Breath on Embers (3 page)

Don’t make this more than it is.
What the fuck did that mean, anyway? Don’t make this anything more than her using him for sex?

There was no way he’d take her at face value and maintain the status quo. Not at the darkest time of the year.

“And you, my friend, have a classic case of sour grapes,” he said to Tim. He buttoned his peacoat, then patted around the collar. “Where the fuck is my scarf?” he said.

“Only pussies wear scarves,” Tim said, an amused light in his eyes. “British actors. Fashion designers. Investment bankers. You know...pussies.”

“Says the man drinking a strawberries and cream Frappucino,” Ronan retorted.

“If you’d eaten what I ate two nights ago, you’d be drinking one, too.”

“Fuck off,” Ronan said with a laugh.

On that note, they parted ways. Ronan strolled toward Central Park as he sipped his coffee. The sights and sounds of the season were everywhere, from holiday displays in shop windows to wreaths on taxi cab’s grilles to the red Starbucks cups. He loved the city at Christmas, lit up against winter’s long dark cycle. This was Thea’s first December here, so she wouldn’t know the beauty of Christmas in Manhattan. She’d moved to the city in February to work for Cooper Bensonhurst, the investment house, as a systems architect. Whatever that was. And she had grieving, shadowed eyes. The dark depths in them drew him as much as their breathless, heated encounters.

He paused at the corner of Eighty-Fifth and Madison, outside the Coach store, and stared absently at a male mannequin wearing a dark blue-and-gray tartan scarf. Tree decorating was probably too intimate, too big a step outside the bounds of hooking up. So he’d start with something less threatening. They went out occasionally. This wasn’t just a booty call relationship. They’d had coffee, gotten dinner beforehand at Caffe Grazie or one of the restaurants lining Second Avenue. Not often enough to call this dating, but they’d done it.

Mind made up, he crossed Eighty-Fifth and headed for the downtown buses running along Fifth Avenue, and took it as a good sign that an M2 Express bus pulled up as he crossed Fifth. Traffic was light, and fifteen minutes later he stood outside Cooper Bensonhurst’s Midtown offices at Fifty-Second and Fifth. People streamed out of the revolving doors and headed purposefully through the mild winter air for subway stations, buses or very expensive parking garages. He’d finished the coffee and bought a new five-dollar scarf from a street vendor working the corner before Thea appeared.

She wore layers that made him want to unwrap her. A dove-gray scarf wound around her neck, trapping her loose hair against a dark blue peacoat similar to his own. Under the coat’s hem peeked a bright green knit dress over brown leggings, knee high brown socks, and brown boots. As she tucked the ever-present earbuds into one ear, she turned east, probably intending to catch the Lexington line home to her apartment at 96th, probably unaware that the suit who followed her out the door nearly walked into a lamppost in an effort to catch her eye.

“That’s the perfect outfit,” Ronan called, pitching his voice to carry.

She stopped. Turned. Let the earbuds trail from the clip attaching them to the big brown leather bag slung across her body. He couldn’t read her face in the darkness, but she strolled toward him. “Perfect for what?”

“Skating,” he said.

She cocked her head and considered him, her eyes shadowed even with the streetlight pooled around her. “Did I miss a text from you?”

“No. It’s a nice night. Calm. Not too cold. I decided to go skating in Rockefeller Center and thought you might like to come. It’s a traditional New York winter activity,” he said, carefully avoiding the nuclear word
Christmas
. Like nothing had happened a week ago.

One dark blond eyebrow lifted. “You know how to ice skate,” she said.

“I played hockey from six to sixteen. Long Island leagues are brutal,” he said, relieved she hadn’t turned him down flat. “Don’t worry if you can’t. Most of the skaters are tourists and little kids falling all over each other. No big deal. I’ll keep you on your feet.”

