To his annoyance, she edged around him, reached into the fridge and pulled out the eggs. “You sit down. I’m happy to scramble some eggs—”
Snatching the carton out of her hands, he pointed her to a chair at the table. “Not this time.” This time? What was up with the implication that they’d have breakfast together again? Where’d that come from? “You sit down. Be a guest.”
“But—”
“Sit.”
She sat. Grudgingly and with a frown, but she put her ass on the stool and kept it there. With a last warning glare, he ran through his inventory again. What could he—
Orange juice! There was orange juice concentrate in the freezer. Pay dirt. Now to find the pitcher ...
The woman, it turned out, could not sit still and shut up. Fidgeting as though she didn’t know what to do with herself, she smoothed her hand over the speckled countertop. “Nice. Granite?”
“Yeah. This little kitchen remodel was one of the last things my mother did.”
Her face fell. “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. I didn’t know—”
“Oh, she’s not dead. She’s in assisted living.”
“Oh. Good. What about your father?”
“He died a year ago. Just after their forty-fifth anniversary.”
“Forty-five years? That’s wonderful. Were they still speaking to each other?”
That gave him a grin. “Well, there was some bickering. But they were in love with each other until the day he died.”
She withdrew a little. The cooling of her spirit was palpable, as though Jack Frost had poked his head in the room and blasted them with his icy breath. “My parents have been married for thirty years. They don’t have a good marriage. I don’t think they ever did.”
The answer was as plain as the eggs in his hand, but he asked anyway. “Can they help you now?”
“No,” she said flatly.
“But you need—”
“ No.”
That was that, then.
Only that wasn’t that at all. It was another layer to this fascinating woman, another mystery he wanted to solve.
And when the hell had he turned into Columbo?
With nothing else to do, she scanned what she could see of the house, a faint and—he hoped—approving smile on her lips. A framed picture over the table seemed to hold her special interest.
“Houseboat, eh?”
Though he saw the weathered and faded family snapshot every day, he rarely looked at it. Too painful now that he was pretty much all that was left of his little family. There he was, age twelve-ish, sandwiched between his father and mother on the boat’s deck on a perfect summer day, their fishing poles standing next to them, Dexter’s catch, a respectable catfish, dangling from his line.
“Yeah. That boat was my father’s pride and joy. He was a police officer and they saved and saved for that boat. I remember the day we went out on her the first time.” He shrugged away the bitter and tried to focus on the sweet. “She’s mine now.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s her name?”
“Breezin’.”
“Breezin’. I like that.”
Hurtling out of nowhere, slamming into him like a drunken hit-and-run driver, came the image of her on the boat with him ... another perfect summer’s day ... laughter ... sunshine ... paradise.
The image (Want? Craving? Need?) didn’t help his equilibrium.
Focus on the eggs, idiot.
She stared at the picture for another minute, and then her smile was swallowed up by a massive yawn. Exhaustion seemed to be claiming her. Resting her elbows on the counter, she ran her unbandaged fingertips over her face and then jerked her head up with surprise. “Where the hell are my eyebrows?” she demanded.
He’d been cracking the eggs into a bowl, but now he paused to shoot her a wry grin. “You singed them off during your misguided attempt to run into the burning house.”
Getting the idea, she sifted her fingers through her short, curly hair, which was also looking the worse for the wear thanks to the fire, and her eyes widened with comprehension. “Oh, my God. Don’t look at me. I’m horrible.”
“Not quite.”
“Oh, sure. You say that now, but what about when I have to pencil in some brows and wind up looking like the Joker from Batman?”
He snorted back a laugh, nearly sloshing the eggs onto the counter with his fork.
“Why did you let me in here, Brady? I foisted my dog on you, I have no hair and no eyebrows, and probably look like Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer. I’m sure I smell like smoke, and I’m probably trailing soot all over your nice house. I’m not even good for cooking breakfast. Why don’t you kick me out?”
She was sixty percent joking, yeah, but there was far too much genuine curiosity in her tone. As though she couldn’t conceive of a world where she mattered if she wasn’t waiting on a man hand and foot, if she didn’t look her best at any given time.
Something came over him. The eggs could wait.
Turning to give her his undivided attention, he caught her gaze. Held it. Waited until she’d stilled, a flush creeping over her soot-and-tear-streaked cheeks.
“Since you apparently never heard it from Kareem, let me be the first one to tell you: You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to look like anything. You just have to be to Kira. That’s more than enough for anybody.”
She stared at him, her eyes wide and unreadable.
Now his cheeks were burning. Where had that little declaration come from? Who put all that emotion into his husky voice? It was time to dial back the tension level in there, so he shrugged.
“But I’m happy to give you a paper bag to put over your head, if that would make you feel better.”
One arrested beat passed, and then she smiled. A real, honest to God, ear-to-ear smile that made him feel awed and wondrous, like the first man in the world to ever behold a rainbow.
Jesus, she was beautiful.
He might have stared forever, with the eggs half stirred and the pan smoking on the range behind him, but the phone—one of those old landline deals that hung on the wall—rang, snapping him free of her magic.
