All Fired Up (Kate Meader) (15 page)

“You’re doing it again,” she said.

Her words halted him cold. “Doing what?”

“That secret smile. Like you’re remembering things I can’t.” She considered him and he felt the weight of her stare like a brick wall between them. “What did we talk about that night?”

Ah, she was still trying to figure out how she had let her guard down. “The crazy bride, Vegas excess, your dream to be Chicago’s next party queen—”

She blinked. “I told you that?”

“Yeah, you have big plans and you were excited about it. How you want to get top events for the restaurant, become the doyenne of party planning. You also talked about Jack and Lili and how great they are together.”

“That sounds familiar.” She looked at the drawing, her expression filled with a yearning that pinched his heart. Cara wanted things with a barely banked passion but fear—of what, he wasn’t sure—bound her like one of her designer outfits. He saw it in Vegas. He felt it when they kissed after the line-dancing class. Even tonight when she had surveyed his dessert samples. What he wouldn’t do to get her out of those fancy clothes and stoke those fires smoldering below the surface.

“I’m sorry about my behavior the night of the dancing,” she said. “I was rude to you.”

“This is a tricky situation and you want to put it behind you. Neither of us wants a marriage, LT. I get that.” The unmistakable heart twinge he felt right then surprised him, but not enough to derail his train of thought. “So, it’ll just have to be sex.”

Her eyes fluttered wide and her mouth worked. “What?”

“We can just do a sex-only thing, like a married-with-benefits deal.”

Gotcha.
Oh, his little beauty wanted to laugh. Her lips twitched and his dick twitched at the thought of bringing a smile to her exquisitely melancholy face. She appeared to be mulling it over, so he went in for the kill.

“Until we can make it annulled-with-benefits.” He waggled his eyebrows and pulled that brimming laugh out of her.
Zing.
Why did it feel better for being so hard won?

On the downside of the laugh, she said, “Speaking of which, I’m picking up the papers tomorrow.”

“Hm,” he hummed. There was the twinge in his chest again, a touch sharper now. This was good, wasn’t it? Never had his life needed more clarity than it did of late, and fixing his marital status would go a long way to resharpening his focus.

She cocked her head. “Lili thinks I should take advantage of all you have to offer.”

“I always liked that girl.”

As quick as he had made gains, he lost them as another Cara brain check whipped them away. He imagined her calculating the statistical probabilities for disaster and coming up with ninety-nine point nine percent. This woman thought far too much.

“Shane, I’m flattered but frankly, you’re not my type.” She gave one of those I-don’t-want-to-offend-you-but-I’m-gonna-anyway smiles. “You’re much too nice for me.”

It wouldn’t be the first time he’d heard it and it made him angrier than a bull battling a bee swarm. It was the stuff of chick flicks and crappy sitcoms, how women love a bad boy and good guys finish last. Where in the hell did she get off calling him
nice
?

“Would you prefer I take baseballs out of kids’ hands at Wrigley Field or trip old ladies in the street? You want a guy who’s not nice?” Here he was defending “nice” when he wasn’t feeling particularly nice. Time to kick this up a notch.

“Were you not turned on the other night?”

Her mouth gaped and even that looked good on her. Was there no end to the ways she could get his blood pumping south?

He filled in her shocked silence. “The other night, when you kissed me—”

“You kissed me!”

“Semantics. When you kissed me and licked my chest.”

Flushing, she brought her palm to her cheek to cool it. “I know what I did. I don’t need you to remind me.”

Man, seeing her all het up did hot and dirty things to him. He moved in and gently tipped up her jaw. She shook under his touch but she didn’t retreat.

“I think you do need me to remind you. I think you need to be reminded of all the passion and fire that exists beneath that cool exterior you show to the world. I bet no one sees that, do they? No one sees how out of control you get when the right button is pressed. Maybe it’s just a whisper of my hand across your breasts…” He dropped his gaze to confirm that what he was saying had some effect on her and, yep, to look at her lovely cleavage. Through the erotically thin material of that dress, he found her nipples primed to hard points. “Maybe a breath close to your ear or my thumb gliding across your lip will set you off.”

