Chasing the Fall (Naughty and Spice)

Six

Twiggy

I’m going stir crazy, and it’s all Bran Kelly’s fault.

Sitting at my computer now with my back to the man, I shove half a Boston cream in my mouth and try my best to ignore his presence. He sits behind me on the couch, quiet and unobtrusive, yet here.

Watching.

He never stops watching, whether it’s me or the landscape on the other side of my big picture window. I’ve never seen a person with such utter, intent focus, and having it all directed at me is unnerving.

Lifting my hand, I smooth my hair away from the back of my neck, unsure if the prickle of sensation there is from Bran’s steady regard or just an errant hair.

I didn’t sleep last night, images of Bran hovering scant inches above me playing like a movie on the backs of my eyelids. I can still feel his weight pressing me into the mattress, the heaviness of his thighs against mine, and that unmistakable ridge against the juncture of my hips. Craziness.

He should have been too heavy; his solid bulk should have made it difficult to breathe; he should’ve made me want to escape.

Instead, he had stolen my breath for an entirely different reason.

I wanted Bran Kelly.

The idea disconcerted me—for many reasons. He was my cousin’s right hand, deeply ingrained in mob life. This meant he was off-limits.

He was significantly older than me, in his thirties to my twenty-one. I squinted at my computer screen. I wasn’t sure of his exact age…

“How old are you?” I blurted the question without deliberate thought, the sound of it in the quiet room a surprise. Bran doesn’t answer immediately, and I turn to look at him.

“Why?” His expression is guarded.

I turn back to my computer. “If you don’t want to tell me, I can find out on my own, you know.” My fingers fly over the keys.

Bran grunts. “I don’t care if you know I’m thirty-two. I’m just curious why you want to know.”

Thirty-two… I look at the date on his driver’s license displayed on my screen. “…almost thirty-three. Happy birthday to Brandon Finley Kelly on the twenty-fourth of December.”

I feel him rise and come to stand behind my chair. “Cut that shit out.”

“Or what?” I don’t know why I’m compelled to sass him, but there it is. He brings out the best in me.

A big hand slinks in front of me and circles my neck, the fingers tangling in my hair and the thumb stroking a spot beneath my ear that makes me shiver. “Just don’t. If you want to know something, I’ll tell you.” His voice is deeper than usual. Or is that just me?

I nod, swallow against the heat of his palm, and force myself to squeak out a response. “Fair enough.”

Bran’s hand slides slowly away after one more stroke of his thumb, and he returns to his seat on the couch. That was the other thing that kept me off-balance—my physical response to him. It was nothing I’d experienced before, and I didn’t have a clue what to do with it.

There were downsides to being a child prodigy. I’d gone to college when I was fifteen and graduated when I was seventeen after an accelerated program. I’d never had the experience of dating my peers, either the brief time I attended the local high school or during the couple of years I spent on a college campus.

Not that any of the guys in either space would’ve been interested in me. As quickly as my brain developed, my body developed with equal slowness. I was flat as a pancake until I hit nineteen and suddenly grew a pair of tits.

Now, I was little more than a brain in a woman’s body that had yet to be tried. I had yet to experience all of those things that normal girls were pros at by the time they hit twenty-one.

I blow an imperceptible breath out and will my response to Bran’s presence to settle. There’s too much working against us to even be thinking about this stuff. Even if we were free to explore this weird something between us, he wouldn’t be interested in a virgin.

Irritated with the direction my thoughts have taken, I power down and stand up. “I have somewhere I need to go.”

Bran stands, too. “Where?”

Nunya. I don’t think I should tell him—not just yet, anyway—what it is I want to do.

I let my gaze travel over his jeans and boots. They’ll do. “Hiking.”

“Hiking?” His expression registers skepticism. “It’s forty degrees outside. Why the hell do you want to go hiking? In case you missed the news, there’s a serial killer out there.”

Moving to the door, I pull a lightweight jacket down from a hook and shrug into it. “I’ll protect you, and I gave my reasons. You coming or not?”

With a roll of his eyes, Bran picks up his own sweatshirt and pulls it on over his T-shirt. “You’re a brat, you know that? I’m driving.”

