Killing Time

by Leslie Kelly

  His jaw stiffened as her jab hit home. Then he shook his head and his lips parted in a rueful smile. “Maybe I was better off with the silent treatment.”

  She moved to brush past him. “Yes, you probably were.”

  Before she could leave the kitchen entirely, however, he put one hand up on the wall, blocking her exit with his arm. “By the way, I am a mortal.”

  It took her a second to figure out what he meant by that almost-growled statement. Then she noticed the look on his face, the way he almost couldn’t tear his eyes away from her lips. The way his towel didn’t fit quite as nice and flat as it did before. And she remembered what she’d been saying when he’d walked into the kitchen.

  She drew a shaky hand to her chest and sucked in a deep breath. He still didn’t move his arm, that thick, strong arm that had supported her with such exquisite tenderness and raw passion Sunday night.

  “Okay,” she said, her tone breathy and thin, “you’re mortal. You need sex. Just not with me.”

  He slowly shook his head. “Oh, Caroline, you never learn.”

  Before she could ask what he meant, he’d lifted his other arm and trapped her there, against the wall. Those hard arms were inches from her shoulders. She had a sudden insane urge to turn her head and bite on his wrist to give him both pleasure and pain.

  “I want sex with only you,” he finally said, his voice thick and intense. “But I want a lot more, too.”

  Then he stepped away and let her go. Caro somehow managed not to look back as she raced back upstairs, wondering the whole time exactly what he wanted from her.

  BY MIDNIGHT Thursday night, Mick had had six beers and was working on a nice buzz to dull the ache in his gut and the tension in his brain. That probably explained why he was trying so hard to pick a fight with one of his best friends.

  “No, I don’t want a rematch,” Ty said, putting his pool cue away and walking toward the bar in the Mainline Tavern.

  The Mainline was an old standard in Derryville and had been in business during prohibition when it had sold hard cider and mountain stuff out of a back room. It wasn’t usually crowded, tonight even less so. The weekend beer drinkers were playing by their wives’ rules—staying home during the week in exchange for a no-hassle night with the guys on the weekend.

  On a Friday or Saturday, the place would be wall to wall with regulars. Sometimes it drew in the odd highway traveler who wanted to stop for a cold one at a quaint bar that advertised dollar beers, misspelling the word dollar on the sign outside.

  Only the pathetic singles—like Mick—or their very understanding friends—like Ty—were here so late on a weeknight.

  “Why don’t we go out for some late-night breakfast?” Ty asked.

  Mick shook his head. “Not interested.”

  They’d played four sets of pool. Mick had already lost twenty bucks and was determined to win his money back. Actually, he was determined to blow off steam in any way he could. Including trying to get a rise out of Ty, which only showed how tense this week with Caroline had been. “Since when did you turn into the kind of guy who walks out on a betting situation? You afraid?” Even to his own ears, his tone sounded belligerent.

  Ty obviously noticed. “Pal, we both know I can’t take you,” his friend said, visibly losing his patience, “but I swear to God if you don’t get the bug out of your ass, I’ll go down swinging and land at least a few good ones before I hit the floor.”

  Mick raised a brow, impressed in spite of himself. Ty prided himself on being a peacekeeper. He’d been keeping Eddie, his twin brother, out of fights since they’d all met back in first grade at Harding Elementary School. He was the most laid-back guy Mick had ever known—next to himself.

  “You’re really ready to fight me?” He wondered if Ty heard the surprise in his voice.

  “You really wanna fight me?”

  Mick thought about it.

  “I mean, if you want some bruises messing up that pretty face of yours, I am eventually going to oblige,” Ty said, sounding both resigned and disgusted.

  Before Mick could take him up on the offer—and he was stupid drunk enough on beer and emotion that he might have—someone gave him a face full of water.

  “What the f—” he sputtered, wiping the icy cold water away with his palm. He swung around, fists clenched, looking for who had doused him.

  “If you’re finished behaving like a total ass, I’d be happy to take you home.”

