Always a Hero Page 15

  She smiled then. And reached out to lay her hand on his chest, palm over his heart.

  “Good thing we’ve got an hour, then,” she said, her voice soft and husky.

  He wondered if she could feel the sudden leap of his pulse, the sudden flush of heat that swept him at her touch. And then she slid her hand downward, over his belly and beyond, and he could barely think at all.

  He’d meant it, that he wouldn’t care who knew. But it hit him, in the last moments before the firestorm that cascaded through him wiped out all coherent thought, that he should care. That he had to care. Because somewhere out there were people who would like nothing better than to know how to get to him.

  He’d had no choice about Jordy. But he’d chosen this, chosen her. And it was too late to change that now. Much too late.

  It wasn’t until he lifted himself over her and she guided him home, and that exquisite, searing sensation of sliding into the hot, slick heart of her swamped him, that he realized he hadn’t had any choice about this, either.

  Chapter 20

  Kai awoke early on Sunday morning. And at first, in those moments suspended between sleep and complete awareness, thought of just going back to sleep simply because she was just so darned comfortable. And then she stretched, and a sudden awareness of certain parts of her body jolted her awake, her breath catching in her throat.

  She laid back, closing her eyes, willing the visions of yesterday to play in her head. She’d never known anything like it, not just the fact that they’d spent the entire afternoon in bed, but the succession of changes. The first time had been a flash fire, rising out of nowhere to consume completely. Wyatt had been almost desperate, a feeling she understood perfectly, since she’d been feeling it herself. The second time he’d been gentler, as if he felt he had to make up for his own wildness. The third time had been a long, sweet, savoring kind of thing, that gave her the chance to study him, marvel in what he was doing, and delight in how much pleasure she herself took in simply looking and touching and feeling.

  The fact that he had looked and touched in turn, with an expression of awe on his face, hadn’t hurt things any. Kai had always assumed the attraction was mutual; Wyatt seemed stunned that it was. She’d thought that one day Jordy’s eyes would knock some girl on her backside. She’d never, ever expected his father’s to do it to her.

  She only realized how widely she was smiling when the muscles of her face reminded her. Pill counter he might be, but Wyatt Blake was one hell of a lover. Who knew? she thought with a tiny laugh.

  Now she did. And it had been more than worth closing the store for.

  When she finally bestirred herself to get up and head for the shower, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. The only outward signs of what had happened were a red mark on her skin here and there, the fullness of thoroughly kissed lips, and nipples that were tightening at just the memories. She wondered if he, too, wore mementos of their wild afternoon, then felt herself blush as she remembered that she knew he wore at least one; her nails had dug into his back that first time, when they had both gone a little crazy.

  “A lot crazy,” she admitted to her image in the mirror. “But wow.”

  If this was what doing without for so long did for you, she’d have to quit thinking of it as, as her friends teasingly called it, a dry spell. From now on, it would be simply building up strength, she thought with a grin at her reflection before she turned and got into the shower, where another encounter had occurred, one that told her without doubt that Wyatt was as strong as she’d thought he might be, from that day with the ax.

  Of course, she knew better. She knew that what had happened here had only a little to do with a long stretch of being alone, and much, much more to do with Wyatt. The man was just full of surprises.

  She felt a twinge of concern as she finished up and reached for a towel. Wyatt’s reluctance had been unmistakable, in fact she’d taken a certain perhaps illaudable feminine pleasure in the fact that he’d wanted her too much to win that fight. Jordy would adapt, she told herself. It might take him a while, but he would. She hoped.

  But what she couldn’t rationalize away was the feeling that part of Wyatt’s reluctance had been for his own sake. To anyone who didn’t know the real story, they might assume it was because of his wife’s death, but she knew that he had, indeed, barely known Jordy’s mother. So what made him hesitate had to be something else, and she didn’t know that that something was.

  And the fact that you’ve had sex with him now doesn’t give you the right to pry into every corner of his life and psyche, she told herself as she dressed.

  Not even if it had been the hottest, sweetest, most life-changing sex ever.

  “What’s that big building?” Jordan asked.

  Wyatt glanced at his son, who was casually—or intentionally—looking out the car’s side window and not at him as they headed for his school. It was the first time he’d probed about HP since their first dispute over his sudden interest in his father’s job.

  “Which one?” he asked, keeping his voice level.

  “The green one.” He gave Wyatt a quick, sideways look, obviously trying to judge his mood. “Up by the entrance.” The boy hesitated, then added in a rush, as if Wyatt had asked for an explanation, “We drove by there in the bus on Saturday, and somebody asked.”

  Wyatt was fairly certain that had been Max, not someone on the bus. But then, Jordy hadn’t exactly said that, had he? He’d worded it ambiguously enough that it was defensible as not being a lie. Not exactly, anyway.

  Great. Maybe he was headed for a career as a politician.

  Wyatt’s mind raced. He’d wrestled with this for the rest of the weekend, time spent keeping Jordan busy when he would have rather been keeping himself—and Kai—very, very busy in that nearly dramatic bed she’d told him was called a sleigh bed. That conjured up images that took his breath away, and memories of her that made him nearly laugh with a kind of joy he’d never experienced. Something she seemed to have the knack for, no small miracle considering how long it had been since he’d laughed about anything.

