Fire Beach: Lei Crime Book 8 (Lei Crime Series) (18 page)

They so seldom got time alone together anymore, and she was in there soaping up all those secret, beautiful crevices without him.

Shit.

Staying mad, staying away from her, was going to be tough.

She didn’t make it easier when she came out, a towel wrapped turban-style around her head—but not around her body. He tried to keep his eyes on the TV as she paraded across his line of sight, those unfamiliarly full breasts swaying and begging to be explored, and damn if her flat belly wasn’t pooching out, like there was a little round ball down there.

“Come here,” he said, muting the TV. “Something’s different.”

“Something’s always different these days,” Lei said. “It’s so weird. It’s like my body just knows what to do.” She unwound the towel from her hair, coming to sit beside him naked. “I wanted to show you something—the baby moving. It’s been doing it a lot lately.”

His legs were straight out on the bed in front of him, and she draped herself across his thighs, propping herself on her elbows across his lap. She must be able to feel how she was affecting him, because her back was over his crotch, but she gave no sign. Instead she took his hand and set it on her smooth, cool belly, on the hard roundness there. “Just keep your hand there for a minute. Baby usually wiggles when I lie on my back.”

They both sat there, looking at his hand on her belly.

Redness of his burned skin against the ivory satin of her waist. The sculptured lines of her, from peaked breasts to the round columns of her legs, the dark triangle between. His long fingers, large enough to span the width of her hipbones. The bulge of their child’s home beneath the palm of his hand.

He had to remember to breathe, and it was difficult. He told himself it was because his lungs were still bad.

He felt something then, a flutter of movement, a tiny pulse that felt like the tug of a fish on a line. He couldn’t stop the widening of his eyes, the grin that lifted his cheeks.

“You play dirty pool, Texeira. I’m still mad at you,” he growled, even as he palmed her belly gently, feeling the moth beat of their child’s movement. “God, this is amazing.”

“I know. She’s really in there,” Lei breathed. Her smile was luminous, even with her swollen black eye.

“
He
.
He’s
really in there, and he already wants out,” Stevens said. His hand stroked her stomach in gentle circles. The baby stopped moving. “Daddy’s tucking you in to sleep,” Stevens murmured, and then, because he couldn’t help it, he leaned over and kissed the place where the flutter of the child’s movement had been.

He looked up. Lei’s eyes had filled, gazing at him. “You’re such an incredible man.”

He shut his eyes, feeling his inadequacies. His failure to protect her. Her betrayal in going after their enemy and
not even giving him a chance to go with her.

“Funny choice of words.” He wanted to stop touching her, dump her off his lap, but it felt too incredible to be almost touching his child in her womb. The coolness of her skin had warmed under the circles his hand drew on it. “You don’t think much of me if you came here alone to take on Chang.” His voice came out thready, weak. Which was how he felt.

“I thought you’d try to stop me.”

Now he did push her aside, but gently, moving his knee so she rolled off his lap onto the side of the bed. He crossed his arms over his chest and looked over at the wheezing air conditioner. He didn’t want to see her nakedness any longer—it made her seem vulnerable, when he knew she was far from it.

“Of course I would try to stop you. But did it ever occur to you I wanted to get this guy as much as you did?” His voice rose and broke. He began coughing, and now she jumped up and fetched a glass of water from the bathroom and a wad of toilet paper, which she handed him.

He finished coughing and wiped his mouth. Pink smears came away on the paper. He took the water from her, sipped. She went to her suitcase and dressed in sweats and a loose tank shirt. When she came back and sat on the bed beside him, he still noticed her breasts, filling out the shirt, the nipples tight pebbles lifting the fabric. Damn, his libido was a traitor.

“I’m so sorry.” Lei sighed, hung her head. Those wild wet curls hung over her face as she covered it with her hands. “I should have…I don’t know. Told you my plan. Given you a chance to come with me. But I remembered what you said that day on Haleakala…that you’d turn me in yourself if you needed to, to protect me.”

“We should have at least talked about it,” he whispered.

