Turn Up the Heat

by Serena Bell

  “Why’d you move to Tierney Bay?” There was a rasp in his voice, suggesting disuse.

  So much for not talking about why she was here.

  Because my Chicago life went down in flames. Because I trusted a man I shouldn’t have trusted and a situation I should have known was unsustainable.

  “My sister’s here, and I can stay with her and save rent,” she said, which was true, as far as it went. “I’m not here for good. Just a few months. Just to earn some money. As soon as I save first, last, and security and get a kitchen job in Chicago, I’m heading back there.”

  “A kitchen job, like cooking?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where’d you learn to cook like that?” he asked.

  “My mom. And I went to cooking school in Chicago.”

  “Is cooking school where you learned to burn a man with a spatula if he messes with your station?”

  She startled. “You saw that?”

  “You’ve got big brass ones.”

  “Why is it,” she inquired, with a little twist of anger, “that men don’t think anyone can be brave without having balls?”

  He laughed, a hoarse, surprised sound. “Never thought about that.”

  “Well, think about it.”

  “Where’d you learn to stand up for yourself like that?” There was no mockery in his voice, only admiration.

  She almost told him how, exactly, she’d failed to stand up for herself in the way that mattered most. Instead she said, “Kitchens. If you can’t fight back, they’ll cook you up for the next meal. No mercy.”

  “Tell me some stories?”

  She should say no. She should make him leave.

  She wanted to tell him stories, to keep him here, where he shouldn’t be. Because of who he might be, because of what he might do to her and for her, even though she wasn’t supposed to go there right now.

  Instead of no, she handed him a rag, and he helped her clean while she talked.

  “One time, one of my classmates deliberately ruined a cream of asparagus soup that was part of my final exam. Because the score on that final exam determined who would get to prepare a special end-of-the-year dinner.”

  “Bastard.”

  “Bitch,” she corrected. “You have to stop making assumptions.”

  He lowered his head in mock contrition, and once again she wanted to nip the smooth skin of his neck. Run her tongue over the spaces between the inked shapes, like navigating a maze.

  She dragged her mind back from that abyss. “One time I got reamed out in bread-making for putting too much flour on the counter while I was kneading. It was at least a ten-minute lecture, but the only part I remember was, ‘Do you want zat bread to be tough as an ’ag’s ass?’ ”

  Kincaid half-smiled. The curl of his full lips softened his face instantly, and it softened something in her, too. As if she needed softening. She had long since melted and was starting to flow, the way the words were flowing out of her now, just because he wanted to listen.

  “My first job, I cried. Because it was so hot and they were so harsh, and I burned all the skin off my right hand. I cried in the bathroom. The kitchen bathroom, which was so filthy—you wouldn’t believe…I couldn’t bring myself to even sit on the seat, or touch the walls. I just stood there…”

  He pinned her in the intensity of those eyes. He listened with his whole self. She wondered if he knew his hands were fists.

  “I came so close to quitting, I was in the manager’s office, my mouth open to say ‘I quit,’ and then…”

  She had to think about it, what that feeling had been, in the disordered office in front of that manager with the pinched face. Something in her had bucked up, hard, and she’d felt a stubbornness she didn’t know she possessed come over her.

  “I said, ‘You need to tell those assholes in the kitchen to have some respect,’ and I walked out again.”

  She’d showed up at work the next day, and even if the fine art of back talk hadn’t come to her as easily as béchamel or roux, she’d learned enough of it to survive. “I never cried in a kitchen again.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  “So, Hadley’s bullshit—I can’t say it didn’t bug me, but I’ve learned to be a lot tougher than that.”

  She pulled the rag from his hand, threw it and her own into the laundry, and said, “Come on. We’re done.”

  —

  She made him forget. He kept surfacing from her to remember who he was, what he had done, and what he still needed to do, and she kept pulling him under again, into those two contradictory aspects of her—the sweetness that had first drawn him, and the toughness that she’d wrapped around it.

