Burning Bright

by Anne Stuart; Maggie Shayne; Judith Arnold

  She’d forced him to look at her. He was surrounded by his peers, all watching, waiting to see what he would do. She should have known it was a matter of teenage male pride and expected nothing less, but when he shook his head and turned back to his friends it crushed her.

  She’d walked away, that same, endless walk, with remarkable dignity for a girl just turned fourteen. She’d walked out of the room, out of the building, and the two miles home on the moonlit path along the lake, wiping the tears and the makeup away from her face.

  Her house was dark when she got there—her parents had gone to bed early. The Jackson house was still a blaze of lights, and she’d moved liked a shadow along the path. By that time tears and makeup and shoes were gone, and she wanted nothing more than to go curl up in bed.

  She moved up her wide front steps quietly, reaching for the screen door, when she saw him in the darkness. He was there on the green wicker sofa where they’d spent hours talking, laughing, doing crossword puzzles or just sitting in a comfortable silence. There was nothing comfortable about the silence now.

  He’d taken off his tie and jacket, and he looked as miserable as she felt. Her first instinct was to ignore him, go straight into the house and slam the door behind her. Her second was to demand what he was doing there.

  She did neither. She went over to the creaky old sofa and sat down, curling up in her corner, wrapping her arms around her knees as she waited for him to say something.

  He didn’t say a word.

  It was her first kiss, and it was a powerhouse. In itself it wasn’t astonishing—just the soft pressure of his lips against hers. And then on her tearstained eyelids, and on her cheek, and on her lips again. He’d been good even back then, a natural, and it was no wonder she’d been ready to put her arms around him. But then the porch light went on, and he drew back as if bitten.

  Her father stood there, rumpled hair, clueless. “Don’t you think you ought to come to bed now, Angie? We’ve got a long drive tomorrow.”

  “I can sleep in the car.” She didn’t want to leave Brody. She wanted more kisses from his beautiful mouth.

  “I should go,” Brody said, starting to stand up. He had his jacket with him, and he held it in front of him. “Good night, Professor McKenna. Have a good winter. Goodbye, Angel.”

  It had been the first time he’d called her that. And then he’d gone, taking the front steps two at a time, disappearing into the moonlit night.

  By next summer Jeffrey had returned, Brody had discovered he was irresistible to almost the entire female population of Crescent Cove and those chaste, almost dreamlike kisses had been forgotten. By Brody, at least.

  But every time Angie sat on the green wicker sofa she remembered. And she spent a very large part of her summers curled up there with a book, trying not to think about anyone at all.

  Oddly enough, she’d never kissed Jeffrey on the sofa. They’d necked on the steps, on the dock, in the boathouse, at the Harbor Club and just about everywhere else during their endless teenage years, but for some reason she’d never let him kiss her on the green wicker couch.

  She never did find out what happened to the furniture after her parents sold the house and the Jacksons had it bulldozed. Probably gave it to Goodwill—most summer cottages were furnished with shabby hand-me-downs and secondhand furniture to begin with, and there’d been nothing of any particular grace or beauty. And she wouldn’t have wanted the couch, really. She couldn’t imagine it on Jeffrey’s mother’s freshly painted porch; the woman probably would have insisted on painting it a baby-blue if she’d allowed it there at all. Angie decided she would rather have it gone, over with, part of her long-lost childhood.

  Of course she was thinking about it now. Brody had invaded her life, her thoughts, just as he had so many years ago. She could remember the faded cabbage roses on the cushions, the stain from the grape juice she’d spilled when she’d beaten Brody at canasta, the faintly musty smell as she devoured romances and ate homemade cookies.

  Cookies. She surveyed the kitchen, the sheets of parchment paper covering every available surface, with Christmas cookies on each one. She’d finally run out of eggs and room, and she needed to give cookies away before she could bake some more. And she desperately needed to bake—it was what grounded her and kept her sane.

