Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
PETRA
I wake up pissed off. Last night I claimed I was headed to bed, because I had to get out of that sitting room.
Being around Sasha, just the two of us, was bringing back way too many feelings.
The attraction and heat, which are so much more intense than when I was a teenager.
The loss and devastation, which haven’t faded enough to fully heal.
I was feeling them in a repeating cycle, like watching our history play out over and over again.
It left me feeling vulnerable, and I don’t do vulnerable.
But when I climbed into bed after finishing up some work, all I could think about was that if I walked out the glass door and into the solarium, I could walk right into his room.
I wanted that so badly my body hummed with the need to feel his hands on me, to taste his tongue against mine, to feel him stretch me wide open as he entered me slowly.
And then I remembered all the reasons that was a terrible idea.
As much as I am still attracted to him, and even though I think he feels the same, our history and our present are both too complicated to further confuse things by having sex.
So I settled for getting myself off to visions of him, which honestly has been the standard for a decade and a half—envisioning myself with the one who got away.
Except now that he’s back in my life—so much hotter than he was as a teenager and even better than I’ve been picturing as an adult in my fantasies—thinking about him while pleasuring myself no longer leaves me feeling satisfied.
It leaves me feeling disappointed because I want the real thing instead.
The man who now sleeps in a bed on the other side of my wall.
Fuck. In the early light of the morning, I’m feeling just as dissatisfied and sexually frustrated as I felt last night.
I get up and shower, piling my curls up on top of my head because I do not have the energy to deal with washing my mountain of hair today.
I scrub every inch of my body, then shave until my legs and lady parts are silky smooth.
By the time I’m out of the shower, I feel more human, less frustrated, and ready to have a relaxing Saturday.
And I have the perfect plan: I’ll see if Emily is free for lunch, then get a little shopping in and see if I can get an appointment for a blowout.
Spending a day away from Sasha and Stella is probably the best thing for me right now.
But when I go to make my blowout appointment online, I notice that they do blowouts for kids too. My first thought is how fun that would be for Stella to get to go do such a grown-up thing. I would have loved to do something like that with my mom when I was a kid.
You’re not her mom.
The thought flashes through my head, and it’s the reminder I need.
Except, I would have loved to do something grown-up like that with an aunt or one of my mom’s friends too.
Not that blowout bars existed when I was a kid, nor did we have the money for frivolity like that, even if they had.
But I still distinctly remember how much I loved to get dressed up for a special dinner out or for an important family event, that feeling of getting to do something out of the ordinary.
I pop off my bed, determined to go ask Sasha if that’s something Stella would enjoy and want to do if they don’t already have other plans. I’m hoping I can ask him before she wakes up. Given how I’ve had to drag her out of bed every school morning this week, I’m guessing she likes to sleep in.
But the minute I step into the hallway and head toward the living area, I can hear her laughter.
I find them in the kitchen. Sasha’s standing over a griddle pan on the stovetop with his back to me, his T-shirt pulled tight across his muscular back and arms. Stella’s sitting on the counter in her pajamas, close enough to see what he’s doing but not so close she could get burned.
Her hair’s a mess of curls and her angelic face is looking up at him like he hung the moon.
“Make a dog,” she insists, her voice delighted.
“I suspect it’s going to come out like the cat,” he says. His voice is a low, sexy rumble that has my thighs clenching together. He sounds like he just woke up, his voice is rough and his tone is tender. He sounds like himself in my fantasies.
“You mean the blob?” she giggles, closing her eyes and scrunching up her face in a way that can only be adorable on a little kid.
When she opens her eyes again she spots me, standing in the open doorway between the kitchen and butler’s pantry, and squeals my name. Aleksandr’s spine stiffens in response, his upper body going rigid. Oh. Is he not happy I’m intruding on their breakfast?
“Good morning, kiddo,” I say as I walk in. Stella holds her arms out to me, so I go and pick her up off the counter. She wraps her legs around my waist and gives me a giant hug.
“I wasn’t allowed to wake you up,” she says into my neck as she snuggles her head against my shoulder. “But I really wanted you to have breakfast with us.”
“I’d love to have breakfast with you. What are you making?”
“Dyadya is making pancakes. He said he’d try to make them into something besides circles, but everything just looks like a blob.”
