SmokingHot

by Anne Marsh

  He hadn’t been aware that they had a relationship. “You asked me to help you work through Kade’s bucket list.”

  “Uh-huh.” Her face wasn’t encouraging. She shoved her glass at Laura without looking at the other woman. “Fill it up.”

  He looked at Laura. “Is this your usual Sunday morning plan?”

  Katie’s hand slapped his knee. “I’m right here.”

  “Yeah. You sure are.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” She eyed him suspiciously.

  Laura passed the glass back. Right in front of Tye’s face like he wasn’t there. “That’s the last inch. We’ve killed the bottle.”

  He wasn’t so sure they had, but Laura was looking out for Katie, and that he was on board with.

  “Damn.” Katie finished the glass, making a face at the orange juice pulp at the bottom. “That’s nasty. And, no, I’m not drunk.”

  His lips twitched. “I never said you were.”

  “You were thinking it,” she accused.

  He was close enough that her knees brushed his arms when she leaned over to set her glass on the porch floor. He caught a whiff of her perfume, all those small, feminine tells. Some kind of floral detergent. Warmth of her skin. And Katie... something that was one hundred percent, uniquely Katie. He dimly registered that he was most definitely in her personal space, but backing off was no longer part of the mission plan.

  Nor was falling over.

  No, the only danger he was in here was of falling for her.

  “Why are you here?”

  “Hear, hear,” Laura chimed in.

  He shot her a look. “You’re not helping.”

  “Do you want me to?”

  Maybe. He ignored her. “We had a deal,” he said. “I’ll help you with your bucket list project. You’ll give me art lessons.”

  “You spurned my art lessons,” Katie pointed out.

  Jesus. He shrugged. “I’m free this afternoon. In fact, I’m free right now. We could get started right away. You told me you like to pay your debts. Get square.”

  “Even-Steven is the best way,” Laura chimed in.

  ***

  The high-pitched, woe-is-me chirp of her Siamese butted into the conversation. Or negotiations. Katie wasn’t sure which. Tye flashed her an inquiring look as the chirp got closer. And louder.

  She shrugged. “My cat gets lonely.”

  “And?” The idea of a lonely cat was clearly a foreign concept in Tye’s world.

  “He brings her presents.” Laura laughed, standing up. “He’s really partial to socks. You kids be good. I’m going to go check on the Pillsbury special.”

  Tye waved a hand in Laura’s direction, but he didn’t take his eyes off Katie’s face. She had no idea what was going on in his head, other than this sudden and inexplicable desire on his part for art lessons. She opened her mouth to prod further, but just then Angus waddled through the door, twelve pounds of brown and white angst. Something pink dangled from his mouth.

  “Most guys settle for flowers.” There was no missing the laughter in Tye’s voice.

  She squinted at the cat and Angus dropped his present at her feet. Merde. That was her laundry day thong. A kind of pink that didn’t exist in nature, with little bows marching down the mesh front. She’d left the laundry basket on the bed and Angus had helped himself like he always did. At least it was clean. Probably.

  Before she could react, however, Tye scooped the thong up in one big hand and eyed it. “Nice.”

  Chapter Eight

  Tye had never been a cat person, but he could definitely like Katie’s Siamese. Or, more accurately, he could get used to a cat that brought him thongs. Jesus. He wanted to do more than imagine Katie wearing that scrap of pink and lace. Maybe she had leather. Or some of those little lace-up bustiers.

  Maybe the cat took orders.

  Although Tye doubted he’d be that lucky. The cat had the same indignant look on his face as his owner. Order-taking was probably out.

  So instead of hot lingerie, he got... art lessons. Definitely not his first choice—or even his second, third, or fourth. Still, he also got to spend time with Katie and that was no hardship, even if he wasn’t looking forward to getting in touch with his inner feelings—her words, not his—and slopping some representative paint onto a canvas while he discussed said feelings.

