Turn Up the Heat (16 page)

She stood much more slowly, brushing the grime of her car off the front of her T-shirt and skirt. He’d dirtied her. Taken something that had managed to stay pure, even in a dark and rough and kinky place, in a world where people hit and hurt and cut, and sullied it.

She didn’t turn to look at him. She didn’t say anything. She patted her hair and straightened her clothes, and then she said, very quietly, “I’m sorry.”

Just that. She didn’t say what she was sorry for.

He reached a hand out, a kind of plea. “You don’t have to be sorry. You have nothing to be sorry for.”

“I’m sorry for—for saying ‘uncle.’ ”

“That’s why there’s a safe word. So you can say it if you need to.”

“I didn’t want to need to say it,” she whispered.

Even now, even though she wasn’t looking at him, even though he knew he’d lost her and that he’d broken the most precious thing left in a life that had had far too few precious things, she was thinking of him and how he felt and whether she had hurt him. At this worst possible moment, she was being the best possible person, and he loved her with all the power in him, straight through the futility of it. “It’s okay.”

She swiped a palm over her face. “It’s not okay.”

She didn’t say,
It will never be okay again,
but he knew it wouldn’t. He’d known it when she’d stopped struggling under him, when her body had gone limp to the very center of her being, when all the fierce resistance had gone out of her.

She dropped her hand from her face and drew herself up. Faced him for the first time. “Tucker got me a job.”

He wouldn’t have guessed it was possible for the night to get darker, but he had to glance up at the sky to see if a cloud had moved across the stars. They were still there, vast and glorious, and the darkness was only in him. The darkness was between them, where there had been only brightness.

“Congratulations.” Somehow he kept his voice level and free of bitterness. Because he wanted success and happiness for her. He wanted her to cook and feed people, to own a restaurant and gather people around her, as many people as she could, so that as many people as possible could know what he knew about her, that she was the very best thing.

She gave him a questioning look. “I wasn’t sure. Whether to go.”

Don’t go.

Please don’t go.

That would be the height of selfishness. To ask her to stay here, with him, when they both knew—

But she didn’t know. She didn’t know all of it. Not yet.

“Technically I’m still doing time.”

She gave him a quizzical look.

“I’m on parole. Technically I’m still a convict.”

She drew a sharp breath, which he felt in a part of his gut as deep as the place where he felt her whimpers, a part of him that knew what mattered.

“Parolees are always looking over their shoulders, always worried they’re going to do something small that will get them sent back. A speeding violation, a parking ticket, a bar brawl. Rough sex where the other partner cries foul.”

“I wouldn’t have done that,” she protested, reaching out a hand as if to stop his words.

“I know.”

“When we were—I always knew—”

But between them, there was still the moment she’d gone limp, and that one word, that
safe
word, that had made everything dangerous between them.

“I could go back to OSP for setting foot in Yeowing or having a conversation with Arnie Sinclair or getting kicked out of a bar for drinking too much and getting pissy with the bartender.”

“That sucks,” she whispered.

He didn’t want her pity—that wasn’t the point. “Even when the sentence is finished, I’m probably never going to own my own landscape company. It takes a lot of resources to do that, and I have nothing. No family, no savings—”

“Without that will.”

He nodded. “I won’t be able to get a job that pays much more than minimum wage, probably ever. I won’t be able to volunteer in my kids’ schools. Hell, I probably won’t have kids, because I won’t have the resources to raise them right or send them to college someday. My life can blow up around me at just about any point, for just about any reason, just because someone finds out about what I did—and you’ve seen how hard it is to keep that a secret.”

Her eyes were wide and dark, shiny with tears. “You could go farther away.”

“Maybe I will. Once my parole’s up. Parole requires me to be somewhere in this county but not too close to Yeowing, and Rodney was the only guy who would give me a job, so that pretty much stuck me here. But yeah, in twenty months, I’ll be done, and at that point, I should probably get farther away, where no one knows me. But even then—it’s a small world. I’ll run into someone who grew up in Yeowing, who knows someone who knows someone, and everything I’ve worked for could go up in flames at any moment. I can’t give you anything. I can’t promise you anything. And you deserve—”

Damn it,
his fucking voice had betrayed him, cracking like a teenager’s.

“You deserve everything.”

There were tears running down her face now, and everything in him cried out for him to take her in his arms, to wipe those tears away, but he meant exactly what he’d said. “Chicago can give you everything. Your life is in Chicago. You can make something great there. You can find a man who can give you the life you deserve. A guy like Fallon—”

“Fallon is a dick.”

