A Little Too Hot

Chapter Twenty-Five

“OH MY GOD!” I squeal, leaping into Jonathan’s outstretched arms. “You’re okay.” Tears sting my eyes as Ginger and Izzy circle us in a group hug.

“ ’Course,” Jonathan says, crushing me in his embrace. “Indestructible, remember?” he says low in my ear.

I pull back and smack him. “You scared the shit out of me!”

“I was just out partying with the guys,” he says with a grin. “No big thing.”

I glance at Blake, who’s standing back watching the exchange. He gives me a tight nod.

Jonathan clamps his arms around me and starts to pick me up, but flinches and sets me down, holding his side. “Yeah . . . don’t quite have those Guitar Hero superpowers back yet.”

I press my hand over his. “You’re okay?”

“The chicks dig battle scars,” he says with a grin. “Told you, Red,” he adds, lifting a finger to the scar on my cheek, “they’re super hot.”

“He’s right,” Ginger says, tugging him to her. She loops her arms around his neck and plants one on him. When their tongues start wrestling, I look away.

Izzy grasps my shoulders and turns me to face her. “Look at you, girlfriend! You’re almost as black as me.”

“Swimming,” I tell her, hugging her tight. “You’re all right?”

“Unemployed, but other than that, I’m fine.”

“Phones,” Blake says, holding out his hand to Izzy. She pulls hers from her pocket and gives it to him.

“Seriously?” Ginger whines when he gets to her.

“There’s no cell service where we’re going anyway,” Blake tells her with a wiggle of his fingers.

She rolls her lip in disgust as she hands him her phone. “Where is that? The Stone Age?”

Jonathan flips his phone at Blake, and Blake plucks it out of the air. “Grab your things. Time to saddle up.”

I look at him and back at my friends. “What’s going on?”

“Road trip!” Jonathan says. He grabs his guitar case off the floor and slings his backpack over his shoulder. Ginger wraps an arm around his waist, and Izzy comes up to my side, wrapping her arm around mine. Blake steps to the side as we all file out the door.

We pile into the SUV, Jonathan up front, and me sandwiched between the girls in back. Once everyone else is in, Blake goes to the Charger and hands the cell phones off to Cooper. They talk for a minute, then Blake climbs into the Escalade. He spares us the country music as he navigates us onto the highway, and we head south.

“Where are we going?” Jonathan asks, and I smile when Blake says, “It’s a surprise.”

I turn to Izzy. “How’s everyone else from Benny’s?”

“Pete’s good,” Izzy answers. “Got a gig at a new club in the Tenderloin. Jen got a job at Denny’s, and Steph moved back in with her parents up north. I haven’t seen anyone else.”

Ginger goes on and on about how shutting down flesh markets like Benny’s is another step toward true equality for women, and the girls catch me up on everything as Blake drives. I pretend not to notice his frequent glances in the rearview at me.

“Did he tell you where we’re going?” I ask Izzy after about an hour on the road, as the Sierras start to loom to our left.

She shakes her head.

Ginger hands Jonathan’s guitar over the seat to him, and he plays us the song he’s writing for her and a few others before segueing into the pizza topping song. Everyone but Blake sings along as the highway rolls by.

An hour later we’re all giggling and punchy from the long ride, but no one’s complaining. It’s just so great to be together again. Our laughing is interrupted by the ring of the phone from the speakers.

Blake hits a button on the steering wheel. “Yeah, Coop?”

“You’re clear,” Cooper says out of the speakers. “I’m heading back.”

“Ten-four,” Blake says, then disconnects.

I turn to see the black Charger pull off the exit we’re just passing.

As we start to climb into the mountains, our attention turns to the passing scenery: trees and cliffs and green, and a forever view back down into the valley. We reach the top of the mountain and inch through a national park checkpoint behind a line of traffic. Blake pays the fee and collects a map.

“Kings Canyon?” Jonathan asks, taking it from his hand and holding it up for us to see.

I snatch it from his fingers. “How long are we staying here?”

“Just overnight.” Blake glances in the rearview at me as he answers, that almost-smile playing over his lips. “Thought you’d earned a night out.”

Dragonflies buzz in my belly at the look he gives me, and I turn my attention back to the beauty outside the window to help distract me from the untouchable beauty right in front of me.

