Light My Fire Page 3

  They all could have, given their unstructured, ungrounded lives.

  It was odd, she thought, but nonetheless true that despite their similar backgrounds (or maybe precisely because of their similar, dysfunctional backgrounds), they'd not all bonded into one cohesive, happy unit.

  Looking at Gwen, she figured that's what the loving woman had hoped for. She'd started out a groupie, hadn't she? She'd always wanted to be part of something bigger. And then she'd come to the compound and stayed, doing her best to be a maternal influence on nine motherless kids whose fathers', at best, treated them with benign neglect.

  "I'm lucky I'm alive," Ren suddenly muttered, letting her know his mind was traveling along some of the same lines as hers.

  "Yeah," she agreed.

  So stay here with him, a voice said. It was Gwen's voice. Stay with Ren at the canyon. Give the both of you a little time to be glad about that together.

  Why glad together? Cilla wondered. But the voice didn't speak again.

  Still, as woo-woo as it might sound, she knew in that instant it was the woman's wish. Gwen wanted her to take these weeks with Ren.

  Cilla couldn't refuse, because she owed the older woman just that much. Not to mention Ren's own desire for a respite at the compound. Whether it was to appease his guilt over missing the memorial or because he'd promised Bean or because he needed the vacation (likely some combination of all three) he was committed to staying. Surely Cilla could be woman enough to ignore her overactive hormones for a short period so the sex god of her fantasies could have what he wanted as well.

  Turning away from the photo, she started for the storeroom exit.

  "Cilla?" Ren said. "What's next?"

  "A morning meal," she said. "Didn't I promise you one?"

  Ren got an evening meal out of Cilla that day, too. He was ostensibly teaming with her to make the chicken-and-vegetable kabobs, rice pilaf, and fruit salad, but so far he'd nursed a beer while watching her move around Gwen's kitchen, a plain white butcher apron protecting her clothes.

  Covering up most of her hot little figure.

  He still got the rear view if he chose to look—and the jaunty bow tied at the small of her back only did more to draw the eye to her fine ass—but he was resisting with every scrap of goodness he could find in his black heart. If they were going to co-habit for a couple of weeks—she appeared to have accepted that now—then the she-was-like-a-sister-to-him angle was the best way to go. He was going to cement that attitude by bedtime tonight, he promised himself.

  As she chopped a zucchini into chunky coins, she shot him a glance through her thick lashes. "What?"

  Tipping the bottle back, he finished his beer. "I didn't say anything."

  "I can hear you thinking from over here."

  Shit. Honesty was not the best policy in this case, so he scoured his mind for what he'd ask a sister-type he'd been out of touch with for a long while. His mind went back to his conversation with Payne about their sibling, Cami. "Uh...you ever been married?"

  "Not once."

  "Shacked up with a guy?"

  "Nope."

  He nodded. "I would have guessed that."

  Cilla sent him another look, this one, he thought, holding a trace of hurt in it. "Gee, thanks."

  Double shit. "Hey, I didn't mean it like that. You're, uh..." Ren, don't go there. "I'm sure some men find you...cute, or whatever." Did that sound brotherly? He thought so, though her reaction was difficult to judge as her focus was back on the green vegetable. Was she wielding the knife more viciously?

  He resisted the urge to cover his crotch and tried a different tack. "What are you going to do with the costume collection?"

  Cilla drew a colander of washed mushrooms toward her and began trimming the ends. "Various things. Gwen and I discussed it."

  A stab of guilt had him crossing to the refrigerator for another beer. Though the time from the older woman's diagnosis of pancreatic cancer to her death had been swift, he should have found a way to come back, if only for an in-person goodbye. "And...?"

  "If I can establish the provenance—who wore them and when—of the better pieces, I'll store them safely or display them in my studio. The others I might try incorporating into my designs. A blend of vintage and contemporary, if that suits my client's taste."

  "I'd like to see some of your work," Ren said, realizing he really did.

  She looked over, as if gauging the truth of that. "Yeah?"

  "Yeah."

