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  The Bad Boy's Pregnant Bride

  The Reformed Bad Boy's Baby

  Chased by the Dragons

  Galapagos

  Chased by the Dragons

  Her Dad's Best Friend

  Working for Her Dad's Best Friend

  Paying Off Her Dad's Best Friend

  Fake Marrying Her Dad's Best Friend

  Seduced by Her Dad's Best Friend

  Saved by Her Dad’s Best Friend

  Spying on Her Dad's Best Friend

  Protected by Her Dad’s Best Friend

  Falling for Her Dad's Best Friend

  Guarded by Her Dad's Best Friend

  Sleeping with Her Dad's Best Friend

  Tempting Her Dad's Best Friend

  Imperial Draka

  Secret Prince's Bride

  Standalone

  Fresh

  Tonight Only

  Billionaire's Assistant

  Drug Lord

  An Heir for the Billionaire Werebears

  The Volleyball Coach's Surprise Baby

  TEMPTING HER DAD’S BEST FRIEND

  ALYSE ZAFTIG

  Copyright © 2022 by Alyse Zaftig

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  CONTENTS

  1. Favorite Lunch Spot

  2. Dianna’s Memories

  3. Fortress

  4. First Dinner

  5. Swimming

  6. Library

  7. Mall

  8. Ballet

  9. First Time

  10. Meeting Vlad

  11. Dianna’s Apartment Lease

  12. Positive for Pregnancy

  13. 3 AM Meetings

  14. Hard Conversation

  15. Shifting Loyalties

  16. Party

  17. Pretext

  18. Vodka

  19. Tracker

  20. Real House

  21. Christening

  1

  FAVORITE LUNCH SPOT

  SERGEI

  Arseny was having a conversation with the waitress who normally took care of his table during lunch. She was part of one of our families, and she had a beautiful face and other assets. They engaged in very light flirtation, but neither of them took it very seriously. Because he had never married and raised a family, Arseny had a reputation of moving on. One of his secretaries was in charge of his goodbye gifts when he tired of his romantic liaisons. The waitress knew better than to be one of them.

  Ignoring their banter, I kept my head on a swivel. My day job was to be a bodyguard for one of the heads of the local branch of the Russia mafia. I settled into my usual position, looking out for Arseny as he ate in his usual lunch spot. I had already given him grief too many times about being predictable and letting people learn his routine. People could target him here, because they knew that he liked to eat at this restaurant. He knew my entire spiel by heart.

  Arseny always told me that he was the second most powerful man in the city. In reality, I was just window dressing, there to keep the odd passersby from him. Arseny could take care of himself. You didn’t rise to his position without learning how to come out on top.

  The waitress finally was taking Arseny’s order and asking about the details. I frowned. There was a young woman carrying a giant purse approaching our table. I put my hand on my gun, worried that I’d need to intercede. It wouldn’t be the first time that someone tried to approach Arseny at his favorite lunch spot.

  She had dark eyes, and her face seemed strangely familiar even though I was sure that I had never seen her before. My basic instincts were beginning to fire before she got too close to Arseny’s table.

  “Excuse me, miss,” I told her. “The table is reserved.” I stepped in her path and tried to move her out of the way. We could settle it the hard way or easy way. I had to admit that I appreciated the feel of her soft body in my arms as well as her scent, which had notes of coconut in it.

  “Sergei, get rid of her.” The soft menace in Arseny’s voice told me that he wouldn’t mind killing a girl who made the mistake of walking too close to his lunch table. We didn’t make mistakes that would wind up with someone dead. Later, I would use this incident as an example, if I tried to waste my breath on convincing Arseny to switch up his routine.

  “No!” she protested. “I’m your daughter.” She was wiggling in my grip.

  All of us froze. Yuly looked at me, shocked. Arseny wasn’t even breathing. He had just given me a command which, given the context, basically gave me the green light to murder her. Now she was claiming to be his flesh and blood.

  She did some sort of release, as if she had been trained in martial arts. Soon, I wasn’t holding her anymore.

  “Can I talk to you?” she asked Arseny.

  Arseny let silence settle into the room for a moment. He checked the faces of everyone in the room. He was very good at reading people.

  “Yes.” Arseny looked at her face more closely. We were all looking for any clues that she was really his flesh and blood. If I looked closely at the shape of her eyes and nose, I could see some resemblance to Arseny’s. What if she really was related to him?

  “Come,” I told her, now letting her get closer to Arseny.

  She shrugged off my arm. “I’m fine getting a seat myself.”

  I kept it off of my face, but I grinned internally. If she was really his daughter and not just someone I’d need to shoot and leave where nobody would find the body, then Arseny was going to have a turbulent time getting to know his spirited daughter. How many young women would have the guts to approach a man she didn’t know with two bodyguards in broad daylight?

