Heat Wave (8 page)

“Yep.”

“It’s stuck in your head, too?”

He nodded. “It’s a catchy song. And maybe
it’s stuck with us because it’s so appropriate. This hot weather
we’ve been having, you know?”

“Technically, we aren’t in a heat wave.
According to the meteorologist on last night’s weather report, an
official heat wave is three days in a row of above 90-degree
temperatures.”

“Really? I didn’t know that.” He resumed
eating. “I just figured a heat wave is anything that makes me
sweat.” Like a broken air conditioner. Or working out. Or sex.

Whoa. Where did that come from?

“I heard that on a weather report the other
evening. The TV meteorologist said we aren’t having a heat
wave.”

“He’s an idiot,” Caleb said, not bothering
to add that Caleb himself was also an idiot for thinking about sex
while seated across the table from a client. Or at least almost a
client, as he’d identified her to Niall and Heather. Close enough
to being a client that he shouldn’t be thinking about sex in her
presence.

That would be a lot easier if she weren’t so
pretty. If she hadn’t gotten cited for exposing her breasts on a
public beach. If she hadn’t polished her toenails so sweetly. If he
didn’t feel that burning flame in his heart.

He was an ethical professional. He probably
shouldn’t have even agreed to have dinner with Meredith, let alone
contemplate anything X-rated.

Crazy song. Crazy ear-worm.
If he hadn’t heard it, he probably wouldn’t be thinking about
sharing a heat wave with her, getting sweaty with her.
Blame the song.

They got along too well, she thought, both
pleased and disconsolate. Pleased because she liked getting along
well with people, especially smart, handsome men, and very
especially someone whose intervention had helped keep kept her
career from plummeting off a cliff. Disconsolate because Caleb had
agreed to let her treat him to dinner only to settle a debt.

She was settling that debt in a rather
unorthodox way, though. If all he’d wanted was payment for getting
rid of her citation, he could have sent her a bill. His explanation
about not wanting to run her case past his partners… She supposed
that was plausible. But he was a lawyer. He’d voided a ticket for
her and refused to bill her. Her father and brother billed their
clients in fifteen-minute increments. They were not above accepting
a free meal—in fact, they were both wined and dined by their
wealthy clients quite often. But being wined and dined was never a
substitute for being paid in cold, hard cash.

The seafood platter before
her was delicious, but a larger portion than she could handle. Her
mother would probably scold her for requesting a bag to take home
the luscious-looking shrimp still sitting on her plate—the Benoit
matriarch considered requesting a take-home bag gauche in the
extreme—but among the things that made Meredith the family rebel,
along with moving north and reaching her thirtieth birthday without
a diamond solitaire on her ring finger, was that she thought taking
home what she couldn’t finish from a restaurant meal was more
sensible than letting food go to waste. Caleb had polished off
everything on his plate except for a few lonely lettuce leaves, but
she couldn’t offer him her shrimp. That would be
too…
familiar.

She asked him if he wanted dessert, but he
patted his flat tummy and shook his head. “I’m stuffed. That was
great.”

“It was.” She handed the waitress her credit
card and decided that, take-home bag notwithstanding, her mother
wouldn’t fault her too much for her behavior over dinner. She’d
conducted herself demurely. She and Caleb had exchanged pleasant
chitchat about his affinity for ocean beaches, a recent client he’d
successfully defended against an erroneous drug charge, and his
courage—or perhaps recklessness—in remaining a Yankees fan while
living in Red Sox territory. She’d refrained from questioning him
about anything personal. Was he married? Attached? Divorced like so
many of her neighbors in Brogan Heights? If he was divorced, was
there a good reason, as there was with the neighbors she’d
dated?

She hadn’t asked. She couldn’t. Bill or no
bill, he was her lawyer. She was his client. And rebel or not,
she’d been raised to know where the line lay between polite
conversation and prying.

The waitress returned with her charge slip
and her shrimp in a small container. Meredith added a generous tip,
and she and Caleb left the restaurant.