  The snow was falling lightly, two days before Christmas Eve, and she’d already given cookies to everyone she’d ever met. She knew she wasn’t going to be getting into her car in such suicidal weather, and she knew the one person she hadn’t given cookies to yet was in walking distance. And he probably had eggs.

  A simple, neighborly gesture, she told herself. So they had a confusing history together. They were both grown-ups, and that was in the distant past. She should go to show him she was entirely unaffected by it, and a friendly visit with a tin box of Christmas cookies would be just the excuse. If he wasn’t there, even better. She would have made the gesture without having to actually talk to him and pretend it didn’t matter. She blew out the Christmas candle, extinguishing its warm glow, and headed out into the night.

  She walked past the snow-shrouded tennis court and the tree she’d planted so long ago. Funny that they hadn’t bulldozed that when they’d wiped out everything else. She circled the house, only to discover where her Christmas tree had come from. He’d taken one of the three carefully landscaped balsams from the side of the driveway. His gardener would kill him.

  The deck was freshly shoveled and his truck was in the driveway, but there was no sign of him. She could always hope he’d gone for a long hike. The wreath she’d made for him was still there on the side of the house, and smoke was curling out of the chimney. She couldn’t see him when she peered through the French doors, and her knock was deliberately soft. If he was meant to hear her, he would; otherwise, she could just leave the cookies and head back to the safety of her house.

  She should have known fate wouldn’t make it easy on her. Before she could knock one more time the door opened and he stood there, barefoot and bare chested.

  “Here,” she said, shoving the cookies at him. “Merry Christmas.”

  He stared at her for a long, endless moment. She finally got a good look at the inside of his house—he’d brought a bed downstairs by the wood stove, the fancy kitchen was a mess and every surface was covered with books and newspapers. It was far too cozy, and she had to get out of there, fast.

  He took the cookies, but he caught her wrist at the same time, and before she realized it he’d drawn her into the warm house, kicking the door shut behind them. “It’s about time,” he said, setting the cookies down on a nearby table. “Merry Christmas, Angel.” And he pulled her into his arms, against his hard, lean body, and kissed her.

  It was as if she’d been holding her breath, waiting for this, for the past ten years. Since the last time he’d kissed her. His skin was smooth, warm beneath the open flannel shirt, and his mouth was just as practiced as ever. He didn’t give her time to speak, and she didn’t want to. She just wanted to kiss him, touch him, let his hands strip the heavy coat from her shoulders and drop it onto the floor.

  The house was dark with the oncoming shadows of early evening, and he hadn’t turned on the lights. Maybe what happened in the dark stayed in the dark, she thought, as he gently moved her back, almost as if they were dancing again, until she came up against a piece of furniture.

  He barely had to nudge her—she sank onto the sofa, still clinging to him, and he followed her down onto the cushions, his long hair falling over them both as he blotted out the light, and she closed her eyes, letting herself drift in the wonderful sensations. The smell of wood smoke and whatever soap he used, the feel of his hot skin against her hands, his hard lean body on top of hers, the taste of him, rich and dark and intoxicating. The muffled sound of the sofa as it creaked beneath their bodies, the distant sound of a phone ringing as he began unbuttoning her blouse.

  He hesitated a moment, his hand stilled, and she put her hands over h
is wrist. “Don’t stop,” she whispered.

  He smiled, a slow, sweet smile. “I wasn’t going to,” he said. “This has been too long coming.” And he was reaching for the zipper of her jeans, when the answering machine clicked on and her ex-husband’s smug voice filled the room.

  She froze. “You haven’t answered my phone calls, Brody. Too busy trying to steal my wife?”

  She put her hands up and pushed, and Brody immediately released her, rolling off her to the side of the old sofa.

  “It’s a waste of time. I had her first and nothing can change that. I was her first and her best, and you’ll just be an afterthought.”

  Angela got to her feet, fastening her jeans with shaking hands, buttoning her blouse crookedly. Brody lay on his side on the sofa, an unreadable expression on his face.

