Anatoly : Ruthless (Bad Russian Book 11) Read online

  Contents

  Anatoly

  I’m not looking for love

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  ©

  Chapter 1 Him

  Chapter 2 Her

  Chapter 3 Him

  Chapter 4 Her

  Chapter 5 Him

  Chapter 6 Her

  Chapter 7 Him

  Chapter 8 Her

  Chapter 9 Him

  Chapter 10 Her

  Chapter 11 Him

  Chapter 12 Her

  Chapter 13 Him

  Chapter 14 Her

  Chapter 15 Him

  Chapter 16 Her

  Epilogue Him

  Epilogue 2 Him

  Epilogue 3 Her

  Extra Epilogue

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  THE BAD RUSSIAN SERIES

  Alexandr Obsessed

  Arkady Possessive

  Yevgeni Protector

  Nikita Demands

  Mischa Dominant

  Nikolai Powerful

  Dimitri Driven

  Leonid Unstoppable

  Konstantin Urgent

  Valentin Jealous

  Anatoly Ruthless

  Christof Brutal

  I’M NOT LOOKING FOR LOVE, AND DEFINITELY NOT IF IT MEANS LEAVING A WITNESS

  But her heart's in my sights the first time I see her. Her lips are my next target, and her soft curves spell danger. I must have her, spread her open and spear the whole of her heart.

  First, I must save her, witness or not. No time to explain, I have ninety minutes to get this done.

  I have to have her, to take her and make her safe. And make her mine, completely. Whatever it takes, I will claim her.

  There's a killer in town, an older man with a ruthless streak a foot long and a fist thick. And I'm about to discover how closely he's watching me.

  I'm sent to wait alone on the quayside, to finalise a dirty money deal. I know I'm out of my depth. A strange Russian voice calls, a voice dripping with sin. He tells me I'm in danger. I have to get away. He tells me to run.

  Do I run, or do I stay? Either way, I risk having the devil inside of me.

  This steamy, fast and sizzling hot, insta-love romance has pent-up passion and fulfillment of raw, surging need, enough to start a forest fire. There’s no cheating and a Happy Ever After Ending guaranteed to leave you gasping.

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  as much as I love crafting and

  telling the stories,

  so let’s keep in touch

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  © Alice May Ball 2020

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.

  Any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, or to any actual events is purely coincidental.

  All the people portrayed in this story are over the age of eighteen, and entirely imaginary. If you think that you know some of them, or that you may be one of them, then you should consider writing fiction yourself.

  Cover Design by Signs of Desire for TzR Publishing

  Chapter 1

  Him

  SHE IS PERFECT.

  HER lovely round ass set my pulse thumping the moment I saw first her. Even through binoculars and from this distance, I want to get inside her coral-blue business suit. My hands tingle as I imagine how her curves will feel. The weight of her fabulous breasts. The softness of her fantastic ass. The deliciously tangy heat between her thighs. My lips buzz as I watch her face and study the sparkling gleam in her eyes.

  I fucking absolutely have to have her.

  Alone and exposed, standing out by the silvery bright water, she’s dwarfed at the foot of the gleaming, upscale property development. The realtor’s website doesn’t even have a profile of her.

  They should at least feature a photograph of this curvy little wonder.

  Dazzling Puget Sound evening sun bounces off the water and the golden, orange and purple streaks in the sky flash, reflected in the polished glass of the five-billion dollar development. The deserted Washington Quayside development looms over her and reflects in the water. A high, sandstone crown of blocks and towers, penthouses, luxury loft spaces, and apartments, all empty, all ready and waiting for wealthy new owners. A shiny ghost town, shimmering like a set in a sci-fi movie.

  The tailored skirt of her suit lifts, picked up on the cool breeze. Her soft, blonde curls blow, making her turn, lift her hand to hold it back, and the creamy reach of her long throat stretches and twists. A dancing flash of her pale blue eyes gives me a shock in my gut and my pants.

  I’m thickening. Hardening up. I want her.

  My flight leaves in ninety minutes. Before that, I have to stop Igor Baryshnikov from signing to close a deal on the property. The man she’s here to meet. I can’t leave without completing the job, one way or the other.

  There’s a bonus if I take Baryshnikov back alive. But it’s not a big bonus.

  This would be a perfect location to whack the oligarchs’ money launderer. Igor Baryshnikov’s final resting place could be the bottom of the deep-water quay, in front of the shining development nobody would build if there weren’t criminals like him to buy it. He could be under the reflections of the wide balconies and tall, polished windows, stretching up from the water’s edge of the Washington Quayside development, up to the high, glassed penthouses. Another monument to greed.

