by Radclyffe
“I suspect I’m not. I’m pretty well formed, and change is not likely.”
“You never know.” Jordan wanted to say Kip was young and had lots of time to discover what she wanted and needed to make life more than just work and obligation. She was far older and could still be taken by surprise. The whole evening with Kip was outside the norm for her, and considering the powerful desire she had to reach out and stroke Kip’s arm, to somehow lighten the darkness she read in her eyes and heard in her voice, she’d already been changed by just the few hours they’d spent together. She only wished she knew what it meant. “I think you need some sleep. And I think you need to forget about fixing the truck in the morning. I’ll call a mechanic when I get home.”
“Absolutely not. I told you I would look at it, and that’s what I’ll do.”
“Do you always do what you say?” Jordan asked softly.
“I don’t know, I hope so. Right now, you might have to take it on faith,” Kip said quietly, as if searching her memory for the truth.
“I can do that,” Jordan said.
“Thanks.” Kip hadn’t realized until that moment just how much she wanted a chance to prove herself to Jordan. To show her that she was more than what Jordan must expect her to be—unreliable, unprincipled, even dangerous. She wasn’t ever going to explain to anyone how her sentence had come about. When she’d taken the two of them out of the club and gotten behind the wheel of the car, she’d assumed responsibility for all of them. She wasn’t going to implicate Randy when she’d already admitted to the crime and accepted the consequences. She was lucky to have gotten such a light sentence, something she could hopefully live through and live down. “I appreciate you giving me a chance, especially when you didn’t ask for any of this.”
“Honestly, I was thinking the same thing myself earlier. But we do need the help, and you’ve been helpful already.”
Kip sighed. “I haven’t done much of anything, but I’ll try my best.”
“I’m sure you will.” Jordan’s instincts said Kip could be trusted, even as her head recommended caution. She reached across the table and squeezed Kip’s hand. She’d only meant to offer some friendly support when Kip was so obviously distressed, but as Kip’s thumb curled over the top of her knuckles and brushed back and forth, she didn’t let go. She should have, her brain told her to, but the contact was surprisingly mesmerizing. Kip’s hand was warm and firm, her skin unexpectedly soft. A trickle of excitement escaped the confines of her control and raced along her spine. Her pulse stuttered and beat fast in her depths.
Kip glanced down at their joined hands and back up at Jordan. “I should go.”
“Yes,” Jordan said thickly, slowly extracting her fingers from Kip’s grasp. The pull of attraction lingered. “So should I.”
“I’ll see you in the morning, then.”
“Let me give you my number, in case you can’t make it.”
Kip took out her cell phone and handed it to Jordan. “You can put your number in my contacts yourself. But I’ll be there.”
*
Kip said good night to Jordan in front of the restaurant and turned to walk south toward her apartment. Jordan went the other way. She could have summoned an Uber and been home in ten minutes, but even as tired as she was, she wasn’t in any hurry to get there. Walking seemed to be the only thing that settled her, breathing in air that hadn’t been recycled in an eight-by-ten box and shared with a dozen other hopeless souls. Walking felt like freedom, and she needed to be able to turn in any direction and go anywhere she wanted, even if she had nowhere to go. When she reached home, she went directly to the bathroom, stripped off Savannah’s clothes, and stepped into the shower. She didn’t even wait for the water to warm and gasped as the cold sluiced over the back of her neck and down her body. She shivered until the temperature rose and she finally washed her hair and scrubbed her body and wondered how long it would take, how many showers, until she felt clean. Her legs were shaking by the time she finished. She grabbed a towel, rubbed her hair and hastily blotted most of the water from her skin before stumbling into her bedroom, pushing back the sheets, and falling facedown. Naked, but blessedly free, the last thing she thought of was the touch of Jordan’s hand in hers.
