Turn Up the Heat (15 page)

Grant nodded. “I’m glad. Lily seems like a nice girl. Not that you need me to approve.”

But Kincaid realized that in a way, he did. Everyone else was dead and gone, but Grant was here, and had always been here, standing by Kincaid whether he approved of his actions or not. Like family.

He’d sounded, a moment ago, just like Kincaid imagined a father might.

Maybe Kincaid wasn’t so alone in the world, after all.

“She’s…”

Kincaid found himself unexpectedly speechless. He took a deep breath, stared out at the vast Pacific and then up at the cloudless sky. There were some marvelous things in heaven and earth, that was for sure.

“I feel like the world made her for me,” he said.

Grant just sighed.

Kincaid crumbled the wrapper from his hamburger, stuck it in the paper take-out bag, and stood. “And now, if you’ll excuse me—I have a fuckload of explaining to do.”

He waited behind Lefty’s for Lily. She’d moved her car to the parking lot from where they’d left it parked earlier, and he leaned on it now, just as he had the night they’d walked on the beach.

When she came out, her head was down, like a whipped dog’s. Defeat sat on her shoulders.

He stepped away from the car. The motion caught her eye and she looked up.

The other night, when she’d realized it was him, her face had split into a smile, and when he’d asked her if she’d wanted to walk on the beach, it had been like watching the sun come out.

Now it was like watching it slip behind the clouds. Her face closed, as tight as a suburban door in the face of missionaries.

Something in his chest shuttered, too.

And yet he realized he wasn’t completely surprised. He’d partly expected this. He deserved it. For waiting so damn long to tell her. For being the sort of man who had something so big and ugly to tell. For the bigness and ugliness of what he’d done.

He deserved that look on her face, but he didn’t want it. He wanted the sun back.

“Lil. Come for a walk with me.”

Because they weren’t going to sort this out, whatever it was, in the parking lot of Lefty’s. They needed space and time, the whipping of the wind to absorb unkind words and big feelings.

“I’d better not.” She crossed her arms, shutting him out further, and stepped around him to her car, pulling her keys from her pocket.

“What’s going on?”

Even though he knew. Someone had told her. It had always been only a matter of time.

She tried to slam the car door but he caught it before it could close, one of his fingers taking the brunt of the blow. He ignored the throbbing pain, pried the door open, and knelt. “Lil.”

“Leave me alone.”

“Please, Lil.”

“You were
in prison.
You
stabbed
a man.”

She made the words so dirty and ugly—the rawest of truths—that he flinched.

“When were you going to tell me? When were you
fucking
going to tell me? You weren’t, were you? You were just going to keep tying me up and holding me down and
getting off on it,
and then you were going to let me go back to Chicago because that was a convenient end to things and you’d never have to face up.”

“No,” he said. “No.”

“I was starting to care. I was starting to really goddamn care about you.”

“Me, too, Lil. I care. God—” He took a deep breath and forced himself past the swirl, the cacophony, in his chest. “I care so much.”

“But not enough to let me in. Not enough to tell me who you were. Not enough to take this seriously as a relationship.”

The look on her face broke his heart. It was so like the look she’d worn when she told him the story about what Fallon had done to her. It wasn’t rage or fear, it was shame.

“Please let me tell you now.”

She half turned away from him, looking out the windshield toward a row of trees. “It doesn’t matter what you tell me, Kincaid. What matters is your capacity for violence, and given what we were doing together, you can’t possibly argue it wasn’t relevant. What if the situation were different? What if I were your sister and I were sleeping with a guy who had a history of violent crime, and he’d hidden that information? You’d tell your sister to run screaming in the other direction. Geez, even if he hadn’t hidden that information, you’d tell her to run screaming in the other direction.”

“Yes,” he said quietly. “Yes, I would.”

Something got still in her face, and into that silence and stillness and possibility, he threw his last hope, that it was somehow not too late for the truth.

“She was everything I had in the world,” he said.

Lily was quiet. Listening.

“And he beat her. He hurt her, daily, systematically, and nothing I did,
nothing,
would make him stop. I tried everything I knew. Everything. I talked, I yelled, I threatened, I cajoled, I bribed, I called the police, I called the state troopers, I called my biggest, meanest friends. I begged her to leave, I begged her to get help. And he kept hurting her. Over and over again. And I—I had to make him stop.”

