Fire & Frost

by Meljean Brook

  “Carry me back downstairs,” she commanded.

  “Sorry. You’re going in.”

  Her heart swum with emotions she couldn’t name. He didn’t know what he was asking, what it was to be exposed, how deep the ridicule had sunk in. How it had poisoned her.

  “I’m not.”

  “Not for you to decide, is it?” Then, casual as could be, he unrolled his sleeves and simply pulled off his shirt, taking the T-shirt underneath along with it, baring his thick, pale torso. His broad shoulders glowed strong and wide like muscled marble, with a series of scars low on one side. She swallowed as he tossed the garments aside and unzipped his jeans, stripping down to blue boxer shorts.

  She’d fucked a good number of the rock stars she’d conjured, some in surprisingly dirty and imaginative ways, but this was already more intimate. And she’d always glamoured her leg for the rock stars. She couldn’t glamour her leg now.

  It had been a long time since she’d felt powerless, but she remembered it well. Frantically tuning into her environment, hanging on every sound. The stress of being on alert. Only the powerful could be oblivious.

  Her devil computers were useless now.

  He came to her and started to draw off the blanket.

  She gripped it with all the strength she had. “No, Max. This has gone far enough.”

  “You think I’ve never seen anything like that? You think your injury’s so special?”

  “No more.”

  He scowled at her. This was how he’d been with perps, she thought suddenly; he’d overwhelm them with the force of his will. “You think it’s special, but it’s not. It’s not anything special.”

  “I think it’s my business.”

  “And keeping you alive is my business.” He yanked the blanket out of her grip and clear off her, then he threw it aside and knelt in front of her and started unbuttoning her sweater.

  “Max.” She pushed at his arm.

  He kept on. “I don’t know what you’re so worried about.”

  She glared. It’s all she had left in her to do.

  He undid more buttons, working gently and efficiently, hands grazing her belly through the tank top under her cardigan. She wasn’t wearing a bra, though that hardly concerned her.

  He paused at the last button and glanced up, face serious and shadowed in the candlelight. “I won’t be your Jophius,” he said. “I won’t be some monster to do your dirty work and then just curl up like a pet.” He pushed the sweater off her shoulders. The cool, moist air touched her arms. “I’ll fight for you, baby,” he said. “I’ll fight to the last. But I’ll never curl up at your feet.” He looked at her strangely, and for one crazy moment, she thought he might kiss her.

  “Fine,” she barked. Not like she had a choice.

  “You’re on board.”

  No, more like she knew when she was beat. “Just do it.”

  Her heart beat like crazy as he pulled the sweater free of her arms and hands. She would reveal herself without a care. Isn’t that what an undamaged woman would do?

  “Ready?” He pulled her up against him and held her with one arm; he pushed her leggings and legwarmers off with his other hand, careful to leave her panties in place.

  “It’ll be like we’re swimming,” he said again, as though they were having any old conversation. As though they hadn’t gone from boss and underling to something new and uncharted.

  “I doubt that.” She tried to make her voice sound casual as he lowered her back down to the chair and pulled the layers of fabric off her legs and feet.

  Just like that, her leg was bare.

  Her blood raced as she sat on view for him. She hated herself for worrying what he thought, nervous as a school girl. What did she care?

  He hoisted her in his arms yet again and stepped right into the tub. The skin-to-skin contact would be nice if he wasn’t touching the leg, which would be fully illuminated by the candle from this angle. Who cares, she scolded herself.

  “Ready?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Nah.” He squatted into the warmth, lowering her gently in front of him. He stretched out like a human air mattress, pulling her onto him.

  The warmth softened and enlivened her. She groaned her pleasure—she couldn’t help it. She tried to avoid letting him take too much of her weight, but it was so tiring. What the hell, she’d gone this far. She was weak. Vulnerable as a kitten. She let her head rest back on his chest, let herself collapse and float back onto the hard planes of his muscles, let him hold her fully.

