into her bedroom, wet hair wrapped in a handtowel. She was too tired to prepare anything, so rang and ordered a pizza from her local, picking at the remains of a Danish she’d had this morning as she did so. Carrying a cold glass of white wine in one hand and a book in the other, she made herself comfortable on the sofa and kept her phone in sight. No bites yet, but she remained hopeful.
Plato skimmed the printout his security adviser had handed him.
‘What in the hell is this?’
‘Rose Red’s blog. The woman you asked us to run a check on—Rose Harkness. This is what came up. She posted it thirty minutes ago.’
‘Rose Red? What’s that? Her working name?’
‘She runs a website—a dating agency.’
Plato looked up swiftly. Was that what they were calling it nowadays? ‘Do you have an address for her?’
‘We do. How would you like it handled?’
Discreetly. For some reason his mind replayed the way she had cut her gaze away when she was speaking to him, as if shoring up her courage, and it interfered with his first thought which was to have his legal team make a threatening phone call.
‘Nyet, I’ll handle this myself. E-mail me the address. I take it she’s in central Toronto?’
‘The old district. Nice area.’
He didn’t doubt that. There had been something classy about her. Less to do with the suit and more to do with the way she had infiltrated that room, sweet and sassy, but low-key. A woman with a mission but not drawing attention to herself.
He picked up the printout again. It was innocuous enough, but it drew attention to the very thing he didn’t want questions about: the absence of the Sazanov brothers. Also, Anatole had told him she’d spoken to nearly all the boys and given them her number.
He should let Security deal with this. There was no reason for him to get involved … other than the smudged line of digits still faintly visible on his left hand, the invitation in her blue eyes and the unreasonable desire he still had to take her up on it.
He was in the Ferrari and driving downtown when he acknowledged that the shape of that ruby-red mouth and the promise in those baby blues had a little more to do with it. The sat nav took him to a quiet tree-lined street with traditional gabled townhouses close to the kerb. He didn’t know what he’d expected, but it wasn’t this. A residential home in a nice neighbourhood.
An elderly lady peered at him over the low railing fence as he strode up the path to the front door of number seventeen.
‘She’s home,’ chirped the woman helpfully. ‘And who are you, dear?’
Plato stopped, frowned. ‘Plato Kuragin,’ he said simply.
‘Foreign,’ said the woman. ‘She’s never had any foreign gents here before. When did you meet?’
When did they …? ‘This afternoon,’ he drawled. ‘It’s cold, madam, shouldn’t you be inside?’
‘It’s Wiggles. He needs to do his business before bed. This afternoon, you say? Well, you’re a quick worker. Mind you be good to her. She’s a sweet girl, our Rose. I don’t like this business she’s in. I think it hardens a girl, makes her cynical. I should have asked—are you a date or a client? It’s confusing with her running the agency from home.’
Plato wasn’t given a chance to reply as Wiggles chose that moment to come hurtling across the garden and into the house. Plato had a glimpse of something resembling a grey streak, and the elderly lady, with a little cry of surprise, vanished after him.
Plato rapped the lion’s-head door knocker. Hard.
The light went on and the door opened, and for a moment Plato forgot what he was doing there, on a doorstep in an inner suburban neighbourhood of Toronto, chasing down a woman who might or might not be a lady of the night and being door-stepped by her elderly neighbour and a dog called Wiggles.
Texas Rose stood on the threshold in a red silk robe with definitely some serious black silk and lace something underneath. Faint music he identified as Ravel’s Boléro was coming from another room, and in the downlights of the hallway the interior of her home hinted at a cavern of sensual delight. But the comparisons with a bordello ended there.
Her head was wrapped in a white towel and her face was scrubbed bare, so that her nose looked a little pink, and she was holding out a twenty-dollar bill that retreated as she took in his presence.
‘You’re not pizza,’ she said faintly.
‘Nyet,’ he said, wondering if the boys at the pizzeria threw dice to see which one got to deliver to Texas Rose. ‘Can I come in?’
She gazed back at him, looking as flummoxed as he was feeling but no doubt for different reasons.
He had been expecting this, but also he hadn’t. Hell, he didn’t know what he’d expected. All he knew was that he should turn around right now, get back in his car and drive away, and forget this had ever happened.
Except in that moment her towel turban slipped and, despite her attempt to keep it in place, damp, dark hair spilled out. All of a sudden he became aware of her nipples peaking against soft fabric, and the stroke of her tongue along the inside of her bottom lip. It all seemed to happen at once and he stepped forward, definitely going in.
‘I’m not sure this is a good idea,’ she said, backing up.
‘Nyet,’ he agreed, ‘it’s probably a very bad idea.’ He watched the outline of her breasts shift beneath that silk. She wasn’t wearing a bra. His mind went blank. The most powerful surge of lust shot through him.
‘Are you alone?’
‘Yes. No.’
She was staring at him warily, and it took a moment for her alarm to penetrate his thick fog of desire. What in the hell was he doing?
‘I’m here to speak to you,’ he said, clearing his voice, as if that sorted it all out.
She looked so appalled by the idea that it brought him back to reality. ‘Miss Harkness,’ he said with exaggerated formality, ‘you crashed that press conference today. We can either do this on the doorstep, or sitting down like a civilised man and woman.’
The tone of command seemed to do the trick.
‘Where are my manners?’ she said rapidly. ‘Of course. Won’t you come on in, Mr Kuragin?’
The sudden switch from open-mouthed alarm to Southern hospitality was too abrupt for his liking.
As was the sway of those hips as she preceded him down the narrow hall. He could see the outline of her bottom shifting under the silk, a little too wide and round for current fashion, but he had lost interest in contemporary standards of the female form the moment she opened that door. Texas Rose had one of those lush bodies found in paintings of nineteenth-century odalisques. He had a few of them hanging on the walls in his home in Moscow. Slender, but stacked in all the right places.
He