“Hmm,” I say, peeking over his shoulder. “I see what you mean.”
“It’s harder than it looks,” he mumbles.
So many sexual innuendos threaten to spill out of my mouth, but I hold them back because I don’t want to traumatize the kid in my arms.
“Is that so?” I ask, my voice just as suggestive as I intend it to be. The way his head snaps toward me, his eyes going wide like he’s reminding me to behave in front of the child, is enough to make me laugh out loud.
“Can you make them?” Stella asks me. “I bet you can do it better.”
“Oh, honey, one thing you should know about girls . . . we do just about everything better.”
The laugh that rumbles around in the back of Sasha’s throat has my thighs clenching together again. Why is this man so damn sexy?
“Prove it,” he says, stepping aside and gesturing for me to step up to the stove. The fact that he doesn’t argue that point, and instead gives me the opportunity to prove myself, makes him even sexier in my book.
I step up to the counter and plop Stella back onto it, then step over to the stovetop, where his pancakes are about to burn on the griddle because they need to be flipped.
“These ones don’t count,” I say, intentionally smirking at him in between flipping the pancakes already on the skillet. “I’m just cleaning up your mess.”
“You know they taste the same no matter the shape, right?” His sarcasm is perfectly placed.
“Do they, though?” I raise an eyebrow. “Because these were about to burn. You weren’t even paying attention. And burned pancakes don’t taste good, no matter the shape.”
“Touché,” he says, as Stella watches our conversation closely without saying anything.
I’m not a person who likes sweet things for breakfast, so I’ve only made pancakes once or twice.
The last time was a girls’ ski trip I took with my friends, where Sierra was hung over and begged me to make her pancakes.
I remember that when I looked up the instructions, there were a few keys to successfully cooking them and I rack my brain for those details now.
I turn the heat down on the skillet. “What do you think, kiddo?” I ask her. “What could make these pancakes come out better?”
She purses her lips as she thinks. “I think maybe you should pour the batter with something smaller. It’s coming out of the bowl too fast and you can’t really make a good design that way.”
“Maybe we use a spoon for the whole thing, so we have more control?”
Stella nods her head vigorously, her curls bouncing up and down. “Let’s try that,” she says.
Beside me, I can feel Sasha move away like he’s giving me this moment with Stella. But I don’t want him any further from me, even though that’s exactly where I should be keeping him. “Hey, Top Chef”—I wink at him—“watch and learn.”
Ten minutes later, I’ve successfully made four cats and four bunnies, several sizes and shapes of hearts, and have pancakes that can (barely) pass for a horse, a dog with droopy ears, and a pig.
“Not bad,” Sasha says as we sit down to eat. “But you probably do this all the time.”
“Yep, I definitely don’t go out to brunch with friends on weekend mornings. I just stand in front of my stove mastering animal-shaped pancakes on the off chance that a kid is going to ask me to make them.”
His gray eyes are focused on me and his lips move into a smile, even though he looks like he’s trying to stop that from happening. Then he turns toward Stella. “Want me to cut those up for you?”
“I want to try myself,” she says.
We eat in silence for a minute while Stella works on cutting her pancakes.
“So, what do you have planned today?” Sasha asks me.
“I might go to lunch with a friend, then I think I’m going to go to the salon and get a blowout.”
His lip quirks. “A what?”
“A blowout. You know, where they wash your hair and blow-dry it?”
“Can’t you just do that yourself?”
“Yeah, but it’s more relaxing and fun to go to the salon and do it there. Besides, you can’t even imagine how hard it is to blow-dry all this,” I say, pointing at my curls, “straight.”
“I wish I had straight hair,” Stella sighs.
That has alarm bells going off in my head. “Why’s that?” I ask.
“Everyone else has straight hair. I want to be able to brush mine when it’s dry and have it be all shiny and pretty like Harper’s.”
“First of all, your hair is shiny and pretty. And second, do you realize how lucky we are to have beautiful curly hair? Lots of girls would trade you their straight, boring hair for your beautiful curls.”
She appears to think about this for a moment. “I still wish I could have straight hair for a day. You’re going to have straight hair . . .”
I glance at Sasha, wondering if it’s okay to ask to take her with me in front of her. If they have other plans, I don’t want to interfere.