Breath on Embers (8 page)

We’re doing it.

Except she couldn’t possibly be part of what happened between
them
. She was half-dead, a corpse re-animated and walking around Manhattan. Any man who fit certain specifications would trigger the same reaction. It didn’t matter which motherboard you plugged the processor into. No, what mattered was the spark crossing the wires, the sexual chemistry that triggered biologically based responses.

Now you’re lying to yourself. You know that’s not true. The right components increase processing speed—

The swinging door opened. Thea automatically jumped and tried to step back from Ronan, but he tightened his grip and held her close; but it was just Tim, without the hat, beard and pillow-stuffed coat. Heat filled his face when he saw Thea and Ronan in what could only be called a clinch, but it wasn’t the embarrassed blush from before. It was purely male, a predatory reptile brain response that sent a little flicker of heat skittering along her nerves, pooling in all the right places. Oh yes, her body knew how to hold back the season, the darkest nights of the year. Deafening music. Dark, explicit sex.

Her body knew.

Tim cleared his throat. “We’re waiting for you.”

“Give me a minute,” Ronan said.

With one more lingering glance, Tim backed out of the door, leaving them in silence.

Thea went up on tiptoes and put her mouth next to Ronan’s ear. “How about he comes over, too? I’ve got the right costume,” she whispered.

Her hip was pressed to Ronan’s cock, so she felt it pulse in response to the low-voiced words. His grip tightened even more, holding her up on her toes, her full length snugged against his. “What’s going on, Thea?” he asked, his tight muscles at odds with the mild tone.

“My sister’s pregnant.”

* * *

Ah, hell, Thea.

On her tiptoes she was nearly as tall as he was, so Ronan could look directly into her eyes, searching to be sure he understood every nuance swirling in the dim, close air of the church basement. The day’s events ticked off in his brain. She’d made cookies, served a hot meal to homeless and low-income families in a cheerfully Christmas room, and helped Santa hand out presents. That kind of afternoon crashed the most relentlessly optimistic extrovert.

And life was going on around her, without her. Husbands died, sisters had babies, life went on, with or without you.

Dark-eyed, pale Thea was near to flashpoint.

Holding her snugly against his body helped assess her. Heat thumped under her skin, poured from her body into his, setting off a firestorm reaction. She was so alive the electric connection between them nearly stopped his heart, but she didn’t let herself feel it. Frustration warred with admiration inside him. He had to respect that strength, that willpower that kept her immersed in grief, but at the same time it infuriated him.

Because he was half in love with her. With this passionate woman who felt so deeply and hid so much.
Oh, fuck.

Sheer terror coursed through him, leaving him light-headed. Never before had he felt that way over a woman. He’d teetered on that edge when he asked her to help decorate his tree. The hot, wild, intense December wore the ground out from underneath him. Conditions were worsening for Thea, and he was falling. Hard.

“Congratulations,” he said, and relaxed the arm holding her to him. “That’s good news.”

“It is,” she said. “They’ve been trying for a third child ever since my niece was born four years ago.”

And maybe Thea and her husband had been trying back then, too. She’d given two hard, necessary years to grief, but grief would take so much more if she couldn’t find her way out of this dark well. He’d lost too many people to let Thea fall into darkness. Not this time. Not on his watch.

“Why do you want to have Tim over?” As if he didn’t know. As if it didn’t turn him on. Heat arced between the three of them when Tim walked through the door. His body to Thea’s, Thea’s to Tim’s, and back again. She wore a pair of jeans and a thin gray fleece pullover, and the added warmth of her skin flowed through his uniform pants, into his veins. He bent close to her ear and murmured, “Am I boring you?”

A ripple of response skittered across her shoulders, then she shrugged. “You say that what happens between us is different. Unique. Let’s test your hypothesis.”

“We’re not a science experiment,” he said.

“Maybe it’s exactly the way it was with my husband.”

So was that good? Bad? Indifferent? He avoided the trap, and struck clean and hard. “How could it be? I’m not your husband.”

