Fade the Heat

by Colleen Thompson

  The thought crashed down upon him that she would always link him with her captain’s death—as both the media and the authorities would undoubtedly attempt to do as well. Yet when tears broke through the dam of her objections, she collapsed into the refuge of his arms.

  “It can’t be right.” Again and again, she repeated the words, until her voice grew hoarse and her breath strained audibly inside her chest.

  He wondered where, if anywhere, she had an inhaler.

  “It isn’t right,” he told her as he steered her toward the living room. “It’s never right when someone dies, never fair to the people left behind.”

  He guided her to the sofa and helped her slip out of her leather jacket. Once settled, she folded her knees nearly to her chest and wrapped her arms around them tightly. He sat on the sofa’s opposite end, within easy reach of a Tiffany-style lamp. Yet he contented himself with the dim light leaking from the kitchen.

  Grabbing a boxof tissues, he set it on the cushion between them. “It’s especially hard when the death is cruel or senseless…when it didn’t have to happen.”

  As she mopped her eyes and blew her nose, he thought of the weeks his father had been missing, the call the Border Patrol made when his body had been found. The disbelief, the hurt, and the fury had set in like a caustic rain, eating away his flesh, leaving almost nothing of the boy who’d lived and loved in innocence. For a long time, he’d hated everyone—the coyotes for their murderous greed, the Border Patrol agents for their lack of interest in the crime and their failure to catch the culprits, and even his own mother for allowing Papa to visit his mother—the Mexican grandmother Jack had never known.

  Reagan, too, would hate, only she would hate him. And there wasn’t one damned thing he could do to change it. But he could help her now, for as long as she would let him.

  “Is there someone I can call for you? What about your mother?”

  “My—my mother doesn’t—doesn’t give a damn about me,” Reagan told him, pausing to breathe between her words. “She m-made her choice—long ago.”

  “You’re going to need some medicine.” He hated to bring it up, but there was no sense in letting this episode get out of hand. Though emotional stress didn’t cause asthma, it could sure as hell exacerbate an existing problem. “Do you have a rescue inhaler, or better yet, a nebulizer?”

  “I don’t—I don’t want to—”

  “Do you want to end up in the ER? That kind of thing stays in your medical records,” he reminded her, though instinct told him she’d already had at least a handful of similar episodes. He’d really like to get her to Li Chen, the pulmonologist he’d mentioned earlier.

  She looked up into his face, her pupils wells of darkness against the lighter irises.

  “I’m not your doctor,” he assured her. “I’m only asking as a friend.”

  She fished an inhaler from the pocket of her jacket and, after a moment’s hesitation, used it.

  He wondered whether he should count it an act of trust or desperation. He was curious, too, about what had caused her falling-out with her sole surviving parent, but asking was a bad idea, especially tonight.

  After she took a second shot from the inhaler, he said, “You really shouldn’t be alone.”

  She moved both the jacket and the box of tissues to the floor and slid close beside him, then shocked him by laying her head on his shoulder.

  “I’m not alone,” she whispered, her breath warm against the hollow of his throat, bare since he had unbuttoned his shirt. “Not as long as you’re with me.”

  His body reacted instantly, heat surging in his loins, anticipation tingling in every synapse. He didn’t move; he didn’t dare. Even the breath froze in his lungs.

  When she turned her body, her fingers stealing beneath the open shirt and her warm lips pressing against his, he knew damned well that this was a mistake, but it didn’t stop his mouth from opening to claim hers in a kiss that rocked him to his core.

  The waves of answering sensation offered the oblivion they both yearned for. The kiss went on and on, lengthening as he rolled to pin her against the cushions, their bodies writhing, struggling to silence the pain this night had wrought.

  His own need flared so urgently, he nearly took what Reagan offered without stopping to think—or care—that it was wrong. His hands were fumbling to unhook her bra, his mouth sliding to taste the long curve of her pale neck by the time his conscience slipped into gear.

  You’re one sorry bastard if you take advantage of her.

