Tears sprang to her eyes.
“The boiler,” she whispered. “Oh, Jack, the boiler’s just kicked the bucket again, oh my God, I’m so sorry.”
Caroline knew exactly what the boiler dying entailed. Mack the Jerk wouldn’t come until Monday evening at the earliest, so they had three miserable, painful days to look forward to.
The house would take about two hours to lose its heat, then the icy fingers of the outside world would reach in and squeeze the house and them, hard.
All of today, all of Sunday and all of Monday would be spent in the freezing cold. It meant bundling up with every item of clothing possible, until only the fingertips and nose showed, and they would slowly chill so much it would hurt. It meant huddling around the fireplace, roasting on one side, freezing on the other. Any other part of the house would be so cold it was painful.
Once, she’d actually had to crack the ice in the toilets to relieve herself.
Foolish foolish Caroline, thinking that this Christmas would be any different from past Christmases, hard and lonely.
The light elation she’d had since waking up had vanished utterly. Things had seemed…so different. For the first time in a long while, there was a lot to look forward to—the zing of attraction she hadn’t felt in years, a couple of days just lazing around, flirting, having fabulous sex.
Instead, a couple of grim days trying to just stay alive in the freezing cold was what she had to look forward to.
“Relax,” Jack murmured, and ran a finger down her cheek.
Easy for him to say. Though, come to think of it, maybe he knew exactly what it was like to have to huddle for days seeking warmth. He’d fought in the Hindu Kush. She distinctly remembered him saying that. She knew enough geography to know exactly where the Hindu Kush was—the foothills of the Himalayas. So this was something he could do.
It’s just that this wasn’t a mission to some godforsaken outback, where hardship was the norm. It was a home he’d paid good money to live in, and he had the right to expect comfort.
Caroline had wanted some lightheartedness back in her life, after so many years of struggle and darkness. She’d been so looking forward to a couple of days of flirtation and lightness and…well, yes, sex.
She’d been planning on drowning him in good food and raiding the Lake wine cellar. What good were all those bottles of Syrah and Valpolicella doing down there in the dark?
And instead, here she was, in a repeat of the horrors of the Kippings. Cardigans pulled out, polite smiles, strangled conversation trying to avoid the stark truth of a freezing home.
Jack studied her features, then turned on his heels.
He was leaving.
Caroline didn’t blame him a bit.
“Jack?” It came out a small croak.
He turned.
This was so hard, after all her childish yearnings. Merry Christmas, indeed. Caroline forced herself to stand upright and caught herself twisting her hands. She let them drop by her side. This was hard, yes, but she’d been doing hard for a long, long time now.
“Do you—” She had to swallow past the tightness in her throat. “Do you want your money back?”
She’d surprised him. He looked totally blank for a moment. There was something about his face that told her he wasn’t often surprised. Then he frowned in puzzlement. “Why would I want that?”
“Because—because you’re going to spend the Christmas weekend in a freezing-cold house. That wasn’t what you paid for. I imagine you want to leave.”
He searched her features. “You’re upset,” he said. “So you get a free one.” He turned around again.
Caroline stood, swaying a little, blinking with surprise, holding her arms around her midriff. Already the temperature had dropped a couple of degrees. “So…where are you going?”
“To go get the toolkit in the garage,” he said, without turning around, “so I can fix that damned boiler.”
JFK Airport
“ENP Security, how may I help you?”
Deaver turned into the plastic shell of the public phone at Kennedy. “Yeah,” he said in a heavy, nasal Midwestern accent. “Can I speak to Jack Prescott? This is Pat Lawrence, tell him we met at Intersec in Dubai last year.”
Coming into Customs as a foreigner had been beyond weird, but it had gone smoothly. Security was primed to question Middle Eastern males, not Finns. The photo likeness had been enough for Deaver to be waved through.
First order of business, find Prescott. The Old Man had died, Prescott would be the new CEO of ENP. Deaver had to find out if he was in North Carolina still.
