Flare Up

by Shannon Stacey

  Joe ducked Mike’s swing and launched Danny’s machine down the ramp. Keri was watching him, and he thumbed the throttle a little, making the engine rev. She tossed her hair back when she laughed, just like she had in high school, and Joe pondered his chances of a little trip to the grass clearing of his own.

  Thoughts of Keri, a bed of grass and a bottle of Deep Woods OFF! lotion got all jumbled in his head until he had to douse himself with a mental cold shower. Heading out for a brothers-only ride with a hard-on that wouldn’t quit was a recipe for masculine disaster.

  Chapter Three

  Keri wasn’t sure how just yet, but Joe was going to pay for abandoning her. While he and his brothers went off on their brothers-only ride—whatever the hell that meant—she was left to fend for herself with the Kowalski clan.

  Flash. “Say cheese!”

  “Cheese.” Keri smiled at the clothesline she was trying to knot around a tree.

  By her count, it was the eleventh boring picture of her Bobby had taken since Joe’s departure. “Don’t use up your camera on the first day.”

  “You’re pretty.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Aunt Terry said you probably had work done, like Daddy did on his truck at the body shop.”

  She glanced at Terry, who seemed very interested in the knot she was tying across the site. “Nope. No work done.”

  “She said you were probably plastic and Uncle Kevin said he’d give you a feel and let her know and then Uncle Joe punched him in the shoulder and said the only thing he’d feel is his A-S-S getting kicked if he tried.”

  “Robert Joseph Kowalski!” Lisa descended on the boy and started shooing him away. “Put the camera away and hit the playground, short fry.”

  Terry was still intent on her knot, which was kicking her ass if the redness in her face was any indication. Lisa gave Keri a sheepish grin, then went back to her own knot tying.

  Keri probably would have minded the plastic comment a lot more if she wasn’t feeling all warm and fuzzy about Joe’s hitting Kevin for offering to feel her up. He’d been possessive like that in school—without crossing over the line into controlling—and she’d felt like a treasured princess. While she didn’t feel exactly regal right now, standing on a cooler breaking fingernails in the name of clothesline, it was kind of sweet. Not sweet enough to get his butt out of the sling, but enough to give her a little tingle.

  Terry, the overachieving show-off, was done with her share of clothesline hanging, so she popped open a soda and sat on another cooler. “The guys will be back any minute, Lisa. Got your quarters ready?”

  Lisa blushed and Keri was dying to be let in on the inside joke but she couldn’t bring herself to ask Terry what she meant. They’d managed to avoid direct communication for two hours now, and she figured careful planning and pure stubbornness could extend the streak to two weeks.

  Then again, she didn’t want to spend fourteen days with two decades of tension weighing on her, and they weren’t in junior high anymore. Plus, she had two rolls of unexplained quarters in her bag. So she took a deep breath and looked right at Terry. “What are the quarters for?”

  “The bathhouse showers.” For a second Keri thought those terse three words were all she was going to get, but then Terry took a deep breath of her own and seemed to relax. “When the guys ride like that they get...wound up. All that testosterone and grunting, I guess. Anyway, Mike always drags Lisa off to the bathhouse as soon as he gets back.”

  “Tick check,” Lisa muttered, but she was damn near as red as Terry had been a few minutes before.

  “So...who checks Kevin and Joe for ticks in the shower?” Keri asked. Finally her knot seemed secure. She tugged on it and, when it didn’t pull loose for the umpteenth time, jumped off her cooler.

  Terry shrugged, but her dimples—which were never quite as pronounced as Joe’s—made a brief appearance. “I guess they have to take matters into their own hands, so to speak.”

  Keri went from warm and fuzzy to hot and bothered just like that. Back when she and Joe were doing everything but it, he’d shown her how he took matters into his own hands, so to speak, and that wasn’t an image a girl forgot.

  Only now the image morphed into an older Joe, naked and soapy and...

  Holy crap, it was hot again all of a sudden. If she’d known being around Joe would be like suffering from menopause, she might have rethought her career path. Or at least packed some herbal tea or something.

