Page 22 of Air Force One (Miranda Chase #16)

Lieutenant General Artemy Turgenev stood at the foot of the stairs to the top floor of their Moscow townhouse.

He hung onto the banister to keep from falling to the carpet.

The gateway to his wife’s private social salon; he hadn’t crossed its threshold since they’d bought the house and she had declared the top floor hers.

The security guard, who’d helped his driver get him out of the car and up to the front door, had informed him that Inessa was home.

And that she was alone—upstairs. She only ever used that private suite when she had guests.

Unsure of how he’d arrived here, he stood at her stairs, holding on like it was a pitching ship.

Normally when he returned from his Lubyanka office, she would be in the living room, reading or writing letters. Of course, he wasn’t returning from the office today, hadn’t been back there since before lunch, but she never needed to know that.

Inessa was one of the last people he knew who still used the post. Her letters had been checked, of course, and he’d seen the reports. No more than friendly notes between women of society, mostly relationship advice and encouragement.

She was from a world gone by: a classic beauty, a gentle spirit, and so charmingly old-fashioned.

He’d witnessed her effect on himself and others since their very first meeting; every room she entered seemed to slip back to a previous era: not of the Soviets but of the tsar and tsarina.

The sensation was slow to fade when she departed.

One of the few self-made billionaires of Russia with no obvious political connections or graft, she was unique.

There wasn’t a fashion trend set in Russia that didn’t start with Inessa and end with her interconnected corporations of importers, designers, manufacturers, and shops.

She had trained him in how to speak, behave, and respond like the others of her class. Now, others sought his praise, his advice, and feared his retribution. But she couldn’t change the way he thought—the way he felt inside.

The higher his banner flew, the more he missed his days as a pilot.

Though with the failing state of the nation’s aircraft and the wicked, pointless war to the west, he was glad to be clear of the fray.

But every place she took him to see and be seen, he’d much prefer to have been kicked back in a run-down kabak reeking of wheel grease and kerosene fuel slopped on clothes.

Sitting with a group of pilots swilling Green Mark, cheapest-on-the-shelf vodka, and peeling strings of salty Chechil cheese to at least suggest the harsh spirit had a flavor.

Telling stories of close calls and hot women.

He knew that FSB Director General Mikhail Murov favored him because he’d been a pilot for years before his wife had turned him into a political animal.

Yet she was the one who’d also taught him to always be military-first with Murov; the politics will take care of themselves if you take care of him.

And she’d been right—as always. He would never have dreamed of reaching such heights.

And now that he had, he wondered why it had all looked so desirable.

One misstep, perhaps like today, and he’d—

Except it wasn’t a misstep.

He rubbed at his forehead as he faced those stairs, her stairs, but nothing became the least bit clearer.

General Murov had suggested the lunch. Not with him, of course, as he rarely left his desk.

Rather lunch with the commander-in-chief of the entire Russian Aerospace Forces—space and air forces combined.

He’d flown for the latter, back before the former existed.

His afternoon had started with a three-martini lunch.

Just like a Western businessman, one for each star! three-star General Sokolov had toasted him in Moscow’s most-exclusive Club Cloud 99.

Even with Sokolov as a dining companion—too powerful to keep out—the door wardens had hesitated over his own admission. Neither Sokolov nor being a two-star general in the FSB had tipped the balance. His wife’s name, Inessa, had opened the door wide.

Her. Again! He was a lieutenant general, yet she was the one who opened the door to the most elite club in Moscow. Not even her married name, his name, simply Inessa—as if he was nothing! That she’d probably never been there didn’t matter.

Artemy crossed into the master bedroom and made it to the small bar they kept for when they wanted a nightcap without going downstairs. Gin, scotch whisky, sherry, aperitifs. He poured three fingers out of a bottle of Beluga vodka into a crystal tumbler and knocked it back.

Sokolov, twenty years his senior, had been the oldest in the whole club. Turgenev himself was perhaps the next oldest. Inessa might be powerful, but even being on the young side of her generation wouldn’t let her fit there. Artemy was on the old side of the club’s members, but not beyond it.

Unlike Inessa’s quiet restaurants where she commanded the best table without asking and was greeted in careful whispers, Club Cloud 99—ironically hidden in a deep subbasement—vibrated.

All of her fancy places with elegant materials were nowhere.

They had black-leather-and-brass booth seating.

Indirect lighting became hard-edged down-spots over tables so that one could lean in and out of the shadows as the conversations flowed.

And they flowed.

After Sokolov had departed on a pretext that sounded like an assignation with his mistress, people he’d never met joined his booth uninvited.

They leapt into conversations without hesitation.

Smart people—many Western-educated far beyond his training at the Gagarin Air Force Academy.

Inspired people—driven by ideas, not fears.

Beautiful people.

Many of the women wore Inessa’s fashions, but so altered he barely recognized them.

The way a half-shredded blouse slid from strap-free shoulders and offered creamy skin and unsupported cleavages made a whole different statement than his wife, the ever-so-lauded designer, probably ever intended.

American jeans were a hot item. Some were so tight they showed every single curve.

Some, cutoff shorts frayed right past the starting curve of their butts despite the chill January weather outside, were impossible to look away from.

And they were fit, athletic women. There were men too, but he didn’t notice them one way or the other.

Inessa’s body was a work of art. She had placed second in the last-ever Miss USSR beauty pageant and had allowed her figure to shift only as befit a mature woman. She still often modeled the top items of her fashion lines at the shows. And everyone applauded like it was still thirty-five years ago.