After a long pause she turned again for Fifth Avenue but tipped her head to indicate he should fall in beside her. They strolled to the entrance between two buildings along Fifth. Light-wrapped trees in planters towered over faded wood benches facing the shops, and parents and kids streamed in and out of the two-story Lego store. Thea paused by the brass railing and peered down at the rink below. As the sun set people headed indoors, away from the darkness, away from the night. He took her hand and led her around the rink to the elevator, keeping his body between her and the gigantic Christmas tree.

Downstairs he rented skates for both of them, then stowed their shoes and her bag in a rental locker. At the door he glided onto the ice, then turned back to help her, only to find her skating backward away from him, into the center of the nearly-empty rink.

The small smile on her face called a chuckle from him. “A ringer, huh?”

“Figure skating lessons until I was fourteen,” she said archly.

He wrapped one arm around her waist and deftly switched positions so he skated backward with her held against him, ballroom dance-style. “So you can do all the fancy footwork, and the triple axel, triple toe stuff from the Olympics?”

“Not anymore. I gave it up when I grew seven inches in two years and totally lost my center of gravity.” She glanced at the gilded statue. “It’s very cool, though. Very New York.”

He faced forward and took her hand. “Prometheus,” he said. “Bringing fire to mankind.”

“How do you know?”

“You know my apartment used to be my uncle’s, right?”

“Yes. Trying to find an affordable apartment in Manhattan taught me all about rent control,” she said.

He paid less for his apartment than some of the building’s residents paid to garage their cars. It was the only way he could afford to live on the Upper East Side on a firefighter’s salary, and they’d carry him out of that apartment feet first. “My mom used to put me and my sister on the train on Long Island and Uncle Lance would meet us at Penn Station and take us shopping, skating, to see Santa, whatever. When I got older and my dad and I weren’t seeing eye to eye, I’d come in and decorate his tree with Uncle Lance on Christmas Eve, so he wasn’t alone. Anyway, he loved Manhattan, couldn’t believe my city-raised mother chose to live on Long Island, in the ’burbs. He took us on tours, and the art at Rockefeller Center was one of the tours.”

“We used to watch the Thanksgiving Day parade when we were kids,” she offered. “I used to dream about going to Macy’s and seeing the windows decorated for...”

Her voice trailed off as the thing-they-wouldn’t-talk-about came up again. He didn’t say anything. A little girl wearing a pink skater costume swirled to the center of the rink and did a passable spin.

“How about that?” he asked. “Can you spin?”

“I always got dizzy. I was better at jumps.”

The rink was nearly empty. “Go on, then,” he said. “Show me what you’ve got.”

“The rink’s not really big enough,” she said.

He considered her, assessing her state of mind, whether she wanted to be persuaded or not. “A kiss for a jump.”

“My mother used to bribe me with hot cocoa.”

He knew a hint when he heard one, and seeing her like this, it was easy to believe she was okay. “Fine,” he said. “One hot cocoa for one jump.”

“And a kiss.”

“No doubt.”

She pushed away from him, her skates working smoothly against ice grooved by an afternoon of skaters, then executed a neat single toe loop in the middle of the rink. His heart leaped at the sight of her lean, leggy body turning perfectly on its axis, skates mere inches above the ice, her hair streaming in the wake of her move. She landed and extended her leg in a self-conscious flourish to his applause.

“I haven’t done that in ages,” she said when she skated back to him.

“Then you were due,” he murmured, and reached up to claim her hand.

Three moms with a pack of laughing, falling, shrieking kids stumbled out onto the ice. Ronan guided her into the herd now moving in a slow loop around the rink. He took advantage of the relaxed atmosphere, and said, “The second year is harder.”

She stiffened next to him. “What?”

“The second year of grieving. It’s harder than the first. Everyone remembers the first anniversary without a husband or the first Thanksgiving without a father. By the time the second one comes around, you’re supposed to be over it. Everyone else is, but you’re not. So it’s harder. Lonelier.”

She’d been in his apartment, seen the folded flag in its polished mahogany box, given to him after Uncle Lance died in the South Tower on 9/11. She didn’t know he’d lost his best friend to a collapsing building three years ago, or how long it took him to emerge from that fog.

