Do Me a Favor

Some days things just click. Today is not that day.

Love is a battlefield, and divorce attorney Sadie Howard is entrenched on the frontlines. She thought she might have met the right man once, but he was a career military guy who got shipped overseas and left her heart on the tarmac. These days, the only commitment Sadie wants is the one she's made to her Denver law practice.

Combat photographer Roman Dvornakov is back. Fresh out of the U.S. Army, he’s using family connections to snap photos at a few weddings while he builds his civilian photography practice. After all he’s captured on film, a few posed wedding shots should be a cakewalk. Seeing so much death through the camera lens, he’s now ready to build something worth living for. A thriving photography business, definitely. But he’s certain his new mission also includes Sadie, the girl who slipped away.

Sadie isn’t convinced, and she's not willing to open her heart anytime soon. Besides, she’s got a high-profile divorce case taking up all her attention. Winning the case for her client will make or break her practice. So what if it's a custody dispute over a ridiculously expensive fish tank? When Roman discovers the soon-to-be divorced couple are still in love, he and his slightly-nutty grandmother, Babushka, are determined to convince them to cancel the proceedings. He’s not camera shy when it comes to matters of the heart, but interfering with Sadie's clients could wreck her career and any chance they'll ever have together...

Do Me a Favor
By Christina Hovland

Chapter One
Before

No. Absolutely not. Sadie, don’t do it.
A million gazillion and one. That’s how many reasons Sadie Howard had to slip her tush off the tailgate of the truck, toss her red plastic cup into the nearest bin, track down her brother, and get her butt home.
Roman Dvornakov stalked—yes, oh yes—he stalked her way. Roman didn’t walk. He didn’t run. He didn’t mosey. No, Roman stalked. A muscled man always on a mission.
His mission at the moment? Given the way his gaze bore into hers? Yeah. That.
Do. Not. Do. It.
The last thing she needed was to dive into anything too distracting before she started law school in three weeks.
Three weeks and she would be totally engrossed in all things legal.
He grinned.
Shit. She was toast. Not just toast, but toast with butter and grape jelly.
Totally distracted grape-jellied toast.
“It’s Sadie, yeah?” Roman asked.
Her heart was torn between doing a happy dance that he had remembered her name and a sad-panda waltz because he had to confirm it.
Which really meant that he didn’t remember her name. But rather, he probably remembered that his friend Eli, her brother, had a sister named Sadie and he assumed that was probably her.
“Yes. Sadie.” She futzed with the plastic cup she held between her palms. The beer had warmed a while back. She was better at people-watching at these sorts of desert parties than actually getting the soles of her shoes dirty and socializing.
“The attorney.” Roman’s tongue rolled against his bottom lip while he turned his matching cup in his hands.
“Soon to be. Not yet.”
Another tongue roll and…oh dear, that time? That tongue roll? It did interesting things to her insides. Fluttery things.
He remembered she was going to law school. That was something.
“Roman Dvornakov.” She stared straight ahead as she spoke, afraid that she’d spontaneously combust if she stared at him too long. “Photographer. Military.”
Last she’d heard, he was on a mission that had taken him away from Denver and he hadn’t been back in years. Not that she’d been keeping tabs. She’d been busy as hell getting her degree and working two jobs to help pay for it.
“This seat taken?” His voice wasn’t smooth. It wasn’t gravelly. It was Roman. And it could likely get a girl to drop her panties in two-point-five seconds.
He nodded to the empty space on the tailgate where she sat.
She was so totally gonna let him distract her before classes started.
Any thoughts of saying no vanished, and she scooted to her right to make room for him on the tailgate. Roman, however, didn’t sit. No, he leaned against the tailgate—more like he propped himself there, crossing his ankles with an air of total relaxation.
“If you’d rather, I can find another seat.” Roman gave her a look like finding another seat was not high up on his list of desires.
Wait. What?
“Why?” Sadie asked.
“I asked if this seat is taken and you didn’t say anything. I can jet if you’d rather be alone.”
“I scooted.” She gestured to the empty space she’d cleared so he could sit. “The scoot implies that you are invited.”
“Scooting isn’t verbal confirmation.”
