Tempting Heat (Tempt Me Book 1)

by Sara Whitney

  She sat with her legs curled underneath her, her plate in her lap, and flipped on the TV.

  “What’ll it be?” He was curious what TV time looked like for Finn. When he’d known her in high school, she’d worked two after-school jobs and barely had time to sleep, let alone consume pop culture.

  She pointed the remote. “Actually, I’m in the middle of watching Barbarian Time Brigands.”

  After a startled second, he threw his head back in laughter. “You? Little Miss Sci-Fi Is For Dorks?”

  “I never said that!” she insisted over his hooting. “Did I?”

  He set his plate on the ottoman to wipe his eyes. “Yes! So many times. Do you remember Dylan and me practically bribing you to go see BTB: Warrior Seasons with us on opening weekend?”

  Her face lit up. “Yes! That’s right! You guys bought me Starbucks for a week after that.”

  “So the great Finn Carey has succumbed to the charms of Griff the time-traveling dragon. What season are you on? Or are you into the movies?”

  She navigated through the menu. “I’m in the final season with the original cast, then I’ll do the movies, and then I’ll start on the reboot. I take it that means you’re okay watching it with me?”

  “Always. And particularly any season that has Marita Leonard on-screen in body paint.”

  Seven

  Finn slept late and woke the next morning to the smell of coffee. After slipping into yoga pants and a fleece, she made a stop in the bathroom to tidy up (including a tiny bit of lip gloss— vanity, thy name is Fiona) and mentally reviewed the options for the day that she’d planned out while trying to fall asleep the night before. But when she padded into the kitchen and found an appealingly sleep-rumpled Tom with stubble darkening his jaw, all other thoughts flew from her head.

  “Happy Saturday! I snooped.” He held a sheet of paper aloft. “Huckleberry, are you telling me that you inventoried the contents of your pantry and made a list of all the possible meals you could make from those ingredients?”

  She yawned and slid into one of the kitchen chairs. “And?”

  He ran his eyes down her notes. “And I’m honestly impressed. You could cook a meal for this whole apartment complex or make sure you and I survived in here for three weeks. It’s incredibly comprehensive.”

  She refused to be pleased by his enthusiasm. “I like being prepared.”

  “Oh, I’m aware.” He plunked a mug of coffee in front of her, into which he’d added her preferred splash of cream. “You must’ve been thrilled when I crashed your blizzard party of one.”

  She held the mug to her mouth rather than answer. He had thrown her for a loop, but now… Well, it wasn’t so bad, having him here.

  He changed the subject before she succumbed to the temptation to be honest. “So you’ve got eggs on here. Do you have specific plans for them?”

  She had a feeling Tom was about to go off-list with a menu suggestion. In fact, she had a feeling everything Tom did was pretty much off-list. “Food plans or life plans?” she hedged. “Because I’ve been saving up to send those eggs to college. But a state school, not an Ivy.”

  Tom rolled with the nonsense emerging from her sleep-muddled brain. “Oh, not Yale? In that case, they’d be better off in the omelets I was going to offer to make.”

  As was becoming common when it came to Tom, she was equal parts horrified and intrigued. He wanted to make a mess in her meticulously organized kitchen? Yet at the same time, there was no sense lying to herself; she really did want to see him make a mess in her meticulously organized kitchen. “You’re right. An omelet is the kinder fate. Do you need any help?”

  He was already pulling ingredients out of the fridge. “Not if you don’t mind my rummaging wantonly through your stuff. I assume you’re not morally or allergically opposed to any of the ingredients on your list?”

  “Not at all,” Finn said after another long slurp of coffee.

  “Bacon it is,” he said. “Your job is to observe and shout helpful suggestions.”

  God, it was easy to forget about her anger the longer he was around. And so she let herself, for the moment anyway. She lounged in a chair and pointed out where he could find bowls and pans and knives, teasing him when his diced veggies came out uneven and complimenting him when the beautifully cooked omelet slid right out of the pan in a way hers never did. If having Tom back in her life meant restaurant-quality breakfasts, she could be into that.