The sky still held a bit of daylight. June
evenings stayed light so late—much later here than in Georgia,
she’d learned, just as she’d learned that during the winter months,
darkness arrived earlier in Massachusetts than in Georgia.

“It’s finally cooled off a little,” Caleb
said. He had his jacket clutched in his hand. Meredith stifled the
urge to shake it out and drape it neatly over his arm so it
wouldn’t get wrinkled. “Want to take a walk down the dock?”

She shouldn’t want to, but she did. As Caleb
had noted, the day had finally lost its scorching heat, and the
breeze rising off the water felt refreshing. Given how full she
felt, she could use a stroll before returning to her car.

They ambled side by side down the concrete
pier, Caleb holding his jacket, Meredith her leftover shrimp.
Between two docked fishing boats, he paused and peered north, where
a beach stretched out along the water’s edge, the sand pale and
undulating, a day’s worth of wind and footprints molding gentle
ripples into its surface. “Was that where your incident occurred?”
he asked.

“A little further north,” she told him.
Brogan’s Point’s public beach stretched on and on, abutted by a
stone and concrete sea wall. Further away from the fishing wharves,
the sand was paler, more pristine. In the very far distance, she
could just barely make out a collection of smaller docks protruding
into the water, a marina where private boats were tethered, luxury
cruisers and sailboats. The beaches around the marina were private;
the northern end of Brogan’s Point was an enclave of mansions.
People who lived there didn’t need to mingle with the riffraff on
the town beach. They didn’t have to risk being exposed to the naked
bosom of a harassed local school teacher.

She wondered if Caleb lived in the northern
end of town. He was a lawyer, after all, and she supposed most of
his clients didn’t pay him with Lobster Shack meals. He might have
a wife waiting for him in one of those mansions. He might—

“I know it was humiliating for you,” he
said, “but I wouldn’t have minded being on the beach that day. You
must have put on quite a show.”

She shot him a sharp look. He was grinning
mischievously.

His smile turned sheepish. “Out of line,” he
apologized, holding up his hands as if to ward off a slap. “I’m
sorry.”

She felt her shoulders relax. The breeze
rising off the ocean cooled her cheeks. “My audience was
unfortunately large. You would have been just one more gawker.”

“I wouldn’t have gawked,” he said. His voice
was softer, almost tender. “I would have tossed you a towel—before
Sulkowski did. I would have kept you from getting that stupid
citation in the first place.”

“My hero,” she said, her tone swoony enough
for him to understand she was being sarcastic.

He was still smiling. “I’m going to be out
of line again,” he warned, “but you’re…” His smile faded and he
turned away, staring out at the darkening horizon. “Never
mind.”

“What?”

He shook his head. “Way out of line.”

A wave of heat swelled
inside her, one that had nothing to do with the mild evening
air.
Burning in her heart. Tearing her
apart.

Why did that song suddenly start spinning
through her mind? Why did her heart start pounding in the song’s
driving rhythm? Why did her cheeks warm again, not from
embarrassment but from yearning?

A yearning for Caleb. Her lawyer. With a
possible wife in a mansion on the north end of town.

Way out of line, indeed.

She gazed at his back, the contours of his
broad shoulders beneath his shirt, the sleek lines of his torso,
his narrow hips. His free hand was barely an inch from her free
hand. She fell back a step, then forced her eyes toward the
restaurant, the solid ground beyond it, the asphalt of the small
parking lot. Which car was his? What kind of car did his wife
drive?

Oh, for heaven’s sake. Whether or not he was
married was irrelevant. He’d made a silly, flirty comment about the
show she’d put on when she’d run topless down the beach, and he’d
apologized for it. He was a man. Most men were hung up on women’s
breasts. Heterosexual men, anyway. All she could conclude from the
past couple of minutes was that Caleb was heterosexual.

That, and the fact that that
song she’d heard at the Faulk Street Tavern yesterday was still
thundering through her head.
Tearing her
apart
.

“I should get home,” she said, her voice
harsher than she’d intended. She needed to jolt herself out of the
wistfulness that had overtaken her, her wholly inappropriate
awareness of Caleb’s sex appeal. When he turned back to her, she
forced a lame smile. “I have a stack of student essays to
grade.”