  But the girl.

  I don’t want to risk her becoming collateral damage. I hate the idea of innocents ever getting hurt that way. Men in our way of life, we know the risks. Some might say we deserve them. My assignments are always on people that have done more than enough to deserve their fate. Richly deserved it, and many times over.

  Besides, overspill, collateral damage always leaves an ugly mess. People ask questions. There’s always somebody who wants to know what happened. How and why. And who.

  I cannot stand the idea of bringing that down upon a civilian.

  My record is unblemished. I haven’t liquidated a single innocent in all of my career, so far. I would hate to have to make an exception here.

  Not her.

  The wind flicks her hair as she looks around. She takes out a phone to make a call. She’s bubbly, bouncy and when I catch a flash of her smile, she’s beyond beautiful. Her shoulders slope and shake, and she moves as she talks. All of my muscles zing at the image of her in the high-strength binoculars.

  All of her soft curves call out to my body, in a language more powerful than words.

  All around the world, in New York, Marseilles, London, and Geneva, these things are built to stash and hide money. Nothing more. Everywhere with an expensive waterfront, massive developments are built, bought and sold. Then they remain almost entirely unoccupied.

  In Kazakhstan or Ukraine, upmarket developments like this are as flimsy and fake as a film set. Shiny on the outside, thrown together on the inside. Their only purpose is to serve as a twenty-acre cashbox.

  Igor will buy the whole thing. Then he’ll divide and trade parts of it with ‘investors,’ through shell corporations, and that’s how the money moves. The ‘investors’ will buy and sell portions between themselves. Every time money moves from one account to another, it gets a little more ‘clean.’

  Igor keeps bad company, but that’s how he came to be on my client’s ‘to do’ list. So now, here I am, to do him.

  Like everyone who gets assigned to me as a target, the world would be a better place without him. That’s not the reaso
n I was sent his dossier, though. If you made a list of people the world would be better off without, my client would feature near the top himself.

  It’s more pleasant to think about her. It’s certainly much more pleasant to look at her. I can do that some more while I wait.

  Cradling the phone on her shoulder, her hair blows as she turns. Her sly, naughty smile ignites me. I know that I have to save her if I can. I think I have to have her. Just looking at her is making my pulse thicken and harden. All my muscles start to zing and I’m aching with a powerful throb for her.

  One flash from the blink of her eyes and I’m salivating.

  I have to have her. Take her. Make her be mine. Completely.

  Chapter 2

  Her

  “TANIA, THIS PLACE IS a mega Las Vegas resort on the waterfront, just built for the ultra-rich. I know the plans, I’ve seen where the marina will be. The space for the heliport is already cleared and marked out. And there’s not a soul here. When I drove in through the automatic gates, they read my key card credentials and opened without me even having to take the card out. But I didn’t see a single blinking human eye since I got here.”

  “And the guy you’re meeting is going to buy all of it?” Tania’s voice is dry.

  “That’s what Reed Barnett is hoping. I can’t believe one person could do all that. Maybe he represents a consortium.”

  “Russian, you say? Maybe it’s a consortium of money-laundering gangster oligarchs.”

  “You read too many thrillers.”

  “Not possible. I could read all the thrillers, it still wouldn’t be too many.”

  Tania loves political conspiracies, spy stories, international crime stories. She always has devoured them by the Gigabit, for as long as I’ve known her. She reads true crime, fiction, everything. How she finds the time I never could understand. She works more or less full time, or so it seems, on her YouTube channel.

  “Honestly, Tania, I don’t know why they picked me to show him around the Quayside development. I mean, he has to be one of the firm’s highest value clients.”

  When I was in school, Tania was the ‘house mother’ to me and the half-dozen other waifs that sheltered in that row-house with her. A few years older than the rest of us, she was the only legitimate tenant. Circumstances left all of us abandoned or orphaned. Parents jailed, ran away, died or hauled off in some police or federal dawn raid. One way or another, all of us had been left as minors without protection. That meant we were permanently in hiding.

  We were the kids who fell through the cracks. All of us were hiding out from some or other government agencies. Doing school the best we could. Working to help with the rent and bills.

  Momma knew they would come for her one day and she prepared me. Told me what to do. Showed me the way out of the apartment if a bang on the door came in the early morning or the middle of the night. When I heard the noise, I knew to go straight to Tania and not look back.

