Heart of a Russian Bear Dog Read online

She’d be damned if she’d cower behind a door until the Secret Service decided it was about damned time to show up, no matter what Carlton had said last night.

  The clerk at Kate Spade had offered to send the purse back to the manufacturer to see if they could fix it, but it would be at least a week. She was supposed to be back in Ukraine in a week. So now she had a damaged purse, which also added to her feeling of no good cheer.

  That and the Russians had decided to attack her.

  Well, she’d had arranged a little visit from the Ukrainian embassy armorer to her hotel room last night—without Carlton or Ambassador Tomas looking over her shoulder. If the Russians wanted her, they’d best come prepared to take some losses.

  Where was that man? Probably off writing some dated romantic poetry, just dripping with Russian heartache dredged up from too much cheap vodka and salty chechil cheese.

  She’d even worn her new Natalia Romanova-designed dress that she’d picked up during Ukraine Fashion Week. She did it just to grind her heel into his face that she wasn’t his demure-and-proper Pushkinesque heroine.

  Sick of waiting, she yanked open her room’s door, strode out into the hall, and slammed into the opposite wall when she tripped over the great Russian bear dog lying across her threshold.

  “You okay?”

  Tanya retrieved her leather jacket from the floor. Then she did her best to rearrange her clothes before she turned to look down at Sergeant Alex Warren sitting against the wall beside her door.

  Valentin was watching her with a happy smile of greeting.

  “Don’t worry, you can’t hurt him with a little kick like that. His mother may have been a T-84, but his father was a T-14 Armata.”

  The T-84 was Ukrainian’s finest tank, but the T-14 was Russia’s newest and gave her chills when she imagined one rolling along her country’s roads at eighty kilometers an hour.

  Alex sat cross-legged on the plush red hallway carpet—ornate enough to be Russian—with a pad and pen in his hands.

  “What drivel are you writing?”

  He looked down at his hands in surprise, then back up at her. “A letter to Mom. She’s an old-school lawyer and prefers the written word over email.”

  “It had better not be about me.”

  He held up the pad in front of his eyes, though it was clear he wasn’t reading whatever was written there.

  “Dear Mom, All that schooling in Russian literature that you and Dad so despised has finally paid off.” He paused and looked up at her. “They’re very practical people, Mom and Dad. Both career lawyers. Anyway… The woman of Pushkin’s Russian dreams has become my Ukrainian reality. Fairer than a dawn breeze, which, sadly for the sake of this metaphor, it isn’t especially warm in DC right now—which also makes it an accurate metaphor. Despite her chill demeanor, she’s wearing an absolutely killer dress that matches her dark and mysterious eyes.” He looked up at her again. “Sorry for taking liberties with your eye color, but it reads better on the page. Have you ever considered dark contacts?” Alex cleared his throat and returned his attention to his pad. “There’s a fairytale-like air to her that—”

  She prepared to kick him with the sharp toe of her Manolo Blahnik boots.

  “Or maybe you aren’t interested.” He tucked the pad away.

  “How long have you been sitting here?”

  “I came on shift at seven. You hadn’t called yet, and Valentin wanted a chance to shed all over this pretty carpet—it is spring soon and he’s already dropping his undercoat in great wads of fur—so we came here. The temperature is up in the forties today. You shouldn’t freeze in the dress, which really is absolutely killer on you by the way.”

  Carlton had said nothing about calling in her morning schedule. Alex had been sitting over an hour because he and his boss were acting like children. Fine. Let him.

  “I’m hungry. Let’s go.”

  “You said the magic word. Yeda!” Valentin responded with enthusiasm at the mention of Food! They both clambered quickly to their feet.

  Tanya led off down the long hall, or tried to. She made it three steps before Valentin pushed past her to take the lead.

  At first she thought that he was going after a half-finished breakfast of eggs and bacon that someone had set outside their door. Though he sniffed at it, he didn’t stop.

  “You must feed him a great deal for him not to take that.”

