Turn Up the Heat (14 page)

She woke late in the afternoon. Kincaid was still asleep, sprawled out as if he’d been dropped from a height on his belly, arms and legs splayed. The abandon of sleep possessed his face, not so different from what he looked like when he lost control inside her. She lay and watched him sleep for a few minutes. Then she rolled over and touched his hair. Then his cheek—the smooth part first, and after, stroking down to where five o’clock shadow prickled over his jaw.

He opened his eyes, lids still heavy.

“I have to go. I have a shift at Lefty’s.”

“Call in sick.”

She smiled. “I can’t.”

They got up and pulled on their clothes. When she was dressed, she crossed the room to where he stood and pressed her face against his chest. He wrapped his arms around her, and they stood there for a few minutes, the heat from his body soaking into hers.

He drove her to Lefty’s and parked in the back.

“Can I pick you up after?”

She nodded. “At two.” She leaned down and kissed him, and he grabbed her and held her tight, like he was afraid if he let her walk away from him, she’d never come back.
Fat fucking chance.
You’re stuck with me.

Walking across the parking lot, away from him, she remembered the night when she’d said,
I have to leave,
and tonight, when he’d told her to stay
.

I’m not going to be able to leave.
I’m not going to be able to walk away from him.

Even though she’d cast off the feeling that Fallon had driven her out of Eden, she still felt like she’d abandoned part of herself when she’d left Chicago. She’d left behind a project in progress, a dream that needed
her
to keep it alive. Waitressing wouldn’t make her a chef, and it wouldn’t get her a restaurant.

The longer she stayed in Kincaid’s bed, in Tierney Bay, the further the dream would recede, until all she’d have was the sensation of standing in front of the diner with him, hearing the voices of her imaginary patrons and smelling the food she’d cooked, as he helped her conjure a future that wasn’t real.

I have to walk away from him.

Some choices were impossible.

She leaned against the peeling siding near the back door and watched Kincaid’s car pull out of the parking lot. He was going to pick her up at the end of her shift. They’d go back to his house and sleep together in his bed. They’d get the rope out again. Maybe a leather belt.

Her body bloomed with anticipatory heat. It would turn Kincaid on, too. She knew it. He’d have other ideas about that belt, and she couldn’t wait to hear them.

He had taken something that had felt dark, shameful, and dirty and made it beautiful. With Fallon, it had been so tempting to compartmentalize and deny that part of herself, but Kincaid had embraced it.

And unexpectedly, he had embraced all the rest of her, too, and just as unexpectedly, she had embraced back. It was a startling gift, one that she couldn’t refuse.

For as long as she was here—and she would stay as long as she could, until the cord yanking her back to her old life tugged too hard to resist—she would give herself over to what was between them. Time enough later to mourn what she might lose.

Her cell phone rang. Feeling pleasantly languid from the sex and the nap, from the fantasy of what would happen after her shift, she pulled it from her pocket and answered. “Hey.”

“It’s Tucker.” Her friend’s voice was exuberant. “How would you like a job?”

Sierra accepted another Bloody Mary (extra pickled asparagus) from Lily and leaned her elbows on the bar.

After Lily had gotten off the phone with Tucker, she’d texted Sierra, who’d left the kids with Reg and come running to keep Lily company for her Lefty’s shift. Lefty’s was a grubby sports-bar-meets-seaside-pub with a stew of tourists and townies that occasionally mixed volatilely. The dinner rush had ended. Lily’s work had tapered to the point where she could carry on a conversation with her sister between refilling IPAs for Hank-at-the-hardware-store and mixing “chick drinks” for a tourist who’d left her family in the hotel.

“What’s going on, baby sis?”

And because Sierra was leaning on her elbows on the bar, her face sympathetic, and because there was a lull in bar action, Lily told her sister the whole story of what had happened between her and Kincaid. She left out
most
of the details, but she did tell Sierra about the alleyway and about being tied up in Kincaid’s bed. She was done hiding who she was, and Kincaid had showed her in no uncertain terms that she didn’t have to.

