I watched Alejandra’s eyes widen as she looked up at my beachfront house. “You live here?” she asked incredulously. I could see from her frown, and hear in the tone of her voice, that she recognized the place.

I shrugged. “The first part of my deal with your father,” I told her. “I needed a place to live, after all, and although the place my uncle Evgeni proposed was…adequate, I was looking for someplace better.”

For a moment, I thought Alejandra was going to bolt. But then she shook her head and allowed me to lead her inside. The second the door closed behind us, I pushed her against the wall, slotting a leg between hers and kissing her long and hard. There was something intoxicating about this girl—the spicy scent of her skin, the fiery way that she kissed. I just couldn’t get enough of it.

It was more than just lust, I was starting to realize. I liked her personality, her hot-headedness and her way of speaking her mind. I liked that she made me want to open up to her—in a way that I hadn’t done in a very long time.

But I didn’t want to consider that now. For now, I wanted to take care of this carnal need to fuck her until she screamed.

We didn’t make it to the bedroom. I steered us towards the living room couch, tearing her dress and her panties off as I did so. She was equally frantic with her fingers at my belt, but she kept getting distracted, her fingers skimming across my chest and then looping behind my neck, drawing me in closer to her.

I pushed her back onto the couch, and she stared up at me with dark, heavy-lidded eyes while I stripped off the remainder of my clothes. Then, I covered her body with mine, nudging in between her legs. She was practically dripping already I discovered, as I plunged my fingers into her slit. Needy and whimpering, her fingers clinging to my shoulders.

I nipped at her neck and she cried out, her head tilting back to give me better access. “Please,” she whimpered plaintively.

“Well, how could I argue with that?” I murmured.

I thrust into her in one hard push, slicing deep into her core, making her practically convulse. When I looked up at her face, she looked positively wrecked already, her hair falling all around her face, her mouth hanging open, her eyes squeezed shut as she shuddered in pleasure.

I grinned and rocked into her again, snapping my hips hard against hers—hard enough to drive away all thought. God, she felt good around me. I wanted to keep fucking her again and again until we collapsed in a tangle of limbs.

As with the dancing at Playa, she met my movements perfectly, her body opening to welcome me, her hips pressing up to meet mine. I shifted, changing the angle slightly, and she howled out my name, a litany of please beginning to fall from her lips.

I could tell she was getting close, the walls of her pussy tightening around my length. I knew that as soon as she came, I would as well, and I was torn between the desire to prolong this, to slow down and gentle my thrusts, to wait…or to keep doing exactly what I was doing and push us both over the edge with one final, quick thrust.

In the end, it had to be the latter: there was no way I could slow down now, not as close as we were. My whole body felt as though it was on fire as I pounded into her, squeezing her hips tighter and tighter until she suddenly came, her back arching off the sofa, her fingers clenching desperately against my forearms as I hovered over her.

As I let go inside of her, my vision whited out for a second. We were suspended in a timeless state of ecstasy, both shaking with the strength of our pleasure. Even after I was spent, it was hard to open my eyes again, my mind still trapped in an endless loop of pure, undiluted feeling.

Finally, I managed to pull away from her. Alejandra looking just as fucked out as I felt. Slowly she started to smile, and I gave her an easy, answering smile in return.

I watched her grimace as I pulled out and, curious, I reached up to flick one of her nipples. She squirmed, but she didn’t push me again. My grin widened, and I rolled off her, getting to my feet and lifting her up into my arms.

“What are you doing?” she gasped, clinging to my chest.

“Bed’s upstairs,” I told her, giving her a wicked smile. “I figured if we were going to go for round two, that might be more comfortable.”

Her eyes widened at the thought of a second round, but she grinned right back at me. “Good thinking,” she said, and I whisked her away upstairs.

Whatever it was I had with Alejandra, it wasn’t my usual style. I was more of a fuck-and-run kind of guy. Sure, I might let her stay a while afterwards; I wasn’t an asshole. But I never woke up with a girl in my bed the next morning.

Yet with Alejandra, I found that I didn’t mind her presence there. I smiled over at her sleeping form, noting how pretty she looked with that soft smile on her face, her hair strewn on the pillow around her.

But I wasn’t looking for a girl who was pretty in the morning. I was looking for a woman who was sexy at night. Alejandra had certainly been that, but this thing had gone on for long enough. I didn’t plan to stay in Barcelona long-term, and anyway, I wasn’t looking for a relationship. Especially not with a Spaniard. Especially not with a woman who was the daughter of someone I was involved in business with.

