Seeing Red (8 page)

Around them the place began to hum with conversation and laughter. Summer concentrated on breathing and hanging balloons. It wasn’t too crowded yet, she assured herself. Not crowded at all. Just because her toes had been stepped on twice already and she couldn’t see the front door…

“Here. Pour.” Diana handed her the champagne and a tray of glasses. “And look alive,” she said, then turned to grab Madeline.

“Oh, no,” Summer said when they headed toward the closest exit. “You two are supposed to do this.
I’m
the one leaving—”

Madeline pointed to the door.

“Yeah, I see. Alley cat at ten o’clock,” Diana noted.

A tall, dark-haired woman dressed in a beaded vintage dress entered and took a long gaze around her.

“The suspense was probably killing her,” Diana said.

Madeline nodded grimly.

“Look at her scoping out the stock,” Diana said. “So rude.”

Summer watched the tall brunette sniff at the hors d’oeuvres with a curling lip.

“Freak,” Diana muttered.

Madeline nodded again, popping her gum in her jaw.

“Yeah, well.” Summer didn’t care about Ally. She cared about being able to breathe, which she suddenly couldn’t do in here. She looked at the door. “I’ve got to run.”

Diana smiled as she took over pouring the champagne. “Of course you do.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you always run. That’s what I heard your mom say to my mom once. She was crying when she said it.”

Summer’s chest caved in as if she’d been sucker punched. “Maybe no one ever told you it’s not nice to repeat things people say.”

Diana lifted a shoulder. “Maybe not.”

Summer stared at her, then let out a careful breath. “You know what? The hell with this.” She moved away from her and Madeline, and toward the front door. People were swarming now, pressing close. Her breathing quickened again.
Damn it.
She pushed her way through and was nearly there when her wrist was snagged.

“Oh no you don’t,” said Aunt Tina.

Summer stared at her aunt’s stubborn face, her chest cinching down. The bell over the door tinkled noisily. Two more people entered, laughing and talking. Summer swallowed hard as the room, so large only moments ago, began to close in on her. “I’ve really got to—”

“Stay. Eat. Talk. Be merry.” Tina thrust a flute of champagne into her hand and smiled. “Just look at your mom, darling. She looks so happy tonight, doesn’t she?”

Somehow Summer forced herself to turn and look. Indeed Camille was smiling as she greeted some of their guests. She wore a beautiful flowing gown in a pale silver that seemed to make her skin glow. She caught Summer’s eye and waved.

Waved. Summer’s throat tightened a little as she waved back. Impossibly, the crowd grew again, pouring in now, pressing against her to get by. With the front door open, she caught a whiff of the smoke from the fire she’d seen earlier. Spots appeared in her vision.

Too close. Too tight.

“Well, would you look at that,” Tina murmured.

Kenny was handing her mother a flute of champagne. He wore khaki trousers and a crisp, white button-down. If he was armed, the gun was hidden. The tall, handsome fire marshal pushed up his glasses and smiled at Camille, who smiled back. An open, sweet smile.

Summer hadn’t seen many of those. Probably because she hadn’t been around to see them.

You always run.

Summer closed her eyes. “I really have to go.”

“He’s awfully handsome,” Tina said. “I think he’s attracted to her.”

Summer opened her eyes. Camille had put her hand on Kenny’s arm, leaning in to listen to him.

“She does seem happy,” Summer allowed.

“Yes.” Tina hugged Summer. “And darling, you being here is part of the reason.”

“Then why does she keep trying to get me to leave?”

“It’s what she expects from you.” Tina tugged lightly on a strand of Summer’s hair. “So prove her wrong. Now go on, go join the fray.” She nudged Summer forward to mingle. “And for God’s sake, smile!”

There had to be a hundred people here already. Surely that was against the code. In fact, Kenny should be kicking people out. Summer craned her neck to find him but he just kept talking to her mother…

Damn it. She tossed back her champagne and waited for the kick. Nothing but her chest tightening further. All around her was talking and laughter, and yet suddenly there wasn’t enough air for her lungs. Each new person sucked even more oxygen from the room. She knew that it was just in her head but that didn’t make it any less real. The walls continued to close in, until she couldn’t draw a full breath at all, but she was good at pretending nothing was wrong. She even managed to keep a smile on her face despite the line of sweat trickling down her spine as she pressed her back to a wall and wished for another drink.

Braden walked past her without a word, then stopped and turned back. “You okay?”

“I need a drink.”

He shot her an odd look but grabbed a flute of champagne from a tray and handed it over.

She gulped it down, but her throat remained parched. “Thanks.”

“Sure.” He wore his usual black, though his standard cynical smile was gone. “You might want to wait a few before your next one.”

