Free Gold Digger by Aleksandr Voinov Page B

good. Stay all night and fuck Henri, maybe get another blowjob out of it. He could very well come three or four more times in between sleeping. And yeah, if he bailed now, that would make it look like a hit-and-run. A straight guy who only hung around long enough to blow a load.
    Nikolai reached for his boxers and jeans. “I’m sorry.”
    “Okay.” Henri reached down for the duvet and pulled it over his legs. “I’d see you out, but . . .”
    “No, that’s fine.” Nikolai pulled his jeans up and buttoned them, then reached over to place a hand on Henri’s shoulder. “Thanks for this.”
    Henri just nodded, but didn’t open his eyes. He didn’t pretend to be sleepy—at least Nikolai hoped that wasn’t the case. And damn, how easy would it be to just lie down next to him and fall asleep, too.
    Once he got moving, the grogginess would wash out of his system, though, and that was for the better. He simply couldn’t risk another round of sex. This way, he could just pretend it was about the arousal and the foreplay in the restaurant and nothing more. That was done; he had no excuse to stay around. And it wouldn’t be fair to Henri, either.
    He found the rest of his clothes and got dressed. Within minutes, he was pulling the door shut behind him.

When he arrived back at the hotel, he was wide awake again, so he stopped at the local Tim Horton’s for a huge coffee and a muffin. Sex did make him ravenous, though tiredness usually won out before he could stuff his face.
    At loose ends in the smallish hotel room, he stripped and caught a whiff of what he thought was likely Henri’s scent and the fragrance of his shower gel. He paused, remembered clearly the man’s body under his.
    Why on earth had he left, again? Oh, yeah, it wasn’t fair to Henri.
    He took a sip from the too-hot coffee, very nearly scalding his lips, and started his laptop, then jumped under the shower for a quick wash. He then wrapped himself in a bathrobe and sat down in front of the computer to check his emails.
    Anya. Boy, that would be fun. She never wrote, always resolved her stuff on the phone, but maybe emailing had kept her from shouting at him. Well, a guy could hope.
    He should probably leave it and read it tomorrow. But now that it was sitting there in his inbox, it wouldn’t let him rest without knowing what it said.
    She’d written this an hour ago.
    Nikolai—I understand you will not get in touch with Liz. You don’t owe me anything, and I think part of you has always known that we don’t belong together. As a doctor, I do believe that our genes make us who we are, and we really only share a mother, and that hasn’t worked out so well, has it?
    Anya.
    He scoffed. She had to be joking. He reached for the phone and dialed her number.
    “Hi, Nikolai.”
    “Hi. Got your email.” He stood and thought, damn, he should have gotten dressed for this. Talking on the phone semi-naked was a shit idea. “Apart from the awful pettiness of it, you’re joking, right?”
    “No. I just wanted to tell you where you stand. You’ve never really felt like part of the family, and that’s because you’re not really part of it. Genetically speaking.”
    “What, so Mother found me abandoned on a church step?”
    “No, you’re hers all right, though God knows you don’t have her strength to fight things out. Or mine.” Anya sounded cold, totally unaffected, and Nikolai wondered if that was her “nothing I could do” voice when she informed a family of a death. It had to be. This felt rehearsed, artificial, and yet it was completely her.
    “Okay,” he said, reeling, his stomach sinking slowly toward his knees. “So tell me where I stand?”
    “Your father was a pilot who crashed in Afghanistan and died. A special friend of my father, and our mother nearly left Vadim for him, but he died before it happened. You were some kind of memento, but that’s it.”
    Wow. Talk about something coming in from left field. The problem was, it made