Too Hot to Hold

by Stephanie Tyler

  “I won’t listen to that. Don’t you dare take my words and twist them.”

  “Listen to me. If she’s working for the CIA, you have to know she’s trying to do her job—one you could be interfering with.”

  “If you were in my place, what would you do?” she asked.

  “Exactly what you’re planning on doing. I just want you to keep all the possibilities in mind. All right?”

  She nodded. “When we get to the hotel and Clutch leaves to go back to the group, I want to go with him.”

  “That’s not up to me. That’s up to Clutch.”

  “Do you think we’ll make it there in time?”

  His hand clapped firmly on her shoulder. “We’ve got no choice. Let’s haul ass.”

  Hours after they crossed the stream, wet, dirty and exhausted, Kaylee walked the final steps into the hotel room Clutch had secured for them just outside of Kisangani … and had trouble reaching the bed.

  Her lungs were heavy, and after a puff on her inhaler at Nick’s urging, she felt him checking her pulse.

  She was still shivering hard as Nick picked her up and carried her to the bathroom.

  She protested. “Nick, the article …”

  “There’s time. You first. I had asthma as a kid—lots of breathing problems. I remembered hating how helpless I felt. How scared,” he told her as he stripped her down, throwing the wet clothes into the corner before putting her into the shower.

  The water was only lukewarm, but it was better than nothing. He managed to strip himself as well, even as Kaylee clung to him and he soaped them both, cleaning the river water debris and other dirt off their bodies.

  “I can’t imagine you being scared of anything,” she murmured as her body temperature began to regulate and the tension in her chest eased as her body rubbed his.

  “You’d be surprised.” He shut the water off. “Come on, let’s get you dry and send the article off.”

  She wanted to ask if they were safe yet, if Caspar hadn’t been able to follow them. But if Caspar was anything like Nick and Clutch, he could no doubt get through anything.

  Wrapped in a towel, she sat on the edge of the bed watching as Nick opened the bag with the computer and gingerly pulled the machine out. He turned it on and watched it power up, relief coursing through him.

  “It works—we’re all set.”

  She smiled. “I backed it up too. We wouldn’t have lost it.”

  “This just makes things a hell of a lot easier,” he told her. “There’s no signal out here; you’re going to have to go through the phone line. Could take a while.”

  He brought the computer to her and she typed fast, fingers flying across the keys as she composed an e-mail.

  The Internet connection stalled out several times—but finally, twenty frustrating, breath-holding minutes later, the e-mail went through.

  Once that happened, she was on the phone with her boss, confirming that the e-mail had reached him. She waited there, on the phone, mouthed,He’s reading it now , to Nick.

  She listened to Roger’s praise—and his warnings. Then, “Kaylee, who are you with right now?”

  “I’m with… I’m okay,” she said. “Really. I’ll be better when the story runs, though.”

  “This is going to shake up a hell of a lot of people in Washington. A lot of them will want to speak with K. Darcy.”

  “If all goes well, I’ll be back home soon. I’ll do what I need to do, but I stand by my story and my sources. I heard the orders myself.”

  Roger hesitated, like he wanted to say more. But all he told her was, “Stay well, Kaylee.”

  She closed the phone without answering him and looked up at Nick, who’d stood over her during the call. “He’s putting it to press for the morning edition. What do we do until then?”

  “I’ll let Clutch know—we’ll sit tight until dark and then decide if it’s safer to keep moving.”

  “He’s worried about me, Nick. He thinks… he thinks there could be real trouble because I’ve written this.”

  “There could be,” he said.

  “That’s not exactly what I wanted to hear,” she muttered.

  “I told you I wouldn’t lie to you,” he said, then shook his head. “About this, I mean. Fuck.”

  They hadn’t had a chance to talk about anything more that had happened before walking through the river. She knew this was neither the time nor the place, and still, she wished he would talk about it with her. Needed him to.

