I flagged the bartender over and got him to pour a line of shots. “To Cousin Vanya’s new promotion!” I said, holding up one of the glasses.

“Yeah, yeah, don’t be a dick, Alexei,” Vanya said, rolling his eyes, but I could tell that he was secretly pleased. His father, Evgeni, had been trying to keep him out of the family business for a long time now, and I imagined Vanya was more than glad to finally have completed his first big mission.

“Should we toast to the fact that our not-quite sister-in-law will be joining us in Barcelona soon too?” Dmitry asked, a teasing glint in his eye.

I rolled my eyes. “Yulia and I are not getting involved again,” I told him, even though it went without saying. “She’s just here to keep her father company.”

“Sure,” Nikolai said. “Because her father isn’t some business tycoon who travels the world on his own for more than half the year, is he?”

“She isn’t coming here to see me,” I snapped. “She probably just wanted to get away from the cold in Russia and come here to lay on the beaches for a while.”

There were knowing looks around the table. I took another drink just to shut them all up.

The truth was, I knew it was going to be hard to see Yulia again after all these years. We were serious once—serious enough that I would have thought that by now, we’d be married, all moved into a home together in St. Petersburg, maybe a couple of kids...

But that hadn’t happened. I’d been sent here to Barcelona to help with the family business, and Yulia had stayed in St. Petersburg to finish her studies and start her career. I couldn’t exactly be upset with her over that; it wasn’t like I could expect her to give up everything that she had ever worked towards to come live with me in a foreign country where we didn’t even speak the local language.

I just wished that things could have been different somehow. But there was no use dwelling on that now. That was five years in the past now, and we’d both moved on. Not that I’d dated anyone since Yulia, but I wasn’t anywhere near celibate. In fact, I’d probably take someone home tonight, just to take my mind off of her.

“Uh oh, now you’ve made him gloomy,” Andrei said, raising an eyebrow at me.

I rolled my eyes again. “I was just thinking about what I wanted to drink,” I told him, slipping out of the booth and heading towards the bar. “And who I’m taking home tonight.”

There was a chorus of catcalls from behind me, guys yelling out for me to go get it, and I couldn’t help grinning. I had never really settled into Barcelona like the rest of them had, but I had to admit, there was something nice about being there with family.

I shoved my hands into my pockets as I waited for the bartender to get to me, hoping that none of my cousins had followed me. I knew they were just teasing—that they probably wouldn’t have brought it up, even, if they knew how deep those feelings still went. I guess they probably all thought that I’d fucked enough girls since Yulia that I wouldn’t even remember her. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.

Even now, if I closed my eyes, I could see her laughing green eyes and her long, dark hair. She had a great figure but never liked to show it off. While studying to be a teacher, she was more comfortable in jeans and a sweater than in the heavy furs, and long dresses that her mother wanted her to wear. But I always thought she was cute.

Once I’d moved to Barcelona, I’d cut off all contact with her; it had just been too painful for the both of us. Neither of us wanted to have a long-distance relationship, not when we didn’t even know when we’d see one another again. What kind of family would we make, only seeing one another on the holidays?

So I didn’t even know what she’d ended up doing. She must have graduated; she had always been driven. But she could be married by now, or at least have some boyfriend. Probably some wimpy coworker of hers, some scrawny guy who wasn’t suited to her at all. Maybe they’d been close once, but there had always been something missing between the two of them. They had never had the passion that Yulia and I had.

I shook my head, knowing that I needed to quit thinking about her. The bartender materialized in front of me, and I quickly placed my order for just a good old vodka tonic. The bartender nodded at me and automatically went for the top-shelf vodka—the good stuff. There were perks when your family owned the hottest club in the city, and here in Barcelona, the main perk, as far as I was concerned, was the fact that we actually stocked real Russian vodka. Not the watered-down paint-stripper that most of the other places in the city touted as “vodka.”

“Mm, I love a man who loves a simple vodka drink,” a woman to my left purred.

I turned towards her, smiling as I saw the display of cleavage that she was showing off in her low-cut silver dress. She had nice legs, too, I thought absently, tracing the lines of them as they reached towards the rungs on the stool she was perched on. When I looked back up at her face, she was smiling knowingly at me.

“See something you like?” she asked, recrossing her legs in the other direction so that my attention was drawn back to them.

I had to grin, shaking my head. She knew exactly what she was doing, the little minx. She was practically begging for me to take her home.