When he lifts his arms, a narrow strip of flat, lightly furred belly peeks between the shirt’s hem and his jeans. Mouth dry, I open the door and escape through it before he catches me staring. “Fine, whatever.”

“What is this place?”

A half-hour later, Bran pulls into an unmarked, half-overgrown gravel road I direct him to. I’m not sure how to tell him that the road fades into a trail that winds through the forest and up the side of the mountain, ending in a clearing that houses the small cabin where Shiloh was held by a madman a few years ago.

“Just a trail I heard about and wanted to explore.” I paste my best, most guileless smile on and open the door to the truck.

Bran rubs at his eyelid with his forefinger—is it twitching?—and follows, his boots crunching on the gravel. “Why do I feel like you’re not telling me everything?”

“Who me?”

“No, fucking Rudolph.”

I ignore him, and for a while, the only sound is the crunch of leaves underfoot. The sky shines a brilliant blue through the canopy, thinner now due to it being the end of November. “It’ll be Christmas soon,” Bran says, his words echoing the random thoughts playing through my mind.

I nod. “In just a couple of weeks, this area will be covered in snow.”

“Elevation?”

“Yep.” We fall quiet again, but it’s a loaded quiet this time. I’m hyper aware of him just behind me, of how he’s adjusted his stride to fit my own, shorter one. Of his breaths, steady and untaxed, puffing out into the cold air. Of his warmth at my back. “What do you do for Christmas?” I ask, desperate to break the cocoon of awareness that shrouds us.

“Go to the bar,” Bran says.

“What?” My head swivels as I stare. “Are you joking?”

He shrugs. “The Irish are my family now, Tally. I don’t have a mom filling my stocking and making eggnog.”

Tally. I don’t like that I like that. I focus on his words instead of the warmth that fills me at the nickname. “I don’t, either,” I return, my voice terse.

“Shit, I know. I’m sorry…I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s okay.” I wave aside his apology. “That’s not the point. The point is that my family is gone, but I still do stuff. I still decorate. I still do all the little things that Mom did.” I eye the path before me, making sure not to trip on any of the overgrowth beginning to narrow the trail. It doesn’t look like anyone’s been through here in a while. “It’s how I keep her memory, and Dad’s, strong.”

Bran’s hand settles on the back of my neck, squeezing softly and sending a faint tremor of response through me. “I get that.”

Another ten minutes, the path opens up into a clearing. Across an expanse of grass broken up by a small pond, a small, tidy cabin sits. I stop just inside the tree break, staring over at it with a mix of resignation and foreboding. “What the…?” I hear Bran’s soft exhalation behind me. His voice turns hard. “What is this place, Tallulah?”

I start forward. “This is the place Shiloh was taken when she was abducted.” Bran releases a string of curses. “I want to look around, see if it’s been in use, that sort of thing.”

“I ought to turn you over my knee.”

It sounds as though he’s speaking through gritted teeth, and I search for something to alleviate the tension. “You into that sort of thing?”

An unwilling laugh huffs out behind me, and I smile in response, careful to hide it from Bran.

“I could be,” he returns.

“I always knew you were a freak.”

“You never know, you might be a freak, too. You’re trying hard enough to get your ass tanned.”

I decline to comment, instead pressing my cold hands against the flush that rises in my cheeks.

Moving up the stairs and onto the cabin’s covered porch, I glance around, taking in the covered furniture and miscellaneous gardening tools piled in a heap beside a grill. A couple of large concrete planters, filled with old dirt and remnants of straggling plants, flank the steps, along with a rusting ice chest. A torn, weathered strip of caution tape flutters from the doorframe. “Doesn’t look like anyone’s been here in a while,” I murmur, reaching out to test the knob.

Pfft.

Something riffles my sleeve, sending a sear of pain through my bicep, and embeds itself in the wall in front of me.

“What the—”

“Down!”

Before I can process his shouted command, Bran flings himself at me, pushing me down to the porch and behind one of the planters. I start to lift my head, figure out what the hell is happening, and his palm pushes it back down against the rough wood of the porch. “Stay fucking down!”

“What was that?” My voice comes out garbled from its position on the floor.

Bran’s reply is terse. “Someone’s shooting at us.”