  Katie grabbed her key to the V.A. center and they headed over to get started. Since Katie was busy pretending Tye hadn’t picked up her thong and returned the scrap to her, things were awkward at first. He glanced over to where she was bent over rummaging in the supply closet. She drove him crazy in all the best ways.

  She mumbled something half-muffled by the closet—he was almost certain it was her umpteen hundredth merde of the day but he was no saint in the cussing department himself—and then she backed out.

  “So,” she said and slapped a fistful brushes into his hand. “Your weapons of choice, sir.”

  Her cheeks were still pink, though, so he was fairly certain she hadn’t forgotten about the thong. That was okay by him, because he had no intention of forgetting either. In fact, he was betting Katie’s thong-bearing Siamese would be one of his favorite memories for the next forty or fifty years.

  “Whatever you’re thinking, stop it,” she snapped and thumped a canvas down in front of him.

  “You can’t read my mind.” He dragged the canvas closer. Eight by twelve of pure blank white. He might have managed paint-by-numbers, but this was foreign territory.

  “So. Paint.” Katie shoved a stack of paint tubes at him.

  “This is a DIY project now? No instructions?”

  “You’ve been having nightmares, right?” She waited for his reluctant nod before continuing. “Pick one and paint what you feel. You don’t have to remember specific actions or things—just the general impression the dream made on you.”

  “I don’t remember anything about the dreams,” he said.

  “Uh-huh.” Her tone said all too clearly that she didn’t believe him. Probably because he was lying his sorry ass off. He didn’t want to remember, and that was the truth.

  “You could model for me. I bet that would help get the creative juices flowing.”

  She blushed.

  “You have.” The blush got brighter and he loved that.

  Her chin lifted. “Lots of girls do. There’s nothing wrong with it and I had bills to pay. School bills.”

  “Girls and guys,” he agreed affably. “I’m just having a hard time picturing it. Or maybe not.”

  Yep. Her blush escalated to about a thousand degrees Kelvin.

  “What did Kade think about it?

  She blinked. “Why would it matter?”

  He unscrewed a tube of paint. “Some guys don’t share well.”

  “There was no sharing,” she objected. “I wasn’t working in the sex trade. I was modeling.”

  “Naked.”

  “Well, he didn’t mind.” She pointed at his blank canvas. “Start painting.”

  He stared at the canvas and came up empty. He had no idea where she got her ideas from, but his idea shop was closed. When his brush didn’t get to moving, she flopped down next to him, dress strap tumbling down her shoulder. That gave him ideas, but nothing he could paint.

  For many reasons.

  She ignored his lack of action, rummaging inside her bag for a plastic water bottle. A couple of inches of water sloshed around the bottom. “Damn,” she sighed.

  “Get me set up.” He jabbed his brush toward the empty tabletop. “If you want to paint, give me something to paint.”

  Not waiting for her answer, he shoved to his feet, dropping the painting supplies on the table. He could fix one problem.

  A quick trip down the hall, a handful of quarters, and he handed her a bottle of cold water.

  “For me?” She twisted the cap off, hesitated and stared at his empty hands. “We could share.”

>   He dropped back into his chair and fisted the brush. He’d stormed insurgent strongholds and successfully evaded hostiles hot on his ass. He could do this painting thing. Randomly grabbing a tube of paint, he uncapped, squeezed, and jabbed his brush into the puddle of goo. Spread the color around some.

  Maybe this was the secret to Picasso.

  “I need to tell you something,” she sighed.

  “Yeah?” Damned if it wasn’t harder to paint a fucking orange than he’d anticipated. His lines were crooked and—he eyed the sticky blob on his canvas—he was pretty damned certain that the five year-old had painted more realistic fruit. “How does this work?”

  “Art therapy?” She patted him on the shoulder. “You use your imagination. Try to paint what you see inside your head. Show me how you’re feeling.”

  He imagined drawing a picture of two people having wild monkey sex on the table. Nope. Probably not what she wanted to see at all. And him? He’d rather be doing anyhow.

  “Anything?”

