With a population of over six thousand, Walterboro was a small town compared to other South Carolina cities like Columbia and Charleston, but in comparison to the neighboring rural small town of Holtsville it was more developed with businesses, more paved roads and more heavily populated subdivisions.
But Holtsville was far from the archaic living standards of Little House on the Prairie. Far from it. Still, that was the viewpoint of the people who never visited the town.
“It’s not that bad, Junie,” she said, making hot and sudsy dishwater in the sink.
“Girl, there is nothing in Holtsville to make me travel to those backwoods.”
Humph, one sight of Kael Strong and you’d move to Holtsville.
“Kael who?” Junie asked, standing next to her as she slid her scraped plate in the sink.
Lisha shifted her eyes to her cousin. “Did I say that out loud?” she asked.
“Yup. So who is he?”
“The son of my client in Holtsville and he is some kind of fine.”
Junie reached for the sponge to sink into the water and wring out before she began cleaning the grease splatter from the stovetop. “How fine?”
“You’d give Shaft the shaft,” she answered without hesitation.
“Yeah, right,” Junie said, rinsing the sponge under the running water and going over the stovetop again. “Horniness messes with your visuals.”
Lisha shook her head slowly. “Oh, hell, no, I ain’t,” she insisted. “And he has silver hair.”
“Now I know you’re horny, talking ’bout some old dude,” Junie said with a frown.
“He’s not even thirty.”
Junie turned and walked out of the apartment. Lisha thought she had gone to prepare for her day’s work in the kitchen of Colleton’s County Hospital.
Lisha was in the bathroom brushing her teeth when Junie suddenly reappeared with a Polaroid camera in hand. She set it on the edge of the sink. “Photo proof. Pretend you’re taking a picture of your client’s injury or something. Running late. Gotta split.”
And with that she was gone again.
“Breakfast on you tomorrow, and I don’t want cereal,” she hollered out the door.
“It’s Friday night and I have a date so you’ll be lucky to see me in the morning,” Junie hollered back just before the front door soundly closed.
Lisha barely had time to close her mouth in surprise. She rinsed the toothpaste from her mouth and picked up the instant camera—already knowing that as photo worthy as Kael Strong was, she would never sneak a snapshot of him.
She examined the camera, turning it over, and noticed a photo jammed in it. She grabbed her pair of tweezers and worked to pull it out.
Because the photo never fully injected, a piece of it never developed properly. She turned it this way and that. “What is . . .”
Lisha gasped in shock as she recognized the tip of a large penis resting on a hairy thigh. She dropped the photo into the wastepaper basket between the commode and the sink. It was far too shiny not to be wet.
Thinking on the last time the camera was obviously used, she frowned and damn near tossed it like a hot potato onto the closed lid of the commode before rushing to scrub her hands with hot water and soap.
Lisha rushed to get ready for work and tried not to feel any excitement about seeing Kael again. She tried and failed. She did know that Kael’s sister, Kelli, was listed as the primary caregiver, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t stop by to assist.
Throughout her half-day shift and then all during her drive back to Colleton County, Lisha was well aware of a slight tremble of nervousness in her hands. Feeling like she should get herself together before reaching the Strongs’ home she stopped at the lone gas station on the small town’s main street.
She pulled up to the lone pump and grabbed her wallet from her pocketbook just as the attendant walked up to the driver’s side window. She read the name on his uniform overall. “Good afternoon, Cyrus,” she said, climbing from her Nova as he held the door.
“It is now,” he said, flashing a bright smile as he looked up at her.
They looked about the same age even though he was shorter than her by at least four inches.
“Fill her up please,” she said, after checking to make sure the price per gallon was about the same as Walterboro. Forty-four cents.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Lisha fanned herself, trying to keep some of the sweltering heat and humidity from pressing so cloyingly against her skin. She looked around, recalling Junie’s earlier disdain for the small town. There was a secondhand store across the street and a brightly painted blue store with a sign proclaiming they sold the coldest pop in South Carolina. On the next corner were a small mechanic shop and an empty lot. The rest of the street was brick homes with elaborate fencing.
“What’s coming over there?” she asked Cyrus, holding her hand over her eyes as she watched a concrete truck backing up to the empty dirt lot.
“A diner,” he said.
She looked over her shoulder to see him leaning against her car and whittling away at a piece of wood. It seemed something very odd for a young man to be doing, but she could tell by the smooth movement of his knife against the wood that he was well practiced at it.
Her eyes squinted as she eyed him. As she did with people who intrigued her or caught her eye, she wondered what his story was. Single? Married? No kids? Or ten? Was he as happy and content as he appeared to be?
“It’s good to see a new business coming,” she said, walking over to him.
“Yup,” he agreed, looking up at her briefly before returning his focus to his project. “Just as long as this stays the only gas station, though. I’m gonna own it one day.”
“My father always taught me that anything you believe in and work hard for is possible,” she told him, patting his shoulder before passing him to enter the store and pay for her fuel.
She added a bottle of Crush soda to her purchase, paying the teenaged boy sitting behind the crowded counter like he’d rather be anywhere else.
