The Soldier's Seduction

She thought back to that night. To the shouts and running footsteps. To her mother dragging Steffi and Greg from their beds and pushing them up the stairs to the attic, her whispered voice urging them to stay there.

“No matter what you see or hear.” Steffi could still hear the terror in her mother’s tone as she said those words.

They had huddled together, lifting the trapdoor that led from their parents’ bedroom to the attic space an inch or two while they watched the scene below...even though they didn’t want to see. Men had crowded into the room, all of them dressed in black. All of them with the tattooed eye on their right hands. Steffi hadn’t seen what happened to her mother, but she had pressed a hand to her mouth as they beat her father. Then another man had come into the room. A big man with dark hair. The atmosphere changed with his arrival. He didn’t have the tattoo, but he was in charge.

Steffi had known this man. He was her father’s friend. He visited their house often, bringing presents for her, and spending hours playing with her by the pool. Greg used to be jealous of the time this man spent with Steffi. He teased her and said she was the favorite. This man wouldn’t hurt them. Why, only a few days earlier, he had brought Steffi the doll she wanted. She had turned to smile at Greg in relief and saw his eyes widen in horror. A shot rang out and Steffi had looked back in time to see the big man lower his gun as her father’s body crumpled to the floor.

“Find the children.” His pleasant voice with an American accent had sounded different as he strode out of the room.

The men had started to search the house, and Steffi could still recall the choking sense of panic when two of them pointed up to the trapdoor. As one of them pulled up a chair and prepared to stand on it, police sirens could be heard approaching the house, and the other man cursed, pulling his friend by the arm; they both ran off.

“The police found us eventually. Mama had told us not to come down, so we didn’t,” Steffi said as she finished recounting this memory to Bryce. Tears sparkled on the ends of her lashes, but she blinked them away. “We told the police what we saw, but no one was ever convicted of the crime.”

“Didn’t you know his name? The man who pulled the trigger?”

“We knew him as our Uncle Waltz, although we had heard our father call him ‘Big Guy.’ The police couldn’t trace him from either of those names. Looking back, I’m not sure how hard they tried. My father wasn’t exactly a law-abiding citizen. Perhaps they were glad his murderer had put an end to the activities of his criminal organization.” She gave a rueful smile. “I went to my new home, became Steffi Grantham, had counseling, of course, and started a new life. Greg’s adoptive parents and mine tried to keep in touch for a while, but it was hard and eventually we lost contact with each other.”

“Until recently,” Bryce said.

“Yes.” Steffi felt a tiny, reminiscent smile touch her lips. “Our mother was an actress, and I suppose we both inherited the gene. It was all I ever wanted to do and it seems Greg was the same. The chances of us ending up on the same movie together were crazily remote, but we liked to think it was fate’s way of bringing us back together. Once we found each other again, we spent so much time together, the press invented this big romance and we decided it was easier to go along with it than tell the truth.”

A shadow passed over her features and Bryce observed it with a frown. “Tell me the rest, Steffi.”

“We talked about the way our parents died, of course. We were curious to find out why it happened. So we set about discovering exactly who our father really was. It wasn’t easy. Getting information about him from Russia was hard, and he had covered his tracks well, but we managed to piece enough together from a number of sources. It was a shock to learn just what he had been involved in.” Steffi turned to look directly at Bryce. “To learn that the father you loved did some horrible things...that’s not an easy discovery to make. But it got worse.” She covered her face with her hands as the memories came flooding back. “It got so much worse when we realized who the Big Guy was.”

* * *

Bryce fixed more coffee and finally delivered the toast he’d promised hours earlier. When Steffi shook her head, he tried for the authoritative tone Leon had used the previous day. “You have to start taking care of yourself. You’ve been ill and you haven’t eaten properly for days.”

He was worried about her. Those pictures in the celebrity magazines had shown a woman with a stunning figure. The Steffi he knew was thinner than the Hollywood actress they depicted. Now she had lost even more weight and her illness of the last few days had given her an air of fragility. Her cheek and collarbones jutted and her pale skin appeared almost translucent. Whatever ordeal Steffi had to face next, whether it involved the police and the media or more running, Bryce wondered if she would have the strength to deal with it.

Her story so far was a wild one, but he believed it. Although he hadn’t known Steffi very long, his gut told him she wasn’t a liar. That might sound like a bizarre claim to make since she had gotten a job in his company under false pretenses, but he was prepared to stake his honor on it. And his honor meant more to Bryce than anything.

