Ghost Dance (Tulsa Thunderbirds Book 3) (19 page)

But for now, she was still in my house, covered in my sweat and the scent of sex. I said a silent prayer for patience, not to mention a heat wave, before I carried London upstairs and set her in the bathroom so she could do whatever was necessary to clean up. Her chair and purse were still in there, and I found another pair of my boxers and a clean T-shirt she could put on.

I went into my own bathroom to shower and try to wash away the memory of all the things I’d fucked up.

Then I set about finding a way to be on my best behavior until the weather cleared up and she could leave.

We both seemed content to pretend that what had just happened between us had been simply a figment of our imaginations. That it hadn’t really happened. That we hadn’t been so stupid as to forget something as important as protection.

I knew I should say something. Anything. Tell her I got tested regularly and was clean. Ask her if she was on any form of birth control.
Something
. But I didn’t, and neither did she. Here we were, two adults, acting like toddlers who would rather avoid a difficult subject than face it head on.

I didn’t know what to make of that sort of behavior with her, because with everything else, she was constantly in my face. Pushing. Demanding answers. Trying to get me to break, and coming damn close to it.

She still hadn’t given up on convincing me to tell her about my past, either. The rest of the day, every time she asked me a question and tried to get me to talk about Sergei or the wreck or even my childhood, I did exactly what she expected of me. I got up and left the room, going upstairs or downstairs, whatever was necessary to get away from her. Running away, she called it. I called it preserving my sanity.

When that didn’t work, she tried using the same tactic I’d used before. If I wouldn’t talk, she tried to lure me into fucking her again. She kept giving me coy glances and licking her lips and making sexy eyes at me.

Not going to happen. The last thing I needed now was to add fuel to whatever fire we’d already created. In response, I did the same thing I would if she tried to insist I talk—I left.

I was getting really tired of trying to avoid her in my own damn house, too, but what else was I supposed to do? Tallie was right. I couldn’t storm out into the weather and leave London all alone. Not when she used a wheelchair to get around, and my house had so many stairs. I wasn’t that cold and heartless, even if I came close.

So, I waited. And avoided her every time she poked at my temper.

That afternoon, I had another call from Hunter, begging me to talk Harper back to sleep. They still had power, and I was half tempted to ask if I could send London over to stay with them until everything thawed, but I knew Tallie would insist I come, too. My plan was to get away from her, not simply move our base camp from one place to another. Besides, I wouldn’t want Hunter and Tallie to be responsible for London. They already had enough on their hands with Harper’s colic.

Once the baby was settled and asleep, I hung up and went back into the living room, only to find London staring at me with one of those looks I couldn’t interpret.

“So I guess I just need to learn Russian, huh?” she said.

“Why you need to learn Russian?”

“To figure out what you talk to that baby about. You have no problem talking to Harper. Just to me.”

“Nothing to talk about.” Not to her, at least.

“Hmm,” she said, but she went back to building a house of cards on my coffee table.

I joined her, since she was otherwise occupied and might leave me alone. We kept working at it in silence until the sun set and I had to light candles in order for us to see. Then I left her to it and got up to make us something for dinner.

The power came back on not long after dark, thank goodness. That meant we had heat, so I could put London back in my bed while I slept on the couch as I’d planned to do. That would prevent me from spooning with her again. I didn’t think I could get through another night of having my cock nestled up against her ass without doing something else I’d be sure to regret, and Lord knew I’d already done more than enough things worthy of remorse for one lifetime.

When I came into the living room after washing the dishes, I found her next to one of the big windows, looking out in front of the house. She glanced over her shoulder at me momentarily, but then she returned her attention to the street.

“It’s starting to melt,” she said. “It’ll refreeze tonight, after the temperatures drop again, but I bet it’ll warm up again tomorrow. Maybe enough will melt that the streets won’t be so bad.”

“Maybe you can leave then,” I said before thinking better of it.

She turned and stared so long it made me feel like an even bigger ass than I already knew myself to be. “Yeah. I’ll call my brother tonight and ask him to come get me as soon as it’s safe tomorrow.”

“Better to spend Christmas with your family, anyway,” I said.

But something deep in my chest ached, dull and throbbing, at the thought that she might be gone tomorrow.

Which made no sense. I should be glad to be rid of her. We’d been driving each other crazy since the moment we’d first met, so anything that would get her out of my life had to be for the best. Didn’t it?

“Definitely better to spend Christmas with my family,” she said, and she returned her attention to whatever was going on outside my window. “I haven’t ever spent one without them. This is the first Christmas Eve I haven’t been with them.” She backed her chair away from the window and went back to the coffee table to collect her phone. “In fact, I think I’ll call Gray now. Who knows? Maybe he can get here tonight.”

So that was that. She was ready to be done with me, and she’d do whatever it took to make it happen. Whether I’d intended it to happen this way or not, I’d run another person out of my life.