  It was like a revelation, this feeling of being held.

  “How is it?” he asked.

  “Not so bad,” she whispered.

  “Not so bad?”

  “Wonderful.”

  “That’s more like it.”

  “Beyond wonderful,” she confessed. It was beyond even that. It was like nothing she’d ever experienced, this sensation of being held, of giving herself over without reservation.

  She trusted him. And he was holding her, helping her. And the more she let go, the more it meant. She felt open like a flower, skin to skin with him so silent and solid below her.

  It was glorious and terrifying. Is this what normal people did? Gave themselves over? Was this a thing?

  She’d had to almost die to get here, but now that she was here, she didn’t want it to stop. She loved being in his arms. Even helpless, she loved it. Maybe even more so because she was helpless. The realization was a bit unsettling.

  He seemed to have arranged himself underneath her—sideways or cross-legged, supporting her with his warm arms and thighs, letting her rest on his broad, muscular chest, which rose and fell as he breathed. As the minutes wore on she became hyper-aware of his masculinity. Not just him as a man, but as a male animal, virile and dominant beneath her. And couldn’t help but think that his cock was very near her ass. The way he sat, she couldn’t feel it, but it certainly loomed large her mind.

  She imagined melting and unfurling around him and feeling his hardness pressed between her legs. She wanted to fuck, even in this compromised state. Warmth blossomed between her legs.

  He mustn’t know. He didn’t want her like that.

  Max held her more firmly and slid them both deeper. She’d bared her rottenness to him, thrown herself on his mercy, and he’d simply held her. It was hard to comprehend.

  She had another shocking thought: this is what a powerless woman had that she didn’t have—vulnerability. A willingness to be held.

  “More hot water?” he asked.

  “Yeah, Max,” she said.

  He lifted his leg from under hers and adjusted the silver spigots with his feet, testing the water with his toe. All this touch. She hadn’t been touched this much since childhood. Before the accident.

  It was then she felt his cock brush against her butt, a steely surprise in the heat. She wasn’t so stupid, though, to think it was her. Any man would grow hard holding a half-naked, wet woman. She looked at her mangled leg resting on his strong, thick leg. How could he ever want her?

  “How’s this?” He tested the water one last time.

  “You’re a regular monkey.”

  “That’s right, baby,” he said, his voice gravelly in her ear.

  Was that sexual? But then, everything about him roared with sexuality.

  “I want to stay in here forever,” she said.

  He kissed her hair. “I think you’re amazing.”

  “For what?”

  “You know what,” he said.

  He meant for doing something that scared her. As if consenting to life-sustaining warmth was brave. No, bravery would be for her to reveal how happy his joy made her. How she pined for him in bed at night. How he’d become everything in the world to her. How he was more real to her than any man alive. How she loved him.

  Her love for him scared her, because there was no controlling it, no controlling him.

  “Salvo’ll come even stronger next time,” he said. “
He’ll come fast and strong. Tomorrow, the next day.”

  “We’ll handle it.”

  “We almost didn’t,” he said. “He’s gotten a taste of going after you supernaturally now. I’d imagine there’s a lot more supernatural where that came from.”

  “Maybe I’ll go after him,” she said. “It wasn’t him I had a beef with. It was the son. But I’ll go after him if I have to.”

  “Even if you killed him now, the vendetta’s there,” Max said. “The Salvo organization’s a hydra. You cut Johnny down and there’s others to take his place. They’ll keep the vendetta strong. That’s how it works with them. It’s time to tell me why he’s after you. Did you have something to do with his kid Benny getting locked up? Is that why they’re after you?”

  More truth. She hadn’t wanted Max to know the reason they were after her because it had felt like a key to her somehow. Silly—she couldn’t even give him that? A brave woman let people know things about her and simply dealt with it.

  A pause. He brushed a bit of hair from her eyes. “Is that why?”

  “Yeah, that’s why. I made sure Benny Salvo got locked up.”

