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He left her standing where she was and walked back to the hospital.
“Asshole,” Marissa muttered behind him.
Viktor stopped, stared at his feet, and exhaled deeply.Shit. What am I doing?
He waited for Marissa to catch up to him, put an arm around her, and kissed the top of her head.
“I’ll try better, Iz,”Viktor murmured into her hair, his arm tightening around her. Marissa was annoyed when Viktor just turned around and left her, not knowing what ticked him off.
“So what set you off, big guy?” Marissa asked. “It couldn’t be me yelling at you to stop intimidating the hospital staff. You’d hate to be banned from the premises, wouldn’t you?”
“I didn’t handle seeing you hurt very well,” Viktor admitted.
“And your answer is to up and abandon me?” Marissa asked incredulously.
“I did not abandon you.” His voice was tight. “You were right behind me.”
Marissa nodded, deciding not to back him into a corner. Yet. She knew he was struggling to make it work between them. Whatever the “it” was. He seemed content to go with the flow. Unfortunately, the flow got interrupted unexpectedly and put him in an unfamiliar situation. She saw a mixture of fear and worry in his eyes, and knowing Viktor, he hated feeling vulnerable.
Did he feel…?
She shook those thoughts from her head. Keeping her hopes up that Viktor might actually fall in love was like waiting for China to embrace democracy.
His arm slid from her shoulder, his hand rubbing her back lingeringly before finding its way to link his fingers again with hers.
“What’s with the hand holding?” Marissa teased.
Viktor glanced at her playfully. Her breath caught. He looked boyish, and boyish was not a word used to describe him. Ever.
He raised their linked hands as they entered the elevator.
“I’m trying it on for size,” Viktor answered her. “I’m finding I like it.”
“Who are you and what have you done with Viktor?”
He did his version of an eye-roll, which was a subtle movement of his eyes.
“Shut up, Marissa.”
5
Rafiq Shadid watchedthe gyrations of the stripper before him. He hated to keep up the pretense of a perverted young sheik. Women were the last thing on his mind. He wanted revenge for his family. Every last one of them must die or suffer. He flicked his wrist and checked his watch impatiently. His men should have returned by now. They finally had a fix on their other target, who he now knew as CIA operative Marissa Cole. He thought she was his friend, and she had betrayed him. But she wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger that murdered his mother. Viktor Baran had received the very first taste of his revenge—the killing of Maia Pierce by an associate in Paris.
There was a knock on the private room’s door.
“Enter,” Rafiq said, and ordered the stripper to leave. His men walked in—one of them was missing.
“The man Viktor Baran was at the woman’s place,” his man answered nervously. “We followed them to a hospital.”
“A hospital?”
“Yes,” his man said. “We did as you told us, used the phone provided by Matthews to call her. She came outside,but immediately grew suspicious.” They related the rest of what happened.
“You. Ran,” Rafiq said slowly. He probably shouldn’t have told his men tales about Baran’s ruthlessness. “You men are imbeciles. Find Ali. I’m not paying him to have sex with women.”
He should have taken care of Cole himself, but he wanted to test the mettle of his new recruits. But more importantly: who were Baran and Cole visiting in the hospital?
McCord? The man should have recovered by now. They couldn’t break him. For three weeks, Rafiq had held him, and he couldn’t get the codes he needed. They hadn’t wanted to damage him too much because he was too valuable as leverage. Rafiq was bothered by how AGS was able to locate Jack McCord.
