Turn Up the Heat (17 page)

“Fuck,” said Kincaid. “Fuck.” And he pounded his fist into his thigh because that was the last way he knew to hold it together, by making some pain somewhere else that was fiercer than the sudden, brilliant realization that she’d gotten free, in the end. That he’d somehow,
somehow,
made a way out for her.

Free. She’d gotten free.

For the first time in more than seven years, despite the rules that still bound him, despite the constraints and the limits,
he
felt free.

“Go home, Caid,” Grant said. “Get away from here before someone else sees you. Go home and keep your ass out of prison. One last thing you can do for her.”

“So now we just need a photo, and you’re ready to go.” Kristin leaned in close to the laptop screen and began reading through the dating profile she’d created for Lily.

“I can’t believe I let you talk me into this.”

“C’mon, it’ll be good for you. You can’t mope about him forever.”

“I wasn’t moping. And it hasn’t been forever.” It had, in fact, been six weeks—six weeks since she’d left Tierney Bay and moved in “temporarily” with Kristin and Tucker.

Kristin gave her a jaded look.

“Maybe I was moping a little.”

The truth was, moping took too much emotional energy, and Lily was numb. At work, everything was as it should be, and yet she waded mechanically through prep and mise-en-place. She cooked and finished and plated, garnished and passed plates across to where the servers grabbed them and delivered them to diners. But as she did it, she felt no particular sense of satisfaction, no particular joy. It was as if she’d been unplugged in some fundamental way from the process, as if she were watching herself from a safe, sterile distance.

Tucker’s dad, having gotten an earful from Tucker about Lily’s abilities, had given her a lot of freedom in the kitchen—to experiment, to remake or replace recipes that weren’t working, to improvise when ingredients ran out or didn’t look good at the market. But even that felt mechanical.

She didn’t dislike her job. She didn’t like it
or
dislike it; she didn’t feel anything about it, just as she didn’t feel anything about the apartment she shared with Kristin and Tucker. It was a good apartment, with walls and a ceiling and floors, a place to keep her belongings and to lie on a bed when it was sleeping time. She had her own room. There was a shower and there were towels, and in the kitchen there was food that she cooked with as little active pleasure as she cooked the food at Weekdays.

She had told herself that it would feel better with time, that she would get less numb and start having emotions again, that she would enjoy the card games that Kristin and Tucker made her play, that she would have fun conversing with the friends they invited over.

She told herself that she would feel less angry and less hurt, that her mind would stop reaching for Kincaid at unexpected moments—when she constructed a hamburger, when she trussed a chicken, when she saw city workers pruning trees. When she lay in bed, when she showered, when she got into a car, when she walked past a diner, when she read a book, when she watched that television show that Kristin and Tucker were so enamored of, with the female prisoners.

But six weeks had passed, and if the anger or the hurt or the craving had abated, she hadn’t detected the improvement.

She was pretty sure she knew why. A few days ago, she’d followed a table’s order out of the kitchen and watched a waitress set it down in front of a family. She’d watched them eat. And she’d waited for the sensation of being plugged back in, that gust of thick pleasure that came from watching people eat food she’d prepared.

Nothing.

They chewed, they smiled, they even swapped bites across the table, and she watched and waited.

Still nothing.

Wrong people,
she’d thought.
I’m not feeding the people I want to feed.

She wanted to feed Sierra and Reg, her nieces and nephew. She wanted to feed the redheaded family and the older couple.

She wanted to feed the town of Tierney Bay.

She wanted to feed Kincaid.

She wanted it worse than she’d ever wanted anything before.

“Lil?”

Kristin was waiting for her to wake up from her reverie. “Photo,” she said patiently, but she rested a hand on Lily’s arm and gave her a sympathetic smile. “Do you have any photos of you on your computer?”

“And preferably not any like these half-assed ones my brother has posted on Facebook,” said Tucker. He was sitting on one of the overstuffed chairs in the apartment’s living room, half-listening to their profile-building, and chiming in with jibes and mockery when it was called for. Some part of Lily’s mind could find it amusing, but that part floated above the rest of her, as if no emotion, not even humor, could penetrate to where she waited, below.

“What’d he do this time?”

“Posted pics of him being drunk and stoned and half nude—he should know better.”