Axel’s documents would hold for a while, but soon he’d need more.
He prepared to be put on hold. The ENP secretaries wouldn’t put anyone through to Prescott immediately. They’d make him jump through hoops. Deaver had a phone card and was willing to wait it out, though.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the secretary said, instead of Hold please. “Mr. Prescott is no longer with the company.”
Deaver straightened. “What? That’s ridiculous! Of course—”
“The company has been sold to Orion Security and Mr. Nathan Bodine is the new CEO. Have a nice day.” The dial tone came on.
Fuck! Deaver stared at the phone, jaw clenched, breath coming in spurts. The son of a bitch had sold the company. His father barely dead in the ground, and the bastard handed over his life’s work, just like that. Well, of course. Fucker had a fortune in diamonds. He wasn’t going to go to work every day when he had a fucking fortune in his hand.
Deaver angrily punched out another number. Prescott’s home line. Secretive bastard had never given him his home number. Deaver’d had to lift it from company files.
Eight rings. He was about to hang up when a recorded female voice answered. “The number you have dialed is no longer connected.”
Son of a bitch had run! Simply pulled up stakes and disappeared!
Deaver hadn’t factored that in at all. Prescott had thrown him to the dogs and stolen his money, but it hadn’t occurred to him that he would disappear with it.
Prescott was a close-mouthed bastard and didn’t have friends—or at least men he’d have confided in—in the company. Even if Deaver wanted to take the chance of showing his face in Monroe, he’d probably come up with nothing. No one would know where Prescott had run off to.
Deaver knew. Fucker had gone to his woman, this Caroline Lake. Find her, find him, find the diamonds.
He needed to regroup, and he needed ID and weapons.
There was a man in New York named Drake, lived out in Brighton Beach. Drake could get anything, anywhere, as long as you had the price. Deaver would hang out in Manhattan, get himself kitted out with new ID, while he searched the Net for Caroline Lake.
Deaver punched in a Brighton Beach number and waited.
“Drake,” a smooth bass voice answered.
Eight
Summerville
“Caroline, go back upstairs. Please.” Jack kept his voice gentle, but he wanted to growl in exasperation. The unheated basement was dank and damp and cold. It would take him at least another half hour to get the piece of shit Caroline laughingly called a boiler going.
She was standing next to him anxiously, eager to help though she couldn’t distinguish a lug wrench from an eyebrow pencil, shaking with the cold. Her nostrils were pinched and white, and her hands were milky blue even though she surreptitiously tucked them under her armpits when he wasn’t looking. He couldn’t stand seeing her like this.
“No,” she said, through chattering teeth. “That’s okay. I want to help.”
“You know what would help me?” He put down the screwdriver and pried away the backing plate. “You’d really help me if you went back upstairs where there’s still some warmth left. Your teeth are distracting me. They sound like castanets.”
“Sorry.” She clenched her jaw.
He sighed. “That was a joke. Obviously not a very good one.” He wrenched the plate open and conte
mplated the rusting wires and leaky pipes with disgust. “Please go up, I can’t stand seeing you like this. I mean it.”
“If you can stand it, I can. I mean you’re a soldier. Were a soldier. Don’t soldiers stick together?” She edged closer to peer past him into the bowels of the boiler, as if looking into the face of a long-despised enemy. “So that’s the inside of the beast? Doesn’t look like much, does it? I mean considering how much damage it causes.”
Jack clenched his own jaw. No, it didn’t look like much. It was the worst, oldest, crappiest boiler he’d ever seen, and he couldn’t believe she was trusting this piece of shit to keep her warm. It should have been tossed onto the garbage heap ten years ago.
“You need a new filter.” And a new casing and a new feed-water drum.
“Tell me about it.”