The women who gathered about his and the departed Sokolov’s table had figures that kept his head spinning with where to look. Party animals, athletes, the children of Inessa’s privileged class. These were the elite in every way imaginable: status, wealth, and body.

Gods above and below, it made him hard all over again remembering them.

He poured two more fingers of Beluga and turned to stare at their bed.

Sex with Inessa was always a gentle wonder.

Sex with Tania—Fairy Queen fit her perfectly—up against the black marble wall of the women’s bathroom had been hard, fast, and left them both laughing for how good it felt to acknowledge the animal inside without hold or bar.

He’d forgotten what that felt like from back in his pilot days.

Except then it had been a whore in a pilot’s bar, not the eldest daughter of one of the twenty great oligarchs.

His wild Fairy Queen radiated power. A top track-and-field athlete because she had the vision, the drive, and the body—Gods but she had the body, all sleek muscle and blonde hair down to her perfect ass.

The last double handful of that lovely hair was a wide stripe of silver and above it a slender line of the richest blue he’d ever seen as a pilot flying beneath a clear Arctic sky.

It wove and rippled and she wrapped it around his throat like a great thick scarf while he took her against that wall.

They didn’t stop once during the long afternoon.

They drank and laughed and danced and screwed again before dancing and drinking even more.

He’d been drunk enough to make the mistake of asking for her number. She waved a hand at the club as if the answer was obvious. If he wanted to forget the outside world for an afternoon, he might find her here.

Drunk enough to ask for her number but sober enough, barely, to stop at the barrier of Inessa’s private stairs.

To hell with that.

He’d thought to shower off any hint of his afternoon tryst.

To hell with that, too. Women said they could always tell, but that was just some rumor they spread about like cow manure to keep husbands in line.

To hell with Inessa’s limitless power.

And Inessa’s perfect refinement.

And her gentle ways in bed.

And—

Just thinking about Tania’s bucking body and clawing sun-gold-glitter fingernails aroused him all over again. He thumped down the empty crystal tumbler, returned to the hall, climbed Inessa’s stairs—his stairs, by God, it was his home too—and shoved open the door.

He slowed only enough to note that it was a room for women. It was all pretty and refined and smelled of roses in the middle of winter and—

Artemy Turgenev was an FSB two-star general, by God, who had just fucked a wild Fairy Queen a decade his junior twice in an afternoon.

Inessa sat with her back to him, alone on a velvet sofa.

The cashmere sweater made her look soft; the linen slacks made her sleek as he stopped behind her and looked down the front of her blouse to where he could see a hint of black satin.

Tania wore no such restraints, needed none to keep her figure in perfect form.

“Good evening, Artemy. How was your day?” She asked without turning from the silent TV showing who cared what. The same greeting in one way or another, every day. Always glad to listen, to suggest, to—

He didn’t give a shit.

Right now? All he cared about was what he wanted.

He buried his face where her thick hair swirled around the side of her neck, grabbing a breast through the cashmere.

It wasn’t enough! He plunged his other hand over her opposite shoulder, down inside the sweater, the silk blouse, which lost several buttons, and under that satin bra to grasp the other of those award-winning breasts.

He knew that many of his peers lusted after Inessa—how many called him a lucky bastard or said he didn’t deserve her—but she was his to have.

“Well,” she huffed out a breath, “That’s a change of pace.”

He’d show her a change of pace. He yanked his hands free, grabbed onto the couch, and flopped it backward.

Inessa tumbled with the couch to lie before him.

Not bothering with button or zipper, he tore open Inessa’s pants.

The button shot aside and the zipper cried out as he jerked it apart.

He yanked her slacks off one leg, in too much of a hurry to bother with the other.

He drove his hands upward, scooping the sweater aside and destroying the rest of the blouse.

He freed one breast and fell on it while he clawed at the bra until it tore between strap and wire to expose the other.

When he fumbled with his own pants, she helped him. The ever-so-proper Inessa let him spread her in her shredded clothes. When he wanted to feed on a breast, she drew him tightly against it. When his taste went lower, she dug her fingers into his hair and arched to meet him.

And when he drove into her, she wrapped her legs around him.

He took and he took and he took. The more he did, the tighter she held him as if she’d never let him go.

He took all that he could manage from Inessa until he left her tousled, disheveled, dressed in tattered remnants, and lying half on the back of a tipped couch and half on the Persian carpet in her ever-so-feminine boudoir.

Even so, her perfection remained intact.

Not once did she complain.

But neither did she moan when the release slammed out of him.

Nor did she laugh for the sheer glory of being alive as his Wild Fairy Queen had—Wild Fairy Fucking Queen Tania had whispered when he’d told her his name for her, just before her body had spasmed in a massive release.

Afterward, Inessa made no move to push him away or cover herself.

He buried his face against her chest, his nose against the tattered remains of her bra, to hide from what he’d done to her.

As she cradled his head and stroked his shoulders, he wished that the soft breasts pressing against either side of his face belonged to his Wild Fairy Fucking Queen’s taut physique—and felt even worse.

Had he seen Inessa’s expression, he wouldn’t have understood it.

Thoughtful and sad, perhaps even the frisson of fear, he might have recognized. But he’d never understand the resignation to an unstoppable future or the silent tears for all that was lost no matter how she tried to hold on.

The commentator on the television had still found nothing useful to add to the new American President’s speech.