“I’m sorry about your mom,” she said. “My dad is like that with Anne and me. Dating was a nightmare. Half the boys in our school were terrified of him and wouldn’t even think of asking one of us out.”
Rory laughed. “I would have chanced it.”
“I bet you would have. You like a challenge, don’t you?”
“I do. Especially when it comes in such a pleasing package.”
“I’m tempted to say something flirty but it might backfire again.”
He laughed again. The rest of his tension started to melt away. He was the first to admit that now that he was sitting across from her, his problems seemed smaller. More manageable.
“What’d you do when you quit firefighting? You’d said you were an investment banker,” she said. “I want to sound like I know what that might be, but I’m really not sure. Is it anything like a day trader?”
“Sort of. I’ve always been good with numbers, but being an accountant was too tame. On the other hand, taking risks on the stock market was right up my alley.”
“Were you good at it?” she asked.
“I did okay. Luckily, I got out before the banking crisis. As much as I like the thrill of playing with stocks, I also like having something solid to hold on to at the end of the day.”
“I bet you have a lot of property,” she said, leaning forward and putting down her fork.
The waitress stopped by to refill their glasses. A reprieve, thank God. He smiled at the woman as she walked away. She was nice enough and usually very chatty when he stopped in for a meal.
Meg had been honest with him. It was only fair that he reciprocate. “I do,” he admitted.
“I don’t have any yet,” she said. “Just a duplex that my grandparents bought for Anne and me when we were little. All I want is one little old house to fix up.”
“My heart is breaking for you,” he said, hiding a smile. She was persistent, he’d give her that. “Is that a roundabout way of asking me to back out of the Clapham place?”
She took a sip of her sweet tea. “It does seem like the gentlemanly thing to do. And I’ve got a feeling that Twin Palms is going to get into your blood. If you stay here, you’ll always regret not letting me outbid you.”
“Ah, Red, you’re welcome to try to outbid me, out-maneuver me, or even out-flirt me. But I’m still not backing down.”
She gave him a saucy look and he felt himself harden. And that was ridiculous. There was nothing sexual about this moment except for the challenge of it.
“It was worth a try,” she said, with a grin as she went back to eating. “I wanted to give you an easy out so you didn’t lose face when I completely beat you at your own game.”
RORY FINISHED HIS dinner and ordered dessert. Despite the salad for dinner, Meg ordered a banana split and ate the entire thing. It made him smile as he lingered over his triple chocolate sundae.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked.
“Just wondering how your kiss would taste now,” he said.
She licked her lips slowly and then gave him a slow, sensual smile. “Pineapple.”
“Yum. One of my favorite flavors,” he said, leaning back in the seat and stretching his legs out so that he trapped her legs between his.
“What are you doing?” she asked. “This is a business dinner.”
“I’m a big guy,” he said, rubbing his hand over his chest. “I have to stretch out or I get all cramped up.”
She shook her head. “You are playing with fire.”
“Am I?” he asked, but he knew he was. There was something between them. A spark that could lead to a full-on three-alarm fire. They’d both been dancing around it, trying to pretend it didn’t exist. But that wasn’t his style.
Despite the fact that his old man had once called him names for leaving the firehouse, he had never been a coward. And this, with Meg, felt like something he wanted to fight for.
As he’d talked to her, listened to her, sparred with her, he knew he wanted her in his bed and in his life.
She was complex and totally beguiled him. So she was probably the last damned woman he should be thinking of getting to know better. But he couldn’t help himself. There was something about the way she’d tease and then retreat. How she tried to be businesslike, yet still sometimes let her temper get the better of her.
“This feels like it could lead to trouble,” she said.
“I’m beginning to think you’re my kind of trouble,” he said. And she was. No matter how difficult this might make his life, he’d decided that Meg would be his.
She tipped her head to the side and gave him a smile as old as the ages. It was one that women had been using to lead men around since the beginning of time. Rory would like to believe that he was smart enough not to fall for it, but he was lying to himself.
From that moment that he’d become sexually aware of her during her passionate speech, he’d wanted one thing and only one thing. Meg, naked on his lap, with him buried deep inside her body. Then maybe the restless ache inside of him would ease.
He’d been blaming that ache on the job and the mess he’d become since Natalie had left him, but he suddenly knew the truth. It was so simple. He needed to feel like a man again. The man he’d been a long time ago. One who was confident in the face of a fire and had an arrogant swagger when he was around women. Natalie had killed that, first when she’d eroded his confidence at work, and then at home. It was something that he hadn’t fully appreciated until this moment.
“Are you okay?” Meg asked, reaching across the table to put her hand on his.
“I’m fine, honey.”
“I thought we were beyond lying to each other. That we’d both sort of opened up, honey.”
He scrubbed a hand over his face. God, that call today had screwed him up. And it hadn’t even been a damned fire. He reached for his wallet and threw a twenty on the table. “I’ve got to go.”