“Tied up, huh?”

Lily blushed and nodded.

“Did you hear hardware stores had a crazy run on rope and duct tape after
Fifty Shades
came out? Not that I’d know anything about that.” She grinned at her sister.

Tears of gratitude swam behind Lily’s eyes, and she had to turn away, drying the highball glasses, so Sierra wouldn’t see. “It’s not just an experiment for me.” If you were in for a penny, you were in for a pound.

To her surprise, Sierra merely nodded. “Okay.”

That was it. No third degree, no suggestions that Lily might want to “talk to someone about this.” Just
Okay.

It occurred to Lily, suddenly, that she was. Okay. Better than okay.
Happy.

This wasn’t supposed to have happened. Not here, not now, not this way.

“So Kincaid was into it, too.”

Lily nodded, and blushed a little, remembering just how into it.

“And you were into it. So what’s the problem?”

For a moment she’d almost forgotten there
was
a problem, that she’d called her sister in a state of near panic. “Tucker just offered me a job in Chicago.”

“Ohhh. Okay. So—yeah. That makes sense. Don’t go.” Sierra reached out and clutched her sister’s arm, then dropped it and laughed. “Damn, I didn’t just say that. Pretend I didn’t say that. You do what you need to do.”

“Don’t go? Do you mean that?”

“Of course! What’d you think? I love having you here. The kids love having you here. We’d be ecstatic if you stayed.”

God,
she adored her sister. Her big mouth and her open heart and the fact that she’d never once asked Lily how much longer she was going to be occupying her basement.

There were so many good reasons to want to stay in Tierney Bay, she was realizing.

But there were things she
had
to do. “I have to take this job.”

“Explain this
have to
to me.” Sierra knocked an olive off a garnish stick and into her drink, then ate another asparagus spear.

“I’m waiting tables and tending bar. I spent more than fifty thousand dollars of Dad’s money to go to cooking school, and I’m doing something I could have done without any school at all.”

Sierra pointed an asparagus spear at Lily. “First of all. It’s not Dad’s money. It’s
our
money. And you and Mom and I talked about how to spend it, and we decided to send you to cooking school. There were no strings attached to that. We didn’t say, ‘Go to cooking school and then you damn well better get a job in a kitchen or we’ll resent you like hell.’ ”

Lily frowned. “
You
could have gone to school, if I hadn’t taken all the money.”

“Believe it or not, I’m happy doing what I’m doing. I love working for Dr. D, and I love being a mom, and I don’t sit around messing with ‘what ifs.’ And I don’t want you to, either. If you love this guy—”

“I didn’t say that.” Lily ducked her head.

Sierra gave her a stern look.

Lily concentrated on a spot on the lip of a wineglass. “I don’t even know if he’d want me to stay.”

“Well, there’s your first problem. Have you tried asking him? For that matter, have you tried asking him if he’d like to go to Chicago with you?”

“He told me from the very beginning he wasn’t ‘relationship material,’ ” Lily said, crooking her fingers into air quotes.
And I kept getting in deeper with him anyway.

“And what did you say when he told you that?”

“I said I wasn’t relationship material either,” Lily admitted.

“Is that true?” Sierra raised her eyebrows.

“It was true at the time. Maybe not…anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Because my feelings have changed.”

“I rest my case,” Sierra said triumphantly. “People’s feelings change.”

“If you ever
did
go back to school, would you consider law?”

Sierra laughed. “I’m just
saying
that you don’t know how he feels unless you ask him.”

“What if—?” But Lily couldn’t quite say it out loud.

“What if what? What if he laughs in your face?”

“He wouldn’t do that.”

