All Fired Up (Kate Meader) (33 page)

“You like Shane, don’t you?” she asked, suddenly defensive of her man.
Her man.

“He’s a great chef, fits my team like a glove, reminds me a little of myself at his age. Especially the flying off the handle part.”

She made a scoffing noise. “When you were his age? You were still going nuts on people last year, Jack. How about an answer that’s not all about you?”

He slipped a loose strand behind her ear. “Yeah, I like him, but I feel as though there’s a lot more to him than meets the eye. Still not sure he deserves you but he would be very lucky to have you, Cara.”

He gifted her a smile that reminded her of…How odd she’d never noticed it before, that crooked kink of his mouth just like Shane’s. On her husband’s face, it skewed softer, less carnal, but it was delightfully bent all the same. Jack’s ancestry was Irish so maybe there was something to be said about the green genes. More likely, she just had her husband on the brain.

On the brain and in her heart. The heart that was full, healthy, and ready for the challenge of anything.

Watch out, Shane Doyle, your hot Irish ass is mine.

Chapter 17

At 4:10 A.M., Shane pulled up into the alley behind his flat and turned off the engine. Cara’s girl car was parked in her spot, and he stared at it awhile, looking for clues. Perhaps it was situated a few more inches than usual to the right, a sign she might have been upset when she came home. Or perhaps, he was seeing things that weren’t there. Wouldn’t be new.

Eating the miles on his bike as far as Indiana hadn’t done much to temper his boiling blood or summon up any more palatable conclusions. Jack’s dismissal and Cara’s denial of their relationship had eviscerated him. There were no real connections here; he was just a neighbor, an employee. A former employee. Time to move on.

As he ascended the stairs, he did a mental inventory of things to wrap up in Chicago. There wasn’t much. Just clean out the fridge, pack his duffel bag, and make sure the cat was sorted. He was going to miss that bloody cat.

A door opened, but not the door he was expecting.

Cara stood in his rugby shirt, framed by the light from his apartment, blonde and fragrant. Something very primal stirred within him. His shirt. His flat. His woman.

“Where have you been?” she demanded, her brow crease even more pronounced. “I’ve been calling and texting you all night.”

“I left my phone at work.” He had crashed out of Sarriette, wearing his chef’s jacket and trousers. Not caring a whit for the ride that grew colder the farther from Chicago he got, he’d abandoned the jacket at the side of the road. The symbolism wasn’t lost on him.

“Sorry I messed up your meeting with Napier.”

Her face contorted with exasperation. “Shane, you defended me against that drunken moron. I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but I was upset about the prospect of losing Mason’s business. I’ve been worried about you all night.”

“You needn’t bother.”

“I want to bother, Shane. You’re worth bothering about.”

No, he wasn’t. He was unwanted, unneeded, not useful to anyone.
Worthless, good-for-nothing. You’re just a mistake.
All the rage he had tried to expel on the road rose to sensitize his skin.

At her step closer, he held a hand up in plea. In desperation.

“Don’t, Cara. Because if you do, I won’t be responsible. I’ll…” He’d what? He would use her body to assuage the dark pulse, to subsume every broken need and desire.

She ignored that and ate the gap between them. Her hand on his chest sparked an electric pulse that rocked him. Anchoring her body with one hand on his hip, she pulled back at the neck of his tee and ran her finger along the silver-white strand on his collar bone. It should have soothed. Instead the phantom memory embedded in the scar tissue burned.

No one knew what it had been like. No one cared to know. It had lived inside him for so long, buried so deep in inky, liquid blackness that there was no way for it to break the surface. He couldn’t tell Jo. She wasn’t his real aunt and she had six needy kids of her own. He would have ended up in some place for the unwanted, miles away from the warmth of her kitchen. Foster care didn’t smell like baking bread or apple-cinnamon coffee cake.

His brother should have been there.

Even now, that crazy thought filtered through, his childish rescue fantasy. Jack hadn’t known he existed and Shane hated him for it.

