“Surf well and hit it hard,” he replied, and she sat upright.
Her hands drawn into her lap, she squeezed her fingers together. “Okay, that’s it. What’s wrong?”
He shook his head, just as innocent as could be. “Nothing’s wrong, Annie. Why do you keep insisting something is? It’s a bullshit chick move, and totally not like you.”
She lifted an eyebrow, easing back in her seat. The chair was low, but the curving back arched into arms that held her and supported her when it felt like everything inside her was shaking. “No. It’s not like me. You’re right.” She measured her words carefully. “If you’re pissed, you can say it. Even if it has nothing to do with me. Or especially if it has something to do with me. If this is just about you being upset with your fall, tell me. But I won’t put up with you saying nothing.”
“Why do you keep insisting something’s wrong?” He injected exactly the right kind of exasperation into his voice, but paired it with good humor to imply that he was willing to tolerate her antics.
“‘Surf well and hit it hard,’ you said.” She wrinkled her nose. “Come on, Sean. Who do you think you’re talking to? You have a thousand more plans than that. I’ve seen the surf charts, for Christ’s sake. I’ve seen your office. Nothing’s just chance to you.”
She couldn’t believe that he thought she’d buy his bullshit. It was completely unfair. Her fingers twisted together hard enough that her nails caught skin, and she felt the muscles of her arms and chest working in tight harmony. This was . . . more. This was more than she’d thought.
Watching him surf had been part of it. Out there, he’d been a god, same as he’d been with the way he’d carved and floated through the smaller surf at San Sebastian. He was . . . everything amazing. She was getting to have him for the moment, and that meant she wanted everything she could get.
He wrenched open new parts of her every time they made love.
Her chest squeezed tight enough that she could feel each pounding of her heart against her breastbone. She was a mess. Such a mess, and it was because of him. If she could hand over so much of herself, so blithely, it wasn’t too much to ask him to be honest with her.
She leaned across the table. “I don’t know this act you’re doing. I don’t know the shell. I know you, Sean. And I’d like you back. At least for tonight. You don’t owe me any more than that, but I’m not having dinner with a stranger. And I’m sure as hell not going back to bed with a stranger.”
He stared at her, shock making his eyes stormy and bright. He had one hand on the table, and his fingers spread wide. She wondered what he was thinking. Maybe choking the life out of her?
She wanted to snatch the words back, except not really. She didn’t have any right to make demands of him. They weren’t anything permanent. She didn’t want them to be anything permanent, because then what would she turn into? What would he expect her to be? She’d learned damn young that the pro surf world was full of men with big egos who expected devotion from the women around them. Gloria was another demonstration of that.
Sean’s smile was perfectly formed, but it was still one she didn’t know at all. “Keep pushing, Annie, and you might not like what comes out. You don’t know all of me. Not really.”
She narrowed her eyes. Her knees pressed together, and she wished she hadn’t worn the little halter dress. When she’d put it on, it had seemed like the perfect island sundress, with its flirty hem drifting around her thighs. Now her shoulders and sternum felt too bare. “You’re such a poser, Sean.”
“Excuse me?”
“This dark and dangerous playboy act . . .” She shook her head. “I don’t think I believe it. Scratch that. I know I don’t believe it. I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
For a brief and beautiful second, she’d stunned him. The ocean breeze fluttered around their table, lifting the corner of Sean’s discarded napkin. The chatter of other diners hummed along with the clatter of silverware. But from Sean there was nothing. His jaw was as sharp as the edge of a razor clam. His hand clenched so tightly on the edge of the table that his knuckles went white.
Then he broke. His shoulders dropped an inch. The starch went out of his spine, and both his chin and gaze fell until she couldn’t see that blue gleam anymore. He shook his head, kept shaking it until he started laughing. It started as a low chuckle, but then it built. And built.
