Ghost Dance (Tulsa Thunderbirds Book 3) (14 page)

Or take her on the couch.

Then there was the living room floor.

Hell, I’d even screwed her brains out in the bathtub when I’d only intended to carry her up there so she could clean herself off after all the sex. She’d jerked on my beard and dragged me down into the tub with her, though, and the next thing I knew, we were humping again with the water sloshing all over the floor around us.

It wasn’t even dark out yet, and I’d already worked through a third of the box of condoms I had on hand. If she kept pushing, we were going to be out well before the snow and ice thawed. Then what would I do to shut her up? I didn’t have a clue.

Might have to leave her on one floor and go to the other. I doubted I could keep my hands off her well enough for that, but it was an idea.

Now, after I mopped up the floor, she really
was
in the tub cleaning off. Once I was certain she had everything she needed, I left her to fend for herself and took a quick shower in my master bathroom, to wash away the sweat and musk of sex that seemed to be oozing out of my pores.

After drying off, I put on a pair of sweatpants. Better to have something covering me. It might not stop me from fucking London again, but at least it would slow me down the next time. While I was in the closet, I found a Tulsa Thunderbirds T-shirt that might not completely swallow her whole, and I dug a pair of clean boxers out of the drawer. Clothes could only help, and we’d put hers in the wash a bit ago.

Or so I kept trying to convince myself.

She was still splashing around in the other tub, so I left the clothes lying on the foot of my bed and headed downstairs to figure out what I’d feed her tonight. I found some steaks in the fridge, which would go well with potatoes and a salad, so I took out the package of meat and set them on the counter to come up to room temperature. They’d be much better on the grill than the stove, though.

I glanced out the window. The snow was still coming down hard, but it was still
snow
. Not ice, like we would likely have later. I could handle grilling in the snow.

I bounded back up the stairs and knocked on the bathroom door.

“Yeah?” The sound of her voice was muffled, and the water sloshed some more.

“Be outside for few minutes. Don’t drown.”

“Outside? In
this
?” She was too indignant about what I was doing to realize she should be indignant about my insinuation.

“Turning on grill,” I explained, grinning. I didn’t smile often, but somehow I had been doing it more than normal with her in my house. My smiling muscles felt achy and out of shape. Uncomfortable. I needed to knock that off. Still, I didn’t wait around for her to argue with me, taking off again, not that my departure stopped her from trying to start another argument with me. It was apparently her favorite thing to do.

“You’re a freaking lunatic!” she called out, along with God only knew what else. Her voice followed me down the stairs, but I did my best to tune her out. Nothing she could say was going to put a damper on my plans.

I toed on the first pair of shoes I came across, shoved my arms into the sleeves of a zip-up sweatshirt with a hood, and went out the back door to start the grill. It was covered in a thick blanket of snow, but that all fell off as soon as I opened the lid, plopping down to wetly land on top of the growing blanket on the porch. I’d bought a gas grill last season, once I’d realized how nice the weather usually was in Tulsa. Cooking out had always appealed to me. Made me feel more like I fit in with the Americans I lived among, or at least the ones here in the Southwest, in whatever small way I could manage.

I turned the dials and got the fire going before closing the lid again and returning inside, kicking the snow off my shoes as I crossed the threshold. Then I spent a few minutes seasoning the steaks and wrapping the potatoes in foil to bake alongside the steaks over the flame. I took the potatoes out and got them started cooking, then repeated the process of kicking the snow off my shoes.

“Dima!” London shouted when I’d just barely come back inside the house.

“Fucking annoying woman,” I muttered beneath my breath. Couldn’t she wait until I finished and came back to get her? But that would apparently be asking too much. I grabbed a towel off the kitchen counter and used it to wipe my hands as I stomped up the stairs. “What?” I demanded as I flung the bathroom door open and draped the dirty towel over my shoulder.

She bit her lower lip and gave me a saucy look, not bothering to try to hide her breasts from me. It seemed she’d given up on that, at least. But she didn’t say anything. She just stared. And laughed. She laughed so hard, in fact, that she couldn’t possibly speak, even if she’d intended to say anything to begin with.

“What you need? I’m busy. Making dinner.”

“Please tell me that’s not how you’re going outside to grill,” she spluttered after what felt like an eternity.

I looked down at myself. Pants. Shoes. Sweatshirt. I was fine. “Is there problem?”

“You’re in flip-flops and your chest is bare. You didn’t even bother to zip up.”

I shrugged. “I’m Russian.”

She raised a brow and laughed again. “There’s all sorts of snow in your hair. Your beard. You could’ve put the hood on.”

Again…it was
just snow
. Did she not understand I’d grown up in Siberia? My childhood had introduced me to an entirely different sort of
cold
than anything she could ever imagine.

But the last thing I wanted to do was start another fight with her. That was all we did—fight and fuck.

Needless to say, I’d rather fuck.

“You need something? Or can I put steaks on the grill?” They probably weren’t room temperature yet, and the potatoes needed to cook longer before I put the steaks on, but at least doing that would get me away from her for a few minutes.

She shrugged. “It can wait.”