  With another assessing look at him, she wiped her hands on the apron front then crossed to a laptop sitting closed on the kitchen's granite-topped island. In moments she had it open and had navigated to a webpage, "Cilla Design." Drawing closer to her, he watched the screen as she clicked through a gallery of images. Some of the clothing hung on padded hangers, other times they were modeled—he presumed—by her clients. The pieces were colorful, beautiful, and clearly well-designed. As she'd told him before, there were brief and glittery ice-skating costumes, sweeping dresses and matching suits for ballroom dancers, and a selection of lacey-though-simple dresses and Western-styled jackets worn in the publicity photo of an up-and-coming country band. "I know those guys," Ren said, pointing his beer at the screen. "They're good."

  Then he tapped his bottle on the back of her head in a gesture of brother-like affection. "You too, Cilla. You're really good."

  She turned to face him. They were so close he could smell that citrus scent of her hair. She had a shallow dent in her chin, like someone had pressed their pinky fingertip there. How had he never noticed that before? Her mouth was soft, two pink pillows that drew his gaze until he jerked it up to land on the brightness of her blue eyes.

  There was a smile in them. "Thanks for the compliment."

  He didn't remember a word he'd said. Not when every damn cell in his body was screaming for him to yank her even nearer, to taste that mouth, to have those eyes close in surrender. But his big hands would leave marks on her tender skin, he wanted to clutch her close that bad. He'd bruise her flesh.

  Mar her life when he disconnected, like he always did. Like he was so damn good at.

  So he drew back to take another pull of beer and reined in his lust. "You're welcome," he said. "It's pretty amazing to think Mad Dog Maddox could pass along that kind of talent."

  She sidestepped away from him—thank God—and moved back to the cutting board. "Mad Dog is color blind. I'm thinking I may have gotten it from my mother. Gwen said she had a distinct sense of style."

  "You've never met?" Ren searched his mental files for what he knew about her. Nothing, he concluded.

  Cilla shook her head. "She had the twins and me, but her relationship with our father was on-again, off-again. After I was born, she roamed away with another band and was killed in a crash of their tour bus."

  "Oh, Cilla."

  She shrugged. "Never knew her. I was a couple of weeks old when she left. I have to think hard to recall her name." There was a glass of white wine on the countertop and she took her first sip. "You?"

  "I always knew the name of my mother, of course. Her last one, anyway." Ren smiled wryly. "I think that's why Bean named Payne, Cami, and me the way he did...so he'd remember the surnames of the women who bore us."

  "You've never met her?"

  "Actually, I have." The legs of a bar stool screeched against the tile floor as he pulled it away from the island. He hitched a hip on the woven rush seat and set down his beer so he could scroll through the images on Cilla's website again. Pretty. Original. Sexy. Like their designer.

  "Well?" Cilla demanded. "What did you think of her?"

  "My mother?" He shrugged. "She didn't throw open her arms when this twenty-year-old tough with long hair and piercings showed up on her doorstep in Pasadena."

  "Pasadena," Cilla said knowingly.

  "Yeah. Wears pearls. Married a doctor. Has a couple of kids with him. He knows about me, they don't."

  "So you don't spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with that s
ide of the family either?"

  He shook his head. "It was clear right away I was an unpleasant reminder of a now-embarrassing period in her life."

  Cilla winced. "That had to hurt."

  "I didn't think it affected me much." Gaze dropping, Ren studied the tattoo that swept from a sharp point near his inner wrist to make a curve four inches higher on his forearm. "Until the girl-of-the-moment refused to go through with our couples' tattoo after my meeting with not-so-friendly Mom."

  "Couples' tattoo?" Stepping closer, Cilla scrutinized the black ink.

  "This is like your dancing, okay?" he warned her. "What's said or done in the compound stays in the compound. Right?"

  A little smile twitched the corners of that sweet mouth. "I can agree to that."

  "It was an incredibly stupid idea, but remember I was twenty and this girl, she gave the most amazing blo—" He broke off, just in time. "Let's say she was, uh, skilled in the sack and she extracted a promise from me in a vulnerable moment."

