Seduced by Love, Claimed by Passion~Summer Box Set

by Helen Conrad

  Chapter Seven

  The steak was probably great, but Blake couldn't really taste it. It wasn't exactly ashes in his mouth, but he couldn't concentrate on flavor. Kate was making small jokes, trying to draw him out. Thanks, but no thanks. These last two days had been weird, and that wasn't what he was looking for in life. Life should have a rhythm, an ebb and a flow. Blake's had been thrown out of whack exactly as much as he could stand already.

  "You could play football with this potato," Kate said. She'd slathered hers with sour cream and butter and cheese, and then seemed to be doing her best to eat around all the fattening parts.

  "No you couldn't. Thing would fall apart after one toss."

  "Well, yeah, cooked. But raw it'd make a good football. For a bit. I prefer short games to long ones, anyway. Hey, if I start babbling, just tell me and I'll shut up."

  Blake sighed. Under other circumstances, this could have been a pleasant evening. The lights were a bit bright, but Kate went and put up candles and turned off a few of them so the atmosphere was much more... atmospheric, Blake decided. Under other circumstances, this would look one whole hell of a lot like a date.

  There were no room for other circumstances in Blake's life, though. Other circumstances, leading his life in the way he felt rather then thought led him to disaster before, and it would do so again. His instincts and his heart were the greatest liars of them all. He could never trust them again.

  "Wow, this is lively, Blake. If you get anymore animated, a funeral is going to break out."

  "Hey!" Blake snapped at her. Kate was in the middle of taking a drink, and she stopped, cup in midair, looking like she was bracing herself for a hit. "You stole that line from Rodney Dangerfield. Here I was thinking that you were some great wit, coming up with barbs at the rate of... something really fast, when the truth is you're nothing but a common thief."

  “I take exception to that,” Kate shot back. "I'm an extraordinary thief!" She was still looking ready to defend herself, but Blake could see this hint of a smile in her face. She'd just come up with a game, and he was going to win.

  He pointed at her with his index finger, like shooting a pretend gun. "Die Hard - that's what Alan Rickman says when Bruce Willis's wife accuses him of being a common thief.” His grin was triumphant. “Isn't this like the games we used to play as kids?"

  Kate gave him a quick quelling look, and he knew what it meant. Talking about the game was against the rules of the game - it had to be figured out by playing along.

  "I guess it is,” she said slowly, looking wise. “And I know what you're thinking: how can the same thing happen to the same guy twice?"

  “Hah!” He slapped the table. “Die Hard II. I'm sensing a theme here. Gonna tell me you see dead people next?"

  She looked like the proverbial cat that ate the canary. "All I see is dead people," Kate said. She couldn't help but grin now.

  She thinks she has me, Blake thought. And he thought, and thought, and realized she did have him. He couldn't come up with an answer.

  "Sixth Sense, I guess,” he said, groaning as he said it. He knew it wasn’t exactly right.

  "Wrong! Twelve Monkeys.” She laughed happily. “I won, so I get to decide what we do next."

  "I get it wrong once, and you're the winner?" Blake said, being grumpy.

  "I never said the game was fair," she said. She pulled a stick of gum out of her pocket and started to chew. She offered one to Blake, but he didn't take any. "I get to ask you a question now, and you have to answer it, okay?" She spoke, cutting off Blake's refusal. "Why did you leave Seattle?"

  He shot right back. "Why did you leave San Fran?”

  Hadn’t they been down this road before?

  “All that stuff you brought here—I’d say you're moving in. Why aren't you taking on the big city anymore?" Blake tried to keep his tone measured, but it was difficult. He wasn't going to be dredging up all his feelings just to satisfy the curiosity of some girl, even if she was... a friend.

  Kate heard the emotion being tamped down in his voice and she saw the flicker of something cagey in his gaze. Her instincts were usually good and this time her instincts were sending out a bright, clear signal. "Who is that girl in the picture?" she said.

  His gaze hardened. “How did you get that scar on your thigh?"