  Jared, staring at him with that quiet, intellectual, assessing gaze that had always made Mick squirm. It was the same look his cousin had had on his face the time Mick had decided to try smoking with his friends in fourth grade and had thrown up all over the dugout in the park where they used to hang out. The same one Jared had worn when he’d come to drive Mick home from college after he’d been cordially invited to leave the campus.

  “What are you doing here?” Mick asked, removing a few more droplets of water from his face with the sleeve of his shirt.

  “I called for him to come get you outta here before you took somebody on who doesn’t know you’re drunk and lovesick,” Ty said.

  Mick glared at his friend, who held his ground and stuck his finger in Mick’s face. “There’s a reason you don’t drink much, my friend. You’re a stupid drunk.”

  Jared nodded. “He’s right.”

  Ty wasn’t finished. “Stupid drunk is bad enough. Stupid drunk who uses a few beers as an excuse to get pissed off is trouble in motion.”

  Jared gave Ty an assessing look. “Correct. I didn’t realize your friends knew you that well, Mick.”

  Mick gaped at his cousin and best friend for a moment, watching them exchange a knowing glance. Then he looked down, not facing either one of them as he gave his head a shake to try to clear his brain and avoid making any more of an ass of himself.

  “Let’s go,” Jared murmured. “This isn’t your dorm room.”

  Those words did a fine job of starting to sober him up. “Shit.”

  “Yeah,” Jared said.

  Feeling much less drunk and angry than he had two minutes before, he turned to Ty with a sheepish expression. “I’m a schmuck.”

  “No, you’re just a damn emotional volcano,” Ty replied with a resigned shake of his head.

  Earl and Freddy, two other occasional friends who sat at the sticky bar, nursing their dollar beers and making flirtatious remarks to the weary-looking waitress, nodded in agreement. “Not good for a man to only get mad once every few years,” Earl mumbled. “It causes testicular cancer.”

  “Colon,” said Tommy helpfully. “You don’t even want to know what the doctor has to stick inside you to check for that.”

  Jared just rolled his eyes. “Come on.”

  With another mumbled apology to Ty, who shrugged it off with a look that said “no problem.” Mick followed his cousin out into the cold night, feeling like a younger sibling bailed out by a big brother.

  Once in the parking lot, Jared handed him the foam cup he’d been holding. Mick hadn’t even noticed it.

  “Black. One sugar.”

  Mick sipped at the coffee gratefully, then nearly spit the mouthful out. “Christ, this tastes like motor oil. No way did you get it from Ed’s.”

  Jared nodded, not even breaking into a grin. “Last cup from the bottom of the pot at the truck stop. Liquid tar. Good for cleaning sewer drains and sobering drunks.”

  “Thanks. I think I’d prefer to clean the sewer drain than drink any more of this.”

  “Tough. Drink it or you’re not getting in my car.”

  Mick glanced toward Jared’s ride, a sleek black Viper that had been his cousin’s number one priority until he’d met Gwen.

  “You even think you’re going to hurl in my car and I’ll push you out without slowing down,” Jared added.

  Mick finished the coffee and sucked in a few deep breaths, clearing away more of the beer-induced cobwebs in his brain. He leaned against Jared’s car. As his cousin shook his head, Mick s
traightened back up. “You’re so anal.”

  Jared didn’t miss a beat, replying, “You’re so stupid.”

  “Oh, thanks for the support.”

  “You want nice and supportive?” Jared reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. “Call your mother.”

  Mick groaned. “Don’t even think about it.”

  Jared put the phone back into his pocket. Mick watched his cousin from under lowered lashes, for a minute or two, feeling the coffee do its magic and the cold air put a normal thought back into his head. “Thanks for coming down,” he finally murmured, able to meet his cousin’s unflinching stare.

  Jared gave him a brief nod. “I should have let you get your ass kicked as repayment for the whole secret agent thing.”

  Mick shrugged, knowing Jared didn’t mean it. Blood made them cousins. Genuine emotion made them brothers. He trusted Jared more than anyone else in the world.

  “Want to talk about it?”

  “Talk about what?”

