Then again, she was a soldier. And showing no weakness was part of who she was.

And she was good at it.

Katya met his gaze head-on. Giving him nothing.

At least she thought he'd given him nothing. Until he smiled the kind of smile that would have taken any conscious woman's breath away. "Oh no," he said. "Sweetheart, you aren't going anywhere."

And Katya knew that somehow, despite her best intentions, she'd given something away.

CHAPTER TWO.

Secrets. The woman had secrets. Which was fine; he had no problem with them in the normal scheme of things. But this time he had a feeling it was those secrets that were taking her away from him, and that was not going to happen.

Alex said nothing as Katya got out of the limo, holding the door open for him, her sharp gaze scanning the snowy street for danger. Not that there was any, he suspected, though after Tremain's shooting you could never tell.

He stepped out into the cold, his breath fogging the air.

Ahead of him was the building that was Zac's office, the HQ of his massively successful security firm, Black Star Security. Zac liked to keep the place, situated in a nondescript building in the Meatpacking District, low-key, a small metal plaque to the left of the door the only sign that you'd come to the right place.

Zac didn't need to advertise his services. People came to him.

Alex didn't look at Katya. "Stay with the car," he ordered, and strode up the steps toward the door. He didn't want her coming with him, especially not when he was going to talk to Zac about her.

He'd let her have her secrets earlier that morningif she didn't want to tell him then she didn't have to-but he was going to find them out nevertheless.

Everyone had a price and he was going to discover hers.

He wanted to keep her, family emergency or not, because he preferred her to the hulking, muscle-bound bastards he'd had for the past year or so. She was far more attractive for a start, and for another he generally felt more comfortable around women, period. Not that he'd ever tell anyone else that.

There was also the fact that he'd spotted a spark of ... interestyes, definitely interestin her eyes that morning. Interest in him.

He'd thought she was immune. Apparently not.

Alex smiled as he walked into Zac's building, because shit, he was used to being irresistible, especially to women, and knowing she wasn't as immune as she seemed gave him a certain amount of satisfaction.

The reception area of Black Star looked like any reception area for any bland business anywhere, blond receptionist behind the desk, magazines on the table, stock standard uncomfortable office furniture. There was even a potted plant, for fuck's sake.

The blonde looked up as Alex entered, smiling at him. "Mr. Rutherford is expecting you, Mr. St. James," she said pleasantly. "Please, go on through."

He blew her a kiss as he strode past toward Zac's office, not bothering to knock as he approached the closed door, just throwing it open and going right in.

Zac was sitting at his massive old-fashioned oak desk, typing something, his gaze fixed on his computer monitor. Sitting cross-legged on the end of the desk, her white-blond hair in a braid down her back, was Eva, who looked to be playing something on her phone.

It was an incongruous picture: the large, broad-shouldered mercenary in a perfectly pressed suit, at the computer, with the small, fine-boned woman in Docs, skinny jeans, and a leather jacket sitting on the desk like a child.

The two had a strange relationship. They weren't together and they never touched, but rarely did Alex see one without the other. Zac had apparently rescued Eva from a difficult situation, but what kind of situation Alex didn't know and had never asked about. Their little clubofficially the Nine Circles, unofficially the "fucked-up billionaires club"had pretty much one rule: Don't ask, don't tell.

So he didn't do either. Besides, he had too many demons of his own. He didn't need to take on anyone else's.

Eva didn't look up from the game she was playing on her phone as Alex came in, but Zac did. With perfect courtesy, he gestured to the chair opposite his desk, a deep leather armchair with a footstool. "Sit," he said with his deep, smooth, and perfectly spoken British accent. "I just have a couple of things to finish up here."

"About my lovely and mysterious bodyguard, I hope?" Alex sprawled in the chair, kicking his feet up on the footstool.

"Not only that." Zac sat and began typing again.

Interesting. Or maybe not so much interesting as worrying. At least the "not only" part was worrying. When Zac had something to tell Alex it was never going to be good, especially when he had a feeling he knew exactly what Zac was going to tell him.

He crossed his feet at the ankles and folded his hands in his lap. "Nice to see you too, Eva."