His ribs were aching as he left Steffi begrudgingly nibbling on a slice of toast and made his way to the bathroom. Pulling his T-shirt over his shoulders was a painful process and, when he checked his reflection in the mirror, his sides were a patchwork of marks in varying shades of red, pink and purple. He winced as he felt his way around, but decided there were no bones broken. His body might be hurting, but his mind felt clearer than it had in a long time. When it had mattered most, the nightmares of flames and blood hadn’t intruded. The doubts and fears hadn’t held him back. He had done what he needed to do. He had gone to Steffi’s aid and fought the bad guys. It felt like he had defeated a monster. A monster that had lived inside him for a long time.

Opening the medicine cabinet, he rummaged around for the salve he knew Laurie kept in there. He remembered her talking about the natural remedy she had purchased at the monthly farmers’ market in Stillwater and about how well it worked on bruising and swelling. Taking the salve and a roll of bandage back into the family room, he presented them to Steffi. She regarded him with raised brows.

“I can’t reach all the way around to get this stuff on my back. And, if I try to put my own dressing on, I’ll look like I’ve been engaging in a bondage ritual.”

Although she attempted a smile, Steffi’s lip trembled slightly as she viewed his injuries. “I wouldn’t have dragged you into this for anything.”

“Just tell me you really do have a commercial driver’s license, and you haven’t been driving my trucks around illegally these last few months,” he said, shivering slightly as her fingertips connected with his flesh and she began to smooth the salve over his bruises.

“Of course I have one.” She glanced up from her task, her expression indignant. “Vincente checked out my qualifications when he employed me.”

His curiosity was aroused by her words and he thought again how little he knew of her. “Why would a Hollywood actress need a CDL?”

“I had to play a truck driver in one of my movies and, although the actual driving was done by a stunt driver, I wanted to make the close-ups look realistic. So I got a license.”

That statement summed Steffi up, Bryce decided. It told him more about her than anything else. It epitomized the determined, unyielding, downright bullheaded way she approached the world. Knowing something of her story, he now knew where that came from. There were still so many things he needed to ask her. There was the whole story about the murders. His instinct from the start had been to believe Steffi when she said she hadn’t murdered Greg Spence and the woman who was with him. It was hard to say why. He barely knew her, but he knew he trusted her. She might drive him crazy on a daily basis, but he had never once doubted her integrity. She hadn’t told the truth about who she was when she came to work for him, but she hadn’t lied, either. She had simply hidden her identity. Once she told him Greg was her brother—with genuine love and grief in those amazing eyes—he had known for sure she wasn’t responsible for the deaths. Even so, she still had a lot of explaining to do.

“If you didn’t kill them, why did you run?”

“I found their bodies.” There was a haunted look in her eyes. “And, just before I did, I saw a man with a tattoo on the back of his hand leaving the elevator in Greg’s apartment building. It was the same tattoo I’d seen on the hands of the men who killed my parents. The same one that was on the man who broke into my cabin today.” Her voice trembled on something close to a sob. “I panicked and ran.”

There were other questions battling for supremacy, and, as Steffi’s soothing fingers continued to apply the salve, Bryce struggled to make sense of and prioritize them. Why had she fled? Why had she come to Stillwater? Who were the men who had pursued her—Bryce had heard an accent and a smattering of a language he didn’t know. He had guessed Eastern European and knew now it was Russian—and how had they found her?

In the end, as Steffi wound the bandage around his waist, he went for the question that seemed the least important, but the one that, for some reason, really mattered. “Should I still call you Steffi?”

She paused, her hand resting on his abdomen. Her touch sent a shimmer of heat through to his nerve endings. It felt a lot like arousal, but that couldn’t be right. How totally out of place would that be in this situation? And anyway, this was Steffi. He might like sparring with her; she might be the only person who could hold his attention for longer than five minutes these days, but did that mean he felt something for her? And if he did, he should shake that aside fast. His head and his heart were in such an almighty mess that neither of them was in any state to consider sharing their contents with another person.

In spite of everything, there was a hint of mischief in Steffi’s eyes as she smiled. “My full name is Stefanya. I use Anya as my stage name, but my family—and my friends, the few I have—have always called me Steffi.”

“Do I qualify as a friend?” He didn’t know why, but it was important to know the answer to that question.

