by Megan Hart
ALSO BY MEGAN HART
Lovely Wild
Precious and Fragile Things
The Favor
All Fall Down
Little Secrets
The Resurrected
Passion Model
Driven
Beneath the Veil
Seeking Eden
Exit Light
Beg for It
Perfectly Restless
Hold Me Close
Vanilla
Flying
Stumble Into Love
The Space Between Us
Collide
Naked
Deeper
Switch
Stranger
Tempted
Broken
Dirty
Tear You Apart
Captivated (with Tiffany Reisz)
Taking Care of Business (with Lauren Dane)
No Reservations (with Lauren Dane)
Order of Solace series
Pleasure and Purpose
No Greater Pleasure
Selfish is the Heart
Virtue and Vice
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2017 Megan Hart
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Montlake Romance, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Montlake Romance are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503942776
ISBN-10: 1503942775
Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant
For anyone who’s ever thought of giving up the dream . . . don’t.
Keep dreaming.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
SNEAK PEEK: ALL THE SECRETS WE KEEP
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHAPTER ONE
There might be worse things than looking out her kitchen window to watch her ex-husband smooching up on some tousle-haired blonde wearing last night’s outfit, but it sure wasn’t the first thing Alicia Stern wanted to see in the morning. Sipping her coffee with both hands warming on the mug, she leaned against the counter and listened to the soft plink-plink of her dripping faucet. Ilya had promised to fix it for her but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Of course. And no wonder, Alicia thought as the blonde drove off in a kicky little VW Bug with fake eyelashes decorating the headlights. He was too busy laying pipe to fix a leaking faucet.
Ilya waved after the car, put both hands on his hips, and arched his back. Then, with his arms flung wide, he twisted at the waist. He touched his toes. Did a couple of jumping jacks.
All in his leave-nothing-to-the-imagination boxer shorts.
Alicia’s coffee slipped down a little too fast, too hot, and she coughed. The neighbors were getting quite a show, she thought with a shrug and a shake of her head. It wasn’t any of her business what Ilya did in the mornings in his own front yard. She could no longer be held responsible for him or his helicoptering ding-dong.
She would be, though. That was part of the problem with living in a small town. Ilya could—and often did—bring home a different woman every night, but until he put a ring on one of their fingers, Alicia was still going to be the one everyone expected to keep him in line.
Her phone rang. The house line, which meant it was Dina Guttridge from the Cape Cod next door. The Guttridge family had moved in about eight years ago, their house a part of the new construction that had cropped up all along Quarry Street within the past ten years. At first, newlyweds Dina and Bill had been fine neighbors. Friendly without being overbearing. Then the children had come, one after the other, three in a row, and two years ago, a fourth. Bill Guttridge had taken a job driving long hauls.
Dina had started getting cranky.
Now she was the sort of neighbor who called about the lawn being too long on Alicia’s side, about late-night loud noises, and about the motion-detector lights being too bright. Once about the smell of the barbecue grill making her precious tots “too hungry” when it was past their bedtime. Alicia had lost her patience a while back with Dina’s constant nosiness and complaining, though she usually managed to keep her annoyances to herself in the name of keeping the neighborly peace.
“Dina. Hi,” she said before Dina could even identify herself.
“He’s almost naked! It’s January!”
Alicia bit back a chortle and peeked out her kitchen window again. From this angle she could see only Ilya’s driveway and not his front yard. Her answer wasn’t a lie. “I can’t see him, Dina.”
“But you knew who I was talking about right away, didn’t you?” Dina huffed and puffed.
Alicia imagined the other woman lifting a toddler onto her hip while she stared out of the gap between her living-room curtains. “I assumed. Yeah.”
“You’re going to have to say something to him. This is ridiculous. Go see what he’s doing!”
Alicia topped off her mug and cradled the phone between her ear and shoulder while she pulled open the fridge to find the creamer. Her parents had done some nice things to this house before moving permanently to Arizona, but they’d never upgraded their landline to a cordless model. She was tethered to the wall by the phone’s long, curling cord. So it was also not a lie when she said, “Can’t see him from here while I’m on the phone, Dina. The cord won’t stretch.”
“The cord won’t . . .” Dina huffed again. “He’s doing some sort of . . . yoga!”
Of course he was, in his own way. It looked like he’d learned from a contortionist with an extra arm, and once he got into downward dog, he pumped his pelvis against the ground a few times, probably because he suspected Dina might be watching. Alicia didn’t miss much about being married to Ilya, though occasionally—very occasionally, and usually only when she’d had a few glasses of wine—she did allow herself to remember fondly his flexibility and ability to control his breathing. “Look, Dina, if you’re so worked up about it, you call him. I can’t stop him from doing anything.”
