Firebird (The Firebird Trilogy #1) Read online

  Alex was standing outside the door, his hair coiffed and his black derby shoes polished. He was wearing black corduroy pants and a navy sport shirt with check-print lining on the cuffs. The shirt was fitted, the shape of his body impossible to ignore. She’d been daydreaming about it for the past day and a half.

  “Hey.” He kissed her cheeks three times, right-left-right. Things were bound to be a little weird, a little awkward, at first. Chatting in their emotional doorways, plotting the shortest course back to the comfortable space they’d once claimed in each other’s hearts. “I should’ve brought you something. So I’ve already screwed up. I don’t usually go on dates, you know, I just…Well, you don’t want to hear about that. Um…you look pretty.”

  “You’re adorable when you’re flustered.”

  “Like old times, da?” He smiled. “Sorry I didn’t call yesterday. I crashed after the team meeting. I didn’t want you to think…”

  “You were having second thoughts?”

  “Something like that. So.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Let’s go before I make a bigger ass of myself.”

  Alex opened every door for her. His culture dictated he show that kind of respect to his date, to be indulgent and attentive, chivalrous and doting. He’d done the same thing as a kid. He started the Mercedes, and they headed downtown. “To be honest, I was a little afraid to call you.”

  “You? Afraid?”

  “I didn’t know if it would be weird now. I feel like I did this backward. Not that the other night wasn’t totally amazing.” His cheeks dimpled. “So you said something then…”

  Yep. Dropped the L-word right in the middle of sex. Total amateur move. “It just kind of came out, but don’t feel pressured to—ˮ

  “No, it was nice to hear, and…” He shook his head and smirked. “Bozhe moy. I sound like an idiot. Is it obvious I suck at this?”

  Stephanie patted his thigh. Solid muscle. She tried to stop thinking about him with his pants off. “You’re very cute when you suck.”

  “Thanks, I think.” He laughed as he turned the car into the parking lot of the AMC Theater.

  After the movie, they lay on the hood of the car in a lot near Puget Sound, holding hands and gazing at the stars. The night would not be clear for long. Beyond the Sound, out in the vast black ocean, clouds were coalescing into a storm, and lightning forked toward the water.

  “My boss loved the story. Thinks it could even win awards.” She had emailed a preview to Alex, as the official version would not be going to press until next month’s issue.

  He kissed her cheek. “Congratulations on your promotion. I’m very proud of you.”

  “Thank you. This one guy has it out for me, though. He wanted the story, so he harasses me every chance he gets.”

  “What’s his name? Do I need to have a talk with him?”

  “Sweetie, no. That’ll just make it worse; believe me. But I appreciate your enthusiasm.”

  He brought her hand to his lips. “Remember when we would lie in your backyard and look at the clouds? And watch the sun set.”

  “Of course.”

  “I used to wish we could be up there together, away from everything. You never expected anything of me.”

  She squeezed his fingers.

  “I didn’t really know what I was getting into at eighteen. I wanted to play pro hockey and be the next great Russian. But sometimes it feels like…” He scratched his chin. “Like I’m the kid who chose the most predictable Halloween costume. I’m a millionaire for something I learned to do on a tiny pond in Russia.” His dilated pupils mirrored the waxing half-moon. “But I know why I wasn’t happy.” He nestled his cheek against her hair. “I always thought I’d be sharing all of it with you.”

  They lapsed into a charged silence until he said, “Here,” and dug a folded piece of paper from his pocket. “Please don’t laugh.”

  She unfolded the paper and read it several times, memorizing the words as though the ink would vanish. This was the kind of love people dreamed of. The kind that’s too good to be true, she thought before shutting her father’s voice away in the deepest recesses of her brain. “You wrote this?”

  “If it sucks, then no.”

  She angled herself over him. When she let him up for air, a wistful smile lit his face.

  “This will sound incredibly stupid, but I don’t know how to invite someone back to my place without implying we’re going to, you know, have sex.” He swept a few strands of hair from her brow.

  “I’ll make it easy for you, then. I want to go home with you.”