  “Don’t you even think about it, Keri Daniels.”

  Keri could almost see the fork in the road of maturity rising before her. She could take the high road and assure Terry her interest in Joe was strictly professional, or she could take the low road, which she had no doubt was the path Terry would be traveling on for the next two weeks.

  “Oh, I’m thinking about it, Teresa Kowalski.”

  “Her last name is Porter,” a voice called from a camper, and all three women jumped. While it was impossible to overlook the four boys playing some demented cross between football and basketball on the playground, Keri had forgotten about Steph. Oops. Hopefully she was a little more discreet than her younger cousin.

  Terry was glaring at Keri, no doubt trying to warn her away from Joe without saying the words out loud. Fat chance of that, since they’d be sharing a cabin every night, with his pajama status still to be determined.

  “I should fire up the grill and throw on some dogs,” Lisa said with the air of somebody desperately trying to smooth over a rocky patch in a conversation.

  “No sense in that until after the guys get back,” Terry pointed out. “Especially since Mike will have some excuse for needing your help in the bathhouse.”

  “Gross!” Stephanie yelled. “FYI, I’m putting my headphones on now.”

  Lisa waited a few seconds, then grinned at Terry. “Don’t even use that tone with me. You and Evan spent more time in the bathhouse than anybody.”

  Terry’s smile slipped a little and even Keri could tell Lisa was giving herself a mental slap upside the head. Her mom had given Keri the details she knew over a hurried breakfast that morning, but there weren’t many.

  Evan Porter had left his wife three months before, moving into a tiny studio apartment over the Laundromat. Nobody seemed to know why, but there’d been no hint of another woman. Or another man, for that matter.

  “Don’t the RVs have bathrooms?” she asked, feeling some pressure to fill the conversational pothole.

  Both women laughed, but it was Lisa who said, “I’ll take your lifeguard duty at the pool for three days if you can have sex with a Kowalski man in that shower without knocking the camper right off its levelers.”

  “I’ll hide your bug spray if you even try to have sex with my brother in the RV—or anywhere else for that matter,” Terry said, and the way Lisa gasped made Keri think it was a dire threat indeed. “Go ahead, Keri, laugh at me. But once the sun starts going down you’d duct tape your own thighs closed for a bottle of Deep Woods OFF!. Trust me.”

  “Since she’d be the only woman for ten miles not reeking of DEET, she’d have guys trying to gnaw their way through the duct tape within minutes,” Lisa countered.

  Keri was blessedly saved from having to comment on that interesting visual by the restrained rumble of approaching ATVs. There was an obey-or-die speed limit in the campground, but as soon as the three Kowalski brothers rounded into view—putting sedately along—Keri could see they’d done some serious hell-raising somewhere. Men and machines both were covered in dirt and mud, and about the only clean thing she could see were three grins’ worth of white teeth.

  Joe expected her to subject herself to that?

  Their arrival brought the boys swarming back from the playground, while Stephanie, Leo and Mary emerged from campers.

  “Finally, I get to have some lunch,” Leo yelled.

  Tho
ugh it had been far too long since she’d last seen him, Keri’s adoration of Leo Kowalski was total and unabashed. He was a deceptively short and wiry man, but she knew he could probably bench press one of those four-wheelers if he got stubborn about it. He’d worn his hair in a gray crew cut for as long as she could remember, and he was the source of the pretty blue eyes. Mary, who had become the quintessential Grammy, gave the kids their dimples.

  Many years before, Keri had been terrified of Leo Kowalski. Her own father was a quiet sort—other than the five-iron incident—and Leo was like a firecracker of energy with a built-in megaphone. She didn’t know what to make of the man who very loudly threatened his children with such dire consequences as having their asses kicked up around their ears and trips behind the woodshed. Of course, neither Keri nor the Kowalski kids knew what a woodshed was and he’d never laid a hand on them in anger, but that didn’t make the promises any less foreboding. She’d discovered after only a few visits it was Mary and her wooden spoon a kid really had to watch out for.