She shifted in her seat. Her toes were cold, her fingers and palms clammy. Biting the inside of her lip didn’t ease any of it, didn’t draw her attention away from Sean’s inexplicable response. Her stomach twirled oddly. “Sean?”
He leaned back. He’d worn shorts, and his legs stretched alongside hers, under the table. The short hair of his calves brushed hers. At least he wasn’t the perfectly constructed, carefully withdrawn man she’d been with moments ago. This Sean might be slightly unbalanced, but hell, at least he was real. “It’s not an act. Me. Any of it. I’m just . . . who I need to be.”
“Because of your mom.” She swallowed, her throat tight. She’d just called him a giant liar moments ago, but now she carefully measured her words in a way she hadn’t. “Because of her hoarding.”
He nodded. “I was in this weird place. If I told people, it wasn’t a bad enough situation to get me removed for more than a few days. Social workers told me to be glad I had food. Shelter.” He leaned forward on one elbow. He kept the hand of his injured arm clenching the table, but his knuckles weren’t white any longer. “I always thought that one was ironic. I should be glad I had shelter.”
“I think I know why.” Her hands were still twisting together, but at least she wasn’t shaking anymore. She wanted to touch him. But when she leaned forward, across the table to reach between their plates and their used-up glasses and silverware to risk putting her fingertips on the edge of his arm, he flinched. She left them there anyway. His skin was flaring hot. “It was a house, but it wasn’t really shelter, right?”
“Exactly.” He worried the tablecloth with the edge of his thumbnail, following the petals of a yellow flower. “I definitely had enough clothes to wear,” he said with a hefty dose of irony. “And Mom provided me with food. The stove was always obstructed, but we had a path to the fridge and the microwave. Bizarrely, she kept those pristinely clean. Scrubbed them every day, in between trips to the thrift store.”
“Maybe it was what she could give you.” Pure hypothesis, but it would be what she wanted to hear. She couldn’t imagine not having her mother’s support. Her parents had been her rock through the shift in her perspective, through everything she’d been through. She wouldn’t be who she was without them; that was how the gig worked. “She couldn’t control the rest of it, but at least she could make sure there was food and a clean way to have it.”
He shrugged. “Maybe. But it didn’t help her lungs, when her bathroom sink flooded and mold started growing in her room. That’s what killed her. I’m sure of it.”
She gasped. He hadn’t mentioned this part the other day. “How old were you?”
“I was five weeks shy of eighteen.” He caught her with a searing look. His hand turned, snatching hers. “She didn’t want to go to the hospital, but I made her. I called the ambulance. Sick as she was, she dragged herself outside to wait for them. Didn’t want anyone touching her precious stuff. Maybe stealing things. When she died without ever going home again . . . I went back and burned the place down.”
Chapter 33
Sean had never said the words out loud. Not once. Even through the investigation, even the times that his uncle Theo had taken him to the defense attorney. It was “grief” and “immaturity,” and people said what a danger the place had been. They talked about how at his age, he shouldn’t have been sent home alone to those conditions. They were full of sympathy. They didn’t make him say it.
So he’d pushed it away. He’d had to do community service, and the family had paid for the firefighters’
response costs. It hadn’t been a pittance. Three trucks had been called out to deal with the blaze.
And Jesus, it had blazed. Sean could still see the orange flames when he closed his eyes. Hell, even when he opened his eyes and looked through the open window of the island restaurant, he could still see the yellow and orange and the sparks that had blown through the roof. He didn’t want to go back there, but it was the memory he needed. The ugly thing he needed to unfold and show Annie. For both their sakes.
She shook her head, disbelief making her mouth a soft pout. “You mean, like . . . there was an accident?”
“No.” He felt cold and hard. His bones were made of ice. Telling her this would do what he needed. Push her away. Give him the distance he needed to keep his head on straight for this fucking contest. He couldn’t afford to lose. “I mean I burned the house down. On purpose. I’d have used gasoline if I could have found some.”