After a few minutes Blake turns off the main road onto a smaller side road that cuts through the forest. A little way up, the woods open out into a cluster of cabins. As we drive deeper, I realize it’s a whole little village.

We bump over poorly maintained roads and Blake finally pulls into a dirt driveway in front of a decrepit looking two-story cabin. Thick pine branches overhang a steeply pitched tin roof, and some of the wooden shingles around the shuttered windows are falling off. A huge stone chimney up the front looks like the only thing holding the rickety structure up.

“What is this place?” Izzy asks.

“My family’s cabin,” Blake answers, sliding out of his seat. “I spent most of my summers here when I was a kid.”

I shoot him a glance. “I thought you were from Texas.”

“I am. But I spent time here with my grandparents every summer.”

“Looks sort of creepy,” Izzy says. “Like it’s haunted.”

Blake’s face is all nostalgia as he looks it over. “No one else comes up here anymore . . .” He glances at me. “. . . which is why I figured it would be safe.”

He lifts the tailgate and hands me my duffel bag. As everyone grabs their bags from the back, I notice sleeping bags, a few grocery bags, and an ice chest buried back there. We climb a flight of stairs to the front door, and Blake unlocks it. I step through into an open room, a dark leather sofa along the back wall and two leather and wood rockers in front of the massive stone fireplace that dominates the entire room. There’s an open archway to the right, where a wooden picnic table sits near a door beyond, which obviously leads to the kitchen. Up the middle of the room is a ladder, which goes to a loft upstairs. The curtains are drawn, so it’s dim, but there’s a thin coating of dust on everything, and cobwebs in most of the corners.

Blake sets his bag on a chair and pulls back the curtain on the window up front. He opens the window, pushes back the shutters, and the room is flooded with bright sunlight.

“You’re sure this place isn’t haunted?” Izzy says, eyeing her surroundings warily.

Blake shrugs. “No guarantees.”

After lunch we hike out on some trails that wind past rivers and meadows full of wild flowers, to a fire lookout, where we can see forever. All there is for miles is mountains, trees, and lakes. It’s so quiet.

As we meander back along the trails toward the cabin, I hook my elbow through Jonathan’s and slow our pace a little, letting the others get ahead of us.

“So, where is this safe house you’re at?” he asks, kicking a rock in our path.

“It’s—” I glance at Blake, on the trail up ahead. “I’m not supposed to say.”

He tugs me closer. “But they’re taking good care of my best girl, right?”

“Yeah.” I slow us even more. “So where were you, Jonathan? You had everyone totally flipping out.”

His eyes don’t leave the path. “I went looking for Marcus.”

“And . . . ?”

“He wanted to know what you were going to tell the narcs. I told him you didn’t know anything.”

I fix him in a hard gaze. “You were missing for, like, four days, Jonathan.”

He shrugs. “We had a few beers.”

He won’t look at me as he says it, which makes something in my gut tighten uncomfortably. “What’s going on?”

His eyes go all wide and innocent as he turns to me. “I got drunk, passed out, woke up, got drunker, passed out—”

“Stop!” I say, shoving him away. “You have no idea how scared everyone was. We thought Ben might have killed you.”

He rolls his eyes. “Ben’s cool with everything, Red.”

I feel my eyes widen. “He had someone shoot at us, Jonathan! That’s pretty goddamn far from ‘cool’ in my book.”

He shakes his head. “It wasn’t him.”

“What the hell are you talking about? Of course it was him!”

He shakes his head again. “Marcus said no.”

“Then who?”

“No fucking clue,” he says with a shrug. “I’ve had boyfriends of at least twenty chicks threaten to kill me when they’ve caught me with their women. Could have been any one of them.”

“Be serious. That was not a jealous boyfriend.” I stumble on a tree root because I’m not watching the path, and Jonathan catches me.

“Think about it, Red,” he says, steadying me on my feet. “I’m the one that got shot, not you. Do you really think Ben’s guys would have shitty aim?”

I chew my lip as I think about that, and when I look ahead, I see Blake fire me a glance over his shoulder. Could he be wrong about all of it? Maybe Ben’s not after me at all. “I don’t know, Jonathan. I’m not buying the jealous boyfriend thing.”

He shrugs again.

When we stumble back to the cabin, Blake starts a fire in the outdoor fire ring near the driveway, then sets a grate over it. It’s not too long later that he’s cooking and we all have a beer in our hands. My job is to flip the corn while he grills burgers and dogs.

