The Russian Seduction by Nikki Navarre

limited off-duty hours—with the woman who later became my wife.”
    So at last we come to the wife. That is, the ex-wife.
    Keen interest sparked through her, though his demeanor hardly encouraged it. But who knew when he’d give her another opening? She moistened her lips and thrust, already braced for his riposte.
    “Why did she leave you?”
    “Isn’t that in my file?” He scowled into the rear-view mirror. “I’m certain your government is aware of the precise circumstances under which my father’s boat sank.”
    “We know he was acquitted of criminal negligence after the inquest,” she admitted. “There was an article on it in Krasnaya Zvezda. ”
    “Yes, well.” His words were clipped, warning her away. “What Red Star didn’t print was the evidence that suggested mutiny by the crew. Because of his ethnicity, and the political tension between Russia and Ukraine at the time, the investigators concluded that my father was attempting to defect with the boat.”
    His hands tightened on the wheel. “The crewmen who died with him were proclaimed heroes for stopping him.”
    God, there was a minefield of pain—anger, betrayal, disillusionment—buried under those chewed-off words. Alexis had to admit she felt for the guy. “That was when you lost your command, wasn’t it?”
    His reply was brusque, rebuffing any attempt to sympathize. “When they recalled me to Moscow, I returned to find that my wife, for whom I’d felt some affection, had left me. For obvious reasons, I chose not to contest the divorce.”
    A beam of headlights from an approaching car swept briefly across his face, sealed up tight as a locked door. Sneaking a peek at his profile, Alexis wanted to ask if he’d thought his father guilty. But even if he felt like talking about it, this wasn’t something they could discuss in the car without objections from their listening audience. She could be accused of soliciting classified information, or he could be accused of divulging it.
    Instead, she pursued the one truth she burned most to know—for what she hoped were purely professional reasons. She’d be more effective in negotiations with him if she knew what made him tick.
    “Do you still love her?”
    His piercing gaze arrowed over her, his tone inscrutable. “Is that for my dossier, Alexis? Or for yourself?”
    “I’m just trying to understand you,” she breathed, her heart beating double-time, hands curled around her knees. “It’s the sort of question one colleague asks another over cocktails, isn’t it?”
    “Is it?” he countered, his Nordic eyes guarded. “In that case, the answer is no. I stopped doing that a long time ago.”
    Stopped loving your wife? she couldn’t help wondering. Or just stopped loving?
    He swung the car into another tight turn, surging onto a dark driveway that wound through the trees—evidently private. The woods huddled so close against the narrow track, branches scratching against the hood, that Alexis would have missed the turn entirely. Now the vehicle’s beams sliced across the pitch-black forest, lighting heavy drifts of virgin snow. The car twisted among the trees, with no sign of human habitation to be seen.
    What am I doing here? She shivered. Alone in this remote location, at night, with this renegade Russian? And no one at the Embassy had a clue where she’d gone. Was she really willing to trust him? Or was she so naïve, so willfully blind that she’d pretend not to know why he’d brought her here?
    The headlights swept across a swaybacked cottage tucked among the trees, snuggled low and protected under a blanket of snow. Quaint wooden lace crowded the eaves and shutters, the peasant style that hearkened to the land’s pagan roots—predating the Soviets by centuries. Through the veil of starched lace curtains, amber light glowed through the windows. Hearth-smoke puffed from the stone chimney.
    “Here we are,” the captain murmured, pulling smoothly behind the house to park in a