He slid out of the booth and got to his feet. He’d been hoping he’d soon feel normal again, but he was beginning to recognize that he no longer knew what normal was. Not for him or for his expectations of what he wanted life to be.
She stopped him with a hand on his wrist. Her fingers were cold, but when he looked down into her deep brown eyes, he felt the empty parts of his soul grow warm.
RORY LOOKED SHAKEN, the same way he’d seemed when she’d found him in the alley next to the diner. She realized that she still didn’t know what the call had been today. She’d been focused on herself and trying to get what she wanted from him. But suddenly, that didn’t matter.
She’d seen that look on her father’s face a million times, usually when he’d gone into The Groves, also known as the low-income housing development on the outskirts of town. She had come to understand that seeing people at their worst left something raw inside her dad.
Her mom had always asked her and Anne to leave him alone for awhile. Her father would spend the night in the shed behind the house using his lathe to make wooden goblets until he felt normal again. But she had the feeling that Rory didn’t have any woodworking tools or other coping methods that would help him get back to normal. At least, not yet.
He needed a distraction. “Did someone die?”
He shook his head. “Not today.”
“Give me a second to gather my stuff,” she said. “We can go for a walk and when you’re ready, we can talk.”
“I can deal with this. I think I need to be alone.”
She shoved her folder into her large bag and slid out of the booth and took his hand. She had studied human development in order to get her degree, and she understood enough about how people reacted to know that the very last thing Rory needed was to be left alone.
“Let’s go. I know of a place that is exactly what you need,” she sai
d.
He allowed her to lead him out of the diner and down the street toward the train tracks. “The train is the only reason Twin Palms was settled. It was a stopover between Tampa and the East Coast of Florida. There was nothing here but two palm trees and a big open plain where cattle roamed. Maybe a few orange groves that were just starting out.”
He didn’t respond. Looking at him, she realized he was lost in thought. So why was she doing this? Hadn’t she had enough of complicated men in her life?
But she wasn’t giving up. Not yet. “The train station was the lifeblood of the city in the early 1900s, but now this is just a freight line,” she continued as they crossed the tracks. On the other side of the tracks was a huge warehouse and next to that were the city’s basketball courts. They were fenced in, but not locked. A large wooden box next to the court contained a few basketballs.
“Why are we here?”
“Because I’ve learned that the best way to get out of your head is to get moving. And even though you’re pretty decent on the volleyball court, I’m betting I can take you at basketball. So what do you say? Want to play a game of Horse?”
“Horse? That’s your solution?” he asked, but she saw interest in his eyes.
“Yes. Fair warning—I played point guard in high school and I’m still pretty good,” she said.
“Fair warning, I played in school, too.”
“I thought you might have. Of course, there’s a bonus in this for me. It’s really hot out, so I’m hoping you’ll take your shirt off so I can ogle you again.”
He laughed, but it was forced. She tossed her bag on the court next to the wooden bench, pulled out one of the basketballs and bounced it over to him. She got out a second one and started warming up.
Should she warn him that her team had gone on to win the State Championship? And that she’d won MVP that year? She wasn’t going to, but she knew that he’d be expecting this to be a breeze. And she kind of wanted to surprise him.
They both took a few practice shots and, as he started moving, the rhythm of the ball against the court seemed to take over and she could almost identify the moment when he let go of whatever had been bothering him and started to lose himself in the sport.
“Can you dunk?” she asked. She’d always wanted to be able to dunk, but she was too short.
“Not for years,” he said.
“Well, you are getting up there in age,” she said. “You must be at least thirty.”
“Thirty-three,” he admitted.
“They say it’s all downhill from there,” she said.
“Really? I think I’m in pretty good shape,” he said. “You wanted me to take off my shirt, remember?”
She wrinkled her nose at him as she got into position to start the game of Horse. “I was trying to make you feel better. Sort of build up your ego.”
“Red, you’re pushing your luck,” he said.
“Ah, I really wanted to push you,” she said. “I’ll go first.”
She bounced the ball a few times, took aim and then breathed in deeply before tossing the ball toward the hoop with a flick of her wrist. The ball sailed through the air, hit that sweet spot on the backboard and then fell nicely through the hoop.
Rory watched her with a shrewd gaze. “I’m guessing you were the star of the team?”
“Nah, there were no stars on the team. But I did get a letter in basketball in high school and played in college,” she admitted.
“Then why are we playing Horse and not one-on-one?” he asked.
“It didn’t look like you were up for that,” she admitted. Besides, ignoring whatever was on his mind wasn’t the solution. He needed to talk, if not to her, then to someone else.
But they were still only strangers who were slowly becoming friends.
Or at least that was the reason she gave herself for caring about him. For not wanting to see him the way he’d been earlier. But in her soul, she knew the truth was that at some point when they’d been eating dinner in the Main Street Diner, her entire perspective about Rory O’Roarke had changed.
