Firebird (The Firebird Trilogy #1) Read online

  “Did I wake Prince Charming?” The cold edge to Alex’s voice was thin and sharp as a blade.

  “No. It’s fine. Just early. What’s going on?”

  “We leave for the road trip this afternoon, but I’m doing a quick shoot for next year’s Body Issue before practice.”

  The Body Issue, where athletes posed nude to celebrate the beauty of, and hard work invested in, a body dedicated to playing professional sports. Plenty of hockey players had done it, including Zdeno Chara and Ryan Kesler to Tyler Seguin and Joffrey Lupul.

  She’d have paid to see that shoot.

  “Will you at least give me something for the interview?”

  “Come or don’t. I don’t care either way.”

  “Alex—ˮ

  “I’ll text you the studio location. Meet me there at eight thirty.”

  Joe was glowering at her when she hung up. “Alex?”

  Whoops. “It’s…Never mind.” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “My job is kind of dependent on him.”

  “And it doesn’t matter to Dave that Volynsky is a manipulative scumbag?”

  Stephanie clenched her jaw. She’d gotten downright possessive of him after the other night. She stared at the engagement ring, Joe’s glare lasering holes into her. “I have to get ready.”

  “Why the hell did he call so early, anyway?”

  “We’re meeting after his photo shoot.”

  “I’m getting sick of this guy. Don’t you see what he’s doing? He’s stringing you along. He doesn’t care about your job, Steph. After this story, you’re done with him. I don’t care what Dave wants.”

  “Joe, I get you’re upset. But don’t ever tell me what I can and cannot do, or whom I can talk to. Do you understand me?” She threw aside the covers, seized her phone, and stalked into the bathroom. She locked the door.

  ***

  After calling Dave, Stephanie drove to a large downtown studio and parked outside. No sign of Alex. Maybe he’d changed his mind and already left for the second part of his shoot at the arena. She stepped into a lounge area with upholstered chairs clustered around a coffee table and the photographer’s work ornamenting the walls.

  The young man at the desk offered a cheery “Hello. Can I help you?”

  “Yes. I’m meeting Aleksandr Volynsky. I’m with King County Today. Do you know if he’s almost done?”

  “It shouldn’t be much longer. Please, have a seat. Help yourself to water or coffee.”

  “Thank you.”

  Alex emerged fifteen minutes later wearing jeans and a T-shirt under a black wool pea coat. Pokerfaced except for his eyes, he watched her rise from the chair.

  “Alex, please let me say something first.”

  His lips thinned. “I am done,” he said, his jaw so tight the tendons in his neck stood out, “begging for your attention. I am done making a fool of myself. You don’t get to be with me when it suits you and then run back to him. Do you think I don’t have feelings? Do I deserve this because of how I’ve treated other women? Do you think any of them want more than to tell their friends who they fucked last night?”

  She glanced at the receptionist pretending, poorly, not to listen. He jerked his head away and returned his attention to his monitor. “Okay, that part about letting me say something first? Can that happen now? Outside, please?”

  He shoved past her and pushed the door open, letting it swing back so it almost hit her in the face.

  “Very mature, Alex.” She hooked her arm around his elbow and yanked him into the alley around the corner.

  He leaned against the brick wall, stared at the sky, and blew out a long breath. “What do you care?”

  “I do. That’s the thing. When I’m with you, I feel—”

  “Everything.” His shoulders sagged, and guilt pricked at her for being this burden on him.

  “Yes.” She took his hand. His fingers laced with hers felt so good, so right, as though she had recovered a missing piece of herself. “I don’t mean to hurt you, Alex. I just don’t know what to do.”

  “It does hurt. Do you understand? I hurt every time I see you. I hurt every time I don’t see you. I hurt all the time.”

  Whatever she’d intended to say to placate him died on her lips.

  “You have to make a choice.” His eyes blazed with confusion and suffering, love and pain. “If you can’t, then we end this. You give the story to someone else. And you stay away from me.”

