All the Lies We Tell Read online

  She frowned. “I just don’t want anyone to get hurt. That’s all.”

  “Mother hen,” Nikolai said.

  “So what? What’s wrong with wanting to make sure everyone is okay?” she demanded, suddenly angry, because Nikolai was always ragging on her. Always on her case. It wasn’t fair.

  Somehow they were both standing. She poked him in the chest, hard, because he was taller than she was now. Not by much—a couple of inches—but she still had to tilt her head to look up at him, and it annoyed her. She poked him again, but this time Nikolai’s hand grabbed her wrist, holding her tight enough to hurt, if she struggled.

  “I’m just teasing you,” he said without letting her go, even though she tugged. “You get so mad all the time, Allie. Why you gotta get so mad?”

  “Because . . . you . . . why do you always have to argue with me? Anything I say or do, you’re always making it like some big deal!” She tried again to get her hand free but couldn’t, so she smacked at him with the other.

  Laughing, Nikolai grabbed that wrist, too. He took one of her hands and jabbed at her face. “Whattya hitting yourself for? Huh? Why are you hitting yourself?”

  She wriggled, furious now. In addition to getting taller, Nikolai had gotten a lot stronger. Gone were the days when she could wrestle him to the ground and knuckle his head until he gave up. Being pressed up against him felt different now.

  A lot different.

  Alicia had kissed a couple of boys before, but nothing like this. Nikolai’s mouth on hers was warm, sweet, and insistent. Her lips parted; his tongue slipped inside. Stroking hers. This kiss was inquisitive and also demanding. It left her weak-kneed.

  It was over before she had time to even think about it, to protest or fight it, because of course she would have. Right? Nikolai?

  “Shit,” he said softly and took a few steps back. “Shit, I’m fucked up. Really fucked up.”

  She reached for him, but he was far enough away that her fingertips skated briefly down the front of his shirt, and then there was nothing but empty space between them. She should yell at him, she thought in a daze. Tell him off.

  Instead, she pushed past him, toward the house. She didn’t look back. Ignoring everyone else at the party, Alicia moved faster and faster through the dancing, hollering mass of kids. Out the front door. Across the street. In her own house, she slammed the front door hard enough to rattle the pictures on the wall. Alicia fled down the hall and into the bathroom, where she brushed her teeth over and over again, leaning over the sink, certain she was going to be sick.

  It took a long, long time to scrub away the flavor of that kiss.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Nikolai smelled so damned good she wanted to eat him up.

  Her brother-in-law, Alicia reminded herself sternly. Ilya’s baby brother.

  The boy who’d once kissed her in the backyard during a party, a kiss she’d never been able to forget.

  The man whose arms felt like iron rods, but bendy. Bendy iron rods, she thought, a little dazed. Bendy, sexy iron rods. His chest, rock hard, firm, the steady thumping of his heart speeding up beneath the press of her palm against it. And lower, damn—not that she was going to assume anything, but there was a sudden rush of heat in her belly at the touch of his body on hers.

  He moved away from her with an anxious snicker. Alicia’s small, obnoxious titter was nothing like her normal laughter. Or her normal reaction to being embraced by a hard-bodied, gorgeous guy.

  Then again, it had been a damned long time since she’d been held like that by anyone. No wonder her body had reacted that way. Hormones, she told herself sourly. Stupid.

  “You don’t have to go back in,” Nikolai said quickly. “I can call you if she takes a worse turn. Really, if you need to get back home . . .”

  If she had to go back to soothing Ilya, she was going to lose her shit. If she went home, she would simply fret and stew about what was going on at the nursing home. She cleared her throat. “I need to check in at the shop, for sure.”

  Nikolai nodded. “Right. I’ll call your cell.”

  “Thanks.” She hesitated, half hating herself for having a single second of concern about what Nikolai thought, but unable to stop herself from asking, “I’m not a terrible person, am I? If I leave? The doctor said he thought it could be any time. Or she could rally and linger on. They don’t know.”

  “I don’t think you’re terrible.”

  She studied him. On impulse she hugged him again, harder this time. Arms around his neck. Cheek pressed to his. She clung to him with her eyes closed, wishing she could forget all the bad things that had ever happened between them, but that wasn’t the way bad memories worked, in her experience. Those bitches stayed around.

  “It’s good to see you,” she told him, and it felt like the truth.

  The breaking off of the hug wasn’t as awkward this time. Nikolai smiled. The small scar at the corner of his mouth made it crooked. She’d been there when a stray tree branch had caught him along the trail to the quarry, making him bleed. She’d been there with Nikolai through so much, and he with her.

  And there’d been so much he’d missed.

  “I’ll call you,” he said again. “If anything changes. You can be here in twenty minutes. Don’t feel bad. Just go.”

  She did feel bad—there was no getting around that—but something in his off-kilter smile made it a little easier for her to leave. He would be there to take care of everything, to make sure his brother was all right. No matter what had happened between her and Nikolai, she knew she could trust him to do the right thing.

  In her office at the dive shop, she handled a few deliveries and rescheduled the classes she’d had to cancel so she and Ilya could make it to the nursing home. The classroom sessions were easiest—she could do those herself. The confined water classes that took place in the pool were a little trickier, since she had to go through the local VA hospital for the use of their facilities. The final certification classes were the hardest, though, because those students were the ones on a deadline. Ilya was supposed to be running a trip next month to Jamaica, but if the students didn’t get their certification in time, the trip would have to be canceled. They’d be out a lot of money, nonrefundable, not to mention how disappointed everyone would be. Stuff like that turned customers to other places.

  He was the one by Babulya’s side at the end, when she’d been the one there with the old woman all along. A wave of irritation swept over her at all the paperwork in front of her. Ilya was the only one who could teach the water classes because, like the shoemaker’s barefoot children, Alicia had never learned to dive. Everything would have fallen to her, anyway, though. She was the steadfast one who stayed behind. Ilya was the one who got to go to crystal waters and warm sands, hooking up with bronzed and bikini-clad hotties, while Alicia kept the proverbial trains running on time but never, ever left the station herself.

  “Stop it,” she told herself aloud. “There’s no point.”

  And there wasn’t, really. Ilya was the same as he’d ever been. His brother, on the other hand, had seemed to change quite a bit. Physically, obviously. Nikolai had been a short, skinny, geeky kid who’d always seemed to be all bony knees and elbows.

  Now Nikolai Stern stood a few inches taller than she did, which put him at about five eleven. He wore his dark hair to his shoulders, shaggy and unkempt, though not hanging in his eyes. Greenish-gray eyes, clear and bright, not at all like Ilya’s, which were a darker, greenish brown. And Nikolai’s body, Alicia thought a little guiltily, letting herself remember it as she sat back in her chair to spin around with her eyes closed. Thinking of those hard arms, chest . . . his thighs—damn, they were like tree trunks. Nikolai felt like he’d been carved out of stone.

  She couldn’t name the cologne he wore, but the scent lingered in her memory. Something fresh. Clean, not overbearing. Like she could bury her face against his neck and breathe him in and in and in . . .

  “Umm, Allie?”