  “About why you’re in a bar picking fights with your best friends when the woman you’re crazy about is alone in your house?”

  Mick’s jaw dropped.

  “You think I don’t have eyes? And ears?” Jared’s lips curved into a tiny smile. “Or a decent memory? I did see the condition of your dorm room, you know. I remember the name of the girl who inspired your, er, rather memorable reaction.”

  Mick didn’t know of anyone better to share his problem with than Jared, who could be counted on not to repeat a word of anything he was told. His years of training in the FBI and in writing true-crime novels had taught the man how to keep secrets.

  “So,” Jared said after Mick briefly told him why he was here nursing his sorry-ass wounds with beer, rather than home straightening things out with Caroline, “you have become a monk.”

  Mick rolled his eyes.

  “Sorry,” Jared said with a laugh. “I guess I’m just not used to Mick Winchester, Derryville’s number one player, walking away from a sure thing. You obviously love her.”

  Mick gaped. He hadn’t mentioned that part to Jared.

  “Do you think I have gotten as far as I have in my career by not being able to do a bit of deductive reasoning?”

  “I guess not,” Mick mumbled, wishing Jared didn’t have to sound so satisfied about it. What was it with married men that they just couldn’t be happy until every freewheeling single guy they knew had also fallen into the sucker pit known as commitment.

  “So, your way of trying to get her to see a future for you two is to make her think you don’t want her.”

  Put that way, the plan sounded pretty stupid. “That’s not the way it was.”

  Jared just raised a brow. Typical. Jared always believed in lending lots of nice, silent rope, until the person he was questioning had tied the noose around his own neck and leaped right off the gallows. “I hate that you’re always right.”

  “It’s a gift. I can’t help it.”

  “Gwen must have to slap you silly regularly.”

  “At least she doesn’t send strippers to my book signings.”

  Mick snickered, remembering that particular incident.

  “So, any other bright ideas for building a future with Caroline?” Jared asked, not distracted from the subject at hand.

  Mick instantly stiffened. Jared’s words hit too close to home: he had been seeing a future with Caroline, and was angry at himself for falling into that same old bad habit. “Who says I see a future with her?”

  “You do, or else you’d just sleep with her and move on in a few weeks when she left.” Jared made it sound like a complete no-brainer. It probably was.

  “It isn’t just geography,” Mick said, knowing there were deeper, more serious issues keeping him and Caroline apart. Her lack of trust. His anger at that lack of trust. But he didn’t want to get into that part with Jared; it seemed too much of an invasion into Caroline’s past to discuss with anyone else her parents fucked-up relationship.

  “So, you plan to sit back and watch her go back to California, hoping she’ll regret leaving, quit her job and come back here to join the Bunko club and sort your mail for you?”

  “No,” he replied, not having to give it a moment’s thought. “She’d never be happy with that life. Caroline loves what she does. She was smothered, kept in a box disguised as a nineteen-inch television set for the first eighteen years of her life. I’d never want to put her back there.”

  He paused, listening to his own words echo through his brain, wondering why he hadn’t realized that before, long, long ago, when he’d been fuming, cursing her, missing and aching for her when she’d first gone away. Too young. Too selfish. Too stupid. Too…whatever.

  Jared tilted his head and leveled a steady stare at him. “Then I guess it’s you who has to change.” He brushed past Mick and unlocked the driver’s side door of his car. Once Mick had walked around to the other side and gotten in, Jared added, “It seems to me you can be pretty happy with any life, buddy. You just have to decide whether you want one without her in it.”

  Somehow Mick didn’t even have to think about that one. It was another no-brainer.

  CARO HAD NO IDEA where Mick was Thursday evening, and frankly, she didn’t care. At least, that’s what she told herself. But when she’d flipped the play button on the answering machine and heard not one but two messages from different women—one named Marcie and one named Deedee—she couldn’t prevent a hint of annoyance from creeping up her spine.

  “How many women does one man need in his life?” she asked herself as she flipped aimlessly around the channels on his big-screen TV. Since it was nearly midnight, she had her choice of late-night talk shows, repeats or old movies. So far, nothing was ringing her bell. But it sure was fun flipping the channels of a TV that cost more than some cars.