  She opened her mouth to speak, but the words still would not come, and he was already walking away.

  They arrived at a small café around the corner and slid into a rear booth, Alex’s back to the entrance. He shrugged off his coat. “You’re not happy, Stephanie. I can see it. That makes it even more frustrating.”

  “You think you can do better by me.”

  “I would do whatever I had to do. We’re in the same place now.”

  Startled, she met his gaze.

  “Yeah. That quote in People…I was talking about you.”

  Of course he was. She could end the charade, as she should have the other night, take off the ring and be with him. If only she were so brave. The wedding was four months away. Stephanie glanced at the café’s other patrons, especially the couples. She’d settled for Joe because she had thought that bright light gone forever, though hope had kept a fire burning in her heart. She wondered how many people around her had done the same. Had given up on love. “What does your tattoo say?” she asked after several moments. “Is it my name?”

  His silence answered.

  “How long have you had it?”

  “The day I turned eighteen.” He didn’t meet her gaze. “I missed you.”

  Stephanie chewed on her lip to keep the tears at bay. They hadn’t spoken in nearly a year at that point. “I’m nothing special. Blond hair, blue eyes, raised in California—I’m a walking cliché. Just like my dad.” A bitter laugh escaped. The alcoholic cop.

  “You’re nothing like him. All these years, I hoped we would find each other again. But…” He stared at her ring with a tangible sorrow that infected her too. “I got here too late.”

  Stephanie examined his swollen, battered knuckles crusted with scabs. She turned over his hand, two of the fingers crooked, broken at some point early in his career, and traced her fingertips over his callused palm. “Alex, there’s something I need to tell you. Something I’ve been keeping from you for a long time. You’re going to be upset. But please remember I—we—were seventeen, and I was scared.”

  He took a slow sip of tea. “Did I get you pregnant?”

  She stared at him, her mouth agape.

  “I assumed it must be that. Otherwise, you would’ve told me by now.” He rubbed his forehead. “Blya.”

  “Um…” She blinked to get her thoughts back on track. “You were back in Russia when I took the test.”

  He gazed out the window. In a perfect, terrible moment of irony, a couple walked by wheeling a carriage, and he blanched. “What happened? Since there’s no kid.”

  “I had a miscarriage two months along, and I never told anyone except Matt.” Her beloved older brother, the one man who had earned her eternal trust. The one person whom their father had proclaimed an even greater disappointment than she was, because while Stephanie had known since they were kids, the soft-spoken ESL teacher had had the audacity to come out to the whole family last Christmas.

  “Not even me.”

  “Alex…”

  “That’s why you stopped emailing me. Well, at least now I have an answer. Definitely not the one I was expecting.” He dropped some cash on the table then, without another word, grabbed his coat and walked out.

  “Alex!”

  He was striding toward the lot across the street. Stephanie ran to catch him, but when she set her hand on his arm, he yanked it away and whirled around, his eyes bloodshot and irate. “What, Stephanie? What else is there to say?”

  “I’m sorry. I’ve always regretted not telling you.”

/>   “I would’ve been there for you. You didn’t even let me try.”

  “It’s been eight years.”

  “Eight years you didn’t think I was mature enough to handle it.” He stared at the overcast sky and shook his head, then jammed his hands into his coat pockets. “For the record, the only reason I’ve fucked so many women is to try to get over you. Funny how it makes me lonelier, not that you care.” He barked an acrimonious laugh. “I’m a fucking millionaire. Not good enough. Best hockey player in the world. Still not good enough.”

  “Alex, it’s complicated, and I didn’t make you any promises—”

  “Remember this? Remember what it says inside?” He yanked off the ring and lobbed it at her. “You don’t keep your fucking promises. Your promises are shit!”

  The heat and force of his fury inundated her like a pyroclastic flow. People were staring or hurrying past, skirting around them to maintain minimum safe distance. She scrambled to catch the ring, but it bounced off her chest and rolled underneath a car. The tears broke through. “This has been just as hard for me—ˮ

  “It hasn’t!” he shouted, his voice cracking, the edges of his eyes growing redder by the second and his fists clenched at his sides. “We kiss or we fool around, and you go back to him. Did you ever love me?”