*
Too restless to sleep, Jordan wandered around her apartment, a large one by Manhattan standards, and it still took her only a minute to traverse the whole place. Three times. Finally, she settled in front of the front bay windows with a book in a big old overstuffed chair a neighbor had donated when they’d moved out. The chair was in great shape, but apparently didn’t match the color scheme of the new place. She loved the feeling of being enclosed in its deep seat and high, broad arms. She laughed to herself—betting a shrink would have something interesting to say about being embraced in her solitude by a safe inanimate object rather than the real thing. For some reason, her thoughts fled to Kip and she imagined herself in her arms.
“Whoa,” Jordan muttered. “Time to squash that idea.”
She leaned forward, searching for a distraction before her mental meanderings crossed a dangerous border. From where she sat on the third floor, she could look down onto the street and watch people setting out for the evening. Nighttime activities generally didn’t start till eleven in the city, and she was always asleep by then. She ought to be in bed now, but she was too keyed up and didn’t want to lie there staring at the ceiling. Her body vibrated with energy, and she had the strangest urge to go running. She didn’t even like to run, although she did on a semi-regular basis because it was good for her. She did enough physical labor she wasn’t worried about her strength, but she liked the loose, limber way her body felt when she finished running. What she hated were the first few minutes when the muscles in her legs and butt screamed at her to stop.
When she picked up the steampunk anthology she’d been reading in fits and starts, she instantly thought of Kip. Funny that they liked so many of the same things, especially when those things taken together were such an odd assortment. By rights, they shouldn’t have anything in common—they were barely the same generation and she’d be willing to bet they came from totally different backgrounds. Kip had been as careful as her not to disclose her past. That made her instantly curious.
Kip was a cipher, a puzzle to be sorted and the pieces rearranged until they fit together. She liked puzzles, but this was one she had to avoid trying to solve. Kip was like a magnet, drawing her nearer, enticing her interest, inviting her to know more. It had to be because their meeting the way they had was just so unbelievable. Kip, a stranger arriving on her doorstep, stepping into her well-ordered life and disordering everything, had made a notable first impression. That was all—just a temporary, if pleasant, diversion. Now it was time to set the unwise fascination aside.
Jordan closed the book and set it aside. She was going to be Kip’s boss and that was all, if only the rest of her would get the memo.
Chapter Eight
Don’t let go, Kip. Don’t let go. That’s my good girl.
Randy’s face, pinched and terrified, floated in the frothy gray sea. Her mother’s voice, so strong and sure, faded slowly away.
I won’t, I promise. I promise.
Of course she would never let go. Randy was her baby brother. She was supposed to look out for him. She reached for Randy’s hand, gripped his small cold fingers.
Mom? Mom? Mom…
Kip jerked awake and opened her eyes in the dark. Cold sweat coated her bare skin. She sucked in a breath and forced herself to focus. In her bed, not on the Virginia Beauty. Almost twenty-five, not ten. Randy, all grown up, not in the water. Just a memory. Why did therapists always call them dreams? Bad dreams. Nightmares. If something really happened, it wasn’t a dream, was it? Whatever she called it, she knew one thing with certainty. She couldn’t change it.
She’d just usually been much better at keeping the past where it belonged.
Rolling onto her side, she squinted at the bedside clock. F
our a.m. Why did that ring a bell? She grimaced. Jordan had mentioned needing to be at the project at four a.m. Maybe she wasn’t serious. Right. As if Jordan was the type to joke about anything connected with her project. Nope, she meant it, although she had given Kip two hours’ grace for her first day.
Groaning, Kip buried her face in the pillow and willed herself to go back to sleep. Ordinarily, she didn’t really need much sleep, but like everything else in her life, that had been totally turned upside down since the arrest. She’d gotten almost six solid hours, but she felt like it had been a month since she’d had any sleep at all. Her nerves tangled and twitched, her stomach was doing some kind of jig, and her mind was racing with a jumble of incoherent thoughts she couldn’t string together. She’d never been one for fooling around with drugs, even in college when it was pretty much what everyone did, but the few times she’d tried anything, she’d felt like this. Like she was coming out of her skin and if she didn’t move, body parts would start flying off in all directions.