  Her hand made a return trip to his shoulder and stayed put. “Pick an ugly memory. Something stressful, something that you’ve hung onto, but you’re ready to get rid of.”

  “No oranges?” He wasn’t a fan of fruit bowls, but he’d take produce over his memories any day.

  “Paint Khost,” she suggested.

  Hell. No.

  He looked at her. “That’s not something either of us needs to see.”

  “Are you sure?” She studied him like he was some kind of painting she needed to interpret.

  “Why am I the only one who has to paint his deep, dark secrets? I’m only doing this if you do it too.”

  She rolled her eyes, but she grabbed a canvas and dragged it towards herself. “Is the bad-ass SEAL scared?”

  Hell, yeah. He wasn’t stupid.

  For long minutes, she drew and he watched as her charcoal flew over the white, filling it in with strong, black lines and endless shades of grey. Kade. Of course.

  “You’re not drawing,” she observed, looking up from the canvas. “You really don’t have any bad memories? Nothing bothers you at night? Because I’m questioning your ability to stick to the terms of our deal here.”

  “Bad dreams don’t always punch a clock.” He stabbed the brush into the puddle of black on his canvas and spread it around some, covering up his orange. “Some memories stick around twenty-four/seven. You miss him.”

  It was a statement of fact.

  “Of course.” Her pencil filled in the familiar lines. The drawing wasn’t a funny caricature. Looking at it didn’t make him want to smile or laugh. Fucking hell, she filled each sweet line with love and emotion and him? He had a smear of paint instead of anything worth sharing.

  “I’d bring him back,” he said, fiercely. Better than This is all my fault. Because Kade should have come home from Khost. Or, at the very least, he should have come home from that patrol. But Tye hadn’t spotted the danger when that young kid had stepped out of the shadows in the alley. Tye had seen a boy too young to be hiding a gun in the folds of the robe hanging from his thin shoulders. Tye hadn’t raised his own weapon. He hadn’t fired.

  Katie looked up at him, her heart in her eyes. “Me too.”

  So, fuck it. She wanted him to express his feelings about Khost? He could do that. He really, really could. Methodically, he filled the canvas in with thick strokes of black paint.

  “I need to tell you something,” she said.

  “Shoot.” Bad choice of words.

  “Kade and I—”

  He didn’t want to hear this, he decided. He really, really didn’t.

  “Yeah?” He knew his voice sounded gruff and like he didn’t give a fuck. He should have painted flowers or something moving and soul searching but... he couldn’t.

  “We weren’t really engaged,” she said in a rush. “It started out as one of his jokes and kind of snowballed.”

  His brush shot over the edge of his canvas and painted the table. Nice going. “Are you kidding me?”

  “Nope.” She set the charcoal down and turned toward him, her knees brushing his thighs. When had she gotten so close? “Kade only asked me to marry him as a joke.”

  “Marriage isn’t a joke.” He knew that much. Marriage was forever and promises.

  “No,” she said and he hoped to God that wasn’t sadness he heard in her voice. “It wasn’t a funny, ha-ha kind of thing. He just wanted to protect me. Make sure no one hit on me in the bar. And then it... snowballed. It was our secret and we were friends and it was just something we did.” She stopped and thought for a moment. “That sounds stupid, when I say it out loud like that. Doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. What it seemed like was exactly the kind of trouble Kade got into. It was also one of those bittersweet moments, followed by a side of relief. He only wished Kade’s death was another joke and his buddy would pop up at any moment, yelling surprise.

  “You’re mad,” she said and fidgeted with her paintbrush. And the canvases, the tubes of paint, and her hair. That gave her a brand-new streak of blue to go with the brown, but now wasn’t the moment to tell her.

  “I don’t know,” he repeated, because that was the truth. “I don’t know how I feel, but how about we paint some more and I’ll figure it out?”