“You’re spending more in fixing it than a new one would cost. And you’re just guzzling up electricity.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And you’d save even more money if you bought—”
“A condensing boiler,” she finished for him. “I know. Believe me I know. I’ve been told all of this, repeatedly. What can I say? I don’t have the money for a new filter and—trust me on this one—I certainly don’t have the money for a new boiler. Maybe someday. But definitely not now.”
Jack gritted his teeth. He was going to buy a brand-new filter Monday and fit it while she was out. Mack the Jerk was never going to touch her boiler again, so she’d never know. He’d give his eyeteeth to be able to buy a new boiler for her, but it would be hard to install on his own, and she’d notice.
Fuck! He hated this! He hated to see her pale with the cold, shaking and frightened that she’d be without heat. It was insane that Caroline had to spend even one more second without money when he had so much. What the hell did he have money for if he couldn’t make her life easier?
But how to get the money to her? A sudden dump of a million dollars in her bank account two days after he showed up would raise too many red flags, though he was tempted to do just that. Fuck it. Just transfer a million, maybe two, so her money problems would be over permanently. God knows he’d have plenty left.
It was such a tempting thought that Jack gritted his teeth against it as he took apart the filter from hell, cleaned it, and reassembled it.
Caroline wasn’t meant for this life. She wasn’t meant to live in a shell of a home, however beautiful that shell was, without rugs and paintings, whose walls needed painting, with an unreliable heating system in the dead of winter. She wasn’t meant to pinch pennies, have a continuous frown of worry between her brows, a slightly sad cast to her face.
Jack wanted to drown her in comfort. He wanted to buy her things—useful things and foolish things. Pretty baubles that would bring a smile to her face. Clothes, jewelry. Rugs, artwork for the house. He wanted her to be able to bring Greenbriars back to what it had once been.
It was going to be hard getting her to accept the money, but he’d manage. He was going to be in her life from now on. They were already having sex. He was going to keep her in bed as much as he could this weekend. There was nothing that forged a bond like sex, at least for a woman like Caroline.
She hadn’t had many lovers and it had been six years since the last one. She’d been as tight as a virgin, and it had nearly blown his head off. She wasn’t an easy woman. Her body had told him she was picky. And by God, she’d picked him.
Jack knew why she’d picked him. Because he’d been there, at a low moment in her life. The taxi driver had said that her parents had died on Christmas Day. Her brother had just died. It was her first Christmas completely alone, and she’d been sad and upset.
It didn’t bother him that he’d caught her not because of his charm—he didn’t have any charm that he knew of—but because he’d been in the right place at the right time. As a soldier, Jack had ruthlessly used any advantage he could get, even if it was only a slight elevation above an enemy soldier, the wind blowing in the right direction, or the cover of night.
He was going to press his advantage just as ruthlessly this weekend, too, bedding her until, by Monday, she’d be his.
She already was his, only she didn’t know it yet. And he’d take good care of her. All his life he’d only wanted two things—to do right by his dad. And Caroline.
She was surreptitiously hopping up and down, trying to keep warm, her breath a little cloud around her face. Damn! Taking care of her did not entail her freezing that pretty tail off.
“Caroline,” he began, putting down the wrench.
“Don’t,” she said, teeth chattering. “I’m staying here and keeping you company until you get that blasted thing going—and if you do, I’ll personally nominate you for the Nobel—or you give up. Whichever comes first.”
“Listen, it’s fu—freaking freezing.”
“Yes.”
“You’ll catch your death of cold.”
“Yes.”
“So go up.”
“No.” That pretty, pointed chin went up in the air a notch.
It was a real surprise enamel wasn’t shooting out his ass, he was grinding his teeth so hard. Jack bent back to the boiler, trying to work double-quick, before he ended up with a gorgeous corpse.
Fifteen minutes later, he tightened the last screw and flipped a switch. A red light came on, and a second later, with a great shudder like an ocean liner taking off for a trip across the Atlantic, the boiler creaked into life.
Caroline had had her arms wrapped around herself for warmth, but her arms suddenly dropped. “Oh my God,” she whispered, eyes huge in her pale face. “You did it. You fixed it.”
