Turn Up the Heat (5 page)

Later that evening, Lily joined Sierra on the couch with two glasses of red wine, knowing it was time to pay the piper.

“I’m still waiting,” Sierra said, accepting a glass.

Lily sighed. “Maybe I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Maybe you do.”

She did and she didn’t. She wanted fiercely to talk about
him,
to make him real again in some way, if only by putting words to him. She’d tried all week to stalk him online, but no dice—no Facebook profile, and even though she didn’t use Twitter or Instagram or Google+ or Pinterest, she’d searched for him there, too, just in case.
Nada.
Well, she couldn’t blame him; she wasn’t too keen on social media herself, only used Facebook to keep up with old friends and rarely posted—he was probably just a private type.

“Remember I told you there was a guy? The weird mysterious one at the diner?” Lily spoke in a hush. The kids were reading in bed down the hall, and Reg was in the kitchen, working at his laptop.

“With the light blue eyes and the tattoos?”

Lily nodded.

“I remember.”

“I kissed him.”

She wasn’t
lying
exactly, just
editing.

Sierra whistled. “How exactly did that come about?”

Lily told the story of her brief stint in the kitchen, Markos’s rage, and the gauntlet Kincaid had thrown down on her behalf. “And then he stuck around to help me clean up, which was really nice of him. And then he carried out the trash, and I—I just kissed him to thank him, and then we were
kissing.
”

“Just kissing?”

Lily ducked her head.

Sierra sighed. “I’m supposed to tell you this is a terrible idea. I’m supposed to tell you you need to stay focused.”

“I know. It’s a terrible idea. I’m supposed to stay focused.” Lily recited it like a robot. “It was stupid, okay? But the thing is, it was also—amazing.”
He was rough
.
I liked it.
She wouldn’t say that, not even to Sierra, who knew the skeleton of Lily’s story with Fallon—dumpage, humiliation—but not the sordid details.

“He’s who you were looking for this morning.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yeah.”

“Have you seen him, since last Friday?”

“No. And—”

“And that bums you out more than you thought it would,” Sierra observed, her eyes warm with sympathy.

Tears pricked Lily’s eyes as she nodded.

“Do you know
anything
about him?”

“I think he’s a law student. He was reading some hard-core textbook. And he’s friends with that guy Reg went fishing with last weekend. With the frizzy gray hair and beard.”

“Grant?”

“Yeah.”

“That makes sense. Grant’s a lawyer. Grant used to be married to Jeannie.”

“
Really?
” Jeannie was one of Tierney Bay’s two dentists, and Sierra, who was a dental hygienist, worked for her.

“Yeah. She left because he was a workaholic. But if you know both of them you have to kind of wonder. Jeannie’s such a dominatrix and Grant’s so mild, I think there has to be more to the story. Anyway, Grant’s a good guy,” Sierra said. “So this guy is friends with Grant? I’ll ask Reg to ask Grant about him.”

“Really? Are we in seventh grade?”

“Just to, you know, make sure he’s on the up-and-up.”

“I think it’s moot. Not so much as a peep out of him, since—he hasn’t even come into the diner.”

Sierra sighed. “Maybe it’s for the best. You’re not going to be here long, anyway.”

Of course it was for the best. Lily knew
that
perfectly well. And if she told Sierra more about the “kissing” she’d done with Kincaid, that would only reinforce Sierra’s conviction. Because she’d told Sierra she’d sworn off sex, vanilla or otherwise.

Which theoretically should also include stand-up groping to orgasm with near-strangers in alleyways, of course.

One. Two. Three.

“Lily?” Sierra asked.

She’d been a million miles away, in that alley, deep in joy.

“I’m okay,” she said, but she wasn’t, exactly. She’d been so hopeful, in the alley. That was what she had to admit to herself. When he’d grabbed her wrists, she’d thought,
Yes.
She’d felt, for only the second time in her life, like
herself,
deep in that unfolding part of her that was freed by being confined.

But then he’d disappeared, too.

Maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference at all if he’d showed up in the diner and smiled at her. Maybe it would have felt like just crumbs. But she thought it might have helped. His disappearing felt too much like judgment.

