Baptism In Fire

A relieved sigh escaped her. She was not normally a paranoid person, but there was something about that guy that made her skin crawl.

As she exited, the tiny bell over the door jingled. She walked toward her car and saw that a piece of paper had been tucked under the windshield wiper. Probably an advertisement for a local business.

Taking out her keys, she leaned over the hood and pulled the paper free, then unlocked the car and climbed inside. About to lay the advertisement on the passenger seat, she stopped dead. This was no advertisement. The letters on the paper were handwritten.

Leeve now…while you still can!

The misspelled words and the undisciplined scrawl shouted kid. The teenagers she’d seen with the apple maybe? They’d think something like this was very funny.

Tearing her gaze from the message, she twisted first left then right, checking every corner of the lot for any sign of them. If this was their idea of a joke, it was not funny and in her present mood, she was just the one to explain that to them.

Her hand had automatically gone to the pendant hanging outside her T-shirt. As she fingered the gold disk, her gaze swept the lot once more. No sign of the teens.

Grabbing her keys from the ignition, she got out of the car and went back into the coffee shop. The waitress looked up as the tiny bell announced Rachel’s arrival.

Nina smiled broadly. “Hi again. Forget something?”

“No. I was wondering if you saw anyone near my car while I was in the restroom.” Rachel pointed to her parked car.

Nina looked where Rachel pointed, then shook her head. “Nope. Sorry. I was washing dishes. Is there something wrong?”

“No. Nothing’s wrong. Thanks.” No sense getting the girl upset over what was probably a kid’s prank. Rachel turned to go, then stopped and swung back to face the girl. “That man who was sitting here at the end of the counter. Do you know him?”

The waitress shuddered and curled her nose as if she smelled something offensive. “Freaky, isn’t he? I’ve seen him go into that rooming house down the block from here. Mabel’s B&B, I think it’s called. I wish he’d find another place to get his coffee. He comes in here every afternoon and really creeps me out.”

Mabel’s was right across the street from where Rachel was staying. With that realization the chills returned, this time raising gooseflesh on her arms. Great! Just what she needed, a voyeur virtually living on her doorstep. She made a mental note to make sure her blinds were closed.

“Should I be worried?”

Nina shook her head, her long brown hair swishing across her shoulders. “No, I don’t think so. He’s never said anything to me except ‘Coffee, black.’ I think he’s just a looker who gets his kicks checking out all the ladies.”

Having worked with the police for a lot of years, Rachel knew the type well. They weren’t breaking any laws, but they made their share of women very uncomfortable.

“Thanks,” she said, and headed back to the car.

Before getting into the driver’s seat, she slid the note into her briefcase. Since Luke would use any excuse to be rid of her, he didn’t need to know about this. He’d have her on Interstate 95 heading back to Atlanta before she could freshen her lipstick. And that was not going to happen just because some kids thought it would be funny to rattle her.

She drove the short distance to her condo, got out and locked the car. Out of the corner of her eye, she noted a newer-model, green sedan had pulled into a space a little way away from her. No driver emerged from the car. Rachel shrugged and headed for the condo complex’s front door. As she was closing the door, the green sedan backed up and left the parking area.

Showered and shampooed, Rachel stretched out on the couch with her notes from last night’s fire. She’d barely gotten started when a knock sounded on the door.

Preoccupied with her thoughts, notes still clutched in her hand, she continued reading them as she wandered to the door and opened it.

Luke shifted one of the three large, white bags he held marked Wong’s Market. “Bad habit, not finding out who’s on the other side of your door before opening it.”

After the incident at the Latte Factory earlier, she couldn’t agree more, but she would never admit it to him. Then again, had she known it was him, she would have played possum and hoped he’d think she wasn’t home.

“Wouldn’t have worked,” he said, his lips curling in a heart-stopping smile. “I saw your car.”

That he still had the ability to guess what she was thinking before she said it unnerved her so much, she could only watch helplessly as he stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

By the time she’d recovered, Luke was in the kitchen unloading the bags. She joined him and began inspecting the items he’d lined up on the counter: boneless chicken breasts, soy sauce, sesame seeds, rice, broccoli, scallions.