  When she glanced, Alex was hanging just a step back. Rather than watching her ass as she’d expected, he was watching over his shoulder as someone came out of their room farther down the hall.

  “Well, he had a half-kilo of raw beef and a bowl of steamed veggies this morning, though a Caucasian shepherd would happily eat itself obese if allowed. But first, he’s on the job, and second, he accepts nothing except from my hand. Food safety. Security dogs are a target.”

  “Whoever would hurt a sweet dog should be shot!”

  “Amen, sister!” Alex’s light words didn’t match his dark tone.

  The tone surprised her. Alex had seemed so light and facile—a uniformed officer quoting Pushkin in the original—yet he was the one who had identified and chased her would-be attackers. And as they spoke, he still kept an awareness of their surroundings. Completely on the job.

  She had to remind herself of what Tomas had said, American Army dog handlers are feared in all war zones, they have heavy bounties on their heads. And the Secret Service handlers do this in broad daylight instead of under the cover of night. The American protection details are one of the most elite and bravest forces anywhere.

  Even if Alex and Carlton did act like children.

  Once they reached the polished copper of the elevator doors, she observed their reflection as they waited. The guard, the woman in the body-skimming white lace dress, and massive dog who had squeezed in between them.

  Natalia Romanova had cut the dress for Tanya herself. The inner sheath reached from her shoulders to mid-thigh. The thick lace flower-work also covered her arms to her wrist, up her neck higher than a turtleneck, and down to stop just above her knees. You have the legs for me to cut it shorter, even more than most women can wear. But Tanya had insisted on the more conservative look for meetings—fashion forward but not showing the skin she normally would.

  Even with the longer cut, it would be a little chilly, but she’d needed the fashion statement to gather her nerves for today’s meetings.

  The white lace paired with the charcoal boots and sixty-millimeter peg heels combined to say, “I’m serious, but I’m glad to kick ass too.” The boots also made her several centimeters taller than Alex. If it bothered him, he made no sign of it.

  She slid on the hip-long black bomber jacket she’d found at Fashion Agony. The only colors were her blue eyes and her green Kate Spade satchel. As planned.

  Alex was right though; it was a killer look.

  And it would be perfect for all the meetings today as she began her campaign to maneuver the Turks and the other Black Sea Balkans into freeing the Crimea from the Russians over the next few years. And she didn’t mind for a moment that the best place to wage her campaign was in this American city. The Americans knew how to live in ways no Ukrainian could.

  Maybe tonight she’d go dancing.

  She eyed their reflections. Did Alex dance?

  9

  It wasn’t just a long day; it was a damn long day. Maybe going for a run before he’d begun his shift hadn’t been his best idea.

  One look at Valentin and Alex knew that wasn’t the problem.

  Yes, in addition to a positive attitude, Russian bear dogs had incredible stamina. But that was an area where he and his dog usually matched.

  Valentin looked as if he’d gladly keep going—especially if Tanya was involved. She’d acted like a supercharger on Alex’s typically complacent companion.

  Alex would shoot himself if he had to do more.

  Assistant Foreign Minister Tanya Larina had turned into a whirling dervish.

  Breakfast wa
s a bagel with cream cheese during her first business meeting with a Ukrainian attaché. Her second meeting was also over breakfast where she didn’t stint either, consuming black coffee and two eggs, toast, and sides of both bacon and sausage. She also ate some poor sub-assistant to the Secretary of the US Navy alive over the meal. As they left that meeting, she’d grumbled.

  “The next meeting, it will not be such a waste of time.” She’d extracted a promise of a meeting with the Under Secretary from the poor assistant.

  All day she clawed her way up the food chain. He’d lost track of how many meetings they’d gone to…before lunch.

  His routine throughout the day had followed protocol: escort, inspect the room, then fade into the background.

  As she tucked into a large lunch at a Chinese restaurant with a spook from the Bulgarian embassy, he began to wonder how she kept her amazing figure. Even with the high-necked dress, most men were having trouble not staring at her body. So much so, that none of them noticed the sharp mind carving them up like a butcher’s knife.

