Black Heat

by Ruby Laska

  Cal shut the truck door and Jimmy drove off.

  "You didn't have to stay with me," Roan said, limping slowly down the path to the back of the house, favoring her sore ankle.

  "Yeah, I did."

  He caught up with her and didn't so much offer her his arm as tuck her hand under his elbow. Well, she wasn't going to turn down the help; the last thing she needed was to fall again before she got ice on her ankle.

  "You need to call in and let them know you're not coming to work," Cal said.

  "No, I'll just ice it for an hour. It's barely seven—I'll have Walt pick me up on his way to the shop and I'll be fine."

  "Damn it!" Cal exploded. "Do you have to do every self-destructive thing you can think of at every opportunity?"

  They'd reached the apartment door. Roan wrenched her arm free and busied herself with her keys, her face burning. But he kept talking.

  "Did it ever occur to you to take the easier way, just one time? There are people who would help you if you just give them a chance. Come on, there's got to be other ways to get Angel help. Did you talk to Dr. Raj about a payment plan?"

  Roan bit her lip. She wasn't about to admit that Dr. Raj had offered to do the surgery now, and let her pay what she could in the future. She didn't take charity—it was one of her mother's beliefs. Elaine had grown up in lean times on a small farm downstate and had known poverty, but she said it was those tough years that had made her resourceful and tough, that had taught her to feed a family with a kitchen garden and a little ingenuity.

  Of course, her mother had never broken the law. So that was a big difference.

  "Yes," she said. "I have to pay the full amount."

  "Well, what about Mimi? You said she still has your mother's jewelry. How about if you just ask her for it?"

  Roan was already shaking her head; she had that bitter taste in her mouth that always appeared when she thought about her stepmother. "Forget it," she mumbled, opening the door and dropping her keys on the table. She went straight over to Angel, who was mewling happily to see her even as she struggled to rise from her bed.

  She placed her hands on the soft underbelly where practice had taught her she would cause Angel the least pain as she helped the dog to stand. So intent was she on the task that she didn't realize that Cal had followed and knelt down next to her until his voice in her ear made her jump.

  "Did it ever occur to you to give Mimi another chance?"

  She didn't answer. Once Angel was standing, Roan headed back out the door she'd just come in, Cal hot on her heels with Angel between them. She tried to pull the door shut behind her but he put his hand on it and wedged his way through, following her.

  She shivered in the misty air—now that the adrenaline of her escape had worn off, she was cold in her thin sweater—and crossed her arms over her chest, watching Angel walk around the backyard, sniffing at all her favorite bushes and trees. The yard was fenced, but there was no danger of Angel running off. She wasn't a runner, and besides, she didn't move fast enough to put herself in danger.

  "People change, Roan," Cal muttered. "Mimi may have changed. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone has regrets. For all you know, she'd like to have a closer relationship with you. According to Matthew, she doesn't have any other family."

  Other than the men who constantly streamed in and out of her life, Roan thought bitterly.

  "Thank you for the lecture," she snapped. "Wow, I never thought of it that way. If it wasn't for you, I probably would have ended up making bad choices."

  "I'm not afraid of your sarcasm," Cal said quietly.

  He was standing much too close. She could feel the warmth of his skin on her bare wrist, and it made her hands twitch with the desire to touch him, to drink in his heat and the sensations she remembered from the day before, when he had kissed her.

  Instead, she stepped away. "Come on, Angel," she said, more harshly than she intended, and her dog looked up at her with her ears cocked, a question in her big brown eyes. She tried again, softening her voice. "Sweetheart. Let's go in now. Cal was just leaving."

  But he didn't leave. He waited until Angel padded past him, into the house, and then he came back in, too, wiping his feet on the mat.

  "I didn't ask you to stay. You need to leave now," Roan hissed, standing in the middle of her front room. She had waited until Angel was settled into her bed, keeping her voice low so the dog wouldn't sense that anything was wrong.

  "And I'm not afraid of your anger," Cal said. "It's not me you're mad at."

