Читать книгу Three-Alarm Love - Carole Buck - Страница 9

Two

“Dance with me?” Fridge asked about five minutes later.

It had taken some doing, but he’d managed to extricate himself from Bernadine Wallace’s clutches after the slow, sultry number had finally come to an end. He’d then made his way across the hall, intercepting Keezia as she headed for the door. After an exchange of greetings and some friendly chitchat—keep it cool and casual, he’d reminded himself, cool and casual—he’ d issued his invitation

Keezia tilted her head. “Dance?”

“Uh-huh.” Man, she looked prime, he thought. Even better up close than from a distance, which, sad to say, wasn’t true with a lot of women. That sweet piece of skin revealed by the modest V-neckline of the loose-fitting pullover she was wearing—mmm-mmm Talk about temptation! And the way the creamy fabric sort of...flo-o-o-owed...over her breasts? Whew! He could definitely get accustomed to looking at that.

As for the short, tight, black leather skirt she had on—well, all he could say was that it was bad, and with those long, lean legs of hers, Keezia Lorraine Carew was wearing the hell out of it.

“I’m on duty tomorrow,” she said, toying with her right earring. Although Fridge wasn’t much on women who fussed with themselves in public, something about this unthinking gesture got to him in a very elemental way. He couldn’t help but speculate about what it would feel like to have Keezia stroking him instead of the burnished metal. “I really ought to be going home.”

“One dance.” While he didn’t want to come on too strong, he didn’t want to take no for an answer too quickly, either. Although he was well aware that sweet talk tended to put Keezia’s back up, he had the distinct impression that this was one instance where she might let herself be coaxed into changing her mind. “One itty-bitty dance and I’ll have you out the door right afterward.”

“I didn’t know you did anything—” his prospective partner paused, and a hint of feminine challenge sparked in her topazcolored eyes as she lowered her hand from her earring “—ittybitty.”

“Size is a relative thing, Sister Carew,” he answered, lowering his voice a note or two and infusing it with just a lick of the resonant bass he turned loose singing gospel every Sunday. “Why, I can imagine more than a few situations when my ‘itty-bitty’ would be another man’s. mighty big.”

He recognized that his choice of words was risky. Keezia was unnerved by his size. He’d picked up on that at their first meeting, long before he’d learned the ugly history that lay behind the reaction. Still, wary as she was, she’d decided to start this back-and-forth. He could only hope that she wouldn’t decide to end it by reiterating her initial excuse and taking her leave.

For a moment, he was certain that was exactly what she was going to do. Keezia’s expression went blank. She seemed to turn inward on herself. Retreating. Remembering. But then she surprised him. Maybe herself, too. The animation returned to her expressive face in a rush. Her richly colored lips parted in a smile that caused his breath to jam somewhere in his chest.

“Mighty big doesn’t do a man much more good than itty-bitty if he doesn’t know what to do with it,” she declared dulcetly. “But let’s leave that be, all right? Because if you’re serious about dancing with me—”

“Oh, I’m serious,” he managed to affirm.

“Well then, Brother Randall, you’d better get me out on the floor right now. The song for our one dance just started playing.”

The song that allowed Ralph Booker Randall to take Keezia Lorraine Carew into his arms had an insinuating beat, the kind of syncopated rhythm that snuck into a man’s bloodstream and started stirring things up. The lyrics had the same sort of sensual hook to them.

Although the urge to pull his partner close was throbbing through Fridge before the end of the tune’s first chorus, he disciplined himself not to give in to it. He kept his hold loose, his touch light. While he’d been encouraged by the sexy banter that had preceded Keezia’s acceptance of his invitation, he knew his proximity made her uneasy. He could feel it in the rigidity of her normally supple spine. He could hear it in the shallow irregularity of her breathing pattern.

Trust me, baby, he urged silently, stroking gently at the small of her back. Please. Trust me. I’m not that bastard Tyrel Babcock. I’d never hurt you.

Gradually, Keezia began to relax within the circle of his embrace. The tension in her slim, sleekly muscled body eased. Her breathing slowed and deepened. The distance between them got smaller and smaller and smaller, then disappeared.

Her hands slid up his forearms and along his shoulders, linking at the back of his neck. The touch of her fingertips against his nape shocked Fridge clear down to the soles of his feet. His nervous system started humming like an electrified power grid.

