Turn Up the Heat (11 page)

When he rang her doorbell the next afternoon, she answered the door in a pair of short cutoffs and a halter top, feet bare, hair pulled back, and he had to stop himself from grabbing for her, all id and
want
and impulse. He was sweaty from work, and he hadn’t come by for sex, rough or otherwise, but there she was, and his body knew by now exactly what it wanted, and how.

“Come in.” She held the door open.

He hesitated. “I’m a sweaty mess.”

“You want a shower?”

“I can head home and do that. I just wanted to—say hi, I guess. Make sure you were okay.”

“More than okay.” She grinned at him.

He let out a breath. He’d been awake half the night, thinking of what he’d done to her on the beach and how afterward they’d walked back to the car in silence, neither of them saying a word. Like speaking would break the spell. Even though he wanted her to tell him every story she had, about learning to cook from her mother, and what her father had been like. He wanted her to tell him about her first memories, her first day of kindergarten, her first friend, her first kiss, the first time she’d suspected that what Fallon was giving her wasn’t enough. He wanted to know everything.

And he wanted to talk. To tell her things he wasn’t supposed to want to tell her, like why it was he ate like someone was about to take his food away. About what it felt like to be at the whim of the guards, at the mercy of bigger and stronger men, about how you had to build a network of protectors man by man, how you had to figure out how to listen and watch and never, ever make a misstep.

He wanted to tell her how before he’d gone to Salem, he’d almost killed himself lifting weights to make himself as invulnerable as possible.

He wanted to tell her how he and Grant had plotted and schemed. How Grant had talked to everyone he knew with any connection to OSP, to find one single man who was the key to Kincaid’s survival. And on Kincaid’s terms—someone who held power without making it about race. And then he and Grant had pored over Bink Jennings’s case for hours, looking for the chinks. In the end, Kincaid had found them—two eyewitnesses, pivotal witnesses for the prosecution, who’d changed their stories. A week into his time, he’d found Bink and said,
If your guys can watch my ass, I can get you outta here.

And they had, and he had, and Bink’s guys had kept him safe.

Well, mostly. He fingered the scar on his arm, largely invisible in the lines of split skin and moss. There were other scars, too.

But he’d
survived.
His biggest victory, a story he’d never get to tell her.

He wanted to tell her how concrete and metal roared day and night, louder than the ocean, louder than the voices in his own head.

How he understood her gratitude to her family, and he understood how it bound her to carry out her plans, because he felt that way, too,
bound.

Last night, afterward, he’d lain in bed in a sheen of his own sweat, thinking of the feel of her, tight as a fist around his cock, imagining what else he could do to her, what else she could resist or fight off or pretend not to want, until he’d had to stroke his own fist over himself. And then when it was over, he’d wondered if he could have mistaken her.

“You were worried?”

“I wasn’t, no, but I’ve never—I guess it’s good to hear you say it.” He stared at a knot in the hardwood of her sister’s foyer floor.

“I like you,” she said.

He looked up, startled. And felt the twin clutches of happiness and fear. They were the best and the worst words she could have said. Those words pushed him bit by bit closer to needing to tell her the truth. Because this was something, something happening, something they hadn’t named but would have to name sooner rather than later. He’d started out feeling like there was only one thing worth doing in the world, but she’d made him rethink that. He’d started out feeling that she deserved better than him—and he still believed that—but she’d made him think he’d like to try to deserve her.

Except that she was leaving. And she’d explained why, and he understood, not just on paper but deep, deep down, so deep he could never try to talk her out of it.

An awkward amount of time had passed since her declaration, enough so that if he returned it now, it would sound forced. And she’d begun talking again, anyway, sounding more hesitant than he’d heard her, but—more certain, too.

“I like—I like that you can be both ways. Like, the way you were last night, and this way. Making sure I’m okay. Checking in. Worrying a little. Not like fussy worrying, but wanting to know. It’s sweet.”

He shook his head. “I’m not sweet. I’m really not sweet.”
There’s a guy with a scar on his throat you can ask.