  How dare he? Roan felt her fury build and take over her body, the way it always did. It was like a hot flame erupting from the hurt that smoldered, always, inside her. When she was younger, she would run—through the fields and along the stream, or down Pedersen road to the abandoned house where she could spend the afternoon licking her wounds. But now she was an adult and there was nowhere to run to. What she had was here. This home. This dog. These few possessions.

  This stubborn man.

  She lifted her hand, fingers curled into a fist. She wasn't really going to hit him—at least, probably she wasn't—but the fury needed somewhere to go and he was standing there and her body was electric with the need to beat something, destroy something, crush something. Anything to get rid of the rage, to dull the pain.

  He caught her fist in his hand.

  He pulled her to him.

  "I'm not afraid," he repeated, a whisper now, his eyes slitted and unreadable, and then she was kissing him, hard.

  He didn't respond at first, but he didn't pull away, either. Roan knew this was wrong; she knew she should stop, but she couldn't. She beat his chest with her fists even as she drank in the taste of him, and his arms went around her and pulled her close. He held her close to him, and even though she could feel his hardness pressed against her, he made no move except to keep kissing her, until finally she collapsed into his arms, exhausted and spent. Tears flowed, wetting his shirt, and she pressed her face against the soft cotton.

  The anger was gone as quickly as it came, leaving shame in its wake. God, why did she have to be this way? Why did she do these stupid things, never thinking first, never stopping herself? She wanted to sink into the floor, to creep to her bed and stay there until day dimmed to night and she could disappear into herself and her sorrow.

  "Roan," he said, holding her up with one arm, gently pushing her hair out of her face with the other. "Roan, honey. It's all right."

  "It's not all right," she mumbled. Because she'd wrecked it again.

  "Not all of it, maybe," he conceded. At least he hadn't tried to cheer her up. She would have hated that. "But there's time to fix things. I promise. I need you to trust me on that. Can you?"

  His voice was so gentle, so kind, that she couldn't help nodding. Cal was the last person she should let affect her—and yet he made her believe in him, in hope.

  "And some things..." he traced her bottom lip, very gently, with his thumb. His touch stirred the heat back up, a cyclone of sensation as powerful as her anger moments ago. "And some things are fine the way they are. Some things are as they should be."

  She held her breath, not sure what he was talking about. Except...the truth was that she was sure. Because she felt it too. Cal's kisses yesterday had been unlike any other she'd ever had: they'd been exactly right. They fit. They made her want more. They made her need more.

  Except he hadn't kissed her back. Just now, when she'd practically savaged him with her lips, her teeth, her fists. Well, who could blame him?

  He bent close and brushed his lips against hers. Softly...so softly she wasn't sure if she'd imagined the sensation. A sound in her throat sounded like someone else, some needful hungry thing. "Please," she whispered, her voice cracked and raw.

  He bent to her again, deepening the kiss with agonizing slowness. His lips were soft and warm and gentle, but when he kissed his way slowly along her jaw, down to her throat, the sensations of his stubble and his teeth nipping her gently were anything but
tame.

  She put her hand in his and tugged, at first tentatively and then forcefully.

  He came with her without hesitation. The room was small, her bed made up neatly under the framed picture of the ranch as it had once been, long ago.

  There wasn't far to go. They fell together onto the bed.

  CHAPTER TEN

  On Sundays, the shop didn't open until noon. By then, Roan had sent Cal home with a kiss and shy wave, showered, dressed, and fed and walked Angel, feeling the whole time like she was floating on air.

  Maybe it was the lack of sleep. But Roan found herself wondering if it might be something more.

  "You didn't have to come to work, girl," Walt said, standing in the door to the work room with his mug of cold, weak coffee. Walt drank coffee from the minute he woke up in the morning until he went to bed at night. He made it in the old percolator that his wife had used for thirty years before her death; the only difference was that now he brewed it in the shop, and it had grounds in the bottom of the cup. "We would have got on just fine without you for a day or two. Now you're just going to make that bum leg worse."