  2

  DIANNA’S MEMORIES

  CLEO

  As I finally came face to face with my father, I had butterflies in my stomach. I stared at my dad’s face, checking that the shape of his eyes was the shape of my own. I could see that his nose was like the one that I saw every day in the mirror. The waitress took my order for a sandwich and a glass of water and disappeared into the kitchen.

  “What brings you here today?” Arseny was leaning back in the booth, utterly relaxed. Nobody seemed to be paying much attention to what was happening at our table, beyond his entourage.

  I didn’t know what kind of father would need two bodyguards around him just to eat lunch at a place he went multiple times a week. I thought that he was pretty unlikely to let me waste his time, so I cut to the chase.

  “My name is Cleo Dawkins. My mother, Dianna Dawkins, just died.”

  “And?” He didn’t seem to care much. He wasn’t reacting to her name.

  “She never told me my father’s name, but I dealt with her estate. I was going through her boxes and seeing what to give to charity when I found pictures of you.”

  I opened my purse and dug around until I found the envelope of stuff that had sent me on a wild goose chase. There were three letters and some photos of the two of them together. They looked young and happy together. I passed them across the table.

  He considered them. “I wrote the letters when I was trying to persuade Dianna to give me a shot,” Arseny confirmed. “How old are you?”

  I told him my birthday. He sucked in a breath, but he didn’t seem fully convinced that I was really his daughter.

  “I can take a buccal swab and send it off so we can be genetically tested, if you want to establish your paternity.”

  “I don’t want to give you my DNA,” my dad said.

  I was stumped. I had looked for answers all of my life, and now I was hitting a brick wall. My shoulders slumped. The waitress came back with my sandwich and water, but I didn’t feel like staying. I started to slide out of the booth.

  “Why don’t you stay and spend some time with me, getting better acquainted?”

  My head snapped up. I gawked at my dad, shocked that he was unwilling to swap his cheek but willing to bring me into his life.

  “I could be convinced.” I needed to be cautious.

  “Great. I’ll send one of my men to get you moved into my home.” He motioned with his hand at the guy who had manhandled me. He spoke to him in rapid Russian. I was in over my head, but I hoped to get some answers.

  Without my dad, I also was an orphan now. My mother had done her best to make up for being a single-parent household, but there was something missing in my life when it came to having a dad like the other kids at school.

  Right after I graduated from high school, Mom had gotten sick. I had enrolled in some online courses that I could take at my own pace while she had battled terminal cancer. It had taken her swiftly enough that I was glad I had put my own plans for college on an easier track while she was dying. I was living off of my student loans right now, and I planned to stay in college until I had my bachelor’s degree. My mom had been adamant about my education.

  “Come with me,” Sergei said.

  I looked at him and the angle of his cheekbones. He looked like the sort of model you’d see on a runway in Milan or one of the other fashion capitals. I didn’t know what he was doing as a bodyguard for my dad, and I was starting to get the feeling that he was

more than just a bodyguard.

  I followed him into a car. I told him where I was staying, which was just a room at an Airbnb since I didn’t have a ton of cash. We drove there in silence. This guy had no interest in seeming friendly.

  3

  FORTRESS

  SERGEI

  When I got to Arseny’s large home, I heard the girl audibly gulp. She said her name was Cleo. “Why are the walls so high?” she asked me.

  “Security. Arseny has powerful enemies.” I knew that she didn’t have enough information. I wasn’t going to be the one to fill her in on who exactly Arseny was.

  She was pretty enough, I supposed, but Arseny didn’t seem convinced that Dianna Dawkins had given birth to his child. I wondered why I was letting her through the gates of Arseny’s home, but I was sure that Arseny had a reason. He never made rash decisions. He could make quick ones, which was why he had gotten where he was. Despite being a law enforcement officer under deep cover, I respected Arseny. He had bone-deep loyalty to the people in his organization. They feared him, but they gave him the results that he wanted. He killed the ones who didn’t.

  When I pulled into the driveway, someone I didn’t recognize took the car. I nodded at him before escorting Cleo into Arseny’s home. Arseny must have alerted his housekeeper before we came, because she met us at the door.

  “I prepared one of the guest suites for you. If you’re hungry, just come into the kitchen. There’s always someone on duty to cook in this household.”

  Cleo was spinning around, trying to take in the opulent surroundings. Arseny’s position meant that his home was a statement of power. His actual bedroom, which I had rarely been in but had seen, was incredibly spartan. He didn’t keep nostalgic pictures or anything in there. He stayed in the master suite, but it was merely functional.

