Fade the Heat (21 page)

“I’d give anything to change their minds.” Jack’s voice shook with anger and frustration. “I’ll speak to them if you’d like, tell them anything you want—”

She shook her head. “No offense, but your word won’t help matters. The only thing that will is time—and an arrest. I’m going back to work tomorrow, at a station a couple of blocks over from your clinic.”

“I hear sirens all the time there,” he said. “That crew runs constantly.”

She shrugged. “They needed someone fast, and I needed a place to let things cool down for a while.”

“But your lungs—did your doctor check to see if—”

The question shafted through her, striking a well of fury and resentment. Part of her was still angry about his refusal to sign her form—but mostly, she hated her own weakness.

“Sure, he signed the release. For one thing, I’ll be riding the meat-box,” she said, calling the ambulance by its department nickname. “My lungs won’t matter much there, at least not as much as my back and bedside manner. And the fact that I can speak a little Spanish.”

“You’re good at it, aren’t you?” he asked. “The EMT work, I mean. You did great when we found Luz Maria. Maybe you ought to think about going further with your medical training.”

She couldn’t answer, couldn’t force the words past the lump rising in her throat. Throughout the week, she hadn’t talked to anyone, not even Peaches, about
returning to an ambulance, about giving up her dream. She’d been hoping that if she didn’t say the words, the reality would somehow fade away.

Besides, she had always kept her problems private, reasoning that she was strong enough to handle them herself.
Strong enough once, maybe,
she told herself resentfully.
Or maybe I’ve been kidding myself all along.

“I need to ask you something,” Jack said. “How’d you get that dent in your front door? And the rose petals lying on the porch?”

She was finished with covering for Beau, finished with allowing the pain of his betrayal to fester like an open wound. Still, it surprised her when she found herself reluctantly telling Jack all of it, from how she had befriended the slightly off-center younger man to how Beau had stunned her by announcing his romantic interest. And how he had hit her on the morning he’d found Jack at her house.

“Why didn’t you say something?” Jack asked her. “I would never let that asshole get away with slugging y—”

“Don’t you see?” asked Reagan. “He was really suffering that morning. Beau was in there, in the fire that killed the captain. Maybe he had to latch on to someone—anyone—to blame besides himself. I couldn’t see destroying his career for that. He’s still on probation, as a rookie.”

“First of all, there’s never any right time for a man to strike a woman. Never. And secondly, that happened the day after the fire. Those rose petals looked much fresher.”

She nodded. “He came bearing flowers. Can you believe it? But I wouldn’t let him in.”

“Smart woman,” Jack said.

“I might have forgiven him for hitting me, but Beau’s been telling everyone he knows how I’ve been ‘whoring with the guy who got Joe killed.’ At least that’s how he put it. He’s the one who turned Donna and my crew against me.”

“I still can’t believe they’d take his word over yours.”

“A fire crew’s a tight group, Jack, and they’re hurting—we’re all hurting so bad, maybe it’s a natural thing to start turning on each other.” She sipped her wine, but tonight, it tasted bitter on her tongue. “At least it hasn’t spread through the whole department—not yet anyway. Some of my old friends have called. They don’t buy that I’d have anything to do with this, and one or two who know Beau suggested he’s been running his mouth out of jealousy. I didn’t know this, but he had some trouble before over a woman, a female recruit at the academy. She ended up quitting over it, I heard. And then there’s the deal with his dad.”

“His father?”

She nodded. “I’m pretty sure the man’s done time for beating up Beau’s mom, among other things. There are a couple of brothers, too—neither of them strangers to the Texas prison system.”

“Have you tried to tell your crew this?”

She shook her head. “If you could have been there at the service, if you had heard the disappointment in C.W.’s voice, you’d know. They’ve bought Beau’s bullshit, all of them.” Her eyes burned, and her nose dripped moisture. Putting down her wineglass, she reached for tissues from the box on the counter.

Jack pushed the box closer to her and waited for her to blow her nose. He had put down his own glass as well, and sorrow underscored the pain in his expression.

“They didn’t even want me there,” she told him as hot tears overflowed. “I managed to hang out near the back, b-but Donna wouldn’t have me at his funeral.”

It seemed so right, so natural, when she found herself standing and wrapped within the circle of his arms. Allowing him to stroke her back, to whisper soothing words. When was the last time she had allowed herself to take whatever comfort another person offered? As close as she had grown to Peaches, as often as she’d allowed her neighbor to spill her heart about the terrible price she’d paid to live life as she saw fit, Reagan had never opened the locked cabinet of her own secrets. She had even told her best friends that her mother was long dead.

