I’d only been here a week, a precaution after someone had attempted to gun me down. Since we didn’t know who was behind it, we couldn’t trust anyone. When Dimitri suggested relocating here, I’d almost argued against it but I understood the logic of it.
Boredom had taken me at first. I hadn’t realized how much I’d gotten used to the noise of the city. The total silence seemed almost deafening at first, and even though I didn’t want to go anywhere, not having the option had me bristling.
That drunken tryst with Dimitri only left me even more stir crazy. We hadn’t talked about it, even to acknowledge what had happened. I did my best to push it to the back of my mind. We’d let our drunken hormones get the better of us; it wasn’t like I’d forgotten about what a bastard he was to me back in the day or how little I wanted to be in this marriage.
When boredom reared its head at the safehouse, no matter how beautiful the view was, my thoughts fled back to that evening and the emotions that had swirled through me at the time. After surviving the assassination attempt, I’d been frazzled and jumpy, even wondered if my new husband had called for the hit himself.
I wouldn’t have admitted it to Dimitri, but I don’t think I’d ever been so scared in my life. Even afterwards, at the new safehouse, I’d hardly stepped outside those first few days. I huddled up in the bedroom after he left, staring at the tablet with its camera feeds around the compound until my vision blurred.
Nobody but his security team appeared in them until he came back after dealing with running the family’s business. Another thing I’d never admit to him was how much safer I felt with him here.
His concern for my well-being, and my wine-induced lowered inhibitions had led to the mistake. A shudder ran through my shoulders when my thoughts turned to those delicious moments. It would have been a lot easier to forget about, banish to the back recesses of my mind if the sex had been bad or even just sub-par.
But no, whether with his tongue, fingers or that wonderful cock of his, he had me buzzing. None of the other men I’d been with even came close. The bastard had ruined all of my go-to fantasies. Almost every night since I’d arrived, I’d tossed and turned in my bed alone, thoughts on the Russian thug two rooms over.
That fear had returned after he’d left the next day, but I’d fought it, knowing how ridiculous I’d been huddled in the darkened bedroom all day. I ventured out of the room, explored the safehouse with its oddly East Asian decorations, then I found the telescope.
Leaving the safety of the building was a step too far, but that telescope allowed me to spy on my surroundings. Hidden behind drawn shades, I peered through its lenses. First, I surveyed the endless horizon to the south. When my scanning found a boat out in the blue of the Florida Straits, I stopped and investigated them.
My telescope had landed on a sailboat, a 20-footer, judging by the size of the woman lounging on the front in her bikini. With its sails drawn it crept along toward Marathon Key or the mainland to the northeast. The man standing at the back, holding the tiller wore a loud and colorful button-down shirt, open to display his well-tanned and equally well-fed belly. They weren’t assassins.
The next boat I found almost zoomed by too quick for me to get more than a glancing look. I danced around, rotating the telescope to keep it in focus. Two men with caramel colored skin sat side by side in the small speedboat. Sun-bleached hair danced around the head of one, the other kept his close cropped.
Given how quickly the boat sped by, I should have realized it was no threat to me. But in my paranoid need, I spun around the telescope to follow it, my shoulder butting into the glass of the window, sending me sprawling to the floor.
Once I’d picked myself up and dusted my pride off, I took the telescope to the bedroom I’d claimed with its west facing windows. If trouble came, it would probably come from the other direction, from the mainland and not Key West at the end of the overseas highway, but I decided to avoid the bedroom I’d left for Dimitri.
Another sailboat sat anchored in the shallow waters between us and the next island in the chain a few miles down. Nobody appeared on deck when my telescope explored it tip to stern. I adjusted the focus and pointed it at the water in front of the sailboat. Clear and calm as it was, the telescope couldn’t penetrate its depths.
My panicked thoughts turned to the idea of potential scuba diving assassins creeping closer to the tiny island I occupied. They’d only surface under the deck out back, sneak in and finish the job without even alerting the security team out front.
After rushing to the sliding glass door that led to the deck and double checking that I’d left it locked earlier, I moved the telescope back to the stationary sailboat. I zoomed in close to the windows on the side of the cabin when I noticed movement inside.
With only a few small, streamlined windows to see through from such a distance, I didn’t recognize what I was seeing at first. Tanned flesh took up the bottom edge of the window but whether it was a person’s arm, leg or even back, the tiny window couldn’t show enough for me to determine.
I didn’t look away when another form dropped close to the first. Paler than the first person, a pendulous breast appeared before a darker hand groped it roughly. By then, I’d realized what I was seeing. Even knowing it wasn’t a threat, I kept watching.
Thoughts turned to my encounter with Dimitri in the kitchen. I imagined him touching me like that, along with all the pleasure he’d given me in that frenetic coupling. My legs crossed, but as my arousal increased, the paranoid fear dropped away into nothingness.
Today, after almost a week at the safehouse, my paranoid peeping was a distant memory. I flopped into the chaise longue on the deck and cracked open the book in my hand. When images of my new husband and our encounter in the kitchen of the mansion threatened to overwhelm my mind, I’d found distraction in books.
A lot of the books on the shelf at the safehouse had been in Chinese. That fit the Eastern decor inside, though made little sense for Dimitri. I hadn’t asked why. He only came back at night and outside my questions about his investigation into the attack, I avoided him the best I could.
Still, I found enough books in English that I didn’t need to ask my new husband to pick anything up for me. Most of the English fiction books on the shelf were classics. I started with theComplete Sherlock Holmes. Having seen a few movie adaptations, I figured it would be a good place to start. Finishing that, I bit off more than I could chew withUlyssesby James Joyce. That lasted for ten pages, before I gave up.
Today, I’d needed more distraction and had lost myself in the world of Huck Finn. Hadn’t read it since middle school. More than a decade after that first read, it was almost like a different book. I’d never considered how my life experiences would affect the way I saw a book.
Thinking of aging took my thoughts back to the other reason I wanted a distraction. Today happened to be my birthday, my first celebrated without my father. One of the perks of a summer birthday was that I had never been stuck at school during it. Now, I was stuck at a safehouse.
The tablet on the table next to me beeped. I glanced down at it. A quartet of video streams appeared on the surface, all different angles of the long driveway. The gate at the end where it intersected with the overseas highway slowly opened to a red SUV.
I didn’t recognize the vehicle, but Dimitri’s guards wouldn’t open the door for anyone but him. Every night he came back in a different vehicle, just in case someone had tried to tail him.
“Mr. Petrovich has arrived home, ma’am,” crackled a crisp British accented voice through the tablet’s speakers.
Being called ma’am would have rankled most women my age. They thought it made them sound old. To me, it was a sign of respect. I’d never objected to it, but the first time one of Dimitri’s team of former SAS bodyguards called me it, I thought he was saying mom.
I watched through the video feeds as Dimitri’s vehicle continued down the driveway. While the small island the compound had been built on was natural, it had no connection to the nearby keys or the highway that snaked across them all the way to Key West. Some earlier owner had had the driveway, the only land entrance to the compound, filled in.