Possibly forever.

Shouldn’t I have been happier about it?

DUE TO THE
combination of the weather and the holiday, there wasn’t a single pharmacy open that late on Christmas Eve or at all on Christmas Day. Just my luck.

The longer I had to wait to get to a pharmacy, the more anxious I grew, too. How long was it safe to wait before taking the morning-after pill for it to still be effective? And did the effectiveness diminish in relation to how much time had passed? I wasn’t sure, and every time I tried to pull out my phone and do a quick Google search, some member of my family or another interrupted me. That meant I had to quickly hide what I’d been searching for and put my phone away, because the
last
thing I needed for any of my family to know was that I’d had wild, crazy monkey sex with a grumpy, tattooed Russian while we were snowed in together.

Not that I was getting much time alone to do my searching, either.

Mom had been hovering since the moment Gray and I had come through the door on Christmas Eve night, constantly trying to help me do every tiny little thing. I had to keep reminding her that having my car stolen didn’t make me any less capable than I had been for the last however many years, other than making it difficult for me to
drive
anywhere. She didn’t like it. Hovering was her thing. It made her feel like she had some control over life, I supposed.

Gray kept sitting down next to me and grilling me about how Dima had treated me the whole time I had been there. Granted, I hadn’t warned him about the house being a split-level, so now he had a thousand questions about how I’d managed to do certain things. The answers were all the same, too: Dima carried me. My brother didn’t like that answer, for some reason. Probably because I always put my foot down and insisted on doing everything for myself if it was at all possible…and even trying to do the impossible on my own. I was too stubborn for my own good, and we both knew it, so the fact that I’d had to rely on Dima’s assistance stuck in Gray’s craw as much as it did mine.

When those two weren’t in my grill, I had my nieces and nephews climbing all over me like a jungle gym. Logan had me drilling him on multiplication tables in between bouts of teaching me how to play Roblox on his mother’s laptop. Kennedy wanted to practice braiding my hair. She made an awful, tangled mess of it every time she touched me, but I didn’t have the heart to turn her away. Almost-three-year-old Erin begged for me to take her for a ride and pop a wheelie almost as often as she wanted to have a
Frozen
sing-a-long while wearing her Elsa princess costume from Halloween. The youngest of the kids, my nine-month-old nephew, Finn, was the easiest. He just wanted to giggle and make faces at me and shove bites of his squashed banana in my mouth. So even though the kids were constantly around, at least they were fun, which was a nice change of pace from the adults.

The only two people in the house who weren’t incessantly checking on me or trying to get my attention were my father and Sierra, my sister-in-law.

Dad knew better than to poke and prod at me after the way I’d blown up at him a few months after my accident. He’d been trying to get me to slow down and stop pushing myself so hard, but that wasn’t in my nature. Which, of course, he knew. He’d raised me to be a strong, independent woman, capable of taking care of myself. But I was still his baby girl, so he hated seeing me cry in frustration when I tried and failed. Still, my blowup had brought us much closer together, and we’d come to an understanding after that. He could still worry about me all he wanted, but he needed to keep it to himself…and if I needed his help, I promised I would ask for it without hesitation. Since we’d agreed to those terms, we’d been fine.

Sierra was another matter entirely. She and I had never been close, but now that I was in a wheelchair, she seemed to resent me more than ever. I supposed it was because some family decisions hinged on whether things would be accessible for me or not. She seemed to think I got more attention than I deserved, and with the focus on me, it pushed her to the fringes. I had never fully figured out her issue with me. Regardless, my accident had only driven a bigger wedge between us than what had been there to start, and my whole car-getting-stolen-and-me-staying-with-them-for-the-holidays thing seemed to be eating her alive from the inside. The sooner she could get me out of her house, the happier she would be.

And frankly, that was a score Sierra and I could agree on. I loved my family to bits, but I also needed my space—especially to process everything that had happened in the few days before I’d ended up here.

It was hard to believe I’d only been with Dima for less than two days. It had all gone so fast, even though we’d spent the entire time sniping at each other or else falling into bed together. And, crazy as it sounded, I missed him.

I hadn’t even been at Gray’s house with the family for as long as I’d been with Dima, but it felt like it had been two weeks.

I needed to get back to my place. To my
life
. As soon as possible.

Christmas Day finally came to an end and the house got quiet. When Tuesday morning rolled around and the roads were all clear, I took that as my sign that it was time to hightail it out of there and try to resume life as normal. And my father was going to be my salvation, whether he realized it or not.

I wheeled up beside him at the breakfast table and fixed a bowl of cereal, grateful for the cacophony that my nieces and nephews were providing all around us. “Any chance you can borrow Gray’s SUV today and take me home?” I asked him.

He gave me a suspicious look. “Already bailing on us, huh?”