  “Good. Because I want to wake up next to you again.” He drew her into a lush kiss, the ebb and flow of his tongue a gravitational force in which she was too happy to be caught.

  The lock to her key, and the key to her lock. Soul mates.

  “Ya khochu byt′ s toboy navsegda.” He grazed his lips over her neck and linked their fingers.

  She didn’t need his protection or his validation anymore. She needed nothing from him; she had forged a life of her own, on her own. Yet where she ended and he began no longer mattered. To love him and to be loved by him was everything.

  ***

  Alex muted the dimmers, then kicked off his shoes and entered the kitchen. “Make yourself comfortable,” he called from behind the breakfast bar. He plugged his phone into a Bose SoundDock, and music streamed into the living space. “Something to drink?”

  “As long as it’s not a Long Island.”

  Alex, chuckling, prepared the drinks, then placed them on coasters and sat beside her. “Pretty tame. Captain and Diet Coke.”

  “So what’s the plan?”

  “I thought we could—ˮ He cocked his head. “Hear that?”

  “Oh my God.” Familiar notes tugged at the strings of her memory. The first song they’d danced to at prom. Their song. “I haven’t heard this in years.”

  Alex rose and extended his hand, his eyes brilliant with adoration for her, with the recollection of what had come after. “Will you dance with me?”

  She gazed up at him, and her first instinct as she pictured him as an anxious seventeen-year-old boy in a tuxedo was to grieve again the lost years. It was difficult not to see him as he once was, not to notice the phantom of that boy over which the man he’d become had been superimposed, a double-exposure memory. “I’d love to.” She offered him one hand and set the other on his shoulder. He whisked her through the open living room, she in bare feet and he in socks, past the windows and their picturesque backdrop, and sang the lyrics. His smile was all the illumination she needed. She could not take her eyes off him, his face more beautiful from its few imperfections.

  “Remember our other first date?” she asked.

  “Miniature golf. You asked me out because I was too nervous to ask you.”

  “Even though you kissed me at the end of our first day of school.”

  Alex bowed his head to hers. “I seem to find you irresistible.”

  The song faded into a dance-pop tune. After a minute or two of spirited jitterbugging, he twirled her, which with a less inept girlfriend would have been charming. Instead, she caught her toes around her other foot and crashed to the floor onto her tailbone. Pain jolted through her backside.

  “Shit! Are you okay?” Alex dropped to his knees beside her.

  “Now you know why I don’t dance.”

  He was biting his lip to keep from laughing. “Are you hurt?”

  “I’ll be fine.” She rubbed her lower back and winced. “Surprise. I haven’t gotten any more graceful. Just laugh already and get it over with.”

  Alex, his eyebrows already halfway up his forehead, let out the chortle he’d attempted to suppress. He hugged her and gave her a sweet kiss, then helped her stand. “Stay here for a minute. I’ll be right back.” He grabbed his phone and vanished into the dark hallway.

  When he returned, he said nothing but offered a captivating smile and led her down the hall.

  Candles burned on the w
indowsill, the dresser, and the nightstand. Soft music with a slow, sexy beat permeated the room. First a love poem, now this. She’d wake up any minute, back in the world where her lost love was a face on TV, a mental photo that had never finished developing. She snaked her fingers into his hair and closed her fist. With her other hand, she gripped the front of his shirt and yanked him closer. Lips parted, brushed, but she pulled back as he tried to kiss her.

  He opened his eyes halfway and smiled. “You tease.”

  She rewarded him with a gentle kiss. Her hand still in his hair, she gave it a little tug as she allowed him to kiss her for a few seconds before she pulled back again. He finished with a delicate touch of his tongue to her bottom lip.

  “Take off your clothes,” he whispered. He sat on the edge of the bed and leaned back on his hands, eyebrows raised in expectation.

  Stephanie chewed on a nail. Like a striptease? After her performance in the living room? That way lay madness. Bumbling, unsexy madness.

  “I hope you’re not getting self-conscious on me. Come here.”

  Mind reader. She crossed the room and knelt between his knees. “I thought Russian men didn’t like aggressive women.”