  Tye painted with single-minded intensity. Katie checked the clock on the wall—discreetly, of course—and was surprised only half an hour had passed since she’d dropped her bombshell. Somehow, not telling Tye had seemed wrong. She wasn’t sure what they had between them, but it was definitely more than a bucket list. So she really needed him to clue her in about his feelings.

  If, of course, the guy a) possessed any and b) was capable of articulating them. Which was doubtful, given his reaction to painting a picture about said feelings. He didn’t know where to start. Which was about as far from great as one could get.

  “How about now?” she said, because she had to have some kind of an answer or sign from him. He focused with single-minded intent on the canvas in front of him. Which was neatly lined with alternating rows of black and gray. Great. If those colors were any indication of how he felt, she’d screwed it up badly.

  “Khost? Or me?”

  He raised a brow. “Excuse me?”

  “Your painting,” she said. “Why gray and black? What experience are you thinking about?”

  He shot her a look she couldn’t interpret. Well, she got the frustration part of his glare. There was something else there, too, though, that she couldn’t quite make sense of.

  “I’m not mad at you, Katie.”

  “That’s a relief,” she said lightly.

  He sighed and set down the canvas. “You really weren’t engaged?”

  “We were, but then he broke it off. He said he wanted me to get out there for real.”

  He picked up her canvas and examined Kade’s face. “He’s always here.”

  No. Kade wasn’t. And that was the problem.

  “Not literally,” he said, “but in your head. In mine. We’re sitting here together because you want to remember him.”

  “Everyone keeps telling me to move on,” she protested. “But there’s nothing wrong with remembering him.”

  He thought for a moment. “Remembering’s good. Nobody wants to forget Kade. We just don’t want you to stop living your own life, Katie. You have to do stuff for you and not because it’s on some damned stupid list Kade probably put together when he was twelve.”

  That kind of attitude just pissed her off. “You make me sound like some kind of martyr. We didn’t even have a real relationship. We were all kinds of made up.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know whether the two of you would have made it to the altar or not, but what you had was real. Just kind of—” he paused for a second, that smile she loved tugging at the corner of his gorgeous mouth—“mislabeled. Kade cared about you. Hell, I saw that every time he got one of those go
ddamned letters from you.”

  “That doesn’t sound like caring.” She set her brush down. Tears blurred her eyes and, darn it, she was so sick of crying. She’d cried oceans. How could she not be all dried up by now?

  “We were all jealous,” Tye said bluntly. “He’d read us parts, show us some of your drawings, but every man in the unit wanted those letters for himself. We wanted to read the whole thing, to have you waiting for us back home, ready for us to come back.”

  His words warmed her up where she’d been cold. “I don’t think I could handle an entire unit.”

  “Yeah.” His head dipped closer, his lips brushing her cheek. “Angel, you’re still stuck on that ménage to do item and that’s just one bonus guy.”

  If she turned her head, she’d be kissing him. Or close enough. He’d pushed her away the other day, on the Segway. Or, she thought, the relationship light bulb clicking on in her head, he’d pushed himself away.

  “I don’t want to talk about Kade.” She meant it too.

  His head rested against hers. “That’s a start,” he agreed. “What do you want, angel?”

  “Tye—”

  She turned her head and, yep, they were definitely close enough to kiss. Her lips brushed his. There. No mistaking that for anything but what it was. A quick, sweet kiss, lips brushing on lips in a quick reconnoiter. She pulled back, just in case she’d totally misread the situation.

  Again.

  Point made. She looked up at him from beneath her lashes. “I want kisses.”

  He ran a hand over his chin. “Yeah. That wouldn’t have been on Kade’s bucket list.”

  “Kissing you?” She grinned. “His loss.”

  “What kind of kisses?” he growled. “Tell me what you want, Katie.”

  “You,” she said. “I think I want you.”

  “Be sure,” he warned, but he was already moving, lifting her and depositing her on the table before she could so much as squeak, and darn it—she shouldn’t have found his effortless manhandling so sexy. But she did. God help her, but she did. And then he leaned into her and she was so, so lost.