Three Nights before Christmas (10 page)

*

“Easy, now. Set
her down easy.” Lacey guided the railroad crane driver as he lowered the boom and the driving wheel it held suspended over the track. Austin watched, amazed and impressed as hell as she worked.

Each set of Lucinda’s driving wheels weighed one ton, not exactly something Austin and Lacey could handle themselves, so she’d gone online and found some volunteers to help them out. She was apparently fluent in train geek, so she’d found several guys willing to give up their night for a chance to put Lucinda’s driving wheels back on. Lacey had texted Austin earlier, telling him to expect a few men to drop by looking for a good time with a naked locomotive. He’d ordered a dozen pizzas and bought several six-packs—for after all the hard work was done.

Now he stood next to her as she held the sides of the wheel and helped slot it into the track. Once it was upright and balanced, she disconnected it from the boom and gave him a wide grin, making something weird flicker in his chest. Something warm and friendly and not at all professional or distant. Something that was getting harder to ignore with every moment they worked together.

“Ready?” she asked.

To fit the wheel?
“Yep.”

For whatever the hell is sending blood rushing to the wrong places?

Nope.

They flanked the wheel and pushed hard. Even though the wheels were designed to roll easily and quickly along the rails, just as they would do when the locomotive was chugging away, their weight and counterweight made them difficult for humans to get moving. Austin unconsciously mimicked Lacey’s stance, using his body weight until the wheel started turning. They rolled it under Lucinda’s frame and steadied it with blocks when it was in the right spot. When all the wheels were in place, they would carefully lower her freshly painted frame and attach the wheels. She would finally look like a locomotive again, steady in her track and ready for all her inside pieces to be reconnected.

Rolling the wheels under the frame was a two-person job, but the other volunteers wanted to take part in the glory, so, after showing them what to do with the first one, Lacey supervised the guys as they fitted the rest. Austin stood back with his hands on his hips, supervising her.

Well, watching her. The more he saw her work, the more impressed he was. When it came time for the potentially dangerous jobs, she had a no-nonsense style that commanded the respect and attention of her team. She wasn’t afraid to get dirty, evidenced by the fact that every bit of exposed skin was smeared with grease. And when break time came along, she sipped her soda and took the guys’ ribbing about why she was laying off alcohol all in her stride.

They clearly didn’t know she was on parole, and it probably would never have occurred to them. Pregnancy seemed to be their main guess, followed by religion. Maybe they secretly suspected alcoholism, but that wasn’t a fun subject to tease someone about so they kept it to themselves. Parole never came up, and Austin certainly didn’t blow her secret.

In fact, he’d completely forgotten about it until the guys pointed out her teetotal drinking habits. Somewhere in the last several days, he’d stopped thinking about her crime. She’d become Lacey Gallagher, train geek and, weirdly, almost-friend.

And dark fantasy.

He took a swig of his beer and tried not to think about the sweaty dreams that had woken him the past few nights, dreams that made no sense, had no structure, but were flashes of flushed, naked skin. Long brown hair sticking to the nape of a neck, tilted to make it easier for a man to slide a woman’s shirt off her shoulder, down her arm, and away from her breasts. Thighs parting but shadows falling over their apex, hiding hot, secret places he wanted to bury himself in.

He pressed the cold beer can against his burning forehead, grateful the manual labor meant everyone else looked overheated, too. He’d never,
ever,
been attracted to such a wrong woman. How could he fight the serpentine desire snaking through his belly and chest every time she stripped to her undershirt and cranked a wrench, sweating and shaking with physical exertion? Each movement made him want to grab her hips, shove her messy jeans to the concrete floor and discover her shadowed places.

Lust wasn’t the only thing he battled on their nights together. Doubt had begun to creep in, too. What would make a woman who so clearly loved her work throw it all away?
Easy money
had been his initial thought, as that tempted many traffickers to the trade. But railroad engineering paid really damn well, and Lacey must’ve had a good, long career ahead of her. More than that, it seemed to be a profession she respected. She treated the locomotive as if it were human—a friend, even.

He couldn’t picture her using her friends.

And what kind of future did she have ahead of her now? He knew the stats—nearly half of women parolees returned to prison within a year of their release. The conditions were tough, and violated communities could be an even tougher place to return to, even though the parole board thought they were the parolees’ best bet for reintegration.

Lacey had clearly beat odds before. Hell, there couldn’t be many female freight train engineers.

Only two things he knew for certain. First, he had to keep his hands off her.

And second, that got a hell of a lot harder every night he sweat alongside her.

‡

L
acey eyed the
clothes hanging in her closet. Knowing they wouldn’t fit her anymore, she hadn’t even bothered to try them on since coming home. But for two weeks, she’d avoided carbs and she’d barely sat still. The release-day outfit Jenna had bought her had started to loosen up. She now needed a belt to keep the jeans from showing off her butt crack whenever she bent over. And she was sick of washing the shirt out every night. Maybe some of her old clothes had been baggy enough that they would fit her now.

Flicking through them, she found a few long-sleeved button-downs she remembered layering over thermals and a pair of soft, old jeans two sizes smaller than the ones she’d spent the past couple of weeks in. She yanked them off their hangers and squared her shoulders, ready for Operation See How Much Prison Weight Lacey Has Lost.

