Red Hot (6 page)

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Authors: Niobia Bryant

BOOK: Red Hot
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Having never kept a job longer than a week, and accustomed to a lifestyle of shopping until she dropped and sending Daddy the bills, Kaitlyn couldn't believe the road her life was suddenly traveling.
Forgetting her rule about never lying on her comforters or coverlets, Kaitlyn set her wineglass on the table and fell face-first onto her bed.
Less apartment. Less allowance. Less shopping. A lesser life.
Why live it?
For a maniacal moment she considered letting the plushness of the silk comforter smother her to death.
Then they'll be sorry,
she thought childishly.
I'll sit high up on a cloud in heaven and look down at them crying for pushing me not to want to live.
With an internal sigh she flopped over onto her back.
Bzzzz.
A voice mail. Probably from Kaleb.
She rolled off the bed to pick up her phone and access her in-box.
“Hey, sis. Kaeden told me about the apartment. Just let me know when you officially move in and I'll be there to help you pack up and move into the new place. You know we all love you.”
She bit her bare bottom lip as he fell silent.
“Call Pops, man. He misses you,” her brother finished.
Beeeeeep.
Truthfully, she missed her father too, but this all was so unfair. She couldn't pretend to chuckle it up, when she felt they were mean to cut her off. She was moving back to Holtsville, for God's sake, in an apartment that was just a few steps from a damn low-income complex.
Her phone rang in her hand and she looked down. Her heart pounded. It was Anola. Kaitlyn's shoulders dropped.
She didn't want to talk to her friends. And tell them what . . .
I can't afford to go shopping once a week.
I can't do lunch at the club.
I can't vacay.
I CAN'T DO SHIT!
If she told them, she could just see them looking at her sadly, right before they hauled ass to continue their fabulous trust fund lives.
Taking a deep breath, she finally answered the call.
“Hey, diva!” Kaitlyn said, sounding overly cheerful and fake as hell to her own ears.
“Hey, girl. I got Tandy on the line,” Anola said.
“Whaddup, whaddup, whaddup,” Tandy piped in.
“What y'all up to?” Kaitlyn asked, rising from her bed to leave her spacious suite and cross the floor to her kitchen. She paused in the hall to look out at the tall height of her gorgeous living room. She sighed on the inside. Deeply.
“We haven't heard from you and thought we could all meet up tomorrow and hit King Street,” one of them said.
Kaitlyn grabbed a bottle of water from her fridge. She loved shopping on King Street in downtown Charleston. Loved it. The best Charleston had to offer.
Kaitlyn made a wounded face and melodramatically clutched her chest as if she had been stabbed.
“I can't,” she said.
“You can't?” they both said in unison.
She closed her eyes and sank down onto one of the bar stools around her granite island. “Uhm . . . my parents . . . uhm . . . uh . . . surprised me with a trip to—to Italy. Yes, a trip to Italy!”
“Ooh, I wanna go to Italy,” Anola said.
“For school,” Kaitlyn added in panic. “Yeah, for school.”
Liar, liar.
Kaitlyn dropped her head in her hand. She had to get this mess all straightened out and get back to living her life, because with every passing day she was losing more and more of herself, the things, and the people she loved.
And that scared her.
C
HAPTER
4
Two weeks later
 
“Daddy?”
Quint looked up from checking the oil under the hood of his Ford F-250 pickup. He spotted a tall, silver-haired man climbing out of his Tahoe and striding over to the office building. He shook his head and smiled, cutting his eyes over at Lei, who was leaning against his truck, watching him.
“Not another one,” he mused.
Lei smiled as she nodded. “Yup. Another one.”
Quint wiped his large hands clean on the rag hanging from the back pocket of his uniform pants before he closed the hood and headed over to his office. His eyes were on the man. He watched him knock; then the visitor tried the handle and then turned around to look.
Another of Kaitlyn's brothers. In the two weeks since she was officially approved for the apartment, he had been visited by two so far. All tall. All broad. All prematurely gray. All overprotective of their sister.
Shit, how many more are they?
Quint wondered.
“Excuse me, I'm looking for Quinton Wells,” the man said.
“That's me,” Quint said, extending his hand to the man, who was as tall as he was—if not taller. “And you're here to see your sister's apartment. Right, Mr. Strong?”
“Kade,” he supplied, looking slightly taken aback as he took the hand offered to him. “Kade Strong.”
Quint turned and headed across the paved parking lot. “Right this way,” he said over his broad shoulder, heading over to jog up the stairs in his favorite well-worn Timberland boots. “You roll a little earlier than the other ones.”
“Who else has snuck over to see the apartment?” Kade asked as they reached the top landing.