“You need verbal confirmation that I’m okay with you sitting next to me after I pointedly scooted? That’s ridiculous. When someone scoots, you know that it’s an invitation. Unless there’s some Russian thing where scooting means something else.” She thought on that for a second. “But that doesn’t make much sense, does it?”
“Fuck, you’re cute.” The edge of his thigh brushed against her calf. His jeans to her corduroy.
Still, he didn’t sit. He just kept leaning. He was a leaner.
“Pointedly scooted,” he said under his breath with a chuckle.
“Um…” Smooth, Sadie, real smooth.
Roman did this thing with his lips that wasn’t really a smirk and wasn’t really a grin. It was more like a please-let-me-take-your-panties-off-for-you smile.
He started to turn his prior lean into a full sit when Sadie set her cup aside and held up her hands, palms to him. “Hold up.”
He held up.
“Why do you want to sit here?” Sadie asked, doing her best to put on a solid, untouched-by-all-that-was-him facade.
“I was thinking it’s out of the way.” He lifted his shoulder. “The party’s getting crowded. Don’t much care for crowds.”
Oh. He was simply looking for a place to sit. Not because it was next to her. Well, that stung now, didn’t it?
The party was getting crowded though. A desert party with a couple of kegs. They weren’t high schoolers, so they didn’t need to come to the desert to have a party. But Roman’s brother Jase had decided this was what he wanted to do with this fine Friday evening. So they all tagged along.
Turned out, there were a lot of tagalongs.
Jase threw good parties.
“You wandered all the way over here because the party’s getting crowded? What’s wrong with sitting over by Jase? Don’t you want to spend time with your brother?” Sadie never tried to be argumentative. But that didn’t mean that her family hadn’t been telling her from the time she could form a solid word-string that she had a future as an attorney.
Sadie was just…Sadie. She didn’t like to think of herself as contrary, she just required an abundance of clarification. Was that so bad?
Roman didn’t seem to mind.
He didn’t move. He didn’t sit, either. He just stared at her with the panty-removal grin.
“You’re not sitting by Jase,” he said. “And I’ve been thinking it’d be nice to catch up.” Roman crossed his arms, amusement dancing in the gleam in his eyes.
That was a better answer, at least.
It wasn’t, I’m just trying to escape the throngs of people. And this seat is available.
She turned fully toward him, which meant there was more leg-to-leg contact, but she was going to go with it.
“Catching up,” she said, “would imply that we’ve spoken more than two sentences to each other in all of the time we’ve known each other.”
Spoiler alert, they hadn’t. Sure, through friends of friends and friends of family, they had seen each other around. She was fairly certain that if he would run into her at the Cherry Creek Mall parking lot, then he’d probably help her out if her car didn’t start. But given that Roman Dvornakov would probably never be caught dead at any place that involved shopping, that wasn’t a likely scenario.
“Do you always argue like this?” he asked.
“I’m not arguing, I’m just asking questions. And yes, generally, I do ask a lot of questions. It helps me find answers.”
“I’ll play.” Suddenly, he was the picture of intensity. “The first time I saw you was when Eli dropped my brother off at the house and you were in the backseat of the car.”
Holy crapola. He remembered that? He remembered that?
Yes, she remembered that, but Roman was the kind of guy you didn’t forget. Even if they’re just kids, a girl noticed when a guy like Roman was around. Even if the attention was totally platonic. Even if the attention was only because she happened to share the same air with him.
“I asked how you liked the seventh grade,” he continued. “You gave me a solid two-minute dressing down of all the reasons middle school sucked. You liked to argue back then, too. Glad to see that hasn’t changed.”
Sadie took a drink of warm beer because she wasn’t quite sure what else she was supposed to do.
“Next time I saw you,” he went on, “you were probably around sixteen, hanging out at the creamery place near your house. The one that blended all the stuff into the ice cream.”
“Frozen yogurt,” Sadie corrected. “Totally different than ice cream.”
“Details.”
Oh no, that’s where you get into trouble—the details. “Details are important.”
He scrunched up his forehead in clear question.
“Frozen yogurt is not ice cream. Like if you get the Oreo cookies blended in, then you have to get vanilla frozen yogurt. If you were to go with the Reese’s Pieces, then you’d go somewhere they serve chocolate ice cream. Everyone knows that.”
“Seriously?”
“You brought it up.”
