Burn in Hail (The Hail Raisers Book 3)

by Lani Lynn Vale

  “Get naked,” I ordered.

  She laughed.

  “I’m still mad at you,” she pushed herself away and walked around the chair, and then even further until she was on the other side of the table.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because yesterday at Bord’s you ignored me,” she said. “You saw me, I know you did.”

  I snorted.

  “It was either wave at you, or send Ariya into another round of questions that only has to do with you, or not piss her off.” I explained. “She thinks I’ve always had the hots for you.”

  She didn’t need to know that Ariya was right.

  “Have you?”

  I paused, contemplating how much to tell her.

  “I’ve always found you intriguing,” I finally settled on.

  Her brows went up. “You’ve always ‘intrigued’ me, too.”

  I chuckled and started to round the table.

  She shuffled to keep the table in between her and me.

  I paused, my head tilting to the side. “You don’t want me to touch you?”

  She pursed her cute little lips. “I want to have my head about me. It seems when you get too close, I can’t remember what I should and shouldn’t be doing. Plus, your answer of ‘I’ve always found you intriguing’ isn’t good enough. I want the hard, dirty details.”

  I snorted.

  And before she could do much more than squeak, I vaulted over the table and snatched her up in my arms.

  She gasped and froze as I pressed my hard length against her hip.

  “You want to know that I’m a dirty boy and had the hots for a girl that was way too fucking young for me?” I questioned.

  She bit her lip and nodded.

  “Fine,” I said. “I wanted to fuck you from the time you grew those breasts. I made myself join the military so I’d forget about you.”

  “Did it work?” she whispered.

  I nodded. “It did. Without you under my nose around every turn, I was able to focus on other things. The minute I got back, all bets were off.”

  Her brows rose as she tried to squirm out of my hold.

  “Let me go, you big galoot.” She squirmed harder.

  I held her so tightly against me that all that she was doing was moving against the length of my cock, making me want to rip the jeans straight off her legs and throw them out the fucking window.

  I grunted when one particular wiggle had her breaking free of my hold.

  Though, she wouldn’t have done it if I wasn’t afraid that she was going to hurt herself by twisting so hard that I had no choice but to let her go or hurt her by holding on.

  She took the newfound freedom and dashed out of the room.

  I followed her much slower, coming to a stop outside of her room and pausing to lean up against the doorframe.

  She was folding laundry of all things.

  “You’re telling me you’d rather do chores?” I asked incredulously.

  “You really did piss me off today,” she added as she tucked a towel underneath her chin, pinched it between her chin and her chest, and then proceeded to fold it.

  “I know,” I said. “If it makes you feel better, I pissed myself off, too.”

  She shook her head. “No, not really.”

  My eyes watched her every movement. The way she easily folded clothes into perfectly pressed presentation. Something that would’ve literally taken me five minutes and a freakin’ headache to accomplish.

  Then she started in on a sheet, and I moved in to help her, taking the edges from her without a word. The minute the sheet was finished, I took it from her and laid it on the bed next to her other clothes, then stared in fascination as she finished it up by doing the impossible—folding a fitted sheet.

  Hell, by the time she was done with it, I was convinced she wasn’t human.

  It looked like she’d taken it straight out of the package that she’d bought it in.

  “That’s impressive as hell,” I finally told her, eying the fitted sheet like it was an alien from outer space.

  Seriously, I could only fold it in half, and then in half again before I decided that it’d never be perfect. Then I followed it up by rolling it up into a ball and shoving it onto the shelf with the other items that seemed to accumulate when you had a house.

  “I learned it from my suite mate in college,” she said. “Mine used to be big blobs, but one day she walked in while I was ‘folding’ my fitted sheet, showed me how it was done, and I’ve never done it the old way since.”

  Once she freed up the chair of the laundry, all the folded clothes now on the end of the bed, my eyes landed on a t-shirt.

  One that was one I’d been looking for this morning, but hadn’t been able to find.

  “Seems like you have some klepto in you,” I told her, nodding my head in the direction of the shirt.

  She blushed.

  “I…” She paused. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Of course she didn’t.

  I took a seat in the chair and stared at her as she tried to make herself busy by putting up the clothes.

  The t-shirt she tried to hand back, but I just shook my head. “Keep it.”

  She bit her lip, then walked to the bed and very carefully laid it on her pillow before turning to me.

  “I’ve got a little bit of a problem when it comes to men,” she said suddenly. “I know that you probably wouldn’t do anything that I accused you of today, but I can’t just turn off that part of my brain.”

  I leaned forward and let my arms rest on my elbows. “Your father damaged something inside of you, and it’s going to take more than me saying that I wouldn’t do something like that to you to fix it. It’s going to take courage on your part, but if you’re willing to give what we have here a try, then I am, too.”

  Her eyes went wide.

  “What if I wanted to be exclusive?” she tested.

  “What if I wanted to have you and no one else?”

  She growled. “What if you decide that this is too much and leave when I’m head over heels in love with you with no way to breathe without you?”