  “I’m glad. We knew all about the kid down in Chicago,” Max said. “We sure didn’t cry to see him go.”

  “The kid’s a psycho,” Veronica said. “If his dad thought he’d stop being a psycho just because he banished him to a small town in the middle of nowhere, he was wrong.”

  “The geography fix never works.”

  Benny Salvo, heir to the Salvo empire, had raped a Malcolmsberg girl, beaten her to death, and then left her in a local park, posed horribly. It had touched something deep in Veronica.

  “They couldn’t get him for it, so I stepped in. I produced his home videos of the rapes and murders. Supposedly anonymously, but…”

  “Right,” Max said. “What I don’t get is, from what I recall of the trial, he’d seemed to truly think the videos had been destroyed.”

  “They had been destroyed,” she said. “But there were photos of the videos. I conjured the videos with my devil computers, made copies, planted them, and then phoned in a tip. Then I blackmailed a judge and a prosecutor. Anonymously, just asking for a fair trial. I knew the Salvos would try and fix it.”

  “Because you wanted Benny Salvo to be locked up,” Max said.

  She swished the water. He was right to wonder why she’d gotten involved. And hell, she could’ve popped his brain like bubble-wrap—that would’ve stopped Benny from drugging and raping and killing another girl more surely than the justice system. “I wanted his own tapes to bring him down. For him to be brought down by his own folly.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I just wanted him helpless and bewildered, and to hate himself. I wanted him to have that feeling.”

  The candle flickered and guttered in the silence that followed.

  “Because that’s the worst punishment you could think of?” he whispered.

  Her voice, when it came out, sounded hoarse. “Yes.”

  She felt his lips near her ear.

  “Why?” he asked. “Because it happened here in Malcolmsberg?”

  “No. It’s not the proximity.”

  The candle cast eerie shadows on the ceiling.

  “It’s the way he left her, isn’t it?” Max guessed. “Uncovered like that for all to see. You have a thing about that.”

  Always the detective, her Max. Too much the detective. Truth and vulnerability was losing its charm.

  “Put on the hot,” she said.

  He flicked the spigot with his toe, said nothing more. But he knew.

  THE MORE SHE REGAINED her strength over the next day, the more that night in the tub seemed like a daring dream. But it had happened, and she’d liked the woman she was back there. What’s more, the incident had made her feel closer to Max, easier with him, and she sometimes imagined he felt it back.

  She had the crazy thought that this was what a relationship was made of—taking risks and letting yourself be undone, undignified. It was surprising and fascinating.

  He certainly seemed to take more command of the place—she noticed it in the bigger-than-usual way he sat on the furniture, and his heavy stroll; it was as though he’d sunken more deeply into life.

  He also seemed more on guard. He really thought the next attack could be any minute. It frightened her. She wasn’t strong enough to fight like again.

  The next day she took her own bath, and afterwards, she went down to her lab and ordered up steak dinners from one of the photos in her gourmet magazine as a surprise for Max.

  She wasn’t quite up for steak when the dinner arrived the next day, but she sat across from him with a bowl of Donkey Kong Crunch and watched him devour both meals. She’d never seen a man so in love with being alive. The way he relished every bite of his food, how badly he wanted to walk around outside on sunny days. The way he padded down the stairs in the morning, opened the refrigerator, and then peered in while stretching like a grizzly bear, it made her want to be better for him, to be the woman in the bath for him, doer of scary things.

  She could never tell him how she felt. She couldn’t stand the silence. The pity. But she could do the second scariest-ever thing: she could try to give him a natural term of life. Total freedom and autonomy. He wouldn’t need her anymore, but that was the gift of it—he’d be his own man. He could laugh at her and leave her. He wouldn’t go back to Chicago, but there was a whole world out there for him.

  You won’t ever do what really scares you, he’d said.