  “Do you want to see the article?” she asked finally. “I normally don’t let people read my stuff until it’s copyedited, but in this case, I could really use an opinion.”

  He sat in silence for several moments, his eyes not leaving the screen until he was finished. “It’s fantastic,” he told her. “I’m not one for news articles—”

  “Or journalists,” she said quietly.

  Nick didn’t disagree. “You can understand why.”

  She didn’t say anything more, waited until he called Clutch and told him that the article would run in the morning edition, listened to him weigh the pros and cons of staying or leaving. But in the middle of their conversation, the power cut out and the rains picked up harder than they’d been before. “I guess that answers our question.”

  She heard the click of the phone.

  “That road we came through? Washed away,” Nick told her.

  “Is there another way here?”

  “They’d have to get to the warehouse first, then go around to come get us. With this weather, it won’t be quick—and they didn’t follow us in.”

  “So you think we’re safe?”

  “It doesn’t get much safer than a monsoon and a power outage around here.”

  “Glad that’s considered safe.”

  But somehow, they were—with the hotel halfway between the airport and the warehouse, a foot in both worlds. Quick escape at their fingertips, even if the hotel wasn’t the best. Still, their room was clean and had a comfortable bed with simple handmade linens, a rough sisal-like rug under their bare feet and halfway warm water.

  Clutch—whose room with Sarah was right next door—had gone out for food, warm vegetable samosas and beef patties and plantains from a local market, had left them in the room when they’d been in the shower. It all smelled delicious.

  It was so dark, even with Nick sitting right next to her, she was still freaked.

  It was so much easier asking questions in the dark, though. “When your brothers find out what I know… they’re never going to forgive me, are they?”

  “They’ll be pissed,” he said quietly. “There’ll be a lot of explaining to do.”

  “Does anyone know beyond your brothers and your dad?”

  “No. I told Jake that he could tell his fiancee, Isabelle. He said maybe, when the time was right. He trusts her. I trust her. But it’s a burden that he didn’t want to put on her.” He shifted. “I’m sorry you have to know.”

  Days earlier, when she’d been at Nick’s house, she’d spent time looking at the pictures in the den, of Nick and his two brothers as they grew from good-looking teenagers into handsome men. In some of the early pictures, there was a woman there—Kaylee assumed it was the adoptive mom Nick had spoken of earlier.

  Her grandmother hadn’t believed in family pictures—there were some religious depictions framed throughout the small house but other than that and a few old scrap-books Kaylee had discovered in the attic, she hadn’t grown up with happy, smiling memories all around. But as she stood in his living room and then his den, the warmth surrounded her.

  It was nice there—it didn’t make her sad or nostalgic for all she’d missed; instead, it made her realize that what she’d wanted all along—a family, love—wasn’t beyond her grasp. It was all right in front of her.

  Love trumps biology every time.

  Yes, she believed Nick. He was living proof of the statement. “In the car, you told Clutch he could trust me—I know you don’t say things you do
n’t mean.”

  “I don’t have much of a choice. I have to trust you.”

  “God, I hate that. I hate that that’s how you feel about what’s happening between us.”

  She reached out to touch his arm, but he’d already pulled away instinctively.

  “Not now, Kaylee. Not in the middle of all this. I can’t.”

  Kaylee was the first woman who knew his secret and Nick felt the uncomfortable weight on his chest of being both burdened and unburdened at the same time.

  His relief had been short-lived, though. Talking about the Winfields and the way he’d grown up had made him too pensive, less ready to take action. He had to get back into mission mode.

  But sitting with her, with the new rainstorm slamming the roof of the one-story hotel, regaining mission mode seemed an impossible task. He finally lit the oil lamp the hotel had provided—it cast small shadows across the room from its place on the nightstand.

  Kaylee remained wrapped in a towel and just waited. Patiently. “You haven’t said one word about how tough this is—that you’re hungry or you’re tired,” Nick said.