  Kate paused for a moment, and she looked like she was going to ask a new question, and for just a moment, Blake frowned. “There you go. She just wants trivia, something to joke about later on,” he thought.

  But she surprised him. Her head came up and she told him straight out.

  "I was in a car accident coming back from a concert at the Warfield. I'd hopped on the freeway to lengthen my drive - I didn't feel like going home, but I had nowhere else to be. I was moving a little faster than I should have been, and my mind wasn't 100% on the road, but I did notice the lights coming on. It didn't register - headlights coming your way just doesn't happen, so I didn't realize it was real until it was too late and I couldn't miss it.”

  She finally blinked, but he couldn’t read any emotion at all.

  "We hit head on. This was an older car, not my pretty little PT Cruiser. I flipped over. It was a miracle the cage of the car didn't crush down around me. Part of it did, actually. That's where I got my scar. I was stuck there for three hours with the damned thing biting into my leg. The other driver was an old man who confused an offramp with an onramp. He was driving one of those old man Cadillacs, so I got the worst of it in car damage. He had a heart attack and died on the scene.”

  Blake winced, but didn’t say a thing.

  "I was actually lucky. Besides the nasty gash and a bruise that didn't want to go away, I was fine. Just the scar. And being there in that car for three hours, that was the hell of it. I think I passed out twice, but only for a few minutes." She made a face. “But there was no way I could put all the blame on that old man. I shouldn’t have been going so fast. My mind was going over things when I should have been alert. I should have stopped and made evasive moves when I began to realize what was going on.” She looked at him, her eyes filling slowly with the tragedy of what had happened, the reality of pain and death. “But I was being me, typical, bull-headed me. I knew I was in the right and I wasn’t going to give way to anyone.” She stared at him as if appalled at herself all over again. “Can you believe that? In some ways, that accident was mostly my own fault.”

  He shook his head. “No, Kate. You can’t think that way.”

  “I can and I do,” she said softly. “And the whole thing began eating away at my self confidence. If I could make such a stupid mistake, what else was I doing? Me. I’m always so sure I’m right. You know that. You’ve called me on it enough times. And I had to face that you and people like you were probably right. I need a little more humility in my life.”

  The world became more vivid for Blake as he listened to Kate's story. His dripping faucet, the subtle howl of the wind outside, pushing needles from the trees. He could hear and feel it all. Most of all, he felt like he'd been an ass.

  “Humility,” he echoed. “Yeah, we could all use a little of that I guess.”

  “I’m trying,” she said with a quirk in her grin. “I know you don’t think I’m trying hard enough, but I’m trying.”

  She sat back in her chair and sipped a little more white wine, then looked up at him again, her eyes bright.

  "So how did you see the scar? You did molest me in my sleep, didn't you?"

  "Uh, no... I... just saw it.” He sighed. She’d gone above and beyond what he’d expected from her. “I guess it's my turn, huh?"

  ***

  Kate felt the slightest bit guilty. She'd essentially played a trick on Blake, and even though she wasn't going to insist on quid pro quo, he was going to give in. There was a lot to complain about with the big goof ball, but he always had an innate sense of fair play. It made him so easy, she thought for a second. So easy to like and so easy to depend on.

  "Okay, um... I don
't know what to say. Hell, you're a lawyer, ask me some questions."

  "Why did you leave Seattle?"

  "Because it was time to go," Blake said. He wasn't looking her in the eye - it didn't mean he was lying, of course, but the avoidance told Kate about as much as a direct answer would. He was ashamed of something. That didn't fit well with Blake, though. Ashamed of what?

  "Does it have something to do with the girl in that picture?"

  "Yeah, sure.” He grimaced again, obviously in some kind of torture. “I don't know if I really want to do this," Blake said. He jabbed his knife into the remnants of his steak.

  "How did you know her?"

  "I didn't."