  Roan looked up from the shipment of parts she was unpacking. "First of all, I've got ice on it, and the swelling's gone almost all the way down. I'll be fine by the time I go home. And second, you can't let Hank anywhere near the Fuji that just came in. It's a beautiful machine, not a toaster."

  Walt grinned. "Funny, he said the same thing about you. Said he'd fix it quicker, too."

  He turned and limped out of the room, favoring the hip that bothered him some mornings. Roan smiled to herself. Hank was a perfectly competent mechanic, but she enjoyed the pretend rivalry between them. It was the closest thing she'd had to a sibling experience. Hank didn't seem to mind being a stand-in for the big brother she never had. It was almost like...

  She shook her head, yanking the packing tape off the box with more force than necessary. Family, she was thinking, but that wasn't true. Wishing didn't make a friend—really, just a coworker—into something more. Family were the people you shared blood with, and all of hers were dead. All she had was a scheming, overblown, bleached-blond ex-stepmother.

  Did it ever occur to you to give Mimi another chance? Cal's words came back to her, stilling her hands on the cardboard box. For a fraction of a second she wondered what it would be like to say all the things she'd never said to the woman. To find out what she'd really been thinking all those years.

  But no. That was in the past. Everything that mattered was gone: her dad, the house, the ranch. Why try to fix a link to something that wasn't even there anymore?

  She got back to work and let her mind wander to Cal. To the way he'd felt in her bed, the things he'd whispered as they moved together, discovering each other, learning each other's bodies. She blushed, remembering how he'd whispered her name as he kissed the soft expanse of skin along her neck, the way he'd...

  No, better not to indulge that now. Roan felt the small smile tugging at the corner of her mouth and forced herself to stop. Cal had made her feel all kinds of amazing things. It had been a long time since she'd been with anyone at all, and she had never felt the way she did today. Probably because of the adrenaline. The narrow escape. All the emotions stirred up by being back in the house that had once been her home.

  No wonder she felt safe in his arms—it was just because he represented safety, because he was kind to her. Hell, he was practically a cop. The men she'd been with—boys, really, most of them—had been a lot like her: undependable, reckless...sad. That's why she'd practically given up dating. How long had it been? Roan counted: she was 24, and the last guy she'd dated for any length of time...

  Tony Garwood. They'd broken up on her twenty-first birthday, when she was almost too drunk to walk home by herself, and she had realized she didn't want to live that way any more. It had been a turning point, getting to midnight on the day she was an adult, by most objective standards, and deciding that being alone was better than being with someone who encouraged the worst in her.

  She'd gone home. Drunk a glass of orange juice. Given Angel a bone. Wished herself a happy birthday and fallen asleep on the floor, with her cheek resting on Angel's dog bed.

  But Cal. Could this be more than a one-time thing? Was there a chance this could actually work? Not as a boyfriend thing, but as a...friendship? With the extra parts, the benefits, as some people said—Roan hated that word. She wanted to be Cal's friend and she wanted, very much, to hold him again, to kiss him, to make love to him. In her narrow bed that wasn't really big enough for them both, but somehow felt just right. Or maybe camping up along the Little Muddy River if they got a late autumn warm spell.

  But not at the bunkhouse. She wasn't ever going back there. Not after today, not after running from the cops. Which brought her back to the problem at hand. She still needed five thousand dollars, and if she had any chance of not ruining things with Cal, she had to get it legally. She didn't have anything to sell, and she wasn't sure what kind of second job she could get—lots of places were hiring, and for good wages too, but she couldn't leave Angel alone all day and all night so she could put in a second shift.

  Give Mimi a second chance, Cal had said. Roan pushed the packing box away and put her chin in her hands.

  Could she?

  For Angel?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Cal tried to nap on the couch while the game was on, but when Jimmy wandered in and switched the channel to a documentary about new life forms being discovered on the ocean floor, he gave up and nuked a plate of leftovers. Zane was at the gym playing basketball, Chase and Regina had disappeared somewhere, and Matthew and Jayne had gone to Minot to pick up some light fixtures they'd ordered for the bunkhouse remodel. Cal snuck a couple of brownies from the pan that Matthew had left on the stove to cool.

