Calling His Bluff (24 page)

The shrill whistle of the kettle on the boil barely competed with the mental whirl
of her thoughts. When she snapped off the flame and the jet of steam from the spout
eased off, she could hear her doorbell blaring on top of the clatter in her head.

She grabbed the kettle off the burner without stopping for a potholder and winced
at the sharp pain. At moments like these, she wished that her family wasn’t quite
so close, emotionally or geographically. A pity party like this would just be embarrassing
in front of company.

Sucking at her sore palm, she hustled down the steps, prepared to shuffle whichever
sibling had come to check on her right back out the door.

And felt her heart stop when she yanked open the door and it was him.

She knew she looked like an idiot, frozen in place with her hand pressed against her
mouth, eyes locked on J.D. like the sight of him was air and she’d been holding her
breath for seven days.

He seemed bigger than she remembered, looming over her in the doorway before stepping
inside, then crowding her until she stumbled backwards and her heels bumped up against
the bottom step of the staircase. He brought the cold air in with him and the darkness
of the night sky was in his eyes as he stared down at her.

“I don’t want to be mad at you anymore,” he said, sounding like he resented it a little
bit. She could see his breath in the chill and took a step up onto the lowest riser,
bringing her eyes level with his.

She was chicken enough to drop her gaze to the front of his ancient wool peacoat as
she apologized.

“I’m sorry. I was an idiot. I wasn’t trying to make you mad.”

“Don’t get me started on the number of ways in which you piss me off without even
trying, Sarah,” he said, sliding gloved hands under her elbows, lifting her to her
toes.

“Hey.”

She jerked her head up to meet his fierce look.

“Just—” he pulled her against him “—stop.”

Then his mouth was on hers and she wanted to protest, to tell him she deserved better
than this abrupt assault, but the heat of him was sharp and brutal and she shoved
herself up against the cold, wet wool of his coat, her mouth opening, her arms wrenching
out of his hands to snake up behind his neck and just hang on to him. The world rocked
and then spun around her, but at her core she knew she was home. Finding her center
with him here,
now.

She heard him kick the door shut behind him, his teeth nipping at her bottom lip before
he plunged back into the kiss. She barely needed the suggestive run of his hands under
the length of her thighs for her to jump forward and wrap her legs around his waist.
She was dizzy and burning with need.

She curved her body around J.D. as he climbed the stairs, one of his arms braced under
her butt and the other wrapped around her waist, her mouth open beneath his, her fists
in his hair, and knew that no matter how briefly this lasted, she would take it. She
would. She would take anything she could get.

When she’d decided to take anything she could get, she hadn’t factored in the possibility
of being struck by lightning.

A sudden shriek of wind blew the rain sideways and ripped a satellite dish out of
the building’s mortar, sending it crashing to the street twenty feet below. Sarah
scraped the edge of her palm over her face to wipe off the rain as she tried to see
into the narrow gap between the two warehouses by the beam of J.D.’s powerful flashlight.

“Can you see her?” she shouted.

“No!”

J.D. was standing only a few feet away from her on the tar paper–covered roof of his
warehouse building, but he still needed to shout to be heard over the wind and the
whipping rain. He braced his hands on the edge of the opposing roof, across the eighteen-inch
gap, and peered down into the darkness. Rain streamed down his arm, plastering his
T-shirt to his skin. He stood up abruptly and cursed.

“Stupid animal. She picked a helluva time to come out of the fireplace.” He clawed
his hair out of his eyes and turned back toward her. “And you’re sure you heard her?”

Sarah wasn’t surprised that the cat had managed to escape J.D.’s loft when her labor
began. Wild things often returned to the wild to give birth, even if it would be more
comfortable and safer to stay indoors. Since she spent most of her nights at J.D.’s
these days, she’d made a point of keeping an eye on his cat, not sure when she’d deliver.
What
did
surprise her was how upset J.D. got when he finally realized the cat was missing.
After weeks of complaining about “that damn animal” and steadfastly refusing to name
her, she’d expected a shrug and “good riddance.”

