Heat Wave (16 page)

He would have summoned her first thing
tomorrow morning, and ordered her to take a leave of absence then,
instead of now.

She didn’t have a union rep at her side, but
she was pretty sure Stuart couldn’t dismiss her without cause. She
had broken no rules. She hadn’t injured a student, hadn’t helped
her pupils cheat, hadn’t initiated inappropriate contact with any
of them. She hadn’t vandalized the building. She hadn’t been caught
buying marijuana from the scruffy, surly band of kids who ran a
small drug dealership underneath the football bleachers.

“I will be here tomorrow morning,” she said,
infusing her voice with steel. “I will teach my classes. I will
make sure my students are prepared for their exams. That’s my job.
It’s my responsibility—and my passion.”

With that, she rose and stalked out of
Stuart’s office. She didn’t waste her breath saying good-bye. She
didn’t beg, plead, or warn him that if he wanted her to leave, he’d
have to haul her away in handcuffs.

She remained silent, her head held high.

***

She drove from the faculty
parking lot straight to the police station, ignoring the glaring
sun, the sizzling heat outside her car, the chafing blasts of cold
from her Prius’s vents. If she could just view the damned video,
she could identify the son of a bitch who’d shocked her with that
ice bath.
Son of a
bitch
, she thought, relishing the nastiness
of the phrase. Her parents would be scandalized to know their
daughter’s language had descended to the gutter. But then, they’d
be even more scandalized to know their daughter was the star of an
R-rated viral video.

Living a thousand miles away from them was
not a bad thing.

Officer Sulkowski happened to be standing at
the dispatcher’s desk when Meredith entered the station house. He
spotted her and waved, as if they were buddies. Meredith supposed
there were worse things than being a cop’s buddy. She cranked up
her southern charm and favored him with her warmest smile. “Hi,”
she said. “So good to see you, Officer Sulkowski. Do you have a
minute?”

“As long as you keep your clothes on, sure,”
he joked.

For the hundredth time that day, her smile
grew cramped. But she kept it in place as she approached him.
“There’s a video of me, taken that day on the beach. I want to see
it.”

“A video?” His smile flickered brighter for
a moment, then faded. “Someone filmed you?”

“With a mobile device. A cell phone, I
presume. I thought, if I could view the video, I might be able to
identify the creep who dumped the ice on me.”

“And if you did identify him…?”

“I’d demand an apology,” Meredith said, her
anger heating her as effectively as the air outside. “I’d explain
why bullying and running away are acts of cowardice. I’d make him
accompany me to the high school principal’s office so we could
clear my reputation.”

“I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes,”
Sulkowski muttered, sounding as if he meant it. Perhaps he’d
encountered a few stern teachers in his day. He looked almost like
a naughty boy fearing detention. “I don’t know how I can help you
with the video, though.”

“I thought you might be able to get a
subpoena.”

He barked a laugh. “You’ve been watching too
many TV cop shows,” he said, then raked a hand over his tawny crew
cut as he contemplated her request. “You should talk to Ed Nolan
about this,” he said. “He’s a detective. If there’s a way to get
hold of that video, he might know.”

“Fine. May I speak to him?”

The cop glanced at the dispatcher. “Wasn’t
he handling that stolen Escalade case, over on Atlantic Avenue?” At
her nod, Sulkowski turned back to Meredith. “If he finished with
that, he’d probably drop by the Faulk Street Tavern. For a cup of
coffee,” he added.

“He’d go to a bar for a cup of coffee?”

“And to say hello to Gus. The owner of the
joint. She’s his girlfriend.”

Meredith recalled the tall woman behind the
bar, with the short, dusty-red hair and the wise hazel eyes.
Meredith supposed that if Gus—an odd name for a woman—and this
police detective were a couple, he would be within his rights to
drink coffee at her establishment rather than at Riley’s, Dunkin
Donuts, or Starbucks. “Thanks,” Meredith said. “I’ll find him
there.”

She had indeed found him there.

But she’d also found Caleb.

She wasn’t ready to see Caleb yet. She
especially wasn’t ready to be inside the Faulk Street Tavern with
him. Whenever they were in the tavern together, she heard “Heat
Wave.” It played inside the jukebox, and it played inside her
skull, and she lost her bearings.

