Burn (17 page)

She bit her lip.

Karl, his hands at his waist, bent to speak directly into
her left ear. “What’s the matter? You don’t like being
called baby girl?”

“They’re just words, sensai,” she said. “Words can’t
hurt me.”

Karl’s big body overshadowed her, his thick, overly
muscled arms making him appear even wider. He threw
a
strike, stopping his fist mere centimeters from Cinder’s
cheek. Every other student flinched, but Cinder
remained frozen.

“You really think you’re tough, don’t you?” The
friendliness of his inquiry failed to blunt the menace in
his challenge. “Assume the fighting position.”

Four groups of two squared off, and at Karl’s signal, they began throwing and blocking slow strikes and kicks.
So intent on his fight with Cinder, Karl paid no attention
to the other students, one of whom carelessly walked into
a blow to the eye.

Cinder ducked and blocked, neutralizing Karl’s
strikes and kicks. She had never watched him teach as she
had Sionne and Chip, so she had no knowledge of his fighting style or habits. He stalked her over the mat, and
she realized it didn’t matter. Karl wasn’t teaching. He was
pursuing a personal grudge.

“Sensai, you said we’re only sparring,” one of the male
students remarked.

Cinder barely noticed that the rest of the class had
become the audience for her and Karl. The more skill
fully she avoided contact from him, the more compli
cated his moves became. He implemented skills far
outside her realm of experience, and even though Gian
had taught her well, she knew that her reflexes and
blocking techniques wouldn’t serve her much longer.

Karl executed a drop spin, his long leg sweeping her feet from under her. She felt as if she’d been struck by a
tree trunk as she rolled out of reach of his subsequent ax
kick, his foot coming down on the mat hard enough for
t
he impact to move painfully through her upper body.
With a frustrated growl, Karl lunged at her, grabbing her
by the waist and throwing her across the mat. Two of her
classmates intervened.

“Sensai, I think that’s enough,” the male student said.
Karl responded with a short chop to his windpipe. The fellow dropped to his knees, gasping for air, his hands
clasped at his throat.

“Karl!”

Gian’s voice boomed throughout the studio, freezing
Karl in place as he leaned over Cinder and the woman
protectively kneeling beside her.

“My office,” Gian demanded. “Now.”

Panting, Karl spent an extra second glaring at Cinder before he turned and stomped out of the studio, flinging
sweat from his face.

No sooner than Karl exited the studio, Zae entered,
Chip close behind her. Cinder picked herself up from the
floor and thanked the woman who’d come to her aid.

“Karl has lost his damn mind,” Zae proclaimed.
“What did you do to make him so mad?”

“He asked me out before class,” Cinder quietly
explained. She went to the man who had tried to stop
Karl. Chip was checking out his throat.

“And you turned him down,” Zae said.

“You’re going to have a nice bruise, but I can’t tell much
more than that,” Chip told Karl’s victim. “Let me take you to Urgent Care, just to make sure nothing is broken.”

Chip dismissed the class. Shouting from the corridor
drew everyone from the studio. Gian and Karl had made
i
t to the office, but the noise of their confrontation didn’t
stay confined to it.

“That girl came through hell to get where she is now,
and I won’t have you turning Sheng Li into a place she
can’t call home!” Gian shouted. “Grow up, you dumb
self-centered bastard!”

“You’re not the biggest cock on the walk, Gian! Criticize
my teaching all you want, but I’m the best you’ve got here!”

“You’re fired, Karl.” Gian lowered his voice, so the
gang in the corridor shuffled closer to the office to get a
better listen. “I’ve had too many complaints about you
from students, the staff, even the cleaning service. I can’t
keep you on.”

Zae punched the air in a silent sign of triumph.

“It’s her.” The darkness in Karl’s voice raised the fine hairs at Cinder’s nape. “If you got your head out of that
woman’s ass for one second, you’d see that—”

“If you so much as look at her funny ever again, it’s
gonna end badly for you, son.”

Gian’s cold warning gave Cinder an unexpected thrill.
“Oh, I’m your son now, Gian?” Karl challenged. “Is that it?”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

Brusque, heavy movement in the office sent Chip run
ning in there, his entourage of Zae, Cinder and two stu
dents behind him. Chip tried to position himself between
Gian and Karl while everyone else crowded the doorway.

“What are you gonna teach me, pops?” Karl
demanded, angling around Chip to strike at Gian. “You
gonna teach me this?”

Karl’s right fist shot past Chip, aimed right at Gian’s
face. Gian caught Karl’s wrist and gave it an expert twist,
bringing him to his knees with a pained cry. He leaned over Karl to speak into his face. “Go near Cinder, her
house, her car, anything, and I will end you. Do you
understand me?”

Karl muttered a stream of curse words under his
breath, earning a savage little twist to his hand.

“All right!” he screamed. “Fine!”

“Get your crap and get the hell outta my dojo,” Gian
ordered.

Karl stood and went to his desk. Angrily, he threw his
belongings into his duffel bag and stormed out of the office, sharply catching Zae in the shoulder with his bag
on his way to the lobby.

“You big—”

“Just let him go,” Cinder said, stopping Zae from
pursuing Karl.

