Break the Sky

by Nina Lane

  She picked up a blue-and-gold egg and studied the pattern. “She developed arthritis in her hands and couldn’t do the work anymore, but even now she still gives me ideas and suggestions. Or direct orders.”

  I could well imagine her mother issuing orders. Nice as Mrs. March had been, I sensed the same core of steel in her that Kelsey had.

  “How do you do it?” I asked, nodding to the egg.

  “It’s a special technique using wax and dye.” She dug around in a box and produced a tool that had a wooden rod and a metal tip. “This is called a kistka. You use it to apply the wax pattern, and then dye the egg. The parts of the egg that aren’t covered by wax end up colored.”

  “Show me.”

  “You’ll find it pretty boring.”

  “Nothing you do is boring to me.”

  She glanced at me, one eyebrow lifting. “Not even if I start talking about data assimilation?”

  “Not even then. Especially not if you do it while standing in front of me wearing a sexy suit and holding a pointer.”

  “Dream on, baby.”

  “I will.”

  Kelsey smiled and opened a box filled with dye-stained jars. “Okay, you asked for it. If I show you the technique, you have to paint one of the eggs, too.”

  I looked at my ugly, callused hands that I used to turn socket wrenches. “I’ll break it in two seconds.”

  “Not if you’re careful, you won’t.”

  “I’m never careful.”

  Kelsey looked up. Something crossed her expression that I couldn’t define.

  “Archer,” she said. “You’re always careful with me.”

  A blade twisted inside me. I wasn’t careful with her. I was too rough, too demanding, too greedy. I’d started this whole thing because I’d wanted to make her lose control, to admit she was wrong, even to break her a little. Being careful had never entered my mind.

  And I’d known she’d respond with fire and lightning. I knew she could take it, that she wanted it, that she’d beg for more. I’d give her more too, as much as I could, push myself to the edge right along with her.

  Hell, we’d challenged a tornado together. I was more alive now than I’d been in years.

  Her blue eyes. I didn’t want to drown in them. I wanted to live in them.

  The blade twisted harder. I pulled my gaze from hers.

  “Where do we start?” I asked.

  She showed me how to get the supplies organized—making the dyes, cleaning the hollow duck eggs, sketching a pattern with a pencil. She lit a candle and demonstrated how to melt beeswax into the funnel of the kistka before using different styluses to trace the pattern with wax.

  “Why the nice, cozy secret room?” I asked her as we sat at the table, each of us concentrating on drawing wax lines.

  “It’s comfortable.” Kelsey shrugged, looking faintly embarrassed again. “I like to come down here, put on some music, maybe have a glass of wine. I wanted a place where I could shut everything else out and just be… I don’t know. Quiet. Alone.”

  “You’re not alone now.”

  Our gazes met across the table, a crackle of energy lighting the air. I wasn’t alone, either. For the first time in a very long time. Maybe for the first time ever.

  Kelsey picked up another stylus and drew it over the surface of the egg.

  “I’ll be alone when you leave,” she said.

  I was this close to telling her I didn’t have to leave. But I did have to.

  I was no fool. I’d wanted to make Kelsey admit she was wrong about me, but she was in a class of her own. One that was way above me. A place I’d never belong.

  A drop of hot wax fell from the stylus onto my egg. The pattern smeared.

  “I’m messing this up,” I said.

  Kelsey came around to my side of the table. “You might have overfilled the kistka with wax. You can get that off with some wax remover. Hold it in your palm for a sec.”

  She poured the remover onto a tissue and took my hand, pulling the egg closer to her. She dabbed at the wax and used a cotton swab to clean it off the pattern. She’d taken off her glasses to do the detail work, and I could see the individual strands of her thick eyelashes.

  I watched her face, the crease of concentration between her eyebrows, the way the blue locks of her hair fell over her forehead, the fine-grained silk of her skin. She had a tiny beauty mark just under her left eye, small as the head of a pin. I inhaled her scent of almond milk and honey. Her lips were full, and without lipstick they were a pale pink like the inside of a seashell.