The smile changed and he got a glimpse of full-on Hollywood charm. It nearly knocked him off his feet. “Engaging in a car chase and shooting the bad guy for me? I think you qualify.”

Steffi finished winding the bandage around his torso and neatly tied the ends. Bryce shifted from side to side. It wasn’t comfortable, but hopefully it would help him heal. “I’ll get one of Cameron’s T-shirts and then you can tell me the rest of the story.”

Steffi nodded, her smile vanishing and nervousness taking its place. He turned away, intending to make his way to the bedroom...just as the front door came crashing in.

* * *

The three men who burst through the door clearly meant business. Bryce sprang into action, reaching for the gun he had placed on the table. Before his fingers could close over the butt, one of the intruders aimed a kick at his head. Steffi heard the sickening crunch of a boot connecting with Bryce’s skull and watched in horror as her only hope crumpled to the floor.

“Shall I finish him off?” The man who had kicked him spoke with a pronounced Russian accent as he trained his gun hopefully on Bryce’s unconscious form. Steffi recognized him as the giant, tattooed intruder who had burst into her cabin and been in the process of dragging her down the hall when Bryce had knocked him out. The darkening bruise on his chin confirmed it. Her heart thudded uncomfortably as she waited for a response to his question.

“No.” The man who answered him had a shaved head and an air of authority. There was barely a trace of an accent when he continued. “The Big Guy doesn’t like it when people he knows nothing about get involved in his business. He’ll want to ask this guy some questions before you get to put a bullet in his brain and throw him in the lake.”

Even though the future didn’t sound hopeful for Bryce, it was a reprieve. Of sorts. Steffi began to slowly back up toward a side table on which a large piece of rose-colored quartz was the centerpiece. If she could just get her hand around that chunk of mineral...

The man who was in charge turned his attention to her. Like his companions, he had the tattooed eye on the back of his right hand.

“You have led us on quite a chase, Stefanya. Yuri has a bullet in his knee courtesy of your friend here. Luckily, he was able to notice you had a flat tire as you drove off. We followed the shredded rubber and the marks your rims made on the asphalt. They led us right here.” He shook his head with mock sadness. “The Big Guy is not happy at the delay.” He signaled to his companions. “Erik, pick up the guy, get him in the car. Sergei, bring Stefanya. Let’s get moving. No more screwups.”

Erik was the huge man who had kicked Bryce. He tucked his gun into the waistband of his pants. Placing his hands under Bryce’s armpits, he began to drag him across the floor toward the door. Sergei, who until now had remained in the background, made a move toward Steffi. Even as her instincts for self-preservation went into overdrive, her fear for Bryce’s well-being kicked up a notch. She wanted to run to him and check he was okay, to shove the thug who was hauling him aside and cradle his head against her breast. The tender feelings welling up inside her were new, unexpected and highly inconvenient.

As Sergei reached out a hand to grab her, Steffi ducked under his arm. He called her an unflattering name and moved in closer. Steffi came up to one side of him, grabbed the piece of quartz and swung the heavy object into the side of his head. It made a satisfying crunch as it connected with his temple. He staggered backward from the impact, clutching a hand to his head as blood blossomed between his fingers. It bought Steffi a few precious seconds, but as she darted toward the open glass doors that led to the deck, she heard him coming after her.

When she reached the deck rail, she turned, taking Sergei by surprise as she gripped the wood with her hands and used it to support her weight. The years of dance training she had engaged in during her time at performing arts school came to her aid and, springing up with the full power of her body behind her, she kicked Sergei in the groin with both feet. He dropped onto the deck like a stone.

She didn’t have time to waste on feelings of gratification. The leader of the group burst through the door seconds later, gun in hand. There was only one way for Steffi to go. It was a long way down, but the alternative didn’t bear thinking about. Taking a deep breath, she placed both hands on the deck rail and vaulted over, propelling her body outward to avoid the jagged rocks.

As she landed on the pebbly lakeside beach, her left foot turned at an awkward angle and she gave a sharp cry of mingled pain and dismay. Struggling to her feet, she attempted to break into a run. It was impossible. Sharp, screaming agony shot from her ankle right up through her calf. She closed her eyes and swallowed hard. She couldn’t even walk. With a sob of frustration, she sank back down onto the pebbles.

“Go down there and get her.” There was a note of smug pleasure in the leader’s voice as it drifted down from the deck above her. “And Sergei?”

“Yes, boss?”