Instead, he’d searched his place for an hour before heading outside into what
had
been a light drizzle.

Two hours later, that drizzle had morphed into a downpour that was rapidly melting
the remaining piles of plowed snow at the street corners, melting it and funneling
it into rivers of ice-cold runoff that streamed along the curbs and through the alleys.

“I heard something. I don’t know what.”

Right before the heavens opened on their heads, Sarah had been shining a flashlight
down this same narrow gap, not even wide enough to be a walkway, between J.D.’s building
and an identical warehouse structure next door. She hadn’t been able to see anything
other than scattered piles of rubble. The space stretched for nearly a hundred and
fifty feet back to the parking lot behind the buildings.

But when she leaned into the gap, she could have sworn she heard the soft mews of
newborn kittens.

Standing on the roof with J.D. now, she braced a hand on his shoulder, his shirt soaking
wet beneath her palm and so cold that she couldn’t feel the heat that always radiated
from his skin. She leaned over the edge.

“Careful,” he warned, reaching under her jacket to grab hold of the waistband of her
jeans. “It’s still slippery up here.”

His fingers were like ice against her skin. She looked down. Shivered. And was suddenly
intensely aware of his body next to hers, her anchor. She leaned a little more heavily
on his shoulder and scraped the rain out of her eyes.

“I don’t see anything.” The light he was shining in the gap just wasn’t powerful enough.

“Me either.”

“Shit.” She didn’t know what to do next. Give up and cross her fingers that the newborn
kittens weren’t drowning in the alley? If they survived this storm, she was pretty
sure Mama Cat would eventually show up at J.D.’s door again, looking for food and
warmth. “Shit!”

She felt him sigh heavily next to her. He’d already spent hours in this nasty rain
and cold, searching for an animal he hadn’t wanted in the first place.

“Sarah—”

“Maybe I can squeeze into that gap a little ways and get a better look,” she said,
and twisted away to head back down there. She couldn’t give up yet.

J.D. yanked her back by his grip on her pants. He spun her around and grabbed her
by the upper arms, giving her a shake.

“No way, Sarah.” He loomed over her in the rain, blocking the wind that was sweeping
nearly sideways as lightning flashed overhead. Ozone hung sharp in the cold night
air. “Absolutely no fucking way. That’s just what we need, you getting stuck down
there.”

She shook her hair back and stood there, fully aware that she couldn’t step away from
him unless he chose to let her go. What she really wanted to do was step closer. Press
herself up against him, wrap her arms around his waist and see if they could work
up some body heat between them in this freezing rain.

He was only touching her
arms,
for god’s sake. She was shivering, soggy and frustrated, and she still wanted nothing
more than to run her hands up under his shirt and across the soft skin and hard muscle
of his back.

Focus.

“I wasn’t actually asking for your permission, babe,” she said, making a face. His
expression went flat and she felt his fingers squeeze her arms briefly before he dropped
his hands to his side. She knew she was being bitchy, but she had to do something,
damn it. She shook her head and tried again, this time without the bitchiness.

“You’ve done all I could expect you to do. You’ve been great and you’re totally off
the hook, promise.”

J.D. turned his head away from her for a moment. His chest rose, held, fell.

“That’s the thing, Sarah.” He faced her again, lips pressed together, rain splashing
off his face. “You keep trying to let me off the hook when I don’t want to be. Don’t
you get it?”

He didn’t understand.

“J.D. It’s okay. You—”

“No, it’s not okay.” He dropped his face into his hands and pressed the heels of his
palms to his eyes for a moment. “I don’t want to be off the hook, Sarah. But I guess
that’s what you want, huh?”

He stepped past her without looking at her again, heading for the door to the interior
stairwell. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why he was pissed. She
got it. She just…couldn’t trust in it.

“Just go downstairs and wait for me by the doorway to the street,” he said. “We’re
going to find that damn cat.”