  But what Keri liked most about Leo and Mary right then was the fact they’d greeted her as if it had been eighteen hours, not years, since they’d seen her. No melodrama, resentments, admonishments or exuberance. They were just...normal.

  Unlike the rest of them. Joe, Mike and Kevin were shouting over each other to tell the family about their ride. There were words like off-camber, high-sided and roost being thrown around that could have been German for all she knew, but the gist of it was they’d ridden to the edge of breaking their idiot necks, but had come home in one piece.

  Now they were filthy, starving and—judging by the smoking way Joe kept looking at her over his nephews’ heads—as wound up, so to speak, as the women said they’d be.

  Sure enough, Mike was beckoning to Lisa. “Hold off on lunch for a few minutes so I can shower this mud off. You should come check me for ticks, too.”

  “Lucky bastards,” Kevin muttered before heading to his tent for a change of clothes.

  Keri wasn’t sure what was up with the plural bastards until she saw Joe moving toward her. Other than a raccoon mask of white where his goggles had rested and his hair, every inch of Joe looked as though he’d taken a mud bath and skipped the rinse.

  “Don’t you even think about touching me,” she warned.

  “I think there’s a tick on my back, so you should come to the bathhouse and check me over.”

  She could tell by his expression the only thing keeping him from claiming the tick was in his pants was the presence of the kids. “Nice try, Kowalski. As filthy as you are, a tick couldn’t find your skin with MapQuest and a GPS.”

  He sighed. “I guess I’ll have to make do on my own.”

  Again with the freakin’ hot flashes. She watched him jump on his four-wheeler and head for the cabin, trying like hell to kill the visual of Joe making do on his own.

  When he passed by a few minutes later with a duffel bag tossed on the ATV’s front rack, she was still trying. She watched him turn up toward the bathhouse, seriously reconsidering her refusal. There couldn’t be an interview if she let Joseph Kowalski die of some tick-borne disease, could there?

  Then came the realization everybody else was watching her watch Joe, followed closely by the thought he was heading to the bathhouse not because the cabin’s shower was too small, but because it didn’t have one. Or a toilet. What if she had to go pee in the middle of the night?

  * * *

  Flash. “Say cheese!”

  Keri watched Terry slip nine-year-old Brian a dollar and shook her head. Ten bucks he’d be the first one to get melted marshmallow in her hair if she didn’t keep an eye on him.

  It was s’mores time and she watched Leo and all the women place their chairs well outside of the campfire perimeter because the guys had apparently promised Lisa they’d help the kids tonight. Even though Keri had breasts, she was exempt because of her status as Joe’s flaming hoop-jumping lapdog.

  But she was ready for this. During an assignment at a summer camp for underprivileged kids founded by an A-lister early in her career, Keri had mastered the art of the perfect s’more.

  The key was in the organization and careful preparation. First, a square graham cracker had to be set on the picnic table with a smaller square of chocolate centered on top of it. Another graham cracker set next to it. Only then should the marshmallow be toasted to a perfect golden brown. Set it on top of the chocolate, along one edge of the cracker, put the other cracker on top, exert slight pressure and then drag the stick out in the direction of the opposite edge, thereby spreading the gooey marshmallow along the chocolate. Count to ten, then eat. A perfect s’more.

  “Everybody got a stick?” Kevin asked.

  In case the chorus of cheers wasn’t enough, the five kids offered visual proof in the form of a flurry of wildly waving sticks. Keri flinched when Danny’s threatened to take off the tip of her nose.

  Kevin ripped open the bag of marshmallows and Bobby squealed with delight. Before Keri could point out it was time for neither sticks nor marshmallows yet the kids had presented their sticks like Musketeer swords and their uncle shoved a marshmallow on the end of each one.

  She could only watch in horror as, after throwing elbows for position, the kids converged on the fire. Joe, Mike and Kevin circled constantly, adjusting stick heights and pointing out when one needed to be turned. Bobby’s burst into flames and only Mike’s reflexes kept him from jerking the stick and winging the flaming marshmallow into the air.

