Hot As Sin

by Debra Dixon

  She didn’t even know why. She didn’t like it though. Ironically, she wanted to make it better, but she had no idea where to start. Gabe wouldn’t help her. Helping her would be against the code—the code of the strong, silent type. Gabe was a hard man with hard rules, and she’d obviously broken one of them without even knowing it.

  He probably learned this little technique for controlling people in officer candidate school. Keep the troops guessing. Keep them thinking they’ve done something wrong and they’d fall all over themselves trying to fix it. She figured her coaches had attended the same classes.

  “Look, Gabe, I’m too tired to debate sleepwear fashions.” Or to play mind games with you. “Can’t we just arm-wrestle for the bed and get some sleep?”

  “We both know that wouldn’t be a fair contest.”

  “That’s the point.” She padded over to the bed, got her pillow from last night, and lifted the blanket off the end. “It’s your house, so you get the bed. I’m the guest, so I sleep on the couch.”

  He didn’t move away from the couch, so she tried again. “Gabe, I appreciate your wanting to be kind or chivalrous or whatever. I do. But common sense alone will tell you that I actually fit on the couch comfortably. You don’t.”

  “All right.” He knew better than to argue with a woman who had her mind made up. “Whatever you want.”

  By the time Gabe had showered and changed into some jogging pants and a T-shirt, Emma had her nose buried in the pillow and her eyes squeezed shut, pretending to be asleep. Before he switched off the lights, he turned the stereo down low and put in a CD of old blues tunes. The sad music fit his melancholy mood. The world was damned unfair. Always dangling what he couldn’t have right in front of his nose.

  A harmonica wailed softly about injustice as he killed the last light.

  “ ’Night, Gabe,” Emma said softly when the bed creaked under his weight.

  Surprised by the faint words, Gabe didn’t answer right away. He rolled over on his back and put his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling. Her whisper was the same clandestine sound he’d heard for so many years at the orphanage—the kind of whisper people used in the dark when they were afraid of being caught or of waking someone.

  Who was she afraid of waking?

  And then Gabe realized, she was afraid of him. She didn’t want to wake him—arouse him. She was scared of him. Of the fact that he could make her respond on a sensual level.

  A long time later, he said, “ ’Night, Emma.”

  “My name is Emily,” she corrected him in the same quiet, hesitant voice. “Even when we’re alone you don’t call me that.”

  “Do you want me to?”

  “No.” It was her turn for silence, and then another question. “I just wondered why? Are you afraid you’ll slip?”

  Gabe was tired of walking on eggshells. So he told her. “Emily belongs to them. Emma is mine.”

  Closing her eyes, Emily fought the intimacy of his words, fought the seduction of the dark. Emma is mine. Those three words had such incredible power. This declaration had nothing to do with the way he’d laid claim to her in the bar. This was about wanting the imperfect woman beneath the ice princess. No one had ever wanted that woman before. No one had ever known she was there.

  With three words he’d managed to knock down most of the wall she’d built between them. The wall was supposed to keep her from doing something foolish, like completely trusting anyone. But the darkness encouraged confidences, and she was afraid to go to sleep. So she kept talking, pretending that they were having an innocent conversation.

  “My granddad had a nickname for me. He used to call me Emmy Sue.”

  “Was he a skater?”

  “Good Lord, no. He didn’t know a thing about ice skating, but he built the most beautiful birdhouses for me. Most of the time I couldn’t tell one bird from another, but I loved to watch them land and take off. They were so graceful.”

  “So were you.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I am always amazed at what a person with a computer can find out if he knows his way around the Internet system.”

  “You researched me?” She wasn’t sure whether to be offended or flattered.

  “For instance, I found out that Emily Quinn has no equal when it comes to takeoffs and landings.”

  “That’s a little exaggerated,” she told him as she stroked the heavy ball of fur that had taken up residence on her belly. “But jumps were my trademark, my signature on the ice.”

  “Darlin’, they were more than that, I think. To quote one particularly eloquent journalist, ‘She rides on a cushion of air that other skaters cannot find.’ ”

  “You dug up that old article?” She smiled. “Although, that was a great quote. My granddad loved it. He said his birdhouses were responsible. They were too. They were my secret. Watching the birds taught me how to soar. For me, those few seconds in the air were the only times I felt truly in control of anything.”

  “I have a hard time believing that. No one gets to that level of competition without enormous self-discipline.”

  Emily rubbed the cat beneath his chin, letting his purr create an accompaniment to the music. “Oh, I don’t have a self-disciplined bone in my body. You are sadly mistaken if you thought I called the shots in my career.”

  “Then who did?”

  “Who didn’t! My parents. Coaches. Choreographers picked my music and choreographed my routines according to the coaches’ guidelines. Designers created the costumes, usually without input from me. Coaches decided when and where I would compete. Fitness consultants mapped out my strength training, and nutritionists monitored my diet. I showed up for practice. I was just the talent, the trained seal.”

  Gabe laughed. “So was I, darlin’.”

  “Oh, yeah!” Emily grinned at her unintentional pun. “I guess you were.”

  “We all are, one way or another. Control is just an illusion.”