It felt like Fallon.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, to an imaginary Fallon. To Sierra, who looked unconvinced.

To herself.

“It’s not going to happen again.”

Kincaid knelt in the thick layer of needles. He was working today on a long road that snaked along the bluffs, close enough to the Pacific that although he couldn’t see it from here, he could hear its roar. There were three or four houses planted at intervals. He didn’t know the owners, only that they were rich Californians, come north to get more bang for their buck and to escape the creep of Silicon Valley.

The Oregon coast was a strange beast, with towns poor as dirt and rich as sin strung out all along it. Tierney Bay had once upon a time been a well-known tourist destination, but about fifty years ago Cannon Beach had stolen its thunder, and Tierney Bay had slowly dried up until there was not much left of its former glory. Markos’s diner. A bakery, a market, a hardware store. The stores that had once appealed to tourists—the bike shop, the kite shop, the ice cream shop, the toy store, the women’s clothing boutiques—were open fewer and fewer hours, and some had shuttered for good, leaving empty storefronts.

But dotted here and there, mostly along the shore, were pockets of old wealth, owners of homes on cliff and beach who’d been unwilling to sell even as the town had shrunk, and it was these houses that Kincaid’s boss’s landscaping company mostly served. Some owners were rarely—or never—home, and Green Thumb did all the gardening and upkeep. These were the best jobs, because you could work in solitude.

Kincaid would never have guessed how much he’d like working with plants. Despite how at home he felt in the woods—despite the forest tattoo on his right arm and the moss tattoo on his left—he’d never thought of himself as a guy with a green thumb, or even someone remotely sentimental about nature’s soothing qualities. But he liked landscaping, liked driving the powerful lawn tractor, liked the soothing repetition of pruning, the artistry of deciding which branches to take out of a tree. He even liked weeding, grubbing in the sandy dirt, yanking out interlopers and giving ground back to the flowers. He liked that it felt like tricking evolution, messing with survival of the fittest. Man dictating his terms to nature.

The soil here didn’t smell quite like the forest on his grandmother’s land. This land smelled of bark and loam, the scent of expensive materials ordered in trucks and spread from wheelbarrows by men like him who were lucky to have the work. The other men on the crew today were all immigrants from El Salvador and Guatemala, who mostly spoke amongst themselves in Spanish, occasionally casting him a glance that lingered somewhere between guilt at excluding him and resentment at being put in the position of having to feel guilty. Kincaid was pretty sure most of them were illegal. Rodney, Green Thumb’s owner, didn’t ask questions, which is why Kincaid worked for him.

Not
that it mattered, not that thinking about the past offered anything but nostalgia and loss, but pre-prison, Kincaid had worked for Yeowing’s Board of Health. He’d planned to go to the police academy and become the town’s sheriff. He’d loved the town that much, enough to become its protector and enforcer—

And wasn’t it ironic that now he was its villain?

In OSP—the Oregon State pen—he’d had a job, too. Jailhouse lawyer, best there was. It was crazy to say he missed anything about those days, but he did. He missed being good at what he did, and he missed the way men came to him with their problems. He missed law itself, how it could be simple and tangled at the same time, how you could tease it apart and figure out which buttons to push and get
justice
out of it.

He had this crazy idea that maybe he’d keep studying. So if circumstances ever aligned, he could finish college and go to law school. He’d do environmental law, bring it all together.

The only person he’d told was Grant, and Grant had given him a look.
Don’t get too attached to that dream,
Grant’s expression said. The words he’d said aloud were: “In Oregon, there’s no law that says an ex-con can’t sit for the bar,” but Kincaid could see how deep his doubt was.

And that was
Grant.
Grant, who’d believed in Kincaid enough to represent him, who’d argued publicly that he’d done what he’d done “in defense of others.” He’d fought a second battle to keep Kincaid out of maximum security. And then, when that had failed, Grant had watched his own marriage fall apart while he gave Kincaid a crash course in jailhouse law so he could make himself useful instead of dead in prison.