“I respect you too much. That’s why I couldn’t tell you,” she whispered back, still not looking at him. “I kept thinking of Anchara. Dying just when she should have been able to meet her son. Physically unable to protect herself. I’m selfish. I didn’t want that to happen to me, to you, to our children. I wanted to move on Chang before I was too big to do anything physical.”

He shook his head. “We could have figured something out together. And then after the fire? Don’t you know I would have moved heaven and earth to protect our family and catch this guy?” He coughed again, and she tried to hand him the water. He waved it away and instead tried to focus on breathing in oxygen through the cannula. “But it turns out I’m glad you were gone. I’m not at all sure we’d have gotten out if Jared hadn’t been there, and he was only there because you were away.”

“When I heard you on my voicemail telling me about the fire…I don’t even know how I ended up at Chang’s house. It was just the last straw.” Her voice quavered. “I was careful. All the time I was careful. More than I ever used to be.”

“You went up to Chang in his house and got him to roll on his family. How was that careful?”

Lei told him how it went down, and he snorted. “Careful? Right. And how about when you got out of your car and got Ray out of the SUV? SWAT wasn’t even going in there to get him!”

“I saw his hands on his head. I knew he was disabled, which they didn’t, and that he wanted to surrender. I took a small chance there, but I knew things SWAT didn’t. About Ray and the kind of man he is.” She took a sip of the water in the glass she still held. “He’s a bitter coward. I don’t think he has the imagination, the brains to be the new Chang leader, no matter what he says.” She told him the content of the interview at the station. “We need to find Anela.”

“Well, I heard what he said to you, his threats. Whichever of them is running the Chang operation, I think he’s the shroud killer. And now he’s neutralized.”

“That we agree on.” She took his hand and lifted it to her lips. He felt the slick lining of her lips as she kissed the exquisitely sensitive, burned tips of his fingers. He tightened involuntarily. “Will you forgive me?”

“I don’t think so.” He stared at her steadily. “Like you said. That was the last straw.”

“Okay. I understand.” She went to the bathroom, and he heard the water running as she brushed her teeth, and he thought he might have heard her crying but couldn’t be sure. Then the light went out, and her shadow moved across the room. The covers rustled as she got into bed and rustled some more as she turned on her side, away from him.

He lay silently, watching the black shadowy shapes of the banyan tree leaves moving on the outside of the curtains, and he breathed as slowly and as deeply as he could, trying to get oxygen all the way into the bottom of his lungs. Because he had to heal and get stronger and find a way to keep living with this woman.

They had children who needed them.

Chapter 18

L
ei barely remembered falling asleep, and the sun was fully up when she woke with that restless feeling that told her she needed a run.

She swung her legs off the side of the bed and looked over at Stevens. He was still pale, but he was breathing better. She crept in close to lean her head down by his chest, and she didn’t hear liquid in his lungs anymore. Still, his color was off, and there were circles under his eyes. He didn’t look like he’d slept as well as she had.

He wouldn’t miss her if she went out for a quick run. They weren’t due at the airport until ten, when they were booked on a puddle jumper back to Maui.

Lei pulled on her shorts, sports bra, and shoes and left a note on the table beside him. She loaded a small can of pepper spray, phone, and her hotel key into her shorts pocket and went out, careful to shut the door quietly behind her.

On the familiar sidewalk buckled by the massive roots of the banyan trees, she breathed a sigh of relief to be moving again. Various aches and pains left over from yesterday’s raid reminded her she’d been active the last few days, but it was good to be running at an even pace in her favorite old route, loosening tense muscles by using them.

Lei ran along the edge of the downtown park with its smooth grass and neatly trimmed coconut palms, looking up as a flock of noisy mynahs fluttered past to land on the grass, the flash of their black and white feathers contrasting with their bright yellow beaks, their voices gossipy and loud. The last of the night’s coqui frog orchestra gave a few shrill calls from the trees.

Fishermen lined the jetty with their bamboo poles, as they always had. Hilo Bay was smooth as glass, and there was an ever-present gauzy quality to the air from the volcanic emissions from Kilauea Volcano, a constant condition these past years nicknamed “vog.” Some people suffered asthma and other breathing problems when it got thick, and Lei was glad it had never bothered her.

