All the Lies We Tell (Quarry Road #1)(56)

Alicia sat back in her chair, uncertain about what kind of response he expected. “No. It doesn’t.”

“I think it’s clear this unfinished business is real. Something between us.”

“Yes,” she said quietly. Her heart beat hard enough for her to feel the throb of it at the base of her throat. She closed her fists in her lap, keeping her hands from shaking.

“For a long time. Years.”

“Yes,” she said again.

Nikolai crossed the room to her in three long strides that startled her enough to push back in her chair. It hit the wall. He leaned across her desk and took her hands in his.

“I’ve spent too many years of my life trying as hard as I could to get away from Quarrytown, but no matter where I went in the world, no matter what I was doing, I always thought about you,” he said.

Alicia gently withdrew her hands from his loose grasp. “Nikolai . . .”

“Just listen, okay? I thought about what happened after Jenni.”

“We were kids,” Alicia said. “Dumb kids.”

Nikolai shook his head. “Was that all it was?”

“I don’t know,” Alicia admitted in a low voice, looking away from the intensity of his gaze. “It was a long time ago.”

“I thought about coming home from Israel to find out you and my brother had run off together,” Nikolai continued. “I was such an * about it . . .”

She looked at him, wishing she could tell him how devastated she’d been when he left. Wishing she could tell him that one of the reasons she’d turned to Ilya was that he was the only one there. “Were you wrong?”

“I was wrong to be such a prick. It was obvious you believed you were doing the right thing. You’d bought the quarry. You were both talking about making this happen.” He waved his hand around the office. “It was a great goal.”

“We didn’t need to get married to start the dive shop.” Alicia sighed. This time, she was the one who reached for his hands. She moved around her desk so she could stand in front of him. Close. Touching. Their fingers linked.

Nikolai turned his face toward hers. “But you did.”

“Yes. It happened. And you weren’t wrong to tell me it was a mistake, even though I didn’t want to hear it.” She let herself press against him. Her face tucked perfectly against his neck beneath his chin. She took a chance. “You weren’t here, Nikolai. You ran off, not a word, nothing . . .”

His arms went around her. “I never meant to hurt you.”

“But you did,” Alicia said on a grating cough, words from a razor-shredded throat. “You left without saying good-bye, like I didn’t matter to you at all. You made me feel like I meant nothing.”

And there it was.

Alicia had been in her sister’s shadow her entire life, and Jennilynn’s death had not brought her into the sunshine. She’d never been able to capture her parents’ attention, or Ilya’s heart, and none of that had mattered much, really, but this did. Nikolai had gone away and left her as though he’d never even known her. He’d made her into nothing, and she’d never been able to convince herself she’d ever been more than that to him.

She wasn’t sure she could ever believe it now.

A hitching, throbbing rasp seared her throat and boiled out of her in scalding tears. She shook, fighting them for only a moment before it became too much to hold back. She sobbed.

Nikolai stroked her hair, which at some point during their escapades had come out of the loose ponytail she wore for work and now lay tangled over her shoulders. He didn’t say anything. He offered the comfort of his embrace and his silence, which was what she needed. He fixed everything else, but he wasn’t trying to fix her, Alicia thought as she pressed her face to the soft flannel of Nikolai’s shirt and wept for the past, for the present—still a mess—and for the future she could not begin to even think about.

It was exactly what she needed, and in a minute or so the tears tapered off. He grabbed a tissue from the box on her desk and tipped her face up to dry her cheeks. She laughed at that and squirmed away from him when he jokingly tried to wipe her nose.

“I got this.” She took the tissue from him. After she’d gotten herself under control, she hugged him again. She did not point out that his brother never would have known how to handle her sudden burst of grief, not wanting to once again remind them both that she and Ilya had been married. But she noticed it. “Thanks.”

“Any time.”

Alicia cleared her throat. “So. What happens now?”

“What do you want to happen?”

“That’s a good question,” she answered honestly. “I don’t know.”

“I meant what I said about these random ‘things.’ I don’t want that anymore. If we’re going to be together, even if we both agree it has to be a secret, I don’t want it to be like this.”

Alicia wasn’t sure she did agree it had to be a secret, even if she knew that made the best sense. “So what’s the solution?”

“I’ll think about that,” Nikolai said.

She chewed the inside of her cheek for a second. “Nobody will blink an eye if you and I hang out together.”

“They’ll do a lot more than blink if they know we’re a couple,” he said.