  She pressed a shaking hand to her mouth. “How can you ask me that? You know—ˮ

  “ʻ—how I felt.’ You keep telling me that, but I need you to say the words.” Alex rubbed his lips. “I have to get ready for practice.” He jerked away from her grasping hands and faced her when he had put several feet between them. He narrowed his eyes, struggling not to cry. Pieces of her heart lodged in her stomach. “Do you think I’m enjoying this? I fucking hate the way I feel right now! I’d do anything to make it stop.”

  “I never understood why you liked me so much to begin with!”

  “No. You do not get to use your low self-esteem as an excuse anymore when I have all but begged you to be with me! Idi na khuy!” He marched toward his car.

  “I don’t even know what that means!”

  “It means fuck you!”

  She unlocked the car door, hiccupping sobs into her hand, and sank into the seat. Behind her, the Mercedes tore out of the lot in a flourish of squealing tires.

  ***

  “Look, Steph, you know I don’t want to let you go. And in the end, it’s not my decision anyway.”

  “At least give me one more chance when they get back from the road trip. I can’t do anything while he’s out of town.”

  “This is it, Steph. I mean it. If you don’t get the story within five days from the second their plane touches down, I’m cutting you loose. I know he’s a dick, but dealing with people like him is part of what you signed up for. Remember, you asked for this opportunity.”

  Stephanie massaged her temples. She’d contacted the league as Alex had suggested, so far to no avail. She trudged into the living room. Joe sat on the couch, red-faced, staring at her phone.

  Shit. She hadn’t heard him come home.

  “I’m such an idiot. All the texts and calls, the disappearances…And then I found this.” He held up the leather-bound journal, Alex’s Christmas present to her eight years ago.

  Stephanie vibrated with fury. Alex had inscribed their initials with a heart around them inside the front cover. “‘AV.’ That stands for ‘Aleksandr Volynsky,’ right? You have a whole box of stuff. All your precious memories with him. You told me you guys were close. You neglected to tell me he was your fucking boyfriend.”

  “Are you kidding me right now, Joe? That’s from high school!” She ripped it from his lap. That he could violate so sacred a personal space as her journal curdled her stomach. She had written everything in it, from her first suspicions of pregnancy to the summer afternoon of its abrupt end. Her terror of telling her parents. Of telling Alex most of all.

  “You’ve always been in love with him, haven’t you? Here I thought you were marrying me because you loved me, not because I was a replacement for him.”

  “What the hell are you doing going through my things?”

  “I trusted you.” He’d have to make this more difficult by remaining calm. Rage would have provided an excuse to perpetrate some kind of violence on him.

  “You want to talk about trust? Really? With my phone in your hand? With the journal you just happened to find? I kept it in a locked drawer. You had to search for my key and fucking unlock the drawer, so don’t talk to me about trust.”

  “Why did you need to keep it locked up if you had nothing to hide? What I can’t figure out is if this is some kind of passive-aggressive way to break up with me.”

  “It wasn’t a passive-aggressive anything.” God, she was lying again.

  “How many times has it happened?”

  “I…I’m not sure,” she mumbled. Never mind the oral sex. She held back an insane laugh.

  “Did you spend the night at his place?”

  No point in denial. “Yes.”

  “And?” His brows knit together. “Did you sleep with him?”

  “We did not have sex.” Stephanie crossed her arms. She ought to be pleading, contrite. Instead, she wanted to throat-punch him for invading her privacy. The dam had burst, and the flood would not be contained. Words, her father had taught her, were the most effective weapons of all. “But he went down on me, and I didn’t even have to ask.”

  Joe’s face turned an apoplectic shade of purple. “Shut your mouth, Stephanie.”

  “I have had it with you telling me what to do. I’m not going to be your fucking housewife and brood mare to satisfy your sense of irony.”

