He’d already ordered it. Trays would be waiting on a trolley outside the bedroom door.
Drake lifted his head. “Something tells me it’s ready. Stay right where you are.”
The weakness disappeared instantly. Grace needed food. Just the thought of her being uncomfortable—God, hungry—in his home, was enough to energize him. He rolled out of bed naked, making for the door, then heard a soft noise behind him.
Drake turned. She was up on one elbow, staring, mouth slightly open. Her hair was tousled, falling in soft locks over her shoulders. One lock, delightfully, had fallen to encircle one nipple, now not cherry red and diamond hard but soft and pale.
An enchantress that had been tumbled and would be tumbled again.
Her eyes widened and he didn’t have to look down to see what was shocking her. He could feel it. His cock rising, lengthening, thickening. Color rose in her cheeks and her nipples turned a deeper pink. His cock rose higher on a thick pulse of blood at the sight. A vein pounded in her neck, bringing the blood that now flushed brightly down to her breasts. Breasts he’d touched, kissed. At the memory, his balls tightened, drew up while his cock burned.
They were seducing each other across ten feet of space.
Her stomach growled again. “Food,” she said weakly.
“Food,” he agreed, turning back around.
Ten
Fifty thousand dollars. So much, for so little. Andrew Peters, born Andrei Petrov, continued peeling potatoes while thinking it through.
Peeling potatoes as the kitchen commis was not where he wanted to be, in his tenth year out of cooking school. By rights, he should have been the chef, or at least the sous-chef, in a decent restaurant, socking money aside for his own place.
And he knew exactly what he wanted. He’d had his eye on the place for a while. A small place, a thousand square feet, in Chelsea. It would be decorated like the dining room in Tolstoy’s town mansion, serving pre-Revolutionary Franco-Russian haute cuisine, what the czars and barons ate before the Soviet monsters came and ransacked Mother Russia.
The Petrovs had been aristocracy in St. Petersburg, the family fortune and nearly all the family members wiped out by Stalin.
But books and photographs had somehow survived the monsters, ah yes, and had come down to the last Petrov. Andrei had an entrée into the lives of his forebears. Though he read the books and pored over the photographs in a small room with plyboard walls which hid nothing his drunken neighbors said or did, though he lived in a small, cramped fourth-floor walk-up in Brighton Beach, that wasn’t his life. His life was in another place and another time. In his imagination, Andrei was Prince Petrov, a grandee in nineteenth-century St. Petersburg.
He lived on Nevsky Prospekt in a palatial Italianate mansion, which had been his great-great-grandfather’s town house. As a young boy, before his parents emigrated, he used to stand in the street, small hands clutching the bars of the elaborate wrought-iron fence guarding the building, and imagine that the building now housing the state archives was still his. The mansion of Prince Petrov.
He knew every detail of his great-great-grandfather’s life. The number of servants, the coaches and the horses, each horse with its own groom. The social calendar filled with balls and concerts and parties. The elaborate meals with fifty guests eating off the one-thousand-piece gold-trimmed set of Limoges china.
And the food! He’d come across a set of menus for meals during the Christmas season of 1904 and his boy’s mind swam with the grandeur of it all. Borscht and kvass, kholodets, pelmeny, twenty different types of pirozhki, kebabs from woodland game hunted on Petrov land, sudak fished from the well-stocked ponds of the country dascha. Fruits and berries collected by the serfs, an enormous Sharlotka carried in on a two-foot-long silver serving tray borne by four servants. Washed down by the finest imported French champagne. Fifty guests, one hundred servants.
Andrei’s young heart thrilled at the images. Russia’s finest, at the Petrov table by candlelight, a quartet playing Mozart on the balcony overlooking the immense mirrored dining hall, an army of servants in livery, quietly serving the ton.
His parents applied to emigrate to Amerika when he was eleven, and he thought yes, perhaps Amerika would be the place where he would make his money and return in triumph to Russia, where the Petrovs would take their rightful place amongst the rich and mighty.
It didn’t turn out that way. Andrei’s father, an engineer, could only find work as a cab driver, working fourteen hours a day for a company that paid him a pittance. Andrei’s mother developed breast cancer and the two Petrov men watched helplessly as she died a fast, painful death.
When they buried her, his father died, too, except his body. He could barely work with his grief. So it was all on him—on Andrei, now Andrew. His shoulders had to bear the burden of the Petrovs.
He’d had such huge dreams of returning to the motherland, dreams with the solid feel of destiny to them. A Petrov picking up after seventy years of the barbarity of the Soviets. Yet with each passing year, as he grew taller, the plans grew smaller, shrinking steadily, until he was reduced to applying for aid to enroll in a second-rate cooking school.
It might have been his way out. A quick rise through the ranks, a few years at the top. Celebrity chefs could pull in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in salary and millions in sponsorships. But not him.
He’d been interviewing for the lowly job of garde manger, the fucking pantry supervisor, in a third-rate restaurant in Rockaway, when he’d heard of a job opening for a Russian speaker. In Manhattan, the heart of fine cuisine. And it paid three times the going salary.
It was a good job, in a superbly well-equipped kitchen, but his talents went unnoticed. Well, what could he expect? He was cooking for Russian thugs. Men who knew the best gun to use in a firefight, but who had no clue how to judge the fineness of crepes or the smooth consistency of a good béchamel. Or even appreciate the fine porcelain they ate on or the heavy crystal of the glasses they drank out of.
Andrei wouldn’t have cared one way or the other, except that they spoke the language he worshipped. The language of his forefathers. The language of Pushkin and Tolstoy and Yevteshenko.
Only this wasn’t the Russian he’d been taught by his parents. The language the thugs spoke was rough, ungrammatical, provincial, the Russian of illiterate goons. Gutter Russian, fit only for guttersnipes.
Yet the money was so good, he was forced to stay, even though every day was an assault on his senses, another day amongst the barbarians. He considered it a form of indentured servitude, the exorbitant salary he could never hope to duplicate elsewhere, like a noose around his neck, slowly choking him.
He studied his surroundings, seeking a way out. He was a prince among swine. It went without saying that he could outwit them all.
The kitchen fed forty-five men twice daily, like a small restaurant. It was also open whenever necessary, as men came and went at all hours of the day and the night. The food was copious, fresh and good, without any attempt at sophistication. After a week in the kitchen, Andrei realized that any decent housewife could do what he did. Only it had to be in Russian, since almost the entire staff was Russian or Ukrainian.
He worked for a mystery man everyone called Drake. Andrei knew very little about him and no one talked, ever. The closest Andrei could come to information on Drake was a friendship with the butler, a Russian-Ukrainian called Shota. Shota was fanatically faithful to Drake, though Andrei couldn’t understand why. The mystery man kept to himself on the top story of the building, rarely interacting with the staff except through intercom messages.