“Maybe he was too drunk and stoned to know better,” Kristin suggested.

“I’ve told him a million times, nothing ever goes away in the electronic realm,” Tucker groused.

“Lil, let’s just take one.” Kristin got up and started digging through a drawer, then emerged, triumphant, with a camera. “Smile!”

She showed the results to Lily.

“Do I really look that tired?”

Kristin sighed. “Yes. Are you sleeping at all?”

“No,” said Lily.

She lay awake at night, remembering. His weight on her, the way he’d angled her against the wall, the way he’d held her down on the car, what he’d cuffed and bound and held, where she had still been able to move, the shift and thrill of body against body, of heat surrounding, invading, penetrating, forcing,
freeing
her.

She wanted another chance. A chance not to panic, a chance to trust him again. She wanted to show him that no matter what shame lay in his past, she could see through and past it, to him.

“If you miss him that much, maybe you should date him long distance.”

Lily had told Kristin and Tucker a version of the truth, that she and Kincaid had decided not to keep seeing each other, but not the whole story.

“He doesn’t want to,” Lily said.

Take the job,
he’d said, his voice stark and dead. Not a tone that brooked opposition. Not a tone that made room for discussion. And when she’d tried, when she’d said,
Maybe we could talk about this—about what just happened,
he said,
Lily.
It was a warning.
You need to go. It’s not just this, and we both know it. You were right. You’d give, and I’d take, and it isn’t fair.

“Besides,” Lily said, reaching for a crisper, lighter tone, something to move them away from this territory that felt so raw, “it wouldn’t work. With my work schedule and everything.”

“It’s not like you have a social life,” Kristin pointed out.

“Unlike my stupid brother,” Tucker observed. “Have a look at this, will you?” He turned the laptop around and displayed his brother’s photos. She wasn’t sure which one was Tucker’s brother, but it hardly mattered. The men—boys—in the photos were shirtless, demonstrably drunk, in flagrante delicto with scantily clad college-age girls. Ordinary guys whose biggest sin was living at a time when everyone had a camera in their pocket.

Everyone you know has a secret life,
Lily almost told Tucker.

You’d give and I’d take and it isn’t fair.

But that was never how it had been. It had been an intimacy so deep that even when they’d played roles, they’d blurred the lines between top and bottom, between pleasure and pain, between give and take.

Just as when she fed him, there was no
give
that was distinct from
take.
There was only the sweetness of doing for him and feeling his joy.

That was what Fallon had never understood.

There wasn’t what Kincaid had done. There was only Kincaid, and the way she loved him.

Kristin was examining the photos on Tucker’s screen. “Tuck, get
over
it. They’re not that bad, and it’s not that big a deal,” Kristin said. “He can delete all that stuff when he’s ready to apply for jobs, right?”

“He can delete it, but that doesn’t mean it really goes away. Facebook archives it, other people copy it or take screenshots of it, his own backups memorialize it. You literally can’t make anything disappear forever anymore. It’s like a permanent tattoo.”

Something clicked in Lily’s head, like a puzzle tumbling itself into place. “But you can wipe a hard drive, right? I mean, if you delete all the copies of something, it’s gone.”

Tucker shook his head. “Sometimes. But not always. Not even usually, in fact. Someone who knows what they’re doing can usually restore it. Data leaves trails.”

“Could
you
?” Lily asked, excitement growing.

“Restore something that had been deleted off a computer? Probably. Depends on the circumstances, and how savvy the person was who’d done the deleting.”

“Tucker.” Lily practically bounced out of her seat. “If I asked you a really big favor that involved a trip to the Oregon coast, would you be game?”

Someone was pounding on the door of the cabin. That was a rare enough occurrence that Kincaid thought hard before he went to open it. There weren’t too many people who even knew he was here—in the beginning it had been only Grant. These days there were a few more, because he’d been coming out of his shell lately and making friends. He’d let Grant take him on a fishing trip with a few other guys, and, after running into Lily’s sister and brother-in-law, Sierra and Reg, at a local nursery and listening to their tales of gardening woe, he’d offered to stop by and help them out.

On his first visit, Sierra had come outside to where he was planting a clump of ornamental grass. She’d sat on a nearby rock and watched him work. After a while, she said, “Lily told me. About—”

“My being in prison?”

Sierra nodded.

