Page 50 of One Last Shot

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?”

“Dyadyais 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?”

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