by Serena Bell
He wanted to tell her how he and Grant had plotted and schemed. How Grant had talked to everyone he knew with any connection to OSP, to find one single man who was the key to Kincaid’s survival. And on Kincaid’s terms—someone who held power without making it about race. And then he and Grant had pored over Bink Jennings’s case for hours, looking for the chinks. In the end, Kincaid had found them—two eyewitnesses, pivotal witnesses for the prosecution, who’d changed their stories. A week into his time, he’d found Bink and said, If your guys can watch my ass, I can get you outta here.
And they had, and he had, and Bink’s guys had kept him safe.
Well, mostly. He fingered the scar on his arm, largely invisible in the lines of split skin and moss. There were other scars, too.
But he’d survived. His biggest victory, a story he’d never get to tell her.
He wanted to tell her how concrete and metal roared day and night, louder than the ocean, louder than the voices in his own head.
How he understood her gratitude to her family, and he understood how it bound her to carry out her plans, because he felt that way, too, bound.
Last night, afterward, he’d lain in bed in a sheen of his own sweat, thinking of the feel of her, tight as a fist around his cock, imagining what else he could do to her, what else she could resist or fight off or pretend not to want, until he’d had to stroke his own fist over himself. And then when it was over, he’d wondered if he could have mistaken her.
“You were worried?”
“I wasn’t, no, but I’ve never—I guess it’s good to hear you say it.” He stared at a knot in the hardwood of her sister’s foyer floor.
“I like you,” she said.
He looked up, startled. And felt the twin clutches of happiness and fear. They were the best and the worst words she could have said. Those words pushed him bit by bit closer to needing to tell her the truth. Because this was something, something happening, something they hadn’t named but would have to name sooner rather than later. He’d started out feeling like there was only one thing worth doing in the world, but she’d made him rethink that. He’d started out feeling that she deserved better than him—and he still believed that—but she’d made him think he’d like to try to deserve her.
Except that she was leaving. And she’d explained why, and he understood, not just on paper but deep, deep down, so deep he could never try to talk her out of it.
An awkward amount of time had passed since her declaration, enough so that if he returned it now, it would sound forced. And she’d begun talking again, anyway, sounding more hesitant than he’d heard her, but—more certain, too.
“I like—I like that you can be both ways. Like, the way you were last night, and this way. Making sure I’m okay. Checking in. Worrying a little. Not like fussy worrying, but wanting to know. It’s sweet.”
He shook his head. “I’m not sweet. I’m really not sweet.” There’s a guy with a scar on his throat you can ask.
“Well, you are to me.”
Now she looked uncomfortable, and there was nothing for it but the truth. “I like you, too.”
She beamed, that slightly crooked smile and wide mouth and big bright eyes.
He wanted to ask her, What is this? What are we doing? But he knew that if the truth-telling started, there would be no going back. And God, he wasn’t ready to tell her a truth that would send her packing before it was time. He wasn’t ready to miss a day of whatever this was they were doing, however temporary it was.
“Caid? The shower downstairs is nice,” she said. “Good water pressure.”
“Would you shower, too?”
She nodded.
He followed her into the kitchen and then down into the basement, where she showed him her room, a cozy little cave with high-up windows whose meager light was blocked by metal half-moon barriers meant, he supposed, to keep rain from leaking in.
“I don’t think you can get much of a sense of my personality from it,” she said apologetically.
She had a double bed made with a sage-green spread and piled high with pillows, a wooden dresser, and a shabby old night table. But her personality had found its way through, anyway—the floor and night table were stacked with books, and the walls—faux wood paneling—were cluttered with drawings. He knelt first to look at the books. Cookbooks, almost all, just a few novels scattered here and there. The cookbooks bristled with Post-its, like his law books. He picked one up and opened it at random to a meatloaf recipe, marked with a blue sticky-note on which she’d neatly printed: Asiago!
“Doesn’t it make you hungry, reading these in bed?”
She laughed. “Ravenous.”
“Insatiable?”
He felt the shift, like a storm coming in, and he knew she felt it, too, because she gave him a little peekaboo glance from under her lashes.
“Better show me the shower,” he said.
—
He washed her, tenderly, and then he turned off the water and had her, hard, her face and nipples chilled against the ice-cold tile, and she loved both things, and everything in between.
Afterward they wrapped up in big towels and lay on her bed, side by side, hands clasped.
“I can’t get enough of you. We weren’t even back to the car yet last night and I was already thinking about what I wanted to do to you.”
“Me, too,” she said.
“It’s like there’s this beast in me, and you let it out, and now—”
“I know,” she said. Because that was what happened. Someone handed you the truth about yourself, someone handed you the key to your most primal self, and then you were out there, and there was no way to put yourself under lock again. Even if you wanted to, even if there were a hundred or a thousand good reasons for you to live a quieter, neater, gentler version of yourself.
That was what had scared Fallon so much, this thing they’d accidentally unleashed in her that he couldn’t and didn’t want to control.
