Heat Wave (12 page)

“You’re the best lawyer north of Boston.
Whoever that young man hires won’t be nearly as good as you.”

She said it with a straight face, but he saw
the twinkle of humor in her eyes, in the twitching of her lips as
she tried to suppress a smile. For that alone—not her overblown
praise of his skill but her willingness to tease him—he could
easily fall in love with her.

Another bad thought. “I’m
just saying, bringing charges against the kid could backfire. You
could be seen as humorless. The big bad bitch—forgive me, but
people might view you that way. It could spoil your reputation with
the students. And after all, you
did
have your swimsuit top
unfastened.” An image of her bare breasts wafted through his mind
again. They would be small—she wasn’t exactly bursting out of her
dress—but they might be a little tanner than expected, because
she’d run topless on the beach on a sunny afternoon. Maybe slightly
pink from that inadvertent exposure to the sun. The color of
peaches. She was from Georgia, after all. A Georgia peach. He bet
her skin would be as soft as a peach’s surface, and as
sweet.

Bad, bad thought.

“On the other hand,” she argued, her tone
calm and reasonable, “the boy who dropped the ice on my back could
be a bully. Maybe he does this to other women. Maybe he harasses
his female classmates. It was an offensive thing to do. I don’t
want him to go to prison, but I would like him to know it’s not
acceptable behavior.”

“Okay. So you look at the video and identify
him. And then collar him and chew him out. You might not have to
take it to the administration or the police.”

She mulled over his comment. “Whether or not
I report him, the incident still might cost me tenure.”

Caleb shrugged. “No guarantee.”

She lowered her gaze to the wine in her
glass. Even in the tavern’s muted light, he could see how long her
eyelashes were. Had he always been so keenly aware of her beauty?
Or was it the damned song that made her seem so absurdly
attractive?

“All right,” she finally said. “I’ll try to
view the video, see if I can identify anyone in it, and deal with
the miscreant. If I don’t get tenure…well, as you say, that was
never guaranteed.”

She sounded so wistful, he
almost didn’t register her use of the word
miscreant.
Great word. Better
than
perpetrator.
He wondered why so few people made use of it—especially
lawyers, who dealt with miscreants all the time.

She took one more sip of her wine, then set
down her glass. Someone had slid a quarter into the jukebox, and a
slow, soulful song emerged, a man wailing that he hungered for his
woman’s touch and asking God to speed her love to him. A few
couples took to the dance floor, arms wrapped tightly around each
other as they rocked back and forth. A vertical substitute for a
horizontal desire—that was what Caleb’s father used to call slow
dancing.

Right now, Caleb would take that vertical
substitute, if he couldn’t have the horizontal desire. But when
Meredith pushed back her chair, he sensed her aim was not to grab
his hand and pull him onto the dance floor. “I should go,” she
said. “I’ve taken up so much of your time. You will bill me, won’t
you?”

Shit. He was fantasizing about horizontal
desires, and she was reminding him to charge her his standard fee.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, jumping to his feet as well, even
though he hoped to keep her at the table for a few more minutes. “I
never charge for my services when I’m drinking beer.”

“Caleb.” Her eyes met his. They were so blue
it almost hurt to look at them. “You can’t keep doing things for me
and not charging me. I feel like I’m taking advantage of you.”

Please, take advantage of
me!
He almost blurted the words aloud, but
she seemed way too eager to leave the tavern—and him. “Let me walk
you to your car,” he said, digging his wallet out of his pocket and
tossing a twenty dollar bill on the table.

He and Meredith had driven to the tavern in
separate cars. When they’d left his office, that arrangement had
made sense. He’d figured they would have a drink, come up with a
plan, and then go their separate ways. But he didn’t want to go a
separate way from her now.

What he wanted didn’t
matter. She was done with him. She wanted to flipping
pay
him. What he
needed—not wanted, but needed—was an icy shower. And maybe another
beer or two. And some music he could relate to. Something loud and
macho, something from the current century. Not ancient Motown
pop.