“I didn’t come inside because I got a call. I’m still a little pissed Babushka chose the moment I was about to get my frozen yogurt fix to insist she needed urgent help. Turned out that she just needed someone tall enough to switch out the soft white light bulbs to brighten the dining room.”
“Since we didn’t technically speak, I don’t think that time counts,” Sadie said.
“You like the fine print, don’t you?” he asked.
“It’s my favorite.” She raised her cup and clunked the plastic edge against his.
Here’s the thing, she wasn’t trying to be challenging. Not at all. But she’d been training to be an attorney for God-knew-how-long—it’d been her dream ever since she was five and her mother had watched some lawyer show on television—which meant that she had a predisposition to uncover holes in all theories, all stories, all…well…everything.
Her best friend Marlee now refused to take her to the movies because Sadie was the queen of drilling holes into any plot.
“You may not believe me, but I don’t have a photographic memory.” Roman uncrossed his arms, the muscled bulk bulging as he set his cup on the wheel well of the truck bed. “Sometimes there are people in your life who stick. You remember everything about every interaction,” he said. “You ever experience that?”
Not that she was ever aware of. She shook her head.
“Every time you brush past each other. Every time you get a little piece of their attention, it sticks. Doesn’t mean I had a thing for a kid when I was eighteen, but it means I knew that person was special. And she’d grow up to be someone special.”
“You thought I was special?” She gave an inner high five to twelve-year-old Sadie.
“I thought you were special back then. Now, I think you’re fucking stunning. And we’ve spoken at least a dozen or more sentences to each other, if you want to get technical. I can go over them, if you’d like.”
Well. Okay, then. Her breath caught in her lungs.
“Seat’s free.” Sadie shoved the satchel she used as a purse behind her to create even more space.
The bed of the truck bounced with the addition of his muscle as he lifted himself up so that they sat thigh-to-thigh. Their thighs actually smooshed together—which seemed like an important note to make so she could tell Marlee later when they caught up after she got back from her family trip to the Maldives.
“I can’t believe Eli still has this piece of crap.” Roman bounced a little, the shocks creaking with the movement.
Her brother Eli’s beat-up, blue Ford should’ve been retired about two decades ago, but he wouldn’t let it go.
Speaking of… Where the heck had Eli gone? She scanned the crowd. No sign of him.
“You were also at the horrible party my parents threw when I enlisted,” he mused.
She’d tagged along with Eli to Roman’s going-away party when he went off to basic training.
“I don’t recall it being horrible.”
He leaned back and braced himself, one hand on the metal truck bed behind her back. Not making contact, but totally claiming her space. Which was super funny, given that she was Sadie and it’s not like she got claimed often.
She wasn’t a stunner like her sisters.
Sadie was just…well…Sadie.
“You’re correct. Not horrible. Totally awful is a better word choice,” Roman said.
“The party wasn’t either of those things.” She flicked her brown hair over her shoulder so her view of him wouldn’t be blocked by her annoyingly long hair. She’d been considering a short, smart bob cut for law school. Something that might make her look a little older. She had a baby face that she’d never fully outgrown.
Roman scratched at the top of his ear. “As I recall, there was a brawl between my brother and me.”
“That was actually pretty fun to watch.” This was not a lie. The two brothers were so evenly matched that the fact that Jase was younger than Roman had no real bearing on the outcome of the fight—a draw according to their mother who lost her utter shit when the boys took out the catered buffet—chicken skewers and shrimp satay flew through the air to bounce off the guests and land in the swimming pool.
That part was pretty funny.
“Good times.” Roman grinned a grin that made Sadie hope. Really hope.
Hope for what?
Well, that part was debatable.
“Now look at us,” Roman continued. “Grown up, but still going to desert parties to drink beer from a keg.” He jerked his chin toward her oh-so-warm beer.
“Where would you rather be?” she asked.
He caught her gaze then. Despite the chill in the air, she heated like she’d just slipped into a hot bath after a long trip.
Which made no sense.
And all the sense in the world.
“Nowhere else I’d rather be, Sadie.”
Do it, Sadie. Oh yes, just do it. Perhaps a distraction was in order, after all. She’d never had a one-night stand before. Never wanted one until now.
“Do you want to get out of here?” She glanced up at him.
The intensity of his gaze sparked with interest at the implied meaning of her suggestion.