But she wasn’t scared of Kincaid or his beast, or—anymore—of hers. And she’d lain awake last night, too, and she’d felt deeply, strangely peaceful. She was a little frightened of looking too closely at that feeling, because she was pretty sure it wasn’t something she was going to get to keep, but last night—last night she’d just allowed herself the contentment. Of being possessed. Overpowered. And strangest of all, understood.
“My dad,” she said.
He didn’t seem surprised by the abrupt subject change. “Thank you for telling me about him.”
“I don’t want all those sacrifices—his, my mom’s, my sister’s—to get wasted.”
“That’s a lot to put on yourself.”
“I think—I’m not putting it on myself. It’s just there.”
He nodded. “I know what that’s like. I feel like I owe my grandmother everything.”
“Your grandmother?”
“She raised me.”
It was the first time he’d volunteered any information about his past, and her whole body got warm in response to the nakedness in his voice. It was a feeling not so different at all from physical desire, the way her body seemed to reach out and unfold for him. She’d never had that before, a sense that her emotions went all the way down in her, past facial expression and heartbeat to blood thickening in her veins, belly heating, fingertips tingling. He was everywhere in her now, whether she wanted him there or not.
“Your parents—?”
“Died. My father was driving under the influence, and both he and my mom were killed. I was with Nan—that’s what I called her—at the time; she babysat me a lot. I was eight. My grandfather died not too long after that…”
“Caid.” She turned, reaching for him, but he stiffened, and she knew he had to get through the story first. She stayed on her side, watching him. He was almost expressionless, his voice level near a monotone, but she could see it anyway, the disturbance under his skin, how much it hurt to talk about.
“The thing about Nan—”
<
br /> His voice broke, and he stopped, took a breath, then started again, steadier. “She lost almost everything, but she was never bitter. I don’t remember ever feeling like I lost her to grief. She was always totally present for me, doing whatever it took to love me and get us both through.”
“She sounds wonderful.”
“She was.”
“She’s gone, now?”
“She died seven years ago. So you see—I understand what it’s like to be grateful, and to feel like you owe someone something. Everything.”
She nodded, and curled her body toward his. He let her, let her rest her head on his chest and wrap an arm over him. They lay like that a long time.
“They couldn’t find a will when she died,” Kincaid said.
“Your grandmother?”
“Yeah. The land, everything, went to—to this man she’d married after my grandfather died. The house, the property, was searched. I think he must have destroyed it. He—” He stopped. “She wanted the house and land sold and the money given to this place she loved, Safe Haven, which was a shelter and school for homeless kids. Because it’s really tough for kids with no address to get an education—they can’t enroll in public school. She loved that place. She loved those kids. And I can’t stand the idea that he hurt her. Beat her. And now he’s living in her house, on her land, off her money, and it—I can’t take it.”
“Oh, Kincaid,” Lily said. There was so much more she wanted to say, like thank you for telling me that, but the thoughts and feelings were stuck somewhere deeper than language.
“I want to find that will,” he said. “You owe it to your father to do something with the money that paid for cooking school; I owe it to Nan to make sure her last intentions in the world are granted. And if I find the will and find out she changed it, left everything to him, I will live by that too. I just—I don’t believe it.”
“Is there—is there anywhere else it could be?”
“There was a laptop. He has that, too. My lawyer is trying to get it. I’m not sure what comes next if that doesn’t pan out.”
“What does this guy say, when you ask him?”
Kincaid rubbed his face with both hands, hiding his eyes for a moment. “I haven’t asked him.”
“You have to ask him,” Lily said. “I bet if you show up at his door—all calm, like you were with Markos. When you told him you’d do the trap if he let me cook for you.”
He emerged from behind his hands and eyed her appraisingly. “Heard that, did you?”
She pressed her lips together against a smile and nodded.
“I wondered.”
“You were—you have a kind of power.”
“Power, huh?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she whispered.
She lay back on the bed as he rolled toward her and covered her with his body, cradling her head in his hands, kissing her with such restraint and tenderness that it made her teary, until Lily heard knocking, far off, on the door from the kitchen to the basement, and she sighed. “I think my sister is home with the kids,” she said. “You’d better get decent.”
She wrapped herself in her towel and climbed the stairs.
“Someone down there with you?” Sierra asked, amused.
“Kincaid,” Lily said.
“Is that—?”
Lily nodded.
“So much for ‘not gonna happen again,’ huh?”
“Yeah,” Lily said with a sigh.
“Is that a good thing? Bad thing?”
“Good,” Lily said, because damn, there were a lot of things she didn’t know, but she did know that. Kincaid was a good thing. Almost—and this was what scared her most—the best thing.
“I’m making meaty mac ’n’ cheese, and I’m making a truckload so I can freeze some. Why don’t you ask him to stay for dinner?”
Her instant reaction was no way, but Sierra meant the invitation seriously, and after a moment or two of reflection, she thought, Okay, smarty-pants, why not?
