Burn (7 page)

Typically not prone to jealousy, Gian didn’t know
what to do about the scene unfolding before him.

“My daddy’s name is Charles Avery Kish Jr.,” Chip
started, “so when I was born, my parents named me
Charles Avery, too. Only I wasn’t number two, I was the
third, so they called me Trip, for triple. My big sister, who
was three at the time, couldn’t say Trip. She called me Chip, and it stuck. I’ve been Chip ever since.”

“That’s an interesting story,” Cinder said politely. She
caught Gian looking at her. “I’ll drop these forms off
tomorrow morning,” she told him. “Goodnight.” She
gave Chip another brief smile and headed for the locker
room.

“
Miss White, I’m done for the day,” Chip said, fol
lowing. “Do you need a ride home?”

Gian bolted upright in his chair.

“No, I’m within walking distance,” she said.

“It’s a nice night,” Chip said. “Let me change out of
these pajamas and I’ll walk with you. That is, if you
wouldn’t mind the company.”

Gian watched, every bit as vested in her answer as
Chip seemed to be.

Cinder’s right hand worried over her left a few times
before she cleared her throat. “I, uh . . .” She cut a glance
at Gian.

He forced his eyes back to the Pritchard Hok
Industries documents on his desk, but not before he
noticed the way her blush deepened her complexion to a
shade of beauty that put him in the mind of slow, deep
kisses and sweaty bodies grasping in the dark.

“You know what, maybe next time,” Chip said ami
ably—to Gian’s relief—just as Cinder replied, “Give me
five minutes?”

Chip’s dimples deepened.

Gian’s face fell.

“See you out front, then,” Chip said, and then trotted
off to the men’s locker room.

At the door, Cinder looked over her shoulder at Gian.
“Have a good weekend, sensai.”

Even though his document was upside down, Gian
continued to study it. He grunted his acknowledgement of her parting words, looking up only after he heard the soft
slap of her bare feet departing toward the locker rooms.

“Zae speaks so highly of you and Mr. Piasanti,”
Cinder said quietly. “She mentioned that you were in the
Marines.”

“Yeah, Gian and I served in Yemen, the Gulf,
Mogadishu. He was my commanding officer.” He shoved
his hands deep into the pockets of his baggy cargo shorts.
“Saved my life a couple of times.”

Cinder slowed her pace and glanced at Chip.
“Really?”

“Oh, hell yeah. I wouldn’t be talking to you right now
if Gian hadn’t carried my ass through two miles of rebel
fire in Mogadishu.”

They stopped at the corner of Lockwood and Gore to
wait for a car to pass before crossing the street. “How
long were you in the service together?”

“Five years.” Chip slipped Cinder’s gym bag from her
shoulder and slung it over his own, and he continued his
story before she could protest. “I’d been in the service for
two years before I was reassigned to Gian’s Force Recon
company. Gian had worked his way up to Special Ops by
the time he was twenty-five. He enlisted right after high
school.”

“What are ‘ops’?”

“Operations. Our missions were highly classified.”

“And highly dangerous?”

“And how.” Chip chuckled somberly.

Chip took Cinder’s hand and started across
Lockwood, waving a hand in gratitude when a consid
erate driver allowed them to cross. As soon as they hit the
opposite curb, Cinder slipped her hand from his. “Is
Gian from Missouri?”

“Yeah, he grew up in South St. Louis, on The Hill.”
“Which hill?”

“
The
Hill,” Chip said. “A lot of Italian immigrants
settled between South Kingshighway and Hampton
Avenue. It used to be called Dego Hill, now it’s just The
Hill, thank goodness. Gian’s people have lived there since the Piasantis came to the States from Italy. Gian’s mom
makes the best meatballs, I swear, they—”

“Chip,” Cinder started softly, “if you don’t want to
tell me about the time you and Gian spent in the service,
you don’t have to.”

“No, no, it’s fine. I don’t mind talking about it. I’m
glad to talk about it with you.” A flash of his blue eyes and friendly dimples assured Cinder that he was telling
the truth. “Our mission in Mogadishu was our last. Gian
decided not to re-up when he left Special Ops, and I was
discharged to go home to—”

“Why didn’t Gian want to re-up?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. He never said. The
USMC wasn’t too eager to let a good commander like
Gian go, so they offered him a position with their
training school in the Ozarks. He helped beat grunts into shape for a few years, then decided to open a school of his
own to teach the fighting techniques he’d learned over
the years. That’s how Sheng Li was born.”

“Why did he pick Webster Groves?” Cinder stepped
aside to allow a group of noisy, pierced, and tattooed
teenagers dressed in black and purple to pass between her
and Chip on the narrow sidewalk. “Does he have family
here, or a girlfriend?”

“I don’t know why he settled in Webster Groves,”
Chip said. “He’s the reason I came here, though.”

They were passing the Webster Groves town hall
when a woman in a sharp business ensemble stopped
opening her car door to stare at Chip. Cinder glanced back after they had passed her to see that the woman’s
line of sight arrowed directly at the seat of Chip’s shorts.