Until right around St. Patrick’s Day, in fact.

“It’s easier to act like I’ve moved on,” she said finally. “No one understands. I don’t meet their expectations. Half the time people say I’ve gotten this great second chance to find love all over again, like Jesse was a starter house with a cracked foundation and a badly designed kitchen.”

He controlled his wince. “It gets worse around the holidays, especially if they were a big deal,” he said as they glided past Prometheus, gleaming even in the darkness, carrying light and flame in his hand.

Her gaze remained forward. “We’re both from big Catholic families, so it was a huge deal. Cookies and presents and caroling, and Advent candles everywhere. We did it up right for the nieces and nephews. Jesse used to leave bells in the snow, like they fell off the reindeers’ harnesses, and get the kids to find them Christmas morning. We got engaged on Christmas,” she said, a little stiffly. “He went down on one knee and proposed in front of his whole family.”

“Sounds romantic,” he said, then caught her sidelong glance. “It does.”

“It’s awkward to talk to the guy I’m sleeping with about my romantic-minded husband.”

“Not for me.”

She considered this for one loop of the rink, then continued. “He died the Wednesday after Thanksgiving. I had to come home early to get back to work. End of year, and a big implementation just before the holidays, which always go wrong and always suck. He was driving back in a storm. A big SUV going too fast for the road conditions skidded into an overpass. His Prius got caught between the Tahoe and the concrete.”

He’d worked enough bad car wrecks for her words to bloom into vivid images, and this time he did wince. She didn’t seem to notice. “His mother wanted to do Christmas for the grandkids, and she’s old-school Catholic, convinced he’s in a better place. She lit candles for him. I...didn’t take it well.”

He knew too well the torrential, monumental grief under the clipped phrases. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“I’m not...good with emotions. Hence the therapist my family insisted I see when I moved.” The fingers of her free hand drifted up to her ear. “I loved him. I loved him like I’ve never loved anyone or anything else.”

And that kind of once-in-a-lifetime love would never come around again. That was the thought she didn’t say.

“He sounds like a great guy,” Ronan said finally. He knew better than to get in a battle with a dead man. He’d lose. Or worse, he’d win and in the process defeat something vital in Thea. “Want to get going? We can pick up hot chocolate on the way to the subway. Your great quadruple lutz earned it.”

“Single toe loop,” she said, amused.

“I knew that.”

They skated to the exit and tottered into the changing room. Thea stamped into her boots while Ronan returned the skates.

“I earned something else, too,” Thea said as she looked up at him.

The colored lights on the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lay against her pale cheeks. Her eyes, the color of dark, smoldering ashes, sent a bolt of heat straight to his cock, but he was picking up the signals now. Music drowned out life, the specialty of that acid rock she blasted into her ears all the time. So did sex. But he could do more with sex. So much more.

“Continue to be a very good girl,” he said, then slid his hand into the tumble of hair and scarf to cup the back of her head and hold her for a quick, flickering kiss that made her sigh. “You’ll get exactly what you’ve earned.”

Chapter Three

“But for now,” Ronan said as he led her into the concourse under Rockefeller Center, “you’ll have to settle for hot cocoa.”

“Make it a peppermint mocha,” Thea replied.

“With whip?” Ronan asked.

“Definitely with whip,” she said.

Ronan manfully braved the long line at Starbucks. Thea stayed outside the crowded store, watching people stream through the concourse to the subway station while she waited. Out of habit she pulled out her phone to check the time and her work email, but the screen opened to the texts she’d exchanged with her sister over the course of the afternoon she’d spent in Cooper Bensonhurst’s data center, deploying a new financial system onto the servers. The data center suited her perfectly. Dimly lit because so few people ventured inside, the room was kept cold to prevent millions of dollars in hardware from overheating, and filled with humming machinery comprising the investment bank’s vast electronic empire. Most people avoided the data center, but Thea volunteered for long hours there, setting up new hardware and upgrading or installing software.