“Shane, all you’ve ever done is be there for me. Let me do the same for you.”

Christ, she had no idea what she was asking, how his greed was so encompassing. How his envy knew no bounds. He shook his head, willing words he had never said aloud to climb his throat. Still, they refused to come.

Her eyes widened, her face stricken by his muteness. She took his silence as an invitation to look at him. To look into him. He didn’t care what he was showing her because if he couldn’t speak, maybe she could see.

Those soft, wicked hands of hers pulled at the hem of his shirt and pushed it up. Just like that night outside the church, except there was none of the urgency, only care. Her fingertips touched his ugliest memory, the one that mottled the skin on his right side. He had thought feeding his father might sober him up; instead of turning on a deep-fat fryer for chips, he probably should have made a sandwich.

In those stunning blue eyes—Cara blue—he saw how far she had come on her journey. He had no illusions that he’d helped in any way. He only wished he could be as brave. She peeled off his shirt for better access and the elimination of that barrier unlocked his voice.

“He drank a lot and sometimes he lashed out. This one…” He took her hand and placed it over that painful memory engraved into his collar bone. “One day when I was eleven, I was cleaning up and I moved a bottle I thought was empty. It wasn’t and he got angry. Pushed me into a glass cabinet. It was an accident, really.”

The words stained the air, impossible to scrub clean after all these years, but Shane still refused to condemn him entirely. Without his father, there would be no Jack. Without Jack, he wouldn’t have met Cara. He had to believe there was a reason for the pain.

Ignoring the liquid sympathy filling her eyes, he plowed on.
This one, that one.
They all held stories that felt looser with the telling, or more likely, it was the unbridled compassion vibrating off Cara that made the words trip off his tongue so smoothly.

“He didn’t recognize me in the end. I visited him a few times, but he thought I was someone else.”

“Who?”

Who else?
The final twist of the knife was Packy calling out Jack’s name. “Someone he had done wrong by years earlier. He wanted his forgiveness.”

“Maybe it was his way of asking for yours,” she said.

“Maybe.” So much hurt in that one word he almost rolled his eyes at the chasm of self-pity he had opened up. He didn’t want to think about the tangled reasoning behind a sick old man’s final ravings or why in the end, Jack was Packy’s abiding memory. He didn’t want to think.

Leaning in, she kissed the scar on his collarbone, just a chaste graze of her lips along that symbol of his dark self and his soul cracked open. He gathered her in his arms and kissed her like it was the first and last time. Her fists bunched against his chest before they unfurled and flew to his hair. Her mouth scorched a trail across his and when she opened her lips fully, a throaty moan heralded the thrust of her tongue.

Desperately, he tore off her shirt,
his shirt
, and found her naked underneath, completely open to him. He kneaded and owned that perfect arse, those perfect breasts, because she
was
perfect, even if she didn’t think so. His kiss was an apology for the sins she didn’t know about, his hands on her hips an appeal for forgiveness.

Her mouth became more ardent, her tongue an insistent engine of torture. She ground her pelvis into his until he folded and roared his need.

Lifting her so she was wrapped around his hips, he set her against the wall, grinding into her until he was mindless with hope and desire. She moved her hand to where their bodies joined and pushed down his pants, releasing him. The new soundtrack was a medley of passion. Sucking, whimpering, moaning. The friction of their bodies, then the slick, liquid sound as his erection slid against her wet, wet heat.

Take her inside. Back up and make love to her in a bed.
Anything but this lava-hot body meld in the no-man’s land between their homes. It seemed suitable, though, an appropriate place for a relationship that defied labels. Before he could articulate that or make a move one way or the other, she wrapped her small but lethal hand around him.

“Take what you need, Shane. I’m all yours.”

That launched him like a missile. He slid into her—no mercy, not gentle, what she wanted and what he needed. Her silken muscles grasped at his erection like her life depended on it. Pleasure coiled in his gut, winding so tight that the thought of release instilled ecstasy and dread. He wanted it. He feared its end. Closing his eyes, he went with the age-old rhythm, pumping deeper and harder, each smooth motion punctuated with the erotic slap of flesh on flesh.

