“They must not teach self-preservation in Miami.”

I stilled. “Are you warning me away from you?”

He showed me a flash of teeth, then looked away and pulled a piece of lint from his suit pants. “Yes. If I were you, I’d get out and run now.”

I stared at him.

His gaze returned to mine, and a slow smile pulled on his lips. He was joking. But something in his eyes didn’t relent.

I swallowed and glanced back out the window.

Entering through the front doors of the restaurant I slept in a few nights ago was a different experience today. It may be timeworn and slightly dusty, but the delicious smells that hit me in the face made me salivate. Unlike the first time I was here, the place was now full.

I locked eyes with a man I recognized from that night. The smoker. He leaned against the bar nursing a glass of clear liquid. His gaze flickered with something so harsh I grew cold. I needed to look up United States–Russia relations the first chance I got.

Ronan removed my coat, and the glide of his fingers down the fabric of my dress dropped my heartbeat between my legs. “Zholtoye,” he said thoughtfully, his eyes on the dress, as if he’d been wondering what was beneath my coat. Yellow.

My breath slowed. “Tebe . . . nravitsya zheltoye?” Do you like yellow?

His gaze lifted, holding, pressing, burning mine while stealing every ounce of breath in my lungs. He never answered me, but something told me he liked yellow, as well as the unpracticed Russian on my lips.

We sat at a booth in the low-lit corner, and the conversation was easy and effortless in a way it shouldn’t be with a stranger. Ronan asked if I attended college. In an effort to not show him how trivial my life was, I changed the subject and questioned him about himself. I learned his last name was Markov, and he had a brother who lived in New York City with a pregnant wife and young daughter. Ronan sounded sentimental when he spoke of them, and I fell a little further into his hands. Soon, he’d be able to mold me like putty.

He was suave with rough edges, pulling an ice cube from a ten-thousand-dollar glass of vodka and biting down on it. It only reminded me of his mouth on mine, the dirty way he kissed, and the absence of his hands on my skin.

My cell rang incessantly in my dress pocket. When I saw my papa’s number on the screen, the phone slipped from my fingers and landed with a thump on the table that seemed to rouse the entire dining room’s attention.

I watched the device buzz and buzz, shaking the silverware beside it and the heart in my chest. I knew if I answered the call, my papa would talk me straight onto a plane headed home. I did everything to make him happy, going so far as to accept a proposal from a man I didn’t even want, thinking in the end, those whispered words in the hall would fade away, my papa would be proud of me, and everything would be all right.

Ronan lifted a brow. “Problem?”

I shook my head, unwilling to share I was hiding out from my papa and his hired babysitter. He already had reservations about my age.

With a shaking hand, I turned the phone off and put it back in my pocket. I just wanted a week. A single week wouldn’t kill anyone.

As we finished our lunch, the smoker with an obvious aversion to Americans approached the table. He didn’t look my way, but I felt his animosity against my skin. Dirty blond hair and a splayed-open suit jacket like he’d just gotten laid in the bathroom. Maybe he had. He was good-looking in a classic way, though he could probably work on his xenophobia.

He said a few words in Russian to Ronan too low for me to hear.

Ronan got to his feet. “Give me a moment, kotyonok.”

I nodded and watched him retreat to the back hall. The man was popular.

The dirty blond remained near the table with his hands in his pockets, looking at me like I was a bug he wanted to squash. “Kill them with kindness,” was my motto. Well . . . not always, but it was a principle I was working on.

“Zdravstvuy,” I said with a smile. “I’m Mila.”

A skin-crawling awareness touched me as his eyes ran down my body, and then he replied, “Kostya,” with a mocking leer. His gaze narrowed with intense focus. “He might buy you fancy things, but you are nothing but another useless whore to him. Remember that.”

My smile dropped.

I’d never been spoken to like that in my entire life. At home, insults were subtle barbs behind your back, not slurs in your face. This stranger didn’t even know me or the fact I was still very much a virgin, but the word “whore” punched me right in the chest.

Again, I was reminded I wasn’t welcome by many here. It made me feel like an outcast; something ridiculous that didn’t belong. Not truly in The Moorings, and not here. Rejection tightened like a vise around my throat until humiliating tears rose in my eyes. Kostya looked darkly pleased as one ran down my cheek.

“Excuse me,” I said, grabbing my coat off the back of the booth and slipping it on as I walked toward the front doors. When I pushed them open, icy air caressed my skin. Unsurprisingly, Albert was reclining against the car at the curb smoking a cigarette. His eyebrows lowered as I made my way over to him. I leaned against the car next to him and breathed in the cold, industrial smell of the city.

“Your face is all blotchy,” he said indifferently, blowing out a breath of smoke.

“Albert,” I sighed, “sometimes, a girl doesn’t want the truth. Just like when she asks you if her butt looks big in that dress, she doesn’t want you to tell her so.”

He frowned. “Someone said you have a big butt?”

No, they just called me a useless whore.

“Something like that.”

“You do not.”

I released an amused breath. “Don’t look at my butt.”

“I am a man. We look.”

Right on cue, a heavily pregnant woman walked by, and Albert’s eyes didn’t hesitate to settle on her ass.

I smacked his stomach. “Stop. She’s pregnant, you perv.”

“That only means she puts out.”

The male mind was an enigma.

“What is a perv?” he asked, his gaze following the woman down the sidewalk.

I laughed softly. “You know, a pervert.” He still looked confused, so I continued, “Today, it just means someone with sex on their mind all the time.”

“That is every man.”

“Maybe, but not every man wants to gag and spank women, Igor.”

He blew out a breath of smoke and met my eyes with a significant look that sent a shiver down my spine. “You’re not in Miami anymore, blondi.”

After a moment of awkward silence, I held my hand out for his cigarette. Albert eyed me suspiciously before he put it between my fingers. Feeling bold, I inhaled deeply, which brought on a cough so hard I thought a lung would come up.

“Oh, my god, that’s awful!”

He took the cigarette back. “What did you expect?”

“I expected to look really cool,” I complained between coughs. “Like Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

“I do not know what you’re talking about.”

That was such a travesty, I couldn’t even speak of it.

I put a hand on my chest. “God, I can already feel the cancer.”

He laughed.

A dizzy buzz rushed so fast to my head I stumbled. Albert steadied me by placing an oversized paw on my arm.