  But Jeffrey wasn’t finished with his long-distance monologue. “The only reason you might be able to get her in bed is that I warned her about you, and she’s still so hung up on me that she’ll do anything she can think of to pay me back. I didn’t want to hurt her, but she didn’t believe that, and hell hath no fury and all that jazz. Don’t be fooled—she doesn’t really want you. She just wants to get back at me.”

  Brody rose slowly, lazily, stretching as he ambled toward the telephone. Jeffrey’s voice was getting edgier now, almost desperate. “I know you’re there, Brody. It’s a waste of time trying to avoid me. Sooner or later you’ll have to face the truth. The only reason you want her is you never could have her, and you’re a man who hates to lose. And all she wants is revenge. Brody—”

  Brody picked up the phone, then set it down again, breaking the connection.

  “Poisonous little son of a bitch, isn’t he?” he said mildly, disconnecting the various cords from the telephone and the back of the answering machine. “He’s been calling me for days now. You’d think he’d be ready to let go of you, now that he’s got a new family, but he always was a dog-in-the-manger type. He may not want you anymore, but he doesn’t want anyone else to have you. Particularly not me.” He leaned against the counter. “But then that brings us to the question of you and your motives. Any truth to what he says?” He seemed barely interested. “Is that why you’re here? For revenge against the man who dumped you?”

  The room had been so hot, so cozy, the wood heat filling the high-ceilinged room. Now it was as cold as if he’d left the door open to the winter air. She turned her head to make certain it was shut, staring out into the darkness, but of course it was closed. It was only the ice in the pit of her stomach.

  “Look at it this way,” she said in a deceptively calm voice. “You finally got what you wanted, even if Jeffrey’s phone call came at the wrong time. Consider me had. You’ve beaten Jeffrey. There is now no woman in Crescent Cove who wouldn’t sleep with you.”

  “There are any number of women in Crescent Cove who don’t want to sleep with me,” he said. “Most of them, as a matter of fact.”

  “All of them,” she said, picking up her coat and pulling it around her.

  “Don’t leave.”

  She paused by the door. “Why not?”

  She would have taken something, anything. But he simply shrugged, and in the end there was nothing she could do but walk back out into the snowy night.

  And in the distance she heard a crashing sound.

  SHE SLIPPED on the icy road, sprawling in the snow, and the hard slap of the cold against her face was a salutary force. She scrambled to her feet again and ran the rest of the way, calling herself all sorts of names beneath her breath. What the hell did she think she was doing? All he’d had to do was touch her and she’d been ready to strip off her clothes and do anything he wanted. She’d done just what Jeffrey had warned her against, fallen into his bed without a second thought, and it had only been the phone call that had saved her from turning her life into a disaster zone.

  Except that it hadn’t been his bed. She’d been aware of very little but the man who was touching her, kissing her. In retrospect, she knew what had felt strange, wrong but right, familiar yet strange.

  He had the old wicker sofa from her front porch.

  She couldn’t figure out why. Most of the furniture in the place had been broken-down junk, and the green sofa had been sagging badly, the wicker split and cracked. There’d been a few real Stickley pieces in the living room—the Jacksons should have saved those, not a worthless piece of porch furniture.

  But it hadn’t been the Jacksons. It had been Brody. She knew that as surely as she knew her own name.

  And that was about all she knew at that point. She’d run, the moment she’d had a chance, letting Jeffrey do what he was so good at. Making her doubt everything.

  Why had Brody kissed her, why had he saved the ratty old sofa, why had he done any of the unfathomable things he had over the years?

  It didn’t matter. If Jeffrey was right, then Brody had accomplished what he’d set out to accomplish.

  Then again, why was she trusting Jeffrey at all? He said he’d been her first and her best. Oh, God, she certainly hoped not.

  The house should have been dark when she opened the door. She’d left when it was still light, and she hadn’t expected to be that long. She’d blown out the Christmas candle, but she hadn’t bothered to turn on any lights.