Her tongue darted, making her lips moist, almost begging him to swipe that pouty lower lip with the pad of his finger. Take a soft suck, a juicy bite. The air felt close, the sweet scent of the cakes, Cara’s skin, and their choppy breathing combining to coat all his senses.

“Still think I’m not your type? Because your body says different. It’s telling me that we would be very compatible indeed. I bet if I were to run my hand down…” He trailed his fingertips down the placket of her dress, between her breasts, along her clenching stomach, until he sensed with his fingertips the band of her panties. A sexy thong, his Braille-for-underwear skills told him.

“I bet I’d find you’re as wet for me as I’m hard for you. Nice? Let me tell you, what I’m thinking about you is the opposite of nice.”

In her eyes he saw desire: greedy, raw, and heart-wrenchingly pure. He also saw other, nameless things that scared and fired him at once. Suddenly this sex-only notion was sounding like chump change. He wanted more. He wanted the luxury of hope.

Somewhere along the way, her hand had crawled along his chest and now rested above his pec.

“There are also other benefits to be had here,” he said.

“There are?” It came out in a hoarse whisper.

I get to smell you on my sheets. I get to think of new ways to make you smile…

“Fat-free treats.”

That sent her skeptical gaze sideways toward the cake samples. “Um…”

“No, Cara. My mouthwatering, succulent…nipples.”

She shrieked so loud it left a ringing in his ear.

“I know you want another shot at these tasty little suckers, woman, and if you’re good, I’ll dab them in chocolate frosting.”

That sent her into further shrieks and a full-body vibration.

“After your disgraceful behavior last week, we’ll stay away from church basements. Best not to risk damnation.” He shook his head in mock censure. “For shame, Cara.”

She lost it. A laugh-snort explosion that she tried to bury in the well of shoulder. “Shane, that’s too much. Please stop.”

No fucking way. Making her laugh had suddenly become the most important job in the world.

She tilted her head up, her full lips so close he had to swallow against the blitzkrieg of her sensuality. “I think I might have missed the nipple frosting section of your résumé.”

“True, I don’t have a lot of experience in that area, but girls do tend to get funny ideas about guys who surround themselves with sugary delights all day. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, ‘You’re a pastry chef? Let’s whip out the double boiler and a can of Reddi-wip and get this party started.’”

Snorting again, she cupped her mouth. She had made that funny little sound in Las Vegas and then spent a lot of time trying to hide it. He loved seeing her let loose like this. A full minute passed as their joint laughter wound down and the proximity to each other became shockingly apparent. Her hand still splayed over his chest, warm and full of life as she breathed herself to neutral.

“I know you’ve been wondering how we got here, Cara. How we both could have done something so crazy.” He caressed her hip, absorbing the shock of heat he found there. “This is what happened that night. This feeling.”

He wished he could articulate it better but that was the best he could do. There she had stood in the middle of her family and friends, looking like the experience was entirely alien to her. Like she had been deposited there from the mother ship and didn’t recognize a single person. Shane knew exactly how that felt—to not belong, to be unsure of your place. The night had been spent turning wisps of recognition into strings of connection. They got drunk, they shared stories, they laughed a lot. And then instead of letting it play out naturally, he’d had a shit-for-brains moment and acted on a crazy, drunken impulse. Not far off from dear old Dad, that. As loath as he was to admit it, life since his teens had coalesced around one thing: meeting Jack so he could resent him in person instead of from afar. That obsession ruled him and time with Cara had allowed him to forget about it, had freed him up to be a different person.

With her, he felt like the best version of himself.

From beneath her dark blonde veil of lashes, she looked right into his cracked soul. The urge to tell her everything scorched his mouth. A woman with a slanted connection to her family would understand. His wife would understand.