  By the two o’clock handover to Lieutenant Carlton Tibbets, Alex knew how she kept her figure—because she never slowed down. Not for a single instant.

  If they had ten minutes walking between meetings, he’d get a download of everything that had gone wrong.

  At first he’d thought that she was the epitome of a Slavic pessimist. But over time he understood that she drove herself hard, and even the smallest misstep needed to be second-guessed and rethought before the next meeting. Her drive was relentless, so relentless that he was wrung dry just trying to keep up with her.

  She didn’t expect him to just listen to her self-debriefs—she expected him to participate. He’d spent the last two years walking a dog and five years with the Service before that. His job was more complex than that, but being a dog handler meant dealing with immediate information. Here and now scenarios. Short-term attack vectors. Protection routes and strategies. The furthest he ever thought ahead was during route planning.

  But to satisfy Tanya’s insatiable need to understand, he’d had to dredge up his decade-gone past. It took a surprising amount of effort to reach back into the history that had been the cultural backdrop of 19th Century Russian Romanticism. Strategies of the five tsars of Russia and the five sultans of the Ottoman Empire came slowly back to mind, but some of their strategies and maneuverings seemed to help Tanya.

  Doing that, while remaining on full alert, and keeping a constant check on Valentin had wrung him dry.

  Tanya Larina was a political animal, a world he knew almost nothing about. She played move and countermove scenarios across a span of years. Which, with the volatile short-term nature of Ukrainian politics, was pretty damn ballsy.

  Once she dragged Tibbets off in whatever the next direction was, Alex reported in. Nothing new on yesterday’s three assailants. Nothing for today except to turn his log entries into a briefing report that no one would ever read…unless something went wrong. Then every word and each random typo would be scraped over with a threshing machine guaranteed to mangle the author of said report. He considered writing it in Russian to further recover that part of his memory but decided that might not be the best choice for a US government report.

  When he finally got back to the apartment complex, he considered knocking on Bethany’s door and seeing if she wanted to split a pizza. She’d found him an empty townhouse just three doors down from hers. The place was dog friendly, especially Secret Service dog friendly, which was a major bonus. He could also afford it. One bedroom upstairs, living and kitchen below. It fit him just fine.

  Then he figured that if Bethany was around and did say yes, he’d probably end up talking about the wild politician woman who had been unleashed on an unsuspecting Washington, DC. And he’d learned long ago that the last thing a woman wanted to hear about was another woman—even if he wasn’t Bethany’s type.

  Instead, he walked softly by, slipped into his own place, and grimaced at the piles of boxes. It was mostly books—in Russian. Very few of them had been published after 1900. But first he had to assemble the bookcases. However, when packing, he’d dropped the bag of shelf hardware into one of the book boxes…without marking which one. And if he began opening boxes, there wouldn’t be any space to assemble the bookcases to put the books on.

  Screw it! He’d been in Washington for all of three days. They could wait.

  Valentin waded through the morass as if it was just another training course. He flopped down in front of the sliding glass doors and sighed contentedly. It was the only clear floor space, and Valentin had already learned that the morning sun shone right there.

  Except today they’d been up and gone before the seven-a.m. sunrise. Tomorrow, too.

  Alex’s sofa still had a blanket and pillow, but no sheets. And it wouldn’t matter if he did have the sheets, because he’d lost the hardware for the bed frame. He had a niggling feeling that it was still sitting in the corner of his old closet…in San Francisco.

  “Moving sucks, Valentin.”

  Valentin snored at him in response.

  He checked his watch, six-thirty p.m. and almost full dark.

  Yeah, so done. He called for a pizza and caught a quick shower.

  In the mirror he asked himself what was Bethany’s type?

  But his mind twisted the question and asked what was Tatyana Larina’s?

  Bethany was the true all-American girl. Beautiful, athletic, talented girl-next-door looks—almost literally girl next door as she lived just down the row.