“I already need another one.”

“Yeah.” He scrubbed a hand over his mouth and looked longingly at a tray of champagne. “I hear that.”

Madeline, and what looked like an entire gaggle of her friends, passed by giggling and teetering and smelling like cigarettes as they eyed the champagne. When she caught Summer watching her, she stuck out her tongue and moved on.

“So, is it being home again?” Braden asked. “Or the crowds?”

When Summer’s gaze whipped to his, he lifted a brow. “A shot in the dark.”

“A good one.” She set down the empty flute. “And for the record, it’s both.” She took a deeper look and saw the stress in his eyes even though he’d done a damn good job at keeping it to himself. He was just as unhappy at this party as she was. “How about you?”

“I’m perfectly fine.”

He was lying, but who was she to press? Besides, at that moment, she caught Chloe’s baleful stare from across the room. Oops. She was talking to Chloe’s property, wasn’t she. She lifted her hands and wriggled her fingers, showing her territorial cousin she was still hands off.

But when she turned back to Braden, he was gone. Without him standing in front of her, buffering her view of everyone milling around her, her breathing hitched again. It seemed as if the number of people had doubled in the past few minutes. Tripled. Her chest hurt, the spots were back, and she again staggered for the door. Fairy lights decorated the entire front façade, and the helium balloons she’d tied to the canopy were floating in the light breeze. She saw all this in her peripheral vision as she finally burst out.

And crashed directly into a hard chest.

Joe’s hands came up to grip her shoulders, probably because she’d just about knocked him flat on his ass. He stood there holding her upright, a faint five o’clock shadow shading his jaw, hair weeks past needing a haircut, smelling like soap and man. An involuntary pained sound escaped her and she slapped a hand to her mouth to keep the next one in.

Hands still on her shoulders, he bent and peered into her face. “What’s the matter, Red?”

Oh, God. His eyes. The haunting sadness was back in the swirling whiskey depths tonight, and it reached her. He’d always been able to reach her with a look. “N-n-nothing.”

He lifted her chin with a finger. “Don’t add lying to your sins. You okay?”

His voice was low, and somehow devastatingly sexy. And the way he asked her what was wrong, as if he really cared, as if maybe, at least for a moment, he’d forgotten to hold back with her. Her throat simply closed up, and all she could do was shake her head. No. No, she wasn’t okay. She might never be again.

His hand, big and warm, came up, tracing her hairline with a long finger, pushing her hair behind her ear. The gesture was an old one, and she nearly lost it right then. She was holding on by a thread here, and if anyone could break her, he could. But she knew that while
she
needed a connection tonight, any connection, he did not. At least not from her.

Pushing free, she ran across the street, heading for the beach. She needed the cool night air, the clarity the pounding surf would give her, the wide open space.

“Red?”

She kept going. It wasn’t the smartest thing she’d ever done, racing away from one of the very people she wanted to prove herself to, but the minute her feet hit the sand she kicked off her sandals and kept running, hard and fast, not looking back, trying desperately not to look back.

J
oe stared after Summer, not so far gone in his own miserable evening that he hadn’t seen the shine of tears in her eyes, or the hitch of panic in her breathing.

It was none of his business. She was none of his business. And so telling himself, he took another step toward the front door of Creative Interiors II, then stopped. “Ah, hell.” Turning around, he caught a fleeting glance of her racing into the night as if the devil himself were on her heels. She wore a soft white sundress over her tanned skin, the material gleaming beneath the moonlight as she kicked up her heels, never slowing.

Not his problem.

And yet he didn’t go inside. He stood there talking himself out of making yet another mistake in a long series of such mistakes he was getting so proficient at making.

“Idiot,” he muttered, and crossed the street to the beach. He stepped onto the sand, kicked off his shoes. “First a jerk, now an idiot.”

He’d kept up with his physical training even though technically he was no longer fighting fires. He ran in the mornings, several miles a day when he could manage the time, and hated every sweaty, struggling minute of it. But he had to really kick it in gear to match Summer’s long-legged even stride.

The dark beach was deserted except for the occasional other crazy person out running. After about a mile, she slowed, thank God, and then came to a sudden halt, breathing like a misused racehorse, head down, feet in the water as a wave lapped her toes.

Joe came to a halt besides her and let the cool water hit his feet as well while he bent over and tried to catch his breath.

“You’re a better runner than you used to be,” she said.

He had to laugh between gulping gasps for air. “That’s what happens when you drop seventy-five pounds.”

She tilted her head and looked at him in the moonlight. The waves crashed onto the shore but other than that, the night felt quiet. Like the calm before a storm.

“I never thought of you as overweight,” she murmured.