  That was cryptic. He wasn't making this easy. But, Kate decided, that wasn't because he was hiding something. He didn't know how to come out and say what he felt or thought, at least not about this. Still, coming up with the right question to draw him out was like putting together a puzzle without knowing what your pieces looked like, or what the final puzzle would come out looking like. It would be tough, but that just meant that Kate wasn't going to give up.

  It was almost like the game. She couldn't approach it directly - she needed side roads. If they were kids, this would have been easy. She'd just have to dare him. That was the one thing they could never refuse of each other - the dares. It was the sacred bond of adolescence.

  "Do you remember the time you dared me to shoplift from Mr. Peters store?"

  "What?" Blake said. He was looking in her eyes now, focusing in on her. Good, Kate thought, he was thinking now.

  "Don't you remember that? I was thinking, with the little girl today..."

  "Yeah, I dared you to get something we could play with and something we weren't allowed to buy. You came back with candy cigarettes. My God, you always were a smart aleck." Blake was smiling now, but there was something bittersweet in his eyes.

  Kate got it. That's what was missing. When he was a kid, he'd toy with getting in trouble. He wasn't as much of a hell raiser as Kate was, but he had his ways, like when he tied little Timmy Waits up in that tree. He wasn't going to hurt the kid, but he'd go to the edge. He trusted himself enough to push. That wasn't there anymore. He was cautious, and he'd never been cautious before.

  "So, where did the wild streak go?" Kate asked. Blake sighed and sat back.

  "Some people would say I grew up."

  "No, when people say you've grown up they mean you've refined yourself, not reinvented. Come on, Blake." He looked away from her again, and Kate could sense he was going back inward. She might as well hit the nail on the head. "Blake, what scared you?"

  He was wiping his hands on his napkin, and when the question came he started to wring it. His looked at Kate then looked away.

  "What happened?" Kate asked.

  "I screwed up, Kate. I screwed up, and there's no way to fix it. That girl," he pointed over to the picture, and paused for a moment. "Cynthia Cooper. Never got in trouble. Played trombone. She was a little thing, weighed practically nothing when I carried her out of there..." Blake stopped, coughed, then started again.

  "Missing Persons, my first lead case. Cynthia Cooper hadn't come home from school. Only eyewitness is a janitor at the school. Said his name was Wally Green, saw her get into a white panel van. Canvassing the area, doing our jobs, talking to everyone we can. Two days later I go for a follow-up at the school.”

  Blake paused, staring at the picture, looking at the girl like she could say something to him, anything to make it better.

  “The principal of the school told me they didn’t have anyone named Wally Green on staff. Their janitor was a 70 year old black woman. It was almost a week before we found the girl, and we never found him. Wally Green is in the wind, and Cynthia Cooper is dead.”

  "My God," Kate said. She sat silent for a moment, trying to think of some sort of follow-up, but nothing was coming. What do you say to a story like that? Sorry, get over it? She looked back to the coffee table, at the photograph. The metal frame hung over the side of the table a bit, face down like it couldn't bear to look at either of them.

  "So I screwed up and I quit, and came to a place where that wasn't going to happen ever again."

  "Were you a good cop?" Kate asked. It was the only thing she could think of.

  "Not that day, I wasn’t. Maybe before... But I lost my nerve - I couldn't do my job anymore. Couldn’t make decisions. So that's the big story, Kate."

  "I don't get it," she said finally.

  "What do you mean?"

  "How did what Wally Green did become your fault?"

  "Don't bother, Kate. I've heard it all before - it wasn't my fault. Not my neighborhood, I don’t know the schools or who works there. Someone says he’s a janitor, why wouldn’t I take him at his word? That everyone did their jobs, including me. Well, if that’s me doing my job, what the hell good was I?”

  "Wow. There are a lot of things I could have expected from you, Blake. I thought maybe you'd become hard from being a cop, or that there was some sort of disability that forced you out of Seattle, or maybe even a scandal. I never expected this."

  "That I was just mediocre?" Blake said.

  "No,” she said slowly, shaking her head. “That you would be gorging on self-pity.”

  Blake's eyes went wide, and he looked genuinely surprised. Kate was surprised, too, that nobody ever said this to him before.