  “I saw online that the city hopes to start plowing the major thoroughfares this afternoon, and then they’ll start working on the smaller streets,” he said as he forked a piece of omelet into his mouth.

  Ah, of course. He wasn’t actually back in her life long-term, and he certainly wouldn’t be cooking her breakfast in the future. “Well, this is definitely one of the smaller streets, but I don’t think we’ll need to ration our food.”

  “I read your list. We should be fine. I mean, your ice cream stash alone could keep us alive for weeks.”

  So he’d discovered her vice.

  “Apparently heavy snow’s snapping power lines all over the city and causing outages,” she said. “All I’m saying is this is an old building with old wires, so stashing ice cream in the snow is high on my list of survival plans.”

  “Speaking of plans,” he said. “It sounds like we have to coexist for another day at least. So I figure we’ve got two options.”

  “Two options,” she parroted, choking back a laugh that she’d come to the kitchen armed with plans for the day, but roll-with-the-punches-Tom had beaten her to it.

  “Yes, two options,” he said. “One, I still have a mountain of editing, so like we’ve been doing, we can work until it’s time for dinner, TV, and bed. Or two: We declare today a lazy day and lounge.”

  His fork clinked against his plate as he waited for her response.

  “Funny,” she said. “I came up with three options as I was falling asleep last night.” He didn’t need to know she’d written them down and numbered them in order of preference in the Bullet Journal she kept on her nightstand.

  “Excellent. Hit me.”

  “Well, there’s plan A: we can keep plugging away on our projects. Plan B: we can fire up Netflix. Or plan C: we can spend all day in bed, reading and napping.”

  He quirked a brow at her. “In bed? Sounds heavenly.”

  The words scorched the air around her. She hadn’t meant to say that, but it slipped out and now the image throbbed in her brain. Tom, sprawled across her bed, curly head propped on his hand while the other held a book. Setting it aside when he noticed her eyes drifting shut and then wrapping them both in a blanket. Napping together and waking to find his hand sliding under her clothes, seeking—

  Her cheeks heated, and she reached for her coffee mug to halt her wayward thoughts. That wasn’t part of the plan.

  “Different beds and different bedrooms of course,” she clarified, inwardly wincing at her prissy tone. “Speaking of, have you gotten over feeling weird about being in Josie’s room?”

  He shrugged. “I still wake up feeling like a stranger in a strange land.”

  She didn’t buy that for a second.

  “But you’re you. You’re not a stranger anywhere you go.”

  He looked up from his plate and waved his fork in a circle. “Explain.”

  Oh Lord. She’d said too much, but now he was looking at her with curious eyes, so she babbled on. “Well, look at you. You’re cooking in my kitchen. You’ve kept a conversation going with me like no time’s passed at all. You’re acting like you can just forget that thing our senior year ever happened. You’re unstoppable.”

  He chewed a bite of omelet and swallowed, then wiped his mouth on a napkin. “I’m an extrovert. Guilty. When I’m an old man, I’ll be that person talking to himself on the L platform because I love the sound of my own voice. But as for that thing in high school, I did try to bring it up the first night, and you didn’t want to talk about it, so hell, why not pretend it ne
ver happened?”

  She scoffed, then filled her mouth with omelet to keep from saying anything else stupid.

  He lowered his fork. “What?”

  She took her time chewing and swallowing. “Easy for you to say.”

  He suddenly looked a lot less relaxed. “Excuse me?”

  She regretted bringing it up but forged ahead anyway. “I mean, I was the one who got humiliated. It just made you look like a jerk.”

  Tom made an elaborate show of looking over his left shoulder, then his right one. “Weird. I don’t see the asshole responsible sitting at this table.”

  She slammed her coffee cup down as the memory of Tom’s old betrayal resurfaced to hook its claws into her brain. “You’re joking, right? You shared a text I sent you, a private text, with the whole school. You called me a slut. Textbook asshole as far as I’m concerned.”