“If that’s true, you were the only one who didn’t.”

“I liked you just as you were.”

“Really?” Still breathing humiliatingly hard, he picked up a smooth stone and chucked it into the pounding surf. “You had a funny way of showing it, cutting off years of friendship without a word, without so much as a ‘fuck you, Joe.’”

She squeezed her eyes shut tight at that. “Does it help to hear me say I regret it?”

“Not really.”

She pressed her fingers to her eyes. “I should have had more than two glasses of champagne.” Then she sighed and looked at him. “
Why
doesn’t it help to hear it?”

“It was a lifetime ago.” He’d gotten over it. Mostly. “We were just kids.”

“Yeah. Kids.” She wriggled her toes, including the one with a tiny little crystal ring on it that looked incredibly sexy.

“You moved on,” he said. “And then so did I.”

She nodded at that, sadly, and though he didn’t understand why, he felt an urge to draw her into his arms. He wanted to stroke away her pain. He wanted to do more than that too, but that would be the mother of all mistakes because with her, one touch would never be enough. “What happened at the opening?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing made you cry?”

The waves were white and frothy by moonlight, and she didn’t take her eyes off them. “I wasn’t crying.”

“You looked like you were having a panic attack.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Did someone hurt you?”

“No.”

“Did someone say something to you?”

“No.”

He began to wish
he’d
had two glasses of champagne. “Red. Are you going to tell me what happened?”

“It’s nothing. It’s me.” She threw up her hands in the way she’d always had of talking with them. “I…don’t fit in here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve been gone too long.” The light wind whipped her hair around them. The ends hit his chest and arm. He used to fantasize about having her hair brush over him, but in his dreams she’d always been naked.

“I don’t have a place here,” she said.

“You have a place wherever you make it for yourself.” When she only stared at him, confused, she broke the heart he hadn’t realized she could still touch. “You used to be good at that,” he said. “Being happy anywhere, doing anything.”

She picked up a rock, threw it. “I guess being back is harder than I thought.”

“Because you never dealt with it.”

She chucked another pebble, her back to him now. “It.”

“The fire. Your dad’s death.”

He saw her flinch. Her shoulders were ramrod straight. “It’s hard to deal with an event you can’t remember,” she said softly.

He felt the surprise reverberate through him, and he pulled her around to face him. Her eyes were shadowed, troubled, and there he saw the shocking truth. “You really don’t remember the fire?”

“I remember being in the basement with you and Danny, and seeing the smoke. Then running up the stairs. That’s it.”

He’d always figured what had happened after that had to be her biggest nightmare, but had also figured she’d put enough time behind her to soften the horror. But that she’d never remembered, and had never really faced it because of that, hadn’t occurred to him. “Red—”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” She gave him a weak smile. “Not tonight.”

He opened his mouth, but she set a finger to his lips. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she repeated. “When I can see you had a rough one too.”

He thought of the fire scene he’d just left and tensed. “Yeah.”

“Can you tell me about it?”

No. Hell, no, but on the night air, over the sound of the waves, the screams came back to him. The sight of the body bag being carried out, the shape in it so small. So defenseless. He closed his eyes.

“Was it the fire I smelled earlier?”

“Probably.”

“What happened?”

“A bad residential fire. A little kid—” His throat closed. He shook his head.

“Oh, Joe.” She had a charm bracelet on her wrist, probably for good luck. She’d always believed in that stuff. It jangled when she skimmed her fingers over his. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, and squeezed his hand.

“I think it was arson,” he managed to say. Christ, he shouldn’t be telling her this. “I think his father killed him.”

Only she would know how that would get to him above all else, and with a soft sound, she stepped even closer. A breeze shuddered over them, and a strand of her hair slid over his jaw now, clinging to the stubble. He left it there.

“Do you ever think about him?” she asked quietly. “Your father?”

“No.” But lying to her had never been possible, and he let out a long breath. “Not that often.”

“My mother wrote me when he died last year. Did you two ever…get close?”

By the time his father had stopped drinking and had come along looking for forgiveness, Joe had been graduating from college and hadn’t been able to find any forgiveness within him. “No.”

He thought he’d said the word forcibly. With confidence. Without a hint of the doubts that sometimes plagued him. But Summer’s eyes searched his and read his deepest, most darkest thoughts, the way no one else ever had.
Ever.

“He didn’t deserve your forgiveness,” she said fiercely, holding his hand tight as she brought it up to her heart, cushioned between the soft warmth of her breasts. “When I think about all those times you came into my window, bruised, bleeding—”

“Red, don’t.”