“It wasn’t your job to exact justice.”

“But it was my job to take care of her,” he said quietly. “She took care of me. When it was hard. When it was impossible. She loved me when she should have been sunk in grief. I know that it was wrong for me to assault Arnie Sinclair, and I know that two wrongs don’t make a right, but there wasn’t anything else I could do. I couldn’t live with myself knowing that he was hurting her over and over again and there were still things left in the world I could do, right or wrong.”

“But if you could do that—if you could
cut a man with a knife
—”

Her face was agonized.

“How do I know—how do I know you wouldn’t—”

“Wouldn’t what?”

He thought he might know what she was asking, and it hurt him to know she had to ask the question, but he understood, too, because what he had done had set him outside all the rules. It had exiled him from the world she lived in.

“How do I know you wouldn’t—hurt—me?”

“All I can do is promise you. All I can do is say that the decision I made to hurt Arnie Sinclair was the hardest decision I ever made, and I still hate that I made it and I still know I would make it the same way again if I had another chance. I know that probably doesn’t make me the kind of man you imagined yourself loving, but I can’t, and won’t, take it back. But I can, and will, say that you have nothing to fear from me. Ever. I would never, ever hurt you.”

She had turned away from him, and when she turned back, her eyes were full of tears, her face even more twisted with whatever uncertainty had taken hold of her. “But how do I
know?
”

He couldn’t make her believe him. All he could do was tell her the truth and hope. She had to decide how she felt about what he’d done and whether she could trust him to keep her safe. “You can’t
know.
You just have to believe me because you trust me. I think—”

He hesitated, because he knew he was about to throw down a gauntlet. And yet—if they were going to do this—if there were any chance—

“I think it’s the only way we can make this work. If you trust that I will never, ever hurt you. If you believe that the circumstances around that situation were unique.”

“But you’d do that again. Hurt someone who hurt someone you loved.”

He wanted to deny it, but he couldn’t lie to her. “Yes.”

She slowly leaned her head down and rested it on the steering wheel for a moment. “I’m so tired,” she whispered. “I’m tired of being alone, out on a limb, thinking I’m in it together with someone and then finding out it was all just a fantasy.”

“You’re not alone.” He reached for her hands.

She let him take them, but she wouldn’t look at him. “I told you the truth,” she whispered. “I told you—”

But she couldn’t say it now. Couldn’t name the secret she’d told him, or the shame she’d had to swallow to do it.

“And you didn’t tell me the biggest truth about yourself.” She said it flatly, which made it worse. “That’s not intimacy. All those times, I felt like I knew you and you knew me, but it wasn’t true. It was just what you wanted me to believe. Just—what I wanted to believe. Just like with Fallon. Jesus.” She started to cry.

The last time he’d seen a woman cry it had been his grandmother. She’d been curled around herself, nursing a sprained arm where Arnie had twisted it roughly just before he’d punched her, hard, in the stomach. Kincaid hadn’t been there; he’d come home to find her afterward, Arnie already off to wherever he went to cool down after his outbursts.

Kincaid had cut Arnie less than twenty-four hours later.

A minute ago, he’d told Lily,
I would never, ever hurt you,
but he was already a liar. And not just because he’d once made an impossible decision, but because he’d made the wrong decision here and now. She was dead right: She’d given him everything, every ounce of her passion, her secrets, her shame, her
self.
And he’d rewarded her by shutting her out. “I’m sorry. I suck with words, but I’m so sorry I made you feel that way, because Lily, I never thought anyone should ever make you feel that way. I hated Fallon’s sorry ass for leaving you hanging out there on your own, and if I made you feel like that…”

There were all kinds of ways to be savage, to be violent, and he saw now that you could do violence to someone with a gesture no bigger than the flapping of a butterfly’s wings. Smaller, even. A non-gesture. You could do violence to someone, to someone you cared about, to something you cared desperately about, by omission.

Words would never make it better, and maybe she knew it, too, because she didn’t protest when he stood and pulled her to her feet and kissed her, didn’t protest when he put his fingers in her hair and tugged her closer so he could get
more
of her mouth. And when he finally drew back, searching her face for something—softening, forgiveness,
redemption
—she nodded her head like she didn’t have the right words, either.