  So goddamned beautiful. A fierce, sexy, brilliant woman who loved to chase storms and disappeared into her secret craft room to paint eggs when the world closed in on her.

  She glanced up and caught me staring.

  “What?” she asked defensively.

  I slipped my other hand under her chin and lifted her face to mine. Her breath caught, and her lips parted. I couldn’t remember if I’d ever kissed her gently. She sparked my lust so powerfully that most of the time I just wanted to grab her and crush my mouth against hers. To get inside her as fast and hard as I could.

  This time, I forced myself to kiss her gently. Her lips softened against mine, a murmur of pleasure passing from her to me. Filling me with heat.

  I put the egg down and wrapped my arms around her waist, tugging her into the V of my legs. She settled her hands on my thighs and leaned in to deepen the kiss. I liked the way she tucked her body against mine without hesitation, as if she knew that even if I couldn’t be careful with her, I’d never hurt her.

  I lifted my head. She was already flushed, her eyes darkening to navy. I tugged a few strands of her hair. I knew I had a better chance of getting answers from her when her defenses were lowered.

  “Because it’s the color of the sky, right?” I asked, twisting a strand of blue around my fingers.

  Kelsey blinked, paling a little. I’d struck a nerve.

  “It was…” She pulled away from me and went around to the other side of the table. “It was something my father used to say. A Russian proverb, I think. When he missed Russia or when I moved away, or when things got rough. He said the sky was still blue no matter where you were or what happened. Even if it was raining… behind the clouds, the sky was blue.”

  She ducked her head, her hair falling over her face as she picked up an egg.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Why do you blame yourself?”

  The egg cracked in her hand. In her fist. I saw her internal struggle. She lifted her head. Eyes like a glacier.

  “I get it,” I told her. “I blame myself for shitty things all the time. But that doesn’t change the fact that they happened.”

  “I never expected anything to change,” she muttered. “Dead is dead.”

  “Does blaming yourself make it easier or harder?”

  Her jaw tightened. “I didn’t know psychoanalysis was part of our deal. Or your rules.”

  I shook my head. Christ, she could still get wound so tight.

  “You think your father would want you to blame yourself?” I asked.

  “Goddammit, Archer.”

  “Tell me.”

  “He shouldn’t have died, all right?” Kelsey snapped, her voice trembling beneath the surface. “We got into a fight… it sounds so stupid now. I was such a fucking loose cannon, especially when I went to college because I thought I could do whatever I wanted. My father and I still argued, but I felt like I didn’t have to answer to his disapproval anymore.”

  She clenched her fist around the broken egg.

  “In my junior year, I told my parents I was leaving college,” she continued. “Quitting. I was going to travel to South America with some guy, hitchhiking and living off the land or whatever. My father said no way in hell would he let me do that. We had a huge fight about it. I stormed off with the guy anyway, in a fit of fucking stupid rebellion.

  “My mother tried to stop me. My father was f
urious. I didn’t care. I thought I was so goddamn cool, so free and independent. I got as far as Ecuador when my mother called to tell me my father had had a heart attack. He died before I got home.”

  She opened her hand and threw the broken eggshell into the trash.

  “Since you want so badly to know, that’s why I blame myself,” she said. “My father died because I was a selfish bitch who thought quitting school and running off to South America would be fun.”

  “And that’s why you self-destructed,” I said.

  “Yeah.” She gave a bitter laugh. “You’d think I’d have learned my lesson right away, but instead I kept the hurt going. I didn’t even think what it would do to my mother if something happened to me. Thank god she showed me what real strength was. I’d spent too many years acting like a spoiled child, and it was finally time to grow up. To take care of my mother for a change. So I went to grad school and started my career. The rest is history.”

  “So all these years you’ve played it safe.”

  “I’ve been responsible.” Her eyes hardened with irritation. “I’ve gotten stuff done. I’ve been an adult, Archer. You can’t say the same, can you?”

