Hot and Bothered

by Crystal Green

  Rochelle almost said I remember hearing this somewhere when we were kids, but the words stuck in her throat.

  He touched the gunpowder scar on his cheek. God, this was why he was telling her his story, and she’d asked for it, suspecting that the whitewashed version he’d given her before wasn’t true. But she’d had no idea his mark tied in with this, had no idea that it was a piece of his soul burned into his skin for all the world to see and for him to keep secret.

  He went on. “I’d just gotten back from overseas, and it was the first time I’d seen my parents in years. It was also the first time they had to face me after the loss of their livelihood, their pride. The ranch meant that much to them, and my mom kept apologizing for messing up any inheritance they could’ve given me.” He shrugged. “I told her I’d survive, maybe even reenlist someday after I got tired of the ranch-hand gig I’d found over in Sandy Valley, but I guess that didn’t make her feel any better. She’d already made up her mind that her life was hopeless, and it seems my dad had agreed. That’s why, soon afterward, he drove Mom out to the graveyard during the dead of night. He saw it as the most giving, loving thing he could do for her . . . and probably himself. Neither of them wanted to face me again as such screwups.”

  Gideon’s jaw tightened, and he closed his eyes, as if he were feeling the punch he’d taken earlier from Jonsey. But then again, it might’ve been because he was showing the first sign of emotion Rochelle had seen. With her heart throbbing, she nearly touched his swelling injury, because she knew where this story was going. The groundwork for tragedy was all there as were the hard lines etched near Gideon’s mouth.

  Yes, she could be his friend . . .

  And when he opened his eyes to reveal the barely concealed pain there, she cradled his hand with hers while he made a fist on the sofa.

  “I’m so sorry, Gideon.”

  “My dad,” he rasped, “had left a note for me, knowing I’d be stopping by in the morning. But I’d been partying at the Rough and Tumble, and after last call, I drove by the house on my way to a room at the Silver Hills near the interstate and saw that his Buick wasn’t there. So I decided to run in and check on them because sometimes after they fought, my dad would take off and my mom would go on a bender. I figured if I was around to sober her up and put her to bed, then so much the better. Instead, I found the note on the kitchen table, and neither of them was in the house.

  “That note spelled it all out. Dad told me that I could find them by the pioneer graveyard in the morning, so I drove there as fast as I could, but I wasn’t in time to keep my mom from taking a bottle of pills that did their job as my dad watched.”

  Not a car accident, Rochelle thought. And she had the feeling this was only going to get worse.

  Gideon narrowed his eyes, as if witnessing the scene all over again. “They chose the graveyard because they’d stopped there on their first date to talk, and it had romantic significance for them. That’s not surprising, though, right? They were the kind of couple that’d have something as morbid as a graveyard somewhere in their courtship.” Gideon sighed deeply. “Anyway, my parents had made a pact with each other, and my dad was supposed to make sure those pills went down nice and easy. But he’d also brought a revolver, and it was in his lap as he sat there, drunk off his ass as usual, watching her.”

  A tear slipped from Rochelle’s eye. She angrily cuffed at it. No one should have stories like this.

  But he didn’t stop there. “When I opened the door of the Buick, still thinking I’d gotten there in time to save my mom, my dad picked up the revolver. I dove in and wrestled with him for it since I was sure he was going to use it on himself. But as I grappled with him, I saw Mom slumped in the passenger’s seat. Realizing she was already dead, I nearly put that revolver to his head myself. Goddammit, I was dying to do it, but the muzzle was facing away from him so that when he pulled the trigger, it went off so close to my face that . . .”

  “It left a burn.”

  Gideon looked so deeply into her that she felt they shared more than just a story right now—they were sharing everything, including his pain. Moment by moment, she felt herself joining with him in more than just the physical ways they’d experienced, and fear pumped through her. Fear of the unknown—a fear she’d never planned for.