The sun drops behind the tall pines as we eat, and as we’re finishing, it disappears altogether, leaving us in the flickering glow of the campfire. We’re well into our third or fourth beers when Jonathan ducks into the cabin and comes out with his guitar. We talk and joke, and Jonathan plays, and I’m cracking up at something stupid he said when I realize this is the most I’ve let down since I got thrown out of my parents’ house over two months ago. My cheeks ache and I’ve given myself the hiccups from laughing so hard.

It’s only when I go to the ice chest near the stairs for another beer that I realize Blake has retreated to the Escalade, a good thirty feet away. He’s sitting on the hood, leaning back against the windshield, watching us. The faint hum of country music makes it to my ears over the cacophony of my friends, and I can’t help but smile.

He tips his head at me and I wave back, then head to the campfire and sit on a blanket on the ground.

Ginger is blowing the flames off her torched marshmallow as Jonathan wrestles the stick out of her hand. “You’re doing that totally wrong,” he says. “It’s supposed to be golden brown.”

“Not in my family,” she slurs, grabbing the stick back and nearly falling off the stump she’s sitting on in her inebriated state. “This is how we do it.”

Jonathan drops onto my blanket as Ginger sticks her marshmallow back into the flames. He picks up his guitar and starts plucking out the melody of his pizza topping song, making up new lyrics involving the carcinogens in burnt marshmallows.

We laugh and give each other shit, and after a few more beers, when Jonathan and Ginger start giving the rest of us a lesson in sex ed, we tell them to get a room and send them off to bed.

Izzy’s eyes shift to Blake, who’s still on the hood of his car, then back to me. She wraps her arms around me and props her chin on my shoulder. “So, what’s the real deal with you and Secret Agent Man?”

I shrug. “He says Ben was mixed up in a lot of bad stuff.”

“But none of that really has to do with what’s going on between you,” she says, nudging her shoulder into mine. “He’s been sitting on that car for the past two hours, staring at you.”

“Because that’s his job, Izzy.”

She shakes her head slowly. “There’s nothing ‘business’ about the look he’s giving you, girlfriend.”

As if he knows we’re talking about him, he kicks off the car and saunters over to the fire ring. He stomps at the embers with the heel of his boot. “You going to be up for a while? I’ll put some more wood on.”

Izzy stands and stretches. “Jonathan and Ginger are probably passed out by now. I think I’ll crash too.” She flashes me a secret smile as she heads to the stairs.

Blake settles onto a rock at the edge of the circle and pokes at the embers with a stick. He’s more causal than usual today, in jeans and a black T-shirt with an open flannel shirt over the top. He looks very woodsy. And it’s totally hot.

“What did Jonathan say?” he asks.

I hook my elbows around my knees and draw them closer. “He said he was just getting drunk with Marcus.”

“For four days,” he says, flicking me a skeptical look.

I nod.

He pokes at the fire again, then gets up and tosses another log on. “And you believe him?”

“I don’t know.” I want to. Jonathan’s never given me a reason not to trust him. “He thinks that guy who ran us off the road might have been a jealous boyfriend.”

Blake’s jaw tightens as gives me a doubtful tip of his head, like maybe I’m too naive to live. “He ran you off the road and shot at your after you told Jonathan you were testifying against Arroyo.”

I shake my head. “Think about it. Jonathan’s the one who got shot, not me. Do you really think Ben’s guys would have missed me?” I hear the defensiveness in my tone and stuff it down. I get that Blake is just trying to protect me. I need to cut him some slack.

He kicks at the log with the heel of his boot and it bursts into flames. “It was dark and you were a moving target. It’s an easy miss, even for a decent marksman.”

The golden firelight flickers off his features, softening some lines and making others sharper. He’s breathtakingly, heart-stoppingly gorgeous, and my fingers dig into the blanket automatically, as if I need to tether myself to the ground or I’ll launch right into him. To keep from staring . . . and probably drooling, I lie back on my blanket and look up at the stars.

For the first few years after Mom married Greg, before the boys were born, he used to take us camping in Yosemite Meadows. That’s when I realized the sky is a flickering blanket of stars when you’re away from the city lights. Tonight, it’s as beautiful as I’ve ever seen it. Maybe it’s nearly a month in captivity that makes my freedom feel so much bigger now. Or maybe it’s the vastness of it all that makes me feel so small. As I watch, a shooting star streaks across the night sky, and then another.

