Nikolai shot her a glance over his shoulder. “Ilya went home. Said he was going to crash for a few hours, then head back tomorrow morning unless something happened overnight. I told him I’d be back at the house later. Figured I’d see if you were still working, since obviously he’s not.”
“Thanks. I’m starving.” She lifted a greasy, dripping slice from the box and settled it onto one of the plates he handed her. Then another for herself. Watching him take the empty chair across from the desk, Alicia leaned back in hers. “Fox’s still makes the best all around.”
Nikolai bit into the gooey cheese with a sigh of bliss. He chewed, swallowed. Wiped his mouth like a grown-up, not a caveman. “I’ve dreamed about Fox’s pizza. I mean, literally dreamed.”
“Get out of here.” She laughed, not easily but genuinely.
“It’s the truth. You can’t find American pizza like this in Israel. And when I was in Antarctica, I craved pizza like you wouldn’t believe. Thick slices, greasy cheese, the salty anchovies . . .” He shivered with pleasure and took another slice. His tongue swiped along his lips as grease slipped over his sculpted chin and down his throat.
Mesmerized, Alicia watched the slow, glistening trickle move over his skin. How would that taste, to lick it away? He’d caught her staring. She covered it up by leaning over the desk to grab a beer.
When she looked up, she’d caught him staring.
“You look good without my brother’s ring on your hand.”
Heat rushed so fiercely up the column of her throat and into her cheeks that she swore she was about to burst into flames. She opened her mouth to castigate him, to really let it fly.
Every part of her tensed at his expression.
Narrowed eyes, slightly parted lips. Intensity in his gaze that had nothing to do with disapproval or lacking or anything but everything to do with pure, raw male appreciation. It wasn’t the first time she’d had a guy look at her that way, but it had been a long, long time since any guy’s look had made Alicia feel this way.
What was that old saying about keeping your enemies close? She wasn’t sure she could call Nikolai an enemy, exactly. But all at once, keeping him close had become very appealing.
Still, there was that small and stubborn part of her that remembered how vocal he’d been about his disapproval when she and Ilya had announced they’d run off to Vegas and eloped. Looking back, she’d known as well as anyone—better, even—that she and Ilya had made a mistake, but you couldn’t have made her admit that. Not at nineteen. Barely at twenty-nine, when at last she’d left him after one too many nights staring up at the ceiling wondering how she could spend the rest of her life being so miserable.
Based on her reaction to Nikolai’s look, she seemed on the verge of making a brand-new mistake. A bigger one, this time. You’d think she’d have learned her lesson the hard way from Stern brother number one.
She drank some beer to cool herself down. “Well, I don’t know if that’s something to say thank you for. But thanks.”
“It was meant as a compliment, but I sounded like a dick. Sorry.” Nikolai grimaced, then grabbed his own beer and took a long swig. “I’ll blame my lack of social skills on all the time I’ve spent alone in the wilderness, if you believe that story.”
“I can tell you, being alone in the wilderness has nothing to do with why you’re still such a colossal doofus.”
It was easier after that. Less awkward, anyway. It wasn’t that she forgot, exactly, that Nikolai had turned into the sort of guy who could turn her head so fast it gave her whiplash. It was more like she was forcing herself to remember to look past the arms, the thighs, the chest, the abs—oh, Lord, the abs. Rippling, rimmed ridges of delicious muscle she glimpsed when his shirt rode up as he stretched while regaling her with a tale of his adventures on a kibbutz in Israel.
She forced herself to remember him as the guy who’d made her feel like she was somehow lacking in comparison to her sister. That she hadn’t been enough for his brother.
And there it was, she thought, watching Nikolai tip back in his chair and lift the bottle of beer to his lips. The real reason she’d been so angry at him for so long. All he’d done was reinforce the feelings she’d been pretending she’d gotten over. Hell, the ones she wanted to pretend she never had.
“You were right,” she said quietly.
He’d been telling her about working in the kibbutz’s apiary, taking care of dozens of hives and harvesting gallons of honey. Now Nikolai stopped, looking her over.
“About?” he asked.
“Me and Ilya.” She didn’t say the rest, but his expression told her he understood.
“Oh. That.” He looked uncomfortable and scrubbed a hand through his hair, pushing it off his face. “I was a dick then, too. I thought we’d established that already.”
“You were still right. You were the only one to say so out loud, though. That’s why we fought.” Alicia laughed ruefully and shook her head. “I was so furious with you.”
“You and I always fought,” Niko said. “We were constantly at each other. It was kind of the way we worked, I guess.”
She nodded, thinking of all the insults and teasing. “This was different, though. What you said hurt so bad. That somehow I wasn’t as good as Jennilynn—”
“Wait, what? No. No, Allie.” Nikolai wiped a hand over his mouth and looked stunned. “That’s not what I meant at all.”
“It’s what you said,” she told him.
He shook his head. “It’s not what I meant. When I said you’d never take her place, I didn’t mean because you weren’t good enough. I meant that my brother wasn’t capable of giving you the relationship you needed or deserved. You weren’t your sister. She might’ve put up with his bullshit and been satisfied with it.”
Alicia swallowed a weakly bitter taste. “We won’t ever know.”
“No. We won’t. But dammit, I’m so damned sorry if you thought back then I meant that somehow you weren’t as good as she was. I never meant that. How could you ever have thought it? God, no wonder you haven’t talked to me in years. What the hell must you have thought about me?”
The truth was, no matter how often she’d found herself thinking of him and what might have been, she’d always pushed those thoughts away so fiercely there’d been only one way to remember him at all.
“I thought you were a know-it-all jerk,” Alicia admitted, certain he’d frown.
Nikolai smiled. “I thought you were smart and beautiful and amazing, and it made me nuts that you were with him, when he so clearly didn’t deserve you.”
Silence, a beat of it. Then another. The clock ticked, and so did her heart. She smiled.
“Maybe,” she said, “we can get over all that crap and put it behind us. Be friends.”
Nikolai leaned over the desk to offer her his hand. “It’s a deal.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Then