First to Burn (28 page)

“It’s clear and dry, dear.” Her mother’s innocent blink had fooled the savviest Catholic-school admissions officers. “Your young man brought a spare helmet. He’s very thoughtful.”

“But—” How would she ever be alone with Wulf if her family didn’t leave?

“Besides, you’ve already lost a leg like that Heather person who divorced Paul McCartney.” She waved her arm, and its half dozen gold bangles, in the air. “Tell me, what else should I worry about? That you’re going to do something like run off and join the army?” She slammed the palm of her hand into her forehead. “Wait, you did that too, despite my objections.” A second arm joined the waving as she warmed to her favorite controversy, her daughter’s life. “If I’m really lucky you’ll get drunk and wake up in Atlantic City! Married!”

“Mom!”

Behind Theresa someone choked and then coughed. Undoubtedly Wulf, because decades of marriage had inoculated Carl.

“Will you
please
leave us alone? Go, already!” She winced at how much she sounded like a teenager, but Jeanne had been so
involved
all through dinner.

“Fine.” Drawing out the word, she made a faux hurt face. “We’ll go to the mall and find another bookshelf.” Jeanne hugged her and pressed her cheek to Theresa’s. “The boys are here, so you should go out. Stay out late. Maybe until Wednesday.” She had never learned to whisper.

“Too much advice rivals too much information.” Theresa hugged back and hoped her mother knew how much her matchmaking, annoying as it was, meant to her. Even when the odds were against her, someone—okay, weird that it was her mother—had thought she might have a date and sex again someday. “When will you become a normal mom?”

“Never, baby doll.” Jeanne waved as Carl pulled her from the kitchen.

While she counted to twenty to help her flush disappear, Theresa scraped the next plate so hard her butter knife clanked on the china.

“Your mother gave me marching orders.” Wulf’s arms stole around her and removed the utensil to place it on the counter. “I’m supposed to ensure you get fresh air.”

His lips feathered her ear, making it a fight to set the plate gently on the counter.

“The house must be stuffy. Your cheeks are pink.” His lips warmed the skin up and down the side of her neck.

As she tilted her head, exposing more skin to his heated kisses, the need to kiss him back unfurled. She had nothing to conceal because fraternization rules no longer applied. He knew about Carl’s business, but at dinner he’d demonstrated respect for her stepfather. With Wulf she could be truly honest, as he had been when he’d shared his history with her. She turned in his arms, and his face was so close to hers, their breath combined. The hands on her back were gentler than she expected based on the flare in his eyes, but then her Viking burst out of the polite facade and his lips crushed hers. As soon as she opened her mouth, his tongue took advantage of the invitation while she grabbed his shoulders, his neck, his head, anywhere she could reach. The contrast of his soft hair and his bunched muscles reminded her of all his contrasts, gentleness and strength and lethality and even vulnerability.

His hands clasped her waist and hips as he pinned her against the counter, reminding her that they were still in the kitchen. Then his kisses incinerated every other thought. Thrusting his leg between her thighs, he lifted her to her toes while she pressed the part of her body that never listened to her brain against the hard desire he wasn’t trying to conceal.

Bunching her sweater, his fingers left heat trails across the bare skin of her stomach, and she suddenly understood the blinding ecstasy of a moth’s final dash at the light. She pressed closer, as if she could show him the depth of her need with her touch and the way she whispered his name between kisses. She didn’t know if they’d make it upstairs.

But he pulled away, swallowing and adjusting his collar as if it squeezed his neck. “If we don’t leave now, we’ll shock your stepbrother when he wants a refill.”

She panted until she could speak. “When did you become modest?”

“I’m trying to make a good impression. Fit in.”

Two could play games, so she gave him a tiny smile and a chest-inflating breath with a catchy little noise. “Try
harder
. I think you’ll fit. In.”

Groaning, he reached for her again, but this time she sidestepped and put the garbage can between them.

“We’re going out, right? Isn’t that what you want to do?” She flipped her hair. His kiss must have given her mall-girl superpowers, because she didn’t recall ever succeeding at a flip without eating a mouthful of stray ends, but tonight it worked. “Or are those helmets meant to impress Carl and Ray?”

Grinning like a devil collecting souls, he followed her to the foyer for coats. “I don’t need to impress them, only you, Miss High Speed.”