I nudged Alejandra’s hip, and she blearily opened her eyes, her smile widening as she stretched hugely. “Dios mio, I feel good right now,” she murmured. Then, she got a sly look on her face, and I had the feeling she was about to ask for another round.

And I was certainly tempted, but I knew that the longer we drew this out, the more difficult it was going to be to stop things. So I frowned at her. “I have an early meeting,” I said. “I have to get going.” I waited for her to put two and two together, and I pushed back a flicker of guilt as her face fell and she pulled herself from bed. “I’ll call you,” I promised, even though I wasn’t sure where the words came from.

Alejandra paused, looking back at me, and then she smiled slowly. “Okay,” she said. She got dressed and slipped out of the room, and I fell back on the bed, letting out a heavy breath.

But I didn’t call her back. A couple weeks passed, and I was careful to avoid her, both around the clubs and at the Audaz headquarters building. I couldn’t believe I had gotten so caught up in the moment. I didn’t know what either of us had been thinking. If Ignasi found out… But fortunately, she didn’t seem to have said anything to him, and I started to breathe more easily.

Of course, that’s when Uncle Evgeni called me into his office at the Volkov family headquarters.

I sighed and dropped into a chair across from him, not even bothering to let him acknowledge my presence first. “You have a job for me?” I asked.

Evgeni narrowed his eyes at me. “Don’t bullshit me,” he said. “You know why you’re here.”

I grimaced. “If this is about-”

He slammed his fist on the desk, making his pens rattle in the cup near his computer. “Deals with members of Audaz!” he snarled.

I sighed. “Just one member,” I told him, as though that made any difference. “And I trust Ignasi.”

“Then you’re a fool,” Evgeni said, a sneer on his face. “But I guess that’s the reason you got sent away from Moscow as well.”

I narrowed my eyes right back at him. “You don’t know anything about what happened in Moscow,” I told him. “Don’t pretend for a second that you do.” I shook my head. “I’ve been working on the deal with someone in Audaz, sure. But don’t think that I’m not getting exactly what I want out of it. It’s all about how you compromise. Ignasi doesn’t need the beach clubs. He’s more than happy to give up those properties. And I’m more than willing to pay him handsomely to do so.”

“I don’t know anything about what happened in Moscow?” Evgeni asked incredulously. “After I spent weeks of talking with your father about it, as the man pleaded for me to take you in, to help you out? They would have killed you if you stayed in Moscow. You went against the family’s best wishes; you made deals with the wrong people. And look how they repaid you: putting a bounty on your head.”

“And yet, they never did come after me,” I pointed out, shaking my head. “Don’t you think that’s a little odd?”

I wasn’t accusing them of lying. I knew that I had made my father’s position in the family uncomfortable, to say the least, making deals behind their backs the way that I had. But if Cyril and his lackeys had really wanted me dead, I think I would have known it. Maybe this whole exile had nothing to do with Cyril and everything to do with the family pride.

“Anyway,” I said before my uncle could respond, “you’re just angry about this deal because you wish you had the balls to make a deal like this. You’ve become weaker the older you’ve gotten. The Volkov family is never going to prosper if you and the rest of our leaders don’t learn to take risks every once in a while.”

“There are certain risks that a man should never take,” Evgeni said stubbornly.

“Why, because it might hurt your pride to have to do deals with Audaz?” I asked, unable to keep the sneer out of my own voice now. “I’ve been very careful with this deal. Ignasi and I had laid out most of it before I even came to Barcelona. We have signed contracts, made agreements. Everything is going the way that it should.”

“Or so you hope,” Evgeni said, shaking his head. “You can’t trust Audaz. There’s no reason to. It’s not like us, with a family name to look out for. They are snakes, the lot of them.”

“There are ways to deal with snakes,” I said firmly, getting to my feet. “There’s nothing left to talk about.”

“If you get into trouble with Audaz, the Volkov family won’t be bailing you out this time,” my uncle warned as I walked out of his office.

I shook my head but didn’t bother to respond. Instead, I was dialing Alejandra’s number even as I was leaving. I knew I should be keeping my distance from her, that I couldn’t afford to keep running around with her. That was one thing that could really ruin the deal that I had with Ignasi.

But right now, the idea of some rough, meaningless sex sounded really good. I wanted to pound into her, to forget all about this ridiculous conversation with my uncle.

It wasn’t all about that, though. Something told me that just her very presence would calm me down, somehow. I shook my head, trying to push that thought away.

Sex, that was all that this was about. But she didn’t answer anyway.