She didn’t plaster herself against him the bold way his previous partner had. She sort of snuggled up close instead, establishing the fit of their bodies by yielding increments. The process was an exquisite form of torture for Fridge, but he endured it without complaint. He was ready to go through much, much worse if it would help Keezia exorcise her demons.

“I was afraid you weren’t goin’ to make it tonight,” he murmured, inhaling the musk-spice scent of her café-au-lait-colored skin.

“Why’s that?” There was a hint of huskiness in her voice.

“Well, when the party’d been rollin’ for more than an hour and you still hadn’t walked in...”

Keezia shifted a little, raising her head and looking up at him. Her expression was difficult to interpret. There was suspicion in it, but it was mixed up with a lot of other emotions.

“You were watching out for me?” she asked after a fractional pause.

He flashed back on that sizzling moment when his eyes had met hers while he’d been slow-dancing with Bernadine. He held Keezia’s gaze for a few beats, willing her to remember—and acknowledge—the moment, too. A sudden flaring of her delicately shaped nostrils told him that she had.

“What do you think, sugar?” he countered, keeping his voice low

Keezia recovered her poise with remarkable rapidity. The suspicion in her expression was replaced by a don’t-mess-with-me sassiness. “I think you had plenty to be looking at besides the door I might be comin’ in through,” she retorted with a disdainful sniff

Her refusal to take the bait he’d offered didn’t surprise him. He’d expected her to sidestep his question. But the admission embedded in her evasion—the admission that she’d been keeping tabs on him in the same way he’d been keeping tabs on her—pretty much blind sided him.

“You mean Bernadine?” he asked after a few seconds. Fridge didn’t believe in playing one woman off against another. But if a little bit of jealousy helped clarify some of Keezia’s other feelings ..

“Is that her name?”

“So she said. Miss Bernadine Wallace.”

“Somebody... new?”

Fridge controlled the urge to grin, relishing the way his partner was trying—but not quite succeeding—to make her inquiries sound offhand. He suspected that he’d been similarly unconvincing when he’d done his cool and casual routine prior to asking her to dance.

“Somebody’s sister,” he answered after a second or two.

“Sister? ”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Whose?”

He shrugged. “Don’t remember.”

Keezia stared up at him, her eyes flicking back and forth, back and forth. “Uh-huh,” she eventually said, her tone skeptical in the extreme. Then she turned her head and leaned her cheek against his chest. She muttered something under her breath as she did so. Fridge couldn’t make out the exact words. He didn’t really need to. The gist of what she’d said came through loud and clear. Namely, that of all the roles his current dance partner might be inclined to assign to his previous one, sister was way, way down on the list.

They danced without speaking for ten, maybe fifteen seconds. Out of the corner of his eye, Fridge caught a glimpse of Jackson Miller and his teenage daughter. They appeared to be having a small disagreement. If the direction in which Lauralee was gesturing was any indication, it involved him and Keezia.

“Why the late entrance?” he finally inquired, wondering uneasily whether his jones for Keezia Carew was a lot more obvious to people than he’d thought. Jackson had picked up on the situation pretty early on, of course. His mama had made a few uncomfortably acute remarks on the subject, too. But aside from them...

No, he told himself. If anybody else knew or suspected how he felt about Keezia, it’d be all over the department. The guys at the station would be ragging him around the clock!

Keezia muttered under her breath, much as she’d done before This time, though, Fridge caught what he thought was the operative word in her response.

“Say what?” he prompted, wanting to make certain of the facts before he reacted.

A long, frustrated-sounding sigh insinuated its way through the thin cotton fabric of his T-shirt. “I had some trouble with my car.”

Exactly what he’d suspected. Should have guessed without asking, in fact.

“The transmission?” That had been the problem the last time, as he recalled.

“Could have been.”

“What about the spark plugs?” They’d been at fault the time before last. Or had it been the fan belt?

Another sigh. “Could have been them, too.”

Much as he liked the feel of her warm breath fanning against his chest, Fridge figured it was his turn to ease back and make some eye contact. He did so.

“Sugar,” he began, gazing down at Keezia. “I know it’s pickin’ on a sore subject, but that car of yours is one of the sorriest excuses for an automobile I’ve ever seen. You are in desperate need of a new ride.”

“Tell me about it.” Her prickly tone suggested that if he knew what was good for him, he wouldn’t. “But unless I strike it rich in the Georgia State Lottery, I’m not going to get one till this fall. I want to finish paying off what I owe on my new furniture before I take on any more debt.”