  But the Christmas candle sat in the middle of the kitchen table, the flame straight and true, filling the room with a warm, comforting light.

  She stared at it. She remembered she’d blown it out—she was always very careful about such things, especially since Brody had warned her. She looked around her, wondering whether she ought to be nervous, whether someone had broken into her house while she’d been gone.

  But no one had been there—she was certain of it. The place would feel different if there’d been an intruder. And no one would have come in, lit the Christmas candle and then left.

  There was no question that the candle was unique—it burned forever with hardly any change in size, it didn’t drip and the ever-shifting scents were a delight to the soul. Maybe the wick was made of some special substance that kept a dull glow, ready to flare back into life again when you thought you’d blown it out, like trick matches. Like childhood crushes. She needed to be more careful in the future.

  She plugged in the lights on the Christmas tree, the extra glow filling the room. The woodstove was still going strong, and for the time being she didn’t need to do anything but curl up on the sofa and pretend nothing had happened.

  This was not turning out to be the Christmas she’d been determined to have. There were too many unsettled memories, too many voiceless longings.

  And the time for denial was gone. Those longings all had to do with Brody Jackson.

  Chapter Five

  Christmas

  He shouldn’t have thrown his answering machine against the wall, Brody thought, but it had made such a satisfying crunch. Almost as good as if he’d slammed it into Jeffrey Hasting’s smug face.

  He’d said the wrong thing, of course. Once Jeffrey had begun to spew his nastiness, once she’d stiffened beneath him, pulling away, he’d known he’d lost her.

  The question was, had he ever had her? Maybe Jeffrey was right—she was simply the one who got away. Except that despite Angel’s flattering opinion of his irresistibility, there’d been any number of women who’d gotten away, including the first girl he’d had sex with, who’d dumped him for a football player; including his exquisitely beautiful, exquisitely shallow ex-wife and any number in between. He’d had his heart broken and he’d washed the pain away with a bottle of Scotch and emerged bloody but unbowed.

  But he’d never gotten over Angel McKenna.

  He was an idiot. He wasn’t going to be fifteen again, stealing a kiss on a moonlit porch. He wasn’t going to be twenty again, pretending to be drunk so that he could kiss her in the rain.

  And he didn’t want to be. He’d made countless mistakes in his life, lost just about everything, but in the end it had made him
a halfway decent man.

  And in the end, he still wanted Angel McKenna, and probably would until the day he died.

  He ought to just get the hell out of there. Coming back had been a mistake, though his options hadn’t been many.

  But he had discovered that the perfect couple of Crescent Cove’s summer population had split, and that Angela had moved up into a house on Black’s Point. And invitations to stay with sympathetic friends in Hawaii, Aspen and Santa Fe had paled next to the chance to see Angel again.

  To his shock, he still felt the same. No, scratch that. Not the same. When he was a teenager he’d mainly been interested in getting into her pants. What he was feeling now was stronger, deeper, surer. He wanted her on every level—as a friend, a lover, a sparring partner and anything else that came to mind. He wanted her, needed her, and he had the crazy hope that she felt the same.

  He grabbed his coat and headed out the door. It was pitch-black—no moon that night, and snow was in the air. By the time he reached Angela’s farmhouse he’d managed to build up a full head of steam, and his knock on the door was closer to a pounding.

  He half expected her to ignore it, which wasn’t an option, but after a moment the door opened and she stood there, looking small and wan, and some of his righteous anger vanished.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “We’ve got unfinished business,” he said abruptly. Not the best thing to say—she immediately folded her arms across her chest in an instinctive defensive posture. “Not that,” he said, irritated. “Though God knows that’s been hanging fire for too damn long.”

  She didn’t say anything. Behind her he could see a soft glow emanating from the living room, and the scent of bayberry mixed with the smell of Christmas cookies hanging in the air. Who would have thought Christmas cookies could be erotic? But then, that was his constant state of mind when he was around her.