  Her turn to jab at me. She didn’t like that I was pushing her to open up and now she wanted to retaliate. I could take her punches. Hell, I’d let my guard down if it would make her feel better.

  “What have you done all these years?” she snapped. “You can’t find a steady job, can you? You just spend your time taking odd jobs, hanging out at bars, and sleeping around, right?”

  “Pretty much.”

  My response threw her. She rubbed her temple and averted her gaze. “So why did you come to Mirror Lake?”

  I shrugged, embarrassed by the answer even though I knew I owed her the truth. “Nicholas, I guess. Thought I should meet him. Didn’t expect to meet you.”

  Kelsey was silent, but some of the anger seemed to drain from her. I felt her watching me again.

  My heart was beating too fast. I pushed away from the table and went around to where she stood. I took her by the shoulders and pulled her in for a kiss, needing her sweet heat to dissolve the tightness in my chest.

  It did. She did.

  She pulled her mouth from mine. Faint desperation flashed in her eyes. “I need structure, Archer. I need a routine and—”

  “I know you do.” It was the reason she escaped the world to paint. She needed quiet solitude as much as she needed excitement. She wasn’t only a risk-taker or a scientist or a crafter. She was finding ways to be everything.

  She made me think I could be everything, too.

  I put my hands on either side of her face and kissed her again.

  “You need peace,” I murmured, “and you need storms.”

  Her resistance slipped away as the kiss deepened. She put her arms around my neck and leaned into me. I loved how responsive she was. How she just gave over.

  She ran her fingers over the feathers on my tattoo.

  “You’re not scared of anything, are you?” she whispered.

  “Yeah, I am.”

  “What?”

  “Leaving.”

  She was quiet for a minute before she confessed, “I’m scared of that, too. Scared of how I’ll feel when you go.”

  My insides twisted. I couldn’t help wondering how she’d feel if I stayed.

  I tightened my hands on her waist. “Do you trust me?”

  “You know I do.”

  “How much?”

  “Why?” She moved back to look at me, her eyes narrowing. “Is this about some freaky sex thing?”

  “No, but now that you mention it…”

  She poked me in the chest. “Haven’t I already proven that I trust you?”

  I patted her ass. “Not like this.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  KELSEY

  HE WASN’T SERIOUS. I WASN’T GOING to do it. I couldn’t. No way.

  Except that I was sitting in a recliner chair under a hot floodlight, my shoulder bare and my stomach in knots.

  “This is insane,” I muttered to myself.

  Ben, the guy with the needle, peered at me. “You okay?”

  “Sure. Fine.”

  I’d signed the release form. I knew what I was doing.

  Sort of.

  Tattoos were no big deal. I’d often thought of getting one. Except I’d always assumed that if I ever did, I would know exactly what design I was getting.

  At the moment, I had no clue, and yet Ben was getting the stencil ready to apply.

  “You want out?” Archer asked from my other side. He was holding my hand.

  I shook my head. I’d never wanted out with him. I’d only ever wanted in.

  “What does he have to do in return?” Ben asked, nodding his shaggy head in Archer’s direction.

  “I haven’t decided yet,” I admitted. I’d barely come to terms with what I was doing, though I liked the idea that Archer would owe me something in return. That eased my anxiety somewhat. I’d have one helluva card to play.

  I felt Ben applying the stencil. I tried to follow the movement of the pencil, as if that would help me figure out the design, but as far as I could tell it was just a bunch of curves and lines. The only thing they’d told me was that the tattoo would be colored and about an inch and a half across, which was the size I’d have chosen.

  As Ben started drawing the tattoo, I had a million second thoughts. I was going to come out of this with a horrible tattoo of a silly cartoon animal or cute angel. I hoped Archer had picked something innocuous like a flower or butterfly, but he and Ben had consulted over the design for an hour, which led me to believe it was a custom drawing. God forbid I’d end up with Archer’s name permanently tattooed on my arm.