Chip left the office with Gian close behind him. Gian
seemed surprised to see a bunch of people in the corridor.
He briefly cupped Cinder’s cheek and said, “Would you
wait for me in there?” He nodded toward the private
studio. Without waiting for her answer, he fell into step
beside Chip.

“I just want to make sure he leaves,” Gian said. “Without breaking a window or kicking a hole in the wall on the way out,” Chip added.

C
inder sat alone in the private studio long after Chip
had escorted Zae into the women’s locker room to ice her
shoulder. The longer she sat, the more confused and
angry she became. When Gian finally entered the room,
she stood and greeted him with a hard push and an even
harder demand. “Who do you think you are?”

“Cinder, what—”

“I told you I didn’t want to be in a group class, I told
you I wasn’t ready, but you insisted! And then you weren’t
even here at five-thirty!”

Gian’s solid figure didn’t budge under her first push,
so Cinder planted her feet and gave him another hearty
shove. She smiled inwardly at the way he had to take a
step back to maintain his footing.

“If you had been here for our class, I wouldn’t have
run into Karl,” she continued. “I pay you for
private
les
sons specifically so I don’t have to deal with humiliation!”

“You held your own against Karl,” Gian said proudly. “He humiliated himself, not you. You don’t have a damn
thing to be embarrassed about. You’re one of the most courageous women I’ve ever met.”

Right then, staring into his eyes, she knew he wasn’t
talking about what had happened in the group class.
“Who told you?” She wanted to push him again. “Was it
Zae?”

“Told me what?” Gian braced his hands in front of
himself to ward off another attack.

“Is that what you do when I’m not around? Talk
about me like I’m some kind of victim who needs to be
protected?”

I
t took Gian another couple of seconds staring into
her feral brown eyes before he figured out what she was
referring to. “I Googled you.”

“What?”

“Last night. I couldn’t sleep, and you said some things
that got my curiosity going. So I Googled you. But I
couldn’t find anything, so I Googled your ex.”

She swallowed hard. “Then you know all about what
happened back East.”

The disappointment and finality in her voice weighed on Gian’s heart, bringing back the hurt and helplessness
he’d felt the night before. “At first I couldn’t sleep because
I couldn’t stop thinking about the time I’d spent with
you,” he confessed. “Then it was because I couldn’t stop
thinking about what your ex-husband did to you.”

“That makes two of us then,” Cinder snapped. Her
lower lip quivered, but she held her tears. “I wanted to tell you. I would have.”

“I know.”

“I don’t need to be rescued.” Her tone defied him to
contradict her.

“I know,” he agreed. “But that won’t stop me from
trying to be your hero.”

“I said too much,” she chuckled sadly. “When I got
home last night, I knew it. I told you just enough to give
you a pry bar to open all the doors I’ve tried to keep closed.”

“Cinder, I’ve never known anyone so . . . so . . .”
“Stupid?” She attempted to finish his sentence for
him. “Gullible? Blind?”

“Strong.” He caressed her shoulders, working his
hands up to cup her face.

Cinder’s anguish vanished. She covered his hand with
hers, turning her face to press her lips to his palm.

“It would have been different if Sionne had been
teaching the class,” she conceded.

“Well, according to Chip, Karl told Sionne that he’d
cleared the switch with me. Karl wanted Sionne to take
his class tomorrow night. Apparently, he was planning a
big date.”

Cinder’s lips parted. “Karl asked me to dinner for
tomorrow night.”

“I hope you said no,” Gian remarked.

“I did. That’s when he got mean. ”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here for you.”

“I can take care of myself. I might not need you to
rescue me, but I do need you to keep teaching me.”
“That would be my absolute pleasure.”

“Then let’s go.”

“Okay. How ‘bout dinner?”

She smiled. “I don’t mean leave. Let’s go right now.”
She bowed to him, and then struck a fighting stance.
“Right here.”

“I figured you had enough fighting for one night.”

“It’s not fighting when it’s with you, it’s learning. Karl
did things that I’ve never seen before. I don’t want to be
surprised like that again. So start teaching me, sensai. I’m
yours.”

Gian spent a long moment just staring at her. In the
quiet studio, with the sunset filtering through the sky
l
ight to brush Cinder in pale oranges and purples, Gian
wanted to remember her as she was in this instant—the
moment he knew he was in love with her.

* * *

Cinder paced before her living room, windows
wishing she had been more specific. When she invited
Gian to her apartment, he had asked what time he should
arrive. “After six,” she had said.

After six turned out to be an enormous place filled
with imagined door buzzers, minutes that lengthened
into years, and hallucinations of Gian’s car every time she
poked her head between her curtains.

A fresh loaf of herbed sourdough bread warmed in
her oven; an antipasto tray, wine, beer, soda, juice, and
bottled water chilled in her refrigerator. She had changed
clothes three times, first wearing a pair of knit shorts, a
matching tank top and espadrilles, then switching to
white capri pants with a pink baby doll T-shirt and
strappy sandals. She settled on comfort over cute, and
put on a simple black dress, a sleeveless cotton garment
with a straight bodice and a flared skirt. She looked a
little like a chic nun. As much as she hated to admit it,
the look suited her.