  “You haven’t either,” she pointed out, then bit her bottom lip in that way he found so freakin’ disarming.

  From the time he’d left the Winfield house up until this point, he’d prided himself on being strong as hell—physically and, more importantly, mentally. Hadn’t let anything get in the way of what he wanted—illegally, at first, and then legally, with the teams. He put his life on the line with every mission, put his soul into everything else he did, and now, to know that he could never truly escape his past was nearly too much for him to bear.

  But he’d be damned if he let this break him.

  There had always been a part of him that didn’t believe that hewouldn’t follow in the Winfield footsteps. As much as he’d tried to deny it, he had the nagging sense that it was deeply a part of him, like a skin he had no hope of shedding even though he wanted nothing to do with it. “Is your boss going to ask you why you’re no longer working on the Winfield story?”

  “Probably. I’ve been on it since I started at the paper. But it doesn’t matter, I’m not writing about it any longer,” she told him. “You don’t think that Walter would tell people who you are, do you?”

  “I can’t see why he would. The story would just embarrass him.”

  “I just assumed maybe he wanted you … back or something, since he came to see you after Deidre’s death.”

  “A lot of things that happened in that family are because of Deidre, but they have nothing to do with her death.” He sat down next to her on the bed, shoving the computer out of the way. He didn’t look at Kaylee, but for the first time in a long while, he didn’t feel like he was telling the story of someone else when he spoke of Cutter. No, this time, the memories were vivid and they were, without a doubt, all his. “Walter loved Deidre, but she broke his heart when she fell in love with Billy, his brother. But I’m sure you know that—you reported on the rumors of the long-lost love affair.”

  “I did,” she said quietly. “There were people—staff, mostly—who came forward to talk about things they’d seen. Subtle things. A touch of hands, or a look, mostly. Nothing substantial, but enough …”

  “Yeah, enough to go on, right?” He shook his head. “In my house, it wasn’t a rumor. After Billy was killed, Deidre was devastated. She went into seclusion for months. The only time she pulled it together was for her charities.”

  He paused and then decided to spill it all to her. “Deidre told Walter that I was Billy’s son. Up until the other night, I believed that. In a way, that made things livable for me—because Billy had bucked the Winfield thing too, had wanted to be different.”

  “But you’re really Walter’s biological son, that’s what he came to tell you the other night,” she said quietly, and he nodded.

  “He apologized for treating me like shit, for hating me when I was little.”

  “I can only imagine the guilt he’s feeling now.”

  “I don’t want him to come to me because he’s guilty. I don’t want him to come to me at all—it would’ve been so much easier if he’d just stayed away. I’d never have to know all of this.”

  “And you might never be able to put it behind you either,” she pointed out.

  “Itwas behind me. Look, I get that you want to ask me questions, about growing up and—”

  “I’d want to ask those whether you grew up a Winfield or not.”

  “I just don’t want you to feel sorry for me, Kaylee. That’s the last thing I’m looking for.” He closed his eyes and turned away, wishing he could actually fucking sleep for once in his life. “I don’t know how to do this. I’m not good at it.”

  “You are good at so many things. But if you want me to understand you, I’ve got to know where you came from, why certain things are so important to you. I need to know the things you can’t share with anyone else—the things you won’t.”

  “I’ve always had barriers.” They were secure. Comfortable.

  “You’ve let those barriers hold you hostage for too long.”

  She was probably right. Fuck, he hated this, mainly because she already knew most of it. All those reports on the missing Winfield heir were closer to the truth than he’d have liked.

  “Look, I already told you I wasn’t held a lot as a baby—that’s because I was really sick when I was born.” He rubbed the scar on his throat unconsciously and took his hand away when he saw her looking at it. “I almost didn’t live.”

  “But you did.”

  “I thought that I was defective—that I couldn’t bond with other people, couldn’t make connections. I thought that was my legacy.” But it hadn’t been true. The connection to Jake was almost instantaneous—same with Chris, and Kenny and Maggie. It was as if he’d been aching for that kind of familial contact, and once he received it, everything else fell into place.