He didn’t say the obvious, that while her husband was dead, he was right here in front of her, alive and so hot for her that only his bone-deep Catholic respect for anything
church
kept him from dragging her into a closet and fucking her. But he thought it, felt the words materialize as dangerous energy in the air.

I’m alive. He’s not. I’m here.

But you’re not.

Be here, Thea. Be here, with me, now.

As if she read his thoughts, she reached for the earbuds again, only to realize they weren’t on her body. “I’m not bored,” she said thinly. “I’m just curious to know if he can back up that dirty mouth of his. Unless that’s too kinky for you.”

“I can handle a threesome,” he said, darkly amused. “But this may tell you something you don’t want to know about yourself. About us.”

She blinked, like maybe he was supposed to go all alpha male on her ass and flatly refuse, then handcuff her to his bed until she came to her senses.

Try again, Thea. There’s nowhere I won’t go with you. So go ahead and try numbing yourself with this. It won’t work.

“Would Tim—?”

“Yes.”

“Then that’s what I want. Tonight.”

He considered her until heat bloomed under her creamy skin. “Fine. But we do this by my rules. No music. All in or all out, it doesn’t matter, but you’re not doing it because you’re lost in some headspace where I can’t feel you. You need to be awake and aware through the whole thing.”

At that she took a step back, but he still had one hand tangled in her hair. He held her for a hot, slippery kiss that had her breath shuddering from her lungs. Then he let her go.

“When?”

He shrugged. “Around seven.” She turned to leave, her hands already patting pockets absently in search of the damned iPod. He stopped her with her name. “Thea? It won’t be the same.”

She pushed through the swinging door without a backward glance, leaving him alone in the hallway. He took a couple of deep breaths and thought about the New Year’s Polar Plunge swim off Coney Island. When his erection subsided, he strolled into the empty fellowship hall and up the stairs to the street, where the engine idled.

When they got back to the station he pulled Tim into the duty office and shut the door. “What are you doing tonight?”

Tim slouched into one of the office chairs. “Last-minute Christmas shopping. Why?”

“Remember a couple of weeks ago when you asked me if I’d be up for a threesome with the foodie?”

“Because sex with Thea is so bad you need to get some on the side.” It wasn’t a question, and based on Tim’s stony expression, he’d found his inner white knight.

“Not me,” Ronan said impatiently. “You.”

“Me?” The astonishment on Tim’s face was almost comical. “With you and her?”

“Yeah.”

Tim blew out his breath. “Whose brilliant idea was this?”

“Not mine,” Ronan admitted.

Tim considered him for a long moment. Ronan met his gaze without flinching. “Somehow I don’t think this is in the Knight in Shining Armor handbook,” Tim said.

It wasn’t. “I’m not trying to rescue her. She can rescue herself. I just want to give her a reason to try.”

“You think letting her do this will motivate her?”

He shot Tim a look. “Hello? Remember Thea from St. Patrick’s Day? I don’t
let her
do anything.”

“Point taken,” Tim said. “What’s her story, anyway?”

“Her husband died just after Thanksgiving two years ago.”

A pained grunt escaped Tim. He sat forward and braced his elbows on his knees. “Ouch.”

“Yeah.” He’d been there. Tim had been there. They were FDNY. First responders to scenes of tragedy and death. Leaving aside the personal impact of losing a fellow firefighter, they stared shock and grief in the face all day long.

“You can’t fix that for her, man,” Tim said quietly.

“I’m not trying to fix it for her,” he said, then chucked the coffee cup into the trash. “There is no fix for this. She has to endure it, and somewhere along the line she has to learn to live again. Surviving isn’t the goal. Living is. This is a battle between me and her grief, and I’m going to be the last man standing.”

“Good thing I’d pay to see that fight,” Tim said with a smile, “because it looks like I’m gonna have a ringside seat. When?”

“Around eight,” Ronan said. “My place. We’ll be waiting.”

Chapter Seven

“Thea’s here,” Rick’s voice echoed tinnily through the intercom.