If it could wait, why the hell had she yelled for me instead of fucking
waiting
? “Back in five minutes.” Twenty, if I could manage it. I closed the door—somehow stopping myself from slamming it behind me—and stormed downstairs again. I grabbed the plate of steaks, headed outside, and threw them on the grill. When I returned to the house, I tossed the plate into the sink, loving the way it clattered around. Listening to the noise it made was the best alternative I could come up with to tossing
her
. Naked. In the fucking snow. But if I did that, I’d just have to warm her up again, and the way I’d end up doing that would surely be to fuck her again.

I took a few minutes reining in my temper before going upstairs to help her. In that time, she’d managed to get herself out of the tub and dry off, and she’d wheeled into my bedroom and put on the clothes I’d left out.

Her tits were like small pebbles, poking out against the soft fabric. Damn if I didn’t get hard again just looking at her like that. I’d never seen a woman in my clothes before. A few of the ones I sometimes went home with wanted to put on my shirt, but I always left before things could progress to that level.

Seeing London like this had me rethinking everything, which was a terrifying prospect.

“So your steaks are on the grill?” she said. Smiling. Everything made her smile, which only made me scowl even more.

“Ready to go down?” I barked.

She licked her lips, and her eyes flashed down to my crotch—just long enough that my cock twitched in response. “Sure.”

Hell. I might not make it through the day, let alone multiple days of this.

SOMEHOW WE GOT
through dinner without either starting World War III or fucking on the dining room table. Don’t ask me how I avoided jumping her, because she spent as much time trying to figure out the symbolism and deeper meaning behind each tattoo she’d discovered on my body earlier as she did actually eating her meal. I wanted to shut her up so she’d stop fishing for answers I’d never even admitted to myself.

Easier said than done.

Finally, though, we were finished with our meal. London wheeled herself out to the living room, and I took a few minutes to clean up the kitchen in peace.

My reprieve didn’t last long.

“Dima?” she called out.

I shut off the faucet and pressed my eyes closed in a silent prayer for patience. “What?”

“Your phone.”

There was only one person who’d be calling me in the middle of an Oklahoma snow storm, and I couldn’t do a damned thing to help him right now. How the hell was I supposed to get to Hunter’s house when driving to the end of the street might take half an hour? I couldn’t be the baby whisperer now, no matter how much everyone wished I could.

I dried my hands, tossed the towel on the counter, and went out to answer the call, snatching the phone out of London’s hands. She shrugged and smiled at me. Again. Damn her.

Harper’s anguished screams assaulted my ear before I could even say anything, echoing from somewhere in the distance. Her sobs were loud enough that even London could hear her. She raised an eyebrow in question.

I glared and turned so I couldn’t see her. “I can’t get there,” I said. My hand clenched, itching to pat the little girl on her back and soothe her.

“I know,” Hunter said. His voice was raw, like he’d been up for hours. He probably looked like shit, too. “I told Tallie you couldn’t come, but she’s going insane. We both are. So I told her I’d call and ask anyway.”

“How long she cries this time?”

“It’s been going on for two hours. But she kept us up all night last night, and—”

“Why didn’t you call last night?” I cut in, going back into the kitchen to finish loading the dishwasher.

“Tallie wanted to, but I told her we needed to find a way to calm Harper down on our own. We can’t keep taking advantage of you like this. Besides, we’re heading out on the road again almost as soon as the Christmas break is over, so it’ll be all Tallie.”

“It’s not taking advantage.”

“Whatever.” He sighed. I’d never heard him sound so exhausted. “The point is, she hasn’t stopped for more than an hour here and twenty minutes there for almost twenty-four hours, and we’re both going insane. We don’t know what to do.”

“Grow beard and talk Russian,” I said.

“I’m being serious, Dima.”

So was I, but I doubted he wanted to hear that. Then I had an idea. “You hold Harper. Go rock in her chair and put on the speaker.”

“You’re joking, right?”

“Serious.” I was very serious.

He waited for a pregnant pause, but then I heard Harper’s cries grow louder, until they rang out inside my head. “All right,” Hunter said. “I’ll try anything.”

“I’m on speaker?”

The sound crackled and clicked a few times. I assumed he was shifting the baby into his arms and trying to get the phone how he needed it. Then I heard everything more clearly. Especially Harper’s shaky sobs.

“Yeah. You’re on speaker.”

“Rock her,” I said to him in English. Then I switched to Russian. “I don’t remember my mama, little one, so you be sure you hold on tightly to yours. Mine left me and Papa when I was only a bit older than you. Ran off with another man to America. Said she wanted a better life. That’s what Papa told me, at least.”

To my surprise, Harper’s screams were already starting to fade. Maybe Hunter was figuring out the right way to hold her.

Or maybe it was my voice.

Either way, I took a seat at my dining room table and kept talking. I told her how I met Sergei when I was seven and he was ten, and how we became best friends despite the difference in age, mainly because I had an extra hockey stick that I’d let him play with. I told her about the winter, and how rocky the ice would be along the shore of Lake Baikal even though, out in the middle, it was a perfectly smooth sheet. So clear you could still see down through it. I told her about the summer I found out Papa had cancer. And when he died.

I told Harper all the things I couldn’t tell London.

And then I thought of London again, sitting in my living room and wearing my clothes and making sexy, smiling faces at me while she laughed, and I couldn’t stop myself from telling Harper all about her. The baby wouldn’t understand, after all.