She was a mess, and wide awake.
“Crap.”
She sat up and switched on the bedside light. She was officially up now, strung out, and feeling hungover. Which she wasn’t. Perfect. The shower helped clear out the last of the memories that clung to her mind like torn scraps of paper blown in on the wind. By the time she finished, she’d resurrected her control and felt human, aside from a nagging headache. She considered making coffee and then decided she’d better wait an hour or two. She checked the refrigerator and found a protein drink, which would do for now. While she leaned against the counter finishing it, she considered the day ahead. She needed to call her father and check on Randy. Too early for that. She needed to look at that truck and get it running so Jordan could do whatever she did before the rest of the world got up. She checked her phone. Four thirty.
Late enough. She punched in a number.
“Yeah,” a gravelly baritone responded almost instantly.
“Harv, it’s Kip. Sorry I left you hanging yesterday. A few things came up and I didn’t get a chance to call.”
“No problem,” the foreman at the Hoboken facility responded. “I got the message through channels.” He paused. “Everything cool?”
“Yeah, thanks.” Kip wondered how much of the whole story had gotten around. Carver wouldn’t have mentioned it, neither would her father, but somehow, nothing ever stayed private in the business world. In any world, really. “I’m gonna be tied up off-site for a while. I’ll work on the UAV-21 remotely and just come in for project meetings.”
“Okay, sure. How long we talking?”
Kip hadn’t really thought about it until that moment, but she swiftly made a decision that felt right even though no one would be happy about it. “Three, four months, probably.”
He whistled. “Okay. We’ll reshuffle some things if we have to.” The silence was longer this time. “Does Michael know about this?”
Michael Phillips ran the Hoboken facility and reported directly to her father. He was ten years older than her, a distant cousin twice removed or thereabouts, and they’d never had much to do with each other growing up. She always got the impression Michael expected to be groomed for higher things, and maybe he would be. That didn’t matter a bit to her. She didn’t want anything more than what she had right now, and her father had finally accepted that. Randy was the one her father pushed now, and Randy wanted even less to do with the family business than she did. She would’ve liked to think the pressure to conform, to step in line with most of the other Kensington offspring, was part of the reason he rebelled, but she didn’t really think that was true. No had been his first word, and after the accident, he’d just gotten worse.
“Kip?”
Kip rubbed her face. Hell, she’d been drifting. She really was more tired than she thought. “No, but I’ll let him know later this morning. You know me and how much this project matters. I’ll stay on top of it.”
“Okay. Sure. I do.”
“That’s not why I’m calling, though.”
“What do you need?”
“An air filter.”
“Come again?”
“One compatible with an ’09 Dodge truck. Can you have one of the guys down in maintenance run one over to my place?”
“Sure. When do you need it?”
“How about now?”
He laughed. “I’ll send Ronnie. Anything else?”
“Yeah, can you have him put together a toolkit for me—general maintenance and construction.”
“We’ll take care of it.”
“I appreciate it. I’ll call Felicity later and go over whatever meetings I had scheduled. You just keep it all nice and shiny for me, will you?”
“Don’t worry, it’s a thing of beauty.”
“We’re still ready to go online first of September?”
“If it don’t rain and the creek don’t rise.”
Kip was too tired to parse the image but she got the idea. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
“Say, ah, Kip,” he said hesitantly, “you need anything, you call me, okay?”
“I will. I’m okay, Harv. Talk soon.”
“You got it.”
As crazy as things were, she was more than okay. She loved her work, but she wouldn’t miss the office politics and one-upmanship that was endemic in the competitive industrial design world. Despite the mess her life had become, she hadn’t looked forward to the coming day as much as she did right now in quite a long time. The buzz of anticipation she got when she imagined seeing Jordan again was new too.