  After watching some terrifying, fanged gray creatures swim through a murky darkness that was apparently a trench six miles underwater, Cal got up and turned off the set, which was so old that it didn't have a remote.

  "Hey," Jimmy said mildly. "That show was giving me an idea."

  "I can't imagine that anything you invent with those things for inspiration would be an advantage for the human race."

  "You never know," Jimmy said mysteriously.

  "Um, I was wondering," Cal said. Then he didn't know what to say next. Ever since spending the morning with Roan, he had felt both better and worse than he could remember feeling in a long time. Better, because Roan was...he felt his face grow hot, just thinking about her. She was perfect—or at least perfect for him, which they had proved not once but twice as the sun slowly rose in the sky, burning off the ice from the prior day. They fit together perfectly, and when she finally lay back, exhausted, with her hair tousled and a sheen of perspiration on her body, she had looked even more beautiful.

  And worse...because he was now certain that he wouldn't be worthy of her, unless he made certain things right.

  He scratched the back of his neck and sighed, as Jimmy flipped a coin in the air while he waited, sending it in spinning arcs before catching it again.

  "So Jimmy, remember when you invited me to come up here to Carson with you guys?"

  Jimmy caught the coin a final time and shoved it in his pocket, then gave Cal a wary look. "Yeah?"

  "I, uh...I mean, we never really talked about it. But I'm assuming you had to do some convincing to get the guys to agree to let me come along."

  Jimmy frowned. He never lied, as far as Cal knew, but he was looking like he wished he could.

  "Okay, scratch that,” Cal said. “I don't need to know. What I was wondering was, what convinced you to give me another chance?"

  "Why wouldn't I? You saved my life, man."

  Cal colored. "We both know that's not true."

  "Okay. My dignity? I mean, come on. You found me flat on my back in my front yard, after I knocked myself out. You have to admit that was the stupidest thing you ever saw when you were a paramedic."

  Jim
my was being kind—as usual. A small smile tugged at the corner of Cal's mouth. "Well, I wasn't a volunteer for very long, so I didn't have a lot of experience. But yeah, that might have been up in the top three."

  A small crowd had gathered by the time the ambulance pulled up that day. The neighbor who called it in said it looked like Jimmy had decided to take a nap on his front lawn, but that he wouldn't wake up. When Cal and his partner got him loaded up on the stretcher, he figured out what had happened. Half of the wheelchair ramp leading up to the front door had been dismantled, the boards stacked neatly next to the driveway. In the grass a few feet from Jimmy was the crowbar he'd been using to pry them free—and the one board that must have been loose and sprung free, hitting Jimmy in the head. Which accounted for the goose egg that none of the neighbors had spotted, since he'd been lying on it, and which was going to give him a hell of a headache.

  "The thing is, when I figured out who you were—that I went to high school with you—all I wanted to do was call it a day and head home. I figured I was a volunteer—what were they going to do, fire me?" He winced at the memory. "I didn't want to be there when you woke up in the ambulance and recognized me."

  Jimmy looked confused. "But I didn't wake up for another hour. Spent the whole day in the hospital, and when they released me that night, you showed up to take me home."

  "Yeah, well—that's kind of what I wanted to talk to you about."

  "About taking me home? And waking me up every two hours and making me tell you who the president was?" Jimmy grinned. "That was sure fun. You want to do it again?"

  Cal's smile grew a little wider. If he wasn't mistaken, Jimmy was attempting humor, which was rare for him. He could tell that his friend was trying to help him out with the painful memory, even if he didn't understand Cal's reaction.

  "Here's the thing. I don't think I ever told you how hard it was for me, because I was sure that the minute your head cleared and you realized it was the guy who single-handedly got the junior class trip canceled, and gave the P.E. teacher a nervous breakdown, and—well, never mind. It's just, sitting there in your living room, waiting for the kitchen timer to ring to make sure you didn't go into a coma, I had a chance to relive every stupid thing I ever did to make you guys hate me."