All the Lies We Tell (Quarry Road #1)(39)

Niko coughed and tried to catch Ilya’s eye again, but his brother had turned away. “Mom—”

“What exactly do you mean,” Ilya broke in without facing them. “More time? Like a long visit, or what?”

“Oh, no,” Galina smiled. “I’m not going back to South Carolina. I’m staying here.”





CHAPTER NINETEEN


“What do you mean, she’s not going home?” Alicia put aside the pile of envelopes and mail that had been piling up over the past couple of weeks and gave Nikolai her full attention. “She’s planning to, what, move right back into the house like she’d never been gone?”

Nikolai nodded, leaning in her office doorway as though it would kill him to come all the way inside. Like she might jump over the desk and wrestle him to the ground to seduce him. Alicia’s mouth twisted, sour, and she smoothed it at once, not wanting him to see her giving him one bare second’s worth of her emotions. She hadn’t heard one damned word from him in just over a week—not a text or a phone call or a random visit with a casserole as an excuse. Let him stand in her office doorway forever. There was no way she was ever going to invite him in.

“Yeah. A bunch of her stuff was delivered yesterday.”

Alicia swiveled in her desk chair and frowned. That was serious. “Wow.”

“Yeah.”

“What’s she going to live on? Retirement? Does she even have any?” Alicia’s parents had both taken early retirements so they could leave the cold winters of Pennsylvania for the snowbird climate of Arizona, but they’d both had full-time, consistent work histories and enough savings to allow it.

“Maybe she’ll get another job? I don’t know.” Nikolai shrugged. “Who ever really knows with her?”

Alicia sighed. “Why didn’t your brother tell me any of this? I just talked to him yesterday.”

When she’d called to ask him whether he was going to bother coming in to work at all, Ilya had told her only that he was still taking care of things at home, leaving her to deal with everything at the shop. He’d been quiet, but not snappish or irritable. They hadn’t fought. She’d been too nice, probably, but the effort of arguing with him about responsibility and picking up his share of the load had been too much for her. She could spend a lifetime juggling her resentments toward Ilya.

“Who ever really knows with him?” Nikolai said with a grin she figured he meant to be conspiratorial.

Alicia didn’t return it. “Don’t do that.”

“What?” He frowned and stood up straight, even going so far as to take a single step over the threshold so he actually stood inside her office instead of just beyond it.

“Don’t try to get me to talk shit about him,” she said.

Nikolai let out a short bark of a laugh. “I wasn’t trying to get you to talk shit about him . . . I just meant . . . wow, Allie. Wow.”

The abbreviation of her name, as it always did, scraped at her. A snagging thorn. She was done ignoring it, especially for him.

“Alicia,” she said tightly. Everything was coiling inside her, twisting and twisting.

“Huh?”

“I don’t like to be called Allie. My name’s Alicia.”

His brow furrowed. “We always called you Allie.”

“I never liked it,” she told him in a clipped, biting tone.

“Ilya calls you Allie,” Nikolai said, like a challenge, his voice dipping low. His gaze flared.

Alicia met his eyes without looking away, both of them pressing hard the way they’d always done, neither willing to give an inch. “Yes. He does.”

“Did you ever tell him not to call you Allie?”

“All the time,” she said. “But he still does it.”

She did not want this heat between them. She didn’t want to remember his hands on her, his mouth, the huff of his breath in her ear. She didn’t want to think about how easy it had been, every shift and move and touch, everything effortless and perfect, at least physically. Everything else between them still seemed as difficult as it had always been.

“I’m sorry. Alicia.” Nikolai hadn’t taken another step toward her, but the distance between them that had seemed so vast a few minutes ago had become far too close.

Her heart throbbed so hard it hurt, a flare of pain in her chest that faded when she remembered to take a breath. He’d said the right words to defuse this impending argument but had done nothing to relieve the tension.

“Thank you,” she bit out.

She hadn’t invited him in; he’d entered anyway. Another creeping flush of heat touched her throat and cheeks as she remembered the way she’d seduced him in the attic bedroom. She’d made such a fool of herself, for what? Asking for what she wanted? Why should she ever feel embarrassed about that?

Yet she did, and she couldn’t bear to do it again. The thought of it sent a wash of ice all over her that cut through the heat and made her teeth want to chatter. She settled for crossing her arms over her stomach and clenching her jaw.

“So, anyway, I just stopped by to tell you about Galina,” he said when she didn’t speak.

She nodded. “Okay.”

“I thought you’d like to know.”