Page 5

I turn back and hand over the drinks. The three men pay and take a seat in the far corner, where they sit with their backs to the wall—and with a direct line of sight to me.

I turn away to serve the backpackers, trying to still my thudding heart.

Will this feeling ever go away?

I thought that leaving Dimitry would be the end of feeling like this.

Of looking for guns under every table, of scanning every figure for possible danger.

Sometimes I still think that if I just hide away in Leetham for long enough, I will relax and stop thinking that death hides behind every hard face that walks in.

Or at least, start to believe that the hard faces aren’t looking for me.

Instead, I’m starting to realize the fear isn’t going anywhere.

The truth is I’ll never be able to outrun the people who want me dead. The shadows will always chase me.

That has nothing to do with Dimitry, or Roman Borovsky. It never did.

Deep down, I always knew that. Just like I always knew I’d be looking over my shoulder.

It’s one of the reasons I never came home before. I didn’t want to risk bringing that kind of darkness into my parent’s sweet, wholesome world.

Not because I want their approval. I gave up long ago hoping that my parents’ conservative farming hearts would ever approve of their art-loving, bohemian daughter.

But because no matter how different we might be, Peter and Susan Chalmers are good people, and they’re still my parents.

They might always prefer my brother, James, who went to agricultural college and returned straight afterward to help Dad with the farm, before going on to marry Belinda, a perfect girl from an even bigger farm than ours.

But preferring James doesn’t mean my parents didn’t love me.

I know they did. And hard as these past months have been, I know they still do.

I also know they don’t trust me.

And given the fact that I still jump every time a shadow moves the wrong way, I can’t really blame them.

I sneak another glance at the bikies in the corner. One of them has his phone up, camera pointed in my direction. I quickly turn away.

Was he taking my picture? Or am I seriously cooked in the head?

This is where Darya would laugh at me and tell me that of c ourse I’m cooked in the head, but that doesn’t mean I’m not fabulous anyway.

God, I miss her.

Maybe that’s the other thing that’s changed , I think as I go to the kitchen and bring out two chicken parmigianas for the gray nomads, who of course waited until the very end of lunch service to order, thus pissing off our backpacker chef, who is waiting to join his mates in the bar and spend his own savings.

Darya is married to Roman now. And even though I didn’t want that to change things between us, it has.

Darya is the only real friend I’ve made in all the years since I left Australia. The only person I’ve truly connected with.

Maybe I always knew she was on the run, too; it takes one to know one.

I knew her as Lucia Lopez when we met. It was only after she fell in love with Roman that she stopped hiding her real name, Darya Petrovsky.

As it turned out, she was hiding a lot, including the fact that her father was once the most powerful bratva pakhan in Miami.

Now her brother, Alexei, runs the Miami business, and Darya is happily married to Roman, who is even more powerful than her father was.

Roman runs an international empire from his Hale Property office in Malaga.

Hale is just a front for Roman’s real business, obviously, although apart from the Naryshkin treasures, I know very little about what he does except that it involves some cryptocurrency platform that has, apparently, elevated his business from the usual girls, gambling, and drugs of the bratva and turned him into a multizillionaire.

All I really know for certain is that Roman’s business is the reason Dimitry never goes anywhere without multiple weapons.

Now that she’s married, Darya is rarely in Malaga anymore. She prefers their country finca up in the mountains to Roman’s city penthouse. I can’t blame her. I love the mountain finca almost as much as she does, and it’s safer for her, especially now that she has a baby coming.

A baby I probably won’t ever get to meet.

But the truth, though I would never have told her, is that Darya’s retreat to the finca left a hole in my life not even Dimitry could fill.

Somehow, so long as it was Darya and me against the world, I wasn’t alone.

My secret life was still somehow fun . But the moment Darya left Lucia behind and became Roman’s wife, suddenly my own subterfuge was thrown into glaring, stark relief.

I told her as much of my story as I felt comfortable doing.

I told Dimitry more of it. Nearly all of it.

But not about the man whose face I never should have seen.

A man Juan Cardenas promised me he would kill.

I didn’t mention that Juan never told me whether he did or didn’t kill the man I never should have seen.

