All the Lies We Tell (Quarry Road #1)(70)

He loved her.

She’d been getting close—he knew it by the way her body had smoothed and formed itself to him—but at the stutter of his caress, Alicia tensed in a different way. She shuddered but did not go over. She twisted in his embrace to face him. Her heart pounded hard enough for him to feel it between them. When she spoke, her voice was ragged.

“Nikolai? What’s wrong?”

He kissed her so he didn’t have to speak. There weren’t words for what he wanted to tell her. Or rather, there were plenty of words, but none that he could make himself say. He wanted to fit himself inside her and move, to let their bodies have the conversation instead of their words. It was too soon for him, though. He couldn’t quite manage.

“Shhh, stop,” she said with her hand at the small of his back to hold him close but stop him from trying to make it happen.

“I want to, for you,” he said. Stubborn. Proud.

Alicia kissed his mouth. “Shhh.”

Minutes ticked past as she kissed him. After a few, she eased her mouth from his. She kept her hands on him, though.

“Are you worried about this?” she asked. “Because it’s not—”

“No.” He took her hand, fingers curled around him, and stroked to show her the way his body could respond.

It was faster this time than it had been earlier in the night. Harder. Fiercer. He’d tried to focus on her, to finish what he’d started, but he couldn’t manage to do that and finish himself. When the pleasure filled him, he bit back her name.

After, she pushed herself up on her elbow to trace circles on his chest with her fingertips. Over his heart. Across his ribs and up again, not tickling, though he did eventually put his hand over hers to keep from continuing.

At some point, the sun had started to come up. Pale, fresh light filtered through the curtains and lit the lines of her face. She wasn’t smiling.

“Nikolai. I want you to know how glad I am that you came home. How happy I am that you and I . . . that we’re here. Together, like this.” She paused. He stayed quiet. “I think you’re amazing and wonderful and all of this is great. I want you to know that.”

He wanted to tell her that he felt the same way. He wanted to tell her more than that. But when he tried to form the words, nothing would come.

“And I want you to know,” she added carefully, “that it’s all right if you have to leave. I would never expect you to stay where you didn’t want to be.”

When you loved someone, Nikolai thought, you gave them the power to hurt you. Worse than that, you made it possible to hurt them. To disappoint them. The last thing in the world Nikolai wanted to do was hurt or disappoint Alicia, at least not more than he already had in this lifetime.

So he didn’t say anything. Not with words. He kissed her and hoped she would be able to understand what he meant to say, even if he couldn’t manage to say it.





CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE


Snow. So much snow. Easily four feet of it, piled high in all directions. At least the power hadn’t gone out, and she’d gone to the grocery store a couple of days ago, so they weren’t going to run out of food.

“And the pipes won’t freeze,” Alicia said, tongue in cheek, as she pointed with her spatula at the still-dripping faucet. She was making French toast with apple chicken sausage.

Nikolai was in charge of the coffee, and he looked to where she was pointing. “I can fix that for you, you know. I should’ve done it already.”

She thought of how Ilya had promised the same thing, time after time. Nikolai, she reminded herself, was not Ilya. “I bet you could. You could fix it so hard.”

“So hard,” he agreed as he set out mugs, cream, sugar. He gave her a grin that lit her up inside. “I’d fix it for you so hard you’d forget it ever leaked.”

Flipping the toast in the skillet, Alicia guffawed. “Perv.”

“That smells good.” He came up behind her to nuzzle at her shoulder, bared by the edges of her robe. “I like that you cook.”

“Trust me, it’s no big thing,” she scoffed, but his praise warmed her. “It’s just eggs, milk, bread, sugar.”

“I like that you’re cooking for me—how’s that?”

She slid the slices onto the platter she’d already filled and turned off the burner. “I’ll cook for you. You fix the faucet. It’ll be a love straight out of 1952.”

Love. The word had slipped out of her before she could stop it, but there was no calling it back. She didn’t want to think about this morning, how she’d spilled her emotional guts all over him and had received only silence in reply. She focused on the French toast instead.

At the table, she sat across from him and watched as he loaded his plate with food. He’d already poured her coffee, though he hadn’t added anything to it. She did: sugar and cream enough to turn the liquid to a light-caramel color. They ate in companionable silence. She could look over his shoulder to the window behind him. Snow still falling.

“This is nice,” Alicia said. Trying again. Stupid, she thought. Don’t be stupid, Alicia.

Nikolai looked up, his cheeks bulging with food he chewed carefully before swallowing. He washed it down with a long swig of coffee. “What, the coffee?”

“Us. Here.” She’d forked a bite of food but set it back on the plate. “Together.”