jam. And anyway, his eyesight was sniper grade.
He did something he’d never done before. He buzzed down his window. The driver’s mouth fell open. Drake flicked his gaze to the rearview mirror. The driver’s mouth snapped shut and his face assumed an impassive expression.
The car instantly filled with the smell of exhaust fumes and the loud cacophony of a Manhattan traffic jam.
Drake ignored it completely. The important thing was he had a better view of the paintings now.
The first painting he saw took his breath away. A simple image—a woman alone at sunset on a long, empty beach. The rendering of the sea, the colors of the sunset, the grainy beach—all those details were technically perfect. But what came off the surface of the painting like steam off an iron was the loneliness of the woman. It could have been the portrait of the last human on earth.