In the driveway, she mounted behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist to become part of his perfect body. The bike’s vibrations lured her into a fantasy. With her eyes closed, she pushed on both footrests, as if she still had two feet, two ankles and ten toes to flex. February cold snapped at the exposed skin between her helmet and her collar and filled her with life. With a transformer leg, a Mafia family and now an immortal lover, she’d never be normal, but moments like this one were damn good.

“What’s next?” He’d brought another set of helmets with transmitters, and she didn’t have to yell. “You swing by my mother’s house on Fridays to take me to a movie?”

“If that’s what you want.”

She wouldn’t allow him to drop into polite crip speak. “What do
you
want?”

“Atlantic City has merits.”

“Whaaat?” He couldn’t be proposing. That would be insane. And it would be totally nuts to say yes, but her heart thumped like motorcycle wheels on pavement.

“Lots of hotels.” He sounded like he’d decided. “With beds.”

He meant what her stepbrother called the bimbo mambo, not marriage, thank goodness. Because she had zero interest in marrying him, none, nada. He wouldn’t be a responsible choice.
He’s just funny
,
absurdly gorgeous
,
sexy
,
able to handle my family and crazy about me.

“Biiig beds.”

Her bed was small, pink and creaky, not to mention Ray and his cousin downstairs with the game consoles, so a room was paramount.

“And a hot tub. Remember our bath in Rome?”

The air whipping against her wasn’t enough to cool her skin when the seam of her jeans pressed at her core, a less than satisfying echo of straddling him on the underwater bench.

“You have stuff we should pick up?” The urgency in his voice tightened every muscle in her body. “Or can we go straight there and buy what we need?”

Underwear she could buy in Atlantic City, if she even needed it, but not her meds or her ankle’s battery charger. Then it hit her. A room with the works—bed, mirror and hot tub—meant he’d see her stump. The end of her leg reminded her of an overripe grapefruit, shiny pink and pocked where the scars weren’t smooth. Sane men didn’t want sex with fruit. She knew he wanted her because she’d felt proof, but his references to Rome made it clear he meant the old Theresa. That woman didn’t exist. “Home.”

The return ride passed in a blur as she fought to control tears.

When Wulf slowed to a lower gear and turned onto her cul-de-sac, she registered an unusual darkness. He put his foot down and skidded into a one-eighty.

“What?” She clutched his waist as he rocketed away. “What is it?”

“The streetlight.”

“It was out. So?” Over his shoulder she watched the needle fly past fifty. Alongside the climbing RPMs, her stomach rose to choke her.

“Wasn’t when we left.” The lover’s voice was gone, replaced by the hard tone of the warrior as he charged a yellow light.

“You think something happened?” She recognized the feeling drenching her as fear
.

“The guards across the street rigged a dead man’s switch. If they don’t hit a button every fifteen minutes, the light blinks off.”

“Guards?” She’d thought the men living in the Giardinos’ house had been FBI agents, and that Ray was pulling a joke sending them pizza, but they were guards? Then she processed the rest of his explanation, and her center fell away to the pavement under their wheels. She understood why the guards hadn’t hit the button. He meant the guards
couldn’t
hit the button.

“My family!” She thumped his shoulder blade with one hand. “Turn around!”

“I put you somewhere safe, then call Carl. What’s his number?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have my phone!”

“Fuck.” His shoulders jerked as he spat the word. “Where’s his work?”

“Take me back!” The bike roared like the pounding blood in her ears.

“Where are his guys this time of night?”

“Why?”

“Thor’s shield, woman! I forgot how you ask questions!”

“All you do is issue orders!” Oncoming headlights blinded her, but she recognized the huge black vehicle that swept past. “That’s them! That car!”

Wulf turned and chased Carl’s SUV, while she held his waist and prayed that Carl would notice them and stop, stop before they got any closer to whatever Wulf thought was waiting at the house.

Her stepfather must have spotted them within seconds, because he signaled a right turn into a self-storage parking lot.

“What you got?” Carl stepped out of the vehicle to face them, and he wasn’t the man she saw around the house. He stood straighter, eyes slit in a harder face, lips pushed forward.

“Streetlight’s out,” Wulf said.