“Who’s your father?” Cyrus asked when she got back to her car.
“Reverend Rockmon,” she said, noticing he’d cleaned her windshield while she was in the store.
Cyrus nodded, his bright eyes gleaming from his smooth dark complexion of his round boyish face. “Good man,” he said.
“Thank you. I’ll tell him I saw you, Cyrus,” she said, climbing back behind the wheel of her car.
Lisha was used to hearing people praise her father. He was a man who spoke and lived the word of God.
She directed the air conditioning vents to blow directly against her face and neck as she remembered Kael’s directions to his father’s home and followed them. She had to slow down as she took the large dirt road directly off the main street and counted the homes until she eventually turned onto a paved road lined with small brick homes that reminded her of a more spread-out version of the subdivision where her parents lived in Walterboro.
She slowed down and turned onto the drive of the Strong home behind a cute VW Beetle. She instantly loved the charm of the small house with its trees and flower bushes. She felt the now-familiar anxiousness shimmy over her as she exited the vehicle and retrieved her tote bag from the passenger seat.
The door opened before she even had time to ring the doorbell. She stepped back a bit as a fair-skinned woman in her early thirties swung the screen door open. “Hi, I’m Lisha Rockmon. I’m here for Mr. Strong’s physical therapy,” she said.
“Come on in. He’s waiting on you,” she said with a friendly smile. “I’m his daughter, Kelli.”
“Nice to meet you,” she said, extending her hand. “You’ll be the primary caregiver . . . besides the home health aide, right?”
Kelli nodded. “Yes . . . well, just until we get Daddy stabilized and my brother finishes up working on starting his ranch. I live up near Greenville.”
Lisha’s heart jolted at the mention of Kael. “Is he her
e? I have some restrictions that I like to review with the family just to help make sure your dad doesn’t hurt his recovery.”
Kelli nodded her head. “No, Kael’s not home yet, but I’ll go over them with him.”
Lisha blinked away her disappointment. “So he lives here with your father?”
“For now,” Kelli said, guiding Lisha through the living room and down a short hall. “He just purchased another home and a ranch that he is renovating, but I know he won’t move out until Daddy is feeling like one hundred percent.”
“Okay. Good,” Lisha said, feeling a thrill again that she would see him again . . . eventually.
Kael grunted as he brought the ax down onto the center of the log to split it in half. The logs fell off the tree stump and he gave the ax one last swing to lodge it into the stump. The summer sun glared down on his bare back and he felt the sweat leave his pores and race down his body to soak the rim of his jeans. His chest heaved from the exertion of cutting logs from the trees he cleared around the hunting cabin.
Using the back of his arm, he swiped away some of the sweat on his face before quickly stacking the logs alongside the side of the small one-room cabin. When winter came the logs would be ready for use in the fireplace for much-needed heat.
Surveying his work one last time, he grabbed his sleeveless T-shirt from where he’d flung it over a bush and made his way over to his pickup at a leisurely pace. His stomach grumbled and he remembered he hadn’t eaten since he left the house early that morning once his sister, Kelli, had arrived. He was in no rush to get back there because he knew it was the first day of the pretty physical therapist, Alisha, arriving to work with his father.
A memory of his first look at her flashed as he climbed into the driver’s seat of his truck. In the past few days since then he found himself thinking about her. He was a man who could appreciate the beauty of a fine woman, but his intense attraction to her, plus his distraction with her days later, didn’t bode well for him. These days he was more about a woman who was convenient than one who would draw him in.
Kael didn’t know if he could take another dose of Alisha Rockmon quite so soon.
Pulling up to park in front of his home, he surveyed the bright white paint and brand-new red shutters he had installed. The house seemed to gleam under the sunlight and he loved it, but one day when his money was right he planned on facing the entire house in brick.
When his stomach grumbled again he glanced at his watch. It was well after six. She has to be gone by now.
Kael steered the truck off his property and drove toward his father’s home. His sister was supposed to get in town earlier that day and he knew she had food cooked. His hunger for food trumped his desire to fight off his hunger for the sexy physical therapist. He was willing to risk it.
It took him less than five minutes to reach the three-bedroom one-bathroom brick home where he was raised. It was set nearly 300 feet back from the road and was shaded over by moss-covered oak trees. The crepe myrtle bushes his mother planted during the first years of their marriage still bloomed brightly in shades of pink, purple, reds and whites.
As he pulled up the cemented drive he noticed a bright red Nova parked next to his father’s diesel pickup and his sister’s yellow Volkswagen Beetle. He hated that the sight of it reminded him entirely too much of his ex, Donna.
“To hell with her,” he mumbled, climbing from his truck to walk across the lawn and up onto the stoop.
The front door was open wide but the screen door was closed, allowing fresh air to float in while keeping the flies and mosquitos out. The scent of something frying wafted to him as he entered the house. It stirred up another raucous grumble.
“Didn’t Daddy teach you not to slam the screen door, little brother?”
Kael smiled at his older but much shorter sister as she came across the living room to open her arms wide. He picked her up easily for a bear hug before setting her back down on her feet. She was the spitting image of their mother. Tall and slender with angular features and a light complexion that hinted at their mother’s mixed heritage of Black and Cherokee.