“Your brothers Kaeden and Kaleb,” Quint answered, amused by it all. “Kaeden last week, and Kaleb on Monday.”
Kade rolled his broad shoulders and shrugged in the tan Dickies uniform shirt and pants he wore.
“That's our baby sister” was all he said as he entered the apartment.
Quint left him alone with it, and just remained outside, looking up at the last of the sun filling the sky as the kids in the complex left their apartments to walk to the entrance, where the school bus picked them up. He looked down and saw Lei still leaning against his truck, listening to her iPod—a recent gift from her mother. She received more of those than she did phone calls. And Vita hadn't been back in the state of South Carolina to visit her child or even to request Lei to come out to see her.
He shifted his eyes downward as loud bass-filled music suddenly echoed in the air. Several young men in an old Chevy Impala, which was decked out with rims and a colorful yellow-and-red paint job, rolled into the complex's parking lot. Quint frowned in distaste at the car, especially at the huge pictures of the Mr. Goodbar candy bar on the doors and the hood. The car slowed down as it rolled by Lei.
The one in the passenger seat leaned over to turn the music off as all four of the men leaned out the windows. Lei didn't even bother to remove her pink Beats by Dr. Dre headphones as she pointed up to where Quint stood.
The fellas all swung around to look out the passenger-side windows. They all looked seventeen or better, probably seniors in high school.
Nada.
Quint made a motion with his hands for them to keep it moving. “She's only twelve,” he said in a hard tone. “Keep it moving.”
The car instantly rolled away.
Lei gave him a thumbs-up as she was already crossing the parking lot to head to the bus stop.
That made him chuckle.
“I got a teenage girl too.”
Quint looked over to find Kade walking up to stand beside him.
“And knuckleheaded little boys are enemy number one,” Quint remarked.
Kade smiled. “Exactly,” he agreed, then turned to head down the stairs. “Oh, and—”
Quint held up his hand. “Don't tell Kaitlyn you came to check out the apartment.”
“There it is,” Kade told him, and then continued down the steps.
Soon he was climbing into his Tahoe and rolling out of the complex.
I should ask how many more brothers there are. That's three and counting. Damn!
Quint locked the apartment and headed downstairs. The Mr. Goodbar car was backing out of the complex and he spotted Mrs. Ruiz's son, Hector, now squeezed in the backseat with his friends. Quint went on his way. It wasn't his job to police the complex and be a tyrant. Plus he refused to assume that anytime he saw a bunch of young black or Hispanic men in a car that they were up to no good.
Quint was headed back to his work shed, anxious to spend a little time on the custom picture frame he was carving from one large piece of green wood for a widow out of Summerville. She had seen a buffet table he did for a neighbor of hers and had contacted him. He was already planning to save the extra income to get Lei a computer tablet for her birthday next month.
The office didn't officially open until nine, and that gave him two hours of free time before his workday. When he moved from the home he owned into the apartment, the only thing of major concern to him was paying a hauler to move his shed with him. Quint felt like he needed to put his hands to wood every single day. It was more than a hobby, and it was well worth the thousand-dollar fee to haul it from Walterboro to Holtsville in order to have it with him.
And he did get lost in the art of carving. It was a lot like making love to a woman: her body as soft and pliable as the green wood.
Stroking every curve and line, he approached her—and the wood—with his
tool,
filled with patience and skill. Stroke after stroke. In both making love and in carving, every single stroke mattered. And he was skilled and deft with his tools—all of his tools.
Quint stepped back from the wood to check his handiwork. The widow wanted the frame to have carved images that spoke to her relationship with her deceased husband. He didn't dare disrespect his skill by using an instruction booklet with patterns and guides. He did it all from pure instinct.
Just like sex.
Glancing up at the clock, he wasn't surprised to see nearly two hours had passed with ease. He cleaned his sharp tools carefully and put them away before leaving the shed to change into the khakis and button-up shirt he preferred to wear when he was officially “on duty.”
“Good morning, Quantum.”
He paused on the steps that brought him from around the rear of the building. He found Kaitlyn standing next to her car, with her convertible top down. She was dressed in a bright orange silk shirt with long sleeves, which looked like bells, lots of gold and colorful accessories, and high heels. Her jeans clung to her body like skin—completely emphasizing that although she was a little on the slender side, her hips and thighs were bigger. Fuller. Thicker. For a moment he wondered what the view looked like from behind.
“It's Quinton . . . and you better hope a bird doesn't use your car as a toilet,” he teased, even as his heart hammered in his chest.
Kaitlyn looked up to the towering trees and frowned as she used the remote in her hand to lift the roof.
Quinton breezed past her.