  Well, he’d eat his words when he learned of this new plan. He might eat his words on the way to California or something, but still, he’d see she wasn’t some sort of coward, hiding behind magic. If he leaves, he leaves, whatever will be, will be, she told herself, ignoring the knot forming her stomach. Only a weak person kept people around by force. And anyway, she knew how to be alone. She knew how to live without love.

  Jophius jumped up on the chair next to her. Jophius had taken to following her around everywhere. She put a handful of cereal in front of Jophius, and he gobbled it up in snorty delight, teeth flashing.

  “That’s nice,” Max said.

  She grinned. “He likes to eat at the big table.”

  Max rolled his eyes and sopped up the gravy with a biscuit.

  A tweak of the code—she felt sure that’s all it would take. But what tweak? That was the million dollar question. She’d figure it out—she always triumphed when she put her mind to something. In the technical realm, anyway. And she did things that scared her all the time—he was wrong to say she didn’t.

  Jophius scrunched his nose and eyes in pleasure as she rubbed his ear. If the tweak worked, she could give Jophius a natural life, too. Jophius would stay.

  Chapter Seven

  THE TRAIN TO CHICAGO THA-LUNKED along the Mississippi past snowy river towns and half-frozen wetlands. Veronica sat next to the window, snuggled down inside her thick, black overcoat. Her furry black hat was adorned with a big jeweled pin, giving her the mysterious elegance of a woman from another era. As if she felt him looking at her she turned to him with a smile that lit her delicate features. Max resisted the urge to pull her snug to him; instead he offered her favorite part of the paper, the Dear Abby section.

  “Thanks.” She took it and folded it neatly.

  He missed the intimacy he’d felt with her in the bath, but he certainly didn’t want to see her broken again to get it back. If regaining her strength meant she needed him less, so be it. Though lately he felt like she was determined not to need him. And she was back to spending endless hours in her lab again, too. And here they were, pit bull and witch, riding a train. Handling business, albeit with a new level of friendship between them.

  The train had left St. Paul at dawn. All the way to the station, he’d had the feeling of them being followed, watched. He didn’t feel easy on the train, either. Salvo would move fast and hard.

  They’d be in Chicago after lunch. Chi
cago, the home he longed for and dreaded seeing. The home he could never have back. Mostly he couldn’t get his little girl out of his mind. Did she carry his death in her eyes? Back when he was a cop he’d seen a lot of kids carry death and trouble in their eyes. He didn’t want that for Teresa.

  He’d resisted going down to peek in on her these past months. It felt like haunting her, because he was a type of ghost. And what if she caught sight of him? It would mess her up big-time.

  He flipped the paper to another section. More blather on Ronald Reagan’s invasion of Grenada.

  She’d be three months older. Nine and a half.

  There was a chance he’d catch sight of her while carrying out their plan. Who knows? It could happen. Maybe his sister and her family would take Teresa to the natural history museum today—the natural history museum was near the old stakeout point, their destination. And Teresa wouldn’t recognize him because Veronica was planning on glamouring them, magically changing their appearance. Still, haunting Teresa felt wrong.

  He was less than a ghost, really, because one of these days his bitch queen would get pissed off enough at him that she wouldn’t want him around, and she wouldn’t even have to kick him out. Her simple inaction would end him. He was conscious of that fact each and every time he opposed her.

  It was no way for a man to live. And it sure the hell was no way for a man in love to live.

  He knew that if he mentioned the idea of seeing Teresa, Veronica would be all for it. If you want to, why not? She’d say.

  But it didn’t sit right.

  Going to Chicago, however, was unavoidable. They had to travel for the plan to work. Max had come up with it after Veronica had explained how she’d conjured up the video tapes from a photo. If she could do that, he knew where they could get all kinds of dirt on Salvo. Veronica had assured him over and over that yes, if he could snap a photo of a certain file cabinet, then she could produce that cabinet with its contents intact. “I got your brain when I ordered you, didn’t I?” she’d joked. “I got your mulish attitude, right?”