  “Maybe it is,” she agreed thoughtfully, and turned over on her side, slipping her hands beneath her cheek. Wart log-rolled as she turned and settled on her hip. “Because every time I think I’ve figured it out, it slips away again. When I hurt my ankle, even the illusion was gone. I lost the ability to take a world that was spinning out of control and balance it again on the edge of my blade.”

  “Can you skate at all anymore?”

  “Oh, I can skate better than the average Joe, but without the jumps there isn’t much point. Not to competing anyway.” She yawned. “Are the doors locked?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you—”

  “Checked ’em twice.”

  He thought she’d fallen asleep, until she hesitantly asked, “Mind if I turn on the bathroom light?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Gabe heard her displace Wart and pick her way across the room. She flipped the switch and retraced her steps.

  “ ’Night, Gabe.”

  “ ’Night, Emma.”

  Although she had turned on the bathroom light, the closet door was still wide open. Progress, Gabe thought. Not much, but progress.

  Gabe rose early, driven by a sense of urgency he couldn’t shake, and by the need to beat the snow predicted by early afternoon. The round trip to the cemetery was over a hundred miles, and most of Mountain Loop Highway was barely a step up from a logging road. Twenty miles out of town it turned into a narrow dirt road.

  The woman occupying the passenger seat in his truck had barely spoken all morning other than to ask how cold it was and offer him Coke or coffee with his oatmeal. Right now she huddled in her parka, staring out the window as if her life depended on it.

  She was mulling something over. That much was obvious. He suspected it had something to do with last night. But what?

  The more he watched her, the harder she looked out the window, and the farther away she scooted. Finally he couldn’t resist commenting any longer. “If you get any closer to the passenger door, you’ll be riding on the outside o
f the truck.”

  Emily jumped as the sound of his voice startled her. For the past twenty minutes all she’d heard was the heater fan and the whine of the transmission as Gabe shifted gears to accommodate the road grade or icy condition. Checking her body position on the seat, she frowned.

  Her knees were pressed tightly together and angled toward the door while her shoulder was jammed into the corner of the seat back and truck frame. Her right arm lay on the armrest and the fingertips of her left hand balanced on the base of the window. Gabe was right; she was practically out the door.

  Anyone with half a brain would see the unusual amount of space between them and jump to the conclusion that she was afraid of him. And they’d be right. Everything about Gabe unsettled her, especially when he focused that incredibly intense gaze on her. It literally pushed heat at her. Like now.

  Unzipping her parka and flapping the front, she made up an excuse for her odd behavior. “I guess I was trying to cool off. It’s colder by the door.”

  She could tell he didn’t believe a word, but he leaned over and cut the temperature lever back.

  “Thanks,” she said lamely.

  “No problem. I was beginning to feel the heat myself.” He checked the road and then let go of the wheel with one hand to shrug out of his coat. He waited until she reached out to help him before he looked her way. “I forgot how quickly two bodies can heat up a small space.”

  That last sentence and the warmth of his coat as she curled her fingers into the lining were Emily’s wake-up call. Heat that had nothing to do with the hot air blowing out of the vents flooded her cheeks. All her life she’d been the center of people’s attention, but never like this. Never like she was being savored.

  Since breakfast she’d been trying to convince herself that Gabe didn’t mean what he’d said last night. That he didn’t want Emma. Did he?

  In public he played the role of an enamored ex-husband: kissing her, placing his hand protectively at the small of her back, trying to rub her shoulders. He’d performed a hundred small services the previous night, exploiting anything that gave him a legitimate right to touch her. And warning off any man who so much as looked in her direction.

  In private he kept his hands to himself, but he managed to touch her all the same.

  Swallowing, Emily hoarsely suggested, “The road.”

  “Right.” Gabe refocused on the road, barely avoiding a jolt to the truck but not the one to his solar plexus.

  He felt like a raw recruit about to take his first rocket ride out of a C-130 plane. All a man could do was close his eyes, kiss his fear good-bye, and jump. Emma didn’t look much better.

  Despite the deplorable road conditions, they reached the first Darrington cemetery by nine o’clock. The spot was easy to miss, barely a dip between two forested slopes. Snow covered the ground already, the white blanket a remnant of the past week’s storm. Silver firs and mountain hemlocks dotted the uneven ground and stood somber watch over the scattered graves. The tombstones resembled eerie marble petit fours, frosted with ice and snow. More ice dribbled down the sides of the monuments and glistened in the early morning sun.

  A cloud scudded across the sky and cast a shadow. Emily shivered involuntarily. She’d been expecting some sort of modern cemetery with a big stone fence around it, perfectly tended grounds, and asphalt pathways. This place was none of those things. It was an old churchyard—obviously still used for burials, but isolated and tended only by love. The kind of place that cradled the history of families.

  Another chill crept over her. She was about to steal the life of one of their children. That action made her feel as if she were taking on a job, a responsibility. She wondered if Gabe felt the same. She almost said something, but he shoved the truck in park and killed the engine.

  After he gave the place a quick once-over for anything out the ordinary, he told her, “Let’s do it.”

  “It seems so dishonest to take someone’s name, someone’s life.”