Fridge had spent a lot of years messing with cars. Based on that experience—plus his under-the-hood acquaintance with the vehicle in question—he had some major doubts about whether Keezia was going to be able to stick with her very admirable fiscal plans. Not that he intended to voice these doubts at this particular juncture. He didn’t. Because unless his ears deceived him, the song he and Keezia were dancing to was going to be over very shortly. He didn’t want to squander what was left of it on arguing about how much life might be left in her old junker.

“I’ll ask my mama to remember your car in her prayers,” he promised, tightening the circle of his arms.

Keezia gave a throaty ripple of laughter. “To tell the truth,” she said, letting herself be drawn against him, “I was kind of hoping you’d ask her to ask Reverend Dixon whether he’d consider trying some faith healing on it I’ve noticed she seems to carry a lot of weight with him ”

“Mama carries a lot of weight with everybody,” Fridge returned, chuckling. He wasn’t just referring to her considerable stature within Atlanta’s African-American community, either. Helen Rose Randall definitely believed in living large. If old photographs were anything to depend on, she hadn’t just kept her girlish figure over the years, she’d doubted—maybe tripled—it. “But I’m sure she’d be pleased to have a word with Reverend Dixon.”

They lapsed into silence at this point, moving in perfect harmony to the last verse of the song and the final rendition of the chorus. Fridge savored the sensation of holding Keezia. It felt so good to him. So...right.

Please, Lord, he thought. Let this last.

The song came to an end. They didn’t separate immediately, though. In fact, Keezia seemed as reluctant to let go as he. Eventually, though, she lowered her arms from his neck and started to ease away. While his masculine instincts urged him to do otherwise, Fridge made no effort to stop her. He simply opened his hands and let her step back.

She stared up at him for several seconds, a hint of heat shimmering in the depths of her enticingly exotic eyes. He could see the jump of her pulse at the base of her long, queenly throat. The rise and fall of her breasts lured his gaze for a provocative moment or two before he forced his attention back to her face.

“Thank you,” she finally said.

“My pleasure,” he answered, meaning it.

There was a pause. Keezia glanced at her watch.

“Well—” she began.

“I’ll walk you out,” Fridge quickly volunteered. He had a number of reasons for not wanting her to leave alone. Included among them was the fact that they weren’t in the safest area of the city.

She shook her head. “You don’t have to.”

“I know,” he responded, clamping down on a spurt of annoyance at her knee-jerk rejection of his offer. He admired Keezia Carew’s independence, he really did. He also respected the dark power of the forces that drove her to defend it so intensely. Still, he lived for the day when she abandoned the notion that saying yes to a helping hand somehow translated into taking the first step toward inviting a smack in the face. “But I want to ”

Keezia was acutely conscious of the curve of Fridge’s strong right arm around her shoulders as he escorted her to the entrance of her apartment building about ninety minutes later. The contact was protective without being possessive. There was nothing about it to make her uneasy. Yet nagging at the back of her mind was the painful recognition that protectiveness could be a trap. Accepting it could sap a woman’s self-esteem. Make her vulnerable. Being dependent on a man could be dangerous. A woman needed to be able to take care of herself

“I really appreciate your driving me home, Fridge,” she said quietly

“My pleasure.” It was the same response—the same inflection—she’ d heard after she’d thanked him for dancing with her.

She took a long, deep breath, inhaling the soft, sweet fragrance of the night air. Atlanta had once again had a very early spring. There’d been pansies blooming at the beginning of February, trees budding in mid-March. It was now the second week of May, and Mother Nature was putting on a fullscale flower show. The beauty wasn’t entirely without cost, however. Keezia knew that emergency services had had dozens of 911 calls from people thinking they were having heart attacks when their problem was actually an allergic reaction to airborne pollen.

“I appreciate your calling your friend from the garage, too,” she added after a moment, slanting a glance up at Fridge. He was a very striking-looking man, with the legacy of his African forebears clearly imprinted on his face. She could picture him in the colorful robes of a tribal chieftain, exuding an authority based on moral strength as well as physical prowess.

You can trust him, something deep inside her suddenly whispered.

Keezia wanted to believe it. She wanted it with all her heart and soul. Her body wasn’t averse to taking the leap of faith, either. Not after the dance they’d shared. She could still feel a hint of sexual heat simmering in her bloodstream. It would take very little to bring that simmer to a full, rolling boil.