  Suddenly sticks pointed at her from every direction, marshmallows varying from light beige to charcoal black drooping from the ends.

  “You’re not ready!” Stephanie shrieked, just as Bobby’s overcooked glop let go of the stick and dropped onto the toe of Keri’s sneaker.

  “I need a cracker!”

  “Where’s the chocolate?”

  “Uncle Joe, she doesn’t even know how to make a s’more!”

  Keri scrambled, dispensing crackers and chocolate as fast as she could while Bobby’s burnt marshmallow bonded with her shoelaces. By the time Brian was shoving his in his mouth, Joey was roasting his second marshmallow.

  Thirty minutes later, when Lisa finally called a halt to the sugar consumption, Keri was exhausted, sticky and feeling slightly nauseated by the s’mores each of the kids had made special just for her. She’d tried accidentally dropping Stephanie’s on the ground and kicking it under the picnic table, but the girl had seen her and, not wanting her to be sad, promptly made her another.

  And Brian, the little twerp, had definitely earned his dollar. He was responsible for the marshmallow gluing Keri’s hair to her left ear, the smear of chocolate down the leg of her jeans and the graham cracker crumbs he’d managed to dump down her back while giving her a thank you hug.

  As soon as the last mouthful was gulped down, the kids disappeared to the playground, leaving the grown-ups to deal with the fall-out. Keri was about to drop into a chair, but Joe grabbed her by the elbow and held her up.

  “You’ve got marshmallow on your ass,” he said, and she could tell by the damn dimples it was killing him not to laugh in her face.

  “That was the most demented display of s’mores making I’ve ever seen,” she hissed, resisting the urge to kick him in the shin.

  “You’ve got chocolate on your lip.”

  Before she could react his finger was there, the tip dipping into the hollow of her mouth and then gliding across her lower lip. She shivered, unable to look away as Joe brought that finger to his mouth and sucked the chocolate off the end.

  The faint suction sound made her insides quiver and she had a hell of a time swallowing. He was sure taking his time about it, and a glimpse of tongue flicking away the last of the chocolate spiked her body temperature.

  A moan almost escaped her throat and Keri dug her fingernails into her palms. What was wrong with her? Her
body was acting as though she hadn’t had sex in...

  How long had it been? Months? Years, even? No, it couldn’t have been years since she’d had sex. That would be sad. The last time had been Scott, colleague with benefits until he’d moved to New York. That had been...thirty-one months ago.

  She hadn’t had sex in thirty-one months.

  “Get a room,” Kevin told them as he shoved Joe out of his way. He picked up an empty Hershey’s bar wrapper and walked away.

  The trance broken, Keri turned her back on her tormentor and busied herself gathering the graham crackers strewn across the picnic table. Thank goodness for Kevin, or who knew what her traitorous body might have coerced her into doing.

  Clearly she needed to avoid being alone with Joe. Sure, that was problematic with them sharing a cabin and sleeping only a few feet from each other. But she could make sure his family was always around during the day and then feign sleep as soon they retired to the cabin at night.

  Being alone with Joe Kowalski was going to get her in trouble. Only this time giving in to his charm could get her in trouble with Tina, who was a lot scarier than her dad, even without a five-iron.

  * * *

  Way too many long and torturous hours later, Joe finally found himself alone with Keri.

  Unfortunately, she was wearing pajamas that buttoned clear up to her eyebrows and was tossing and turning like a princess in a pea-riddled bunk. Every once in a while she’d emit one of those female sighs that said she was annoyed and he wasn’t going to get any sleep until he acknowledged it.

  Not that he’d been anticipating a good night’s sleep anyway. Arranging to have Keri Daniels spend the night in a bed only six feet from his own wasn’t one of his brighter ideas. Arranging to have her sleep six feet away for thirteen nights was just downright moronic.

  Keri sighed again. They were getting louder, and he knew why.

  “The more you think about it,” Joe said, “the more you’ll have to go.”