“Ex-husband.” Alicia thought, and not for the first time, how simple it was to say. It made her sad, sometimes, how easily she’d been able to stop thinking of Ilya as her husband, even if nobody else seemed to manage. “We’ve been divorced for almost longer than we’ve been married, Dina.”
“So you don’t care that he was practically humping some random woman in the driveway. Right in front of my kids.”
“I don’t care about what Ilya does with random women, no. I’m sorry he’s a douche, Dina. What can I say? He’s a free spirit. Holler at him, not me.” Alicia put the creamer back in the fridge and added some sugar to her coffee, stirring it before sipping. “There’s honestly not much I can do about it, and, frankly, I don’t even want to.”
That last bit slipped out a little harsher than she’d intended, but Alicia decided she didn’t regret the words. Or her tone. It was the truth.
“Just say something to him, anyway. I know you’ll see him at work.” Dina’s voice faded, and there came a sound of scuffling. A wailing cry. She came back on the line, sounding disgruntled and exhausted and irritable, and Alicia would have had more sympathy for her if the woman hadn’t been so insistent that somehow everyone else take some responsibility for her woes. “Tell him it’s . . . well, it’s just not right that he lets his goods hang all out like that.”
“Fine. I’ll say something,” Alicia promised, if only to get Dina off the line so she could finish her coffee in peace. “I can’t make any promises about him changing his behavior.”
Dina huffed and puffed again. “He should be more considerate of the people around him! I mean, he should just think!”
“That’s Ilya for you. Not a big thinker.” Alicia hated the tone of apology that had managed to creep into her voice despite her earlier abruptness. No matter how she fought it, she was still taking the blame for him. “I’ll tell him to cool it.”
After hanging up the phone, she punched in a familiar set of numbers for the house across the street. She’d been calling that number since they were kids. Like her, Ilya had kept the same phone from the time he’d been growing up. She had his cell number, too, of course, but if he was out there on the front lawn doing half-naked yoga, he didn’t exactly have a pocket to keep a phone in. He’d hear the old-fashioned jangling, though, and maybe he’d at least go inside before Dina completely lost her mind.
The phone rang ten times without an answer, but a knock on her front door a few minutes later revealed an unapologetically grinning Ilya glistening with sweat. It had slicked his dark hair back from his forehead and sparkled on his upper lip, until he licked it away. January had been unseasonably warm, but even so, he must’ve been putting on quite the show after she stopped watching.
“She called you, huh?” Ilya said.
Alicia stepped aside to let him in. “Yeah. Do you have to be such a dick about everything? You know she gets all worked up about that stuff. We don’t live alone on this street anymore. It’s not like it used to be. You need to remember that.”
He moved past her and into the kitchen. He poured himself a mug of coffee, as at-home in her house as she’d be in his, even after being divorced for so many years. One of the hardest things about them splitting up had been enforcing boundaries. This was her house now, not her mom and dad’s, but apparently even almost a decade of not being married couldn’t cancel out a near lifetime of being somehow intertwined.
This was one of the many times Alicia thought it would have been a better choice if she’d sold her childhood home and moved away when she left him. Across town, or even farther. Canada. China. A house near a loch in Scotland. There were thousands of places she might have gone instead of staying in Quarrytown, but here was where she’d always been, and here was probably where she would always stay. Anyway, moving away would have required money. It always came down to money, and hers had been tied up in the business.
“She’s a busybody. You got any eggs?”
Alicia reached around him to shut the fridge door he was attempting to open. “Out.”
Ilya gave her puppy eyes, but she’d grown immune to those charms long ago. “C’mon, Allie, I haven’t made it to the grocery store yet this week.”
“Starve,” she said unsympathetically, and stood in front of the fridge with her arms crossed.
Frowning, Ilya took a few steps back and drank his coffee. “Wow. Harsh.”
She couldn’t let herself feel upset about hurting his feelings. If she let him, Ilya would simply continue to walk in and out of her kitchen the way he walked in and out of her life. “When are you going to grow up?”
“Harsher,” he said, brow furrowed. “Shit, Allie.”
She couldn’t let him guilt her into anything, either. He was a master of that, too. Charming, insistent, oblivious to anything beyond himself. It had stopped hurting when she’d come to accept that Ilya’s self-absorption had nothing to do with anything lacking inside her—it was all him. Still, there would always be that tiny sting when she looked at him and remembered that once upon a time she’d loved him enough to marry him and take his name. Once upon a long time ago.