  No. He wasn’t that arrogant.

  Was he?

  I closed my eyes and tried to keep my breath even. I heard Archer and Ben talking above me, felt Archer’s hand on mine, but I let myself drift.

  It hadn’t actually been a difficult decision to let him choose my tattoo design. I trusted Archer in more ways than I’d ever trusted anyone.

  “All right, Kelsey.” Ben wiped the tattoo with a soft cloth. “Ready to see it?”

  My stomach knotted again as I sat up slowly. Though the tattoo was on my left upper arm where I could see it if I looked down, Ben gave me a handheld mirror.

  “You can also check it out in the full-length over there,” he said, nodding toward the mirror against the wall.

  I held up the mirror. The tattoo was an intricate, shaded gray cloud with two golden bolts of lightning flashing from it amidst a shower of rain. Along the edge of one of the lightning bolts, in delicate flowing script, were the words Storm Girl.

  “What do you think?” Archer sounded a little nervous.

  I stared at the tattoo. It was small, colorful and…

  “I love it,” I said.

  “You do?”

  My heart twisted with ribbons of emotion—pleasure, gratitude, and relief that Archer knew me as well as I’d hoped he did. I looked at him and smiled.

  “I absolutely love it,” I said. “It’s perfect.”

  And it would remind me of him every time I saw it. I should have been unnerved by that realization, but instead I liked the idea of having a reminder of Archer West, one that would go along with the collection of memories I had subconsciously been storing away. The memories I’d hold on to when we parted ways. The ones no one else would know about.

  I looked at the tattoo again. My souvenir.

  “Can this be our secret?” I asked Archer. “Just between us?”

  “One of many.” He extended his hand. “Pinkie swear.”

  I wrapped my pinkie finger around his. I wished neither of us had to let go.

  “Because of the grant, they got fifteen new computers,” Tess said. “And they integrated the synoptic lab into the rotating fluids dynamic lab. They even have access to the supercomputing lab’s mainframes.”

  “Lucky bastards
,” I muttered.

  “Yeah.”

  “Does Stan Baxter know yet?” I asked.

  “I heard he’s going to the board of trustees again to complain about the state of our equipment, so I think so,” Tess said.

  My envy over another university’s state-of-the-art lab equipment was quickly surpassed by guilt. Though Stan Baxter had been on my case this year, I knew he was intensely committed to King’s University and its students. That was just one of the reasons he was so insistent that I prove my own dedication.

  Now Stan was going to fight for better computers and equipment in our synoptic lab. I made a mental note to ask him about it and find out what I could do to help. We’d all be at an increasing disadvantage if we had to continue working with outdated equipment, which in turn could hurt the reputation of the entire university.

  The phone rang. I hit the speaker button, my gaze still on the radar. “Kelsey March.”

  “Kelsey, it’s Peter Danforth.”

  “Oh, Peter, I’ve been waiting for your call.”

  “You have?”

  “No.”

  Tess laughed.

  “Ha ha,” Peter said drily. “Is that Tess? Hi, Tess.”

  “Hi, Peter. You’d better talk fast. Kelsey is scowling.”

  “Okay, okay. Kelsey, rumor has it you got some phenomenal tornado footage on your recent chase.”

  Shock bolted through me. Tess jerked around to stare at me. I grabbed the receiver and shut off the speaker phone.

  “Where did you hear that rumor?” I asked Peter.

  “From that guy who went with you. Who is he, anyway?”

  “None of your business. What did he tell you about the video? When did he tell you?”

  “I ran into him on campus, and he said you got footage. I tried to get the tape from Colton, but he played dumb, like he didn’t know what I was talking about.”

  “Colton didn’t know,” I snapped, my anger rising hot. “I never sent him the video.”

  “Why not?”

  I turned away from Tess, not wanting to see the expression on her face. All of my students would be upset to know I hadn’t shared that incredible footage with them. And I could never explain why I still hadn’t. That video belonged to me and Archer alone.