Firebird (The Firebird Trilogy #1) (8 page)

“You’re uncomfortable.” He smirked. “It’s funny, da? There was a time we couldn’t get our clothes off fast enough.”

“But that was—ˮ

“A long time ago.” The smile faded. He picked at something on the comforter. “It doesn’t have to keep being a long time ago.”

She lay down, her back to him. He ran a hand over her arm.

“Here you are, in my bed. And I’ve just gotten you off. Maybe now you’ll be honest with me about why you’re marrying this guy. We’ve already established he’s terrible in bed. Is he good to you in other ways?”

“He…” But she couldn’t think of a single thing to redeem Joe, to convince her heart of his worth when her heart’s desire lay beside her.

“You’re tense. Some things haven’t changed. You still think you don’t deserve to be happy.”

“Stop doing that,” she whispered, and curled up. She sucked in a deep breath and kept blinking until the tears went away.

“Doing what?”

“Just…knowing what I…”

“I know,” he whispered in her ear, “because you were my best friend. You were my everything.”

“He’s not like you.” Alex’s mere presence augmented the miserable, inescapable truth of it, and she began to cry despite her best efforts.

Until he smothered her mouth in a kiss that melted whatever remained of the icy wall she’d built around her heart. That water, warm now, rushed through her and into her limbs, her core. She fastened her arms around his shoulders and, pulling herself up a little, thrust her tongue between his lips. He forced her legs apart with his knee and lay between them, then moved his hands down her body, her skin tingling where he touched her. He settled them on her waist.

“Do you want me?” he whispered.

Her want was the entire crux of the problem. “Alex, I can’t…”

“Why are you doing this to yourself?”

She swallowed and stared up at him.

“I’m not trying to upset you, Stephanie.”

“I know.”

“But you are upset.” Alex pressed his lips to hers in a poignant kiss. He rolled off her and curled up under the blankets, his arm around her. He rested his hand over her heart. She twined her fingers with his and, though she hadn’t expected to sleep at all, she did so with a child’s peace in the amnion of his love.

***

She woke around six thirty. Disoriented for a moment, not recognizing the room. Her heart speeding up at the sight of Alex beside her, their legs tangled and their arms around each other. She grudgingly extricated herself from him. A sound sleeper, he didn’t stir except to roll onto his back as she sat up and picked the crust from her eyes. She dressed, then poked around the medicine cabinet in the bathroom across the hall for some ibuprofen.

When she closed the mirrored door, he was standing behind her. He scratched his head and pushed his hair back as if posing for a designer underwear ad.

“Leaving without saying good-bye?”

“I thought you were still asleep.” She wedged her hands into her pockets so she wouldn’t touch him.

He closed his fingers around a fistful of her hair and jammed his mouth to hers, an ardent kiss that buckled her knees.

She grabbed the counter before she puddled onto the floor. “Alex, stop.” She pushed him away, though she had to pry her hands from that chest. “This shouldn’t have happened. I drank too much, and I let things go too far.”

He furrowed his brow as if he didn’t understand her and opened his mouth to speak, but only a soft, sad sigh came out. He leaned over the sink and knuckled its porcelain edges. They had shared so much last night. Yet the power to hurt, power itself, was a narcotic her brain, having tasted it, was unprepared to relinquish.

“Go,” he said.

“It’s not that I—ˮ

“Go
away
.”

And, turning that power on herself, she did.

Chapter Seven

“Hello?” Stephanie grunted into her phone.

“Who the hell is calling at this hour?” Joe had to get up in fifteen minutes anyway. Stephanie pressed a finger to her lips.

“Did I wake Prince Charming?” The cold edge to Alex’s voice was thin and sharp as a blade.

“No. It’s fine. Just early. What’s going on?”

“We leave for the road trip this afternoon, but I’m doing a quick shoot for next year’s
Body Issue
before practice.”

The Body Issue
, where athletes posed nude to celebrate the beauty of, and hard work invested in, a body dedicated to playing professional sports. Plenty of hockey players had done it, including Zdeno Chara and Ryan Kesler to Tyler Seguin and Joffrey Lupul.

She’d have paid to see that shoot.

“Will you at least give me
something
for the interview?”

“Come or don’t. I don’t care either way.”

“Alex—ˮ

“I’ll text you the studio location. Meet me there at eight thirty.”

Joe was glowering at her when she hung up. “Alex?”

Whoops.
“It’s…Never mind.” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “My job is kind of dependent on him.”

“And it doesn’t matter to Dave that Volynsky is a manipulative scumbag?”

Stephanie clenched her jaw. She’d gotten downright possessive of him after the other night.
She stared at the engagement ring, Joe’s glare lasering holes into her. “I have to get ready.”

“Why the hell did he call so early, anyway?”