But wanting to believe wasn’t enough. Something deep inside her had once whispered that she could trust a man named Tyrell Babcock, and he’d nearly destroyed her. Until she could be absolutely sure...

Fridge smiled, his teeth bright against his dark brown skin. “Jamal’s one of the best mechanics I’ve ever met. I know some of the comments he made about your car weren’t very respectful, but he’ll have it up and running by the end of the week.”

They reached the front door of her building. Keezia eased herself out from under Fridge’s powerfully muscled arm and turned to face him. She nibbled on her lower lip, debating whether to raise the point that had been troubling her since she’d watched Jamal hook her pitiful car to his tow truck and haul it away.

“Jamal was a little hard to pin down when it came to getting an estimate of how much this repair job is going to cost me,” she finally remarked, selecting her words with great care.

“He’ll give you a good price, Keezia.”

That wasn’t what she wanted to hear. Well...actually...it probably was, given her limited financial resources. She certainly wasn’t looking to get overcharged or cheated by Fridge’s friend! But she wasn’t looking to be handed some kind of bogus bargain, either.

“It better not be too good,” she emphasized after a moment, staring directly up into her companion’s dark eyes. She needed him to understand that she was dead serious about this. “I heard what he said about owing you for delivering his son—”

“Simone did all the hard work,” Fridge interjected with a shrug. The bunch and release of his shoulder muscles was clearly visible beneath the fabric of his jacket. “I just caught Jamal Junior when he popped out.”

“Maybe so,” Keezia conceded, although she sincerely doubted it. While Jamal Senior hadn’t gone into detail, she’d gotten the impression that his son’s entrance into the world had been a very dicey matter She suspected the scenario had been one of those forget-trying-to-make-it-to-the-hospital-this-baby-ain’t-gonna-wait types of medical emergencies that every firefighter heard about during training and secretly prayed he or she would never have to face in the field. “The thing is, I saw those looks you and Jamal were giving each other. I don’t want him doing me any favors because of you.”

Fridge expelled a breath, his features tightening. “Because that’d make you feel like you owed me.”

She stiffened, uncertain how to interpret his tone. He’d sounded—what? Offended? No. Not exactly. He’d sounded closer to ..to... hurt.

The possibility that she’d bruised Ralph Randall’s feelings shook her. The man had been nothing but good to her from the day they’d met.

“Fridge—”

“It’s cool, baby,” he interrupted, his expression altering with breathtaking swiftness. He brushed the tip of one finger against her mouth. Her heart somersaulted at the feather-light caress. “Forget what I just said ”

“But—”

“It’s cool, baby,” he repeated firmly. “I heard what you were tryin’ to tell me. I’ll explain the way things have to be with Jamal. He’ll understand. ’Course, he’ll probably end up chargin’ you double for parts and labor just to make sure you don’t think he and I are conspirin’ to do you a friendly turn—but, hey. Sometimes that’s how life works out.”

Keezia gaped. Was he serious? Was he actually threatening to have his friend stick her with an outrageous bill if she didn’t let him cut her a sweetheart deal?

Then she saw caught a wicked glint of humor in Fridge’s eyes and realized he was getting a little bit of his own back. Profoundly relieved, she started to laugh. Her companion quickly joined in.

“Would you like to come up for a few minutes?” she found herself asking as their mutual merriment finally petered out. It wasn’t an invitation she’d intended to issue. But now that she had...

“To your apartment?”

She nodded, wondering at the wariness she thought she heard in his voice. “I could, uh, fix you a quick cup of coffee before you head home.”

Fridge regarded her silently for several seconds, his dark eyes searching deep into her topaz ones. “You don’t have to, Keezia,” he said at last.

It was the perfect opening for a retreat from her impulsive invitation. For reasons she was nowhere near being prepared to articulate, Keezia didn’t even contemplate the possibility of taking it.

“I know,” she said evenly, sustaining Fridge’s penetrating gaze. After a moment, she returned to him the words he’d given her earlier when she’d tried to brush aside his offer of an escort out to her car. “But I want to.”

There were lots of reasons Fridge accepted Keezia’s obviously unplanned invitation. Not the least of them was her coffee. He knew from experience that the brew she served was strong, black and sweet—just the way he liked it.