  Cilla's brows were high over her big blues. "'Couples' tattoo'?" she repeated.

  "Yeah, see, she was supposed to get the same design as me, but on her left wrist. So, when we held hands—now don't laugh—they'd make a heart."

  Silent, she was staring at his arm.

  "All right," he said, shaking his head. "Go ahead and laugh."

  "I don't want to." Cilla looked up and her gaze caught his. "She didn't follow through with it, you said."

  He had no clue what was going on in Cilla's head and his powers of deduction were distracted by her lemon-sweet scent. "Not after I found my mother. I was never one for warm-and-fuzzy, but I went both a little wild and a lot remote following that meeting. The girl didn't stick around much longer."

  Though of course Ren had never emotionally attached to her anyway.

  "You could have the half-heart removed," Cilla pointed out. "Don't they do laser or something?"

  "Have never opted for that. First, that procedure hurts like a mother." He winced. "No pun intended. Second, it's a good reminder."

  "A reminder of what?"

  "I suck at anything other than solitary."

  After that moment of sharing, she went back to dinner prep. He topped off her wine and got the grill started. They ate out on the patio just off Gwen's kitchen, under a propane heater that radiated warmth on their head and shoulders. A single votive candle illuminated the small table and the darkness closed around them like a loosely held fist.

  The food tasted good and when his plate was clean, he kicked back in his chair and breathed in the clean canyon air. They could have been the only two people in the world. Though L.A. with all its neon excitement and larger-than-life dreams was a car ride down Laurel Canyon Boulevard, this was Eden. Ren decided he felt a little buzzed. Not on beer, but maybe on all the oxygen exhaled by the thriving flora at the compound. Or maybe it was Cilla, who seemed as content as he to enjoy the...contentment.

  He couldn't remember the last time he'd slowed down enough to absorb quiet. Christ, and he'd never told a soul about the visit to his mother and the story behind the tattoo on his wrist. Maybe he really was buzzed. Picking up his third beer, he squinted at the label, then grunted. Nothing he hadn't imbibed before.

  He transferred his gaze to Cilla. She was cradling her wine glass and staring off into the distance. The candlelight flickered across her face, giving her silky skin a golden glow and shadowing her eyes and that small depression in her chin.

  She could break some man's heart, he thought. That vulnerable expression belied an upbringing as messed-up as his own. For whatever reason—did there need to be one besides their oddball childhoods?—the nine Lemon kids were a prickly, wary lot, not much good at reaching out to one another, let alone to anyone else. Yet that didn't show on Cilla's fine features and in her fathomless blue eyes. Someday a man was going to come along and be drawn to all that delicate outer beauty but then find, to his dismay and unending frustration, that she was too well-armored to let him in all the way. He'd only be able to dip his toe into Cilla's essence, because she wouldn't let down her guard and allow him any more of her than that.

  What had Payne said? Not one of us knows what a normal, healthy relationship looks like.

  It was bad, sad, sadder than he'd ever considered, when he thought about Cilla Maddox, forever the lonely little rock princess, as inaccessible to love as if she was truly locked up in her Rapunzel tower for the rest of her life.

  The notion shook him, and he stood so abruptly, his chair rocked violently against the flagstone patio surface. Cilla looked over in surprise. "Don't get up," he told her. "I'm on dish duty."

  Still, she trailed him into the kitchen, and they managed to do the clean-up without any fuss or much conversation. Glancing at the clock, he noted it was barely nine o'clock, but he was ready to retreat. Like he'd said, he was best when he was solitary and he could use the time to put her soundly into the no-touch column in his head. He moved around the small house, locking doors and windows. Then he strolled back into the kitchen to address Cilla, who was sipping at a cup of hot tea while she surfed the internet on her laptop.

  "Jet lag still has its claws in me," he told her. "I'm going to bed." He'd stashed his duffel in the cottage's second bedroom. It was free of Cilla's scent, unlike the one he'd woken up in this morning. That way, he hoped, her nearness wouldn't disturb his sleep.

  Why would it? a little voice in his head mocked. Remember, she's like a sister to you.