  Although his hands balled into fists on the tabletop, he spoke in a flat voice. “I was a dumb kid in high school, but I thought you knew me better than that.”

  “I texted you that I wanted to end things with Dylan. I said…”

  She swallowed convulsively, amazed at the capacity of that old hurt to conjure fresh pain. I’m going to break up with Dylan. I need to be with someone who really sees me. She’d texted that to Tom between math class and PE the last week of their senior year. And she’d waited for his reply with her heart lodged in her throat, praying he’d understand what she was asking: Do you see me the way I think you do? Should I really be with you instead? But by the time she’d changed into her gym clothes and made it outside, she was greeted with a hissed chorus of “whore” and “I’ll give you that D” from the smirking classmates lying in wait for her on the rubber track.

  “You put the screenshot in the class Facebook group.” She closed her eyes as she recited the words, unable to look at the grim face of the man across from her. “‘The quarterback’s slut wants to get laid. Who’s got next?’” Words she’d never been able to shake. Words that still hit like a punch to the gut.

  “How can you still think it was me?”

  Her eyes flew open at the harsh rasp in Tom’s voice. “Because I sent it to you, and then it ended up online!”

  He banged a fist on the table, sending a spoon clattering to the floor. “Oh, and our phones were so secure back then, right? It’s not like it took a team of hackers weeks and weeks to crack my shit. It probably took Dylan all of thirty seconds to post that from my phone.”

  “Sure, Dylan just happened to be holding your phone when I texted you my secret desire to break up with him.” She scoffed, but she struggled to put any heat behind it. Was he really trying to tell her it hadn’t been him?

  “The Castle bad luck.” Tom grimaced and plunged a hand through his already disheveled curls. “He was borrowing mine for the calculator because his battery was dead.”

  She opened her mouth, then closed it again as her mind worked. She’d spent years wondering how the Tom she’d known could be capable of something so ugly, and she’d never truly been able to reconcile his actions with the person who’d been her closest friend. Still, one detail stuck in her mind from that horrible afternoon, and it’s what had convinced her that she didn’t know Tom at all.

  “You laughed,” she said quietly.

  “I what?” He flung his arms out.

  “You heard me.” Now she found the fire to put behind her words. “You laughed when I finally found you.”

  His cheeks flushed as his voice grew louder. “You came running to me in your gym clothes. I thought you were injured. I thought somebody hurt you.”

  She surged to her feet. “You hurt me! And then you laughed!”

  He stood too. “Because I was so relieved that you weren’t bleeding from a stab wound or something!” Her mouth worked, but no sound came out so he kept talking. “But you ran off before I could figure out what was going on, and once I did, I got to a computer lab and deleted it. But then you never spoke to me again. You avoided me, presumably blocked my number. You never let me explain.”

  She clenched her teeth at his injured tone. Was he seriously trying to make himself the victim? “Of course I avoided you! My text was posted from your account. What was I supposed think?”

  His glittering eyes bored into hers. “You were supposed to know me better than anybody else in my life. You should’ve trusted that I would never do that to you when all I ever wanted was—”

  He blinked rapidly, choking on the words, and silence stretched between them until Finn spat out, “Fucking Dylan.”

  “Fucking Dylan.” Tom forcefully agreed. “I take it he never had the balls to tell you he was behind it all?”

  She shook her head, her brain churning as she processed this new information. Of course Dylan. His selfishness had bothered her from time to time when they were together, and then she’d become horribly aware of his cruelty after they’d split up and he’d mounted a campaign to ostracize her during the last week of high school. But even then, all she’d been able to see were Tom’s face and name next to that vile post that haunted her. The betrayal she never saw coming. The cruelty that had hurt the most.

  But it was Dylan, not Tom, this whole time. She pressed a hand to her churning stomach as she struggled to make sense of the new villain in her life.

  “And?” Tom asked.

  She shook her head in confusion, so he clarified. “Dylan. Are you still pissed at him?”

  The sharp question threw her. “I broke up with him, didn’t I?”