  His voice was so low that she could barely make out the anguish-riddled words. “That was the first bullet. And I’ll give this to the old man—he had some bullish strength in him. He kicked my ass out of that car so that, the next thing I knew, I was on the ground. Then, before I could get back up, he managed to use the next bullet on himself.”

  Rochelle closed her eyes.

  “I was used to death on the battlefield,” she heard him say. “The first time you see someone dying when you’re there, you live through the sight of blood time and again until, finally, you learn how to put it in a place where the color isn’t as red, a place where it doesn’t seem real anymore. Then, if you push it back even farther, you’re able to forget it altogether.” He nodded. “It’s been a few years since the suicides now, enough to forget how I went back to the car and saw my dad leaning against my mom, bleeding over her white shirt. It was the quietest I’d ever seen them together.” He smiled in obvious remorse. “The only time they’d probably ever agreed about anything was about how they’d die.”

  She searched for a reply, but even though she made a living using words, she had nothing. All she could do was hold on to his hand. She’d heard terrible stories during her research for books—the fire that had taken down the house Cherry had been partying in, tales of drug abuse and lives stained by tragedy—but that was just what it’d been: research. She’d imagined the faces that belonged to the stories, but she’d never been so close to a real one before.

  Her voice quivered as she opened her eyes and asked, “How did everyone come to think that your parents died because of a car accident, Gideon?”

  He still looked unaffected, as rough and steady as ever. “That’s on me. Shit, I hated my parents and I loved them, and it was the love that won out in the end. I didn’t want them to be the people who committed suicide by the graveyard, and before I could think about the consequences, I hopped in that car and drove it out of Rough and Tumble. I took the evidence out of that Buick and then sent it over a cliff and into a gulch. I watched it crash, crumble, and burn, and all the while I figured my dad had lived a drunk, so why not die one, too? Truthfully, I might’ve also not wanted to be the person whose parents took the easy way out of life.” He paused for a heartbeat. Two. “Seems as if I’m just as much into historical fiction as you are.”

  She opened her mouth to say something, anything, but he beat her to it.

  “So that’s the story of my black mark. I figured that you shouldn’t leave Rough and Tumble without it.”

  He was so nonchalant. “And that’s actually why you became a bodyguard—because you weren’t there to prevent your parents’ decision.”

  “And I became one so I could stop things before they happen. Hell, Shel, don’t dig into me deeper than that,” he rasped. “I know you want to set up a character profile for everyone you meet but . . .”

  She’d lowered her head, and she raged that she couldn’t stop her emotions from overwhelming her.

  When she felt his fingers under her chin, tipping her head up so she could meet his gaze, her chest rolled into itself, squeezing the breath out of her.

  He said, “Kat and Boomer know this story, too. On the first anniversary of my parents’ deaths, I’d had more whisky shots than usual, and my tongue was looser than I intended. We never talked about it again, though.”

  “And after that . . . no one else found out?”

  “I never told.”

  He must have recognized the fear of intimacy in her gaze, because he let go of her chin, the afterburn of his touch searing her. Then his gaze darkened again, and she stiffened. />
  He wasn’t seeing the pain she was also feeling for him; he was seeing that she didn’t know what to do now, what they were to each other.

  An anguished laugh rocked him, and he pulled away from her. “You’re wishing I hadn’t told you a word of this.”

  “No. You gave me a shoulder to lean on, Gideon, and I’m glad I could give you one, too.”

  But, as she looked into his eyes, friendship didn’t seem to be enough for him.

  It had to be, though. She was better as a friend. Cherry had been the same way with Tommy, afraid that love wasn’t as real as ambition or goals, afraid that love didn’t actually exist, afraid of tossing aside her life for a bad bet like love.

  But was that what she had with Gideon? Love?

  Rochelle stayed on the sofa as he stood, his hands on his hips.

  Love, she thought, her pulse weak. This couldn’t be it. It didn’t fit with her. She’d never wanted it.

  But as he stood over her, he seemed more exposed than ever, his gaze naked with yearning. “I see now. You make up stories all the time. You hear stories that build your books, but you have no idea what to do with one that hits this close to home.”

  She looked up at him, and it was as if an electric shock got her pulse working again with a vicious jump.

  The veins in his arms strained as he clenched his hands. “Can’t you feel anything real?”

  Could she?

  With a tragic jerk of her heart, she realized she wasn’t sure. She’d told herself a hundred times she wasn’t a candidate for true love, but she’d told herself a lot of things in life mainly just to leave them by the wayside. She couldn’t jump out of a plane. She couldn’t cook a meal on Iron Chef in under an hour.

  But this? It was much more meaningful than any of that, and it pained her that she wasn’t capable of it.

  “Rochelle,” he said with such raw feeling that she stared at the floor.

  “I wish your parents hadn’t gone that way,” she said shakily, giving him a way out so they could both go on as if nothing had happened just now. Moving along, nothing to see here.

  But when he tentatively reached out to her, stroking her hair with a gentle touch, she panicked.

  Instinct had her reaching out to slide her hands up his jeans-clad hips, dragging him closer. She ran her fingers over his fly, feeling one button under the denim flap, then the next, then the swell of him, and she hoped she could make them both forget this keen awkwardness.

  “I want to make you feel better,” she whispered, and she truly did. She wanted to do it in the only way she knew how.

  But all she felt was a sawing sensation around her heart as if it were being cut out.

  He grabbed her wrist. “Don’t. Jesus, is that all I am to you?”

  Her voice was thick. “You asked if I could feel anything real. From what I see under your fly, this is as real as it gets, Gideon.”

  “I’m not talking about sex. Shit, Rochelle, are you really gonna play dumb with me like this?”

  Yes. She would’ve if she could’ve. It’d worked so many times before with men.

  He slowly bent down on one knee in front of her, while she kept her hands midair, utterly stilled.

  “Are you gonna treat me like the only thing I’m good for is sleeping around?” he asked.

  She pulled back her hands. “You’re worth a lot more, and you damned well know it.”

  “Then listen to me. I’ve always wanted you, Rochelle. Only you. Goddamn, even that kiss you gave me in the saloon was the most earth-moving thing I’ve ever felt.” He took her hands in his. “Did you mean that kiss?”

  The one that had provoked her cousin to punch him? Hell, yes. She’d felt that kiss in every cell of her body, and in that single moment, all there’d been was the desire to have something simple with him, to feel him against her and never let him go.

  He’d been everything in that reckless few seconds when she’d kissed him.

  But how could she tell him that, if there was one promise she’d made herself a long time ago, when she’d seen how her mom had broken her dad into the closed man he was, it was that Rochelle would leave before she was left?

  “Yes,” she whispered, unable to lie. “I meant that kiss.”

  Before she even finished, his eyes lit up again, a shining golden brown that warmed her through and through.

  “But, Gideon,” she said with a lump in her throat, “we both know that I shouldn’t have done it.”

  ***

  Her words reverberated through him as if he were an echo chamber, the sound and slam of bullets leaving open wounds with every ricochet.

  Yeah, she’d told him earlier today that she was leaving, but after what they’d been through, he’d expected . . .

  What? That she would change her mind suddenly? That somehow they’d be more than two people from two different worlds who had some kind of irresistible chemical explosion every time they got near each other? Did he think she would drop her jet-setting life for the bodyguard she’d slummed with—a man who’d just made things worse by telling her his deepest, darkest secret?

  He’d pushed her into this reaction, and even though she’d offered friendship, he’d turned it aside, wanting more.

  With a brutal shock back to reality, he realized that he’d gotten on his knee for her like some misguided Prince Charming. Jesus, now he knew how she must’ve felt that night when they’d first been together, when she’d been mortified by how awkward the sex had been. This was mortification.

  But had her heart felt like it’d turned to dust that night, like his was doing now?

  He’d given her more than he’d given anyone, and it still hadn’t been good enough. Then again, when had he ever been good enough for anyone?

  His pride still intact, even if the rest of him wasn’t, he refused to get off his knee, instead leaning his arms on his thigh, like she hadn’t just sliced him in two. A sharp laugh found its way out of him.

  Even so, he was done lying to himself. For years, he’d denied that she’d always been on his mind. He’d been storing a lot of things in his black box, and he was sick and damned tired of it.

  “Something just occurred to me,” he said in a tight voice. “I’m your Tommy.”

  She flinched. “No, you’re not.”

  He gave her a lowered look from his hunched position. Couldn’t she see how much of her was in Cherry?

  Anger racked him. “You’d think,” he said, “that you would’ve learned a thing or two from writing that book about her.”

  Her mouth pressed into a straight line. That mouth, the one he’d kissed not even two hours ago, the one that had told him with that kiss that there was so much more between them that she wasn’t seeing . . .

  A dull throb consumed him. “Cherry never even tried with Tommy, Rochelle. And you know what happened after that. Do you want to go down the same road she did?”

  “She was a tragedy. Is that what you’re saying I’ll be?”

  With each second that passed, his anger was dissipating under the cover of truth. He was so sure what he’d come to feel for Rochelle was right, too. He was even sure he’d felt it since they were kids.

  Maybe she’d even been his Tommy back then, and this was his chance to finally go after her, never letting her drive away from the ranch.

  He held Rochelle’s hand, enveloping it between both of his. She seemed surprised that he was still persevering as she looked into his eyes. Was she finally seeing all the way into him? Was she realizing that they were meant for each other?

  “Why not give this a try?” he asked, putting all of himself out there, finally going after his Tommy. “Why not learn what Cherry learned only too late?”

  “And what did she learn?” Rochelle asked, sounding frightened.

  She had to know the answer. But it was that fear in her
that brought out the protective hackles in him. The awful thing was that, this time, the bodyguard couldn’t defend her from what was coming at her now.

  Emotion, true and strong.

  “Don’t throw away what’s right in front of you,” Gideon said. “Open your eyes, Rochelle.”

  But he’d temporarily forgotten that this was the girl who’d been shuffled off to her uncle’s ranch every summer because her dad had no idea how to relate to her. She’d learned how to cope through years of isolating herself and depending only on herself, and Gideon could see the battle in her to find her way out of that trap.

  He kept holding her hand, anticipating the moment when she’d break through. And just when he thought she’d discovered a way out . . .

  A decision cracked in her gaze, and he knew she was cursed to stay bound and chained by the past.

  “I guess I was right,” he said. “Even the characters in your books never commit. Why would you?”

  She pressed a hand to her stomach, clearly gut-punched. “You’ve never read all my books. How would you know?”

  “Somehow, Rochelle, I can predict the plots.”

  He stood and started to go. This was his house, but he wasn’t about to stay. Even Tommy had walked out on Cherry in his own apartment.

  He thought he heard a sob behind him as he headed for his front door, but even before he closed it, he automatically, tragically started to push Rochelle into that dark box in the recesses of his mind again, where he wouldn’t have to feel anything for her.

  ***

  “Cher-ry! Cher-ry!”

  They cheered for her as she stood on stage, captured by lights as murky as burning cigar tips, the room filled with smoke and shadows.

  Cherry smiled and held out her arms to the crowd, welcoming every clap and every shout. This was the audience she’d always needed, she thought in an alcohol-fumed daze. Finally, her fan club.

  When she stepped back for a bow, she lost her balance, then righted herself by grasping a bar on her go-go cage. The lights went out on her, and the men in the club quieted, already anticipating the next act, a young, supple dancer who was crawling on the main stage to that old gem “Teach Me Tiger.”