  “It is, but it’s better than being dead. Let’s go.”

  When she still didn’t open her door, Gabe got out and wrenched it open for her. “Come on, darlin’. You know you hate not being in control of your life.”

  “I never said that.”

  “Not in so many words, but it’s true. So, I’m asking you—do you want to start taking control of your life? Or do you want to sit there and give it away again?”

  Stunned, Emily knew he was right. Over the years it had been easier, less risky to agree rather than take action or live with conflict. If she wasn’t in control, then other people were always to blame for the bad things that happened.

  Gabe might have found one of her flaws, but he also revealed the secret to maintaining control. She had to be willing to take the blame, to make the decision. That was the secret. That’s why she felt in control when she jumped. She made every decision—when to take off, how fast to spin, how many revolutions, and when to land. If she fell on her butt or her face, she was responsible. She stayed in the air until she said it was over.

  “I’ll pick the name in a heartbeat, and I guarantee you won’t like it if I do,” Gabe warned her softly.

  “You’re right,” she said. “I won’t like it at all if you pick the name.”

  “See there? I keep telling you I’m right, but you don’t listen.”

  “That’s because you’re usually yelling at me,” she retorted as she swung her legs around.

  “That’s because you don’t listen.” He held out his hand to help her down. “Careful. This parking lot is a sheet of ice.”

  “Ice I can handle. I grew up on it,” she told him as she hopped down without accepting his help. Her feet immediately slid out from under her.

  Gabe caught her, dragging her back up against his chest, where his coat hung open. He gave her a minute to catch her breath, enjoying the feel of her in his arms again, enjoying the way she leaned into him so naturally. Wishing he had more time. Wishing for what he couldn’t have.

  Gabe drew back from the edge, but only because an icy cemetery parking lot was no place to kiss Emma. He didn’t draw back completely, just far enough that something besides testosterone could influence his thinking.

  “Darlin’, if you handled ice any better, I’d have to carry you.”

  Obviously embarrassed, Emma straightened and stared at his throat. Her cheeks were flushed. “That won’t be necessary. I can handle it from here.”

  Unfortunately she turned away from him too quickly and had to put a hand on the truck bed to steady herself.

  “Right,” Gabe said sarcastically.

  She swung around to explain about the tennis shoes being slippery, but the excuse died on her lips. Gabe pulled a pad of paper and a gun from the glove compartment.

  NINE

  Gabe found the sweet spot at the small of his back and slipped the Beretta into his jeans. He hadn’t intended to carry the gun until he realized the cemetery was a sniper’s dream.

  “Do we really need that?” Emma asked.

  Slamming the truck door, Gabe said, “Probably not, but think of it as my American Express card. I don’t leave home without it, and people recognize it instantly.”

  She didn’t believe his flip answer. “It’s because of the guy last night.”

  “It’s because of a lot of things, but mostly it’s common sense.” Gabe switched the pad to his right hand. “Let’s get this done while the mountain’s out.”

  She followed him toward the rows of gravestones, zipping her parka and trying to find the mountain he was talking about at the same time. “Which mountain? They’re all around us.”

  “None of these slopes. It’s an expression I learned growing up in Seattle, a way of announcing the day is beautiful. Mt. Rainier is usually hidden by clouds near the top of Crystal Mountain. So around Seattle, when the mountain is out—”

  “It’s a clear day.”

  “You got it.”

  They trudged through wet snow toward a side a
rea where the markers looked newer and a few granite benches were scattered beneath the trees. Every few steps, Emily found herself glancing over her shoulder. Something about being in the graveyard unnerved her. Maybe it was Gabe’s gun.

  To take her mind off the surroundings, Emily tried to make conversation. “So the orphanage you mentioned, the one with the nuns, that was in Seattle?”

  “Yep.” Gabe walked more slowly, reading the epitaphs as he went.

  Emily looked over her shoulder again, hating the sound of crusted snow crunching beneath their shoes. She didn’t watch horror movies, and she didn’t like quiet, scary places. “So … tell me about it. Every detail.”

  “There’s not much to tell. St. Christopher’s Home for Children is run by nuns. It’s a big gray stone building with a courtyard near the waterfront.”

  God, she hated economical conversationalists. “Sounds pretty.”

  “Hardly. The place is falling down around their wimples.”

  “Why not sell?”

  “They should. They could make a fortune, but they don’t listen to me.”

  Surprised, Emily said, “Somehow I got the impression that you didn’t keep in contact with them.”

  “I don’t,” he answered absently, and hunkered down to brush a snowdrift away from the base so he could get a better look at the dates. “The last time I saw Sister Mary Joseph was when I paid my bill.”

  “Your bill?” Emily asked, puzzled by his choice of words.

  Gabe’s hand stilled as he realized what he’d said. A second later he brushed the last of the snow away from the date and ignored her question. “If you don’t object to being thirty, this one might do.”

  “Fine. Put her down as a possible. When I’m sixty I’ll look young for my age. Now back up. When did nuns start running a tab on charity?”

  Gabe sighed and looked up. He could tell that Emily wasn’t going to let go of this, and he kicked himself for opening the door. “Nuns don’t run a tab on charity. They give it away free.”