The room shrouded her in a vast, dark cocoon until her sister’s text lit up her phone.

Erin: Are you coming home for Christmas?

Me: I can’t. Big implementation. I volunteered to work for Brent and Lisa so they could be with their families.

Erin: What about YOUR family? What about Jesse’s? We love you, and miss you.

Me: I’m the most recent hire. I can’t get out of this.

A couple of hours passed, long enough for Thea to kick off the configuration scripts for the new software package, and fool herself into thinking Erin had accepted her excuse and moved on. On every level that mattered, her sister meant well. She loved Thea, and desperately wanted to help her get on with her life. But Thea couldn’t cope with the idea of Christmas, let alone a big O’Malley/Moretti reunion over the holidays. One last text arrived just before she’d left work.

Erin: Jesse’s mother had a memorial mass on the 3rd. I lit a candle for him, and for you.

The third was the anniversary of his death, and the text opened a gaping black maw inside her. She needed Avenged Sevenfold, had one earbud in, when Ronan’s voice had her turning before she even recognized him as the speaker. Something about that deep male voice got her attention even through “Nightmare” and her internal chaos.

He’d become her favorite distraction because sex fought back the void she tightrope-walked over every waking minute, which was a problem because it wasn’t fair to use him that way if he was talking about decorating trees together. But the skating idea was carefully framed as a winter activity in Manhattan, not a Christmas tradition, and he used his big shoulders and height to mostly block the sight of the tree on the way to the rink. She could get through the skating for more sex with Ronan, and it wouldn’t do to appear too anti-Christmas, like she wasn’t coping. She hadn’t planned to have fun hacking around the rink, doing her first jump in fifteen years.

She stared down at the phone in her hand. There was one last text message. Erin always did like to get the last word.

I wish you’d come home forever.

Emotion surged inside her, too tumbled and powerful to identify unique feelings, but the aftermath left her shaking. Her sister wasn’t trying to be hurtful. She was trying to show how much she loved Jesse, and Thea. It was the right thing to do, the appropriate thing, the thing everyone would see and understand. It wasn’t fleeing Columbus for Manhattan. It wasn’t refusing to go home.

“Here you go,” Ronan said, handing her a tall peppermint mocha, then glanced down at the phone in her hand. “Everything okay?”

She took the cup, but couldn’t meet his eyes. “Everything’s fine.”

They took the stairs to the platform. Ronan was native enough to know exactly where to stand in order to emerge from the train right next to the exit; Thea blindly followed his broad back through rush-hour commuters and stopped when he did, then let the clamor and jostle of the platform rush into the void inside her. Ronan didn’t even try to talk over the noise. By the time a B local train arrived, they’d finished their drinks and stood with a crowd of other passengers impatiently waiting for the local train. Taking her hand, Ronan shouldered his way into the train and wedged them into a sliver of space at the rear of the car. The cheery automated warning reminded them to stand clear of the closing doors, then the train lurched out of the station.

“Rush hour,” he said, looking around at the people crammed shoulder-to-shoulder, steadfastly ignoring each other as the train lumbered into the Seventh Avenue station. “I don’t know how you stand it every day.”

She stood close enough to him for her lifted shoulder to bump against his hard chest. “When the weather’s good, I walk.”

“Forty-plus blocks?”

“And three avenues, but most of it’s through Central Park,” she said. Some days she needed to walk, head down, music slamming against her ears.

Gripping the overhead rail with one hand, Ronan stood behind her, his other arm wrapped protectively around her, using his whole body to keep her steady as they swayed and clattered up the line to Columbus Circle. People streamed out of the car doors, shouldering aside passengers in search of the few available seats. In moments the car was as packed as before, and making its way up to Seventy-Second when Ronan’s hand worked into the flap closing her peacoat, then dropped to cover her mound.

