Lisa Childs - His Christmas Assignment

“It mattered enough to you,” he said, his voice deepening with confusion and concern, “that you quit the job you loved.”

“ Loved is right,” she agreed. “Past tense. I don’t love it anymore.” But that was a lie; she knew it even as she said it. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her job anymore. It was that she was afraid she might fall in love with something—with somebody —else.

“Is that my fault?” he asked. “Or Logan’s?”

That was why she couldn’t risk falling again—because she had already made enough of a fool of herself over love before. “If this had anything to do with Logan, I would have quit when he married your sister.”

“Maybe you were just waiting around for them to fail,” he said. “It’s not like anyone really thought they’d last.” He chuckled. “Least of all me.”

“They have a child together,” she said.

“Little Penny,” he murmured, his grin widening with obvious love for his two-month-old niece.

Candace’s breath caught in her lungs. Garek was so damn handsome it wasn’t fair. “You shouldn’t be here,” she said. “You need to leave.”

He glanced around as if just realizing where they were. “I’ve been wanting to get into your bedroom for a year now...” He stepped closer to the bed and ran his fingertips across the sheets. “Silk...”

She flinched with anger and embarrassment and lashed out, “Of course you’d be surprised a man like me would have silk sheets.”

“Man?” he repeated, his brow furrowing with confusion. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“You just said I was the best man for the job—”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” he said.

“Why not?” she asked. “Everybody else thinks of me as just one of the guys.”

He shook his head. “I have never thought of you that way.” He stepped closer now and jerked her into his arms so quickly that she didn’t have time to react. If she’d had time, she would have stopped him—she would have hurt him. Instead she just slammed up tightly against his chest, so that she felt his every breath, his every heartbeat...

“And I have thought of you,” he said with an intensity in his gray gaze that had her heart racing with excitement, “every moment since I’ve met you...”

He lowered his mouth to hers but when their lips were just a breath apart, he paused and murmured. “And I have thought of doing this...of kissing you...”

And then he did—he kissed her with that intensity she’d seen in his eyes. He kissed her with such passion that she had no doubt he didn’t think of her as one of the guys. He thought of her the way she’d been thinking of him.

And she realized something else—it was too late to escape.

* * *

It was too late. No matter how hard he tried, Garek was unable to escape his old life. It just kept dragging him back in...

Back into a life lived on the edge, back into a life of danger...

Maybe it was a good thing that Candace had taken off the way she had, because at least he wasn’t dragging her in with him. He didn’t even know where she had gone—just that she’d finished packing her suitcases sometime that night and she’d left.

Her leaving had hurt more than the fist that slammed hard into his stomach. He coughed and doubled over in pain, but strong arms held him up so the fist could strike him again. Harder.

A curse slipped through his lips along with a slight trickle of blood. He didn’t have any internal injuries; he’d just bitten his tongue. Purposely. He’d been beaten harder than this before; hell, his brother had beaten him harder than this before. Of course that had been years ago when they’d been just kids. But he groaned as if he were in agony. The truth was the old man didn’t pack the wallop he had once had. But as the godfather of River City, Michigan, Viktor Chekov commanded respect and fear.

And with good reason. The guy was a killer. And maybe it could finally be proven...

With a jerk of his silver-haired head, Viktor called off his goons so that they released Garek. He dropped to the ground with a groan and complained, “What the hell kind of greeting was that...?”

“How do you expect me to greet you?” Viktor asked. “You just walked away—”

“I didn’t just walk away,” Garek said. “I was taken off in handcuffs to prison.”

A muscle twitched in Viktor’s slightly sagging cheek. “That wasn’t because of the work you did for me.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Garek agreed. “But I might have avoided jail time if I’d given up what I did for you, or if I’d set you up...” Like he was setting him up now...

Viktor swung again—this time right at Garek’s jaw. He could have ducked. But he took it on the chin. And this time he didn’t bite his tongue on purpose. He spit out a trickle of blood and wiped his mouth.

“If you’d done that, you would already be dead,” Viktor told him.

And this was why he hadn’t given up or entrapped Chekov. The sentence he’d served out had been for something that hadn’t actually been a crime.

“I never would have betrayed you.” Then. But he was a different man now. He was actually a man now whereas when he’d worked for Viktor he’d been a desperate kid, living on the streets.

“You’ve been out of prison a long time, Garek,” Viktor reminded him. “But until tonight you have never come back to the family .”

Viktor and his organization had never been family. They had preyed on his desperation and utilized the skills he’d learned from his jewelry-thief father before Patek Kozminski had gone to prison.

“I made my sister a promise,” he said. And while it had been a struggle at times, he had kept that promise—to never leave her again for either a jail cell or a grave. They had already lost their father—first to prison and then to death. “I vowed to her that I would stay on the straight and narrow.”

“You’ve been working for her husband, that former detective, Logan Payne.” Viktor had obviously been keeping track of him over the years.

“Still am,” Garek said. Unlike Candace, he wasn’t about to quit a job he loved—even for another job that had to be done.

“So why are you here?”

Garek wiped the blood that continued to trickle from the corner of his mouth. Maybe Viktor had hit him harder than he’d thought. “To offer my services.”

Viktor glanced at his gargantuan goons and chuckled. “You think I need another bodyguard?”

“I think you need a good one,” he said.

The two muscular guys glared at him.

Viktor shook his head. “I am perfectly safe.”

“But the people close to you aren’t,” Garek said. “I heard you recently lost a member of your family .” Not a blood relative but a very close associate.

That muscle twitched again in Viktor’s sagging jaw. “It is too late for Alexander.”

Polinsky had been murdered just days ago—shot in the head execution-style. The feds believed that Chekov had been the executioner.

“What about Tori?” Garek asked. “Aren’t you concerned for her safety?”

Viktor’s face flushed with color at the mention of his daughter’s name, so Garek braced himself for another blow. But Viktor didn’t swing his fist. Instead his shoulders slumped. “Tori is safe. Safer without you near her.”

Garek nodded. “I thought that once, too.” Actually he’d thought the opposite. He was safer if he was nowhere near her. Viktor loved his little princess so much that he would probably kill anyone who made her unhappy. And Garek hadn’t ever seen the young woman happy.

“Why are you really here?” Viktor asked. He stared at him again, as if trying to see through him.