They were close and had always been. After their mother’s death, Kelli had taken on the role of homemaker at the young age of seventeen. And she was prone to dishing out advice like she was his mother as well, but Kael loved her.
“Good to see you, Smelly Kelli,” he teased her, mussing her hair and receiving the swat she always gave him.
“The interstate to Greer goes in both directions, you know,” she said.
She was constantly getting on him and his father because they had only been to visit her and her husband’s, Willie’s, home in Greer twice. He didn’t bother to explain that her husband, an attorney and local politician, never made them feel comfortable—or sometimes even wanted—in their home. Kael didn’t particularly care for his brother-in-law and all of his showboating and grandstanding, but he never let on to his sister. It was her life, her love and her choice to make. He did a good job of letting the words, “Man, shut the hell up,” not escape from his lips when he was in Willie’s presence.
“How’d Daddy do today?” he asked, easing past her and her chastising look to enter the kitchen.
He headed for the stove and raised his hand to lift the lid to the pot. His sister beat him to it and swatted his hand away.
“Wash your hands,” she reprimanded him.
He moved to the sink.
“In the bathroom.”
Kael chuckled as he left the kitchen and headed down the hall past two of the bedrooms to the lone bathroom of the house. He paused at the sound of his father’s laughter. It was decidedly mischievous. Devilish.
Frowning in curiosity, he quickly washed his hands in the white porcelain pedestal sink that was clearly a part of the 1930s when the house was built. As were the white and black subway tiles.
Kael left the bathroom and headed left down the hall to the master bedroom. Alisha was holding both of his father’s large hands as he gently sat down on the bed.
“Careful, remember to keep that ninety-degree angle like you’re in a chair with a back,” she said.
His eyes went to her profile and he instantly noticed she was as pretty from an angle.
“Like I’m on the john,” Logan said.
Alisha laughed and shook her head as she stepped back from him and picked up her clipboard to make notations. “Yes, Mr. Strong. Straight up and down like you’re on the john.”
His father looked up and spotted him. “How’s the ranch coming along?”
Kael stepped into the room next to the dresser as Alisha glanced up at him. His heart pounded. “I worked on the hunting cabin today,” he said. “How are you?”
Logan shrugged in his plaid pajamas. “Same.”
“If you do the exercises you will not be the same by the time I come back Monday,” Alisha said, sliding her clipboard into a bright orange tote bag.
Logan snorted in derision. “You want a horse, ’cause I got one I’m selling for a penny,” he grumbled.
“You have offered me that horse ten times since I’ve been here and the answer is still no,” she told him with a playful wink.
Kael shifted his eyes back to her. They traveled down the length of her body in the dull green scrubs she wore. She bent over to pick up her tote. He could see the outline of her panties slightly pressing into the thin cotton and he looked away from the delicious curve of her bottom.
Damn.
She turned and stepped toward him to reach the door. “Mr. Strong—”
“Kael,” he corrected her.
Her eyes fell to his lips when he spoke and shifted back up to his eyes when he stopped. She cleared her throat. “Uhm, Kael. I already went over some restrictions for your father with your sister. I could go over them with you or—”
“No,” he said abruptly.
Her face filled with surprise.
His father glared at him over her shoulder from his spot on the edge of the bed.
Kael softened his stance, knowing he was being rude even if he didn’t intend to. “Thanks.”
Alisha squinted her eyes just a bit as she studied him. The top of her head reached his chin, causing her to have to look up at him as she did. She opened her mouth and then closed it, biting her bottom lip before she smiled and chuckled a bit. “You have a good day, Mr. Strong. I’ll see you Monday,” she said, to his father, her eyes still locked on his face. “And I’ll see you too . . . Kael.”
She was bold. She was defiant. She was take-no-charge. She was in his face. She was challenging him.
The question was to what?
Kael rose up off the wall where he leaned, raising his height another inch or two and closing the gap between them as well. He chuckled and shook his head when she just arched her brow and didn’t back away.
In a different time, different place and if he was in a different emotional skin he would have snatched her up and kissed the smugness from her. He knew he could do it. Easily.
Just as easily as he could see himself pressing his lips, tongue and hands to every inch of her body.
“Good-bye, Ms. Rockmon,” was all that he said, although many more words rested on his tongue.
She turned. “It’s Lisha,” she called over her shoulder as she left the room.
He turned his head to watch her exit.
Logan chuckled. “If I was twenty years—no, make it ten—if I was ten years younger and didn’t have a bum hip I’d give you a race for your money, son,” he said, placing his hands on his knees as he stretched his back and sat up straighter on the bed.
Kael looked over at him. “Race for what?” he asked, playing dumb.
He knew exactly what his father meant.
“That one got your nose so open, you can smell rat shit ten miles away.” Logan reached for the black and white 5X7 photo of Ivy Strong on the nightstand. “Your mother had me jittery as hell like that too.”
“You might need to lower the dose on those pain meds,” Kael said over his shoulder as he walked through the bedroom’s open door.
Logan just grunted and laughed.
Strong Heat Page 5