“What’s all this?” She picked up a bottle of wine and read the label. White zinfandel. Her favorite.

“From experience, I know that eating alone is not all it’s cracked up to be, so I thought, why not eat together?” He grinned at her. “Get out the wok. You can stir-fry and I’ll chop.” When she didn’t move, he said, “You do have a wok, don’t you?”

Rachel shook herself loose of the web of his smile. “I…I don’t know. I have no idea what A.J. keeps around here.” She turned to the bank of floor-to-ceiling cabinets. “I’ve either been eating out or having something delivered.”

“Or not eating at all,” he added, doing a once-over of her body. “You’ve lost weight, Rach. You need a little more meat on those gorgeous bones of yours.”

His words brought on an involuntary shiver of awareness. God, she didn’t want him here, didn’t want to feel anything for him, didn’t want to react to his charm, his smile, his voice. But what her head wanted and what her body wanted seemed to be on opposing sides.

With an effort, she tamped down the wave of excitement building inside her, then covered it with an indignant huff. “I don’t see how my weight or my eating habits should concern you,” she snapped coldly.

He studied her for a moment, then turned back to cutting the boneless chicken breasts into narrow strips, but not before she noted the flash of pain resulting from her sharp tone and thoughtless words.

“It does when you’re working for me, and I need you to be one hundred percent on,” he finally said, his tone low and controlled.

She had lost weight. She was not eating well, and she’d noticed the difference in her stamina.

Damn! She hated when he was right.

Throwing a scathing glare at his back, she began searching the cabinets for a wok. Three cabinets and a lot of noisy banging of pots and pans later, she found one hiding under a colander.

When she spun around to place it on the stove, she almost ran straight into Luke’s wide, hard chest. Her pulse picked up speed. Her senses swirled like fallen leaves caught in an autumn wind. Slowly, she raised her head to find him staring down at her, his eyes filled with desire.

Before she could do something she’d live to regret, she moved quickly to one side in an effort to put space between them and lost her balance. He grasped her upper arms. A current of acute sexual tension shivered over her.

“This isn’t going to work,” she mumbled, referring to the limited space of the small kitchen. Her blue-eyed gaze lifted to lock with Luke’s.

Acutely aware of her silky skin against his palms, Luke had to fight to keep a coherent thought in his brain. “It will if we give it a chance,” he said, unsure if he meant the cooking arrangement or something neither of them seemed ready to address.

To avoid the off-limits thoughts chasing around his mind, Luke let her go, then surveyed the cramped kitchen. “I’ll move to the other side of the counter. You stay here and man the stove.” Quickly, he gathered the vegetables, meat, chopping board and knife and scooted around to the other side.

He’d just started working on the scallions, when the sound of the wok dropping against the glass cooktop drew his attention.

“Slipped,” Rachel said with a sheepish grin.

A wave of intense longing crashed over him. If this had been two years ago, that grin would have ignited a delay in supper and a quick trip to the bedroom. Food would have been forgotten.

But it wasn’t two years ago. It was here and now, and all they had between them was a tenuous, barely civil working relationship. He knew, better than anyone, that the chances of Rachel and him finding what they’d lost were zero to nothing.

As if this admission had opened a floodgate in his mind, the guilt and second guesses poured in. What if he’d handled Maggie’s disappearance better? What if he’d tried to understand more of what Rachel had been going through? What if, when Maggie had been declared probably deceased, instead of pulling away, he’d gathered Rachel to him and they’d lived out their grief together?

And the biggie… What if he hadn’t decided to work overtime that night and had been home where he should have been, protecting his family?

Luke had been beating himself up for two long years over the bad decisions he’d made, but none more than working that night. Rachel’s birthday had been a few weeks away, and he’d wanted to get some overtime in to take her to the Bahamas on the honeymoon they’d never had. As a result of his decision, a stranger had invaded their home, set fire to it, nearly burned Rachel alive and snatched Maggie.