  He hadn’t meant to say, Tell me some stories. He’d meant to stay aloof. But she made him want more. She made him want to unfurl himself, or to probe, as if she were a splinter that had gotten somewhere deep under his skin.

  He followed her as she locked the diner’s front door. She bent to pick up a huge plastic drum bag of trash, but he brushed back her efforts and shouldered the bag himself.

  She wanted to object. He could see the words on her lips and the protest in her eyes.

  “You worked damn hard tonight,” he said. “Let me.”

  You don’t always have to be tough, he wanted to say. You could let me help you, just a little.

  But of course she couldn’t. And he couldn’t.

  She had snuck those looks at him as they cleaned up. Curiosity and something more dangerous. A question. What would it be like? He could hear it as clearly as if she’d asked it out loud, probably because it was the same question that rattled around his head, that tumbled around his gut. What would he see if he took her question as an invitation? Would she be all toughness or all sweetness, or some mix of the two that would break him to bits?

  He couldn’t.

  The difference between a convict on parole and an ordinary citizen is basically like the difference between living in a police state and living in the United States.

  He’d gotten lucky with his parole officer. A guy who was old enough to have been around but young enough not to be jaded. A guy who still bothered to try to keep Kincaid out of trouble, for Kincaid’s sake and not his own.

  Cops get called on an ordinary citizen, there’s a process, right? Questioning, investigation, arrest, arraignment—you know the deal. Cops get called on a parolee, that’s it. Clank. John, Kincaid’s parole officer, had mimicked the slide and slam of a jail cell.

  So you gotta use your gut as a trouble sensor. Your gut says, Bad idea, you run the other way as fast as your legs can carry you. Things that aren’t trouble for a regular guy are trouble for you. Listen to that gut.

  Kincaid saw that What would it be like? look on Lily’s face and his gut said, Bad idea.

  He slung the trash up high, over the lip of the Dumpster, and it smacked wetly into something he didn’t want to contemplate. He got ready to run the other way as fast as his legs could carry him. Far away from Lily and her sweetness and her toughness and those eyes.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for everything.”

  She took a step closer, rose onto her tiptoes, and put her hands on his shoulders. No one had touched him gently in eight years. He’d been elbowed, shoved, punched, slapped, cut, herded, crowded, kneed, and beaten. You’d think it would have inured him completely, but instead those two hands through a layer of T-shirt lit him up. He felt it all over, his skin tightening and tingling.

  Run.

  It was only a split second’s thought, too late.

  She kissed him.

  It was a small kiss, a thank-you kiss, the touch of her wide, pretty mouth against his, but his cock surged against cotton and denim, all desperation.

  He exhaled involuntarily, the sound too harsh to be a sigh, and the green of her eyes darkened.

  She kissed him again. Her lips parted and her tongue found his before he knew he’d opened to her.

  The one-two punch of it bowled him over. T
he innocence of that first kiss and the sensuality of the second.

  Stop her.

  His brain was fine-tuned to danger, expert at warning. It blared at him while his body gave in and he kissed her back. After that first assault on him, she subsided, but she wasn’t passive, not at all. She was live and striving, surging and retreating like the rhythm of the ocean. She outlined and defined, ordered, asked, pleaded. Something he could fall into and be lost in. Maybe it had been way too long since he’d been touched, longer since he’d been kissed. Maybe he’d simply forgotten how powerful it was. Or maybe she was something extraordinary, but either way, he couldn’t not kiss her.

  Stop it.

  But he wouldn’t. Not until he’d memorized the salt taste of her mouth, the breath mint she’d snuck, the smells of the kitchen, onion and garlic and grease, on her clothes and skin, the tremble of her under his fingers. He tried to keep his hands where they belonged, and for a brief time that worked. He held her arms, her shoulders, her back, but then his hands went off without his permission and he found them other places—clutching the curve of her head so hard it must hurt her, slipping down to cup her ass and pull her tight up against him, to ease the roaring of blood in his cock. One hand glided up her side, checking off her ribs one by one until the soft swell of her breast under his fingers brought him back to himself and he dropped his hand and began all over again the process of trying to keep from pawing her.