Lily knew he wouldn’t, because as little time as she’d known him, and despite the strange circumstances under which their bond had been formed, she
knew
him. She knew that he would hear her out and take her seriously. He’d make her feel like he was in this thing with her, even if in the end they decided together that “this thing” couldn’t last forever.

“He would never do that.”

“But you’re not in love with him,” Sierra said quietly.

“I—”

“Sierra!” said a voice behind them.

Sierra turned. “Oh, hey, Dr. D! Lily, this is my boss, Jeannie. Jeannie, my sister.”

A round, beaming middle-aged woman slid onto the bar stool next to Sierra. She looked more like the tooth fairy than a dentist.

“What can I get you?” Lily asked.

“Something that’ll rot my teeth,” Jeannie said. “I’ve had a helluva week.” She turned to Sierra. “I had to refer Mrs. K for periodontal grafting.”

“Aw. That’s a bummer.”

“I know. Thought I was going to be able to keep it from going that way. So what are you ladies up to?”

“The usual. Getting drunk so we can go tip cows.”

Lily mixed a Peach on the Beach for Jeannie and set it in front of the older woman. Down the bar, a regular hailed her in search of his whiskey. “I’ll be right back,” she told Sierra and Jeannie.

When she came back, she could see right away from the expression on Sierra’s face that something had changed, and not for the better.

Sierra put her palm down on the bar’s glossy surface. “Don’t be mad.”

“I’ll try not to. What did you do?”

“I asked Jeannie about Kincaid.” Sierra’s tone was dark, serious, and the look on Jeannie’s face matched.

Lily closed her eyes, willing the world not to tilt.

Jeannie leaned across the counter, face sympathetic. “What’s going on between you and Kincaid?”

Lily tried to take a deep breath, but something had snagged in her chest. “Long story. The upshot of which is, ‘Not sure.’ ”

“But you’re—you’re seeing him? You’re
with
him?”

Lily nodded. A swirling panic was gathering in her belly at Jeannie’s tone, at Jeannie’s expression, at the sadness in Sierra’s eyes.

“And you—you don’t know about him.”

She said
know about him
in a particular way, the way people whispered the word
cancer,
and Lily’s hands went cold. She’d remember this moment forever, she was pretty sure, the couple at Table 5 leaning toward each other to kiss, Jeannie’s face stern and worried at the same time, the rattle of pots from the kitchen, a sound she followed like a thread no matter what else was going on.

Lily shook her head.

Jeannie closed her eyes.

“Oh,
hon.
”

“I’m gonna tell her,” Kincaid said.

“I think you have to,” Grant said. “I’m frankly shocked you didn’t tell her sooner.”

The two men sat on the seawall where the stairs led down from Tierney Bay to the beach. The sky overhead was brilliant, dizzying, with stars. They had picked up takeout at the diner—Lily wasn’t there; Kincaid had looked, his heart picking up speed at the thought of just
seeing
her—and carried it down to the seawall.

“Why didn’t you tell her?” Grant unscrewed the top of a bottle of sparkling water and took a long swig.

Kincaid bit into his hamburger. Not one of Lily’s. He didn’t want to make a lame excuse for himself, and all the excuses were lame. He should have told her, should have told her so many times over. “It—it happened so fast.”

Lame, but the truth. The goddamned truth. One day it hadn’t seemed important that she know, and now he was sitting here with a secret that had grown into an impossibly big lie.

“What ‘happened so fast?’ You don’t have to tell me all the gory details, but at least give me the gist.”

“We hooked up. I know, I know,” Kincaid said, in response to Grant’s expression of deep disapproval. “I should have told her before. I should have told her after. I should have told her the next time it happened. I should have been strong enough to resist temptation in the first place. I’m an asshole.” It wasn’t just a cold litany of his sins. He
felt
like an asshole. If he could start over—

But he couldn’t start over.

“Not an asshole,” Grant said mildly. “But that girl—she
trusts
you. It’s all over her face.”

That made Kincaid’s stomach hurt, but it also flooded him with warmth. Lily
trusted
him.