  She finally found a station playing old Moonlighting episodes and got interested in spite of herself. Somehow, she’d always had a thing for the flirtatious playboy type. Huh. Fat lot of good it had done her.

  Trying to decide whether Bruce Willis looked better young and with hair than he did now and bald, she didn’t even hear the front door open. She had no idea Mick had returned home until he walked into the family room.

  She instantly froze and straightened on the sofa. After grabbing the remote from the next cushion, she tried to punch the power button and only succeeded in muting the sound.

  “You’re up late,” he murmured, looking at her from the entrance to the room. He leaned against the jamb, arms crossed. His legs were crossed, too, the toe of one boot resting on the floor beside his other foot. The position pulled the fabric of his jeans tight against his thighs and hip. And crotch.

  Sucker.

  “I’ll go upstairs,” she murmured, dropping the remote and walking toward the door, determined to keep this a strictly roommates 101 interlude. No way was she going to ask about the smell of beer and cigarette smoke on his clothes. Nor did she really want to know why his hair was all messed up. For all she cared, some local dairy queen could have been rolling around with him in a pumpkin patch, and she wouldn’t have wanted to know a thing.

  But she couldn’t pass by without asking about his shirt. “Why are you wet?”

  He glanced down, then shrugged his shoulders, not meeting her eye. “It’s nothing.”

  There was more to the story, she knew it, but it wasn’t her business. “Hope you had fun,” she said, keeping her chin up as she waited for him to get out of the way. “I’m going to—” not bed, she couldn’t say bed to him “—my room now.”

  He didn’t move out of the way. “Aren’t you going to ask where I was? What I was doing?” He leaned closer, until his chest brushed against hers, so close that her pajamas began to soak up the moisture from his wet shirt. She would never admit it, but being so close to him, feeling his heat and his warmth, his breath and his intense stare, and she began to get wet elsewhere. She cleared her throat. “It’s none of my business.”

/>   His eyes narrowed. “You don’t want to know if I was out with another woman?”

  God, almighty, if he was she’d find Louise Flanagan’s gun and shoot him herself.

  “Nope. No concern of mine.”

  He laughed, a low, wicked laugh. That was when she noticed the slight glassiness in his eyes and the tiny wobble in his legs. “You’re drunk.” Even as she said it, she could hardly believe it. She’d never known Mick to drink more than a couple of beers, and never once seen him inebriated.

  “Nah.” The denial was accompanied by a stronger whiff of beer.

  “Yes, you are—I can tell.” She narrowed her eyes. “Why? You never drink this much.”

  “Maybe I needed to get my mind off a few things,” he replied, his voice tight and measured, suddenly very controlled. So maybe he wasn’t completely drunk, after all. But he wasn’t completely sober, either.

  “Yeah, well…uh…ditto,” she replied. The stupid little quiver in her voice needed to be ripped out of her throat and put in front of the firing squad right next to Mick.

  She pushed him out of the way, ignoring the heat, the steam, the chemistry that always exploded between them when they were together. Chemistry wasn’t enough. They’d proved that more than enough for one lifetime.

  But before she could walk away, Mick grabbed her arm, turning her to face him. He stared searchingly into her eyes, opened his mouth to say something, then seemed to reconsider.

  “What?” she prompted, her heart picking up its pace, knowing whatever Mick had on his mind, it was important to him. To them.

  He shook his head and let go of her arm. She began to walk away with a disappointed sigh, but as she reached the hall, she heard him ask one question. Very soft. Whispered. Obviously meant for his own ears, not hers.

  “Why did you walk out on me?”

  She paused at the bottom of the stairs, her hand on the banister. Used to be she thought she knew the answer to that question. But suddenly the reasons she’d used over the past eight years to convince herself didn’t seem enough anymore.

  She nearly turned back, nearly opened the dialogue that would clear the air for both of them once and for all. Before she could do that, however, she realized something. Until she knew the answer to his question, she couldn’t even try to explain it to him.