“You’re making your students write essays
this close to the end of the school year?”

“I’m a sadist,” she said. Her smile felt a
little less forced.

“Yeah, I can tell. That steely look of yours
has me quaking in my boots.” He had dimples. She wished she hadn’t
noticed that.

Her gaze dropped to his free hand, and then
to hers, their fingers so close a twitch would have them touching.
She shifted her leftovers from her other hand. Better to keep those
fingers occupied with a container of shrimp.

She started walking up the wharf toward the
parking lot, and he fell into step beside her. The wind caught in
her hair, blowing a few strands into her face. It tangled his hair,
too. His hair was a chestnut brown, long enough for a woman to
twine her fingers through. She wished she hadn’t noticed that,
either.

What had happened to make her so painfully
aware of him? They’d eaten dinner, that was all—eaten dinner and
exchanged idle chatter. They’d talked about the song from the
jukebox in the tavern yesterday, and that should have qualified as
idle chatter, too. But for some reason, it didn’t. Simply thinking
about it had skewed things. It had cast everything in a different
light, as if a tinted lens had been placed between her and the
world.

 
Heat
Wave
. The evening
had
cooled down. Yet by the time
they’d reached the lot, Meredith felt ridiculously warm. Caleb
stayed with her as she strolled to her Prius. He stood patiently as
she unlocked the door and swung it open. Then he spoke. “Thanks for
dinner. It was delicious.”

“I’ve never had a bad meal at the Lobster
Shack,” she said.

They faced each other, the heat of her car’s
interior spilling out into the evening and augmenting the heat she
felt inside her. She was tall, but Caleb was taller. Tall and lean,
his features sharp, his dark eyes intense as he met her gaze. “The
company wasn’t so bad, either,” he said.

As compliments went, that was pretty mild.
Yet her body temperature seemed to spike another few degrees.
“Well. I’m still willing to pay you a fee, if you’d send me a
bill.”

“I think we’re all squared away,” he assured
her.

“Most lawyers would prefer payment.”

“I’m not most lawyers.”

Was his face really so close to hers? His
mouth so near? Was it his breath she felt on her cheek, or just a
wisp of wind sweeping off the water?

Whatever she might be thinking, or bracing
herself for, fearing or hoping for, didn’t happen. He thrust his
right hand out to her for a shake. “Thanks again.”

A handshake. Right. That was the way an
attorney and his client parted ways. She slipped her hand in his
and told herself she was just imagining that he squeezed hers
slightly as they shook. Then he grinned—those dimples again—nodded,
pivoted on his heel and strode across the lot to a shiny black
Audi.

She slid behind the wheel of her car, closed
the door, and started the engine. Through the windshield, she
watched Caleb climb into his sporty car, rev the engine, and peel
out of the lot. She remained where she was, waiting for the air
conditioner to kick in. It hissed, it sighed, but it didn’t cool
her down.

Blanche Larson had a face like a bulldog, a
bark like a junkyard cur, and the personality of a border collie.
She liked order. She herded facts into neat arrangements and
spotted every stray datum, every outlier. Caleb had worked with her
on other cases, and she’d never let him down. If there was a
questionable transaction, an unsubstantiated expenditure, the
merest blip in a financial record, she would find it.

“I’ll need everything,” she reminded Caleb.
Even over the phone, her voice conjured an image of a large, angry
mutt baring its pointy teeth. Fortunately, he knew her well enough
not to be daunted by her growl. “Valenti’s financials as well as
Felton’s, and the town’s,” she said. “I need everything.”

“I’m working on it,” he assured her. “I’ve
requested Valenti’s info from the DA. I don’t think he’s looked at
it yet. He just took her word for everything, and she dumped all
the blame on Jerry Felton. Of course the DA wants to believe her.
Indicting a high-ranking public official gets him a lot of media
attention.”

“You’re getting media attention, too,”
Blanche noted. “I saw that press conference you held at Town Hall
Tuesday afternoon on the local news. You’re a TV star.”