said quietly, and began to turn away, but she reached up, yanked him down to eye level, and nailed her mouth against his. It wasn’t a kiss, it was a hurricane. Her strong fingers laced around the back of his neck, her ankle hooked his knee, and Ian found himself burying his hands in her hair and yanking her hard up against him. He felt her compact form almost climbing up his as her teeth scored his lip. He bit at her right back, drinking the taste of her like ice and salt and violence. His wife kissed like she was trying to drink his heart through his throat.
“Bloody hell, woman,” he managed to say, heart pounding. “The mouth on you . . .”
She regarded him coolly, as if they hadn’t just nearly ravaged each other against a deck railing. “I don’t want to talk.”
He could still taste her, like the icy burn of vodka electric in his throat. “I don’t either.”
They dragged each other back to the tiny cabin booked in the name of Mr. and Mrs. Graham, which Ian hadn’t set foot in. Is this a good idea? he thought.
No, he answered himself promptly. But I don’t give a damn. Banging the door shut, he picked up his wife and kissed her again.
“Chyort,” she muttered, wrenching at his shirt as they toppled onto the bed. “What are you doing?”
“Confiscating your weaponry.” Ian tugged the razor out of her boot top. “I know better than to take an armed woman to bed.”
“You have to fight me for it.” She gave a mock snarl like a wolverine, her strong limbs coiling and twisting through his. She was half laughing and half angry, at herself or at him he didn’t know, but she was nearly throwing off sparks of heat and fury as they kissed and struggled and clawed to get closer. There were enough buried sparks of his own anger to meet hers, the banked antagonism of the quarrel in his office flaring into a different kind of fire as he roped her hair around his hand and pulled it tight, and she left the marks of her teeth in his shoulder even as she wrapped her legs around his waist. The razor came partly unfolded and nicked Ian’s arm before he got it away from her.
“I know how to fight, you Red Menace.” Ian hurled the razor across the cabin and kissed her again, drinking down her bone-buckling taste of ice and arctic wind, blood and sweetness. Her nails raked his back, and he sank into her like he was sinking into a headwind, blown and tossed and dizzied by chaos.
The first thing she said afterward was, “We still get divorce.”
Ian burst out laughing. They were both still breathing hard, sweating, sheets and skin lightly dappled with blood from the cut on his arm, which he still didn’t feel even remotely. “I’d say this rules out nonconsummation as grounds.”
“This is—” Nina hunted for a word, muttered something in Russian. Squirming away from his side, she set her back against the foot of the bed facing him, scowling. Ian’s flare of anger had burned out, but she was still crackling and sparkling, all wary prickles in the dark. “We’re on the hunt. We search, we fight, the blood is up, we screw. Is all it is.”
Ian leaned forward to run a hand over the smooth curve of her leg still tangled with his, down the strong arch of her calf. She had a tattoo on the sole of her foot, he saw with fascination; some spiky Cyrillic lettering. Шестьсот шестнадцать. The visceral tug toward his wife that he’d felt at the deck railing hadn’t gone out, it had only gone deeper. He curved a hand around her ankle. “If that’s how you want it, comrade.”
“Is.” She looked fierce, and he wondered what she was remembering. What memory she’d pushed down when she dragged her eyes away from that quarter moon and dragged him down for a kiss instead.
“Who were you thinking of when you kissed me?” he asked, running his thumb over the Cyrillic on her small foot.
She looked him in the eye. “No one.”
Liar, Ian thought, even as he tugged her back toward him and kissed her scowling mouth. What’s going on in that head of yours, Nina? Who are you? He still had no idea, only that the answer was growing more complicated rather than less.
Chapter 24
Nina
January 1943
North Caucasus front
This makes thirteen,” Yelena called on ascent. By now