“Send her up,” Ronan said. He opened the door to his apartment, leaned one shoulder against the doorframe, and waited for the elevator doors to slide apart. She must have been alone in the elevator because she arrived almost immediately, stepping out onto the marble tiles in front of the elevator bank. Despite her typical appearance—her down coat over jeans and boots, a scarf wrapped haphazardly around her neck and loose blond hair—she looked different. After a second he copped to it. No earbud cord stretching up through her hair, into her ears.

“Where’s your iPod?” he asked as he hooked his thumbs in the front pockets of his jeans.

She crossed the tile to the carpeted hallway to stand in front of him. “It was in my apron pocket when Nancy took it off at the soup kitchen. Dave thought it was his and took it home by accident. He lives in New Jersey and is off until after New Year’s.”

He did the math; Thea had been without music for five hours. He lifted an eyebrow at her, but didn’t step aside to let her in. “How are you doing without it?”

She looked up at him, her gray eyes unreadable. “I’m not a crack addict whose dealer just went to jail, Ronan. I just like music.”

Uh huh. Thea
liked
music like most human beings
liked
breathing. But she was here, present in front of him. No distractions. Nothing diverting her attention from
right here, right now
. From him. From how they were together.

He straightened away from the doorframe and reached under the scarf for the zipper of her coat. She stood still while he fumbled in warm, soft hair and scarf for the tab, then pulled it down to her waist, enough to see what she wore underneath. A fitted violet cashmere turtleneck.

“You got my text,” he said, his hand still inside her coat, resting at her waist. He’d told her not to wear the Santa’s helper outfit, that he had something else in mind, but she hadn’t responded.

“Yes. I wasn’t sure what to wear instead, so I wore this.”

A door slammed down the hall and a woman appeared with a bin in her hands. She emptied Diet Coke cans into the recycling chute at the end of the hallway, then spared only a single curious glance for Thea and Ronan before disappearing around the corner.

“Can we do this inside?” Thea asked, a hint of amusement lifting one corner of her mouth.

Without a word he stepped back and let her in, closing the door while she took off her coat and hung it on the coatrack. “I lost another scarf,” he said when she hung hers up.

“You don’t seem like the kind of person who loses eight or ten scarves a season,” she remarked.

“I’m not,” he said absently, because without the coat Thea’s long legs and curves arrested his attention. Her hair spilled over her shoulders to her upper arms, the first thing he encountered when he reached out and ran his hand from shoulder to wrist. “Warm and soft,” he said, stroking his thumb over her pulse. He bent his head, not very far as she wore heeled boots, and kissed her. Just a mere brush of his lips over hers, held for a long moment as they breathed together and her wind-chilled lips grew warm under his. “The kind of thing you should always have next to your skin. But you’re a little overdressed for what we have in mind tonight.”

At the word
we
her gaze sharpened. That’s how he was playing this, not him against her, not him and Tim against her, but Thea and Ronan, exploring together. “Where’s Tim?”

“He’s coming over a little later. I wanted some time with you, to get ready.”

Still holding her wrist he pulled her through his dim, quiet apartment toward the bedroom. Traffic on Madison was heavy on a Saturday night, but mere background noise nine stories up. Her gaze flicked to the living room, still bare of any Christmas decorations at all, but she balked in the doorway.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, glancing over his shoulder. He’d lit fat white candles and placed them around the room, two on his nightstand, three on his dresser.

“Those are fire hazards,” she said, her voice high and faint.

“Placed far away from any flammable materials,” he said reasonably. “Carefully monitored by an eight-year veteran of the Fire Department of New York. Two veterans, when Tim shows up.”

“I don’t like candles,” she said.

No shit, given she was staring at them like people stared at venomous snakes. “Care to tell me why?”

She looked at him, her eyes a gray wasteland. “They remind me of funerals.”

The simple comment gave him pause. He thought back over the months with Thea. Most women had candles in their apartments, on the tub or nightstand, used them to mask cooking odors or as centerpieces for dinner. Candles were romantic, a beacon in dark nights of winter, or of the soul.

But not to Thea.

“I’ll blow them out,” he said.

