Tempted by Deception (Deception Trilogy #2) by Rina Kent

I remain there, motionless, my body and heart on high alert until I hear the soft click of the front door.

Did he…leave?

I stay still for a few minutes, thinking that it must be a distasteful joke. That he will come back and either finish what he started or tell me what the hell he’s planning.

He doesn’t return.

I should be feeling relieved, and I am—I finally got rid of the asshole.

And yet, the marionette strings tighten at my nape and an empty sound echoes in my chest.





9





Adrian





Fuck.

Make that double fuck.

Kolya and Yan are standing in front of my car. The younger guard is running his hand through his long hair as he smokes a cigarette. He offers it to Kolya, but he shakes his head and scolds him in Russian, “Smoking is bad for your health.”

“What are you, my father?”

“I would’ve beaten that habit out of you if I were.”

Yan scoffs since he has absolutely no respect for those older than him. He’s nineteen, reckless to a fault, and Kolya has to clean up after him so that he doesn’t get himself killed by the other senior guards. Especially those my father left behind.

Upon seeing me, Kolya moves to open the door, but I beat him to it. I slide into the back seat and undo the top buttons of my shirt.

Kolya and Yan are inside before I can blink.

“Where to?” my second-in-command asks.

“The Pakhan’s house.”

He nods and kicks the car into gear without asking questions.

While I don’t make it a habit to attend breakfasts at Sergei’s. I need a distraction from the woman I just left upstairs.

A part of me wants to stop the car, open the door, and go back. That part wants to finish what I started, to hear her erotic voice as she comes undone all over my dick.

That part also wants to erase the memory of any fucker who touched her in the past so that her body only remembers me.

But that part isn’t keeping its sights on the reason why I’m doing this in the first place. I’m not getting under Lia’s skin to fuck her. I’m getting under her skin for information.

In my dictionary, information is deadlier than any gun. It’s a weapon of mass destruction, and if there’s anything I learned from my psycho mother, it’s that I need to grab the bull by the horns.

People think whoever has the largest and better equipped battalion wins. What they fail to understand is that if a battalion doesn’t gather enough information about the enemy, they will never get far. They might win a battle or two. They might kill a thousand or a few, but the one with more intel is the winner of the war.

Being raised to never accept any losses has turned me into a master of acquiring information. I’m even better than both my monster parents combined.

I internally scoff at that. Why would I call them monsters when I’ve become worse than them?

But then again, monsters might recognize each other, but they don’t necessarily like one another.

They’re more interested in digging each other’s graves.

In winning.

That’s what I should be focused on—winning. My main mission with Lia Morelli is to acquire information. But the lines blurred somewhere between her erotic moans and the way she looked at me while she came apart around my fingers, and then once again when she licked them as if she’s been doing it for eternity.

I’ve never been as hard as I was in that moment. I’ve lost sight of my mission, like I did when she parted her lips and completely let go.

That’s why I left. I need to play my cards right and that won’t happen as long as I’m in her vicinity.

“Did you find out anything?” Yan asks. He always has a terrible way of broaching subjects.

Kolya shakes his head at him.

“What? That’s what you wanted to ask, too.”

“Shut it, Yan,” my senior guard scolds.

“I don’t see why I should.”

“Yan…” I release a long sigh. “I told you to read the atmosphere before asking. Have you ever learned anything from me and Kolya?”

“I learned that you’re too silent. If I don’t talk, no one will.”

Kolya glares at him.

“What?” Yan retrieves a cigarette and lights it. “You’ve been boring me since birth.”

Usually, I’d tell him to put the cigarette out, but I couldn’t give a fuck right now.

“Then why are you still here?” Kolya asks.

Yan taps a fist to his chest. “I was personally handpicked to guard Boss. That honor doesn’t come easily.”

“Obviously an error on the part of whoever picked you,” Kolya mutters under his breath.

Yan gets worked up and starts enumerating ‘all the shit’ he recently went through in the Spetsnaz Special Forces so that he could come back to serve me. Kolya meets that with cold indifference because Yan only spent two years there, which is nothing compared to the time my second-in-command served.

I let their back-and-forth go in one ear and out the other. I try to use that time to implement my next plan, but all I keep thinking about are plump lips, perky tits, and a soft, pink cunt.

But that’s not all. It’s the way she moaned. The way she stared, dazed after she orgasmed. I want that sight in my brain, not as a spur-of-the-moment thing, but as a constant that I can revisit again and again until she’s completely out of my system.