  “Sure, eight years ago, but are you pissed at him right now?” He stepped closer, so close she could smell the soap from her shower on his skin. It made her head spin, and she spoke in a rush.

  “Honestly, I don’t give a shit about Dylan.”

  His voice dropped. “Then I don’t understand why you’re still pissed at me.”

  She wanted to tell him that was ridiculous, that she’d gotten over her anger ages ago, because holding on to it for all this time was unreasonable. Yet when she opened her mouth, the truth spilled out. “I am still pissed. You were the best guy I knew.”

  His mouth flattened. “But he was the one you were dating.”

  “Well, you were dating every girl in our class!”

  “Only because the girl I wanted was dating my best friend!”

  They were standing toe to toe now, yelling again, and for a moment the only sound was the rasping of their breath as the realization of what Tom had said coursed through her body like fast-moving lava. Her skin heated, and the blood pounded so hard in her temples that the air around them flickered and her eyesight started to fade.

  Wait, that wasn’t her eyes. That was the electric grid. They both glanced up as the overhead lights blinked off, then back on for a millisecond before flickering off again, plunging the room into darkness.

  Eight

  Tom’s heart thundered in the sudden blackness.

  Fuck. He hadn’t meant to shout his deepest secrets at her, and he’d seen understanding click in her brain right before the lights blinked out. He might as well have fallen to his knees and announced how much he used to love her.

  Next to him in the dark, Finn exhaled slowly. “Tom, I… I didn’t… I never…”

  Her voice sounded small after the volume of their fight, and his heart plummeted every time she started a sentence but didn’t finish it.

  “You seriously had no idea how I felt?” He matched her hushed tones, the darkness making the question easier to ask. He couldn’t see her, so he wouldn’t be distracted by her big brown eyes. Wouldn’t have to watch her let him down easy.

  The air next to him stirred. “I wasn’t sure. I wondered if…” She sighed. “I guess it stopped mattering after all that.”

  It hadn’t stopped mattering to him, and he cleared his throat against the tightness lingering there to say something he should’ve said years ago. “I’m so sorry, Finn.” Exposing this particular vein was painful, even all these years later, but he’d do it. He’d
drag his blood and his guts to the surface if she asked him to. “I was so pissed at you for thinking I was capable of doing that. By the time I cooled down and realized how it looked, that you deserved an explanation about what actually happened, we weren’t…”

  She picked up his unfinished thought, her voice sounding mournful in the dark. “We weren’t friends anymore.”

  Friends. The word sat on his tongue, filling his mouth with a familiar bitterness. Yet hadn’t she just implied that she was put out by his dating other girls in high school? Was it possible she’d felt something for him too?

  “I missed you, Tom.”

  Her confession startled him, and now he wanted the light. He wanted to study her face, to see if she missed her friend Tom, or if she missed him for bigger reasons than that. But the power stayed stubbornly off, and her whispered words didn’t reveal what was in her heart. Still, she’d said “friends,” so Tom squeezed his eyes shut in the middle of the darkness and reminded himself of how well he played the look-what-great-buds-we-are game. He could do that again if that’s what she needed.

  “I missed you too. What’s Tom Sawyer without Huckleberry Finn?” Their old joke earned him a watery laugh in the darkness, and it was enough to get him moving onto a less dangerous topic. “Okay, let’s get some light in here. Do you have candles or anything?”

  “Oh! I’ve got something better.”

  Her voice was back to its normal volume, and as she moved away from him, he navigated toward the windows and pulled back the curtains, allowing thin gray light from the overcast sky to trickle in. “Looks like the power’s out for the whole street.”

  “It happened once before during a big storm,” she called from the hallway. “Then it was fixed in a few hours, but who knows with all this snow.”

  The ambient light was enough for him to see her outline plunk something down on the coffee table in the living room. Then with a “voilà!” she switched on a camping lantern that emitted a welcoming yellow glow in a ten-foot circumference. “Battery operated LEDs. It’ll last up to a week, allegedly.”