  Even when he’d called her Sunday morning, before Jordan had gotten up, she’d made what he’d been afraid would be awkward joyous instead—he hadn’t been sure how you thanked a woman for the most amazing afternoon of your life. But Kai’s rich, wonderful laugh and her heartfelt, “It was breathtakingly fantastic, wasn’t it? We’re magic,” made him feel things he couldn’t even name.

  But the questions he’d been pondering since then were anything but laughable. Because they all involved Jordan, and keeping him out of serious trouble. He could, he knew, open up some channels, talk with some people who knew some other people, and get some action. But he’d sworn to never open that door again. Besides, once one group from his past knew where he was, the word would spread, and until he knew why someone—or several someones—had been looking for him already, it wasn’t safe.

  “The metal building?” he asked Jordan, as if he wasn’t answering right away because he wasn’t sure what the boy meant, when in fact he was stalling, thinking, wondering.

  “Yeah, that one.”

  If it was anyone else asking, he wouldn’t hesitate. The building was, after all, simply the repair shop for that packaging equipment that occasionally broke down.

  But this was his son, and he didn’t know what to do. He, the man who could always be counted on to have plans A through D going in, and be able to come up with E through G on the fly, couldn’t think beyond the fact that his son was headed for trouble. And it seemed like there was nothing he could do about it, short of uprooting them both and moving again.

  Which would mean leaving Kai.

  The thought of leaving her, at the very time when they’d discovered this amazing thing between them, wrenched at him in a way he’d never felt.

  “So what is it?” Jordan asked again.

  Control what you can control, be ready to roll with the rest.

  The old maxi
m shot through his mind. Maybe he needed to start thinking of this tactically, and not like a panicked father. If Max thought he’d gotten what he needed from Jordan, maybe he’d drop the boy like a tool he no longer needed. And whatever Max and his cohorts had in mind, it was likely going to happen whether Jordan helped them or not. He couldn’t control that.

  But maybe he could control what they thought they knew. That building Jordan was asking about was near enough to the main road to be fairly easy to get to from the outside. That made it easy for Max.

  But it was also in a cleared area, away from the offices and other peopled areas, which made it easier and safer to defend.

  “It’s a storage building, where they keep the incoming shipments so it’s out of the way until they’re ready to package.”

  It wasn’t perfect, but it was the best he could do on the fly. He doubted Jordan realized he was lying; he might be rusty, but even rusty he was better than most. And the way the boy went rigidly still, as if he were afraid to even breathe, told Wyatt that that answer had been, as he’d thought it might be, exactly what Jordan—meaning Max—had wanted to know.

  It felt right, doing something besides holding back and worrying. And that Jordan had probably had to tell Max he was having trouble getting the old man to talk would make it more believable when he finally delivered the goods.

  He supposed, had he been a real father, a good one, he wouldn’t have done it. But then, if he was a real father, he would have somehow gotten the boy to talk, to tell him the truth. But he’d already long accepted he was lousy at this, so it was time he dealt with it the way the man he’d once been would have. Strategically.

  Then again, if he’d done this before, maybe he wouldn’t have had to resort to begging for help from the one person his son trusted. And he would have missed out on the most incredible experience of his life.

  He again fought down vivid, sizzling images of that afternoon spent in a place he’d never expected to be, feeling things he’d only heard about, wild, huge, crazy things that he hadn’t thought himself capable of.

  No, running, leaving this place, leaving Kai, wasn’t an option he was willing to consider. And all the warnings from that little voice he’d once trusted with his own and other lives couldn’t trump that determination.

  “I’m sorry, Jordan,” he said, almost startling himself; he hadn’t intended the words.

  Jordan shot him a sideways look rife with suspicion.

  “I didn’t really realize, before, what it must have been like for you to have to leave everything and everyone you’d ever known.”

  But now I do, because I know how much I don’t want to leave here, leave Kai.

  And that scared him. Both the thought of having to leave, and the thought that it hurt so much. How had that happened, and so fast?

  Jordan muttered something unintelligible. Probably just as well, Wyatt thought.

  “Someday I hope you’ll see I was trying to do the best thing for you.”

  “Right.”

  The single bitter word told him Jordan wasn’t buying. Not that he’d expected him to, it was just that it had hit him that he’d never really let the boy know that he understood the enormity of what he’d done to him, relative to the teenager’s still-limited world.

  Later, he thought. He’d have to try again later. Along with all the other things that were being pushed to the rear for the moment. Even the warning emails were filed away. He had to put that nagging concern about possible shadows from his past on hold. He had to trust the assessment that the inquiries had been from friendlies, and thus could likely wait. They had to wait. Just as the questions of why so many and why now—and why they’d stopped—had to wait.

  Whoever was looking for him and why didn’t matter at this moment. Because right now Jordan and his safety had to come first. His priorities, he realized, had been permanently changed.