“Phone,” she said.
Screw the phone. He wracked his brain, tried to imagine someone whose call was important enough to interrupt this moment, and came up with no one. Not even the director. Hell, not even the president.
He shrugged. “The machine’ll get it.”
Rarely had he regretted a decision so quickly. The machine clicked on, his message played, and a throaty female voice purred, promising sexual availability like a bitch in heat at a dog park. The sound had a precise clarity that he’d never heard outside a movie theater with Dolby surround sound, and he froze, wishing he’d switched to the phone company’s automated voice mail system when he’d had the chance.
“Hey, baby—pick up the phone. Pick up the phoooone. Dexter? You there, baby? Hello? I missed you last night. And the night before that, and the night before that. Is there a reason you’re not answering your cell phone? Hello? Hello-ooo?”
Belinda. Shit. Ignoring Kira’s wickedly amused smile, he lunged for the receiver and snatched it off the wall before Belinda really got going with the sex talk, which was a distinct possibility.
“Ah, hey, Belinda,” he muttered, turning his back on Kira. “What’s up?”
“Hey! You are there! Are you screening my calls?”
“No, it’s just been a busy couple of days. Can I, uh, call you back?”
“Okay.” He could hear the pout in her voice. “But what about tonight?”
“I’ll have to, ah, get back to you on that. Okay?”
“Okay, but—”
“Great. Bye.”
There may have been more, but he hung up before he could hear it. If he knew anything about Belinda—and he did—the punishment later would be dire, but that felt like a distant and unimportant consideration right now for reasons he chose not to explore.
Cheeks burning, he turned bac
k to Kira while on his way to the stove and the cooking eggs.
“Who was that?” she asked with bright and unabashed nosiness.
Using the voice and the face that made his men shrink into chastised and fidgety preschoolers when they got out of line, he shot her a glare. “None of your damn business.”
This wouldn’t slow her down, not if her widening smirk was any indication. In fact, she smelled blood and zeroed in for the attack. “Sounded like a booty call, is all I’m saying.”
“Okay. Why are you talking?”
“You’ve never been married, have you, Brady? You should get married. Don’t let my poor example stop you.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not? Don’t tell me you’re a”—she made quotation marks with her fingers—“confirmed bachelor. You’re not on the down low, are you, Brady?”
This made him crack an unwilling smile. “Having fun?”
“Well, you’re not getting any younger—”
Wasn’t that the truth? Next to her early twenties, his thirty-nine felt like a hundred and five, easy.
“—and how’re you going to have a long and happy marriage like your parents’ if you don’t get started soon?”
There was an easy answer to this, and he gave it to women all the time, right up front at the beginning of any sexual relationship: he was married to his career. Allied answers? He didn’t have the time and inclination to devote to a serious relationship and/or he didn’t want any part of a woman crazy enough to get seriously hooked up with a DEA agent.
So it was with some surprise that he opened his mouth and none of those things came out. He stared at her. “I’ll know when the right woman comes along.”
This seemed to unsettle her. She floundered and her smile slipped, despite her efforts to keep it in place. “Maybe that was her on the phone.”
“That wasn’t her.”
“Oh.” Ducking her head, she looked away—a little desperately, he thought—and focused on something over his shoulder. “Brady! The eggs!”
Huh? “What? Shit.” Wheeling around, he snatched the smoking pan off the burner and dropped it, clattering, into the sink. He ran some water into it, generating a blinding cloud of steam that engulfed his head. “Shit,” he said again, sucking his burning fingers into his mouth. Damn hot handle. Brilliant. There was one edible thing in the house, and he burned it. King of Hospitality—that was him. “This is why you shouldn’t yack so much,” he told her. “You’re a distraction.”
“Well, sorry.”
“You should be. Luckily, I’ve got more eggs.”
“Great. Your cooking skills are inspiring a lot of confidence. I can hardly wait to eat them.”
“Keep it up and you’ll get the burned ones.”
They laughed together for one delicious moment, and then, with zero warning, her face contorted into a sob. Trying to choke it off, she slapped a hand over her mouth. When that didn’t work, she rested her elbows on the table and buried her face in her hands, shoulders shaking.
“Kira.”
Agonized, he took a step toward her. He was a strong man, yeah, but there were some things even he couldn’t do, and watching Kira Gregory cry without taking her into his arms was one of them.
But when he reached out to her, she pulled back and swiped at her wet eyes, already embarrassed at this normal show of emotion on what had to be one of the worst nights of her life.
“Sorry,” she said again.
He dropped his hand, uncertain now because God knew he didn’t do emotions well. “Don’t be.”
She stared into his face, searching. “Can I tell you something, Brady?”
Okay. This was another one of those questions that should have a simple answer. No, he should say. As a man with a firm and abiding belief in rules and boundaries, he knew when he’d crossed them, and he’d been doing that with alarming frequency where Kira was concerned. He shouldn’t have come home with the drug lord’s wife, shouldn’t have agreed to watch her damn dog. Shouldn’t have offered her breakfast, shouldn’t have admired her beauty and courage or anything else about her. Playing true confessions with her now and offering comfort also fell firmly into the shouldn’t column.