“It’s a meteor shower tonight. Possibly a meteor storm.” Blake steps around behind me and sits next to me on my blanket. “It really started to pick up about half an hour ago. They’re predicting a ZHR of at least four hundred per hour.”

I sit up, propping myself on my hands behind me. Between his country music, cowboy boots, and infuriating tendencies, I forget he’s a genius. “Great, Mr. Rocket Scientist. Now can you repeat that in English?”

He stifles a smile and stares up into the sky. “NASA has been predicting this shower since 2009, when they discovered Earth would pass through the debris trail of comet 209P. The ZHR is the zenithal hourly rate, or the rate at which debris from the trail will fall through our atmosphere. They say it could peak around one A.M. at up to a thousand, which would bump it from a meteor shower to a meteor storm.”

“So, that’s a lot?”

His eyes turn from the sky to mine and he nods slowly. “Yeah. It’s a lot. And with the crescent moon, we should get a pretty good show.”

“Do you ever regret it?”

His eyebrows rise as he lowers himself onto an elbow. “There are myriad things I regret. You’ll have to be more specific.”

“Leaving Astronaut Candidate training. Giving up your dream.”

He stiffens momentarily. “Cooper told you that?”

I nod.

He blows out a breath and rolls onto his back, lacing his fingers behind his head and gazing at the stars. “Sometimes.”

“Do you think you would have made it? I mean, aren’t there a lot of people shooting for just a few spots?”

“There are. Whether I would have made it or not is irrelevant now. I chose to do something different with my life.”

“Because of your dad.”

He shoots me a glance and his jaw tenses. “Remind me to put a muzzle on Cooper.”

“Thank you for finding Jonathan.”

“I didn’t. Arroyo’s people just let him go.” There’s suspicion in his eyes as he says it, and I hate that he still doesn’t trust Jonathan.

“Listen, Blake. Jonathan is a good guy. Really. He’s just sometimes . . . a little misguided. He would never do anything that he knows would put me in danger. And he swears Ben isn’t after me.”

His expression hardens. “He’s lucky he didn’t get himself killed.”

“Just cut him a little slack, okay? I mean, even if it was Ben’s guys, he’s the one who got shot because of all this.”

His lips press into a line, but he nods. “I invited him on your field trip, didn’t I?”

“Thanks for that. And, thanks for all this,” I add with a wave of my hand at our surroundings. “This is pretty amazing.”

His gaze travels back up to the stars. “It is. I’ve always loved it up here.”

“Did you come up here with your father?” I don’t even know why I asked, but I have the sudden need to know.

He bends a knee and props his other ankle on it. “No. It was my mom’s parents’ place.”

“Oh,” I say. “Were they divorced? Your parents?”

He gives his head a shake. “My mom died when I was born.”

My hand goes to my mouth as I gasp.

“My sister and I came to spend a week every summer at my dad’s in San Francisco, and then we’d come up here with our grandparents for a few weeks before heading back to Texas.”

I prop up an elbow on my side, facing him. “Why didn’t you live with your dad?”

“He was busy,” he says, like it’s no big deal, but there’s something sad in his voice.

“I’m sorry,” I say softly, feeling a tug at my heart. “If it’s any consolation, I’ve never even met my real dad. At least, not when I was old enough to remember it.”

He rolls to face me. “Not to sound harsh, but maybe that’s better.”

I can see why it might seem like that from his perspective, so I don’t give him shit.

Neither of us moves for a really long time. We just lay here staring at each other, and I feel my pulse gradually quicken at the need I see growing in his gaze.

“Sam,” he says, his jaw tight and a warning in his voice, and I realize I’ve moved closer.

I break our gaze and roll onto my back, staring up into the night sky and trying to shake the desire pulsing through me.

But then he groans and in one fluid motion rolls us so I’m pinned beneath him. He crushes his mouth to mine and I claw at him, needing him closer even though there’s no space between us. His kiss is deep and desperate, and it’s everything I’ve been waiting for. Our tongues tangle, and there’s nothing gentle about any of it. Our desperation for each other only feeds on itself the deeper we go, becoming unbearable. My whole body buzzes at the current surging between us, forcing a frantic moan up my throat as I arch into him.