She looked at him. “Careful, Nikolai. You’re going to make me think you like me a little.”
He palmed her ass again, kneading. Then slipped his hand between her legs to press her there. “I think we’ve already established that I like you more than just a little.”
She rocked against him, her fingers curling in the front of his shirt. Her back arched as she offered him her neck again. Whatever she meant to say eased into a mumbled moan.
“I want you,” Niko said. “I want you so fucking much . . .”
The fall of footsteps above them pushed them apart. Alicia turned to the sink to fake rinsing a dish. Niko put the lid on a plasticware container of leftovers. Nobody came downstairs, and after a minute or so, both of them started laughing.
“It’s worse than in high school, waiting to get caught making out on the couch,” Alicia said.
“I never worried about getting caught. I never had a girlfriend.”
She made a face. “Not one you brought over here, anyway. Don’t tell me you and Deb Smith never got hot and heavy in her rumpus room.”
“What about you and Mike Taylor?” Niko took her by the hips and pulled them together again, one ear cocked for sounds from upstairs.
“What about him?” Alicia gave him a coy smile. “What makes you think he and I were an item?”
“Because he used to brag about it in gym class.” Niko frowned at the memory. “Used to piss me off.”
Her jaw dropped. “Ew, gross, no! He did? Oh, yuck. What did he say?”
“Just that he was taking you out.” Niko’s lip curled.
Alicia swatted at him. “And what . . . you were jealous?”
“Maybe.” He gave her a steady look, watching the way her smile softened. “I did think he should have kept his mouth shut about you. I remember that.”
“We never did more than kiss,” she told him. “And only then a couple of times. If I’d known you cared—”
“What? What would you have done?” he asked when she broke off.
Alicia shrugged and linked her fingers behind his neck. “I don’t know, to be honest. It wasn’t like I thought you and I would date or something. Back then. We just had a thing.”
“A thing. Like we have a thing now?”
Her smile didn’t quite all the way reach to her eyes. “Yeah.”
“This thing,” he said in a low voice. “This unfinished business.”
“What happens, do you think, when it’s finished?”
Niko had a feeling it would never be finished between them. It had been more than twenty years in the making. What would he do without this desire that, once sated, would surely disappear? What would he do without the thoughts of her that he turned to when he needed to remember he was capable of feeling? Where would he run to then?
“I think that’s a much longer conversation,” he said finally.
She bit her lower lip for a second. “Why can’t we have it, then?”
He said her name, meaning for it to push her away, but it only pulled her close to him again. The kiss went on and on, and he lost himself in it and her, trying hard not to be that guy, the guy who took advantage of someone who wanted something from him he knew he couldn’t possibly provide . . . but he failed. Of course he did.
“We can’t do this, Alicia.”
When they were younger, it had always been her older sister who’d pushed the boundaries and crossed the lines. Alicia had been the one to hold back. To follow the rules.
Obviously, she’d changed.
“Why not?” she challenged. “Why can’t we do this?”
Niko sighed. His fingers tightened on her hips. He wanted to let her go, to step away and put some distance between them to make it easier to deny the heat still palpable between them.
“Because we can’t.”
“You’re not going to stick around. You’re going to fix some things around here for your mother until you can’t stand it here anymore, and then you’ll be back off into the world, having your adventures.” She sounded only the tiniest bit bitter. “So why can’t we do this thing we both want to do, at least for the time you’re here?”
“You were married to my brother.”
Alicia snorted soft laughter. “Who was in love with my sister.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Niko said. “It doesn’t make this right.”
“You had me first,” Alicia told him boldly. Bluntly. She stood on her tiptoes to offer him her mouth, brushing her lips over his before pulling away when he tried to kiss her back. “Everything about this is messed up, Nikolai, believe me. I get it. But you can’t tell me that you want me and then not follow through. It’s not fair. More than that, it’s cruel. Is that what you want? To be cruel to me?”
He shook his head, then pressed his face to the side of her neck. Holding her close. Breathing against her skin. “No. That’s not what I want.”
“What do you want?”
It should’ve been easier to tell her. He’d thought about it so much over the years, after all. Yet words failed him, as they almost always did. All he could do was scrape his teeth along her throat to make her moan again. He pushed his hand between her legs, pressing against the heat there.
“This.”
“Then take it,” Alicia whispered into his ear. “Take all of it.”
Footsteps overhead pushed them apart again as they both breathed hard. The sight of her nipples outlined against the thin fabric of her shirt made his mouth go so dry he had to swallow hard. His cock ached, confined in the denim.
“Niko?” Galina called down the back stairs, her voice getting closer. “Is Allie still here?”
“Just leaving,” Alicia called. “We finished the dishes.”
The door at the bottom of the stairs creaked. Galina peered out. She’d wrapped herself in a silk kimono, her hair piled on top of her head. She had her pack of cigarettes in one hand.
“The hinges need to be oiled,” she said.
Niko frowned. “Okay, I’ll get right on that.”
Galina shrugged and moved past them to go out the back door, where the brief flare of her lighter lit her shadow through the glass. Alicia turned her head to look where Galina had gone.
The line of Alicia’s neck and the curve of her shoulder made Niko turn away so he could get himself under some kind of control.
“I should go,” Alicia said.
Niko nodded. “Yeah. I guess you should.”
She made no move to leave, though her gaze cut again to the back door. The soft mutter of Galina’s voice talking on the phone meant her attention was on that, not them, but even so, Niko wasn’t going to risk another embrace. He walked her to the front door, though, where he did pull her close when it looked as though she meant to leave without another kiss.
“This is crazy. You know that,” he said against her mouth.
“Maybe we can’t help it,” she whispered. Her eyes flashed in the dim light of the front hallway. “Would that make you feel better? Thinking that you can’t stop yourself? Would it give you an excuse?”
He could stop himself. He didn’t want to. He was saved from answering, though, at the sound of his mother’s shout.
“Niko!”
They both turned at the sound of his mother’s voice. He sighed. Alicia laughed.
“I’ll see you,” she told him, and let herself out the front door.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE