Flirting With Disaster

by Ruthie Knox

  The leave of absence had been Mike’s idea. He’d gotten tired of having his head bitten off by the stir-crazy, short-tempered asshat Sean had become the second he set foot in Camelot.

  “You talked to me by accident, didn’t you?” Katie asked. “Both times.”

  He nodded.

  An accident. The whole fucking thing had been an accident. After he’d been in Camelot a month or so, he’d met Caleb at the pub. They’d watched a baseball game side by side at the bar and bought each other a few rounds when it turned out they were rooting for the same team. One thing led to another, and by the end of the night, Sean had a job offer.

  He took it, because being on leave turned out to be boring. His mom’s estate required eight hours of work one day and none whatsoever the next, and he’d taken to going on long runs and longer bike rides, drifting into the community center gym at weird hours to lift weights, eating alone at the Village Inn and drinking alone at the pub. Anything to avoid his single most important job: packing up the house he’d grown up in and selling it.

  The real estate agent he’d spoken to called him every few days, but Sean remained frozen, incapable of sending his mother’s clothes to Goodwill or throwing away all the toiletries in the bathroom closet.

  Partly it was that he couldn’t work up any real enthusiasm about going back to San Jose. Released from the endless meetings, phone calls, and schmoozing, he found he didn’t miss it.

  Partly it was that. But mostly it was the past, rising up to kick his ass.

  “Does that piss you off?” Katie asked. “That you broke your own rules and talked to me?”

  He shook his head.

  He wanted to tell her the truth. There are no rules, Clark. There’s just what you do to me, and me trying to figure out how to handle it.

  But he knew how he’d sound if he opened his mouth.

  With an irritated huff, she crossed her arms and turned her back on him, walking over to the wall to gaze at the weird animal head.

  He was supposed to be good at solving problems. After assigning him to brainless tough-guy work for less than a month, Caleb had figured out Sean had a head on his shoulders and started bringing him all kinds of knots to untangle instead. Logistical problems, tech problems. Judah Pratt’s stalker problem.

  Sean was supposed to be good at solving problems, but he didn’t have the first fucking clue what to do about Katie.

  Chapter Five

  Katie bared her teeth at the wolf-robot-head. It bared its teeth back.

  She felt like growling. If she had claws, she’d sink them into Sean’s neck and shake him until words started falling out of his mouth.

  The whole situation was so infuriating. He didn’t talk to her, except when he did. He’d only answer yes or no, except when he didn’t feel like answering at all.

  She hated him, except … well, except she couldn’t, because seeing him on the bed with the laptop, typing and clicking at warp speed, had set off a nostalgia bomb in her chest.

  The sad fact was, she’d liked him once. Every Monday in math class, when she’d twisted around to copy the week’s extra-credit story problem off the board at the back of the room, she would study him at the desk behind her—the way his hand curved over his pen, his terrible handwriting, the angles of his face. He’d been painfully shy, and they hadn’t traveled in the same social circles, but he would nod at her in the hallways. She’d considered him an ally, if not a friend. What had she done to deserve this treatment now that he was back? And why the hell did she care so much?

  He was different, but he was the same. On the bus, he’d blended into the vinyl seats, a boy genius surrounded by surly, muscular farmers’ sons who had stubble and stories about the Columbus girls they’d finger-banged at the state fair over the summer. He’d sprawled out sideways and kept his eyes on his book or his video game or whatever he had to occupy himself with that day.

  He’d always looked as if he constituted his own world, complete in itself.

  She’d envied that about him. When Caleb enlisted and Amber moved into an apartment in Mount Pleasant with her best college friend, Katie was thirteen years old, and she became almost frantic with the need to fill her parents’ apartment with noise, with presence, with people. Anything to banish the emptiness. She still didn’t know how to sit alone in a room and feel okay.

  Whereas Sean could be alone in a room even with her in it. He kept himself under tight control and didn’t need anybody.

  Maybe that was why she found him so unaccountably fascinating—because she needed to figure out how to be like that.

  Every time she let down her guard, she fell into her worst Katie-habits again, her fretting and depending and nurturing. Always trying to figure people out, to help them and fix them and make them like her. After she came home from the epic catastrophe of her married life in Alaska, she’d diagnosed the problem as youngest-child syndrome.

  But she didn’t have to spend her life being a people-pleasing weenie. That kind of behavior wouldn’t get her anywhere except where it had already gotten her: left behind when she outlived her usefulness. She needed to forge her own path—to become impossible to abandon because she was the one out front, blazing her own trail.

  Hadn’t she been trying to do what Sean had done? To leave the old Katie behind and become a different person, harder and stronger and more focused than the old one? Yet here she was, out on a job at last, and she was stuck in a Louisville hotel with a reformed geek who didn’t talk to her.

  A trailblazer wouldn’t moon around thinking about high school. She would be too busy blazing.

  The trouble was, Katie had no compass. With Judah AWOL, she needed some kind of heading or intel or something. And that meant she had to get Sean to stop screwing around and actually speak to her so they could start working together.

  If all he would do was shake his head and nod, she’d nod him to death. She’d make him nod until he got a goddamn neck spasm.

  She whirled around, and he twitched. “Do you want some dinner?” she asked. “We could order room service.”

  He nodded, and she grabbed the menu from where she’d found it earlier. “Want me to order? That way you don’t have to talk.”

  Nod.

  It was one of those menus with words she didn’t know, but she forged ahead, ordering burgers for both of them with something called “jezebel sauce,” and roasted potatoes on the side. Easy-peasy, so long as she didn’t fixate on the prices.

  By the time she’d finished, Sean had returned to his clicky-typing.

  “Are you working on Judah stuff now?”

  Another yes-nod.

  “Can I see what you’re doing?”

  Yes.

  She perched on the edge of the bed and leaned over to look at the screen, uncomfortably aware of the way his bare forearm brushed against her stomach as he typed but unable to do anything about it if she wanted to see what he was up to.

  He had several different programs open, and he was cycling rapidly between them, checking one, clicking something in another. His web browser was open to Judah’s Facebook page, but he was typing what looked like code in a terminal program. Or gibberish. She wouldn’t know the difference.

  “This is work?”

  Yes.

  He raked his hand through his hair. Sean had dark blond hair of the sort that aspired to volume, but he kept it so short it had no hope of attaining its ambition. The closest it could come was a sort of ruffled messiness, which ought to have been unattractive but unfortunately wasn’t.

  He really didn’t look anything like he had in high school.

  “Caleb asked you to do this?”

  No.

  “Judah did?” A long shot. As far as she knew, Sean had never spoken to Judah.

  No.

  “So you’re taking your own initiative here.”

  Yes.

  But what was he doing? A restless energy loosened her tongue and propelled her to her feet, sending her pacing back and forth
across the carpet.

  “You’re a real mystery man, you know that? Unless Caleb told you more than he told me, then you haven’t got any more idea what we’re doing here than I do. All we know is that Judah got some weird messages from a fan, and he asked Jamie Callahan for advice. Jamie sent him to Caleb because he knows we’re trustworthy. We still don’t know what the messages said, where they came from, why they were weird, or why Judah didn’t just have his regular security people handle it. Yet you seem to have a plan.”

  She planted her feet and put her hands on her hips. “I want in on it. I don’t like standing around feeling as useful as a clod of dirt.”

  This won her a glance and a flash of something that looked remarkably like panic in his eyes before he schooled his expression into sternness.

  What could he possibly be panicking about?

  You’ll just have to work it out between you, her brother had said, with full confidence that such a thing was possible.

  Well, she was trying. Sean was staring at his laptop screen, clicking and typing like a madman.

  She screwed up her courage again. “Will you please tell me what I did to make you hate me?”

  He looked up, frowning, and shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  He didn’t say anything, but he kept staring at her, which made her skin tingly.

  No. Not tingly. Itchy.

  “Sorry, I forgot,” she said. “No open-ended questions. I’ll rephrase. You dislike me, yes?”

  No.

  Huh.

  “Come on. You won’t even talk to me, and you’re always staring like you’re trying to classify my faults. You obviously disapprove of me. Maybe you think I’m flighty, or I talk too much? Or I only got this job because I’m Caleb’s sister? Maybe I’m not smart enough to be your partner, and I should go back to the office where I belong?”

  He shook his head slowly, holding her gaze with those blue eyes of his. Eyes the color of the night sky in Alaska, dark and fathomless. Just looking into them sent her back there, reminding her of what it had been like to give everything she had and still come up short.

  “Well, you don’t like me.” That much she knew for certain. She’d known it since the first day he came into the office, when he’d had to wait ten minutes for his appointment with Caleb. She’d greeted him pleasantly, and he’d responded by backing away from her like a vampire threatened with a crucifix.

  His quizzical expression briefly made him look like his old self again. Then he nodded.

  “See? I just need to figure out why.”

  This time, the shake of his head was so exaggerated, she could feel the exasperation coming off him in waves.

  “What?”

  Sean sighed, making her feel about six years old. He clicked a few times, typed something fast, and turned the laptop so she could see it from where she stood a few feet from the bed.

  I like you fine, Katie.

  Now he was just messing with her. Wasn’t he? Or being polite?

  Only Sean wasn’t the type to be polite for the sake of convention. He’d proved that to her time and time again.

  “Then why won’t you talk to me?” The question came out small and weak, and she cursed herself for caring. Her best self wouldn’t care. Parisian Katie would tell this distant, disapproving stranger to go to hell.

  Sean frowned again, only this time his expression was less shuttered than she’d ever seen it. Vulnerable. When his lips parted on an inhale, hope rose in her. She took a step toward him. He would tell her what the problem was, and they would fix it together. Everything would be fine.

  In fact, for one strange, confusing moment, she thought everything might be better than fine. That she and Sean could be—

  She didn’t know what. Something.

  She sat down on the bed again, facing him this time, and watched his pupils dart from her eyes to her mouth and down her body, then back up. Cataloging her. Looking for reassurance? Trust?

  She reached out and put her hand on his knee, trying to give him whatever it was that he needed, but the touch was wrong. Not reassuring, because her palm landed a few inches too high, and his thigh was really hard. And hot from the laptop. Hot from his body. Hot.

  Sean’s nostrils flared, and then before she could even get used to that or think about what it meant, he flipped his computer shut and dropped it to one side and leaned toward her, covering her hand with his own. His eyes locked with hers, and her heart gave a painful kick as she recognized on some level deeper than reason that she’d had him wrong from the get-go.

  He didn’t hate her at all.

  “What?” she asked him. “What did I do?”

  She didn’t mean regarding the case. She wasn’t entirely sure what she meant, except maybe that she couldn’t have ignited that look in his eyes with one hand on his knee. It was impossible. As though she’d wandered into opposite land.

  He loomed over her. He was a looming sort of man, taller than her, bigger in every dimension. She could smell him, warm skin and dark beer, and when she breathed in that smell it went places in her body she’d never invited it.

  Secret, smoky, yearning places.

  Sean leaned closer, until his mouth was close to her ear and his own palm was braced on the bed right beside her hip, so his forearm pressed against her side almost all the way to her waist.

  So much contact, when before today there’d been a black hole between them.

  “Nothing,” he whispered.

  The way he said the word—as if it were in a foreign language, or he were reading it off a card. Delivering it to her. She shuddered.

  She didn’t know whether it was the sound of his voice or something else. The way his lips almost brushed the side of her face when he spoke. The sound of him breathing right beside her, shallow and fast. The poised tension in his broad torso.

  Maybe it was his weight pushing down on the mattress, his hand covering her fingers, which had at some point started digging into his hard-muscled thigh without her permission.

  Or maybe it was just that he was speaking to her. She ought to resent him for it, for withholding the sound of his voice so long that it became a gift he could give her.

  She had, before. She would again, she was sure. But at the moment, she was too busy wanting more of it.

  As a child, she’d loved to hang upside down. To flip the world on its head and try to imagine inhabiting it that way, her feet in the sky and her hair dangling in space.

  She felt like that now. Like she could slide her hands between the buttons of Sean’s shirt and walk on air. Like doing that would be both possible and impossible at the same time, and if she could figure out how, the feel of his skin on her palms would fill her with light.

  “Talk to me,” she said.

  The tip of his nose connected with her jaw as he lowered his head and inhaled deeply. He rubbed his raspy cheek against the slice of bare skin at the juncture of shoulder and neck.

  He shook his head, slow and deliberate. His face, his hair, his skin against hers.

  Saying no.

  It took a moment for it to sink in, but when it did, she stiffened, and he drew away.

  She was such an idiot.

  She pulled her hand back and wiped it on her jeans, hating the pins-and-needles feeling. As if he’d stunned her, burned her with his heat.

  Hating that she’d put herself in a position where he could deny her all over again, when she’d practically begged.

  Sitting on the bed with Sean Owens, touching his thigh, inviting him close as if they were friends. As if they were lovers, for Christ’s sake, when they were nothing of the sort.

  The creases in his forehead and his narrowed eyes told her he was as confused as she was, and sorry, too. Genuinely sorry. But the set of his mouth promised that nothing could change it.

  His feet hit the floor as he leaned past her to retrieve his jacket. He stood up and backed away from the bed, watching her.

  Intense. Dangerously intense,
the way he looked at her. The way her skin tingled under that look.

  Not itched. Not prickled.

  Tingled.

  Goddamn it.

  He shoved his feet into his shoes and crossed to the door, and all the while she got heavier on the bed. Leaden with failure and embarrassment, though she didn’t even know what she’d failed at, or why she should be embarrassed.

  Had she done this to herself? Had he? Whose fault was it, even? Whose fault was this weighty desperation that wanted him to stay, even now, even though it would be just awful if he did?

  “Dinner’s going to be here any minute,” she said.

  But what she meant was, You wouldn’t. You wouldn’t just walk out of the room rather than tell me.

  He would.

  He did.

  Chapter Six

  Sean had to admit, Judah Pratt was pretty good live. The singer’s voice had mellowed since his early hits—pop garbage that still got way too much radio air time—and he played his steel-bodied National guitar like someone who’d spent a lot of time honing his craft.

  “Why hasn’t he recorded this?” Sean asked Ginny, who leaned against the bar next to him, sipping a Coke and whooping enthusiastically whenever Judah spoke or finished a song.

  “He says it’s not ready yet.”

  “Sounds ready.”

  “I know. Amazing, huh?”

  She didn’t require a reply, and he didn’t give her one. He scanned the room, noting the Palmerston security guards positioned at the exits and around the stage, skipping his eyes over Katie in the booth next to Judah’s manager, Paul.

  Sean was trying not to look at her. She’d worn this black dress that was just … He was trying not to look at her.

  A gruff bulldog of a man, Paul had put himself at Sean and Katie’s disposal as soon as they showed up at the High Hat. Judah had sent a message that he didn’t have time to meet them before the show after all, so could they talk afterward?

  It would be late by then, eleven thirty at least, and no doubt Pratt would find another excuse to beg off. Bunch of celebrity bullshit.

  Onstage, he finished his song, and the audience went crazy. Sean’s gaze got stuck on Katie, who was beaming as she leaned toward Paul to shout something over the applause.