  He palmed a warm breast, squeezed it, heard her gasp in pleasure and surprise. Thumbed the button of her nipple and groaned to feel it peak.

  “Yes,” she rasped, and he wanted more than anything to make her shout his name.

  A man died tonight, his mind screamed, and you would use that to get inside a woman?

  Groaning with regret, he managed to push himself away. When she moved toward him, he raised his hands. “I can’t. We can’t, not tonight.”

  He heard her breathing heavily, and much more easily, as she sat up.

  “God, Jack. God, I’m—I’m sorry. You must think I…you must think I’m some…some horrible slut, to do this…do this now, when he’s dead, when my captain…my friend is—”

  He wrapped his arms around her, this time out of empathy instead of lust. “It’s all right, Reagan. You’re in shock still. We’ve both had an awful night. We’re exhausted—anyone would understand. I’m certainly the last one to throw stones. I didn’t exactly beat you off with a stick.

  “You should go to bed now,” he said quietly. “You’ll feel better in the morning.”

  “I just wanted to forget for a little while,” she whispered as she stood. She reached down for his hand. “I still want to.”

  Her invitation was unmistakable, as were her loneliness and vulnerability. He hesitated on the blade’s edge, realizing that no matter what decision he made, the outcome he had feared was now inevitable.

  One of them was going to feel this cut straight to the heart.

  Chapter Eight

  Jack Montoya could go straight to hell, thought Reagan as she stepped into the shower.

  She couldn’t get the water hot enough, couldn’t get enough lather from her bar soap or enough water pressure from the showerhead to wash away even the top layers of her fury. She was still shaking with outrage over the way Jack had kissed the top of her head as if she were a child, then quietly told her, “I think it would be best if you went to bed alone.”

  As if she were not only blind to the desire in his eyes but insensible to his body’s reaction to their tangle on the sofa and the raw need building in his kiss. He wanted her—she knew it. He needed an hour of mindless passion as desperately as she did.

  Her flesh tingled at the memory of his strong hands cupping her breasts, the way he’d swiftly pinned her to the cushions. She closed her eyes, but behind the lids she could see the act their grinding foretold, could almost feel him entering her heat. An instant later, she twisted the faucet far to the right, for suddenly the water felt unbearably warm.

  But the icy torrent did nothing to wash away the pain that lurked behind her lust. Instead, the grief she had fought so hard to dampen burst to the forefront, so that she found herself sobbing and shivering, her tears streaming hot against her now cold face.

  Maybe Jack had done her a favor after all, she thought as she wrapped herself in a towel. Maybe he understood that sex with a near stranger would prove every bit as destructive an impulse as deadening her pain with drugs or alcohol.

  That might explain his actions, but it left a more important question: Why didn’t Jack Montoya feel like a stranger to her heart?

  After drying, she pulled on her oldest, most comfortable sleep shirt, an oversized, long-sleeved tee from the dilapidated gym where she worked out—the same gym her father had trained in years before she was born. But the memory of the day Joe Rozinski had introduced her to boxing broke her down again.

 
It had been a charity match between a Houston firefighter and a cop, though Joe had told her mother he was taking the ten-year-old to Astroworld. Smart move, considering that the newly remarried Georgina would rather have seen Reagan ride a hundred roller coasters than have anything to do with the Houston Fire Department. Intent on fitting into her well-heeled husband’s world of exclusive clubs and cocktail parties, Georgina had packed up the memories of her old life and put them in cold storage—or at least that was the way Reagan saw it.

  Even so, her mom had welcomed Joe Rozinski’s periodic offers to take her daughter off her hands. Some days, Reagan was almost certain that both her mother and stepfather would have given her to passing strangers to get a break from all the commotion she stirred up in their household.

  Served their snooty asses right for trying to pretend her dad had never existed. If she hadn’t hauled a few of his things out of the trash, they would have left her nothing to remember him by—not the flag from his coffin, his fire helmet, even a damned photograph. And certainly not the chance to talk about him—something that invariably sent her mother fleeing to her professionally decorated bedroom to lock the door.