And he’d rewarded her by hiding his worst self from her.

He set his hamburger down. He felt like he’d been shaken, his heart and lungs rattling around in the cage of his chest, and it was hard not to clutch the spot to keep everything together. “It kept happening.”

“What kept happening?”

“Lily kept happening.” He could see it, feel it, all—the alley, his bed, the beach, her room, last night. A barrage of images, swamping him. “I didn’t mean for it to go this far. In the beginning I told myself it was just scratching an itch, and then—it was like bodysurfing; that’s the only thing I can think of to describe it. I’d get back on my feet and then the next thing I knew I was flat again—”

“Literally,” Grant said dryly. “My heart is aching for you. That must have been just terrible, not being able to speak to the girl because you were
too busy getting laid.
”

Kincaid couldn’t laugh. He was too full of regret.

Grant was right, of course. Harsh, but right. He’d let fear and shame and
greed
gag him, and she’d have every right to hate him for it.

He couldn’t start over. He could only do the right thing now. And he was starting to glimpse what the right thing was, how profoundly Lily had changed what mattered to him.

“I’m going to tell her. And I just want to know, can I tell her everything?”

Because he wanted to pour his shame and fear into her the way she’d poured hers into him. To deliver himself to her, in all his twisted, broken glory, so she could shine her light into his dusty corners.

Grant nodded. “If you’re sure about her.”

“I’m so fucking sure about her, Grant. Here’s how sure I am: I’m going to drop the will. I’m going to let Arnie keep the property.”

Grant’s eyes went gratifyingly wide. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“Why?”

“Because the only way to get that will now is to confront Arnie, and I can’t risk going back to prison over it. I can’t risk rocking the boat, not when—”

Not when I love her so much.

Not if it would mean not seeing her. Not being with her.

Kincaid had been on the verge of this realization for days, and then the laptop had turned up and he’d discovered it had been wiped clean. And when he’d been flayed and broken, she’d given herself to him so completely—
take it out on me—
that she’d somehow put him back together again.

Kincaid had thought he was alone in the world after Nan died.

He’d thought Nan’s house and land were all that was left of home.

He’d thought Arnie Sinclair had taken everything that mattered from him.

And then he’d met Lily, and it had turned out that he wasn’t alone. He had people, because he had her. She was family. She was home.

He wouldn’t,
couldn’t,
put that in danger. He’d lost too much already.

Grant’s eyes were surprisingly soft. The older man reached out and touched Kincaid’s arm. “I’m glad,” he said. “Whoever she is, I’m glad she’s made you see sense. Your grandmother wouldn’t have wanted you to sacrifice any more for her—you know that, right?”

Kincaid had cried when his parents died, more than once. He had cried, just once, when Nan died. So he knew the welling sensation in his chest that presaged tears. He felt it now, but he pushed it back. “Maybe,” he said. “I still hate the bastard. I still blame him for her death. But justice isn’t perfect, right? If justice were perfect, the cops would have carried him off nine years ago for beating her, and I wouldn’t have done what I did.”

“Do you feel like justice failed you?” Grant asked quietly.

Kincaid thought about it for a long time. In prison, he had, sometimes. Often. When there were so many men around him who had committed acts of violence for no reason at all, who had hit or cut or fired guns or raped women or children. For long stretches he hadn’t seen how the law could treat those men’s crimes the same as his.

But over time he’d come to see that whatever Arnie Sinclair had done hadn’t justified what he’d done in return. He’d been pushed to a terrible kind of desperation, but that didn’t give him permission to become what he had despised.

And that was the thing. He had already let Arnie Sinclair take his self-control, his grandmother, and his sense of self. It was time to stop.

“I deserved what I got,” Kincaid said quietly. “I wanted Arnie Sinclair to get what he deserved, too. But I’ll learn to live with the fact that he didn’t if it means getting to be with Lily.”