Black Heat (10 page)

She put her hand in his and tugged, at first tentatively and then forcefully.

He came with her without hesitation. The room was small, her bed made up neatly under the framed picture of the ranch as it had once been, long ago.

There wasn't far to go. They fell together onto the bed.

CHAPTER TEN

On Sundays, the shop didn't open until noon. By then, Roan had sent Cal home with a kiss and shy wave, showered, dressed, and fed and walked Angel, feeling the whole time like she was floating on air.

Maybe it was the lack of sleep. But Roan found herself wondering if it might be something more.

"You didn't have to come to work, girl," Walt said, standing in the door to the work room with his mug of cold, weak coffee. Walt drank coffee from the minute he woke up in the morning until he went to bed at night. He made it in the old percolator that his wife had used for thirty years before her death; the only difference was that now he brewed it in the shop, and it had grounds in the bottom of the cup. "We would have got on just fine without you for a day or two. Now you're just going to make that bum leg worse."

Roan looked up from the shipment of parts she was unpacking. "First of all, I've got ice on it, and the swelling's gone almost all the way down. I'll be fine by the time I go home. And second, you can't let Hank anywhere near the Fuji that just came in. It's a beautiful machine, not a toaster."

Walt grinned. "Funny, he said the same thing about you. Said he'd fix it quicker, too."

He turned and limped out of the room, favoring the hip that bothered him some mornings. Roan smiled to herself. Hank was a perfectly competent mechanic, but she enjoyed the pretend rivalry between them. It was the closest thing she'd had to a sibling experience. Hank didn't seem to mind being a stand-in for the big brother she never had. It was almost like...

She shook her head, yanking the packing tape off the box with more force than necessary.
Family
, she was thinking, but that wasn't true. Wishing didn't make a friend—really, just a coworker—into something more. Family were the people you shared blood with, and all of hers were dead. All she had was a scheming, overblown, bleached-blond ex-stepmother.

Did it ever occur to you to give Mimi another chance?
Cal's words came back to her, stilling her hands on the cardboard box. For a fraction of a second she wondered what it would be like to say all the things she'd never said to the woman. To find out what she'd really been thinking all those years.

But no. That was in the past. Everything that mattered was gone: her dad, the house, the ranch. Why try to fix a link to something that wasn't even there anymore?

She got back to work and let her mind wander to Cal. To the way he'd felt in her bed, the things he'd whispered as they moved together, discovering each other, learning each other's bodies. She blushed, remembering how he'd whispered her name as he kissed the soft expanse of skin along her neck, the way he'd...

No, better not to indulge that now. Roan felt the small smile tugging at the corner of her mouth and forced herself to stop. Cal had made her feel all kinds of amazing things. It had been a long time since she'd been with anyone at all, and she had never felt the way she did today. Probably because of the adrenaline. The narrow escape. All the emotions stirred up by being back in the house that had once been her home.

No wonder she felt safe in his arms—it was just because he represented safety, because he was kind to her. Hell, he was practically a
cop
. The men she'd been with—boys, really, most of them—had been a lot like her: undependable, reckless...sad. That's why she'd practically given up dating. How long had it been? Roan counted: she was 24, and the last guy she'd dated for any length of time...

Tony Garwood. They'd broken up on her twenty-first birthday, when she was almost too drunk to walk home by herself, and she had realized she didn't want to live that way any more. It had been a turning point, getting to midnight on the day she was an adult, by most objective standards, and deciding that being alone was better than being with someone who encouraged the worst in her.

She'd gone home. Drunk a glass of orange juice. Given Angel a bone. Wished herself a happy birthday and fallen asleep on the floor, with her cheek resting on Angel's dog bed.

But Cal. Could this be more than a one-time thing? Was there a chance this could actually work? Not as a boyfriend thing, but as a...friendship? With the extra parts, the
benefits
, as some people said—Roan hated that word. She wanted to be Cal's friend and she wanted, very much, to hold him again, to kiss him, to make love to him. In her narrow bed that wasn't really big enough for them both, but somehow felt just right. Or maybe camping up along the Little Muddy River if they got a late autumn warm spell.

But not at the bunkhouse. She wasn't ever going back there. Not after today, not after running from the cops. Which brought her back to the problem at hand. She still needed five thousand dollars, and if she had any chance of not ruining things with Cal, she had to get it legally. She didn't have anything to sell, and she wasn't sure what kind of second job she could get—lots of places were hiring, and for good wages too, but she couldn't leave Angel alone all day and all night so she could put in a second shift.

Give Mimi a second chance,
Cal had said. Roan pushed the packing box away and put her chin in her hands.

Could she?

For Angel?

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Cal tried to nap on the couch while the game was on, but when Jimmy wandered in and switched the channel to a documentary about new life forms being discovered on the ocean floor, he gave up and nuked a plate of leftovers. Zane was at the gym playing basketball, Chase and Regina had disappeared somewhere, and Matthew and Jayne had gone to Minot to pick up some light fixtures they'd ordered for the bunkhouse remodel. Cal snuck a couple of brownies from the pan that Matthew had left on the stove to cool.

After watching some terrifying, fanged gray creatures swim through a murky darkness that was apparently a trench six miles underwater, Cal got up and turned off the set, which was so old that it didn't have a remote.

"Hey," Jimmy said mildly. "That show was giving me an idea."

"I can't imagine that anything you invent with those things for inspiration would be an advantage for the human race."

"You never know," Jimmy said mysteriously.

"Um, I was wondering," Cal said. Then he didn't know what to say next. Ever since spending the morning with Roan, he had felt both better and worse than he could remember feeling in a long time. Better, because Roan was...he felt his face grow hot, just thinking about her. She was
perfect
—or at least perfect for him, which they had proved not once but twice as the sun slowly rose in the sky, burning off the ice from the prior day. They fit together perfectly, and when she finally lay back, exhausted, with her hair tousled and a sheen of perspiration on her body, she had looked even more beautiful.