But Jack Montoya was no friend. She pulled away just far enough to look into his eyes, to fall headlong into depths as dark as the inky blackness of a moonless night.

One arm still draped around her waist, he raised his free hand to slide his fingertips along the hot, slick pathways of her tears. From her cheek, caresses flowed beneath the curve of her jawbone and down her neck.

He never took his gaze from her eyes, yet those sensitive healer’s fingers read her pain the way a blind man read Braille poems. When he touched her lips, she kissed away the salty dampness and watched, transfixed, as hunger etched itself into his face.

Beneath her stomach, an answering need fluttered to life, a quickening within her, and desire seared her from the inside out. Until there was nothing she could do except to close her eyes and quench it, her mouth rising to meet his in the same moment that he moved.

Heaven help her, she thought. Jack Montoya
is
no
friend. Yet if she followed her heart’s lead, she would have him as a lover.

Jack had told himself when he had come here that he would consider his trip worthwhile if she would speak to him through her closed door. He had hoped for more, of course—polite conversation on her sofa, a tentative discussion of the possibility that she might see him in six months or a year, when she’d had time to heal and he’d had time to put the fragments of his broken life together.

Her kiss, so warm and unrestrained, washed over him like a startling benediction, a blessing he’d done nothing to deserve.

Nothing but seduce her at her most vulnerable.

In spite of Reagan’s repeated attempts to prove her toughness to him, Jack knew damned well how vulnerable she was to kindness. Especially now, only a week after the day her world had gone to pieces.

Had he been the saint that Paulo termed him, Jack would have pulled away. Had he been the best of men, he would have at least reminded her of how many questions hung over his future. Would he lose his job, his license? Would he be forced to flee the state?

But as he’d warned her after the first time she’d kissed him, Reagan Hurley was one temptation he couldn’t bring himself to say no to twice. Not with her mouth opening to his tongue and her fingers kneading into his back, with her body pressing against his, her thigh moving over his suddenly hard length, and her breasts flattening against his chest.

He wanted so badly to touch them once more, to cradle their soft roundness, to suckle hardened nipples.
To drive himself into her over and over, kissing her until she screamed his name.

Those were his last coherent thoughts before his mind spiraled from the rational to the primal. Before he gave himself up to an attraction that had lain dormant and half-formed since childhood, only to spring to life full-bodied the first time he set eyes on her as an adult.

An animal could be forgiven for falling back on instinct. An animal knew no better, for it lacked the capacity for moral judgment.

But there were times when circumstance could push a person beyond reason, to a place where painful knowledge was suspended for a while. Reagan wanted to believe that she had come to such a point and that what she did with Jack was mindless, no more than a reflex in answer to a certain look that passed between them or the clean musk scent she smelled as her lips grazed the base of his neck, just below his throat.

She wanted to believe it, yet she couldn’t. Not with all of her awareness focused on the hand that stole beneath her sweater and deftly unhooked her bra. Not with the way she melted as his clever fingers cupped and caressed, teased and tormented, until she was peeling off her sweater and arching her back, offering up her throbbing breasts, then gasping in relief when he finally, finally lowered his head and used his lips and tongue to send her spiraling toward heaven…

But the relief she felt was short-lived, for with each caress, the aching pulse between her legs grew stronger, the hot moisture more unbearable. Until she knew she had to stop this, stop
him
, before she gave way to a need that threatened to consume her.

Yet instead of pushing him away, her hand knocked over her wineglass on the counter. She felt the liquid splatter, then soak into the denim covering her thighs.

Pausing to set the glass back on its base, Jack smiled wickedly down at her jeans. “That red wine’s sure to stain. We’d better get you out of those.”

When he scooped her into his arms, she offered no resistance but only kicked off both her shoes. When he carried her to the guest bedroom, she kissed his neck and flicked her tongue into his ear.

“Oh, my God,” he whispered, and she felt him shudder. Just before he laid her down and unfastened her jeans.

He knelt beside the bed before peeling them off her, his face such a heart-stopping mix of lust and awe that simply looking at him made her moan and quiver with anticipation.

“Oh, Reag, you’re so damned beautiful,” he told her as he removed his shirt. “So absolutely perfect, except…some of this wine’s gone straight through to your skin.”

Leaning forward, he parted her legs to kiss the inside of a knee, laving the tender flesh with his tongue, his hands settling tenderly on either side of her hips, pulling down her lace-trimmed panties one languid millimeter at a time.