  The years while I finished school were hard times, but I never felt as close to anyone as we all were in that cramped little house. Tania kept the house. Still lives there now, and she owns it. I kept in touch with her. Tania will always be my BFF and the one person I will always turn to for advice.

  I tell her, “I probably shouldn’t say any of that to him, though. Right? I mean, he’s going to know immediately that I’m not one of the principals or a partner. Heck, I hardly even have a title at all. ‘Executive Assistant.’ What’s that even supposed to mean? It even sounds like a star nobody. I’m so far down the totem pole in Reed Barnett I’m practically underground. But telling a high-value client he’s being escorted by a junior seems like bad diplomacy.”

  “You’re just not a natural liar, Emma.”

  “How would a natural liar handle it?”

  “I don’t know. Probably say a lot of things that were true, with one colossal lie in the middle. I’m not a natural liar, either.”

  “But you read a lot about people who are.”

  “True.” She laughs. I love the sparks in her laugh. “Well, that’s what they do. Say as much as possible that’s true and tell the fewest lies possible to get them what they want.”

  Tania’s skills go beyond what she reads. Her coding and hacking skills were legendary in the school. She makes herself a very comfortable living now as a hyper-influencer. She says that it’s more about romancing the algorithms than the audience.

  She was one of the early social media ‘influencers,’ and now she has a niche all of her own. She’s one of maybe half a dozen ‘Sunrise Exciters.’ Whatever that means. Tania makes bank, but she puts nearly all of what she makes into looking after more and more kids. All she wants is to start a full-scale refuge.

  I know that’s what makes her skeptical and wary of rich people. Too many wealthy ‘patrons’ show up to get their picture taken, then never get around to ponying up.

  I don’t think I’m cut out for the real estate business at all and I have to say, I’m not fascinated by it. I do want to do better, though. It’s the opportunity that I got and I believe that any opportunity I can get to work, I should be grateful, and give it all that I can. I work hard and give everything my best shot.

  It may be a bottom of the ladder job with the realtor, but I’m determined to hold on to it and make a success out of it. I’m going to make it work, whatever it takes. At least to a point where I can make enough money to put something aside for a better education. Acting classes, maybe.

  I want the big money, but I don’t crave it. All I really yearn for is some security. Not having to worry all the time about payments and premiums and coverage and rent.

  The realtor’s office is cliquey and I feel, if not quite frozen out, definitely frosted. The boss seems to relish sending me to faraway, remote locations where I have to conduct potential clients, usually single men, around properties on my own. Once, he even sent me out alone to meet a group of three men.

  Turns out they were great guys, and they were all as gay as Freddie Mercury. We had a ball. Mr. Drucker wasn’t to know that, and I didn’t tell him, either.

  A rumble, a distant roaring sound grows from behind the high, pristine sandstone buildings. Imagine being rich enough and being able to buy all of this in a single purchase. One transaction. To have enough money to even think about it.

  I’m startled out of the daydream when my phone rings. I expect that it’s Tania, calling right back with something that she just remembered. An incredibly urgent thought. That’s her usual pattern. Ideas burst out of her head like fireworks, 24/7. As soon as she hangs up, she gets really excited about something and calls right back.

  But my phone says, ‘Unknown number.’

  Like it might burn, I hold the phone a little way from my ear. Silly, right?

  The man’s voice has a thick accent and a low, dark, rolling edge. He sounds like a Russian. It’s a voice of authority. And power. The sound of him drips, like its sticky with forbidden things.

  He says my name. “Emma. Emma Fielding.” I tremble inside, a feeling like guilt and fear spills through me. A note of sadness in his voice takes me by surprise. He tells me, “You should leave.”

  “Who are you? How did you get my number?”

  “You are Emma Fielding, no? From Reed Barnett.” Hearing my name in the liquid temptation of that voice makes me feel so naughty I have to hold back a gasp and my knee shakes. The thrill is so deep it makes me afraid.

  “You are waiting for Igor Baryshnikov, yes?”

  “Who is this?” my voice shakes now.

  The distant roar has grown to a loud whine. A black helicopter rises to loom up behind the Quayside building. It hovers and the ground trembles, then the black machine drops out of sight. I hear it land behind the building.

  “Miss your appointment.” The tone of the man’s voice on the phone sets off a feeling inside my chest, like the muffled clang of a huge bell. “Walk away. Don’t fucking be there.”