At street level, she huddled miserably under the scant protection of the doorway and
waited for J.D. to come out. Which he did after five minutes, thrusting the pole of
a large klieg light at her before heading back to the roof. An industrial orange extension
cord ran from the base of the light she held back through his open front door.

“Get that elevated as high as you can. Lift it up if you have to. And shine it down
in the gap.”

She stared at him in disbelief. She knew he thought she was crazy to keep at it when
there was little to no chance any of this would help. And now he was risking his professional
equipment on her crazy need to continue this hopeless search? Even if the light didn’t
suffer death by drowning, what good could it possibly do? The gap was just too long
and narrow.

“You’re not going to be able to see a goddamn thing even with this light!”

Lighting exploded. J.D. shook his head and laughed hollowly.

“Actually, I think I’ll be fine.” He headed for the stairs to the roof.

He was carrying an armful of metal tubes and she wondered what he planned on doing
with them. Cold water squished in her shoes as she headed back to the small gap between
the buildings.

The light was heavy and awkward to carry since most of its weight was apportioned
to the boxy light atop the long pole. She propped it upright at the gap and figured
out how to manipulate the three legs of the base into a stable tripod. She found a
power switch and flipped it on.

Dazzling. Sarah squinted involuntarily against the blue-white radiance, turning her
head away until her eyes adjusted. Rain rattled down onto the square metal housing
that encased the light. She twisted the box until it faced the gap and peered under
it to see if it was working.

The intensity of the light made bright highlights, but even darker shadows. Still,
it shone much farther into the gap than the handheld flashlights. What she’d taken
to be a pile of trash was actually—no, it
was
a pile of trash that cast an inky black shadow stretching out behind it. She blinked
again and wiped the water out of her eyes.

“Sarah.” The shout came from directly above her. She looked up and saw J.D. leaning
over the parapet. “Can you get the light any higher? The shadows are too long.”

She understood immediately. If the light could be made to shine from a higher angle,
the shadows and areas hidden by them would be smaller.

“Give me a minute,” she called back.

She found a textured metal band on the pole that twisted when she screwed it counterclockwise.
When the fitting was loosened, she was able to extend the pole another foot, moving
the light over her head. The shadowed spots in the gap looked smaller.

“Any better?” she shouted. But if J.D. replied, she couldn’t hear anything. Thunder
boomed and in mere moments lightning burst overhead. The wisdom of standing next to
a tall metal pole in a storm was frigging questionable. Yikes.

She took a step back from the light and peered up at the roof, the edge of one hand
pressed to her forehead, shielding her face like the brim of a ball cap. She couldn’t
see a thing.

A fierce screeching yowl echoed from the gap. The inhuman sound revved like a motor
without stopping, hitting a fever pitch high.

After a minute, J.D. appeared at the edge of the roof above her and called down to
her.

“Found her. But there’s a shitload of water down there, Sarah. I mean, it’s seriously
flooding. I don’t know—” She knew what he wanted to tell her. That there might not
be any kittens left alive to rescue.

“What do you want me to do?” she shouted up.

The constant roar of the rain hammering the pavement filled the empty space where
she waited for him to answer.
Don’t quit,
she whispered inside.

She waited.

“Give me as much light as you can.”

It took twenty minutes. She ended up picking up the light and lifting it as high in
the air as she could after J.D. asked her again if she could raise it, but she had
to put it down a lot. It was too heavy to hold steady. She heard loud ripping sounds
from above, along with some extremely creative cursing. At last, he called for her
to come inside. She grabbed the pole just beneath the light fixture and dragged the
whole contraption behind her.

When she made it through the door, J.D. was kneeling in front of the fireplace, building
up the flames. On a bathroom towel on the floor beside him were four balled-up kittens
so newborn their eyes were still sealed shut. Only one was moving. J.D. didn’t turn
away from the fire as she set the light on the floor and trotted over. She’d only
caught a glimpse of the contraption he’d managed to assemble out of tripod poles,
a dustpan and duct tape, but it had been enough to leave her in awe of the fact that
he’d maneuvered four kittens from the ground to the roof of a two-story warehouse.