“That depends.” His chest rose and fell softly with each breath he took. “Where are we going?”
“There’s a movie playing that I’ve been wanting to see.”
“Is that right?” Roman asked, angling his body so they faced each other. So their individual spaces became one. Not his, not hers, but theirs.
Sadie traced a fingertip over the curves of his knuckles. “Or we could go to my place.”
A breath of a moment passed. The kind of moment when a girl had to pause to see if she was going to have a freaking fantastic night or if rejection would be her friend as she watched a hot movie star race cars on the big screen instead.
This was that moment.
And, goodness gracious, it was stretching into what felt like forever.
“Let’s go to your place.” Roman followed the line of her bottom lip with the edge of his thumb.
Sadie grinned, holding his gaze. Yes, distraction with Roman was going to be oh so very fun. She nodded.
Sadie took his outstretched hand and, tethered, followed him through the crowd to his car—an unremarkable, very respectable sedan with a rental company sticker on the back window. He held the door as she climbed inside, their gazes briefly melding together as the unspoken promise of what they’d both agreed to simmered between them.
Settled in the car, she shot a quick text to Eli so he’d know where she’d gone and that she was fine. More than fine.
Roman’s hand found hers as they made their way to her apartment near the University of Denver. A heady buzz of adrenaline and lust wrapped around them in the confined space.
“Hungry?” he asked.
“Nope.” She’d eaten before she went to the party. Even if she were hungry, she had many, many other things on her mind. “You?”
“No.”
“You leave Monday?” she confirmed.
“Early.” He tapped a beat along with the music, his thumb brushing against the fleshy spot at the base of her thumb.
“Big mission?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t usually know where I’m going until I’m halfway there. This one’s an aid mission though. Not classified. They need a photographer to track their progress for evidence. Should be an easy one while I get back into the swing of things. Time off always screws with my head.”
“What exactly is a hard one?” She cleared her throat. “Mission. I mean.”
“Anytime bullets are coming at me, it’s not an easy one.” The words were serious and said without emotion—flat—but they were accompanied by a flash of dimples and relaxed shoulders.
“You like those, too, though, don’t you?” she asked.
“Yeah.” He kept his focus on the road, moving his hand away from hers to turn onto the street leading to her building. “Keeps things interesting.”
Bullets? Nopers. Interesting was not the word she’d use. “Do you get to come home often?”
“Not a lot of time off for me. But I like what I do. Like that it’s never the same thing twice.”
She fidgeted with the zipper on her handbag. “I’m with you. I like to be moving forward. Toward something.”
“Exactly.” He looked her way, a camaraderie sparking between them at their mutual understanding.
“Next left, last building.” She pointed at the gray building that housed her teeny tiny apartment.
Roman walked behind her as they climbed the stairs to her front door. They didn’t touch—the promise of what was to come taunted her, making her skin tingle and her mouth water.
This was just one of those one-night—maybe two-night—things. Nothing serious. Nothing more than sex between two overachievers both waiting for the next move.
But once they were inside and Roman’s hands landed on her hips, things felt a whole lot more serious than they’d ever felt for her before.
Palm against his jawline, she ran the tip of her nose against his.
He grinned, moving in. Sadie’s body instinctively moved with his as he pressed a feather-light kiss to her forehead and then her temple before moving down to kiss her cheek, ending with her lips.
Sadie knew there were all kinds of kisses—the fast kind, the slow kind, the meh kind, the holy-crap-this-is-good kind—but Roman’s kiss was unique in its ability to turn her legs to applesauce.
She gripped the muscles of his shoulders for support as his mouth moved in tandem with hers, his tongue sliding with hers, his body pressing against hers.
She led him to the bed, kissing him the entire way—heat and flesh and the carnal need to be with him propelling her forward.
“Sadie,” he whispered as they fell against her bedspread.
God, he said her name like she was special. And that was the kind of moment a girl wanted to put a pin in so that she could come back to it over and over again.
The kind of moment when nothing would be the same.
The kind of moment that ignited the next, which would lead to the next and the next until, eventually, everything would fall apart.
Everything always fell apart.