Stepping outside the tavern, he was slapped
by the evening heat. Summer solstice—the longest day of the
year—was just a few weeks away, and the sky was still bright with
sunshine. The air was thick and sultry. The breeze lifting off the
ocean a block away didn’t cool him but instead added to the
humidity. He was tempted to grab Meredith’s hand and drag her back
into the bar’s air conditioning.

He did grab her hand. He shouldn’t. He knew
he shouldn’t. But his brain had gone AWOL again, and his body was
operating on impulse, on reflex. His fingers closed around hers and
he pictured her sweet, glossy nails, and he pulled her into his
arms, just as he’d wanted to do inside the tavern, when that slow
song had begun to play.

He kissed her. Alone in the shade of the
tavern, accompanied by the hum of traffic cruising down Atlantic
Avenue and the shrill caws of sea gulls swooping and gliding above
the beach beyond the road, he touched his lips to Meredith’s,
brushed, caressed. Clung to her left hand with his right, circled
his left arm around her slender waist. Felt her body’s warmth along
his front as the evening heat pressed into his back.

She kissed him back.

She didn’t taste like
peaches. She tasted like…
her.
A distinct flavor, wine and honey, strength and
femininity. When he probed her lips with his tongue she opened to
him, and they sighed in harmony.

He released her hand so he could twine his
fingers through the golden silk of her hair. The nape of her neck
was damp—evidently, she was feeling the evening’s heat as much as
he was. But he no longer wanted to return to the cool interior of
the bar. He wanted to melt in this heat, to drown in it. He wanted
to sweat with Meredith. He wanted her wetness to mingle with
his.

He wanted everything. Now. It was burning in
his heart.

He couldn’t have
everything
, not while
they were standing on a public street a barely block from the
public beach where Meredith had already gotten in trouble. No
public nudity. “Come home with me,” he whispered, then grazed her
forehead, the narrow bridge of her nose, her cheek.

To his amazement, she nodded.

If she let herself stop to think, she would
beg Caleb’s pardon, race home, and lock the door securely. But she
couldn’t lock herself safely from him. No deadbolt existed that
could protect her from her mindless desire for him.

Mindless
was definitely the operative term. When she’d told
him her brain was missing in action, she hadn’t been exaggerating.
The existence of the video had vexed her. Breaking down in sobs in
Caleb’s office had embarrassed her. The way he’d held her hand as
they’d sat side by side next to his desk had discombobulated her.
Escaping to the tavern for a drink had seemed like a good idea—but
then that song had started to play, and any chance of regaining her
ability to think vanished for good.

Well, perhaps not for good. And not forever.
Later, she would come to her senses and realize that having sex
with any lawyer, let alone a lawyer who was ostensibly counseling
her through a difficult situation, was a serious mistake.

Growing up, she’d been surrounded by lawyers
and lawyers-to-be. They’d debated. They’d quibbled. They’d pampered
their clients and made huge amounts of money defending the
indefensible. She loved her father and her brother, and she was
fond of her brother-in-law. But she couldn’t shake the suspicion
that whoever made up all those silly lawyer jokes must have known
her family personally. “What do you call a hundred drowned lawyers?
A good start!” and “What’s the difference between a dead skunk in
the road and a dead lawyer in the road? There are skid marks by the
dead skunk.”

The menfolk in her family earned a great
deal of money by shepherding shady bankers, sleazy hedge-fund
managers, and nefarious money-launderers across multiple lanes of
traffic-clogged highways without getting hit. Because if they did
get hit, there surely wouldn’t be any skid marks at the site.

Caleb didn’t seem like that kind of lawyer.
But look at whom he was currently defending: a municipal manager
accused of skimming money from the town’s pension fund. “He might
be innocent,” Meredith’s father always said when she questioned him
about one of his less savory clients. “And he’s paying me darned
good money to convince a jury he is.”