And then, because he was the unluckiest guy on the planet, her phone rang. Her gaze flicked to the screen, flashing
Mom
and a picture of Francesca.

She sighed. “She’s calling to check up on me. The woman hates it when I muscle in on her babysitting gig.”

“I hate when she does that, too.”

“Ciao, Mom.” She rolled her eyes for his benefit. “It’s fine. All under control.”

Oh no, it wasn’t, and as soon as she got off that phone, he was going to show her just how out of control things could get. Stepping away to give her privacy, he wandered a few steps into the living room. Jack and Lili had moved in about six months ago and the place had long passed the comfortable stage to thoroughly lived in. A little cluttered, a lot messy, with baby toys, books, magazines. Except for the kitchen, which clearly came under Jack’s purview—it shone and spoke to his neat-freak nature. They were both alike in that way. It was almost competitive between them how clean they could keep Sarriette’s countertops.

A gurgle from a baby monitor on the couch’s side table broadcast that Evan was awake. Glancing over his shoulder, he watched Cara, her hands making a series of swoops and whips through the air as she tried to explain something to her mother. “Yes, I know, Mom.”

The baby fussed again, louder this time, and Shane’s heart fisted at the thought of the little fella all alone somewhere upstairs.

“Mom, I really need to go,” Cara was saying. She had heard Evan’s distress and now desperation marred her usually smooth features.

Shane raised a hand to let her know he had it and got a grateful look in return. He took the stairs two at a time and closed in on the sound.

Practically every inch of wall space on this level recorded Jack and Lili’s life. While the downstairs gallery of images displayed what looked like Lili’s more professional, artsy work, here, it was an ode to their happiness. Pictures of Jack caught unawares while cooking or shaving or just plain laughing. Lili captured as she woke up, looking bleary-eyed and beautiful, the compositions not as practiced because Jack was likely behind the camera. There were photos of Cara, too, some with Francesca, bald and stunning, some with other DeLucas at family parties. In those, his wife stood out, her blonde crown a shining beacon among all that brunette Italianness.

Right now, another beacon beckoned—a six-month-old crying for a spot of comfort. He stepped inside and found Evan snugly wrapped in a one-piece, his chubby cheeks heated and wet. Shane picked him up and laid him against his chest, making sure to support his little head in his palm.

“There, there, kiddo. What’s all the drama?”

Evan heaved a breath, a herculean effort for his tiny lungs, and Shane was instantly transported back to an earlier time. He didn’t remember much about his mother, but he would never forget the helplessness he felt when she died and he ended up in his father’s care at the age of five. A dyed-in-the-wool drunk was ill-equipped to handle a child, but the Irish social services system with its Catholic underpinnings privileged familial bonds over a child’s fundamental needs. His father could be sober and charming when called upon, especially in the face of a financial incentive such as an allowance from the government.

Shane walked around the room and after a few back rubs, they both calmed down, transferring serenity to each other in a weird osmosis. The room was chockablock with a sensory overload of color, still vibrant under the dimly lit shaft of light shining in from the hallway. The ceiling was a night sky of celestial light, pimped out with glow-in-the-dark star stickers. Aunt Jo’s boys had one of those ceilings and as a kid, Shane had wanted it for his own bedroom. Packy walloped him into the middle of next week when Shane dared to ask for it. Toys of every shape and stripe ringed Evan’s room, many of which were too advanced for an infant who probably couldn’t sit up yet. But the message was clear.

Evan, you are loved.

Through the now steady sough of Evan’s breathing, he inhaled the baby’s scent and pondered the other smells that might come close. Baking bread, Sarriette’s kitchen at full tilt, Cara…

On the dresser lay a photograph of Jack holding Evan with Jules at his side. Laughing and easy, perched on the corner of picture and perfect. Heart thumping so hard Shane worried it might wake the kid, he picked up the frame, needing the heft of it to convince himself it was real. The family Kilroy: tight-knit, happy, impregnable.