Crucially, I never told Dimitry that if Juan really is dead his son Rodrigo won’t ever stop looking for me.

Or that there is a very good chance there is someone even more lethal than Rodrigo out there who still wants me dead.

Telling Dimitry any of those things would have meant a war.

And no matter how much he loves me, a war with the Cardenas cartel is the last thing he, Roman, or Darya need. I won’t be the person that brings that to their door. And in the end, that was what it came down to. I couldn’t run again, and certainly not from Dimitry.

There’s nowhere I could go that he wouldn’t come looking for me. And Dimitry knows how to find what he’s looking for.

I couldn’t stay.

Not unless I was prepared to either keep lying or send Dimitry into war on my behalf.

That left going home. Choosing my family was the only trump card I had. The only place where Dimitry would respect my privacy and let me run to.

So I came back to Leetham, determined to make the best of it. Hoping against hope I’d fall in love with my old life, which, I naively thought, might just solve all my problems.

Might make me somehow forget how much I love Dimitry, and Darya, and my little apartment in Spain that smells like paint and passion.

Needless to say, I was so fucking wrong it’s laughable.

I glance over to the corner of the bar, but the bikers are gone.

Sighing with relief, I take my apron off. I give the night shift barmaid a quick brief, which doesn’t amount to anything more important than the fact that we need more ice, then head out to unlock my bicycle. I glance around, but there’s no trace of the bikers.

Hopefully they’ve decided to finally leave town.

I head out past the few scattered buildings that make up Leetham’s main street, then take the right-hand turn down Chalmer’s Lane. The narrow, potholed road is named after my family, who’ve farmed the country on either side of it for over a century.

It’s a fifteen-kilometer ride out to Mum and Dad’s. Lately, despite the brutal heat, I’ve begun to relish the ride home. Or rather, the memories that come once I start pedaling.

The ride home is where I find Dimitry .

I never know what memory will come. It’s like a delicious lottery, where every vision I see is a winner.

Today, it seems my mind wants to go right back to the start.

Malaga, Spain

Two years ago

“Hey, Skippy.”

I look in the mirror behind the bar, and my stomach does a happy little flip at the crooked smile and sloping gray eyes looking back at me.

My groin does something entirely different, but I do my best to drown out that particular urge. My groin, or any other part of my libido, is not at all to be trusted when it comes to men.

Particularly not when it comes to men like Mr. Tasty Bodyguard. He comes into the café every morning with Roman Stevanovsky, who is supposedly the CEO of the gleaming Hale Property offices across the road.

I know they’re both involved in far shadier shit than property. I’ve seen enough criminals I can pick them out at a thousand yards in a fucking snowstorm.

And I’ve seen enough of what criminals are capable of to know that the smart thing to do is to run from them. More than a thousand yards. Preferably in the opposite direction.

Groin spasm or no groin spasm.

“You need to stop calling me Skippy.” I put his coffee down on the bar, trying not to stare at the ridiculous biceps bulging through the white T-shirt or the tattoos twining down his forearm to hands the size of dinner plates.

“To start with, that TV show has been over longer than I’ve been alive.

And second, there is not the girl alive who wants to be named after a talking kangaroo. ”

“I dunno.” He grins.

He’s lethal when he grins.

“I always thought kangaroos seemed pretty cute. But like I’ve been saying for months now, if you just give me your name, I’ll start calling you by that. Even better, give me your number.” He raises his eyebrows at me as he sips his coffee.

How is he so damned big?

I’m used to big men. I grew up around them in Australia.

In southern Spain, however, the men are usually slender and short, a leftover from years of Moorish occupation.

Tasty Bodyguard, on the other hand, is six foot five of serious fucking muscle, and the kind of thirst trap that should come with a written warning.

Especially to an Australian girl who has been away from home for way too long and been sleeping with seriously inadequate men for even longer than that.

“What are you doing in here without your lord and master, anyway?” I wipe the countertop next to him, which is a mistake, since it puts my hand close enough for him to grasp.

I go very still, my heart thudding like a jackhammer. His hand is warm, calloused, and feels so good covering mine that I want it all over me.

“You’re avoiding the question.”

I look up to find him grinning at me.

“You avoided mine,” I counter, but I don’t move my hand.