She didn’t want to ask him because she knew they were getting very close to the point of having to have a conversation about what they were doing. In the last twenty-four hours, she’d laid her soul bare and told him she liked him, and then, just now, the way he’d finally opened up to her, like patterns unfolding and unfurling, the very center of Kincaid—
They could fudge things up to a certain point. A one-night stand could turn into several one-night stands, maybe into a summer fling. You could like someone you were having a summer fling with, even confide in him, as long as the rules were clear. But the rules were changing every time they touched each other. The rules were changing with every word they parceled out to each other, tiny gifts like raindrops streaking down a window.
The rules would change even more if she invited him to dinner with her family…
Her sister’s eyes were full of worry and sympathy and love.
It felt like stepping off a ledge, in the best possible way.
“Sure,” she told Sierra. “I’ll ask. I don’t know if he’ll stay, but I’ll ask.”
—
“My sister wants to know if you’ll stay for dinner. She makes this dish with mac and cheese and hamburger—I think technically it’s called American Goulash, but we usually call it Meaty Mac.”
“I shouldn’t,” he said to Lily. So much simpler that way. He’d been letting things get more and more complicated, letting them slide downhill, letting them gather speed until he no longer felt in control. If he accepted her invitation, the brakes would only loosen more, and he had no idea what lay at the bottom of this slope.
“Yeah, probably a bad idea…” He hated how embarrassed she looked, like she’d been out of line asking him in the first place. She didn’t—couldn’t—know what was in his head or in his past, and he knew she thought his rejection of her invitation was a rejection of her, of her family.
“These are your nieces’ and nephew’s, right?” he asked, to cover over the awkward moment, gesturing at the artwork tacked up all over the room. She had no posters or paintings besides the kids’.
“Yeah.”
“Will you miss them when you go?”
The words hung there a moment, full of more import than he’d intended. What will you miss? Will you miss me?
I want you to miss me.
I don’t want you to go.
Her eyes said she hadn’t missed his meaning. “I’ll miss them a ton. Do you want to—do you want to at least come meet them?”
To hell with it. He wanted to say yes. To this, to her, to everything she asked. “Sure.”
They got dressed—he watched her surreptitiously, not wanting to make her self-conscious, but wanting to know that about her, as he wanted to know everything about her. How she put on her clothes, whether she did it in a hurry or carefully, whether her clothes were a toy or armor or costume. She spent a long time fitting her bra around her breasts, and he wanted to brush her hands and that stupid wire-and-lace contraption away and cup her, support the weight in his own hands and feel those curves that didn’t exist anywhere else in nature. But he didn’t move, just watched as best he could and put the rest of his clothes on, and followed her up the stairs, where Lily introduced him to her sister and the kids.
There were three of them: Alana, Joelle, and Ben, grubby and grumpy. Once upon a time, when it had seemed possible, he’d wanted three kids.
“Play a game with us,” Ben exhorted.
“What games do you like?”
“No more screen time,” Sierra called from the kitchen. “They try to use visitors to get extra screen time. Don’t fall for it. If Ben says he wants to show you something on Minecraft, it’s a ploy.”
Kincaid raised an eyebrow at Ben, who looked down at his feet. Kincaid hid a smile.
“I don’t want to show him anything on Minecraft,” Ben called back.
“Show him Würfel Bohnanza,” Lily said.
“Wha-ful wha?” Kincaid demanded, and made Ben and his sisters laugh.<
br />
Ben got the game out, a small yellow box full of cards and dice, and showed Kincaid how to play.
“You’re really bad at this, you know,” Ben told Kincaid, after he failed to roll a red for the fourth turn in a row.
“You are,” Lily affirmed.
Kincaid wasn’t aware of having made a conscious decision to stay, but after Ben had thoroughly beaten him at Würfel Bohnanza, he followed Lily into the kitchen and asked Sierra what he could do to help.
She was tearing lettuce. “How would you feel about cutting up a tomato for the salad?”
“Sure.”
She handed him a cutting board, then reached toward the knife block.
His gut went cold when he saw the handle, ebony with an embedded line of stainless steel. The same brand as the knife he’d held to Arnie Sinclair’s throat.
The same size.
Don’t think about it.
It’s just a knife.
But it would never be just a knife again.
He took it carefully, fear skittering in his gut, his hands cold.
Lily sat on a stool and watched him, and he wanted her to stop, because all he could think about was what he’d done.
You’ve got no fucking right.
He had no fucking right.
If Lily’s sister and her husband had the slightest idea what he’d done, that he’d drawn blood at the edge of a blade like this one—
If they had any idea how rage and impotence had crushed him—
Or how, in the center of that flame, he’d found the icy certainty of what he needed to do, the bone-deep understanding that Arnie would understand only one language. If they had any idea how he’d cleared away the heat of his emotions, how coldly he’d advanced on Arnie, how knowingly he’d made his threats, how consciously he’d set knife blade against skin, pressing just hard enough—
If they could see that about him, if they could juxtapose it with what he’d done to Lily, how much he’d enjoyed wedging her between his own body and the cold, hard tile, how much he’d loved her don’t, and stop, and no last night, how happy it made him that he could still see a faint abrasion on her wrist where he’d bound her several nights ago—