He was so focused on Annie and the way she’d flinched in reaction to his story. After a few beats, she released Sean’s gaze. Her mouth bent into something that wasn’t a smirk, but it wasn’t pity either. Good. He wasn’t looking for pity. He was looking for a clear mind, and to gain back the ability to concentrate on what he needed to do. Getting back in the game. Making sure his shoulder didn’t hold him back.
“You’re an asshole, Sean.”
“What the hell?” That certainly hadn’t been the response he’d expected. His shoulders flinched as if he’d been smacked by this afternoon’s wave all over again.
She crossed her legs. “I’m not an idiot. What is this? Tell the little woman all the deep dark secrets so she’ll run away? Pay the check. We have shit we need to deal with.”
Sean felt himself smile. A little thing, one he didn’t want to give. But sometimes the worst responses were the ones that could be contained the least. “You’re a fucking firecracker, aren’t you?”
“You’re about to find out.”
Signing the check to the room, he added a thirty percent gratuity for the speed with which the staff moved them along. Fiji time sometimes meant that things took triple the time they would have in the States. Not tonight, though. Something in either his or Annie’s face must have given away that it was a good idea to get them hustled out of the dining area. Annie and Sean walked across the beach to their private bure, which had been left open to the evening breeze.
Annie walked ahead of him, then stopped in the middle of the living area. She’d skipped heels, giving in to the island culture of bare feet. Sand clung to her heels and the backs of her ankles. Idly, she brushed it off, one foot rubbing the other.
She reached up to take the pins out of her hair. The silken strands flicked around her neck, and she dropped the pins to the floor. They disappeared in the dark as completely as if they’d been thrown over the side of a boat and into the sea. In the dim light, she was smudges of shadow and dipping curves.
Her hands bent behind her shoulders, releasing the single button that topped her zipper.
His body instantly leaped to awareness. That was all it took with her. He was completely twisted around. “Annie . . .”
“Unzip me.”
He repeated her name, and he wasn’t sure if he was asking her to stop, or asking her to do it herself. She looked at him. Her eyes were as dark as the night. “I told you to unzip me, Sean.”
He moved forward and lifted a single hand as soon as he was within reach. The zipper had a tab that measured only a fraction of an inch. Still, he found it unerringly.
He pulled. The teeth gave way slowly, revealing the shallow curve of her back. At the base of her neck, the delicate bumps of her spine were a chain of islands emerging from the sea. Each separate, but making up a beautiful whole. They called to his mouth. He kissed three in a row.
She shivered.
“What is this, Annie?” He didn’t want to ask. But the question was pulled out of him one word at a time by the way she moved. Her shift into each breath. The skin exposed by something so simple as a zipper down her back.
“You tell me, Sean.” She turned, and only then did he realize that he’d balanced his hands on her shoulders. His touch stroked across her back, dipping into the opening of her dress. She was softer than the silk. Harder than steel too. “I thought we were fine.”
“Fine at what?”
“What we do.” Her hands lifted to his shirt. Found one button, then another. “Why should there be any name to it?”
“Because I don’t know what to do if I can’t quantify it.”
She laughed. In the dark, her laugh was music and chimes. He stroked his hand up her shoulder, over the graceful length of her neck. Despite the laugh, she was tense. “You know exactly what to do.”
With that, she lifted on her toes and wrapped her arms around the back of his neck. Her mouth was fire and wet, and she swept in and took him as fully as he’d ever taken her. But his hands squeezed tight at her waist. The fabric of her dress shifted and gapped. She was tease and withdrawal, something he’d been seeking out for a long damn time.
Maybe forever.
He took the kiss, flipped it so that it was his and hers. She hadn’t run. He’d told her about the arson and she hadn’t run. He wasn’t sure what that meant yet, not really. But he wasn’t good enough to let Annie go. “I had to do it,” he muttered against her mouth.