She remembered her runs down through town to this park with Keiki, the way her big Rottweiler would lift her nose to sniff the bay and give a little snort as they ran, enjoying the briny smell.

Lei’s mind ticked over the argument with Stevens last night, and she felt heaviness bring down her good mood.

He wasn’t going to forgive her. At least not right away. Well, she’d give him space while he was recovering, but after that she’d find a way to get them back into bed—because even if he could hold out, she couldn’t. She already missed being with him, hated the discord between them even if she knew she deserved it.

Still, it had all worked out. Surely he’d let it go in time.

Lei did some laps around the park, her eyes scanning the faces of pedestrians and commuters, realizing she was still looking for Anela Chang. Of course, there was no sign of the woman. She’d studied the woman’s driver’s license and memorized her appearance: medium height and weight with a brown, oval face framed in black hair.

She shook her head at herself—Anela was probably long gone. She was getting paranoid. She headed back to the motel, stopping to buy two cups of coffee and a bear claw from a nearby Gas ’N’ Go.

Stevens was agitated when she returned to the room, offering him a coffee. He was dressed in pants, but no shirt, and he wasn’t wearing the oxygen rig.

“I feel fine,” he said when she asked about it. He turned to put on a shirt, and she gasped at the huge purple bruise on the right side of his back.

“Looks bad, does it?” He craned a bit to see. She backed him up so that he could look at it in the mirror. “No wonder it hurts like a sonofabitch.”

“Makes me so glad for Kevlar,” Lei said. “I hate to even imagine what would have happened to you without it. I’m going to hop in for a quick shower. Want to join me?”

It was worth a try.

She could swear she saw him grit his teeth as he replied. “No.”

Lei showered and got dressed for the airport, squashing a little gel into her hair. When she got out he was already dressed, had eaten half the bear claw, and was seated in the cheap plastic armchair, working his phone, with the oxygen back on.

“Got a call from the insurance company. They’re going to cover the loss of the house. Unfortunately, not the cost to build a new one—just a flat rate of what the old one was insured for.”

“Well, thank God. That’s something, right?” Lei whisked a little mascara on her lashes, taking a bite of the pastry to get something in her stomach. “I don’t know about you, but I miss Kiet so much. Can’t wait to snuggle with him.”

“Me too.” He stood and picked up his bag. “Let’s get on the road.”

Lei looked around at the decrepit little room, happy to say goodbye to their first night in separate beds. Hopefully, that wouldn’t be an option in her dad’s cottage, though it was going to be tight with all of them crammed in there. Still, whatever the sleeping arrangements, she knew she’d rest easier with the shroud killer in custody.

Things had to get better from this point.

Stevens followed Lei onto the tiny aircraft, ducking his head to get in, and took a seat behind her. His long legs brushed the back of her seat, and he felt folded up into the small space, the tin can of a plane tight around him.

They’d gotten to the terminal on time and checked their weapons with the two pilots, who performed everything from stamping tickets to weighing luggage for Ohana Air, an operation that ran a few Cessnas out of the small-aircraft section of Hilo Airport. Neither of them had flown with the outfit before, but Ohana was the only airline with any openings on such short notice.

Stevens tightened his belt and stowed his duffel under his seat. He’d brought the O2 canister but he hadn’t wanted to use it unless he had to. Looking around the confined space and knowing how bumpy the wind over the channel between Maui and the Big Island could be, he decided to hook it back up.

A few other passengers bumped past him as he turned on the O2 canister and hooked the cannula over his ears. A plump Micronesian woman in a brightly printed, homemade skirt clutched an excited toddler; her husband followed, holding a carrier containing an indignant rooster. A businessman in a suit, wearing a white Panama hat, filled a seat near the front.

Stevens rested his head back against the seat, shutting his eyes and wondering when he was going to feel even halfway normal. Everything just took so much effort, and even though his breathing hurt less and he knew his lungs were healing, he was frustrated with looking and feeling injured.

He tuned out the conversation between the pilots as they went through their preflight check, their heads and equipment clearly visible in the open cockpit. Instead he looked at Lei in the seat in front of him.