  Ironic, he supposed, and typical of the tangled web his life had become, that in order to accomplish that priority, he had to lie, as he had to so many others so many times before.

  Jordan would just have to understand, when the time came. Maybe Kai could help with that. Although he wasn’t sure exactly where her boundaries were; as much as she hated drugs and what they could do, would she think trying to stop Max would justify lying to his own son? In effect, using the already existing conduit of Jordan to Max to plant false intel? In effect, using Jordan?

  He could only hope she would understand. Maybe not agree, but understand.

  Right, he thought. You’ll have them both never speaking to you again before this is over.

  The thought clawed at him, leaving bloody furrows he’d swear he should be able to see across his chest over his heart. This is why you don’t get involved, he told himself. He’d known that, all along. And he’d managed to live that way, for a very long time.

  But that old axiom had never run into the likes of Kai Reynolds.

  Chapter 21

  “He said he hasn’t talked to Max in days. He seemed kind of…hurt about it.”

  She felt Wyatt, lying beside her with his head cushioned by one upraised arm, go still. He’d been especially fervent this afternoon, hungry, demanding, yet at the same time he still seemed so amazed at what happened between them that it filled her with a wonder of her own. It would have been awful if it had only gone one way. But then, she thought she was right; nothing this incredible could happen if it was only on one side.

  “Hurt?” he asked.

  “When I was setting him up in the sound room today, he was awfully quiet. He finally told me Max showed up when he was walking over here from school on Monday. Max said he was busy, and that was the last time they spoke. And Max hasn’t been into the store, either.”

  “Good.”

  Kai shifted so she could see Wyatt’s face. “I guess your warning took.”

  It surely would have convinced me, she thought. Just one of the many surprises this man was capable of. Not a few of which she’d experienced in the last half hour.

  She’d appreciated that he hadn’t assumed, when they’d come upstairs after Jordy was settled in the sound room, that they’d immediately leap into bed. Although the idea had a lot of merit, she liked that he left it up to her.

  “We only have an hour,” he’d said.

  “I think we can accomplish a lot in an hour,” she’d teased, but had been touched when he’d protested.

  “I don’t want this to always be some rushed, sneaky thing.”

  “Never done it on the sly, huh?”

  “I have. No more. Not with you.”

  The simple explanation had moved her in a way she couldn’t completely explain. There were depths to this man that weren’t just cloaked, they were hidden so deep she wondered if anyone would ever find them. Wondered if he even knew them all himself.

  “It wasn’t my warning,” Wyatt said now. “At least, not completely.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He sucked in a deep breath as he gave her an assessing look. As if he were trying to calculate her response to something.

  “Wyatt?”

  He sighed. “Max got what he wanted from him.”

  She blinked. “What do you mean?”

  “He got what he was after.”

  “I thought he was after information on Hunt Packing, on the drugs.”

  “Yes.”

  “But Jordy doesn’t really know anything….”

  Her voice trailed off as it dawned on her just what he meant. And she realized why he’d been wondering about her response to it.

  “He pumped you again.”

  “Yes.”

  “And this time you answered him.”

  “Yes.”

  She supposed she should appreciate that he didn’t lie to her, but she was too busy trying to process this. Why on earth would he risk his job, and his apparent friendship with John Hunt, by giving Jordy information that he knew would be passed along to Max? If he was right about Max’s intentions
, and she thought he probably was, why would he do something that would help that along?

  More importantly, why would he risk Jordy getting caught up in the middle of it?

  The answer hit her with stark clarity.

  He wouldn’t.

  Everything else aside, the bottom line was simply that he would not risk Jordy.

  “You told him so he’d tell Max, who would have no further use for him then. And would leave him alone.”

  “Yes.”

  A beautifully simple solution, she thought. Except for one thing.

  “But…if you’re right about Max and his intentions to steal the stuff from HP, haven’t you just helped him?”

  “No.”

  She studied him for a moment, then it came to her.

  “You lied,” she breathed, staring at him. “You told Jordy exactly what you wanted Max to think.”

  She thought she saw the faintest trace of a smile begin, perhaps that she had gotten there fairly quickly, before he quashed it and solemnly nodded.

  Several things tumbled through her mind in rapid succession. First, relief that she was right, Wyatt would never knowingly endanger his son. Second, that he would also never do harm to someone he felt he owed, like Mr. Hunt.

  And third, that for a pill counter, he was awfully darned good at this.

  “I thought maybe we could all go get pizza.” Wyatt eyed his son’s stunned expression. “Unless you’re burned out on it.”

  “Is it possible to burn out on pizza?” Kai asked lightly. “I’d love to. Jordy?”

  The boy stared at them, as if sensing the undercurrent between them. Wyatt knew Kai knew this was the beginning. He’d meant what he said, he didn’t want to hide this or sneak around. But he also didn’t want to slap Jordan in the face with it, and he knew she understood that, too.

  There wasn’t much her quick mind and sometimes startling perceptiveness missed.

  Jordan seemed torn, likely between the pain of being with him, and the lure of being with Kai. The latter, he understood completely.