  Her mouth was ten thousand kinds of soft. The dry silk of her lips when they’d first touched his, the wet satin of her tongue when it dove for him. The tender parts deep within slick and yielding, the way she’d be if he were inside her.

  He had her nipple between his thumb and finger without realizing he’d taken it. She shook like a leaf and her breath came fast and uneven.

  Let her go.

  And he might have. He might have, except she sensed his hesitation and pulled her mouth away from his long enough to say, “Don’t stop.”

  Chapter 4

  Nothing had prepared her for Kincaid.

  She had stood on her tiptoes and reached up to kiss him, still telling herself that it was an innocent thing. Until the last moment, she told herself she would kiss him on the cheek, at the corner of the mouth. She would let good sense, her better self, her new self who protected her newborn life, prevail.

  A series of things had undone her. The heat rising from him, so that when she stepped close she found herself in a different climate entirely. The Tropic of Kincaid, a warmth that soaked straight into her and melted all the things that were not already melted and set other parts to boiling.

  The way he’d responded to that first kiss, the breath she’d forced out of him. The way his body had gone rigid, as if her kiss had been electric.

  Heat flashing in his eyes. Color rising under the ink on his neck, like embarrassment flaring under a collar, only not.

  Those things had spoken to the dark core of her. They’d reached past reason, sense, and restraint, straight into swirling need, and she’d responded the only way she could have, by kissing him again.

  Then it was like she’d unleashed something. This beast, this towering giant of a man, who could put his arms around her and lean down over her and make her feel tiny, even though she was not, by any stretch, a small woman. She’d unchained that dark core in him and he’d kissed her back, his mouth demanding but gentle on hers. Without thinking she let herself touch him, let her hands wander over the unrestrained machinery of his body, muscle that flexed and tensed under her fingers, as if he were still, somehow, being held back, fighting against cuffs or cords. Muscle everywhere, that power she’d craved all around her, enveloping, surrounding, blotting out the world and all the frustrations she’d been wrestling for days and weeks—not being where she wanted to be, not being what she wanted to be, the powerlessness of having done everything she’d meant to do but not reaching the goal she’d set.

  Nothing had prepared her for Kincaid. Not Fallon, certainly.

  Whatever still held Kincaid back, it was a strong thing. And she wasn’t willing to let it keep him at bay. She wanted him, all of him, the pent-up part, too. She’d been thwarted and shamed too many times lately and for nothing, but her body screamed that this was not nothing. This was what she’d made all those mistakes for.

  You’re doing it again, part of her said. You have no idea who he is or whether you can trust him.

  But none of the rest of her believed that, because this didn’t feel like how things had felt with Fallon. Not by miles. This felt like both of them. In this together.

  Even if she wasn’t sure what this was. Or where it was going.

  That was why she had said, “Don’t stop.”

  And to his credit, he didn’t. He began kissing her again, but it was different now, rougher, faster, harder. Less refined. If he’d been trying to impress, or coax, trying to be gentlemanly or just gentle, he was done with that now. This kiss spoke. It said, I am all in.

  So she kissed him back to tell him, Me too. She bit his lower lip, and he groaned and licked her, not a cajoling little open for me but with the flat of his tongue owning her tongue, her mouth, her whole goddamned self. She thought of a book she’d read once that described a spell that let magicians bind like to like, the way the liquid heat between her legs heard the wet click of their mouths and answered. The way the slide of his tongue against hers swept open a craving, for being filled.