So if Grant didn’t think Kincaid could do it, the chances probably weren’t too good. Still, Kincaid wasn’t ready to give up the dream. In the meantime, he’d plant gardens—not such a bad lot in life, if it came to that.

Several yards away from where Kincaid worked now, an ornamental iron fence defined the edge of this property, and beyond that was the road. Inside the fence, these owners had planted a grove of true cedars—the trees responsible for the blanket of needles—and Japanese maples to hide themselves from the rest of the world. In the shade underneath, ferns, hostas, bleeding heart, marsh marigolds, and violets grew in thick bunches. At least these people had been wise enough to choose sturdy, native shade lovers. Some people planted expensive, delicate flowers, then hired Rodney and his crews to keep them alive against all odds. It might have given Kincaid a rush to beat natural selection, but it was damn hard work.

There was a lone jogger coming up the road. He could see only that she was female, with breasts that bounced under her sports top and a ponytail that swung. As she got closer, he allowed himself to admire both those things. What had happened in the alleyway with the waitress should have taken the edge off the sexual need that had dogged him, sometimes painfully, during his captivity, but it had honed it, instead. Now, instead of being an abstract longing, it was a specific one: her, at the borderline between civil and unruly,
all the way.

Of course, Murphy’s Law being what it was, as the lone jogger came into more vivid view, it was
her.

Her. The waitress. He knew her name, of course, but saying it out loud, even in his own head, unsettled him. It made her seem real, and important, and the only way he could have done what he’d done the other night was if it was a one-off thing. A mistake he could pretend had never happened. That was why he hadn’t been back to the diner since then, because it made it easier to pretend it
hadn’t
happened.

He crouched behind the wheelbarrow he was filling with weeds and tried not to look at her, because now that he knew those were
her
breasts, his hands felt hot and itchy with the need to cup them. His mouth filled with saliva, his tongue deliberately
not
remembering the shape of her nipples
.
He refused, unsuccessfully, to contemplate the way her wrists had felt, gripped against his palm, the way his knuckles had scraped the brick. He’d wondered if they’d be bloody when he was done, and he’d hoped they would, so that in the morning, the scrapes would remind him (he still had one tiny scab, which he ran his finger over sometimes, with an ambivalent thrill of memory). He’d hoped the skin along her spine or the skin of her ass would be similarly abraded, even though he shouldn’t want her to remember him.

Her clothes fit like a second skin—a light gray tank top and black pants that ended mid-calf—and she wasn’t wearing makeup. When he’d escorted her back to her car the other night, her mascara had been smudged under her eyes, and he’d imagined that her tears sprang from the same mixture of pleasure and pain he’d felt. Now her face was bare, but flushed bright with exertion, and it was impossible not to flash back on the way her breasts had heaved against him while he’d restrained her hands overhead, the way her breath had rushed hot on his cheek.

He was hiding from her, he realized. He was hiding there, squatting behind the wheelbarrow, hoping she’d pass without spotting him.

And hoping she’d see him. Hoping she’d glance between the black iron bars, over the top of the barrow, that her eyes would meet his. That she’d draw up sharp in shock, that she’d trot to the fence and grip the bars, that she’d press her face through the bars and—

And what? Demand he kiss her? Let him clutch her hands tight around the bars, trapping her there? Let him pull both her arms through the bars so the iron would press into the flesh of her breasts, then hold her tight while he worked his body against hers, the metal painful and pleasurable where it bit into his own skin?

Yes, pretty much. Hoping all that, and more, that she’d ask him to open the gate, that she’d lean back against the bars and draw him to her, that she’d look up through her lashes and let that pouty lower lip fall open slightly, inviting him in as explicitly as if she’d said,
Kiss me.

Instead—unsurprisingly—she jogged by, so close for a moment that if he had only breathed her name she would have heard it. He could have thrown a clump of weeds and caught her on the arm. There were beads of sweat on her forehead. From this distance, he could hear her breath, fast and desperate, a deep, dark tug that woke his cock and dragged it to standing.

And then she was gone, and he watched her run away, the lean, sculpted muscles in her legs, the clutch of the bigger muscles in her gorgeous ass, the bounce of her ponytail.