  “I think it’s fucking hot when you tell me what you want.” He nuzzled her neck. “Mmm. Ty takaya krasivaya. The most beautiful woman in the world.”

  “You’re a delightful liar, Aleksandr Volynsky.”

  “I wish you could see yourself through my eyes. Then you’d know how beautiful you are. And I’ll never let anyone hurt you again.”

  She drew her fingertips over his scruffy cheek, his chin. He gazed at her with all the adoration the universe could hold. Opening the door and peering out, hopefully seeing in her what poured so freely from him.

  “I don’t need someone to protect me, Alex. I just want to be loved. The way people should be.”

  “I never stopped.”

  She circled her arms around his neck. “This is how it was supposed to be. You and me against the world.”

  “You’ll always have me, baby.”

  Stephanie climbed onto his lap, straddling him. “How about right now?” she whispered against his lips. He smiled and slipped his hands beneath her shirt.

  “Especially right now.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Stephanie’s phone alarm shrieked from her purse. She groped around the floor and shut it off. The dull hammering in the back of her skull sent pangs of nausea through her gut. She inhaled deep, slow breaths until it passed, took a sip of water from the glass on the nightstand, then lay down again. “I’ll never drink again” may have crossed her lips at some point last night. One of these days, she’d hold herself to that.

  Alex was trying his best to keep things clandestine. They never ate at the same place twice, and always in a different part of town. They minimized physical contact so that anyone watching would see nothing more than a casual dinner between friends. An arduous public denial of attraction that exploded the second they set foot in his place or hers, or anywhere marginally private. They had made out, and made love, in places that would have embarrassed her to admit just a few months ago.

  Alex rolled onto his back and angled his arm over the pillow, one leg escaping the comforter. His long lashes fluttered, eyes chasing whatever he saw in his dreams. His hair, unbound by styling products, flopped onto his forehead. Stubble darkened his upper lip, his cheeks, and chin. Stephanie skimmed her fingers over the curve of his bicep and shoulder, outlined his pectoral arc. She kissed his brow, his nose, each cheek.

  She flung the covers aside and kissed him from his mouth to his hard nipples, to the half-erect cock that grew stiffer in her palm. His fingers formed a languid comb through her hair. His balls tightened as she sketched their shape with her tongue; he gasped and pressed a hand to the back of her head. Inhaling his musk, she licked him from base to head, collected the precum at his tip before inching her lips down. She slid her tongue back and forth over a penis far bigger than the previous two that constituted all of her oral sex experience. He bucked his hips and fed her more with each thrust. Stephanie worked him deeper, testing her gag reflex. When her jaw began to ache, she swirled her tongue over the head and underside of his shaft. Then she pressed it upward and swallowed, increased the pressure.

  “Fuck,” he whispered. “Sosat′ yego slozhneye.” He clenched two fistfuls of her hair and compelled her to take him deeper, to suck in time with his thrusts. He pulsed in her mouth. A low noise rumbled in his throat. He clamped his hands around her head and with a loud cry spurted into her mouth, rope after rope. She swallowed and gulped some more water, then laid her head on his thigh and watched his cock flag, the head retreating into its sheath.

  “You’ve never done that before. With me. And it was fucking fantastic.” Alex pushed himself up and cupped her chin. “Coach gave us the morning off. Doesn’t want us to be tired tonight with these back-to-back games. Call off. Spend the day with me.” Their tongues entwined in a slow, sumptuous kiss. “I don’t have to be at the arena until four thirty. Better yet, come to the game too. I get comped two tickets for every game, and I never use them.”

  “I need an excuse for my boss. ‘I’m busy having sex with Aleksandr Volynsky’ probably won’t work.”

  “Sounds good to me.” He nipped her earlobe. “Just tell him you’re not feeling well. And then…” Alex ran a finger along her inner thigh, and she shivered. “I’ll make you all better.”

  “I do have a bit of a hangover. But don’t you have to work out?”

  “There’s a certain activity that burns a lot of calories if done with enough enthusiasm.” He waggled his eyebrows.