  He held out his hand. “Give me the fucking ring.”

  “With pleasure.” Stephanie twisted it off her finger and jammed it into his palm. The symbol of her bondage to him, broken at last.

  “I can’t believe you fell for his bullshit. I thought you were smarter than that.”

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Joe howled a contemptuous laugh. “I’d almost feel better if it had been with different guys instead of the same one. This isn’t a mistake. It’s an affair.” He rolled the phone over in his hands. “I wonder what the media would pay me for the story that one of their own was sleeping with Aleksandr Volynsky.”

  Stephanie embraced the storm brewing inside her. “Give me the goddamned phone, Joe.”

  He rose from the couch and slapped it into her hand. “I gave you another chance, and this is how you repay me. I even blamed him. Stupid me.” He marched down the hallway and into the bedroom, emerging a few minutes later with his suitcase. “Once I find a place, I’ll be back for the rest of my stuff. But I have to leave now, because I can’t stand the sight of you.”

  She’d gone numb. In shock, though she couldn’t quite figure out why, as her five-year relationship disintegrated, she didn’t feel more. She was to blame, after all. Not Joe. Yet her only shame was the fact she felt so little of it.

  “Glad to see you’re broken up over this.” He shoved past her, dragging his suitcase behind. “I hope he’s worth it. But don’t come crying to me when he’s fucked another woman behind your back.” Joe wheeled his luggage into the hall, his eyes red with unshed tears. Now the expected twinge of guilt, of regret, so she felt like a human being after all. “Did you ever love me, Stephanie?”

  Why did people keep asking her that? “I don’t know,” she said, because she owed him the truth if nothing else.

  Joe cast his gaze toward the floor. “I’ll try to move out while you’re at work. I’d rather we didn’t see each other again.”

  Just like that, her safety net was gone, leaving her perched on the tightrope. Within minutes, the apartment had grown too big. Too quiet. She’d never been alone. From home to college roommates to a place with Joe.

  She ought to cry, but the tears would not come.

  Stephanie sat on the couch, the cushion still warm, opened her contacts, and stared at Alex’s num
ber. They were playing tonight, but she couldn’t bring herself to turn on the TV. Relieved he wouldn’t answer, she dialed.

  “You’ve reached Aleksandr Volynsky. Please leave a message. Spasiba.”

  “Alex, it’s Stephanie. I know you’re busy, but it’s important. So if you get a chance before you come back, give me a call. Thanks.”

  ***

  Stephanie took the next day off from work. Calling the venue and vendors, especially when she’d have to eat the hefty cancellation fees—she was the guilty party, after all—gave her a migraine before she picked up the phone.

  The wedding planner berated her for a good five minutes. Stephanie listened in silence about how irresponsible she was to cancel with four months to go, how much time and money had been lost. She cracked the pencil she’d been twiddling between her fingers.

  “It was my wedding, you crazy bitch,” she snapped and hung up.

  She printed a note for each of the guests they had invited:

  We regret to inform you of the cancellation of the engagement of Stephanie Hartwell and Joseph Warner. All wedding plans have been discontinued. We sincerely apologize to any of our guests who have been inconvenienced.

  Because she’d been sticking her tongue down Aleksandr Volynsky’s throat. Let’s not forget where his tongue has been. If Joe knew she’d once been briefly pregnant with Alex’s baby, his little head would have popped right off.

  She folded each note and tucked it into an envelope, addressed all one hundred seventy-five envelopes by hand in contrast to the computer-generated notes, so it appeared she cared, that she regretted this loss. She couldn’t tell them she doubted she’d ever loved Joe.

  Stephanie spent the afternoon repacking the engagement gifts they’d received, addressing them to the appropriate recipients, and piling them on the table. More money to spend on stamps and postage. It would’ve cost less to marry him and then get a divorce later.

  She pretended she was wrapping Christmas presents. Her thoughts wandered to the cause of this disaster, who hadn’t called her back yet. That left her with no one. Perhaps better for everyone.