Free Lying and Kissing by Helena Newbury Page A

sort of thing I did. But, as I stared into his eyes, I felt the excitement spiraling up inside me. Arianna Scott, languages geek, wouldn’t do it. But Arianna Ross, carefree vacation girl...maybe she would.
    Maybe being undercover could be liberating.
    Keeping my knees together as demurely as I could, I crouched. By tipping my head back and pressing my chest close to my legs, I just managed to get low enough to put my mouth on the ice spout. Slippery hardness nudged my lips.
    Arianna, what the hell are you doing?
    Ice-cold vodka exploded into my mouth, colder than I’d ever tasted it. Smoother, too, with none of the harshness of the vodka I’d tasted in the US. And there was a lot of it—the equivalent of two or even three shots back home.
    Throughout the whole thing, I kept looking up at Luka. His eyes never left mine for a second, not even to lick over my body as I crouched in that submissive pose.
    I swallowed.
    What really shook me was that not a single person around us laughed or leered at me. The moment was all about me and Luka - everyone else was too scared to do more than watch.
    As I got to my feet, I caught the look the men were giving Luka. Longing. I’d never known that men could look like that. They wanted his lifestyle, his money. But most of all, they wanted that attitude he had, that aura of pure, undiluted evil. They wanted to be intimidating like him. But I knew they couldn’t be. It wasn’t something you can buy or learn. It wasn’t something Luka had acquired because of what he did. It was something he was born with—maybe it had even driven him into crime.
    And that same aura was doing something to me. Something about the way he looked at me, like a king looking at a favored maid. Wondering if he should take her off to his bedchambers or just ravish her right there.
    His eyes sparkled and then he smiled. If it had been a test, I’d passed.
    “We’ll take the bottle,” said Luka in Russian and the bartender nodded and thrust it at him. No money changed hands, so I took it that he had a tab. Given how expensive the whole place seemed and what bottles went for in clubs, I didn’t even want to guess at how much money he’d just spent—and we’d only been here a few minutes.
    On the way through the crowd this time, he saw me looking at the other women. Every movement made some part of them flash as it caught the light: rings topped with diamonds, bracelets encrusted with crystals.
    “Bling,” said Luka, his accent giving the word a whole new, disapproving tone. “Less of it now, than a few years ago. But here, people still like to show off.”
    It wasn’t just the fancy clothes, though. The short skirts and strappy tops were showing off long lengths of gym-toned thigh and perfect, slender arms. They were all graceful as swans. “I feel a little...drab,” I muttered.
    Luka suddenly gripped my arm and spun me to face him, pulling me closer at the same time. I think I let out a little gasp of surprise—he did it so abruptly, with no thought for paltry American concerns like personal space. When I met his eyes, I saw the anger there at what I’d said. “There’s nothing wrong with the way you look,” he said in a voice that wouldn’t be argued with.
    I blinked up at him, amazed. But, at the same time, I felt my heart unfold from the tight little knot it had become. We stared at each other. For an instant, I saw that arrogant, iron-hard exterior fracture and I glimpsed the man underneath.
    It was gone in a heartbeat. But what shocked me to the core was that, no matter how many times I played it back in my mind in the days to come, he always looked the same.
    For a second, he’d looked like I felt: helpless.
    He turned away from me as if embarrassed and I looked away, too, trying to get control of myself. Pull yourself together! You can’t go gooey just because he says one nice thing! Remember what he is! I tried to imagine what Nancy would do. Probably karate kick him out of a window.