“Uhm, excuse me?”
He stopped on his path to his front door and turned to eye her.
“My luggage,” she said, waving her hand at the trunk.
“What about it?” he balked.
“They can't walk themselves upstairs,” she said as simply as if she asked for the time of day.
Is she for real?
Quinton rocked back on the heels of his boots as he eyed her. “And your point is . . . because I'm lost,” he told her, feeling his ire rise.
Kaitlyn sighed in obvious annoyance. “I want you to help with my luggage—”
Quint flung his head back and laughed. “Oh, I'm not lost.
You're
lost.”
“The movers are at my old apartment loading up, and it takes an hour to get here,” she said, still looking at him expectantly.
Quint literally wanted to shake some sense into her. “On whatever planet you're from, I'm sure that make sense. Now translate it for earthlings,” he said, his voice tight with rising annoyance.
“I can't wait for them to get here to get the luggage.”
Quint bit his bottom lip as he eyed her. She was serious. “I'll help you with your luggage, like a gentleman would . . . if you ask me politely like a lady.”
Kaitlyn sighed and walked over to stand close to Quint.
His eyes dropped to her eyes and her mouth. He forced his vision back up to her eyes.
“Oh, kind sir, would you please be so kind as to help a poor little helpless lady with her luggage?” she asked in a docile tone, faking a Southern belle accent.
She was mocking him. Quint nodded slowly in understanding. “Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn,” he told her, in his best imitation of Rhett Butler from
Gone with the Wind.
“Why are you so
mean
?” Kaitlyn asked.
“Why are you so
spoiled
?” Quint shot back.
A chuckle broke the tension that brewed around them as they stood there glaring at each other. They both swung their heads to the side and then tilted their heads down to find Mrs. Harper, still in her housecoat, with Fifi tucked under her arm, standing there looking up at them with a twinkle in her eyes.
“Is this your girlfriend?” Mrs. Harper asked.
“No!” they both barked out in unison.
Mrs. Harper leaned back a bit from the velocity of the denial.
“Mrs. Harper, this is Kaitlyn Strong,” Quint said, leveling his tone. “She's moving into Apartment eleven.”
“Oh, nice to meet you, Kaitlyn. Aren't you a pretty, tall thing,” Mrs. Harper said.
Quint looked on as Kaitlyn extended her hand. Her dozens of jeweled bracelets flashed in the September sun.
“Nice to meet you,” she said, smiling politely.
“And this is my precious Fifi.”
Here we go,
Quint thought, covering his mouth with his hand as Kaitlyn bent down to stroke her index finger against Fifi's chin.
“Hi, Fifi . . . aren't you . . .” Kaitlyn's words trailed off, and she looked over her shoulder at Quint with an odd expression.
He motioned for her to let it go, and to his surprise she did. However, she did look a little weak on her feet as she snatched her hand away.
“I won't take up your time while you're busy getting settled in, but please come down and chitchat with me soon.”
“Yes, ma'am,” Kaitlyn said, although her face said different.
Mrs. Harper walked away and entered her apartment.
“Oh, hell to the no,” Kaitlyn said, rummaging in a bright gold tote. “Was I just stroking a dead-ass dog? Like really, who does that?”
Quint looked on as she squeezed half of a tiny bottle of hand sanitizer into her palm.
“She's harmless,” he said, moving past her to start taking the designer luggage from the small trunk. “Could you unlock your apartment door?”
“So I won?” Kaitlyn asked, looking smug.
Quint paused and then started loading the luggage back into the trunk.
“Okay . . . okayokayokayokay . . . I'm sorry,” she screeched, turning to head up the stairs. “No elevator, huh?”
Quint ignored her—except for a quick glance to see that her bottom was full and round and shapely, like the base of a pear.
All those good looks wasted on a spoiled, self-indulgent airhead with more ass than manners.
He took the stairs two at a time, not even flinching under the weight of the bags.
“This room will be my closet, so could you put the bags in here?” she asked, pointing to the guest room. “The rest of my clothes are coming with the movers.”
The rest?
Quint did as she asked, not even shocked that she needed an entire bedroom to hold all her clothes. His ex had all her clothes scattered throughout every possible closet in their house—including his and Lei's. And to his way of thinking, his ex and this woman standing before him were one and the same.
“I have to get to work,” Quint said, ready to get out of her presence.
“Okay,” she said, pressing a folded bill into his hand.
Before she could turn away, he held her hand with the money sandwiched in between their palms. “I'm not a bellhop,” Quint told her, his voice hard and his eyes locked on hers.
Kaitlyn wiggled her hand free. “I didn't mean to offend you,” she said softly. “I was appreciative of your help.”

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