When had all his boundaries become so blurred?
No, Brady. Tell her no.
He started to speak, no longer in control of anything that came out of his mouth. “You can tell me anything.”
Her chin quivered and a shuddering breath rippled through her body. “I’m so tired. I’m so tired of being scared.”
He couldn’t answer.
“I’m scared of being Kareem’s wife and scared of walking out on him. I’m scared of making my own way in the world. I’m scared of dying without ever really being free. I’m scared that a mistake I made when I was nineteen will always be the defining thing about my life. I’m scared I’ll always be scared.”
“Why don’t you try not being so hard on yourself ?”
She let this question pass. “I don’t think he’s dead. Nothing could ever be that easy with Kareem.”
“We’ll know soon enough. In the meantime, you’re going to eat a plate of eggs and drink some juice to keep your strength up. And then you’ll handle whatever comes your way because you’ve got the courage for it. Okay?”
“You think so?”
“I know so.”
One side of her mouth curled as she dabbled at her eyes with one of the blue paper napkins from the holder on the table. “Okay. Maybe I should wash my face?”
“Okay. The bathroom’s down there.” He tipped his head toward the hall.
“Great.”
And then, to his absolute horror—and, worse, to his absolute, heart-stopping, breath-freezing pleasure—she stood and did the thing she’d done once before: patted his jaw with her soft hand and kissed his cheek.
“Thank you, Brady,” she said, and slipped away, taking his brain with her.
Undone, he watched her go and tried to ignore the persistent tingle where her skin had brushed his. And then he made busy work for his fumbling hands.
What had he been doing? Making eggs?
Okay. He could do this.
With remarkable efficiency now that his distraction was out of the room, he scrambled up a second set of eggs and made the juice. When he’d fixed their plates and set them on the table, it occurred to him, for the first time, that he hadn’t heard the water run in the bathroom.
He set off down the hall to find her, but she wasn’t in the living room, the half bath off the living room, or his cluttered office/weight room.
Where the hell—?
Two more steps, and he found her. In his bedroom. On his bed.
Jesus.
He watched her, his heart contracting. It wasn’t a pretty scene, and if any photographers from Playboy magazine wandered through the neighborhood and peered through the window, they’d keep going without taking a single shot.
Sprawled spread-eagle on her belly, Kira lay diagonally across the king-sized bed, looking as though she’d staggered in from a trek through the heart of the Sahara and barely made it to the bed before collapsing. Her head was nowhere near a pillow; one arm, meanwhile, dangled off the side, and her soft, even breathing was the kind of thrilling music he wasn’t sure he’d ever heard.
Max had assumed a post on the floor near her curled fingers and had his snout resting on his front paws. Looking up through drowsy eyes when Dexter crossed the threshold, he thumped his tail once or twice in greeting, yawned, and curled into what was evidently a more comfortable position.
This unexpected silence, after the night’s chaos, gave Dexter the chance to think a few thoughts he’d been postponing. Like how he didn’t know what the hell he thought he was doing with Kira Gregory, but he didn’t plan to stop doing it. Like how this house felt different—better—when she was in it. Like how Kareem’s death had unlocked a strange feeling of hope inside him, and it had nothing to do with his wishes for a drug-free Cincinnati and
everything to do with her.
Standing in the doorway, he discovered, was way too far away. It seemed dangerous to move any closer, but his body wasn’t counting his vote. He crept to the bed. At this distance, his fingers began to flex and itch, desperate for the feel of her skin. There were so many things he was hungry to know. The curled silk of her hair, for one, even if it was dirty with soot. The curve of her brow (the unsinged part, anyway), the smooth arch of her neck, the tenderness of her lips. Any of those were his for the touching right now. She wouldn’t wake up; he’d stake his life on it. Now was his moment, the one he almost felt he’d willed into existence—who would know?
He would know. That was the problem.
If he touched her without her permission, he’d be no better than Kareem, the man who’d violated her. And if there was one thing that Kira absolutely, positively needed to know about him, it was this:
He wasn’t Kareem. Not even close.
So he wouldn’t touch her. Yet.
But shit, man. Shit. More than anything else, he wanted to touch her.
In his life he’d seen some moving sights. The Grand Canyon when he was a kid came to mind, and so did the newborn face of his nephew, and the reunion he’d once witnessed between a neighbor girl down the street and her dad when he came home from the war.
None of that had prepared him for this.
If he lived another sixty years, he doubted anything would stir him quite as much as the sight of Kira, fully clothed and asleep on his bed.
Chapter 11
After drawing the bedroom shades to block out the sun’s blinding glare, covering Kira with a blanket, and leaving her a note saying that he’d gone to the office but would be back soon, Brady left.
He did not go to the office. At least not right away.
“Hey,” he said when Belinda opened the door of her condominium. “Sorry to just show up like this—”
“It’s okay.” She broke into a delighted and dimpled smile that made him feel like a two-inch layer of green pond scum. “Come on in.”
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