  Had it not been for Joe Rozinski, Reagan might not have survived what a school counselor once politely termed her mother’s “coping strategy.”

  But as she turned the lights off and blindly groped her way to bed, Reagan thought that for the first time, she might just understand it. Sometimes, for some people, holding on to memory was like holding a live flame in your cupped hands.

  A fire far too bright to look at—and far too eager to consume.

  More than an hour later, Reagan remained awake, staring at the slowly spinning shadow of a ceiling fan that she habitually kept running, even on the coolest nights that Houston had to offer. She couldn’t stop thinking of her family and the part that the captain had played in its undoing so many years before: the day he’d come up their walk, beside the fire-department chaplain, and told them what had happened to her father.

  It had been the week before Christmas, and Reagan had at first thought this strange visit must be part of some surprise her daddy had planned. Until her mother took one look out the picture window and dropped the ornament she’d been hanging on their tree.

  The blue bulb exploded when it hit the wood floor. Reagan could still hear the thin glass shattering, could still feel her own quick pulse of anger. That ornament had been her favorite, one she didn’t think she could live without.

  But she hadn’t understood then. Not yet. Not until the captain was standing on their doorstep, his tears washing clean gullies on the soot-stained landscape of his face.

  Above Reagan, the fan blades did their death dance, while beside her on the nightstand the clock radio’s red digits changed to four A.M.

  She reached for the telephone beside the readout. Then, before she could change her mind, she quickly punched the number she had programmed first on her speed dial, despite the fact that it had been years since she’d last called it.

  It rang twice, then three times, before someone picked it up.

  “Mmm…um, hello…who is this calling?” The woman’s voice was edged in fear as she braced for the worst, in the way of sleepers awakened by a ringing in the stillness of the night.

  “It’s Reagan,” she said softly, as if her tone could blunt the news she had to share. “I thought you’d want to know that Joe…that Joe Rozinski died this evening. Of injuries he sustained on duty, at a fire.”

  Reagan couldn’t decipher the next sounds she heard, couldn’t say whether they were whispers or the animal-like snuffles of a woman crying. The next thing she was sure of was the soft click of a receiver, followed by the cruelly loud dial tone.

  Reagan listened to it for a long time before hanging up her own phone and then falling into a sleep as black and thick as tar.

  Jack woke from a sound sleep to a woman’s screaming, a shriek worse than anything he’d heard since a member of a mowing crew had been carried into the clinic with a partially severed foot. Jack was on his feet and moving, still wearing yesterday’s black jeans, before he took in the basic facts: he was in a strange house at mid-morning, judging from the sunshine streaming through the window.

  Reagan Hurley’s house, he realized as he burst shirtless from her guest room. Following the noise, he threw open a door along the short hall and saw her struggling on her bed, arms thrashing and her bare legs kicking off the covers. Frank Lee paced the floor, whining and then looking at him pleadingly, clearly no more disposed to guard his mistress than he was to be a watchdog.

  “Wake up.” Jack kept his distance to avoid her flailing limbs. “Reagan, wake up. You’re having a nightmare.”

  “It burns,” she cried out, her breathing sounding strangled as it had last night. “It burns—it burns me. Put the fire out.”

  Was she dreaming of her captain? Though the house was cool, perspiration filmed her face as her body twisted. Her sleep shirt had crept up, exposing her lower body, but her distress kept Jack from enjoying what would ordinarily be one fine view.

  Closing in, he repeated her name, then grabbed her shoulder.

  Her right fist shot out and caught him on the chin. Though he stood nearly six feet tall, outweighed her by a long shot, and worked out at the gym four times a week, the blow set him on his ass beside her bed.

  “Ow,” she murmured, shaking her hand and rubbing the knuckles. “That—that hurt.”

  “You’re telling me,” Jack said, his fingertips probing his sore jaw. A little higher, and he might have been searching for his teeth on the room’s ivory carpet.