He patted moist soil around the hair grass’s roots to avoid looking her in the eye. “She tell you why?”

“Yeah.”

“I should have told her. I wish I’d told her.”

“I wish you’d told her, too.”

His head shot up, but there was nothing in her expression but regret, and he realized that in his selfishness he’d never thought about how Sierra must have felt about Lily’s departure.

Sierra stood, then hesitated. “I miss her.” She headed toward the house.

Just before she reached the house, he called out, “Me, too,” and she turned back to smile at him, the faintest echo of her sister’s smile, enough to kick-start his longing.

And that had been it. Sierra had asked him back several times to do more work, and after a while, he fell into a pattern of visiting with her and Reg for a little while, and sometimes playing board games or soccer or Wiffle Ball with the kids. If Sierra felt some inner caution about letting him spend time around her kids, she didn’t let him see it.

But despite all that, even though they’d all enjoyed a few beers together a couple of times now, he didn’t imagine Sierra or Reg would head out this way to see him.

Grant, then, maybe.

He pulled the door open and his heart practically stopped.

“Lil,” he said foolishly.

She’d tucked her hair behind her ears. Her face was white, with pink high on her cheekbones, and she wore a purple T-shirt that clung tight to her flat belly. The word “Weekdays” swerved over her gorgeous breasts.

“Hey,” she said.

She had a laptop in her arms.
His
laptop. It didn’t seem possible for his heart to beat any harder, but it managed.

She saw his gaze fall on the laptop. “I got it from Grant. Tucker—you met him—he knows how to find things that are hidden on a computer. He used some restoration software to fit together bits of information that got left behind on the hard drive after it was wiped. He found the will, Caid.”

He couldn’t force breath all the way into his lungs. His name on her tongue, all his prayers promising to be answered in one fell swoop.

“There’s a lawyer’s name, address, and phone number in the file. Grant called him. He has a signed copy on file at his office. He was a high school friend of hers, located in Portland, retired. Grant says that’s why you two couldn’t find a lawyer around here who knew anything about a will—he says she probably looked for someone far away to reduce the chances that Arnie would find out and try to stop her. And of course Arnie
did
find out, which is why there are no local copies. He was counting on the fact that word wouldn’t reach the lawyer that your grandmother had died, and since you were in prison, no one would contest his right to inherit.”

Now the crazy stubborn muscle in Kincaid’s chest was slamming itself against his rib cage, and he honestly didn’t know whether it was what she was telling him—
the will,
for fuck’s sake!—or the mere fact of her standing there. For one long, glorious moment, before he’d seen the laptop, he’d thought she’d come back
to be with him.

He’d give up the will and everything if that would turn out to be true.

“Come in,” he said stupidly, because it was something to say, something he could do, and it was better than just standing there, staring at her blankly.

She came in and set the laptop on his coffee table, and then she sat on his couch. He sat down next to her, leaving a safe space between them, because even at this distance he could feel the pull of her, the draw and heat and sheer
wish
of her chemistry on his. If he got any closer he would have to turn his face toward hers, and lean in, and the scent of her skin would hit him seconds before the taste of her lips and he’d be lost.

“I didn’t read it.” She laid a hand on the laptop.

“You could have.” He wished she had. Wished she’d felt like she had a right to know what it said. That would mean she was still caught, despite everything, in the spiral of his life, the way he was still caught in hers.

And maybe she was. She’d come, after all, all the way from Chicago, chased down the laptop, put her friend to work, shown up on his doorstep. You didn’t do that for someone you’d locked out and forgotten about.

He beat back the possibility in his mind, because second chances were few and far between. You only had to be in prison a short time, you only had to watch a few cons leave and come back, before you knew that.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you what I was doing. Grant and I agreed, though, that it would be harsh to get your hopes up for nothing, and Tucker wasn’t sure he’d find anything.”

“It’s okay.” But he thought,
My hopes are up,
and he didn’t mean the will. He searched her face for a sign, but she was intent on the computer, not looking at him.

She opened the laptop and pulled up a document. It was speckled, here and there, with corruption, a smattering of nonsense that indicated that Tucker’s work hadn’t saved every character. Still, it was readable.

“Grant wanted to come over here, but I convinced him to let me bring it.” Her expression was carefully blank, but he looked down and saw her hands were shaking, and emotion skipped and soared under his ribs.