Not quite enough, it turned out. The shirts fit, sort of. She couldn’t wear anything but a bra beneath them, but she could slip the buttons through their holes without them straining too hard. As long as she didn’t make any sudden movements, she wouldn’t have to worry about them ripping away from their threads and pinging across the room, leaving her breasts exposed like a bimbo in a terrible Eighties movie.

The jeans, though…they proved more of a challenge.

She managed to pull them over her butt, but she had to lie on her bed and contort herself to close the button. The bed squeaked as she rolled from side to side, trying to stretch the fabric as far as it would go. Now that she had the jeans mostly on, she refused to let them defeat her. “Come on, you bastard snap,” she muttered.

“Lace?” Sawyer called out from the other side of her door. “You okay in there?”

“Busy!” she bit out. “Can’t…get it…
in
.”

“Whoa! Spare me the details. I’ll be in the kitchen…making a lot of noise.”

She jerked and kicked until the snap finally popped together. Exhaling as much as she could, she tugged at the zipper, murmuring, “Don’t make me get my pliers.”

The zipper fought her tooth by tooth, but she finally got it up. Victory rushed through her, and she lay on the bed pumping her arms in the air for an imaginary crowd of screaming fans. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t bend, but goddamn she could fit into her old jeans. She’d managed to shed some of the weight from prison.

She rolled off the bed and tottered straight-legged into the bathroom to check herself out. The shirt was long enough to cover her butt, so no one could see how the jeans struggled to constrain her. She could almost pass for the old Lacey—except for the lines on her face, the bushy unibrow, and the silver strands threaded in her hair. Maybe after Christmas she would have time to do something about those.

Flipping off the light, she waddled into the kitchen. Sausage sizzled in a pan while the blender whizzed up some white liquid on high speed. Sawyer manned the frying pan with his back to her, a pair of thick earmuffs covering his ears.

Lacey frowned. “Sawyer?”

No response. She touched his arm, and he jerked, yanking off the earmuffs.

“You okay?”

“Just a sec,” he near-shouted before tugging earbuds out of his ears. They were connected to his phone, which peeked from his pocket, and music blasted out so loudly she could make out every word. “What was that?”

“What’s wrong with you?”

He sighed. “Look, I don’t want to cramp your style. I mean, we all have needs. But—”

She glanced around the kitchen and cast her brain back over the past two minutes before busting out laughing. “Oh, my God! You poor, naive man. Do you really think…” She laughed so hard she couldn’t finish.

“What?” he grumbled.

“If there’s one skill I learned in prison, it was how to jerk off quietly.”

All color leeched from his face and he looked sick.

She pointed at the blender. “What’s in there?”

“Milk.”

She waited. Nothing came. “Milk and…?”

“More milk.” He shrugged. “Loudest appliance we have.”

“You are so sad.”

“You’re my sister. I don’t want to think about it.”

“Then don’t, perv.”

He threw his arms open wide, grease flying from his spatula to splatter against the back of the stove. “It’s not my fault! You were making these horrible noises—”

“Excuse me, but my sex noises are
not
horrible. They’re beautiful and alluring.”

“Seriously, seriously on the verge of vomiting.” Almost as if he couldn’t look her in the eyes anymore, his gaze flicked to her jeans, then to the fat sausages so puffed up they were about to burst from their casings, then back to her legs.

She gasped. “Don’t you dare.”

“I’m worried about your circulation. Can you still feel your feet?”

“These jeans fit fine.” She waddled to the table, determined to show him how well they fit. “See? I can sit and everything.”

She braced a hand on the back of the chair and lowered herself, unbending.

“Great impression of a diagonal line.”

“Lines are flat, so I’ll take that as a compliment.”

He rolled his eyes. “I know you’re sick of wearing that other outfit, but why not go shopping and buy clothes that actually fit?”

“First of all, that would be like admitting I’m not going to lose these last ten pounds.”

He raised a bullshit-detecting eyebrow.

“Fine, twelve pounds,” she muttered. “Plus, I don’t have money to spare.”

“Good thing it’s payday, then.”

She pulled her head back in surprise. It was the only part of her body she could move. “You just paid me on Friday.”

“I’m the boss. Pay day is whenever I feel like handing out money. You got a problem with that, take it up with HR.” He twisted the heat off under the sausages and pulled out his wallet. “Here. Add this to the stash under your mattress.”

She took it and gave him a little smile. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. When are you going to open a bank account?”

“After Christmas, when things die down here.” Too many of her life’s details had lapsed while she was away. Her bank had closed her account. Her driver’s license had expired. Getting it back was her priority, so she wouldn’t be such a burden on Sawyer, Joel, and Tony, and Austin, but she didn’t have time to tackle everything at once.

He sat in a chair across from her and clasped his hands between his widespread knees. “Why don’t you take today off?”

“Because you can’t afford for me to.” The farm had been jumping, which kept her and the boys busy felling trees on the back lot.

“I can’t afford for you to burst a vital organ, either, but you seem hell-bent on that,” he quipped, nodding at her jeans. Before she could protest, he said, “Go into town. Buy me a present. Pick out something I can get you, then buy it for yourself and tell me how much to pay you back. Please make it something you can wear.”