“A guy like him, but without his dickish tendencies,” he corrected, and she laughed through her tears.

“I don’t want that,” she said.

For a moment, he thought she was going to say,
I want you,
and his stupid, hopeful heart leapt. He wasn’t sure what he would have done if she
had
said that, whether he would have gathered her in his arms or told her to go, but at any rate, it didn’t happen. She made a half turn away from him, staring into the wooded perimeter of the parking lot.

Maybe if she hadn’t said
uncle.

Maybe if she hadn’t gone limp between him and the car.

Maybe if she still trusted him, if she still believed that he could keep her safe, no matter what he’d done.

Maybe then.

But this was real life, with its implacable reality, with its hard edges that couldn’t be filed away or covered with bumpers.

“Take the job,” he said.

“I took the job.”

It had taken a while for Lily to find a quiet moment with her sister, but now the kids were asleep, Reg was out bowling with the guys, and Sierra had put her feet up on the coffee table and was sipping a glass of red wine. Lily sat on the couch across from her. “I’m flying to Chicago on Friday.”

“Did you talk to him?” Sierra scrutinized Lily’s face, then frowned. “You didn’t.”

Lily had accused, she had listened. She had tried to understand, been willing to forgive, been willing to try, and then—

Uncle.

There was only so much you could take, only so much you could risk.

She’d been so sure this time was different, so sure that this time, they were
in it together.
And then she’d seen how far away he really was, how much he’d held back. How he’d hidden himself.

He hadn’t let her in. There was a gulf between Lily and Kincaid as wide as the one between her and Fallon.

And she hadn’t been able to reach across it, not even with that strange chemical bond between them.

“It’s complicated.” What an understatement
that
was.

Sierra crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes. “That’s what people say when they wimp out of doing what they know they need to do.”

“Back off.”

Something in Lily’s voice must have warned Sierra that she was dead serious, because Sierra lowered her shoulders and her expression softened.

“Do you want to hear what I learned? I Googled him, too, under the other name,” Lily said. Jeannie had told them Kincaid’s parents’ last name, his legal name.

Sierra touched Lily’s hair. “You know I do. Do you need a glass of wine?”

“Do you have anything stronger?”

Sierra winced. “That bad, huh?”

When they were settled with their wine and a bag of dark chocolate squares, Lily told her sister what she’d learned. To fill in between the little bits of the story Kincaid had told her, she’d read newspaper accounts of the crime and the trial—how public sentiment had turned sharply against Kincaid, how his lawyers had said that there was little possibility for him to have a fair trial in a town that saw Arnie Sinclair as a good cop and a hero.

How at the last minute, Kincaid’s grandmother had declined to speak at her grandson’s sentencing hearing, on his behalf.

Jeannie had told them,
Lotta people said that was proof of Kincaid’s guilt, if even his own grandmother wouldn’t say anything good about him at his sentencing.
But I know Grant never believed that. I didn’t, either. I don’t know why she missed it, but I know she must’ve had a good reason.

Lily kept thinking about what that must have been like for Kincaid. Facing a long sentence in maximum security prison, knowing that your grandmother could intervene…

And then wondering why she had chosen not to speak on your behalf. What it meant.

She wished, she wished so hard, that she had been able to do what he had asked her to do. Trust him. Believe him. But she hadn’t, and her body wouldn’t lie for her.

Sierra sighed. “It makes everything make more sense, huh?”

“Does it?”

“Well, it makes more sense why he said flat out that he wasn’t relationship material. Prison, violent crime—not exactly the kind of guy women line up to get pregnant by.”

It was true, but it wasn’t all there was to Kincaid, either.
You don’t know him,
she almost said, but the truth was, neither did she.

She thought of what Kincaid had said, about how his grandmother had been the only person in his world. And she wondered. She’d said it hadn’t been his job to do what he’d done, to chase after justice, but if no one else was doing the job, was that still true? And if it had been Lily in that situation—if the victim of abuse had been Sierra or her mother, if one of the kids had been hurt over and over again—what would she have done?

She liked to think she wouldn’t have held a knife to someone’s throat, but she’d been lucky enough not to find out what she would do in a situation like that. Kincaid—Kincaid hadn’t.