“Well, you are to me.”

Now she looked uncomfortable, and there was nothing for it but the truth. “I like you, too.”

She beamed, that slightly crooked smile and wide mouth and big bright eyes.

He wanted to ask her,
What is this? What are we doing?
But he knew that if the truth-telling started, there would be no going back. And God, he wasn’t ready to tell her a truth that would send her packing before it was time. He wasn’t ready to miss a day of whatever this was they were doing, however temporary it was.

“Caid? The shower downstairs is nice,” she said. “Good water pressure.”

“Would you shower, too?”

She nodded.

He followed her into the kitchen and then down into the basement, where she showed him her room, a cozy little cave with high-up windows whose meager light was blocked by metal half-moon barriers meant, he supposed, to keep rain from leaking in.

“I don’t think you can get much of a sense of my personality from it,” she said apologetically.

She had a double bed made with a sage-green spread and piled high with pillows, a wooden dresser, and a shabby old night table. But her personality had found its way through, anyway—the floor and night table were stacked with books, and the walls—faux wood paneling—were cluttered with drawings. He knelt first to look at the books. Cookbooks, almost all, just a few novels scattered here and there. The cookbooks bristled with Post-its, like his law books. He picked one up and opened it at random to a meatloaf recipe, marked with a blue sticky-note on which she’d neatly printed:
Asiago!

“Doesn’t it make you hungry, reading these in bed?”

She laughed. “Ravenous.”

“Insatiable?”

He felt the shift, like a storm coming in, and he knew she felt it, too, because she gave him a little peekaboo glance from under her lashes.

“Better show me the shower,” he said.

He washed her, tenderly, and then he turned off the water and had her, hard, her face and nipples chilled against the ice-cold tile, and she loved both things, and everything in between.

Afterward they wrapped up in big towels and lay on her bed, side by side, hands clasped.

“I can’t get enough of you. We weren’t even back to the car yet last night and I was already thinking about what I wanted to do to you.”

“Me, too,” she said.

“It’s like there’s this
beast
in me, and you let it out, and now—”

“I know,” she said. Because that was what happened. Someone handed you the truth about yourself, someone handed you the key to your most primal self, and then you were out there, and there was no way to put yourself under lock again. Even if you wanted to, even if there were a hundred or a thousand good reasons for you to live a quieter, neater,
gentler
version of yourself.

That was what had scared Fallon so much, this
thing
they’d accidentally unleashed in her that he couldn’t and didn’t want to control.

But she wasn’t scared of Kincaid or his beast, or—anymore—of hers. And she’d lain awake last night, too, and she’d felt deeply, strangely peaceful. She was a little frightened of looking too closely at that feeling, because she was pretty sure it wasn’t something she was going to get to keep, but last night—last night she’d just allowed herself the contentment. Of being possessed. Overpowered. And strangest of all,
understood.

“My dad,” she said.

He didn’t seem surprised by the abrupt subject change. “Thank you for telling me about him.”

“I don’t want all those sacrifices—his, my mom’s, my sister’s—to get wasted.”

“That’s a lot to put on yourself.”

“I think—I’m not putting it on myself. It’s just there.”

He nodded. “I know what that’s like. I feel like I owe my grandmother everything.”

“Your grandmother?”

“She raised me.”

It was the first time he’d volunteered any information about his past, and her whole body got warm in response to the nakedness in his voice. It was a feeling not so different at all from physical desire, the way her body seemed to reach out and unfold for him. She’d never had that before, a sense that her emotions went all the way down in her, past facial expression and heartbeat to blood thickening in her veins, belly heating, fingertips tingling. He was everywhere in her now, whether she wanted him there or not.

“Your parents—?”

“Died. My father was driving under the influence, and both he and my mom were killed. I was with Nan—that’s what I called her—at the time; she babysat me a lot. I was eight. My grandfather died not too long after that…”

“Caid.” She turned, reaching for him, but he stiffened, and she knew he had to get through the story first. She stayed on her side, watching him. He was almost expressionless, his voice level near a monotone, but she could see it anyway, the disturbance under his skin, how much it hurt to talk about.