Carl had his phone in his hand before he finished saying
fucker
.

“Wulf!” Her mother unsnapped her shoulder belt and leaned toward the open door, smiling. The red lipstick, the perfectly lined dark eyes and the cheery finger flutter devastated Theresa into speechlessness. She’d put her mother through so much since last summer. To know her mother was about to learn what Carl had already realized made Theresa want to throw up.

“Ray’s not answering.”

“Take her.” Wulf’s grip on her waist left her no choice but to dismount from the bike. “While I go in.”

“I got things in the back.” As he staggered the length of his car, Carl’s shoulder bumped the metal panels as if he was impaired.

Her doubts about whether either man realized she’d followed and her mother had exited the passenger side were dispelled by Carl. “Not your business, Jeanne.”

“If my daughter’s here, it’s my business.”

“Mom—”

“I’m taking youse both to Cookie’s.” Hearing that Carl wanted to park her with her mother made her feel as useful as the junk abandoned behind the line of storage unit doors, but she didn’t blame him.

Confusion and the beginnings of concern put lines on Jeanne’s forehead as she stepped out of the liftgate’s trajectory. “I thought we were going home.”

“Ray didn’t answer the phone.” The floor mat trembled in Carl’s hands.

“Maybe he went out for chips or—”

“Mom—”

“Maybe he went to see a girl.” Her mother’s voice rose. “What’s the—” She stopped when she registered the automatic weapons, handguns, magazines and bulletproof vests neatly organized in the bottom of the cargo storage space.

“He liked those video games too much for girls.” Carl turned his back to her mother and faced Wulf, who stood next to her. His eyes watered at the rims. “I know he was at the house.”

* * *

Slipping into the kitchen he’d left less than an hour before, Wulf scanned the room with Carl’s Heckler and Koch MP5 automatic, ready to pay the devil’s toll, but nothing moved. Like he had on a hundred other ops, tonight he had to clear a hostile building, but this time he wasn’t connected to his team by an earbud and lip mike. Tonight there’d be no high fives with the Big Kahuna, no one breaking right when he zigged left and no one covering his back.

And no one to impose modern rules on ancient justice. The men who defiled this home would find their hell very hot and very soon. He couldn’t afford to wait, not with Carl on his way as soon as he’d secured Theresa and Jeanne. Nothing excused his failures, and he wouldn’t compound them by risking another person Theresa loved.

Silently, he opened the swinging door to the dining room—nothing stuck or squeaked in Jeanne’s house—and swept the space with his rifle set on three round burst. All clear.

The white living room was next. Men skilled enough to take out the guards across the street would know when a fly landed, so they’d know he was there. He pictured the house layout. They’d be crouched behind the L-shaped couch, an effective barrier as they covered both sets of doors. They’d try to pin him while someone circled through the hall and attacked from the rear. If he didn’t want to be shredded by cross fire, he’d have to jump into their nest and go hand-to-hand.

Staying low, he reached for the pocket door. Wood panels quivered at his fingertips, as if aware of their coming demise. One slide, then puffs of white marked a fusillade of bullets as they punctured drywall and sent Jeanne’s oversized copy of
The Last Supper
crashing to the floor. A normal man, one like Theresa deserved, wouldn’t hear the rhythm of automatic weapons. But he knew that, in the same way two runners subconsciously synchronize breathing, most shooters converge their trigger squeezes by the third burst. At the fractional pause that preceded the fourth barrage, he charged across the living room, emptying his magazine at the men behind the couch.

The tug on his right arm meant a hit, but adrenaline masked his pain as he vaulted the cushions and slammed hard to the far side. His boots connected with a chest and drove that man to the floor. He smashed his rifle butt into the other’s face, crushing a set of night vision gear deep into the guy’s pulpy nose and forehead. The one under his feet evened the score by shooting a point-blank through and through into his exposed armpit.

Right arm rendered useless, he dropped the MP5 and collapsed to his knees. The right side of his head felt branded where the round had continued its trajectory, and the sounds of fighting had been cut in half. His functioning left hand gouged downward for the man’s eyes, but this opponent was too fast. Wulf rammed a protective vest instead of a face, but managed to grip a strap. While they rolled, he located the round shape of the man’s kneecap. Popped it as easily as Bubble Wrap.