What was Caleb doing in a bar at
three-thirty in the afternoon, anyway? He wasn’t also involved with
Gus, was he?

No. She glanced toward the booth from which
he’d approached her and Detective Nolan and saw the town manager,
Caleb’s client, sitting there, staring at their little group at the
bar. Jerry Felton had been ousted the way Stuart Kezerian was
trying to oust her from her job. She hoped Caleb would be able to
save the man’s job.

She wasn’t going to ask him to save hers,
though. For one thing, she wasn’t sure if he could think of her as
a client, now that they’d been intimate. For another, she was tired
of dealing with lawyers—including Caleb and the partners to whom
he’d tried to pass her along. For yet another, she was indignant
enough to save her job herself.

“I need to discuss something with Detective
Nolan,” she informed Caleb, her voice not quite as cool and calm as
she would have liked.

“I’m your attorney,” Caleb reminded her.

Evidently, he hadn’t palmed her off on
Heather and Noel yet. And for all she knew, obtaining a subpoena,
or a search warrant, or whatever was necessary for her to view the
video, was something her lawyer ought to be involved in. Maybe she
would need his help, after all.

The detective shuttled his gaze between her
and Caleb. He stood as tall as Caleb, a bit broader in the torso,
and he had a square, blunt face that gave nothing away. He wore a
polo shirt and khaki trousers. In this kind of heat, Meredith
supposed that a plain-clothes detective was entitled to opt for
business casual. Nolan could have passed for a gym teacher at
Brogan’s Point High. A football coach, given his robust build.

She knew he was waiting for her to speak. If
her attorney was standing right next to her, was she supposed to
let him speak for her? She’d be damned if she’d let Caleb serve as
her mouthpiece. She could speak for herself just fine.

Yet his nearness distracted her. The song
wasn’t playing, the jukebox was silent, but her innards clenched at
a scorching memory of those amazing minutes she’d spent in Caleb’s
bed. Her breasts tingled. Her lips craved the taste of his.

She narrowed her focus on Detective Nolan,
waiting until he’d taken a sip of coffee and lowered his mug to the
bar. “There’s a video of me circulating through the high school,”
she said. “A video of me during a foolish moment when someone
dumped ice on me at the town beach, and I chased that person—”

“The miscreant,” Caleb interjected.

She shot him a quelling look, then turned
back to Nolan. “The miscreant. I had untied my bikini top earlier,
in order to avoid a tan line on my back—”

“Right,” Nolan cut her off. “I remember this
case. So someone recorded the moment for posterity?”

“Someone recorded the moment
in order to inflict humiliation on a high school English teacher.”
Just saying those words made her feel a little less humiliated. “If
I can view the video, I might be able to figure out who dumped the
ice on me. My job may hang in the balance.” No
may
about it. She was just inches
away from joining the town manager in the leave-of-absence
club.

Nolan turned to Caleb, who took his cue and
added, “I’ve advised her to forget the whole thing.”

“I can’t forget the whole thing,” she
argued. “I’m…” No. She didn’t want to mention that Stuart was
trying to kick her out of the school, not in front of Caleb. If she
did, he would take over. Or take her to bed. Or tell her to forget
the whole thing.

This was her battle, not his. “I’m being
ridiculed by my students,” she completed the sentence. “I think
most of the school’s population has seen it. They’re mocking me.”
She heard Tommy Lynch’s snide voice shouting, “A Farewell to Boobs”
from the rear of the classroom.

“So you want to view this video,” Nolan
said.

“Yes. I asked Officer Sulkowski if he could
subpoena it, and he told me to talk to you.”

From Nolan’s scowl, she deduced that he
didn’t consider Sulkowski’s referral a favor. “I don’t think I
could get a subpoena for something like this. The courts would
probably tell you just what your attorney did—that you should
forget it. That said,” he cut her off, apparently aware that she
was about to tell him again why she couldn’t forget it, “there are
ways other than going through the courts to get that video.”

“Really?” Her mood brightened.

“I’ve steered some high school kids to Nick
Fiore. You know Nick Fiore?” he asked Caleb.

“The name rings a bell.”