  I crossed my arms. “What makes you think that I’m not in the exact same position?”

  She gritted her teeth.

  “I know next to nothing about you,” she blurted.

  “I’m an open book,” I said. “I have no secrets.”

  Now she was just bringing shit up to throw at me because she was scared.

  My belly was rolling, and I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to talk her out of not wanting anything to do with me.

  I wasn’t the best catch on Earth, but I knew one thing for certain.

  The woman standing there, the woman that stole my shirt…she was the one. She was it for me. There was no one else that would ever be good enough, and I’d always known it.

  Chapter 20

  No man is worth losing a friend over. Unless she touched his beard, then it’s game on.

  -Hennessy to Krisney

  Hennessy

  “Tell me something…”

  His brows rose to his hairline, and he sat back and opened his arms. “Whatever you want to know.”

  Seriously, it was like this man wasn’t willing to give me anything. He may act all nonchalant right now, but the minute I started digging too deep was the minute he’d take a step back.

  “What was your home life like?”

  He gave me a droll look.

  “You know about my home life.”

  I did, but I didn’t.

  Everyone thought they knew, yet there wasn’t a single person in this town, I didn’t believe, that had the entire story.

  “I don’t…”

  “There’s nothing to know, Henn. You have the basics. My mother was gone most of the time. She was more of a roommate than a mother. I guess she loved me in her own way, but at this point in my life I haven’t figured out how tha
t was.”

  I sighed.

  “What interests you?”

  His mouth quirked.

  “Pretty women that have daddy issues.”

  I flushed from the roots of my hair to the tops of my knees.

  “And what kind of woman is that?”

  I was playing with fire.

  This had gotten out of hand very quickly. Why did this man have the ability to do this to me? He always had.

  “You,” he said. “Only ever you.”

  Something warm started to fill my belly.

  He’d been slowly filling it all night, but now I was filled to the brim, and it was about to spill over.

  I’d been seconds away from giving in, from throwing myself into his arms and telling him that I was sorry for being such a jerk.

  In a last ditch effort to keep him from getting too close, I’d told him I wanted to know more about him, knowing that he wouldn’t want to give me that information.

  He never talked about himself. In fact, he went out of his way to not talk about himself. He didn’t like his mother. He wasn’t very close to his father. The minute any of them came up, he turned and walked away so he wouldn’t have to talk about them.

  I’d seen him do it to no less than ten people in the last couple of weeks. And when I’d tried to broach that topic while he was seeing me strictly as a patient, he’d skirted the issue, and downright shut it down, unwilling to talk about it.

  Now, though? He didn’t once hesitate to talk about it.

  Dammit!

  “Are you sure that you don’t want to ask about my sister? About my time in the Marines when I was deployed?” He paused. “Most of it you already know. When I was talking to you at your office in the beginning, I wasn’t doing it as your patient. I was doing it as the man who was falling in love with you. As the man who’s been in love with you since way before he ever should have had feelings for you.”

  And the last of my misgivings melted away.

  My eyes went to the corner of the room.

  I looked at the innocent looking toy that I’d had for years.

  Well, it wasn’t innocent to me.

  My dad gave it to me as a reminder.

  I was never smart enough to solve it, and when I got frustrated and tried to break it, my father had taken my birthday present back.

  “My dad thought I was stupid.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “If I give you my heart,” I said, walking over to the toy and picking it up. “You better take care of it.”

  His eyes went to the toy that I’d dragged my finger across, then to me.

  “He laughed at me when I couldn’t figure this out,” I said. “He gave it to me for my birthday. He’d said he’d ran out of time to get me a present, and had seen this at the dollar store.”

  It still had the hundred-dollar bill in it.

  Every once in a while, I picked it up and tried to solve it, but I never could.

  “I try to solve this every couple of weeks. Have been steadily doing it since I got it from him,” I said, turning and handing it to him. “He laughed at me when he found out that I couldn’t do it.”

  He took the innocent toy, looked at my face, and then down at the puzzle.

  Then he stood up, dropped the toy to the floor, and slammed his booted foot down onto it.

  The puzzle smashed into a hundred tiny pieces.

  I gasped.

  “Your father doesn’t have control of you anymore,” he said. “And I never had the patience for those, either.”

  I started to laugh.

  He watched me for a few long moments, and then took two long steps toward me.

  The next thing I knew, I was on my back in the bed, all my carefully folded clothes scattering to the sides and the floor.

  His mouth slammed down onto mine, and he growled.

  “Your dad is a fucking asshole,” he said. “He probably laughed because he thought it was funny, but it wasn’t. It was a shit thing to do, and the moment that he saw that it was frustrating you, he should’ve done something to help, not made it worse by laughing.”

  I agreed, wholeheartedly.

  I was a psychologist. I knew that I should be practicing the same thing I preached.

  But when it came to my father and all the crap he’d put me through over the years, it was hard to separate myself from the little girl I once used to be.