She made a soothing noise, something halfway between agreement and denial. Her hands stroked over the back of his head. She was unknowable to him, but someone he desperately wanted at the same time. “I know. It was hard, right?”
“That house killed her.”
Her lips pressed his, slipped away again. “So you killed it?”
He sighed against her mouth. Wrapping his arms around her, he yanked her close. Hard and fast. She tasted like pineapple, the fruit of the island. The tropics would always own a piece of them. A piece of Sean, at least.
He lifted her in his arms, pulling her up so that her chest was even with his. They were balanced that way, even with her feet off the ground. “I didn’t mean to. Not at first.”
“Tell me,” she whispered. “Tell me what happened.”
“I shouldn’t have.” He nuzzled her neck, and his beard growth made her shiver with tickles. “I just wanted some fucking food. But I couldn’t get to the stove. There was a stack of newspapers that had spilled from the counter.”
“Did you use an accelerant?”
“There was a bottle of dark rum.” He gave a helpless laugh. “She always had it. Called it her fucking medicine the last couple years. When the cough wouldn’t go away.”
Her hands petted and stroked over the back of his head, his neck. She was a wraith in the dark. They were wrapped up together in a way that didn’t have anything to do with secrets. Her touch slipped beneath the back of his shirt, so he pushed it off for her, shrugging it down one arm at a time, so he didn’t have to put her down.
She made a little noise in the back of her throat when he did it. Pride was a charging beast. It ate him from the inside out. It drove him on, so he could tell this story. Get all this gone and put it behind him, maybe.
He’d thought he would have driven her away. Instead, she was wrapped tight in his arms, one knee lifted to his hip. The dress’s skirt was drawn tight between them, more sensation than barrier as the silk rubbed over his stomach.
“What was the cough?”
“Mold. Straight up. The doctors had a series of names for it. Bronchitis. Pneumonia one wet winter.” He cupped the back of her head and felt the strands of her hair slip between his fingers. “But it couldn’t have been anything else.”
“You didn’t get sick?” She was peering at him. It was a new sensation, someone who managed to sympathize and draw the story from him without heaping him with pity.
“I had a cough sometimes. My lung power and resistance training went up o
nce the house was gone.”
“Gone because you burned it to the ground.”
He sucked in a deep breath of the cool evening breeze. The salt in the air was the ocean, always at his side. His confessor. The only thing that had saved him before. But maybe now things could be different. “I did. I poured the rum on the newspapers, then tried to turn on the gas. But the igniter was broken. I lit it with a Zippo.”
He’d finally put her feet back on the ground, but there was still no space between them. They were breathing each other’s air, faces pressed so close that they traded it back and forth like promises and vows.
She traced her thumb over the thick arch of his shoulder. He’d been broken so recently. Now he was better. And she was the one he expected to break now. “Did you call the fire department?”
His hands clenched on her hips. He hissed in a breath. “Leave it to you to ask the telling questions, Annie.”
“Did you?”
“No.” He felt the way she swallowed with his hand on the side of her jaw. His thumb fit in a soft, tender space. His fingers speared into her hair. “Think less of me now?”
“How long had she been dead?”
“My mother?” His teeth were white in the shadows that cut lines across his features. His cheekbones cast more shadows across his jaw. “Hours. Fucking hours.”
“You weren’t even eighteen?” Her voice was sharp. “Who the hell left you alone at that age?”
His laugh was bitter, but his hands spread across her ass, one of them lifting her skirt to the small of her back so the material bunched up. “Don’t blame them. Mom and I had been more like roommates than mother and son for so long. There was no controlling me.”
“Someone should have tried.” She seemed to mean it too. “You were practically a baby. If I’d been responsible for my choices at that age . . .” Her voice trailed off in the darkness.
Sean gathered the hem of her skirt up and up, pulling the whole dress over her head. She wore only panties underneath. As soon as he dropped the dress away, she stood nearly bare. Beautiful. Like something splashed with darkness.
Ahead in the Heat Page 22