He dropped her hand, crossed first to the nightstand, then to the dresser, and blew out the candles, leaving the room lit only by the ambient light from Madison Avenue when he opened the blinds. Then he stopped beside the bed, and beckoned her to him.

The faint acrid hint of smoke hanging in the air dissipated as she walked toward him. He ran his finger from the top of her turtleneck between her breasts to the hem, resting on her hipbones. “Off.”

Without hesitating, she pulled it over her head and let it drop to the floor. Underneath she wore a dark gray bra, and when she wiggled out of her skintight jeans, boots and socks, a matching pair of briefs remained. The outside air temperature hung around ten degrees but the old Manhattan buildings held heat and he’d turned up the radiator in his bedroom. A little warm for him. Comfortable for Thea.

“We can do better,” he said. He opened the large white box on the bed, and laid out the corset from Idylle, followed by the stockings, a pair of white satin panties and white satin heels.

The corners of her mouth quirked up. “You bought me shoes?”

“The clerk said they’d complete the look, whatever that means,” he said. He never shopped for women outside his family, and for them he bought books and kitchen supplies.

“That means two things. I won’t snag the stockings, which must have cost a fortune, on hardwood floors, and my ass will look a thousand times better in heels.”

“She said the same thing, although much more discreetly. Strip.”

He left two final items in the box. She stepped into the panties while he loosened the laces on the corset and pulled it down over her raised arms, settling it against her ribs. He left her little more breathing room than before, tightening the laces enough to plump her breasts but not so much she’d lose oxygen.

No distractions.

“Come here while you put those on,” he said, and sat on the bed. She sat between his spread legs while she put on the stockings, easing them up each leg to her thigh, adjusting the seam at the back, then slipping her silken foot into each heel. Heat simmered inside him each time she wiggled her ass against his cock. Her skin gave off a soft scent as she moved, something delicately sensual that went straight to his back brain.

She peered over her shoulder through her tangled hair. “Ready?”

He flattened his hand on her abdomen and pulled her back against his erection. “Yes.”

Moving with an easy grace, she straightened in front of him, then stepped just out of arm’s reach. The heels lifted her ass, barely contained by the tiny scrap of satin, and the seam down the backs of her legs lengthened them to almost impossible lengths.

“Well?” she asked, peering over her shoulder again. “Was I right?”

“Yes,” he said again, forcing the word out of his dry throat. “Turn.”

She did, and put her hands on her hips as he treated himself to a long, thorough look up and down her body. The curve of her shoulders peeked through her tousled hair, hanging to the upper edges of the corset and tickling the tops of her breasts. Her hipbones jutted under the lower edge. She tossed her hair back and let him look, no coquettish poses this time. This time it was all Thea, all sex.

“You think he’ll like it?”

A dark laugh huffed from his nose. “Yeah. He’ll like it. But you need one more thing.”

She waited while he removed several yards of white ribbon from the tissue paper left in the box. “Where did you get that?”

“Idylle,” he said. “She produced it without blinking an eye. Turn around.”

He tied a length of ribbon around each wrist, then folded her arms at the base of her spine so her left wrist rested against her right elbow and vice versa, then wove the dangling lengths of ribbon around her forearms until he could tie a neat knot at the opposite wrist. The braided effect matched her elegant demeanor.

She tugged experimentally at the ribbon bindings, then looked over her shoulder at him. In response he idly swept her hair to one side, then wrapped his fingers around her upper arms and bent to kiss her shoulder blade. Shivers raced under his lips as he took his time kissing the soft, warm skin stretched over bone to the nape of her neck. A sharp nip, followed by soothing tongue had her trembling under his touch.

The quick, short buzz from the intercom startled them both. He left her just long enough to tell Rick to send up Tim, then came back. “Ready?”

When she nodded he pulled the blanket and top sheet back, then held her waist and helped her up onto his bed. She knelt in the center, facing the door, and the sight of her, head bowed, arms restrained, sent hot lust streaming through him. When the doorbell rang she looked up through the tousled fall of her hair.

“Better get that,” she said.