“We’re meeting after his photo shoot.”

“I’m getting sick of this guy. Don’t you see what he’s doing? He’s stringing you along. He doesn’t care about your job, Steph. After this story, you’re done with him. I don’t care what Dave wants.”

“Joe, I get you’re upset. But don’t ever tell me what I can and cannot do, or whom I can talk to. Do you understand me?” She threw aside the covers, seized her phone, and stalked into the bathroom. She locked the door.

***

After calling Dave, Stephanie drove to a large downtown studio and parked outside. No sign of Alex. Maybe he’d changed his mind and already left for the second part of his shoot at the arena. She stepped into a lounge area with upholstered chairs clustered around a coffee table and the photographer’s work ornamenting the walls.

The young man at the desk offered a cheery “Hello. Can I help you?”

“Yes. I’m meeting Aleksandr Volynsky. I’m with
King County Today
. Do you know if he’s almost done?”

“It shouldn’t be much longer. Please, have a seat. Help yourself to water or coffee.”

“Thank you.”

Alex emerged fifteen minutes later wearing jeans and a T-shirt under a black wool pea coat. Pokerfaced except for his eyes, he watched her rise from the chair.

“Alex, please let me say something first.”

His lips thinned. “I am done,” he said, his jaw so tight the tendons in his neck stood out, “begging for your attention. I am done making a fool of myself. You don’t get to be with me when it suits you and then run back to him. Do you think I don’t have feelings? Do I deserve this because of how I’ve treated other women? Do you think any of them want more than to tell their friends who they fucked last night?”

She glanced at the receptionist pretending, poorly, not to listen. He jerked his head away and returned his attention to his monitor. “Okay, that part about letting me say something first? Can that happen now? Outside, please?”

He shoved past her and pushed the door open, letting it swing back so it almost hit her in the face.

“Very mature, Alex.” She hooked her arm around his elbow and yanked him into the alley around the corner.

He leaned against the brick wall, stared at the sky, and blew out a long breath. “What do you care?”

“I do. That’s the thing. When I’m with you, I feel—”

“Everything.” His shoulders sagged, and guilt pricked at her for being this burden on him.

“Yes.” She took his hand. His fingers laced with hers felt so good, so right, as though she had recovered a missing piece of herself. “I don’t mean to hurt you, Alex. I just don’t know what to do.”

“It does hurt. Do you understand? I hurt every time I see you. I hurt every time I don’t see you. I hurt
all the time
.”

Whatever she’d intended to say to placate him died on her lips.

“You have to make a choice.” His eyes blazed with confusion and suffering, love and pain. “If you can’t, then we end this. You give the story to someone else. And you stay away from me.”

She opened her mouth to speak, but the words still would not come, and he was already walking away.

They arrived at a small café around the corner and slid into a rear booth, Alex’s back to the entrance. He shrugged off his coat. “You’re not happy, Stephanie. I can see it. That makes it even more frustrating.”

“You think you can do better by me.”

“I would do whatever I had to do. We’re in the same place now.”

Startled, she met his gaze.

“Yeah. That quote in
People
…I was talking about you.”

Of course he was. She could end the charade, as she should have the other night, take off the ring and be with him. If only she were so brave. The wedding was four months away.
Stephanie glanced at the café’s other patrons, especially the couples. She’d settled for Joe because she had thought that bright light gone forever, though hope had kept a fire burning in her heart. She wondered how many people around her had done the same. Had given up on love. “What does your tattoo say?” she asked after several moments. “Is it my name?”

His silence answered.

“How long have you had it?”

“The day I turned eighteen.” He didn’t meet her gaze. “I missed you.”

Stephanie chewed on her lip to keep the tears at bay. They hadn’t spoken in nearly a year at that point. “I’m nothing special. Blond hair, blue eyes, raised in California—I’m a walking cliché. Just like my dad.” A bitter laugh escaped.
The alcoholic cop.

“You’re nothing like him. All these years, I hoped we would find each other again. But…” He stared at her ring with a tangible sorrow that infected her too. “I got here too late.” 

Stephanie examined his swollen, battered knuckles crusted with scabs. She turned over his hand, two of the fingers crooked, broken at some point early in his career, and traced her fingertips over his callused palm. “Alex, there’s something I need to tell you. Something I’ve been keeping from you for a long time. You’re going to be upset. But please remember I—we—were seventeen, and I was scared.”

He took a slow sip of tea. “Did I get you pregnant?”

She stared at him, her mouth agape.

“I assumed it must be that. Otherwise, you would’ve told me by now.” He rubbed his forehead. “
Blya
.”

“Um…” She blinked to get her thoughts back on track. “You were back in Russia when I took the test.”

He gazed out the window. In a perfect, terrible moment of irony, a couple walked by wheeling a carriage, and he blanched. “What happened? Since there’s no kid.”