  Stephanie, giggling, picked up her phone and speed-dialed Dave. “Hey, Dave,” she said when he picked up, “it’s Steph.”

  Alex disappeared beneath the covers.

  “I’m feeling under the weather today, so I’m going to stay out of the office. I’ll try to get some work done from home.”

  Flicked his tongue over her clit.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, hopefully. Bye.” She set the phone back on the nightstand and huffed out a moan.

  “Sorry, did I interrupt your call?” he said between kisses along her thighs.

  She threw the blanket back. He licked his lips, his mouth and chin slick with her natural lubrication, then gripped her thighs and plunged back in. Blood rushed into her tissues, inflaming her already full, aching labia, the sandpaper rasp of his whiskers alleviated by the tender flicker of his tongue. She cradled his head between her hands and jammed his face into her, then let out a scream.

  Alex, grinning, raised his head. She sat up halfway.

  “You are entirely too good at that.”

  He inched forward on his knees, pinioning her to the headboard as he pulled her legs around his waist. Hard again. “I’m good at a lot of things.”

  She crossed her ankles at the small of his back, and Alex thrust full force into her. Sighs wafted across sweating skin. She was starved for him, for his mouth and his hands and his body and his heart. Tongues delved, probed. Licking and lapping. Moving together in fluid swells, innate synchronization. His back muscles tightening and relaxing, his abs rippling with each surge. Her moans punctuated each lunge. His hot skin sliding against hers, she became more conscious of each cell, each nerve, touch-sensitive. Sweat trickled down her belly. He licked a droplet from between her breasts.

  Lips parted against each other’s, exhales flowing from one into the other. Then skimming her cheek, her ear, her neck. Alex kissed her chin and throat and shoulders, skidding his hands along her sweat-slick skin. A soft groan as he plunged deeper. Lost in one another, in the fundamental rhythm of all living things. He brought one hand to her cheek, traced her lips with his thumb. His heartbeat throbbed inside her, so full, swollen, and gorged with him. He tipped his head back and moaned, shifted his hands under her knees to lift her legs, then pounded her, his mouth agape. The moment of stillness, a sigh against her ear, then a cry and a warm,
thick gush into her.

  The distinctive bouquet of sex anointed the air. She cupped his face, kissed it all over, and tasted his lips and his tongue again.

  “Stay here.” He pulled on a pair of flannel lounge pants—no shirt, as if he wasn’t stunning enough with one on—and left the room. She heard things rattling in the kitchen, the refrigerator opening and closing.

  She put on the shirt he’d worn last night, the scent of him infused in the fabric. Buttoning up, she tiptoed through the hallway and paused outside the kitchen. His iPhone was streaming an internet radio station, and he sang along, shaking that callipygous ass as he opened a package of turkey bacon. Stephanie pressed her forearm to her mouth to smother a laugh, then crept back to the bedroom to pretend she hadn’t gotten out of bed.

  Alex carried in a serving tray upon which perched two coffee mugs and two plates loaded with bacon and what appeared to be blintzes. He set it on her lap and climbed into bed beside her. “I hope it’s edible.”

  “You’re spoiling me.”

  “I want to. Do I make you happy?”

  The earnestness was disconcerting, though Alex danced around few subjects. Stephanie pushed his hair back from his forehead. “The happiest,” she said.

  She would have said it a thousand times to see his smile.

  ***

  Stephanie settled into her seat in the lower 100s behind the team’s bench. The Jumbotron was broadcasting an interview with Alex as fans funneled in. Sipping beer from a plastic cup, she glanced at the women around her. Young and most of them, admittedly based on appearance alone, weren’t the sharpest crayons in the box. Puck bunnies caring little for the game, only for the bad-boy hockey image.

  She returned her attention to the warmup as the PA system blasted the players’ chosen mix, to Alex shooting pucks at his goalie. How remarkable to sit there with the other WAGs—wives and girlfriends—so soon after she and Alex had strayed into each other’s lives again, but it had also been inevitable. The heart wanted what the heart wanted.