  But before I could tell him anything more, he pushed my shirt up and over my head, and pressed a single chaste kiss to the base of my throat.

  “I want to fuck you.”

  My belly clenched.

  “I want to show you that I’m not a bad guy.”

  I closed my eyes.

  Which meant I missed him when he stood up and pulled my shirt down as if he was never between my legs.

  “But I’m going to give you tonight, and most of tomorrow to think about what we’ve talked about today.”

  My eyes flashed open.

  “And tomorrow when I come by, we’ll finish where we left off.”

  Then he was gone, and I was left staring at what remained of the puzzle that I’d stared at for nearly half my life. Only this time its shattered remains didn’t fill me with a sense of unease.

  And I found that by breaking that, Tate had somehow set something free inside of me, leaving me with hope that maybe he could set other things free, too.

  Chapter 21

  Never ask a woman who is eating ice cream straight from the carton how she’s doing.

  -Hennessy to Tate

  Hennessy

  I was avoiding the man like the plague.

  First, it was because I’d thought that he’d gotten someone pregnant within days of sleeping with me. Then it was because I thought he had a dying child with his old girlfriend.

  Now? Well, now I was avoiding him because I was embarrassed. Oh, and let’s not forget the guilty feeling that was practically eating a hole through my chest.

  My father had slept with his girlfriend while they were still technically ‘together.’ He’d gotten her pregnant. Then, the icing on top, he’d refused to have anything to do with the child because he didn’t want anyone to know that he wasn’t still worshipping at his dead wife’s feet, despite the fact that we all—Tate, Ariya, Krisney and I—thought that he was a horny toad that did anything with legs.

  I’d gone to bed last night thinking that I was doing okay.

  Then, as I’d gotten comfortable thinking about Tate, my mind had wandered.

  At first it’d been fairly innocent. I’d been happy to know that he was willing to take a chance on us. I’d been thinking about the future, and what that would mean for us.

  The town, I was thinking, might have a lot to say about us.

  My father being who my father was meant that I garnered a lot of attention, even when I didn’t want to. And Tate being who he was, well that meant that there’d be a whole lot of gossip coming at us twofold. Pairing us together, though? Well, that was just a disaster in the making, I was quickly realizing.

  For example, the woman standing in front of me, staring at what I now knew was a hickey.

  “That’s not something that I would think a woman of your position should be showing in public,” Maria Sandoval, one of my father’s sheep, murmured under her breath at me. “You’re at the grocery store where little kids can see you. I seriously don’t see how you thought that was okay.”

  At first, I hadn’t been aware of what she was talking about.

  It being Saturday, I’d brushed my teeth, put on my favorite pair of leggings, and a tank top. Once I’d had my hair up in a messy bun on top of my head, I’d headed out the door to have coffee and pancakes with Krisney. I’d promised her that we’d go today since I’d walked out on her yesterday, especially since I was still expected to go to my father’s service tomorrow or all hell would break loose.

  I’d just wanted to stop at the
store for some bread for later when Maria had started to question me.

  She kept looking at my neck like it was disgusting her, so I’d moved to the mirror across the aisle that was made to look at yourself while you tried on the glasses in the display, and saw the damning evidence.

  “Look,” I said. “It’s seven in the morning. There aren’t any kids here. The only person here is you, and that’s because you work here. I think it’s time to take a step back, let me get my bread, and butt out of my business.”

  Maria snorted.

  “I think that you have a certain obligation to the public seeing as who your father is. I certainly don’t see how it’s a good idea for you to be seen with that man,” she continued as if I hadn’t said a single word. “He’s a bad influence on you. You would’ve never missed Sunday school before him.”

  I gritted my teeth.

  “And you most certainly wouldn’t be looking at this kind of stuff.” She indicated the wall behind me.

  I hadn’t actually meant to come to this section when I’d entered the store. At first, I’d just gone down an aisle, thinking to use it to cut to the bread that was at the back right corner of the store.

  But something purple had caught my eye, and I’d stopped in front of the biggest selection of lube, condoms, and other intimate products that I’d ever seen in a store.

  I must’ve cut down the same aisle at least a dozen times before, but not once had I given it more than just a cursory glance.

  This time? Well, this time I had gotten my curiosity peaked, and I’d stopped in front of the display and picked up the purple bottle that had caught my eye.

  It was KY Jelly, Hers and Mine. One bottle was bright purple and said it was warming. The other was said to be cooling.

  I’d been reading the label when Maria had walked up.

  She’d taken one look at the bottle in my hand, and the hickey as well as beard burn on my neck and chin, and started in.

  Which led me to now.

  I was getting more and more upset.

  “Tate isn’t good for you, or for your father. He’s a bad kid, and always has been. His mother is a whore, and I’m sure that his sister is, too.” She paused for a breath. “That father of his was the only smart one in the bunch, leaving before he got sucked into their demented vortex.” She smiled like she was imparting some great news to me. “I saw him a few weeks ago. He has a new wife and kids. They’re much more well rounded than Tate Casey is.”