“I had a miscarriage two months along, and I never told anyone except Matt.” Her beloved older brother, the one man who had earned her eternal trust. The one person whom their father had proclaimed an even greater disappointment than she was, because while Stephanie had known since they were kids, the soft-spoken ESL teacher had had the audacity to come out to the whole family last Christmas.

“Not even me.”

“Alex…”

“That’s why you stopped emailing me. Well, at least now I have an answer. Definitely not the one I was expecting.” He dropped some cash on the table then, without another word, grabbed his coat and walked out.

“Alex!”

He was striding toward the lot across the street. Stephanie ran to catch him, but when she set her hand on his arm, he yanked it away and whirled around, his eyes bloodshot and irate. “What, Stephanie? What else is there to say?”

“I’m sorry. I’ve always regretted not telling you.”

“I would’ve been there for you. You didn’t even let me try.”

“It’s been eight years.”

“Eight years you didn’t think I was mature enough to handle it.” He stared at the overcast sky and shook his head, then jammed his hands into his coat pockets. “For the record, the only reason I’ve fucked so many women is to try to get over you. Funny how it makes me lonelier, not that you care.” He barked an acrimonious laugh. “I’m a fucking millionaire. Not good enough. Best hockey player in the world. Still not good enough.”

“Alex, it’s complicated, and I didn’t make you any promises—”

“Remember this? Remember what it says inside?” He yanked off the ring and lobbed it at her. “You don’t keep your fucking promises. Your promises are
shit
!”

The heat and force of his fury inundated her like a pyroclastic flow. People were staring or hurrying past, skirting around them to maintain minimum safe distance. She scrambled to catch the ring, but it bounced off her chest and rolled underneath a car. The tears broke through. “This has been just as hard for me—ˮ

“It
hasn’t
!” he shouted, his voice cracking, the edges of his eyes growing redder by the second and his fists clenched at his sides. “We kiss or we fool around, and you go back to him. Did you ever love me?”

She pressed a shaking hand to her mouth. “How can you ask me that? You know—ˮ

“ʻ—how I felt.’ You keep telling me that, but I need you to
say
the words
.” Alex rubbed his lips. “I have to get ready for practice.” He jerked away from her grasping hands and faced her when he had put several feet between them. He narrowed his eyes, struggling not to cry. Pieces of her heart lodged in her stomach. “Do you think I’m enjoying this? I fucking
hate
the way I feel right now! I’d do anything to make it stop.”

“I never understood why you liked me so much to begin with!”

“No. You do not get to use your low self-esteem as an excuse anymore when I have all but
begged
you to be with me!
Idi na khuy!
” He marched toward his car.

“I don’t even know what that means!”

“It means
fuck you
!”

She unlocked the car door, hiccupping sobs into her hand, and sank into the seat. Behind her, the Mercedes tore out of the lot in a flourish of squealing tires.

***

“Look, Steph, you know I don’t want to let you go. And in the end, it’s not my decision anyway.”

“At least give me one more chance when they get back from the road trip. I can’t do anything while he’s out of town.”

“This is it, Steph. I mean it. If you don’t get the story within five days from the second their plane touches down, I’m cutting you loose. I know he’s a dick, but dealing with people like him is part of what you signed up for. Remember, you asked for this opportunity.”

Stephanie massaged her temples. She’d contacted the league as Alex had suggested, so far to no avail. She trudged into the living room. Joe sat on the couch, red-faced, staring at her phone.

Shit. She hadn’t heard him come home.

“I’m such an idiot. All the texts and calls, the disappearances…And then I found this.” He held up the leather-bound journal, Alex’s Christmas present to her eight years ago.

Stephanie vibrated with fury. Alex had inscribed their initials with a heart around them inside the front cover. “‘AV.’ That stands for ‘Aleksandr Volynsky,’ right? You have a whole box of stuff. All your precious memories with him. You told me you guys were close. You neglected to tell me he was your fucking boyfriend.”

“Are you kidding me right now, Joe? That’s from high school!” She ripped it from his lap. That he could violate so sacred a personal space as her journal curdled her stomach. She had written everything in it, from her first suspicions of pregnancy to the summer afternoon of its abrupt end. Her terror of telling her parents. Of telling Alex most of all.

“You’ve always been in love with him, haven’t you? Here I thought you were marrying me because you loved me, not because I was a replacement for
him
.”

“What the hell are you doing going through my things?”

“I trusted you.” He’d have to make this more difficult by remaining calm. Rage would have provided an excuse to perpetrate some kind of violence on him.

“You want to talk about trust? Really? With my phone in your hand? With the journal you just happened to find? I kept it in a locked drawer. You had to search for my key and fucking
unlock
the drawer, so don’t talk to me about trust.”