He let his gaze drop, reached for a handful of knotweed, and went on with his work.

Lily sat at the kitchen table in her sister’s house, peeling an orange and gazing out the window over the kitchen sink.

It was not the most beautiful view ever. The houses in this neighborhood had been built all at the same time and the developer had run out of money for landscaping before he’d been able to do much to break up the view between them. Sierra’s window revealed three consecutive yards, lined up, cluttered with toddler toys and swing sets, pre-fab sheds and plastic lawn furniture. The lawns were drying up in the summer sun, rife with patches of dead grass and crabgrass. Here and there, someone had planted a compensatory fruit tree and there was a patch of shade.

Lily had finished peeling the orange and was dividing it into sections. It made her not only miss her nieces and nephews—who were at camp—but also feel quietly glad they weren’t here. Although the orange was really too big for one person, it was too small for four, and she would have given most of it away.

Sierra had done a good job with those kiddos, taught them manners without disciplining the childhood mischief completely out of them. Lily hoped she’d do as good a job with her own someday.

If she had any. She didn’t know how easy it would be to have kids and own a restaurant, particularly as a woman. The first few years, running a restaurant was backbreaking, life-consuming work. You had to be there every hour of the day and deep into the night, and when you weren’t on the premises, you were buying food at the market—or sleeping.

And there was the problem of having time to meet someone eligible when you were so damn busy. You might be able to have an encounter here and there, but to have a long-term relationship, get married, you’d have to meet a patient man whose own ambitions dovetailed with yours.
Fat chance.

Lily figured that even if she managed to meet someone willing to compromise between his ambitions and hers,
she’d
have to be willing to give up some of her own fantasies. The chances were slim that he’d be the sort of guy who graced her daydreams.

Like Kincaid.

She wasn’t an idiot. She knew that marrying the shirtless man on the cover of a romance novel didn’t necessarily deliver the happily-ever-after it promised. Kincaid
might
look like the best item on the menu, but she’d be better off taking compatible values and goals over photogenic looks and sexual wow-factor.

On the opposite side of the next yard, someone was pruning one of the few trees. He was wedged in the vee of two branches, leaning back against one while he trimmed a branch over his head with a pole pruner. He was by far the best part of Lily’s view, naked from the waist up, rippling with muscle, not an ounce of fat on his tanned, glistening form.

Nice.

This town was
full
of them, apparently, these photogenic, wow-factor men. This one’s back and arms were heavily inked, the most prominent tattoo a design that wrapped the back of his neck and covered most of one side of his back. Diamonds—

With a start, she recognized him.

Kincaid. Up a tree, not a hundred yards from her house.

She looked away. It was one thing to idly admire a random, well-muscled arborist, another thing to deliberately ogle a man she knew while he worked.

A man who had made her come, standing up, in an alley, through some combination of the skill in his fingers, the taunt in his voice as he’d counted, and the way he’d confined her.

What a bizarre coincidence. As if the universe were trying to tell her something. And maybe it was. The universe had, after all, brought him to the diner where she worked and bade him sit, idle, in a back booth. It had dictated that he would be in the diner on a night when she cooked, that she would cook
his
meal, that Markos would castigate her, and that Kincaid would stand up for her.

He pushed himself up out of the notch where he’d been working and stepped onto a higher branch. She watched his calf bulge, saw the ink on his back ripple with the surge of energy under his skin. Sunlight played off the sweat on his neck, caught the blond hair on his forearm as he raised the pole to clip another branch.

More.

It wasn’t even a word, really. More a sensation, a sinking heat, a spreading warmth. She’d never been someone who responded to visual stimulation. Sure, she could appreciate a photo of a hot, mostly naked guy, sure, she could admire a well-sculpted male form, but she didn’t troll the internet for video or anything. She didn’t linger and stare.

Or if she did, she wasn’t so conscious of herself. She didn’t feel so out of control of her body, like there was a trip wire between the two of them, so that when he raised his arm to show her the twist of muscle that defined his shoulder, when he displayed that tuft of darker hair like some primitive mating call, her body shot to awareness without her brain even having a say in it.