“At any rate,” Sierra said, “he’s not relationship material for you. You can’t tie your life to a guy like that. Not now, not when you’re so young, and you have so much ahead of you. I mean, what kind of chance does that guy have to make anything of himself?”

Which was exactly what Kincaid himself had said.

“And right now, he can’t even travel. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t visit you in Chicago unless his parole officer gave him the go-ahead, and presumably he doesn’t have any money for flying—and how’s that going to change, when getting anything other than a minimum-wage job is going to be practically impossible for him, maybe for the rest of his life? You don’t want that for yourself.”

Lily didn’t. Of course she didn’t. And yet she’d almost told Kincaid she didn’t care what he’d done. Didn’t care what his prospects were or whether he could give her what she deserved or whatever nonsense he’d been spouting.

But of course that was a naive perspective. That was the lust talking, the bubble of kinky sex they’d existed in for weeks. Kincaid and Sierra were dead right: Lily had a whole life ahead of her, and Kincaid was a bit of summer madness. And really, her craving for rough sex, that weird dark side of her, had always been and would always be nothing but trouble for her. In that, Fallon had been right.

“I wish you didn’t have to go,” Sierra said, “but I think you do.”

The tears came rushing up, then, and she leaned into her sister and cried—for herself, yes, for having been so close to exactly what she wanted, and then so far away, but most of all, for a man who had made an impossible decision.

Even though there was no reason to think that Arnie Sinclair, or anyone else, would recognize the car he’d been driving since being sprung, Kincaid parked far from his grandmother’s house, tucking his beater into a pull-off intended for hikers and mountain bikers. The conservation land bordered Nan’s property on one side and Grant and Jeannie’s on the other. Kincaid was headed for a spur trail, less than a mile in, which he’d cut himself nearly twenty years ago with Grant’s help so he could come and go as he pleased, in and out of the public forest. The trail led to his grandmother’s house.

The forest here was old growth, dinosaur trees reaching their points high into the sky, but the path was wide and laid with pine needles, soft underfoot, comforting. Sun dappled the forest floor in only a few places, spots of brightness. The smell of evergreen seared his nostrils.

Lily would like this,
he thought, as he did a hundred times a day. She’d been gone only three days, but it could have been a year, she felt so far away, so remote, and so permanently removed. He’d called her, once, but she hadn’t answered, and he hadn’t left a message. What would he say if she did?
I want you back.
But he couldn’t ask that of her. She belonged where she was.

It was just as well, because what he was about to do could very well land him back in prison. He’d come to search the house for the missing will. Lily was gone, and he had nothing to lose.
So
the least he could do was take one last stab at getting the will—and justice for Nan.

He was already in Yeowing in violation of his parole. In a few minutes, he’d make things worse by trespassing on land that didn’t belong to him, and by breaking and entering. He believed the house was empty, but if it turned out it wasn’t, or if Arnie came home in the middle of his search, he’d also be violating the order that he stay far away from his step-grandfather.

The damp smell of moss and humid soil rose around him as he made his way through the trees, until the short spur to the road joined a main loop trail. He was hoping not to run into other hikers; he’d worn a cap, pulled low, and sunglasses, but he knew he was physically imposing enough to catch people’s attention, and recognizable if he caught the attention of someone who knew him well.

He was almost to the junction when he heard a mountain bike, coming fast down the trail. He looked around frantically for a place to hide, but the trail rose steeply to one side and dropped off precipitously on the other, and he’d end up scrambling dangerously just to barely conceal himself behind a tree. Instead, he stepped to the side of the trail and prayed it wouldn’t be anyone he knew.

The bike skidded to a stop past him, and a voice said, “Caid?”

It was Grant. Of course. One guy in the forest, and it had to be him.

“Aren’t you too old for that shit?” Kincaid demanded.

“Never,” said Grant. “Day I’m too old for fishing and mountain biking is the day I’m dead.” He dismounted his bike and leaned it against a tree. “Hey, man. I heard what happened. That Jeannie blabbed. I’m so sorry. I never thought to tell her to be discreet. I figured she knew better, and it didn’t occur to me that she and Lily would cross paths.”

“Don’t beat yourself up. I’m an asshole for not telling her sooner. She was gonna find out somehow.”

“I called Jeannie.” That had been a huge sacrifice on Grant’s part. He’d cross ten streets to avoid talking to his ex-wife. “I chewed her out, attorney-client privilege, but she said what she told Lily wasn’t anything secret I’d told her, only what everyone knew. And she said she tried to tell Lily you didn’t do anything wrong. You just did what any of us would have done if we’d had the balls.”