She peered back over her shoulder at him, but aside from one quick, teasing glance at her, he stared determinedly forward as his thumb brushed gently, rhythmically over her mound. Even through her knitted dress and leggings sensation pulsed through her core, heating and softening her.

“What are you doing?” she asked mildly.

“Giving you what you earned,” he murmured. He smelled like chocolate and mint and Ronan, that warm, musky scent of hot skin and a very subtle cologne that made her want to nuzzle and lick his throat.

“I earned a kiss,” she said.

The train screeched to a halt at the station, and in the confusion of people exiting the train, Ronan worked his hand under the elastic waistband of her low-cut leggings. “You’re going to get so much more than that,” he said.

Thea grabbed hold of one of the poles running down the center of the subway car. The move gave her something to hold on to and shifted her brown leather messenger bag to shield Ronan’s questing hand from view. She glanced quickly in the plastic windows but the crush of people was such that she could see nothing of her own torso, only shoulders and coats and bags, and people utterly lost in their own worlds. While her world slowly shrank to consist of Ronan’s deft fingertips. Parting soft, hot folds, stroking into the wet heat he found there. A little growl rumbled in his chest, felt more than heard over the noisy clatter of the train. When his fingertip brushed against her clit, a delicate shudder rolled through her, and her eyes closed.

With each slow, focused touch heat slipped like honey along her nerves. Her nipples tightened under layers of bra, shirt, dress and coat. Emotion and desire melded inside her, coursed through her veins, seeped into every cell, driving her heart to a rapid, thudding pace she couldn’t bear. “Where are we?” she whispered.

“Coming up on Eighty-Sixth,” he said.

The train ground to a halt in the darkness of the tunnel, and the conductor’s voice squawked into the crowded car, apologizing for the inconvenience. Muffled grumbles and shifting seeped into Thea’s heated consciousness.

“We’re stopped,” Ronan said even as his fingertip kept up its
slowslowslow
stroking. “Shouldn’t be long.”

She didn’t look around so much as use her peripheral vision to see if anyone had noticed Ronan’s improper hand. No one was paying attention. Heads were bent over the
Times
, the
New Yorker
, fashion magazines, ereaders, eyes closed to absorb music through headphones or gain strength for the evening to come, or just lost in their own inner worlds. Unlike Columbus, where after Jesse’s death two extended families watched and commented on her every move, in the city it was possible to stand hip-to-hip with fifty strangers in a subway car and get stroked breathlessly close to orgasm, and have no one notice. Heart racing, she bit her lip as she shuddered up to the peak, the car jerked to a halt at the station and Ronan’s fingertip moved a quarter of an inch to the right.

“Let’s go,” he said, using the shifting bodies to cover pulling his hand out of her leggings. He took her hand to lead her out of the train, through the turnstiles and up the stairs, into the mid-December darkness. The line for the crosstown bus extended out of the shelter and down the block, and all the taxis’ signs were dark. A tall, silent presence in the city’s odd blend of darkness and light, Ronan turned and headed across Central Park West, into the park itself. A few intrepid souls walked through the park in the winter but most preferred the crosstown bus or taxis. Light pooled from the replica lamps spaced out along the walkways leading deeper into the park’s dark interior. The starry sky peeked through the bare tree limbs as they crossed the drive and passed the playground at the northwest curve of the Great Lawn. The brightly lit Midtown skyline loomed over the Belvedere Castle at the south end of the lawn, but inside the vast space of Central Park, blackness sidled along Thea’s nerves and pooled in her chest.

She stopped abruptly. “I want my kiss.”

Ronan sat down on one of the green benches encircling the octagonal bricks and dormant grass of the oval lawn, then pulled Thea to straddle his lap. She flattened her gloved hands on either side of his face as his big hand gripped the back of her head and pulled her mouth down to his. Chocolate and mint blended with lust, made him delicious. His hand tightened on her skull to hold her in place as his tongue rubbed against hers, retreated, then his teeth closed over her lower lip. She gasped in a breath and ground her needy, aching center against his cock, rock-hard and straining in his jeans.