*
Jordan stopped at her favorite bakery and picked up scones, the most sinful cinnamon buns she’d ever eaten, and coffee. While she waited, she texted Tya. I’ve got goodies. C U in a few.
Tya wouldn’t be in for another two hours, so Jordan skipped getting her coffee. Kip had said she’d be at the project at six, but Jordan wasn’t convinced she’d actually make it that early. Just in case, it was only polite to bring her coffee.
“Sue,” Jordan called.
The barista turned, her dreads swinging about her shoulders. She’d threaded colorful beads throughout, and the little bits of gleaming glass reflected in her dark eyes. “What do you need?”
“Add another black eye, would you?”
“You got it.”
“Thanks.”
A few minutes later, she loaded up her cardboard carry tray and set off. At five thirty, the streets were still almost empty. A few joggers with earbuds in and remote expressions passed her, maintenance workers hosed down the sidewalks in front of hotels, and cabs sped by ferrying early morning travelers. A clear sky promised another warm day. The spicy scent of spring, impossible to stifle even in the midst of concrete and fumes, stirred the excitement she always experienced this time of year. At home, trees would be in bud, the fields would be greening, and the birds would be nesting. Everywhere, life would be exploding. She still thought of the farm as home, even though she hadn’t lived there in almost twenty years. Even though the house was gone, and all the land with it. Still, the old saying was true. Home is where the heart is, and her heart would always reside in the valley with those fields and the creek and the life she’d thought she would have.
A police car shot by, siren blaring, and shocked her out of her reverie.
She didn’t often do that, drift back. She couldn’t afford to do it now. She had a full day’s work ahead, and a life of her own to tend to. She turned down the alley and stopped, letting her eyes adjust to the gloom while taking in the scene. The hood of the truck was up. The engine revved steadily. Glad she’d thought to get another coffee, she walked the rest of the way down and stopped by the open hood.
Kip, in jeans and a plain gray T-shirt that hugged every line of a nicely muscled torso, leaned with one arm on the grille, a screwdriver dangling from her other hand, staring intently into the guts of the truck. Jordan looked too. She could tell it was running smoothly and sounding better than she’d eve
r heard it. The rest was alien. “It’s alive.”
“Hi.” Kip grinned. A smudge of dirt marred her right cheek. Her dark hair was tousled and she looked mighty pleased with herself. Pleased looked good on her.
“How’d you get it running?”
“Keys in the magnet box under the right fender. You might want to rethink where you keep the extras.”
Jordan pursed her lips. Couldn’t argue that. “Uh-huh. What have you done to it?”
“Just a little sweet talk and a few minor adjustments.”
“You’ve obviously got a very polished line.”
“Oh, I do. You probably noticed that last night.”
Jordan laughed. Kip was young and good-looking and undoubtedly knew it. All the same, her easy confidence was disarming. Maybe a little too disarming. Jordan pulled her gaze away from the subtle curve of Kip’s breasts and the very nice way her butt filled out her jeans. “Can’t say I did.”
“I’ll have to work on my delivery, then.” Kip grinned again, completely unfazed. She closed the hood, turned off the engine, and stowed her tools. She picked up the big shiny black box and put it in the truck bed.
Jordan frowned. “That’s not ours.”
“Nope. It’s mine. I can work with most anything, but I’d rather have my own tools.”
“You just happened to have them hanging around your apartment?”
“I got them from the shop.”
“That was fast.” Whatever, wherever the shop is. “I thought you couldn’t get an air filter until later today?”
“Got lucky and had one hanging around.”
“Oh. Well, don’t we all.”
Kip glanced meaningfully at the two cups of coffee and the bag balanced between them on Jordan’s carryout tray. “Is there any chance one of those is for me?”
“Oh, gosh, I’m really sorry. I didn’t know you’d be here.”
“Hey, no problem.”