It started sweet.

It started with kisses, with his hands gentle in her hair. It started with him looking at her, checking in, asking permission.

She thought that it would be okay. At first.

But then it was fierce. Then it was her fingernails and his back, her teeth and his shoulder. Her anger, and all the ways she could punish and pummel.
You should have told me.

For a while, she still thought it would be okay. When he grunted at the pain of her breaking his skin, when he kissed her back harder but broke the kiss to cry out because she’d pulled his hair, when he backed her up against the car, the metal cool on her bare thighs.

Until he pressed his body against hers and wrapped his hand around her wrists, and then she was afraid.

She was afraid, in a way she’d never been afraid of him before. Because all the times before, she’d felt him with her. In her head. Or thought she had.

Maybe she’d been stupid, that night in the diner, not to be afraid. She’d admired his height, the bulk of muscle that took her breath away, the coolness of his eyes, the remove at which he kept himself, but she hadn’t added it all up to danger. When he’d stood up for her against Markos, when he’d turned the force of his personal power and persuasion on the weaker man, she hadn’t thought,
He could use that power for evil, too.
She’d only loved that he was her champion and wanted to feel that power unleashed on her.

Now she was afraid of him.

Heat poured off him. His weight crushed her, cutting off her breath, and his hand felt like a vise around her wrists.

She didn’t want it. She didn’t want the heat or the weight, the roughness, the cuff, his bulk looming and threatening. She wanted him off her. She struggled under him, and he responded the way she’d trained him to respond, by bearing down harder on her. By tightening his grip, by grating out, “Hold
still.
” By pinning her to the car with his thigh between hers, right where it should have let her ride pleasure and pain to its logical conclusion—only this time, that wasn’t what happened.

She couldn’t breathe and she couldn’t move. He’d stabbed another man and gone to prison; he’d lived in a cage and eaten institutional food. For almost a decade his life had been a struggle for survival, and he hadn’t wanted her to know it.

She could smell his breath and his sweat and her own fear. Her throat closed up, her chest tightened, and she started to panic.

“Stop,” she whispered.

But he didn’t, of course. He used his grip on her wrists and his knee to flip her over. He covered her body with his and lifted her skirt, and she felt the seam of his jeans against the crack of her ass, where the thin slip of her thong lay. If he wanted to, he could have her whether she wanted him to or not, which had been true all along. At any moment, from the very beginning, he could have done whatever he’d wanted to her.

And she’d let him put her in that position, let him make her vulnerable, because of this stupid, dangerous, unnatural need of hers, because she wanted something that she shouldn’t want, and she wanted it against all reason and against all judgment.

She was flooded with shame, and the potent mixture of shame and panic, his body crushing the last of her breath out of her, her cheek against the cold, grimy metal roof of her car, forced the word out of her mouth, barely more than a whisper—

Of course he would have heard it even if she’d only moved her lips, even if it had floated out on the barest breath, because he was listening that hard for it.

“Uncle.”

He released her at once, stumbled back as if she’d struck him, and for an instant the pain was so intense it was almost a physical blow.

He had wanted her to forgive him. To absolve him.

He had wanted to be washed clean in her.

Instead she had gone dangerously still under him, and even before she’d said the word, he’d known.

The peculiar trust that had existed between them—the unwarranted, unearned,
undeserved
trust—was gone. He had destroyed it, not with a single stroke but with his systematic failure to give her back the trust she’d given him.

Everything that had happened between them, from that very first inexplicable, improbable encounter in the alley to this moment, had depended on that now lost trust. Her whimper. That first time she’d splintered under his touch. Her willingness to follow him back to his house. The way she had held still while he’d bound her. Her faith had been utterly and completely without foundation, but it had still been the most essential stone in this precarious, marvelous structure.

She had once trusted another man enough to reveal herself, and he had humiliated and renounced her. The miracle was that she had trusted again, trusted
him.
That was what Kincaid had seen and sensed in her from the first, in the diner, that she was deeply and fully willing to believe the best about people, despite all evidence to the contrary.

But she didn’t believe it of him, not anymore.