  Her blue eyes fluttered open, and she stared down at him. “Jack? What the hell are you doing in my bedroom?”

  He thought of pointing out that last night, she’d been eager enough to get him in here. But he decided that getting belted once before coffee was more than enough. “You must have been having a bad dream. You were screaming, scaring poor Frank half to death.”

  Jack didn’t add that he’d been equally alarmed. For one thing, her bare bottom—now at eye level—was proving one hell of a distraction.

  To his regret, she pulled the hem of her oversized T-shirt down to cover herself.

  “Did I hit you?” She ran her palm over sleep-spiked hair to sleek it back, then once more glanced at her knuckles. “My hand hurts.”

  “I can tell you, I didn’t crawl in on the floor. You have a killer right, you know that? You must use that punching bag for more than decoration.”

  “I fight in the female lightweight division, strictly amateur.”

  He managed a smile and rubbed the tender spot on his chin. “That felt pro to me.”

  Her answering smile fell almost before it started, and he wondered if she was remembering her dream or the worse nightmare of her captain’s death. Her breath hitched, but a moment later, her delicate jaw tightened and her shoulders squared, reminding him for all the world of a soldier steeling herself for battle, despite her puffy eyes.

  “If you’ll give me a minute, I’ll throw on some clothes.”

  He nearly told her not to bother on his account, then thought better of it. But she speared him with a hard look, as if some flicker in his expression had allowed her to read his mind.

  “If you’re having second thoughts about turning me down last night, you might as well forget it. You were right,” she told him. “I was half out of my mind, but I can tell you one thing. I won’t repeat the offer.”

  His gaze smacked up against hers. “If you do, you’d better damned well mean it, because I’m not lobbying for sainthood. And you’re one temptation I won’t say no to twice.”

  She opened her mouth as if to shoot back some remark, but before she could get it out, she seemed to change her mind. Climbing out of her bed, she turned her back to him and pulled open a closet. “Okay, then,” she finally managed. “Soon as I change, we can grab you some ice for that chin of yours and maybe scrounge up breakfast. Then I’ll drop you at your
mom’s place—provided the coast is clear.”

  “I don’t need ice,” he said. “And I’ll call my sister and get her to pick me up here. But I wouldn’t say no to some toast or cereal—on the condition that you’ll have something, too.”

  She shrugged a shoulder. “I don’t feel much like eating.”

  “Sometimes you just have to go through the motions. You won’t be any good to anybody if you don’t get some food inside you. Did you have anything last night?”

  He could see the argument gathering like a storm behind the lightning flash of her eyes. But to his surprise, she merely shook her head.

  “It never crossed my mind,” she said. “But I suppose you’re right about eating. I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck.”

  In a way, they both had. But what Jack wanted to know—what he hoped like hell the investigators would find out soon—was who had been behind the wheel of their misfortune.

  By the time Reagan threw on a charcoal-colored, long-sleeved tee, a pair of jeans, and her boots, then ran a brush through her hair and washed her face, the aroma of brewing coffee pulled her, nose first, to the kitchen.

  She was thankful Jack had put on the white shirt he’d been wearing yesterday. It might be wrinkled, but at least it covered that well-developed chest of his. Clearly, he wasn’t one of those hypocritical MDs who gave lip service to exercise without bothering to make time for it himself.

  “And here I thought you doctors didn’t deign to make the coffee.”

  “Are you kidding?” He pulled a carton of eggs out of her refrigerator. “By the time we’re through with residency, we’re all a bunch of caffeine fiends. I hope I didn’t make it too strong for your taste.”

  “Unless the spoon stands up in the cup, I’m good,” she said as she flipped on a small under-cabinet TV to a local news broadcast. “Let’s see what they have about the…about what happened.”

  Apprehension gave her lungs a quick squeeze, until the picture on the screen resolved into a chamber-of-commerce weather forecast: warming into the high sixties by midday, with gobs of sunshine, a stark reminder that yesterday’s nasty weather had been an aberration.