Any moment now…oh Christ, he held onto the perfect feeling and forced the messy emotion out of his mind. The part of him that wanted to tell her he loved her so much and that he was nothing without her. Her whimpers stretched to moans that stretched to, well, they could only be called screams. Cara was loud, and he loved it.

Lost in the heat of her, the feel of her, he held on tight until she crested to orgasm. Another second and he followed her over in a crash of sensation, fireworks bursting behind his eyelids, their noisy passion a symphony.

Then silence. Blissful, exquisite silence.

The cat purred.

Locked as one, a few moments leached to a couple of minutes. His cock was still hard inside her, powered by emotional versions of little blue pills. The twang in his shoulder said he should lower her to the ground, but leaving her was an impossibility.

“We didn’t use a condom,” she said.

So, that was it. It had felt good before, but slipping into her unholstered had taken that one over the top.

“Cara, I’m sorry. I just lost it there. I’m clean, baby. I swear.”

She kissed his eyelids softly. “It’s okay. Me, too. And it’s the wrong time of the month for anything to happen.”

What if he’d knocked her up and wasn’t around to take care of her and their child? With every passing moment, it felt like he was turning into his father. The drunk who used alcohol to excuse his piss poor decision making. The deadbeat who wasn’t around to raise either of his sons properly. But he wouldn’t be like him. He refused to be like him.

“I don’t regret it,” she whispered.

“What?” he asked, assuming she meant the mind-blowing unprotected wall sex.

“What happened in Vegas.”

Her words reached inside and placed a clamp on his heart.
Yes, baby. Don’t stop. Give me this.
He immediately turned rock hard again.

“Something happened between us, Shane. Something is happening between us now.”

Hell, yeah, it was.
Without realizing it, he had nudged his erection farther inside her inviting sheath. He was in the zone and he wanted to memorize the GPS coordinates so he could get back there. He loved her enough to lie about who he was. Did he love her enough to tell the truth?

“I wouldn’t mind if something else happened. If we had a baby.” He touched his forehead to hers. “Do you think you’d like to have a baby with me some day?”

A flash of something crossed her face and for a moment, he wondered if he had engineered another stunning miscalculation. But then she smiled at him, one of those heart-fracturing smiles that would have put him in a puddle of longing if he wasn’t already in a puddle of lust. Lust mixed with longing, a lethal combination that destroyed him.

“Yes, Shane. I would.”

He hadn’t dared to hope, and now his heart leaped so high it could clear the Chicago skyline. This was what he wanted. Connection, family, Cara.

“You mean it, Cara?” He pumped her slowly, rhythmically, all while keeping his eyes pinned to hers. Every upstroke was heaven, every downstroke a dream.

“Yes, I mean it,” she gasped.

“Don’t say it if you don’t mean it, gorgeous.”

“Damn it, you crazy Irish peat-bog dweller,” she said in that bossy tone he loved. “I mean it.”

She hadn’t said it, but he knew she loved him. Complex, messy, beautiful Cara loved him. Tonight he had spoken aloud words that had never known the air, so these new words of love would wait. At least, until he had done what he needed to do.

In her eyes, he saw everything he felt. Hope burned bright, blazing through his body, immolating the skin of the past. Every thrust, every moan freed his mind from indecision. Maintaining the lie might keep her, but he could no longer live in the half-light. Tonight was perfect, but perfection wasn’t enough.

Tomorrow, it might continue or it might end. There was no more middle ground.

Chapter 18

Shane wanted Cara more than he had ever wanted anything. More than acknowledgment from Jack. More than a kind word from his father. If he remained silent, he could have her, but the deceit would chip away at him. Chip away at them. Knowing Cara loved him should have felt like a sweet relief, but he couldn’t enjoy it until this was done.