[Quarry Road 01.0] All the Lies We Tell Read online

  ALSO BY MEGAN HART

  Lovely Wild

  Precious and Fragile Things

  The Favor

  All Fall Down

  Little Secrets

  The Resurrected

  Passion Model

  Driven

  Beneath the Veil

  Seeking Eden

  Exit Light

  Beg for It

  Perfectly Restless

  Hold Me Close

  Vanilla

  Flying

  Stumble Into Love

  The Space Between Us

  Collide

  Naked

  Deeper

  Switch

  Stranger

  Tempted

  Broken

  Dirty

  Tear You Apart

  Captivated (with Tiffany Reisz)

  Taking Care of Business (with Lauren Dane)

  No Reservations (with Lauren Dane)

  Order of Solace series

  Pleasure and Purpose

  No Greater Pleasure

  Selfish is the Heart

  Virtue and Vice

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2017 Megan Hart

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Montlake Romance, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Montlake Romance are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503942776

  ISBN-10: 1503942775

  Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

  For anyone who’s ever thought of giving up the dream . . . don’t.

  Keep dreaming.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  SNEAK PEEK: ALL THE SECRETS WE KEEP

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  There might be worse things than looking out her kitchen window to watch her ex-husband smooching up on some tousle-haired blonde wearing last night’s outfit, but it sure wasn’t the first thing Alicia Stern wanted to see in the morning. Sipping her coffee with both hands warming on the mug, she leaned against the counter and listened to the soft plink-plink of her dripping faucet. Ilya had promised to fix it for her but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Of course. And no wonder, Alicia thought as the blonde drove off in a kicky little VW Bug with fake eyelashes decorating the headlights. He was too busy laying pipe to fix a leaking faucet.

  Ilya waved after the car, put both hands on his hips, and arched his back. Then, with his arms flung wide, he twisted at the waist. He touched his toes. Did a couple of jumping jacks.

  All in his leave-nothing-to-the-imagination boxer shorts.

  Alicia’s coffee slipped down a little too fast, too hot, and she coughed. The neighbors were getting quite a show, she thought with a shrug and a shake of her head. It wasn’t any of her business what Ilya did in the mornings in his own front yard. She could no longer be held responsible for him or his helicoptering ding-dong.

  She would be, though. That was part of the problem with living in a small town. Ilya could—and often did—bring home a different woman every night, but until he put a ring on one of their fingers, Alicia was still going to be the one everyone expected to keep him in line.

  Her phone rang. The house line, which meant it was Dina Guttridge from the Cape Cod next door. The Guttridge family had moved in about eight years ago, their house a part of the new construction that had cropped up all along Quarry Street within the past ten years. At first, newlyweds Dina and Bill had been fine neighbors. Friendly without being overbearing. Then the children had come, one after the other, three in a row, and two years ago, a fourth. Bill Guttridge had taken a job driving long hauls.

  Dina had started getting cranky.

  Now she was the sort of neighbor who called about the lawn being too long on Alicia’s side, about late-night loud noises, and about the motion-detector lights being too bright. Once about the smell of the barbecue grill making her precious tots “too hungry” when it was past their bedtime. Alicia had lost her patience a while back with Dina’s constant nosiness and complaining, though she usually managed to keep her annoyances to herself in the name of keeping the neighborly peace.

  “Dina. Hi,” she said before Dina could even identify herself.

  “He’s almost naked! It’s January!”

  Alicia bit back a chortle and peeked out her kitchen window again. From this angle she could see only Ilya’s driveway and not his front yard. Her answer wasn’t a lie. “I can’t see him, Dina.”

  “But you knew who I was talking about right away, didn’t you?” Dina huffed and puffed.

  Alicia imagined the other woman lifting a toddler onto her hip while she stared out of the gap between her living-room curtains. “I assumed. Yeah.”

  “You’re going to have to say something to him. This is ridiculous. Go see what he’s doing!”

  Alicia topped off her mug and cradled the phone between her ear and shoulder while she pulled open the fridge to find the creamer. Her parents had done some nice things to this house before moving permanently to Arizona, but they’d never upgraded their landline to a cordless model. She was tethered to the wall by the phone’s long, curling cord. So it was also not a lie when she said, “Can’t see him from here while I’m on the phone, Dina. The cord won’t stretch.”

  “The cord won’t . . .” Dina huffed again. “He’s doing some sort of . . . yoga!”

  Of course he was, in his own way. It looked like he’d learned from a contortionist with an extra arm, and once he got into downward dog, he pumped his pelvis against the ground a few times, probably because he suspected Dina might be watching. Alicia didn’t miss much about being married to Ilya, though occasionally—very occasionally, and usually only when she’d had a few glasses of wine—she did allow herself to remember fondly his flexibility and ability to control his breathing. “Look, Dina, if you’re so worked up about it, you call him. I can’t stop him from doing anything.”