“He runs programs at the Community Center
for at-risk teenagers. Let me talk to him,” Nolan told Meredith.
“He can reach out to his kids. I’ll see what I can find out about
this video. Okay?”

“I would be grateful.”

He gave her a reassuring pat on the arm,
then drained his mug, thunked it down, and called over to the tall
red-head, who was engaged in a quiet chat with an inebriated man
slumped on a stool at one end of the bar. “I’m heading out,
Gus.”

She nodded.

“Does he need a ride?” Nolan asked,
indicating the slumping man.

“I’ll deal with it,” she called back,
lifting a key ring and jingling it. The man’s car keys, Meredith
assumed. “We’re good here.”

“See you later, then,” he said, touching his
index finger to his lips and then pointing it at her, as if it were
a gun that fired kisses.

Fine ammo, Meredith thought. She wouldn’t
mind having that kind of gun. She’d load the magazine, aim it at
Caleb, and…

No. Just because standing beside him turned
her on like a lamp, glowing hot and blinding bright, didn’t mean
she should shoot kisses at him.

His somber expression as he studied her
implied he might want to shoot her, and not with kisses. “So,” he
said.

“I’m sorry, Caleb. My life is a mess right
now.”

“Because of the video?”

She nodded, but her words
contradicted her nod. “Because of you.” As soon as she’d spoken,
she knew that was the truth. She was more upset about Caleb than
about the video and the precariousness of her job. She was upset
that she’d made love with him so impulsively, upset that—she
couldn’t shake the notion—a
song
had propelled her into his arms. Upset by the
understanding that running half-naked down a public beach and
having sex with a man she scarcely knew were part of the same
thing, some weird corruption of who she was and everything she’d
always believed about herself.

She wasn’t a prude. But she was modest,
reserved, even a bit old-fashioned despite her family’s judgment of
her as a wild rebel for having chosen to forgo law school and live
north of the Mason-Dixon line. She’d always considered herself a
reasonably proper southern woman who didn’t use words like “shit”
and “son of a bitch”…until now. Until a heat wave had swept over
her, dragging her away from everything she’d ever known herself to
be.

“You’d better go back to your other client,”
she said quietly, motioning toward the town manager, who continued
to observe them from the booth.

Caleb’s already dark eyes grew even darker
as he cast his gaze in Jerry Felton’s direction. “Don’t go away,”
he said, then planted a quick, hard kiss on her mouth—the kiss
she’d craved, the kiss she should have resisted—and strolled back
to the booth. He slid onto the banquette across from Jerry, then
gazed Meredith’s way. No index-finger gun pointed at her. Just a
hot, hard look.

If she stayed, someone might slide a coin
into the jukebox. “Heat Wave” might play.

But she didn’t need the song to cast a spell
on her. Caleb Solomon’s dark, hungry gaze did the trick.

He watched her climb onto one of the bar
stools, arranging her curvy little hips on the surface, propping
her sandaled feet on a rung and pressing her knees primly together.
The skirt she had on today was narrow. She couldn’t maneuver as
easily as she could in the flowing skirt she’d worn the last time
he’d seen her. He wondered if this skirt would slide as
effortlessly down her legs once Caleb located the zipper.

She signaled the bartender, who glided down
the bar. Meredith placed an order. A glass of white wine, he noted
when the bartender set a stemware glass filled with something pale
in front of Meredith. Good. She’d sip that slowly. It bought him a
little time.

He turned back to Jerry, who glared at him,
his expression an odd mix of accusing and baleful. “Are you going
to bill me for the time you spent over there, talking to the cop
and the lady?” he asked.

“No, of course not. I’m sorry for the
interruption. She’s…another client of mine.” He supposed Meredith
would remain his client as long as she kept her clothes on around
him. If he managed to coax that skirt off her, however, he’d
forward her file to Heather.

Right now, though, he needed
to concentrate on Jerry, who was being a pain in the ass. He
appeared not to have shaved in a few days, and his stubble of beard
was whiter than the hair on his head, making him look old. His sour
demeanor also made him look old. Caleb had already lectured him on
the importance of presenting himself in a professional manner, even
if he was on leave from his job. If he looked like a bum, people
were going to assume he
was
a bum.