Katya, his beautiful Katya, had been lying on her stomach, sated, rosy, smiling. He lay next to her on his side. One hand propped up his head, the other lay in the small of her back. He was composing a poem in his head, an ode to woman, for it seemed to him in that moment that Katya embodied every beautiful, desirable woman who had ever walked this earth.

The smell of woman was in the air, and he knew generations of men had lived and died for that smell, the smell of slick, hot love.

Idly, he began to compose an “Ode to Woman,” a poem that had simply welled up inside him. The first poem in his life that had come to him perfect and complete and whole in one simple rush.

He had been touched by the gods that afternoon.

The words had come, powerful and golden, in perfect cadences. He didn’t need to write them down; the words were etched in his heart as they came to him. He beat out the rhythm of the poem with his forefinger, against the swell of Katya’s perfect white buttock, like the beat of a song, the music of poetry against the skin of his woman.

She’d known what he was doing. Of course. Katya knew him, knew him down to his soul. He wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d been able to pluck the words from his head.

His finger tapping the cadences of the words on her soft skin, he’d just ended the poem, the best thing he’d ever written, when the harsh knock sounded at the door.

He hadn’t even been given the time to get up, put his clothes back on, armor himself with dignity. The KGB goons kicked his door down and, weapons drawn, dragged him away from a screaming Katya.

This is impossible, he thought frantically. No! Russia has changed! The world has changed! The Berlin Wall has just come down! he screamed, before a rifle butt in the head felled him.

He shook his head, stunned. This wasn’t happening, couldn’t be happening. Gorbachev had introduced glasnost, perestroika. Russia was, finally, opening. The long Stalinist nightmare was over.

And anyway, Vassily was no dissident. He was apolitical. A writer. A writer of the New Russia, with no agenda other than creating great literature. He was lionized amongst the intelligentsia, a New Russian, a man freed from the shackles of the past.

But the men who broke down his door were throwbacks—brutal brutish men, coming out of the murky hallway like orcs out of a dark cave, out of a darkness before time.

This was a mistake. He was Vassily Worontzoff. Dry Your Tears in Moscow was a best seller. One of his short stories had been made into a film that had won a Leone d’Oro in Venice. He’d been interviewed on TV, on a number of the brand-new channels that were opening Soviet society up. He hobnobbed with the new businessmen, with the media darlings.

They’d named him a Chevalier de la République in France.

He had to contact someone, get this cleared up, he thought, as the goons tossed him his pants, then dragged him, bare chested, into the hallway.

And then his heart stopped, simply stopped, when the third officer went back into the house and dragged a screaming Katya out into the hallway.

His gaze locked with hers.

The great Soviet scorpion was dying but its poison-tipped tail still had the power to sweep lives away. He would be accused of anti-Soviet propaganda—such a huge joke when the Soviet Union was falling apart. Daily, pieces of it were breaking off, like floes off a huge iceberg, floating away on the tides of history.

He would be accused and sentenced to a prison camp, a certain death sentence. A long, lingering death sentence. There would be no getting out alive.

And now they had Katya. This was beyond his worst nightmare.

He thought being taken away by the KGB would be the worst thing that could happen to him. But he’d been wrong.

Screaming, raging, fighting every step of the way, desperate to shield Katya, he was dragged out of the building on Arbat Street and into a waiting Zil.

The twelfth of December, 1989.

The day Vassily Worontzoff died.

Yes!

Nick had known that the answer to his unasked question would be yes. Letting him come in for coffee was girl code for Do you want to have sex? And the answer was yes. Hell, yes!

Nick thought of nothing else as he drove them back to her house. She’d murmured directions, but he didn’t need them. He’d driven so often to her house on his stakeouts, he could find the way blindfolded.

And now that he’d spent an evening with Charity, he could probably find her blindfolded, by smell alone. She had the most enchanting scent. The whole car was filled with it. Some fresh springlike perfume mixed with shampoo and soap and warm woman. Unique, heady.

In the car, her scent alone had been enough to make his cock sit up and take notice, not that it needed any stimulation. Good thing he had on his expensive cashmere overcoat.

Nick was a good strategist. He set goals and figured out how to meet them with the tools at hand. This was the staging phase, the one right before battle. This was when his body started readying itself for combat. His senses heightened, his heart rate slowed, he saw and heard with unusual clarity.

The next stage was crucial. He had to convince her to trust him. Taking a woman to bed was the best way to do that, he knew from long experience. So he should be moving things slowly around to getting into her pants.

Nick knew exactly how that was supposed to work. Walk her to her door, a light kiss before she opens it, just to break the ice, another kiss after she’d poured their nightcaps. Sitting on the couch, listening to the music she’d put on, idly chatting. Another light kiss, then another, less light this time, with a little tongue….

Everything slowly, with style, giving her time to get used to him.

He could do it. He’d done it before, countless times. He always kept his cool during sex. Hell, with Consuelo, he could have recited from memory whole chunks of the Army Field Manual while fucking, trying not to wince while Consuelo’s razor-sharp claws dug into his back. Keeping his cool before, during, and in the aftermath of sex was easy, he’d done it all his life.

No matter how heated the fucking, a part of him remained detached and was sometimes even able to comment on the proceedings, as if he were at a show.

He needed that cool right now. This was a job. A pleasurable job, okay, and man, did he deserve it after the shit details he’d been on in Afghanistan and after a year in the employ of the Drug Lord from Hell and his sister, Cruella De Vil. He had the moves, all shiny and polished from lots of use. He had the moves, the words, he had it all in his armamentarium. This should be a snap.

Have sex, make sure she was pleasured, gain her confidence, seduce some intel on Worontzoff out of her, gain an invite to the musical evening Fuckhead was organizing…that was the mission. He’d done harder things in his life, he could do this. Easy.

So why was he finding it so hard to focus on the job while she was in his arms?

He stopped just inside the door, back against it, just for a second. His knees had turned weak when her tongue met his. It was crazy. Maybe it was the bottle of wine he’d polished off over dinner, though he was known for being able to hold his liquor. He was Irish, after all.

So maybe it wasn’t the wine, but her mouth. The taste of her, spicy, sexy, with an overlay of the chocolate and cream desert.

He lifted his mouth for a moment and looked down at her. Her hair spilled over the collar of his overcoat, light against the dark color. Her lips were red, slightly swollen, pale gemlike eyes wide, the pupils dilated. A vein beat against her neck and he wanted, violently, to feel that beat against her breast.