Chapter Eight
TWILIGHT FADED away to night. Their first game ended in a draw, and their second one went to Meg because she’d realized that he was watching her legs each time she took a shot. So she started to move closer to him each time he was about to take a shot, hoping to distract him.
“Give me some room,” he said as he lined up his shot. He didn’t like losing, especially not to Meg. He guessed there was a part of him that wanted to puff out his chest and make her take notice.
“I’m just trying to help you out. If you hold the ball like this,” she said, standing behind him so close that he could feel the waves of heat coming off her body and smell her natural musk. She put her arm around his waist and lifted her arm up under his. “More like that.”
His mind wasn’t on his mixed-up life or the shot he was trying to take. It was on the small mounds of her breasts, which were pressed to his back, and the light exhalation of her breath, which brushed over his arm. He tossed the ball toward the basket, then turned quickly in her arms and pulled her close to him. He stared down into those eyes of hers that seemed like home to him.
“You missed,” she said, her voice airy and soft.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. Putting both hands on her waist, he confirmed that the fabric of her dress was as thin as it had looked. He could feel her skin beneath it and he lowered his fingers to her buttocks, drawing her solidly against him.
“I think this is better, don’t you?” he asked.
“Is it?”
He realized she didn’t intend to give anything away, no clues about how she was feeling. He was going to have to work for each one she revealed. He got that. He wasn’t one to wear his heart on his sleeve either, but he’d have liked it if she could have made this a bit easier.
He shook his head. No, he wouldn’t have. He could never resist a challenge. As he lowered his head and breathed in the scent of her perfume and her sweat, he knew that he wouldn’t have it any other way.
He rubbed his lips over hers and tasted the pineapple and ice cream in her kiss. He wanted more of that. Wanted this summer evening to never end because, at this moment, everything was perfect.
She’d reached out to him and made him feel like it was okay to be himself. That was a gift that no one else had ever given him. He owed her. But for right now, he was content to just enjoy the feel of having her in his arms.
She held him lightly as if afraid to cage him, but then he realized that she was still thinking. He hadn’t pushed her to the point yet where instinct took over. Hell, he was thinking too much, too. He thrust his tongue into her mouth and felt a bolt of desire shoot through his body, pooling in his groin.
He hardened as he rubbed himself against her and she clung more tightly to him, her nails digging into his shoulders as she gripped him. She moved against him in an undulating movement that awakened every one of his senses.
He softened his kiss, pulling his mouth from hers and dropping nibbling kisses along the edge of her jaw, and then moved lower to her neck. He suckled the pulse at the spot where her neck and shoulder met. He felt her heartbeat as it raced under his tongue.
He lifted his head and framed her face in his hands and realized that the words inside him couldn’t take form. He wanted to say thank you. But he didn’t know how. Besides, what would happen if things didn’t work out between them? What if he couldn’t stay?
He dropped his hands, turning away from her. This was her town and he knew she’d be okay. But what kind of man would leave a woman like this? A man who wasn’t worth the title of man. Time to put on the brakes . . .
“That got out of control,” he said, taking a step away from her.
“Not nearly,” she retorted. “What’s going on
with you? I can tell something threw you at work today.”
“Really? How can you be so sure? Maybe I’m just this big of a jerk all the time.”
“Nah, I’ve been the daughter of a cop my entire life. I can tell you that there is only one reason why someone who’s in Emergency Services acts the way you are.”
“And that is?”
“Obviously, something happened today that shook you. I’ve seen it happen to my dad. He doesn’t talk about it, though. Since you’re the first guy I’ve been interested in who has that kind of job, I thought I’d give you the chance to get it out,” she said. “Try to help you if I can.”
“I appreciate it,” he admitted. “I’m just not programmed to share like that.”
“Fair enough. Want to walk me back to the diner?” she asked. “I don’t want to be the woman you sleep with to take your mind off your problems.”
“You’d never be that, Meg. I’m sorry. It’s just that you’re so damn tempting . . .”
“I’m tempting?” she asked.
“You are.”
“No one has ever said that before,” she admitted.
“They must not have seen the real you.”
They stowed the balls and she got her bag. As they walked through the darkness between the street lights, the sound of her flip-flops echoed in the silence between them. It was then that he realized the truth he’d been hiding for way too long.
He took a deep breath. “I’m not sure of myself as a firefighter anymore,” he admitted.
She reached over and slid her hand into his. “Did you screw up today?”
“The opposite. I used the Jaws of Life to get a guy from his car and didn’t freak out at the scene. It was only afterward that I realized what could have gone wrong.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “I haven’t been back in a fire, yet.”
She stopped under a street lamp and turned toward him, tipping her head back so that their eyes met. “The fact that you had doubts afterward—not during the rescue—speaks volumes. You’re going to be okay. I know it.”
In The Heat 0f The Night (The O'Roarkes Duet Book 2) Page 7