“He didn’t deserve your forgiveness,” she said again, and keeping their fingers entwined over her heart, looked up at the stars. “Sometimes, when I’m out on a trek, in the wilderness with just a handful of people, it’s easy to forget all the cruelty in this world. But you…you grew up with it. You have to see it all the time in your job. How do you do it?”

He shrugged. “Most people are basically good. The ones that aren’t, I can help put away. I just keep that in front of me I guess.”

She slowly shook her head. “I’ve been spoiled out there.”

“Speaking of that wilderness, when are you going back to it?”

“I told you. I’m staying to help, until all the work for the fire is done.”

“And given your mood here tonight, it’s going so well.”

“I know.” She let out a low laugh. “It’s just that I feel so tense, all the time. So uptight. So…unlike me.”

“What, no special crystals? No special breathing exercises?”

She played with her bracelet. “I don’t think they work anymore.”

She looked so devastated over that, he searched his brain for a way to help her. “You used to hike to relieve stress. Straight up Palomar Mountain, remember? I hated doing that with you almost as much as I hated jogging.”

With a low laugh, she let go of his hand and bent to pick up a rock. “Actually, I was thinking of another stress reliever entirely.”

He watched as she chucked it hard. “Like what?”

“Like the kind that involves the oblivion of a good orgasm.”

In the dark her self-deprecating smile didn’t shoot to his heart, but straight between his thighs.

“Don’t worry,” she said quickly. “I’m not propositioning you. I met Cindy, I know you’re taken.” Her next rock took a trip halfway to China.

“She dumped me,” he heard himself say.

She looked at him for a long moment. “Before or after the lunch special?”

“I really wish you hadn’t heard that part.” He shook his head, surprised to find himself embarrassed. “We, uh, didn’t. Not that day, anyway.”

She let out a little smile. “A shame for you.”

“Red.” He grimaced. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

“Okay.” She looked at her toes, then back into his eyes. “I’m sorry if you got hurt.”

“I didn’t.”

“Getting dumped is never painless.”

He shrugged.

For a long moment, she was quiet, reflective. Then she asked the million dollar question. “Did you ever wonder what it would be like between us?”

He looked into her warm, dreamy eyes and felt everything within him react. “This is a bad idea.”

“What? We’re just talking.”

“Yeah, about what it’d be like between us.”

“All I’m getting at is how can one really great night without strings be a bad idea?”

“Red.” Christ. He was only human here. “We have a past. That makes it impossible to do the no strings thing.”

“Hey, I can make a no strings night work with just about anyone.” Her smile turned self-mocking. “It’s a special talent of mine.”

He’d held the same talent. In fact, in a true ironic twist, the last person he’d had any deep, emotional ties to had been her. Knowing that, there was no way for him to make just talking to her casual, much less a physical intimacy.

If they slept together, she’d do him in for sure.

“You know what I want?” she asked softly.

His body leapt in spite of himself. Yeah, he was pretty clear on what she wanted. To escape, to forget. She’d just never wanted it from
him
before. “The oblivion of a good orgasm.”

She closed her eyes, hiding. She was good at that too. “Besides an orgasm. I want to go home, Joe.”

“That’s easy enough.”

“I need a ride.”

No. Don’t offer.
Don’t say a word.
“I’ll take you,” his mouth said, clearly disconnected from his brain.

She smiled at him, the kind that used to grab him by the throat and squeeze until he couldn’t breathe. Then she nudged his shoulder with hers, an old gesture that brought him back years.

He nudged her back, and with a laugh, she staggered toward the water, laughing, losing her balance. He grabbed her wrist and pulled her upright, knocking her right into his body.

Bracing herself with a hand to his chest, her fingers curling into him, her grin slowly faded. “You know what gets me?”

“Um…” His mind raced. “The ridiculous price of gasoline?”

“No.”

“The amount of crumbs at the bottom of a box of cereal?”

“Silly.” She smiled, but it was a sad one. “What gets me is that you sound the same.” Her fingers tested the strength of him, from pec to pec. “But you sure don’t feel the same.”

Her touch made him want to roll over like a puppy and expose his underside. He stepped back so that her hand fell free. “We’d better go.” He turned toward the way they’d come, flinching when he felt her hand on his arm.

She just danced her fingers to his shoulder, down his spine, slowly but not tentatively, tearing away his defenses as only she could. “Don’t,” he managed.

Her other hand joined the fray.

God, don’t.
“Red—”

“You feel good, Joe. Warm. Strong.”

Not strong enough to resist this, but he gave it a valiant effort. He had to, or lose it, because with her, only with her he felt far too vulnerable.

Take that, Kenny,
he thought.
I did it. I found the woman I could actually let in.

Only I can’t really do it because she can’t be trusted to stay in.