She’d tried to assure
herself that her father’s clients had nothing to do with her. She
would never need a lawyer, unless it was to write a will or
purchase a house. Who would have thought she’d run afoul of the law
merely by sunning herself on a town beach? Who would have thought
she
would
need an
attorney, and the attorney she hired would not only seem stubbornly
opposed to letting her pay him for his services, but also would
also be tall and lean, with mahogany hair and eyes as dark and
intense as espresso, an intriguingly angular face and a devastating
talent for kissing?

Who would have thought the early June
weather would be scorching, and she and this attorney would hear an
old rock song that cranked the temperature in their world so high
their brains melted?

Not just their brains—their entire bodies.
Merely kissing Caleb seared Meredith’s nerves, turned her spine to
liquid, and caused a quivering pool of sensation to gather in her
womb.

Once she cooled off, she’d indulge in a
nice, long bout of regret and contrition. She’d revert to being a
righteous, proper schoolteacher, fighting for her reputation.

Right now, however, standing in the
sweltering evening, with Caleb’s arms tight around her and his
mouth fused to hers, she was a long way from cooling off.

Somehow, they managed to stop kissing long
enough to walk to Caleb’s sporty black Audi. Meredith had left her
car parked at his office, and she assumed he’d drive back there so
she could get it. However, he headed north on Atlantic Avenue
instead of south. To her right was a sidewalk, next to it a stone
and concrete sea wall—as if a simple man-made structure could hold
back the power of the sea. Yet somehow, it did. Beyond the sea wall
lay an expanse of pale sand, and beyond that the ocean, its
blue-green surface calm beneath the hot sky. To her left stood a
row of narrow, shingled houses, lined up along the sidewalk like
weary soldiers. They were older homes, most of them broken into
apartments, or so she assumed, given that most of them had several
mailboxes attached to their façades.

Eventually, Caleb steered around a corner,
then pulled into an alley that ran behind the houses. He eased into
a detached garage across the alley from one of the houses and shut
off the engine.

They turned to face each other. The garage
was gloomy, the air stagnant. Caleb’s face in shadow was a wonder,
the sharp lines and planes of his features appearing almost
mysterious. He wasn’t smiling. Was he happy?

Was she?

It didn’t matter.

“You live on Atlantic Avenue,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Just across the street from the ocean.” She
sighed. “How lovely.”

“I like it.” He pushed his door open, then
with apparent effort tore his gaze from her in order to swing out
of the car.

She opened her door, too, but he’d circled
the car to her side before she could climb out. He took her hand,
and she almost hoped he would kiss her again. If he did, though,
they might never make it into the house. And the garage was too
stuffy, the steamy air smelling faintly of gasoline.

They stepped out into the sunlight and he
pressed a few buttons on a keypad to close the garage door. Then he
led her across the alley to the back door of a gray shingled house.
He unlocked it, ushered her inside, and strolled with her down a
hall to a flight of stairs. “Which floor do you live on?” she
asked, mostly because she had to say something. Her lips were
crying out for kisses; if she kept them moving with speech, they
might not crave him so much.

“The top two floors. I rent out the first
floor.”

“You own the building?”

“Yes.” They’d reached the second floor. She
noticed in passing that the stairway railing was polished, the
walls painted a soft cream hue. At the top of the stairs, he
unlocked a door and brought her inside.

The room was huge, stretching the length of
the house from front to back. The front wall featured a bay window
and a French door that led out to a small deck overlooking Atlantic
Avenue and the ocean beyond—a view the ground floor apartment
wouldn’t have, thanks to the sea wall. The room’s walls were white,
the floor honey-colored oak, and a fireplace with a brick hearth
anchored one wall. An oversized leather sofa and two cube-shaped
chairs were grouped around a low parsons table. Shelves stood on
either side of the fireplace, stacked with books, a few model cars,
and a small sculpture constructed of wood and wire that was either
a kindergartener’s arts-and-crafts project or a piece of fine art.
Further back into the room was a dining area—a long table of dark,
scuffed wood surrounded by six ladder-back chairs. An ascending
flight of stairs formed a divider between that space and the
kitchen.