“Hard to believe this is the same place Jackson and I moved you into last month,” he commented, glancing around approvingly. They were sitting in the living room of her one-bedroom apartment in Virginia Highlands. He was ensconced on a comfortable, pillow-strewn sofa. She had kicked off her shoes and was curled up in an armchair angled off to his right. The earthenware mug that had held his coffee sat on a small, tile-topped table in front of him. Keezia’s cat, a marmalade-colored feline named Shabazz, was sprawled across his upper thighs, purring contentedly.

“It’s coming along,” Keezia agreed. Although her words were modest, they were laced with pride. “I got those—” she nodded toward a collection of shallow baskets hung on the cream-colored wall opposite her “—the other day at that gallery across from the High Museum. Handmade in Zimbabwe and marked down 50 percent.”

“Impressive,” Fridge said with a chuckle, scratching lightly beneath Shabazz’s chin. He’d known the cat almost as long as he’d known Keezia. She’d rescued Shabazz’s very pregnant mama from a tree during her first week as a probie, succeeding at the task after several veteran firefighters had failed. A month or so after this episode, the mama cat’s owners had turned up at her station house with a boxful of mewing kittens. After being assured by her captain that the prohibition against firefighters accepting gratuities did not apply to things like home-baked cookies or helpless, homeless little animals, Keezia had happily taken her pick from the litter.

“You must be wearing catnip for cologne, Fridge Randall,” she observed with a trace of asperity after a few moments. “Anybody else comes to visit, Shabazz hisses, spits and scratches. With you...”

“What can I say?” he asked wryly, stroking the cat from head to tail with a slow sweep of his fingers. He glanced down, struck by the contrast between the color of his skin and the color of the animal’s silken fur. He repeated the head-to-tail caress several times. Shabazz’s purring grew louder with each pass. “I have the magic touch with certain females.”

“Mmm.”

Something about this nonverbal response caused Fridge to look from the cat to her mistress. Keezia was staring at Shabazz. Or, rather, she was staring at Shabazz being petted. Her gaze was fixed on his hands, the dilation of her pupils reducing her irises to narrow rings of gold. Her lips were parted and trembling. There was a faint flush of excitement along the line of her angled cheekbones. She looked...dazed.

The memory of what he’d felt earlier in the evening when he’d watched Keezia toy with her right earring came back to Fridge. His body tightened in response to an erotic rush of sensation. Blood—heated and heavy—began to pool between his thighs.

Time to go, he told himself.

“Keezia,” he said, disciplining his voice into something he hoped approximated its normal tone.

She jerked, causing her earrings to swing wildly, then lifted her eyes to meet his. Although she did her best to hide it, he could tell that she was shocked by the potency of what she’d just experienced. He wondered, not for the first time, whether her ex-husband had been sexually incompetent as well as abusive.

“W-what?” she asked, the word catching in her throat.

“It’s getting late,” he told her, easing Shabazz off his lap The cat rebuked him with a disdainful twitch of her tail, then leapt to the floor and padded away.

“Late?” Keezia checked her watch. “Oh. I didn’t realize—”

“No problem,” Fridge assured her, standing up. “But it’s definitely time for me to be headin’ home.”

Keezia rose to her feet as well, smoothing the front of her pullover with a languid gesture as she did so. The garment’s V-neckline dipped for an instant, revealing the top of the shadowy cleft that separated her breasts. She seemed unaware of what she’d done.

Fridge cleared his throat, willing himself to stay focused on her face. “You plannin’ to take MARTA to work tomorrow?”

“MARTA?” It seemed for a moment that his hostess couldn’t imagine why he’d raised the question about Atlanta’s public transit system. Then she blinked, apparently recalling the circumstances that had led to his being present in her apartment. “Oh, yes. MARTA. Absolutely.” She underscored the affirmative with a nod. “There’s a, uh, bus stop about a block from here. I’ll change to the train at the Five Points station. It’ll probably be a quicker commute than when I drive.”

“Sounds good.” His gaze started drifting downward toward her breasts. He yanked it back up. “But listen, sugar. If you should happen to find yourself in need of a chauffeur before Jamal gets your car fixed up...”

Keezia smiled fleetingly, neither accepting nor rejecting his implied invitation. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

They walked to her front door.

“Thanks for the coffee,” Fridge said.

“Thanks for the ride home.” Keezia smiled again, less noncommittally than before. “And the dance.”

“As I said earlier, that was my pleasure.” Although he knew it was unwise, Fridge sought to prolong the moment. He made a show of surveying the apartment. “You’ve got a lot more room here than in your last place.”