When she didn’t answer, he shook his head, then muttered, “Sorry. I’m hungry, that’s all.”
“Your girlfriend didn’t make you breakfast in bed?” The words slipped out sounding angry, even though she wasn’t. Not really. Not about the blonde, anyway.
Ilya laughed. “R-i-i-i-ight, girlfriend, right. And she couldn’t cook me breakfast if I didn’t have anything to eat.”
“So go to the store,” Alicia said without moving. “Or get a girlfriend who will go shopping for you.”
“Jealous?”
She laughed and rolled her eyes. “Oh, yes. So, so jealous.”
“I’m sorry,” he said again, this time sounding more sincere.
She paused, eyes narrowed. “Uh-huh. What’s going on?”
“Nothing.” He sipped his coffee and went to the window to peek out, as though checking on what she’d been able to see earlier. He glanced at her over his bare shoulder. “Think Dina would let me borrow some eggs?”
Alicia grinned. “Why don’t you go over there and ask her?”
They both burst into laughter. If it felt a little mean, it also felt a little nostalgic. It felt a little melancholy, and she wasn’t about to go there with him. Too much had passed between them for that.
“She doesn’t mean anything to me,” Ilya said suddenly to her back as she emptied her mug into the sink and moved to put it in the dishwasher.
Without even a glance, Alicia answered, “Who? Dina?”
“Not Dina.”
Her back stiffened, and she almost dropped her mug but managed to settle it onto the top rack before she did. When she heard the clink of his mug on the counter, she said, “Ilya. Don’t.”
He moved up behind her and put his hands on her hips. His fingers squeezed her lightly. His crotch pushed against her ass. She tensed at the gust of his breath on the back of her neck. He had not touched her that way in years.
“Allie . . .”
“I said ‘don’t,’” she repeated firmly, willing her voice not to shake. He couldn’t see her closed eyes or the way she sealed her mouth tight to keep herself from crying, her tears as unexpected as his come-on had been. “Stop it, Ilya. It’s not going to work. I’m not one of your pickups, okay?”
His fingers gripped tighter for a second or so before he stepped back, putting distance between them. His voice, low and rasping, tried to turn her, but she kept herself facing away. “I know that. I just thought . . .”
“You want what you want,” she told him as coldly as she could, which was barely lukewarm, because this, after all, was Ilya. Her worst mistake. The one man who had never been meant for her.
He snorted soft laughter that had no humor to it. “Doesn’t everyone?”
“It’s getting late. Are you coming in to the shop today?” She didn’t turn. Didn’t look. She breathed t
hrough the threat of tears and forced them away.
After half a minute or so, she heard him sigh. “Well . . . yeah. Of course. I’ll stop in before I head over to the Y for the beginner classes.”
Carefully, she closed the dishwasher and rinsed her hands at the sink. The beginner sessions consisted of a bunch of paperwork, a few lessons on technique, and some preliminary work in the pool. The advanced sessions were all in the water, and they’d also take place in the pool since Go Deep didn’t allow winter diving. All of them were Ilya’s responsibility.
She turned to face him. “Don’t forget the advanced sessions later this afternoon—both of them. You need to get them all their certification before you take them on the trip.”
“Yeah. I know. It’ll happen. Don’t worry about it.”
“They’ve all put down deposits and bought their flights. I’ve paid the hotel. We can’t afford to be late on any of this—”
Ilya nodded, his normally open expression unreadable. He glanced down at his boxers and seemed uncomfortable, at least in the way his gaze cut from hers. He scuffed a bare foot along the faded linoleum, then looked over at her sink.
“Hey. Your faucet,” he began.
Alicia cut him off with a small wave. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll call someone to come and deal with it. It’s not your problem. We’re not . . . it’s not your problem.”
He nodded slowly. “Okay. Sure. But you know I wouldn’t mind.”
She looked him in the eye, both of them full of words that neither of them seemed willing to say. “I’m going to be late. We have a delivery scheduled. I need to be there for it.”
“Sure. Right. Yeah,” he said and backed away. “I’ll see you there in half an hour.”
That meant easily an hour or longer, but Alicia didn’t say so. It would start a fight and not change anything, in the end. Ilya would still be there late, and she would still be irritated, and around and around they’d go. Instead, she smiled and nodded and showed him to the front door. She closed it after him and leaned against it, eyes closed, breathing in and breathing out. Most of the time it was so easy not to love him anymore, she thought as she shook it all off, got her chin up. Most of the time it was so easy, but sometimes, it was so, so damned hard.