  She was realizing more and more that he was a really great guy—and for him to let himself sink from what he could be in order to nurse his wounds would be a real shame.

  "Look at you, almost thirty, and you look in better shape then you've probably ever been. You were probably the best-looking guy on the damned force, you've got dedication to beat the band. And you're a smart guy, too, especially for somebody acting so stupid."

  Blake was on his feet and walked around the table. He had a look on his face that Kate couldn't read: maybe he was angry, or confused. She could not tell.

  "So you're a really good man who ought to be doing better about himself. Because the way you're acting now is a real drag, you got that?" Blake stood over her, the same expression on his face. His presence hung over her, like a cloud drifting across the mood. She stood up, and though he still towered over her, it didn't make her feel so intimidated.

  "What did you say?" he said, his voice low and inflected with urgency. Kate took another sip of wine and set the glass down before she spoke.

  "Said you shouldn't be doing this to yourself, 'cause you deserve better that's all. And I wouldn't mind if you'd step back a..." Her voice was cut off by Blake's lips suddenly coming into contact with her own.

  Didn't expect this, she thought.

  It was a compulsion. Or maybe an overreaction. Blake didn't know and he certainly didn't care. By all rights he should have been incensed. This woman came here just yesterday and presumed to psychoanalyze him and tell him his business when she didn't even have a clue. He wasn't even sure how he was going to respond, or why he was coming round the table. When he kissed her, it was almost as big a surprise to him as it surely was to her. He puts his arms around her and held her tightly, feeling the warmth coming from her body, and the pure heat from her lips.

  His hands were on her back, and they felt awkward there. It had been so long since he'd even touched a woman, let alone held her, that he wasn't sure if he was even doing it right. Should my arms be lower, and cradling her? Higher up, holding her tightly against me? The thoughts came, a mile a minute, and just as quickly they were forgotten.

  It was just passion, then. A delirious moment when reason lost out to need. He needed nothing right then but to feel Kate against him and to hold her there with his lips. He pulled back a bit, just to look at her pretty face, and then he kissed her again, and then again.

  Kate had lost her breath; Blake had taken it from her. The moment their lips had touched, chills broke out through her body, and she thought she was shivering. Blake didn't seem to take any notice - he just held her clos
er. For a moment she kept her eyes open and looked at Blake as he kissed her, just to see him and prove to herself that he was real, and really doing this again.

  Then she closed her eyes. Kate shuddered as his lips came away and back again, twice, three times. She couldn't bear to touch him - her fingertips felt cold against the broad expanse of his back. Then her whole body lost all tension, and her arms draped across him and his cradled her.

  She remembered the first time she'd kissed Blake. When they were little children, they had kissed once, and she remembered distinctly Blake's reaction: "Yuck!"

  I guess it isn't yuck now, Kate thought, and she almost laughed. Giddiness welled up inside her, the sort of abandon she'd not felt in ages. Blake touching her had an intensity that moved past the physical. As their lips touched, it was like something much deeper touching inside of each of them and holding on for life. A door had been opened inside Kate, and emotions flooded her consciousness. Tears started coming to her eyes from the ecstasy of feeling.

  Somebody wants me, Kate thought.

  Then the kiss was over, and Blake pulled away feeling somewhat guilty, like he'd taken advantage of an unfair situation. He looked down at the ground and muttered, "Sorry."

  "I should say so," Kate said, her voice soft and gentle. "I was just starting to have fun." He looked back at her, and she smiled with tears coming down her face. He put his hand there for a second and sighed. Blake knew what he felt, though he wanted to deny it -- he was filled with a desire so intense it made him shake. And if he wanted anything that much, he knew if had to be a mistake.

  "Sorry, really, I... hey, I've got gum in my mouth."

  "That's mine. See, I should be apologizing to you." Kate held her hand out, like she was expecting the gum to be produced this instant. Blake put it on a napkin on the table, then sat down on his couch.

  "Blake," Kate said.