“Jack,” she cried. She couldn’t stand this torture, couldn’t wait much longer.

His look told her she wouldn’t have to.

“The wine is good,” he said, “but something tells me you’ll taste even better.”

Her world burst into flame. She wanted it to last, but her body might as well have been built of dried kindling. Kindling that exploded as his mouth pressed to her core.

Afterward, she helped him finish his undressing. Then guided him as he came over her, his body reigniting her as his hardness plunged inside.

Moving together, they pushed past her misgivings, pushed beyond all thought of the price she might pay for such pleasure. Pushed and pushed until she neared obliteration once again. But suddenly he paused, balanced on his hands, and stared down into her eyes.

The emotion in his face was so stark it was almost painful, so true that it shimmered in the air between them, making words redundant.

Yet he said them anyway.

“Reagan, I’m in love with you. So much that it scares me.”

She met his mouth in a feral kiss, desperate to prevent the words running through her head from tumbling from her lips as well.

Love you. Love you. Love you twice as much, Jack.

When even the kiss was powerless to bank the torrent, she pulled him down to impale her with a powerful thrust. A few more and she cried out, her whole world splintering into white-hot pleasure.

And her blind eyes never saw how the jagged pieces could fall back to slice off bloody slivers of her heart.

Time reshuffled the chronology of Reagan’s memories, the way it so often does in dreams.

One moment, it was the day after Papa’s funeral, and the Hurleys’ Mexican tenants—Jack, little Luz Maria, and their mother—were bringing over a candle in a tall glass cylinder decorated with a prayerful Virgin Mary.

The next moment, her father, in his uniform, was leaning over the lit candle, blowing it out, and telling Reagan, “Fire’s dangerous. It burns.”

Relief burst its banks and flooded through her, but when she cried out, “You’re not dead,” and tried to hug him, his figure dissipated, along with the wick’s smoke.

Yet she smelled him in her nostrils, the scent of woodsy aftershave gone bitter with the ash.

Then, as if he’d never been there in the first place, she and Jack were in her old back yard, and she was chattering away at the handsome boy from next door. “Mama told Aunt Lilly we’re moving soon as the in
surance money comes. We’ll rent this house out, too, and go away.”

“Where to?” asked Jack.

She shrugged, feeling absurdly happy that he had spoken to her, that he had laid his warm palm on her shoulder because she felt so bad about her papa. “I dunno exactly. Somewhere boys won’t call me ‘blond bitch’ when I play in the front yard. Someplace more of the kids will look like me.”

Jack let his hand slide off her back. “She wants to take you someplace with no brown people—except for maids and lawn boys who don’t speak ’til they’re spoke to. That’s the kind of neighborhood your mama has in mind.”

The anger flashing in his eyes told Reagan she’d said something wrong, something bad and ugly. She stiffened, her hands knotted in small, determined fists. “She never meant a thing like that! My mama’s a good lady. She just worries, that’s all.”

Reagan remembered hearing Mama tell Daddy, “
Look at all these beer cans in the ditches—and last week I found a needle. This neighborhood is going downhill fast. Pretty soon we’ll be the only decent people left.
”

But decent didn’t mean
white
, did it? It meant good and kind. Like a big boy who’d helped her with her homework, even though he’d complained she was a pest.

With that day in mind, she said, “I think
you’re
nice.” And meant it.

“Glad to hear it.” His chin rose and his lip curled in a look that made a lie out of the words. “Maybe you can hire me to mow your lawn or pick your trash up. My mama, she can scrub your toilets, too.”

When the gate banged shut, she had wanted to run
after him. But before she could take a step, Joe Rozinski—the older version, not the younger man who had been her daddy’s captain—threw his arms around her and said, “He’s not for you.”

And the burning smell grew stronger, until she realized Captain Rozinski was on fire. She struggled, pleading with him—but he wouldn’t let her go.

As the flames began to taste her, she knew a pain unlike any she had ever felt before. As her limbs began to glow red, then crumble like the burned tips of Mama’s cigarettes, Reagan started screaming.

Screaming until she could no long draw breath.

Reagan’s thrashing woke Jack from a sound sleep, but it was the wheezing that made him bolt upright in bed.

Her
bed, he realized with a start, and it all came back to him, the way their passion had sparked, bursting into an emotion more powerful than anything he’d known before.

“Wake up, Reag.” He shook her shoulder and saw, when lightning flashed, that her eyes were wide already. In that split second he saw, too, that she looked both frightened and disoriented. Was it the asthma that upset her, or waking up with him?