Chip continued to talk about his experiences in the
service, but Cinder watched him more than listened to
him. An orange Tennessee Volunteers T-shirt hung off his
broad shoulders, the worn fabric nicely showing off the
carved muscles of his upper arms and back. Cinder’s gaze, and that of a couple of female pedestrians, followed the
movement of Chip’s hand when he mindlessly raised his
T-shirt to scratch his belly, casually exposing the stacked
muscles of his runway-ready abs and the trail of golden
hair adorning them.

Cinder examined him from head to toe as one would
take in the details of a museum exhibit. From his big feet in their plastic and foam flip flops to the chaos of thick curls atop his head, Chip was a beautiful man. He was a
nice one too, who was walking her home, carrying her
gym bag, and who’d held her hand to cross the street.

“
I was in Nashville recuperating,” Chip was saying by
the time Cinder transferred her attention from his looks
to his words.

“Recuperating from what?” she asked.

“Somebody always comes out on the bad end in a
fight. In our last one, it was us.”

“What happened?”

“Our last mission was . . . challenging.” He sighed. “I
got shot in the leg and nearly bled out in the field, and
by field I mean a grass hut village surrounded by wasteland and enemy troops for ten miles in every direction.”

She looked at him. He stared at his feet as they
walked, his mind clearly in a time and place that etched fine lines around his youthful eyes.

“We lost four men before we could get a signal strong
enough to radio for an extraction,” he went on. “The
hardest part was getting to the extraction point two miles
away.”

“Gian carried you?”

He raised his head and stared forward. “The whole
two miles. He didn’t break stride or stumble once. He led
his men through gunfire and mortar rounds, and he did
it with my dead weight over his shoulder. Most people
can’t even imagine what that must have been like.”

I can
, Cinder thought.

“I was sent home to recuperate,” Chip said. “Three
surgeries and a year of physical therapy corrected the
muscular, skeletal, and nerve damage in my leg. When
Gian asked me to come to Webster Groves and work for
him, he wouldn’t take no for an answer, even when we d
idn’t know if I’d ever walk again.” He slapped his upper
thigh. “I’ve got enough titanium in here to build a battle
ship, but it works almost as good as new, thanks to Sheng
Li and Sue Pan.”

“Is Sue Pan another form of martial arts?”

Chip laughed softly. “No, she’s the physical therapist
who helps me out here.”

They walked in silence, passing well-lit houses where
families sat for dinner, or teenagers laughed and chatted
on wide, wraparound porches. Cinder offered a polite
smile to an older couple walking a pug that strained
against its leash.

A young woman in neon running shoes jogged
toward them. She eyed Chip so closely that she nearly
collided with Cinder. When the woman passed, Cinder
peeped over her shoulder to see the petite brunette
runner staring back at Chip, her sweating face split in a leering grin. Cinder studied Chip, forcing herself to view
him anew, to see him as the overheated jogger had.

He was the very picture of summer sexiness, and
Cinder realized that she should have been enjoying his
company. She was. Yet in taking inventory of Chip’s good
qualities and good looks, she couldn’t stop comparing him to Gian.

A few inches taller than Chip, Gian was long, lean,
and elegant compared to Chip’s compact, gym-built
physique. Chip was as quick to smile as Gian was to
scowl; he was sunny and open to Gian’s authoritative, business-like demeanor.

S
he sensed a tender vulnerability within Chip’s
apparent strength that left her affection for him more
familial than carnal. She sensed no such vulnerability in
Gian, who was as solid and stoic as a Marvel superhero.
From what she’d seen so far, Gian was everything Zae had
promised: patient but firm, knowledgeable, handsome.

Chip had a mouth built for kissing, but it only made
Cinder want to know what it would feel like to press her
lips to Gian’s head and cradle it to her bosom. Not many
men could carry off a near-buzz cut. Gian’s square jaw
balanced his broad forehead. His eyebrows were manly,
not too heavy and not too thin—the perfect awnings for
his deep-set hazel eyes. Gian’s face never showed his emo
tions, but his eyes betrayed him every time Cinder
looked into them.

He was curious about her, but unlike most people
she’d met in Webster Groves, he asked questions out
right. When he accidentally bloodied her nose, his face
had remained totally calm, but his eyes had telegraphed
his concern for her. Gian was so different in appearance
and temperament from Chip, yet every bit as beautiful
inside and out.

Cinder shook her head to clear it of that last. She
hadn’t enrolled at Gian’s school because of his looks or
personality. She wanted only to learn what he knew—
how to kill a man a hundred different ways with no
weapons other than her hands and feet.

“This is you,” Chip said, stopping.

“I’m sorry?”

“This is your house, isn’t it?”

She answered with a reserved smile.

“Got some things on your mind?” Chip shoved his
hands into his pockets and rocked on his heels.

“I didn’t think it showed,” she replied. “Thank you
for the walk home.”

She climbed three short concrete steps leading to the
long flagged path in front of the three-story Victorian. Chip vaulted the stairs to get ahead of Cinder.

“I think I already know the answer to the question
I’m about to ask you, but I have to ask anyway,” he
started. “Would you have lunch with me sometime? I’d
really like to get to know you better.”