  Ignoring the taunt, he started for the hall, glancing at Cilla as she followed on his heels. "I'm tired too," she said.

  When he paused with his hand on the doorknob to his bedroom, she hesitated as well. He looked down at her. "Well...goodnight."

  She smiled. Then, placing one hand over the tattoo on his wrist, she lifted to her toes and placed a kiss on his cheek.

  Both touches burned.

  As she fell back to her heels, they stared at each other. At the flutter of her pulse in her neck, he knew her heart was pounding as fast as his. At the flags of color on her cheeks, he knew that fire was pouring into her veins, just as it was into his. At her wide eyes and their expression of very real alarm, there was no doubt in his mind that this white-hot physical attraction was going both ways.

  Her hand was still on his skin and his muscles went hard as he clamped down on the need to take her into his arms, to jerk her up to meet his mouth, to drag her to his bed and slake this inconvenient, throbbing, aching lust.

  If he was anyone else, he would. If she was anyone else, he would.

  If they were anyone but the messed-up, mistrustful progeny of the careless, hedonistic kings of rock 'n' roll, there might be a chance for something here. Temporary, of course, but that didn't mean it couldn't be satisfying.

  But nothing was going to happen, because they were the messed-up, mistrustful progeny of the careless, hedonistic kings of rock 'n' roll.

  "Fucking Lemons," he muttered, jerking away from her and from temptation.

  Her eyes went even bigger, but then a little smile curved her pretty mouth. God, she was going to kill him. Her voice was soft as a whisper when she spoke. "Do you remember what Gwen always told us?" she asked. "When life gives you the Lemons..."

  He shook his head, remembering all too well and not believing for a second anything sweet or good could come out of this unwelcome connection between him and Cilla. "Make lemonade."

  Chapter 3

  The morning air was beginning to warm as Cilla approached the pool, considering a swim. If she was at her place near the beach, she'd be preparing for a run on the sand, but the canyon roads were narrow and wound around each other in intricate coils. If she went out for her usual forty-five minutes of exercise she was afraid she'd either get lost or hit by a car. Bending over, she dipped her fingertips into the aquamarine water, yelping when her flesh met the much-too-cold wet.

  Nope, no swimming for her. Resigned, she turned toward the pool house, half of which was filled with top-of
-the-line exercise equipment including a varied set of dumbbells, a weight machine, an elliptical, a stair-stepper and a pair of treadmills. It was a good thing she'd worn her running clothes just in case.

  When life gives you the Lemons, make lemonade.

  The echo of that line halted her footsteps as her mind replayed last night, the moments right before she and Ren exchanged their halves of the line.

  What impulse had led her to do it? She didn't know, but she'd hadn't thought twice about giving Ren the most casual of goodnight kisses. It had been just a little peck on the cheek, really.

  But then something had happened that made the walls of the hallway close in like a blood-pressure cuff. Ren had looked at her, merely looked at her, and the smolder in his eyes had sent her pulse pounding and her body temperature soaring. She'd felt turned on and terrified. Aroused and afraid.

  It was one thing when she was the host of a solo passion-party, but entirely another when an unexpected guest arrived, ready for party games.

  He'd looked that way, felt that way, his arm turning to steel beneath her hand.

  But if he actually wanted her, despite how attracted she was right back, Cilla knew there was no possible way she could do anything about it. She was terrible in bed. Awkward, cold, essentially embarrassed by the entire procedure that was intrusive, intimate, and, ultimately, messy.

  Just the thought of going through that with Ren—with the guaranteed result of experiencing his disappointment in her performance—made her want to dive into the freezing pool and never come up again.

  Her only hope was she'd imagined the moment.

  Somewhere in the night she'd started wondering about that. Besides "Fucking Lemons"—and there could be an untold number of reasons for him expressing that sentiment, as she well knew—he'd not given away what was going through his mind. Perhaps that smolder and that tension had all been on her side and she'd been, well, projecting.

  With her hand on that unfinished heart, the defiant symbol of his solitary nature, perhaps she'd romanticized the moment. Gone girly, fantasizing she was the one who could be his other half.