And worse...because he was now certain that he wouldn't be worthy of her, unless he made certain things right.

He scratched the back of his neck and sighed, as Jimmy flipped a coin in the air while he waited, sending it in spinning arcs before catching it again.

"So Jimmy, remember when you invited me to come up here to Carson with you guys?"

Jimmy caught the coin a final time and shoved it in his pocket, then gave Cal a wary look. "Yeah?"

"I, uh...I mean, we never really talked about it. But I'm assuming you had to do some convincing to get the guys to agree to let me come along."

Jimmy frowned. He never lied, as far as Cal knew, but he was looking like he wished he could.

"Okay, scratch that,” Cal said. “I don't need to know. What I was wondering was, what convinced you to give me another chance?"

"Why wouldn't I? You saved my life, man."

Cal colored. "We both know that's not true."

"Okay. My dignity? I mean, come on. You found me flat on my back in my front yard, after I knocked
myself
out. You have to admit that was the stupidest thing you ever saw when you were a paramedic."

Jimmy was being kind—as usual. A small smile tugged at the corner of Cal's mouth. "Well, I wasn't a volunteer for very long, so I didn't have a lot of experience. But yeah, that might have been up in the top three."

A small crowd had gathered by the time the ambulance pulled up that day. The neighbor who called it in said it looked like Jimmy had decided to take a nap on his front lawn, but that he wouldn't wake up. When Cal and his partner got him loaded up on the stretcher, he figured out what had happened. Half of the wheelchair ramp leading up to the front door had been dismantled, the boards stacked neatly next to the driveway. In the grass a few feet from Jimmy was the crowbar he'd been using to pry them free—and the one board that must have been loose and sprung free, hitting Jimmy in the head. Which accounted for the goose egg that none of the neighbors had spotted, since he'd been lying on it, and which was going to give him a hell of a headache.

"The thing is, when I figured out who you were—that I went to high school with you—all I wanted to do was call it a day and head home. I figured I was a volunteer—what were they going to do, fire me?" He winced at the memory. "I didn't want to be there when you woke up in the ambulance and recognized me."

Jimmy looked confused. "But I didn't wake up for another hour. Spent the whole day in the hospital, and when they released me that night, you showed up to take me home."

"Yeah, well—that's kind of what I wanted to talk to you about."

"About taking me home? And waking me up every two hours and making me tell you who the president was?" Jimmy grinned. "That was sure fun. You want to do it again?"

Cal's smile grew a little wider. If he wasn't mistaken, Jimmy was attempting humor, which was rare for him. He could tell that his friend was trying to help him out with the painful memory, even if he didn't understand Cal's reaction.

"Here's the thing. I don't think I ever told you how hard it was for me, because I was sure that the minute your head cleared and you realized it was the guy who single-handedly got the junior class trip canceled, and gave the P.E. teacher a nervous breakdown, and—well, never mind. It's just, sitting there in your living room, waiting for the kitchen timer to ring to make sure you didn't go into a coma, I had a chance to relive every stupid thing I ever did to make you guys hate me."

"I never hated you."

"I believe you, but Matthew, Zane, Chase—all those guys did. I mean, I gave them good reason."

Jimmy looked away, his eyes thoughtful. "Well, then why did you stay with me that night?"

"You didn't have anyone else," Cal said, embarrassed. They hadn't been able to reach Jimmy's brother, and his mother had died the month before, which was the reason he was dismantling the ramp. He was getting the house ready to sell, so he could pay her medical bills. Cal learned all of this while he was hanging around in the waiting room.

Jimmy nodded, slowly. "It's true. If you hadn't agreed to take me home, I probably would have had to stay in the hospital. But I still don't see where you're going with this."

"It's just that—well, that's the first time I can remember making the right choice when it was really hard."

"That's not true. You turned yourself around long before that. You had that warehouse job, and you took care of your grandmother—"

"But those were easy things. I mean, I didn't really give anything up when I started working. And my grandmother was cool. You never got to meet her, but she was great...anyway, even the paramedic thing, I only volunteered because I thought it would help me get on the force. But when I stuck around with you that night—well, it's the first time I remember really, really wanting to walk away, and doing the right thing instead."

Jimmy stared at him. He had that narrow-eyed, frowning look of concentration that usually signaled he was deep in thought. Suddenly he nodded. "I just got it. You're thinking about that day now because you're trying to decide what to do about Roan. The easy thing, now that they've agreed not to arrest her, is to just pretend it never happened."

Cal was relieved that Jimmy understood. "Yeah. But if I do, it'll eat at me. I might get on the force, but I'll always know I took the coward's way out."

"You'd have Roan," Jimmy pointed out. "You and she seem highly compatible."

"Right. That's why this is hard."

Jimmy nodded. He picked up the last of his brownie and tossed it in his mouth. "Yeah, not that hard, though."

"What do you mean?"

"You're not that guy any more. The guy who has to think twice before doing the right thing."

CHAPTER TWELVE

As it turned out, Roan didn't have to gather the courage to go talk to Mimi, because Mimi came looking for her first.

It was nearly closing time, though Walt often kept the store open and the front doors open for an extra half hour or so when there were customers hanging around and chatting. Today it was just old Dave Sharman; the last time the elderly man had bought a bicycle from Walt had been nearly a decade ago, but he liked to come around and cadge free service from Walt and chat with the staff. Roan had been taking her time putting her tools away and cleaning up her bench, in case Dave needed her to "give a second opinion" about some repair he didn't actually need.