“I don’t think it’s what Lily would have done,” Kincaid observed mildly.

“She would have, if it’d been her grandmother,” Grant said. “God damn, I never liked that guy. Never trusted him. I told Nancy that, but she didn’t listen to me.”

“She didn’t listen to anyone,” Kincaid said bitterly.

“Did you talk to Lily, after? Before she left?”

“We talked.”

“And?”

Kincaid turned away for a moment.

“Shit,” Grant said. “I’m so sorry.”

“She went back to Chicago. She got offered a job.”

“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

Grant’s sympathy and regret cracked through Kincaid’s numb acceptance and into the raw pool of emotion underneath.

Lily.

A cry, a howl, in his heart.

“It’s not your fault, and it’s not Jeannie’s fault,” he told Grant. “It’s my fault. I stabbed a man. I went to prison. I didn’t tell her the truth.”

“Your grandmother’s land is right over there, isn’t it?” Grant asked.

Kincaid nodded.

Grant tipped his head to one side. “Rumor has it your parole says you can’t be in Yeowing or near Arnie Sinclair.”

Kincaid smiled wryly. “Rumor also has it that my grandmother left everything she had, money and property, to Safe Haven.”

Grant sighed. “Man, she loved those kids.”

Kincaid could only nod. He’d just remembered one Christmas when he and Nan had stayed up all night on December twenty-third, stuffing stockings for the kids. He’d been young enough to still believe in Santa, so it hadn’t occurred to him that she’d also be up late the next night, making Christmas magical for him. But that had been one of the most splendid Christmases he could remember. He’d woken up on Christmas Day to a brand-new bike. She must have stayed up all night on Christmas Eve assembling it.

He could imagine Lily doing that sort of thing. He could imagine her up late, putting together a kid’s bicycle; up early, cooking for her family, gathering everyone around her and listening as they told her their worries or their hopes.

Not him, though. Not him, not his kids, not his life.

“You need to get out of here.” Grant was dead serious. His eyes were beginning to be rheumy with age, hands starting to claw, but his body was still lean and tough, the legacy of an active life.

Kincaid hesitated.

“You don’t want to go back to prison,” Grant said. “You should get yourself home.”

“I have to find that will.”

“Nancy wouldn’t have wanted you to go back to prison.”

“She would have wanted her kids to have that money.”

Grant shook his head. “Not at your expense, Caid. No way. I knew her. She wouldn’t want this.”

“I gotta, Grant. I gotta do this for her.”

Something was breaking down inside Kincaid, some wall, as impenetrable as those concrete walls he’d lived behind. As fast as he piled up reinforcements, he couldn’t keep up with the dissolution.

“Caid,” Grant said gently. “You don’t gotta.”

“After what I did, after what I did to her—”

Grant took a step toward Kincaid, but didn’t touch him. Just stood there, a little closer than normal personal space, until Kincaid felt a little calmer, because there was a person in the world who would do that. Stand by him. “You didn’t do anything to her,” Grant said. “You saved her from that asshole, that’s what you did.”

“I didn’t save her,” Kincaid said. “I left her. I left her alone with him, in that house, and—it killed her.”

“No,” said Grant. “No. That’s not what happened. You gave her the conviction to leave. That counts for a lot.”

Kincaid stared at him blankly. “To leave?”

Grant gave him an astonished look in return. “You don’t know.”

“I don’t know
what
?”

“That she left him. Oh, Jesus, I always assumed she told you.”

“She
left
him?”

“Two weeks before she died. She was living at Safe Haven, and she was in the middle of taking a restraining order out against him, and she had all kinds of plans for how she was going to start visiting you—I ran into her, and she looked great, and she sounded great.”

Kincaid couldn’t believe it—he couldn’t take it in. It was too much, didn’t make sense yet. Emotion surged and bucked in him, wild and confusing, everything he’d ever wanted and yet wrapped up in so much suffering.

She had
left.
She had walked out, walked away.

It was like tossing ballast out of a balloon, the sensation. He was light enough to float over the world and see it clearly for the first time in years. Or maybe in forever.

She had gotten out.

“You’re—you’re sure,” he managed, finally.

“Of course I’m sure, Kincaid. I just—I didn’t realize she never got a chance to pay you a visit before—” Grant coughed and blinked. “I would have told you, if I realized she never got a chance to.”