He felt around, his clumsy movement tipping over the small lamp on the guest room’s nightstand. After catching and righting it, he switched it on, flooding the small room with warm, yellow light. Reagan was sitting up against the headboard, the sheet pulled up to hide her breasts. One long, lean leg was exposed, however, reminding him of the things they’d done—and bringing his body to attention.

But her wheezing had worsened, and she avoided
meeting his gaze…as if the thought of what they’d shared embarrassed her.

“Sounds like you need your nebulizer,” he said, turning away to pull on his jeans. “Come on; I’ll help you set it up.”

She didn’t try to argue but crossed to the closet and took out an oversized fire-department T-shirt to hide her nakedness.

Something was wrong, he realized, and it wasn’t just her breathing. He wanted to ask about it, but first he needed to address the immediate problem of her wheezing.

Once more, lightning flickered, and he heard the first grumble of thunder closing in.

Fifteen minutes later, she was sitting on a barstool by the pass-through counter that looked into her kitchen. The nebulizer purred beside her, its medicated vapor curling from the plastic mask that fit over her nose and mouth.

Reagan lifted the mask to say, “I told you—you don’t have to fix that.”

Jack turned from the sink. Still shirtless, he held an Allen wrench in one hand and a pen-sized flashlight in the other. “Put that back on—right now.”

She’d frightened him at first, the way she couldn’t speak. Or simply didn’t for some reason, he thought uneasily.

“Damn bossy doctors,” she murmured and tugged the hem of her T-shirt to cover her bare leg.

He frowned, disconcerted by her newfound shyness, so at odds with their lovemaking only hours earlier. Though he wracked his memory, he could come up with no hint that something had been wrong. On the
contrary, he broke out in a feverish sweat, remembering her body pulsing around his, not once but time after time, and her throaty murmur rising to a cry of what could only be pure pleasure.

Hellfire. His jeans were feeling far too tight.

He consoled himself with the thought that at least he knew she was now breathing well enough to speak. Still, she avoided his gaze, fidgeting with a ragged nail instead.

“What’s wrong, Reagan?” he burst out, though he knew he shouldn’t speak to her until she finished her treatment. “Having second thoughts about what happened? Is that it?”

She flinched, then gave her head a barely perceptible shake. Lifting the mask again, she said, “I had a nightmare, that’s all.”

Replacing the mask, she quickly returned to fiddling with her thumbnail. He thought he saw her shudder, as if with an unpleasant memory.

Did she always have so many bad dreams? Or did they only trouble her when he was staying over?

Unsure he wanted to know the answer, Jack turned back to the chore he’d taken on. Earlier, he had recalled what she’d said about the disposal being broken, and he’d gotten her to point out the drawer where she kept tools. Despite her protests, he’d started poking around in her sink, mainly to keep himself busy so he wouldn’t hover over her. Besides, he was fairly handy. Maybe he could save her the cost of a repairman, as well as another day wasted waiting for one to show up.

In the darkness outside, rain pattered against both the roof and the kitchen window, behind its row of potted herbs. Nearby, on the counter, two cups of herbal tea brewed and the sweet fragrance of chamomile per
fumed the air. Maybe it was the afterglow of sex—a connection that had stunned him with its power—or maybe it was the warmth and light of the small kitchen against night’s overarching presence, the sight of the sleeping dog sprawled near his feet, and the feel of the worn old wood-handled tool he held, but he was overwhelmed with the sensation that he belonged here: not necessarily here, in this old house, but beside Reagan Hurley.

The same woman you’ve been giving nightmares.

The next peal of thunder was louder and closer than the ones before it. The sound curled around the small house with the sinuous menace of a huge snake strangling a rabbit.

Unhappy with the direction of his thoughts, Jack scrounged around for a new subject.

“You know, it’s possible the rain’s set off the mold spores,” he commented as he peered down the drain and used the Allen wrench to try to start the disposal spinning. “And they’re heavier at night anyway. If you’re allergic to them—”

“I thought you said you weren’t my doctor.” She must have lifted the mask again, because her voice was clearer.

Something was stuck down the disposal, he realized. Maneuvering the flashlight, he said, “That doesn’t mean I stop being a doctor when I’m with you. I was just thinking that if you get testing and find out mold’s the problem, maybe you can get things under control.”

There. He saw something sticking up, something that looked a hell of a lot like the corner of a Manila folder. But who in his right mind would shove cardboard down a drain?

He went back to the tool drawer and started digging. “Do you have a pair of tongs?”