“The thing about Nan—”

His voice broke, and he stopped, took a breath, then started again, steadier. “She lost almost everything, but she was never bitter. I don’t remember ever feeling like I lost her to grief. She was always totally present for me, doing whatever it took to love me and get us both through.”

“She sounds wonderful.”

“She was.”

“She’s gone, now?”

“She died seven years ago. So you see—I understand what it’s like to be grateful, and to feel like you owe someone something. Everything.”

She nodded, and curled her body toward his. He let her, let her rest her head on his chest and wrap an arm over him. They lay like that a long time.

“They couldn’t find a will when she died,” Kincaid said.

“Your grandmother?”

“Yeah. The land, everything, went to—to this man she’d married after my grandfather died. The house, the property, was searched. I think he must have destroyed it. He—” He stopped. “She wanted the house and land sold and the money given to this place she loved, Safe Haven, which was a shelter and school for homeless kids. Because it’s really tough for kids with no address to get an education—they can’t enroll in public school. She loved that place. She loved those kids. And I can’t stand the idea that he hurt her. Beat her. And now he’s living in her house, on her land, off her money, and it—I can’t take it.”

“Oh, Kincaid,” Lily said. There was so much more she wanted to say, like
thank you for telling me that,
but the thoughts and feelings were stuck somewhere deeper than language.

“I want to find that will,” he said. “You owe it to your father to do something with the money that paid for cooking school; I owe it to Nan to make sure her last intentions in the world are granted. And if I find the will and find out she changed it, left everything to him, I will live by that too. I just—I don’t believe it.”

“Is there—is there anywhere else it could be?”

“There was a laptop. He has that, too. My lawyer is trying to get it. I’m not sure what comes next if that doesn’t pan out.”

“What does this guy say, when you ask him?”

Kincaid rubbed his face with both hands, hiding his eyes for a moment. “I haven’t asked him.”

“You have to ask him,” Lily said. “I bet if you show up at his door—all calm, like you were with Markos. When you told him you’d do the trap if he let me cook for you.”

He emerged from behind his hands and eyed her appraisingly. “Heard that, did you?”

She pressed her lips together against a smile and nodded.

“I wondered.”

“You were—you have a kind of power.”

“Power, huh?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she whispered.

She lay back on the bed as he rolled toward her and covered her with his body, cradling her head in his hands, kissing her with such restraint and tenderness that it made her teary, until Lily heard knocking, far off, on the door from the kitchen to the basement, and she sighed. “I think my sister is home with the kids,” she said. “You’d better get decent.”

She wrapped herself in her towel and climbed the stairs.

“Someone down there with you?” Sierra asked, amused.

“Kincaid,” Lily said.

“Is that—?”

Lily nodded.

“So much for ‘not gonna happen again,’ huh?”

“Yeah,” Lily said with a sigh.

“Is that a good thing? Bad thing?”

“Good,” Lily said, because damn, there were a
lot
of things she didn’t know, but she did know that. Kincaid was a good thing. Almost—and this was what scared her most—the best thing.

“I’m making meaty mac ’n’ cheese, and I’m making a truckload so I can freeze some. Why don’t you ask him to stay for dinner?”

Her instant reaction was
no way,
but Sierra meant the invitation seriously, and after a moment or two of reflection, she thought,
Okay, smarty-pants, why not?

She didn’t want to ask him because she knew they were getting very close to the point of having to have a
conversation
about what they were doing. In the last twenty-four hours, she’d laid her soul bare and told him she liked him, and then, just now, the way he’d finally opened up to her, like patterns unfolding and unfurling, the very center of Kincaid—

They could fudge things up to a certain point. A one-night stand could turn into several one-night stands, maybe into a summer fling. You could
like
someone you were having a summer fling with, even confide in him, as long as the rules were clear. But the rules were changing every time they touched each other. The rules were changing with every word they parceled out to each other, tiny gifts like raindrops streaking down a window.