  Tanya, despite her protests, drew him the way the Russian heroines had, from Pushkin’s Tatyana Larina to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina born half a century later. Amazing, driven women, trapped by circumstances outside their control.

  Curiously, he had followed in their footsteps, after a fashion. In pursuing the unexpected, he’d forged his own path away from the family’s law firm. The eighth generation? Not him. His sister had fought the bit, and lost. Now she was San Francisco’s most ruthless family lawyer—with a vicious side that he barely recognized from their youth.

  But she was also his only supporter in following his own path. “Hold out as long as you can, Alex.”

  Listening to Tanya Larina throughout the day, he could see that she too was forging her own blazing path across the political landscape. That was even more attractive than her beauty.

  At a knock on his door, he dragged on jeans and a USSS t-shirt, the only clean things he had handy, and hurried back downstairs.

  He fished out his wallet and opened the door.

  “You weren’t going to eat pizza without me, were you?” And there was Bethany with a pizza in one hand, two beers in another, and a dog on her heels.

  “Hell no, woman. I’m not crazy enough to try and do that.” He held the door wide and waved her in.

  Valentin raised his head eagerly, saw who it was, and flopped back out of sight with a soft growl of displeasure.

  “Most pleasant greeting yet. Guess I’m making headway.” Bethany stepped in and he had his wallet half tucked away. “Hey! Keep that out. You owe me twenty.”

  He pulled out a twenty and jammed it in her back pocket as she turned for the kitchen.

  She sent him a dangerous look.

  Then it struck him what he’d just done. Yeah, just one of the guys, so shove the money in her pocket. Except Bethany was a her and he’d just put his hand on her ass.

  “Shit! Sorry. I didn’t mean to— Shit!”

  “Not my type, remember? Just watch them hands, bub.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Sorry about that. I—”

  “Shut up, Cisco Kid.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Shee-it!” She gave it a good West Virginia drawl. Then she looked at the train wreck of his boxes. “Any idea where some plates are hiding?”

  He tore the flap off the nearest box, ripped it in two, and handed one to her.

  “Yeah, close enough.”

  While she served the pizza, h
e stripped the blanket and pillow off the couch and kicked two boxes into place as side tables. One tinked as if he’d probably just broken one of his few plates. The other almost broke his toe, which meant the box was filled Russian literature with an attitude.

  10

  “Do you dance?” A woman’s voice on the phone asked him in Russian. Tanya Larina.

  “Do I…dance?”

  Bethany was looking at him strangely. They’d finished most of the pizza and both beers. Now they were at either end of the couch and talking about dogs. Big surprise there. He’d managed to avoid the protectee topic, mostly.

  “Da. Ya tantsuyu,” was all Alex could think to say.

  “Good. Your Lieutenant Carlton Tibbets does not run and I can not imagine that he dances. Is he even alive? My day is over and I need to drop it in the road. Leave your dog and pick me up in fifteen minutes. We are going dancing.” And she hung up.

  He put his phone away and ran his hand through his hair, trying to figure out what had just happened.

  “What’s up?” Bethany still sat on the end of his couch.

  “Uh,” he wasn’t sure. It was his job to provide protection duty. And that meant he was on call. But…

  He didn’t have anything to place on the other side of that. Tanya’s safety was his job.

  He checked his watch. Nine-thirty at night. Tomorrow he was on duty at seven.

  His protectee had just made it sound as if she was going out with or without him. He was actually impressed that she had called him at all. Yesterday’s attack must have spooked her more than she was willing to admit. But she also wasn’t going to let such a thing keep her from doing what she wanted.

  “Uh,” he looked at Bethany again, then shrugged. “Looks like I’m back on duty.” He checked his watch again. “Actually, I’m already late.” Because even if he hit all the lights green, he was twenty minutes from her hotel.

  “Welcome to the friggin’ Secret Circus,” Bethany pushed to her feet and scooped up the last piece of pizza. “Ain’t protection detail just so fine?” She walked out the front door.