  His guest suites were also a statement of power. They were furnished in a way that made his business partners who stayed in town conscious of how much wealth he could spend on lavish furniture and custom architecture. The housekeeper brought us into a room that looked like it was inspired by the palace at Versailles. I was bored, because I had seen plenty of Arseny’s home before. As one of his personal bodyguards, I was sent on missions to babysit people he didn’t want to babysit himself. Cleo wasn’t someone he wanted to come to an agreement with. I supposed he had plans for her.

  She went into the bathroom, which meant that I could leave. I went into my own bedroom, which I swept for any kind of electronic device every morning. I pulled out the government-issued laptop that would get me killed if anybody ever saw it. I sent an email to my handler to look into Cleo Dawkins’ background. If she really was Arseny’s daughter, I’d expect to see some moves. If she was some kind of con artist or grifter, she’d be yet another dead body soon enough.

  I showed up in Arseny’s office, where he generally spent his afternoon having meetings. Mornings were for his deep-thinking time. He was scanning the reports that various people had sent in. He had a bunch of people who were bean counters. The business hummed along with mostly his reputation. He shot people who couldn’t do their jobs.

  When I walked into his office, Yuly was sitting in his chair. He was looking at a tablet.

  “Is she settled into my home?” Arseny asked.

  “Yes. Why did you let her in?” Arseny let me speak to him most of the time.

  “Dianna Dawkins was an old flame of mine, but I know for sure that she had an abortion. I looked at pictures of her entering an abortion clinic. I’m sure that Cleo Dawkins has been sent to keep me off kilter. I need to learn who sent her, so I can burn their home to the ground. Yuly, you can start to get close to her and get the answers I need.”

  “I can do it.” The sentence was out of my mouth before I could think about it.

  “She is a firecracker, and you’re not all that charming.” Yuly had looked up from his tablet.

  “Charm isn’t my strong suit, but it’s not yours.”

  “I can’t deny it.”

  “Sergei will do it.” Arseny finished the discussion and went back to reviewing reports. I sat back in my chair, thinking of strategies to get the information that we wanted.

  4

  FIRST DINNER

  CLEO

  There was a thump on my door. “Your father wants to have you join him for dinner at 6.” It sounded like the bodyguard who had driven me to the house. I thought his name might be Sergei.

  I looked at the clock. It was a quarter until six.

  “I don’t have anything to change into,” I told him.

  “Can I come in?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said.

  Somebody had collected the stuff that I’d brought with me and put it into my new guest suite. I didn’t know why my father wanted me here if he wasn’t sure that he was my father. I also didn’t fit into this suite at all. I lived a middle-class lifestyle, where I didn’t wear the flashy Gucci or Prada clothing that other girls did. My casual clothes weren’t designer.

  He scanned my closet. I had to admire the width of his shoulders while he wasn’t looking my way. He was tall, but I’d seen plenty of tall men before. There was an edge to him, a hyper-alertness that made me think there was more to him than met the eye.

  “None of these dresses will do for a dinner with your father. I’m going to have to speak with the housekeeper.”

  I didn’t know why he left my room so quickly, but I got the impression that disappointing my father was something that put some pep in his step. Within five minutes, he had returned with the housekeeper. She had a bunch of pretty evening dresses in her arms.

  “Why do you have so many dresses?” I asked.

  Nobody answered me. She looked at me, sweeping me with her eyes as if she had a mental measuring tape.

  “We’re going to have to go with the ones that are stretchy,” she told me. “Get out, Sergei.”

  He vanished. She started sorting through the dresses, muttering to herself. There were some silk dresses that were clearly never going to fit me.

  “I have wide shoulders,” I warned her. There were lots of beautiful dresses that I’d love to wear, but they were like straitjackets for me.

  “And hips and breasts,” she sighed. “I know. I have a granddaughter shaped like you. I know how hard it is to find things off the rack that will fit. I make her clothing myself. We’ll have to do the best we can before dinner is served. Get undressed.”

  I felt a little shy stripping down to my underwear in front of a stranger, but she felt like a train coming down the tracks. The first two dresses definitely did not fit, but the third one did. I did a slow spin in front of her. She clicked her tongue.

  “It’ll be enough for tonight. I need to take your measurements. Tomorrow, I’ll have a stylist show up.” She went to a drawer in my room that magically had a measuring tape in it. She briskly took a bunch of measurements and scribbled them down on a sticky note from that same drawer. We took a look at the remaining dresses. None of them looked like they would fit, so she carried them out again. “Tomorrow, we’ll be better prepared.”

  I just wore my normal shoes into the dining room, which took me some time to find. I followed my nose. My dad was there and frowning at me.

  “You’re late.”