Still, I decided to flirt with her first—half the fun was in the chase. I didn’t want to seem too easy.

So I shrugged and took a sip of my drink. “I’m hardly the only person you’ll meet drinking vodka in here.”

“Yeah, I heard that this place is owned by Russians or something,” the woman said, cocking her head to the side. “Your family?”

I shrugged. “Yeah,” I admitted. “We do a lot of business in this city.”

The woman laughed. “Do I want to know what kind of business?” she asked, reaching out a hand to trace the tattoos swirling up my forearm. “You look like you must be the type of guy who’s up to no good.”

I raised an eyebrow at her. “Is that something you’d like?” I asked her. “Maybe you’re just a naughty girl yourself who’s come to the bar all alone looking for trouble. Just hoping someone to take you home and fuck you silly tonight.”

Even surrounded by the noise of the club, I could practically hear her sharp intake of breath. I could definitely see the way her eyes darkened with lust. Yeah, she needed this, I thought smugly.

“Is that what you want to do with me?” she asked, reaching for my glass as though she had every right in the world to take a sip of my drink. Normally, I would snap at a stranger who did something so overly familiar. But instead, I watched in surprise as she savored the sip like she really appreciated the taste of good vodka.

Which was so rare in a woman, even back home.

“You know, if I didn’t know better, I’d think that you must be Russian as well,” I said jokingly.

The woman raised an eyebrow at me. “How do you know I’m not?” she asked.

I stared at her for a long moment. I supposed she did look almost Russian, with that dark hair and those chiseled features. I hadn’t noticed it at first because I’d been so focused on her sex appeal, but she actually looked something like Yulia might have looked, if she’d dressed up sexily and put on makeup. But I shook my head. “You don’t have the accent,” I pointed out.

“I’ve spent years working on getting rid of it. It helps that I work at a bilingual school, where we have plenty of native English-speaking teachers.” The woman smiled sharply at me. “You know, Alexei, I’d think that after all these years, you might still recognize me.”

I felt as though the floor had dropped out from beneath me. “Yulia?” I asked incredulously.

From her stool, Yulia gave me a mocking bow. “Guess I’m just another in the string of women whose hearts you plan to break in this city?” she asked bitterly.

I wanted to remind her that I had already broken her heart. But somehow, that didn’t seem appropriate. Instead, I shook my head, taking a step back. I still couldn’t believe it was her. Gone was the mousy girl-next-door that I had always known. She had grown into her curves, and she had dressed like…

I swallowed hard. She had dressed to look sexy.

Not only that, but her presence here in Ritmo couldn’t be a coincidence. It might be a coincidence that I had happened to run into her at the bar, that I had tried to chat her up, but she must have known exactly what she was doing, coming in here, looking like that. I glanced over towards my cousins, wondering who had told her that we were going to be there that night. But they were all studiously avoiding looking over.

Guilty, all of them, I thought. Not that there was anything I could do about it.

I looked back at Yulia, wondering what to do now. I wondered if she really did want me to take her home that night, if that had been another part of her act or if that was really true. But my feelings were too mixed up for me to risk taking her home. She might be here in Barcelona for the next couple weeks, but I had no doubt that she would be returning to Russia after that. I better stick to those meaningless one-night stands.

With that in mind, I spun away from Yulia, heading towards the door. Suddenly, Ritmo seemed claustrophobic, and I knew that it was time to get myself home. I’d down another few drinks and pass out on the couch. No shame in that, in the privacy of my own home.

But even three strong drinks later, I couldn’t stop thinking of Yulia’s long legs. I wanted them wrapped around me, or I wanted her bent over at the end of the couch as I took her from behind. There was so much pent-up need between us, so much history, that the lines blurred and I didn’t even know what I wanted.

Her. I just wanted her.

I shook my head and flopped back on the couch. I couldn’t have her, and I knew that. Or rather, I could have her, but only for a couple weeks. Not nearly enough to satisfy either of us. Just long enough to make everything hurt all the worse in the end.

One thing was for sure: I was going to have to avoid her while she was here. It shouldn’t be too difficult to do: she might be here to accompany her father, but that didn’t mean that Yulia herself had anything to do with Volkov family business. I might bump into her around headquarters once or maybe twice, but that was it. As long as I steered clear of Ritmo and other places that she might be, it would be fine.

With that resolve in mind, I drifted into an uneasy sleep.