When she didn’t answer, he glanced toward her, only to find her eyes glazed over as if she were lost in thought. Too late, he sensed he’d given her the idea that she could resume a career in firefighting. He thought of telling her it was a long shot. He could be wrong about the allergy, for one thing, or it might be one of many factors.

Yet he couldn’t bring himself to take away her hope, so instead, he repeated his question.

She gestured toward another drawer, where he found a pair of ice tongs. Sliding them into the drain, he grasped a corner of the folder, only to have it tear when he attempted to pull loose the wedged item.

The torn bit that came free told him he was wrong about the Manila folder. It was instead a heavy ivory paper, the sort of high-quality stock people used to print their resumes or formal invitations. Where was it he had last seen something similar?

He remembered. It had been the business card Sabrina McMillan had given him, not her own but the one belonging to the administrator of a trust. The Trust for Compassionate Service, that was it.

But the next scrap he worked loose from the disposal was no card. For one thing, it was too big. For another, some of the lettering was clearly visible.

Reagan cut off the nebulizer when a change in its hum signaled it was empty. “What’d you find?” she asked.

Though Jack strained his ears, he caught no sign of wheezing. Thank God, she was responsive to the medication.

“I’m pretty sure it’s your high-school diploma,” he
said. “What’s left of it, at any rate. Why would anyone…you didn’t shove it down there, did you?”

“Of course not.”

The look she shot him was insulted. But at least she
was
looking at him again. Maybe it had been a simple nightmare troubling her and nothing at all to do with him.

He wanted to believe it so badly that he grasped on to the thought with all his might.

“I thought the authorities went over this place with a fine-tooth comb,” he said.

“Mostly they concentrated on the bedroom and the window where the—uh—the intruder climbed inside. I haven’t been home much, so I didn’t know the disposal was jammed until this morning. And I never figured it had anything to do with the break in. It’s not the first time I’ve had trouble with it.”

“Maybe we should call the cops or Special Agent What’s-His-Name—the FBI guy?”

“You mean Casper the Unfriendly Ghost? The ringbanger.”

Jack snapped his fingers, thinking of the pale man in the dark suit. “Lambert—that’s the one. And come to think of it, he does have a thing going with that damned ring.”

She shook her head. “I’m not letting them tear up the rest of my house. And besides…”

She paused, looking strained and thoughtful.

“Besides, what?” he prompted.

“Besides, I have an idea—about my diploma, that is. Think about it. Why would anyone care enough about that diploma—that one thing—to destroy it, especially like this?”

Surely there were more efficient ways, Jack thought.
The culprit could have shredded it, burned it, or better yet, simply taken it if he had wanted to be certain it was ruined. But this…

“It’s almost like it was something personal against you,” Jack said. “Seems to me, whoever did this had to be someone local. Someone who knows you, more than likely. What we need to come up with is some kind of link, someone who would…What are you thinking, Reagan? Do you know?”

“I’m not—I’m not sure, but there is one connection. One I can’t quite dismiss.”

“Connection to what?” he asked.

“To…”

She clamped down on whatever she had been about to say so abruptly that he wondered if she was protecting someone.

“Are you thinking about
Peaches?
” he asked, his mind spinning back to the day Reagan had said something about her neighbor tripping circuit breakers by using too many of her appliances at once. Still, he couldn’t begin to imagine any reason the neighborly transsexual would destroy an easily replaced diploma, especially considering how friendly and helpful she’d appeared.

But Reagan’s head was shaking. “No way would Peaches do something so bizarre. I’m afraid I was thinking about Beau.”

“Beau? What possible connection could he have to your—”

“We graduated from the same high school. Joe Rozinski lived near there, and I was staying with him and his first wife then. Beau and I didn’t go at the same time—he’s a few years younger—but we used to talk about the things we both remembered. Teachers we’d
had in common, classes we’d both hated, how it had felt to be on the outside. We had that in common, too. I came in as a junior and never really found my niche. And Beau might be a lot of women’s concept of eye candy, but he’s never really understood how to connect with people.”

Jack let the thought sink in for a few moments before saying, “I guess that makes sense, him destroying something that represented what the two of you shared. But when could he have done it? Are you—are you thinking he could have been the one—the one who broke in last week? The one who hurt my sister?”

The idea rolled over him with the force and fury of an eighteen-wheeler. Beau LaRouche had been enraged the morning after his captain’s death. Angry enough to threaten him, then use his fists on Reagan. And Beau had been here when Luz Maria came to get him.

“That son of a bitch,” he breathed. “I’ll kick his big, dumb ass all the way to—”