"Alex." Eva still didn't look at him.

He didn't even bother rolling his eyes. Eva was another woman apparently immune to him, and not through lack of trying. He'd persisted more as a point of honor than anything else until eventually, after she'd told him to fuck off more times than he cared to think about, he'd come to see her more as a little sister than a prospective lover. Annoying at times, useful at others, but always part of the family.

Like Honor?

Alex shifted at the thought of his real sister. The one he hadn't seen for nearly nineteen years. The one currently holed up with Gabriel Woolf, his best friend, in the guy's Colorado lodge. She'd been trying to get in touch with him but he'd ignored her texts and e-mails. Didn't answer her calls.

He wasn't ready to see her. He probably would never be ready to see her. He'd abandoned her and their mother a long time ago, and although he'd kept a watch on them from a distance, he didn't actually want to talk to them.

Fuck, what would he say? And Honor would have questions too. Like Where did you go? and What happened to you? and Why did you never call? Questions he wasn't going to answer, at least not in this lifetime.

Alex shifted again, pushing Honor out of his thoughts, concentrating on Zac's almost obsessively tidy office, all sleek furniture and no clutter whatsoever. The guy was so anal when it came to tidiness it made Alex want to tip over his wastebasket just to see what would happen.

"Come on, man," Alex said restlessly. "I've got shit to do."

Zac made one last movement with his mouse, then looked over at Alex, his amber eyes giving nothing away. "You wanted a report run on Katya Ivanova."

"Yeah. Did you find anything?"

"Apart from what I gave you when you first got her on contract?"

"Obviously."

Zac leaned his elbows on his desk and laced his fingers together. "What's your interest in her?"

"Oh Christ, if we're going to be having the third degree-"

"A lot of her information is classified, which makes it difficult to get hold of. And difficult to get hold of means more work for me. I just want to know whether this is idle interest so you can fuck around with her, or whether you're serious."

Alex put his hands behind his head and met the other man's gaze. "By 'fuck around' I assume you mean..."

"She's female. That's reason enough to ask."

Alex was aware that Eva had put down her game and was looking at him. He ignored her. He knew she had some kind of crazy protective thing going on when it came to women, and generally he was fine with that. But sometimes the assumptions she made about him pissed him off. "Jesus, can't I ask a simple question about someone without you two assuming I want to screw her?"

"No," Eva said flatly.

Resisting the temptation to be flippant, Alex looked at both of them in turn. "I never fuck around with my employees; you know this. The reason I want to know what's going on with her is that she's asked to be released from her contract."

"And you don't want to let her go?" Zac's gaze never left his.

"No. I don't. She's damn good at her job and a total professional." He allowed himself a smile. "Plus she's much better looking than any of my other bodyguards and I do like to maintain a certain image."

Eva scowled at him. "That's not the real reason."

Alex smiled back. "No, you're right; it's not. The real reason is that when I was sixteen I was raped by a guy and ever since then I don't feel super comfortable in close quarters with men."

There was a brief silence. Then Eva snorted. "Sure, use rape as a joke. That's pretty low, Alex."

They thought he was lying. Everyone always did.

He let the smile sit there. "I am pretty low, Eva. You know this about me."

"I imagine," Zac said, ignoring the sniping, "that she's returning to Russia because of a colleague of hers."

Alex gave his friend a sharp look. "What colleague?"

"His name is Mikhail Vasin. From the looks of things they were both in a special forces unit of the Russian army. He disappeared a couple of years ago in Chechnya after an anti-terrorist operation and is presumed dead. Or should I say 'was' presumed dead." Zac glanced back at his computer screen. "Apparently there's evidence he's still alive."

"So she's returning home for him?"

"They were both in the same unit for over two years." Zac looked at him. "She's ex-army, which means she'll have a very strong loyalty to her fellow soldiers. If he's been found alive, I can't imagine her sitting here on the sidelines."

No, she wouldn't. Katya had told Alex nothing of her life, but from what he'd seen of her in the past three months, she was a soldier through and through. Honorable, loyal, and upright. Pretty much the antithesis of himself, which did make it beautifully ironic that she was his bodyguard.