  He hated the bitter feeling that hit his throat when he mentioned the Winfields, wanted it to fade away until the memories were nothing more than a gentle scrape of a healed wound. Unpleasant, not almost unbearable. “She never came for me. None of them did. This new family—myfamily, did. They came for me, wanted me. Fought for me. Not like the Winfields—they wanted perfect. At least on the outside. By the time I left, I was already long gone from them emotionally.”

  “And they just let you go?”

  “They just let me go,” he said. “It was what I wanted. It would’ve happened with or without their consent. At least this way the Winfields could control it, put their own spin on the situation.”

  “What kind of parents do that to their own child?”

  “I thought my mother hated me growing up because I was Billy’s son—an accidental pregnancy because of her affair. I assumed that when I was born small and sick, she couldn’t stand to be around me. Saw it as some kind of punishment for her indiscretion. She only let Walter know the truth after her death to hurt him more. I was just a pawn.”

  “So that’s why Walter let you leave the family.”

  “Yeah. See, I was going to run away, but Kenny—the man I callDad now—he found me at the train station and brought me back to the Winfield house with signed emancipation papers that Dad had drawn up. Dad wanted to go back inside with me, but I needed to go in alone, to hand Walter the papers myself and leave on my own steam. I’d signed away my rights, and from there it was simple. I left everything behind in my room, except for the jeans, sneakers and green sweatshirt I’d been wearing that day to school, when I pretended everything was normal. But I already knew what was going to happen.” He cleared his throat. “Deidre was busy tearing up pictures of me in the kitchen, burning them. So they could say that I did it. There was nothing for me to take, nothing I wanted to take, so just after midnight, I climbed down the trellis the way I always did. Jake was waiting for me.”

  “Where did you go?” she asked softly.

  “Walked the ten miles to Chris’s house. And Cutter
Winfield was never seen or heard from again.”

  “Until now. My God, all you’ve been through,” she murmured. “All you’ve accomplished.”

  “I got better,” he said shortly.

  “You had a strong will. Wanted to survive. Lots of other people would’ve given up in your situation.”

  “That wasn’t an option.”

  “Because you wanted to make yourself whole, better … so your biological family would accept you.”

  Fuck, she’d hit on something. His throat felt tight and he swallowed hard and her fingers dug into his biceps as she massaged his muscles. “I guess so. Stupid, right?”

  “Not at all.”

  “It was, Kaylee, because it didn’t work. Because even when I got better and came out of the hospital, they still didn’t want me. I was wild, uncontrollable. I needed too much attention and I didn’t know how to deal with a quiet, understated family. I broke all the dishes, I slid down the banisters…”

  “You were a kid.”

  “I was a Winfield. I didn’t know the rules, didn’t know how to act. I craved action—attention. Pain. Anything to feel.” He hung his head. “Nothing worked—not being good anyway. But doing things like stealing cars and getting into fights, that hopped up my adrenaline levels. I don’t need to feel that kind of action as much today. I get it in my job, racing cars, things like that.”

  “And sex.”

  “Yeah, with sex.” He realized just how much his body ached—not from exertion, but from stress and quite possibly fear.

  Even his skin seemed too sensitive, the way it had earlier when he’d poured water on his body from one of the jugs Clutch had in the back of the car—and yet he wanted to be touched by Kaylee again. Craved it.

  He rubbed his own arms in an effort to shake off the feeling.

  He had a friend who was into the BDSM scene and Nick had tried a few things with a female dom. Let himself get tied up.

  He’d had to use his fucking safe word after half an hour. The whip she’d used worked—he could go there; but the tied down, helpless feeling was intolerable.

  “We’ll work on desensitizing you,” the woman had whispered. He’d nearly broken the wooden St. Andrew’s cross he’d been strapped to.