“Yeah.” Jack put the tools away neatly, eyeing the boiler with loathing. He’d fixed it with the equivalent of chewing gum and duct tape, but it goddamned well better hold until Monday when he could get a new filter in, or he’d rip the fucking thing out of the wall with his own hands. “Whoa.”
Caroline had walked straight into his arms, laying her head on his chest, her arms hugging him tightly. “Thanks,” she whispered. She looked up at him, tears on her eyelashes. “Oh my gosh. Thanks so much. I can’t tell you how I was dreading being without heat all weekend.”
His hands came up, one around her head, one around her waist, holding her tightly, looking for words, though none came.
Brand-new emotions, ones he didn’t have names for, coursed through him, fierce and raw, emotions he didn’t know how to handle.
No one had ever looked at him like that, certainly no woman. Women looked at him with lust, greed or indifference, never with the warmth and admiration he could clearly see on Caroline’s beautiful face.
“It was nothing,” he said gruffly. And it wasn’t. Jesus, he wanted to shower her with pearls and diamonds. Coddle her and spoil her, take care of her problems for her. Fixing her boiler didn’t even register on the scale.
In answer, she turned her head and kissed his chest. He didn’t feel it through his sweatshirt, but the gesture stunned him. It was an unmistakable gesture of…of affection.
He’d lusted after this woman for most of his life, it seemed. The sex they’d had yesterday hadn’t even begun to get her out of his head. He was okay with sex. It was what he knew, so he could deal with lust, and the thought of fucking her as long as he was physically able.
What he saw on her face nearly unmanned him. He wanted to put it back on a sexual footing, right now, so he wouldn’t have to deal with all those…things roiling around in his chest like huge hot boulders. He was bending to kiss her when she shivered.
“Out,” he said harshly. If he could have reached his own butt, he’d have kicked it. Jesus, keeping her in the cold damp basement was not a good idea. What was he thinking of? He’d actually flashed on pushing down her pants and taking her, right there, on the freezing concrete floor.
What was the matter with him? He wouldn’t even treat a casual sex partner like that—and this was Caroline.
With a hand on her back, he u
shered her up into the kitchen. This wasn’t any good. In the half hour it had taken him to fix the boiler, the house had cooled down noticeably. He was okay with it, but Caroline would find it uncomfortably cold. Only one place to go—to bed.
Oh yeah. Get her between the sheets, start fucking. Get rid of that…that prickly feeling in his chest.
Jack kept his hand on the small of her back. “Keep on going up.” Caroline looked up at him, startled. She blushed when she saw the heat in his eyes and smiled faintly.
“Okay.”
Her bedroom had big windows, with no double glazing. The heat had simply leaked out, and it was already close to freezing. Condensation had iced the windows over, forming giant star patterns on the pane. Their breaths were making clouds around their heads. Undressing Caroline slowly like he wanted to was out of the question.
He bent down and kissed her softly, reaching past her to pull down the covers. “Don’t undress, just get in.”
“Okay,” she whispered, toeing off her shoes and lying down. She scooted over, watching him. She’d left a big empty space on his side of the bed, an invitation as clear as if she’d engraved it on a card.
Jack undressed, watching her eyes. There was a little trepidation, a little shyness, but there was also welcome.
Naked to the waist, he unzipped his jeans and hooked his thumbs in the waistband. Hesitating, he finally just shucked them and the briefs off, taking socks and boots with him. Caroline’s eyes widened when she saw him.
He didn’t have to look down, he could see what condition he was in from what was in her eyes. And he could feel how swollen he was. He was hard as a club, already weeping from the tip, the drops of moisture cool against the tip of his cock. It was the only place where he felt cold. The rest of him was so hot he didn’t feel the cold at all, though he was naked. All he had to do was look at Caroline and know that he was going to be inside her very soon, and a hot flush swept over his body.
“You’ve been thinking about this,” she said faintly, when he got into bed.