“Why?” He wasn’t sure where he’d found the courage to ask, as if he had the right to know anything about her motives.

“I don’t know. I guess I thought—” A crack, a glimmer, split across the blankness. “I wanted to. I wanted to see your face when you found out it existed. I wanted to know what it said, even if it was disappointing.” Her gaze found his, just for a second.

Impulsively, he grabbed her hand, squeezed it tight. It was warm and alive in his, and he dropped it, quickly, before he did something he—or both of them—would regret. “I’m glad you came.”

She turned away. “Go ahead. Read it.” She rushed the words out, as if he’d pushed her too far, and she needed to put a wall between her and her admission, as cryptic as it had been.

“It’s so short,” he said.

There’s a bank account at Tierney Savings—all the contents of that go to Safe Haven. Everything else is Kincaid’s—

His hands and feet were numb, his lips, even.

“Caid?”

But he couldn’t even form a sentence to tell her what he’d just read; he could only push the laptop toward her. She began to read, and a gasp came from her lips.

They read together.

Caid: Sell off as much land as you want, but keep the house on at least three acres or your grandfather will roll in his grave. And for God’s sake, don’t let my soon-to-be-ex-asshole-husband get his hands on any of it.

If you can, please forgive me for not being there for your hearing. Arnie locked me in the bathroom. I hope it means something to know that if it had been within my power, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

“Motherfu—” He caught himself.

Lily tilted her head. “You must have known. That something had kept her away. She would never have missed it.”

“I didn’t. I didn’t know, not for sure. I thought—” He took a mighty breath through the lump in his chest. “I guess I thought—some part of me thought I’d become the first person in the world she didn’t think was worth saving.”

“Oh, Caid.” She shook her head. “No. No. Keep reading.”

I hope it means something that I vowed that day that Arnie would never stand between me and what mattered again. I heard your voice telling me there were some people whose salvation wasn’t and couldn’t be my job, and that night after he’d fallen asleep, I started planning my escape. You have to understand, Caid, you saved my life twice over, once when you gave me something to live for, and once when you reminded me that I count. And for that and so many other reasons, you are the best thing that ever happened to me. I couldn’t love you more than I do.

He realized he was shaking, that Lily had grabbed both his hands and was squeezing them tight in hers, which were small and light and barely able to partially enclose his.

You saved my life twice over.

His grandmother had never stopped loving him or lost faith in him.

He hadn’t disappointed her. Hadn’t failed her. Had never been unforgiveable or unlovable or beyond saving.

“Caid?”

He turned to discover that her face was wet.

“Are you crying?”

She nodded. “I’m a softie.”

“Me, too, then, I guess,” he said, and she reached up and brushed a lone tear off his lower lashes with her thumb.

Her hand lingered, and if he turned his head, he could kiss it. Could trail kisses down her wrist, along her arm, up her shoulder, could paint the sweet shape of her ear with his tongue. Something in him knew she wouldn’t resist him if he were gentle with her.

But it wouldn’t be enough. It would never be enough. He wanted back what they’d had, what he’d broken and thrown away, what he’d lost, the trust and abandon of the way she’d given herself over. He didn’t think he could stand it if he touched her and she hesitated, and he didn’t think he could stand being careful with her.

He moved away instead. Stood up. “Thank you. I can’t tell you how—well, I think you pretty much get how important this is. Just seeing her words. And knowing he won’t be able to live in her house anymore.”

If she was hurt that he’d turned away instead of pulling her close, if she’d even noticed the moment when something might have happened between them, she didn’t show it. “Plus, you’re rich.” She stood, too.

He half-laughed. “Not rich.”

“How many acres is it?”

“Couple hundred.”

She smiled, and in the brilliance of her pleasure, he regretted not taking what he could. And he wanted to say,
Tell me it can be the way it was again. Tell me you want to try again.

She turned away this time, and he wondered how much hunger and desperation, how much need, his glance had showed her in that exposed moment.

Enough to scare her again, he suspected.

She patted his arm. “You should ask someone how much that land is worth. Pretty sure you won’t have to do much worrying about anything for the rest of your life.”

His arm tingled.

Tell me you can learn to trust me.

She turned the knob. “See you later.”

And she was gone.