  Tension gathered itself, coiling in her belly, tightening in her core. It rose fast, drowning out quieter sensations and the voices of fear and doubt. Her breasts were tight, too, the nipples knotted and tender. He put a hand, big as a lion’s paw but far more nimble, to her waist and lifted her T-shirt where it clung above her skirt, pushing it up over her breasts. He dipped his head and took a nipple between his lips, and his tongue wiggled the tip as the twining heat in her groin grew fiercer. He bent his knees and tilted his hips to rub the thick bulge in his jeans against her, and she strained for more of him—more pressure, more friction, more speed. But her denim skirt was in the way, too tight around her thighs, and too thick to push easily out of the way. She clutched at him, scraping, grabbing, trying to get him where she wanted him, tugging his hair.

  “What do you want?” Barely more than a murmur, in his dark, rough voice.

  “I—want—to—rub—against—you.”

  She was shameless now, like an animal. She grappled for purchase, and then his hands were there, pushing her skirt up, out of the way, around her waist. The cooling summer night air brushed over her bare, damp thighs, stirred her green silk panties. As light as the touch was, she felt it core-deep.

  He eased his denim-clad erection against the scrap of fabric, and she gasped at the slip of the silk over her swollen clit. His cock was big, like the rest of him. Nothing will have prepared me for that, either.

  He shoved her toward the alley’s wall, a hand cupping her skull, and she gasped as brick abraded her butt and her shoulder blades. He made an answering sound, a growl, and pinned her with his hips. Catching her wrists, cuffing them in one huge, callused hand, he raised them over her head. She felt everything at once—the rough, solid wall, the squeeze of his fingers around her wrist, the hard press of his cock at the vee of her thighs, his breath, fast, on her cheek.

  She struggled for a moment against the restraint, testing, but he was unrelenting, and she whimpered at the impossible pleasure of that knowledge.

  Chapter 5

  He pulled back as if he’d been burned, dropped her hands.

  He berated himself. For ignoring his gut. For thinking he was an ordinary citizen and not a parolee. For being rough when the whisper of violence could get him thrown back in jail. For forgetting that he had something important to do, that he owed the one person who’d ever been family to him justice, and that everything else was a distraction.

  Most of all, for forgetting who he was and what he’d done.

  He would apologize and leave. He would never come back
to the diner. He would go do what had to be done.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, already turning away, praying that she would let him walk. When she would be entirely within her rights calling the cops.

  There was no margin for error. He’d told himself that, and yet she’d managed to make him forget.

  “You didn’t hurt me. You won’t hurt me.”

  Startled, he turned back, because her words said they weren’t done. You won’t hurt me. And his traitorous body, all id, roused at the thought that there would be more. But: “You made that sound—” That whimper, like something captive and wounded.

  “Because I liked it.”

  He’d been beside himself. Beyond. Eight years without real human touch, and suddenly there she’d been, mouth and hands, sighs and moans, willing and eager. Her body long and strong, curves his hands found without half trying.

  And then that whimper.

  Because he’d pressed her against the wall and trapped her with his body, because he’d done it roughly and because he’d roped her hands tight in the clutch of his.

  She’d whimpered because she wanted it this way, crude and dark and unapologetic, caught and held.

  Because I liked it.

  As long as Kincaid could remember, he’d denied this.

  He’d had fantasies of rough sex even when he was too young to have sex. He’d lain in his bed and pictured a woman, faceless, almost formless, her body jiggling under the force of his thrusts, and then he’d made himself not picture it, because it was wrong. He’d listened to imaginary moans that cleaved along that fine line between pleasure and pain, and then he’d made himself imagine different sounds, whimpers at delicate pleasure.

  Someone who didn’t know him might blame pornographic images or hatred of women, but at that age, he’d never seen porn and didn’t hate. He’d just been born like that, wanting it that way.

  It didn’t mean it was the only way he wanted it. Like any healthy man, he wanted it any way he could get it, and he’d had it, plenty, in high school and in the years before prison. Casual sex, booty calls, friends with benefits, real relationships with women, even some serious ones. Women he’d loved. Women he’d respected enough that even though he’d been fantasizing that they’d cry, More, harder, deeper, I want to feel your balls slap my clit, he reined himself in willingly when they asked, politely, “A little gentler?”