* * *

Nearly a year of sleeping with Ronan, and Thea had just begun to explore his depths. Agreeing to a ménage was creative enough. Orchestrating this white innocence/dirty sex scene, down to the heels and the ribbons binding her arms, was in another galaxy altogether.

She could spend a lifetime with Ronan and never get to the end of him. Because he’d taken her idea, her suggestion, and transformed it into something completely unique, and all them. So pretty and poetic, except she was an emotional minefield. Most women would slit their wrists for a man romantic enough to set the scene the way Ronan had, and here she was, freaking out over candles. She had to see this through. For both their sakes, she had to see this through.

For a city that never slept, Manhattan could be eerily quiet, as it was now. As she knelt on the bed, breasts and waist compressed, arms restrained, her heart thumped in her ears in counterpoint to her breathing, short and shallow, seemingly weighed down by the silence of Ronan’s apartment. Without her music, without Ronan’s touch anchoring her in the now, a daunting medley swirled inside her. Grief, with its dark weight, binding her as effectively as the ribbons woven around her arms. Longing, too slippery and shifty to identify but somehow related to Ronan. Fear, which could sometimes be simple but now was terribly complicated. Fear that what she and Ronan were together wasn’t unique.

Fear that it was.

The front door opened. A rectangle of light appeared on the apartment’s hallway floor, then just as quickly disappeared when Ronan shut the door. Based on the tone and quick exchange, Ronan and Tim said hello, then Tim asked a question, likely along the lines of
Where’s Thea?
In return Ronan spoke, his voice low, firm, but the words undecipherable. A murmur of assent from Tim, then both men walked down the hallway to the bedroom door, Ronan in the lead. He stepped inside, but Tim stopped, framed in the doorway, ducking his head in an automatic way that told Thea he hit it frequently.

He blinked at her, his gaze flickering from hair to mouth to breasts to the curve of her hips to her kneeling position. Based on the extending silence, they’d managed to shock Tim speechless.

She shook her hair back out of her eyes. “Hey, darlin’.”

The amused, inviting words broke the tableau. Tim stepped into the room, straightened to his towering height, and took a long, slow look completely in character with his player self. Thea’s heart beat against her sternum in slow, heavy thuds, picking up speed like a train leaving the station. Tim studied her, the assessing look in his eye disappearing into a purely masculine interest. Off to the side stood Ronan, arms folded across his chest as he watched the boundaries shift in the silent sand.

The light filtering up from Madison Avenue glinted off Tim’s blond stubble as he smiled at her. “Damn,” he said. “You look like the angel on top of a Christmas tree.”

The seemingly innocuous comment made Ronan stiffen, but Thea just smiled at Tim. “Surely not,” she said.

“At first glance,” he said easily. “Blond hair, gray eyes, pretty pink lips, white satin over skin like cream. But angels are cold.” He stepped up to the bed, left one arm crossed over his chest and reached out one long arm to tuck Thea’s hair behind her ear, then brush his thumb over her parted lips. “You’re anything but cold, darlin’.”

His words, spoken softly and without the typical egregiously bad Tim come-ons, brought heat into Thea’s cheeks. Or perhaps it was the touch of his thumb, at once gentle and proprietary as he stroked sensitive, intimate flesh. Thea touched the tip of her tongue to his thumb. In response he rubbed the edge of her teeth. A smile flashed in the gold stubble when she bit none-too-gently on the fleshy pad of his thumb.

“This is gonna be good,” he said.

Something settled inside her when Tim looked at Ronan, the question
How do you want to play this?
hanging unspoken in the air.

Ronan crossed to the bed and plucked one more item from the Idylle box. White satin and Velcro resolved into a blindfold when he knelt on the bed in front of Thea. Her eyes widened as she shifted to avoid tipping into his lap, and for a moment everything about the situation flared sharp and hot in her mind. The corset and stockings, tight around her torso and thighs. The ribbons binding her from elbow to wrist. A hot rain of desire coursing through her veins to pool in her hot spots. Her helplessness in front of Ronan, and Tim.

His gaze searching her face, Ronan slid one hand under her elbow and steadied her as she regained her balance. The gentle touch tightened her throat. “All right?” Ronan asked.