Man, did he love a good bit of irony.

"She told me it was a family emergency," he said to no one in particular.

"Perhaps she does consider this Vasin family. Both of their fathers were exKGB operatives, and are now pretty high up in the Russian military. A family business from the looks of things. If Vasin is involved in black ops activities no wonder she didn't tell you anything more."

"Not that it's any of your business," Eva added.

"It is when she wants to leave before her contract ends," Alex said without heat. "I wonder what she's planning. A rescue mission?"

"That's not the real question." Zac stared at Alex, his gaze unnervingly direct. "The real question is what you're going to do about those dice."

Fuck. Knowing Zac and his loathing of loose ends, he should have expected the question, or at least anticipated it. Alex crossed one ankle over his knee, shifting the tension that had suddenly gripped him. "I'm going to do nothing as yet."

"Why not? Tremain is still in a coma and no one knows who's responsible. Even my sources are finding it difficult to get anything concrete." He paused. "Considering that all of this appears to be centered on your family, I would have thought you'd have shown more interest than this."

Jesus, of course Zac wasn't going to let this go. He never let anything go.

"Hey, you know me," Alex said, going for flippant. "I don't give a shit about anything."

"Sure you do." Eva folded her arms. "I think you give a shit about this."

"What makes you say that?"

"You got all tense the moment Zac mentioned it." Her gray eyes narrowed. "You know more about this than you're letting on, Alex. Why not share with the rest of us?"

Could he say it again? No, he couldn't. The truth needed to be rationed carefully; otherwise it came off sounding far more real than he could handle.

"I thought we had a don't ask, don't tell policy?" he said instead.

"When it doesn't go outside the club," Zac replied. "But in this case, it's ending up affecting rather more than just us."

"Shouldn't you be having this little chat with Gabriel instead of me in that case? He was the one who opened this fucking can of worms in the first place."

"And you're the one who was at that casino." Zac's voice held a hint of iron. "You were the one who knew your father owned it when the rest of us didn't." He paused. "Anyway, we're on this path now; we may as well continue to walk it."

Alex didn't move. Christ, he'd already given away far too much already, which for a man famous for his poker bluffs was galling in the extreme. Fucking friends. This was why he had so very few of them. He hated being read so damn easily the way Zac and Eva seemed to be able to do.

"Very Zen," Alex said. "But we don't have to walk anything if we don't want to."

Zac leaned back in his chair. "You know where the dice Tremain gave Gabriel came from, don't you?"

He willed his muscles to relax. Made himself smile. "You mean your precious sources haven't figured it out already?"

"Of course they have. They're a VIP invitation to an exclusive poker game."

"Conrad South," Alex said. He'd long been able to say the name without inflection, without even feeling anything, something he'd spent long years dedicated to. "He owns a casino in Monte Carlo. The Four Horsemen. Every year he runs what he calls the Apocalypse, a high-stakes poker game by invitation only."

"And have you ever been invited?" Eva asked.

What did he say? More truth or another evasion? "No. But that's because Conrad knows I'd wipe the floor with him."

Zac was frowning. "But why would Tremain have those dice? And why did he give them to Gabriel? What's his connection to this casino?"

Alex had an idea. But it wasn't anything that Zac wouldn't be able to find out on his own, because he certainly wasn't going to tell the other man. The conversation had already progressed way beyond what Alex was comfortable with and he didn't want to be asked yet more questions that he didn't want to answer.

You really think it still matters? Haven't the last nineteen years of your life been about making sure it doesn't?

Alex took his hands from behind his head and put them on the arms of the chair. No, it didn't matter. It really didn't. "I'll leave you to work that one out for yourself, Zac." Alex pushed himself out of the chair. "I know how you love a good mystery."

The other man's amber gaze was impassive. "They're connected, aren't they? The Four Horsemen and that casino your father owned."

Shit. The guy was far too sharp for his own good. "Don't you have a proper job to think about? Papers to file or something?"

"I have a secretary for that kind of thing," Zac said without any discernable change in inflection. "There were things about that casino I didn't like."

"What? Other than the fact you could buy just about any drug you liked there?"