“You don’t want a kiss,” he growled when she backed off to inhale jerkily.

She didn’t want to stare down darkness, and this would help. For better access she spread her knees and rubbed against him, pausing only when he reached down to adjust his shaft in his jeans. Each greedy swivel of her hips edged the tension higher, higher, until she panted into his mouth. He gripped her hips and helped her take what she needed from him, then swallowed her triumphant little cries.

Her head dropped forward to rest on his shoulder, blocking out the view of the NYPD Precinct, housed in the old stables at the north end of the lawn. The bench slats dug into her knees, but she didn’t move.

“Want to tell me what that was all about?” he asked, his mild tone belying his heart, thudding fast and hard in his chest.

Why not? They’d already talked about Jesse. “I was texting my sister,” she said.

“And?”

“She wanted to know if I’d be home for Christmas.”

“Ah.” Under her, his big body didn’t change, but he did tug on her hair gently but insistently until she looked at him. “You don’t want to go home for Christmas.”

She looked into his eyes. “My coworkers have families. Kids. I don’t.”

“And?”

She left out the part about the mass for the dead, the candles. “Then she wanted to know when I was coming home for good.”

His gaze sharpened. “Your job’s here,” he said.

“I could get a job there, no problem. My former boss calls every couple of months just to stay in touch. System architects are hard to find. Good ones are even harder to find. I’m good.”

“Manhattan’s a nice place to live,” he said defensively.

“According to my family, people visit here. They don’t live here,” she said.

“Eight million people live here,” he pointed out.

“Normal people don’t live here.”

His teeth flashed white in the darkness. “I actually can’t argue with that,” he said.

Heat seeped from his body to hers through the layers of their clothes, but she wasn’t wearing enough to make a prolonged stay outside after dark pleasant. She wanted to get moving again before he asked any more questions, and the vast black sky, visible above the expansive Great Lawn, threatened to engulf her.

She shimmied against his erection. “What are you going to do about that?”

“Nothing here,” he said. “I’ve already taken too many chances with you. I want to get you home, in my bed, under me.”

That’s exactly what she wanted. “Then let’s go,” she said. She bent her head, flicked her tongue along his lower lip, pressed kisses into the corner of his mouth, teased him until his arm tightened around her waist. He surged to his feet and began walking toward the northeast entrance to the lawn, all the while holding her so the tips of her boots dangled inches above the ground. With a whimper she locked her legs around his hips and deepened the kiss, until a throat cleared loudly in front of them. Thea turned to see a man holding his daughter’s hand as they walked. The gray jumper and red-checked pinafore from one of the Upper East Side’s private schools peeked under the hem of the girl’s zipped coat, her eyes primly forward.

“Sorry,” Ronan muttered. He eased Thea down until she found her footing. They crossed the drive behind the glass walls showcasing the Temple of Dendur at the Met, and followed the path to the Eighty-Sixth Street exit. “You make me crazy,” he said matter-of-factly as they waited for the light or a break in traffic.

He made her sane. The thought rose unbidden into her brain, only to dissolve again under the lust sparking along her nerves. Ronan’s stride lengthened as they crossed the street and hurried up the block and into his building. By the sixth floor they had the elevator to themselves, and by the time the doors opened on the ninth she had his shirt loosened from his jeans and her hand gripping his cock. Both of his hands were fisted in her hair as he kissed her, clearly caught in some feedback loop between their fused mouths and his erect shaft. They bounced off the mirrored wall opposite the elevators, stumbled into his apartment and slammed the door hard enough to make the windows tremble. Ronan shucked out of his coat and scarf, then shoved her coat to the floor. Thea shed her boots and leggings in the hallway, then followed him into the bedroom. His erection jutted from his opened jeans as he yanked a condom from his nightstand then fell back on the bed. Thea knelt beside him while he rolled down the condom, then he pulled her to straddle him.