“Don’t I know,” Keezia concurred feelingly. If she suspected he was stalling, she gave no sign of it. “That other apartment was so small, I practically had to go outside to change my mind.”

He chuckled, dimly registering that Shabazz had evidently recovered from her feline snit and was rubbing up against his left leg. “I have to admit, I sometimes worried the walls might be closin’ in on me. I always felt a little cramped.”

“I thought about moving the furniture into the hall whenever you came to visit,” Keezia joked. “You seemed to get into a lot of elbowing contests with that ugly old sleeper-sofa I had. And you’ve probably got scars on your shins from bumping into my coffee table. A man your size...”

Her voice trailed off into silence as the blood drained from her cheeks. Her gaze veered off. She trembled for an instant, then went terribly still.

If Helen Rose Randall’s only child had been given to cursing, he would have done so.

Neither of them spoke for what seemed like a very long time.

All right, Fridge finally decided, forcing himself to unmake the fists he didn’t remember clenching. Let’s stop the jiving around and deal with this. The longer we wait, the harder it’s going to be to say what needs to be said.

“It bothers you, doesn’t it, Keezia,” he began, inflecting the words like a statement of fact rather than a request for confirmation.

Keezia brought her eyes back to his. He could tell it cost her to do so. “What?”

“My size.”

She made a gesture, obviously attempting to deflect the issue. “You can’t do anything about how big you are, Fridge.”

He shook his head, unwilling to let her evade the point he was trying to make. “Neither can you, Keezia,” he declared. “And I know that scares you sometimes. You’ve found the guts to take care of a whole lot of business since you left that ex-husband of yours, but when it comes to dealin’ with me—”

“What?” She cocked her chin, daring him to go on. “When it comes to dealing with you—what?”

Fridge hesitated. Forcing Keezia into confessing her fear was tantamount to bullying her into a corner, and that was something he desperately didn’t want to do. He also suspected that it was something she wouldn’t forgive.

Carefully, cautiously, he lifted his right hand and stroked the curve of her left cheek. He was attuned to the slightest hint of resistance. Detecting none, he cupped the curve of her jaw gently, finessing her smooth skin with the ball of his thumb. Keezia quivered at his touch, but didn’t try to turn away from it.

“Baby,” he began, letting his voice drop into a deeper, more intimate register. “Baby, listen to me. I’m bigger than you. That’s a fact and neither one of us can change it. But don’t you understand? I know what being bigger means. I know my own strength. It’s been...well, it’s been a gift to me. Same as my singing voice. My strength has helped me save lives, Keezia. I respect it. I don’t use it against people. And I would never, ever use it to hurt you.”

“I—” Keezia paused, moistening her lips “—know that.”

The darting lick of her tongue triggered a snap-to-attention reaction below Fridge’s belt. Closing his mind to the pulsing of his flesh he asked, “Do you?”

“Yes.” She nodded. “Yes...I do.”

It would have been easy for him to accept this assurance at face value and take the next step. Heaven knew, his libido was clamoring for him to do so. But he couldn’t. Because with this woman, accepting at face value wasn’t enough. Soul-centered certainty was the only thing that would serve in building a relationship with her.

“Maybe you know it up here,” he agreed after a moment, touching Keezia’s temple. “But here?” He lowered his hand and feathered the tip of one finger against the spot over her heart. “Do you know it in here, baby?”

Keezia released a breath on a tremulous sigh, her eyes wide and liquid. “I can’t...I mean, I—oh, Fridge. I trust you. I trust you more than anybody.”

The conditional nature of the last statement ripped at him, but he managed to keep his expression neutral. “Which isn’t the same as just plain trustin’ me, is it.”

“N-no.” The syllable came out reluctantly, as though she sensed how much her words had hurt him and regretted the pain she’d inflicted. “No, it isn’t. But I’m working on that. Only, I can‘t—it isn’t that I don’t—” She stopped, closing her eyes. When she reopened them, Fridge caught a glimpse of emotional storm within her. He also glimpsed her determination to weather it intact. “I need... time.”

There was a long pause. During the course of it, the dynamic between them seemed to alter. The air around them pulsed suddenly, as though charged by a silent lightning strike.

Keezia’s warm, womanly scent teased Fridge’s nostrils. The heat he’d seen shimmering in her eyes at the end of their dance was back, more alluring than before. He yearned to stoke that heat to flame. The ignition of the passion he knew she had within her was one form of combustion he didn’t fear.