Fire And Ice

She smiled and absently reached for the receiver. Would he answer if she called? She always left the volume up on her answering machine to screen out telemarketers. She could always ask him to pick up.

“How are you feeling?”

“Hmm?” Jena looked up to find her partner and one of her two best friends, Marie Bertelli, standing in the doorway.

“Feeling,” Marie repeated, leaning against the jamb. “As in, how are you?”

“Fine, I’m fine.” Why wouldn’t she be?

Well, maybe because she’d called in sick the past two days, that’s why.

She snapped upright, kicking herself for having forgotten that important little detail.

Marie had been the only one not in that morning to feed the cock-and-bull story about having come down with some sort of bug. Oh, she had come down with a bug all right, and his name was Tommy.

“Fine now, I mean,” Jena clarified, taking her hand from the phone and squelching the desire to hear Tommy’s deep, rumbling voice.

“Good.” Marie tucked her red, curly hair behind her right ear, apparently buying the lie hook, line and sinker. And why wouldn’t she?

Sometimes her friend could be so naive. Cute, a hell of an attorney, but incredibly naive. She supposed that’s what happened when you were the youngest of a large family with three older brothers and old-fashioned Italian beliefs. The concept of deception between friends had yet to even register with her. Aside from Marie’s two-year stint in the L.A. district attorney’s office, she had lived at home all her life.

Jena prided herself on not envying anyone—except when it came to Marie. As much as her friend moaned and complained about her overprotective family, she never once noticed the way Jena sometimes sighed wistfully, wishing she’d had such a restrictive, loving upbringing. Well, she supposed she had known a bit of that. Until she irreversibly lost both her parents in one fell swoop of fate when she was ten.

“Jena?”

“Hmm?”

“Are you sure you’re feeling okay? I mean, maybe you should take a half day.”

Jena smiled at her friend’s clueless comment and refused to think about how good the suggestion sounded. “I wish I could.” Well, at least that much was true. She did wish she were at her apartment with Tommy exploring the rest of the Kama Sutra positions from the book she kept on her bedside table. “But I have to head out to the detention center this morning to visit Patsy Glendale.”

“Ah. The make-you-or-break-you case.”

Jena made a face. “No, no, no. It’s the make-me case.” She set her briefcase upright and got to her feet. “I’m going to get her off.”

Marie gave an exaggerated shudder. “Please tell me you believe it was self-defense.”

“Of course it was.”

Marie shrugged. “It’s just the way you said it. You know, ‘Get her off.’ Made it sound like it didn’t matter one way or the other to you.”

“In all honesty, it doesn’t. Everyone is entitled to fair representation, Marie.” She shrugged into her coat. “What would you have us do? Walk Patsy straight to the electric chair for accidentally killing her husband in self-defense?”

“Lethal injection room in New Mexico. And not if it wasn’t premeditated.”

“But if it was…”

“You said it wasn’t.”

“And you’re not catching my point.” Jena came to stand in front of her younger friend. If the memory of her own parents surfaced a little bit more every time she worked on the Glendale case, that was only natural, wasn’t it? And if that same memory made her want to change the system, there was nothing wrong with that either. “Was there a reason why you stopped by? You know, other than to give me a lesson on morality?”

“Oh! Yes. I almost forgot.” She tucked the hair at the other side of her face behind her left ear. “I wanted to ask if you’d co with me on the Fuller case.”

“I thought Dulcy was going to do that.”

“She was. But what with her new condition and all… Anyway, the court date is set at the same time as her due date and I’d really hate to get all the way there and have no backup.”

Jena twisted her lips. “Depends.”

She gave a secret smile, remembering when Tommy had used the highly suggestive word on her earlier that morning, and her own puzzling response to it.

“On what?”

“On whether you’ll co with me on this case.”

“The Glendale case? The case of the wealthy socialite who whacks her husband and screams years of emotional abuse as the reason that’s in all the newspapers and smeared all over the television? Oh, no fair.”

Jena lifted a finger. “On the condition that there’ll be no more conversations like the one we just had questioning the client’s innocence.” She lowered her voice to a mutter. “And no comments like the one you just made.”

“But…”

“Uh-uh. Those are my terms. You want me to co on the whistle-blower Fuller case, you have to do the Glendale case.”

Marie made a comic face at her. “Oh, okay. Done.”

“Good.”

“You want to catch dinner tonight?” Marie asked, leaning against the desk.

Jena paused, then continued through the door. “Rain check. I already have other plans.”

“Ah. A guy.”

Jena smiled, thinking the word grossly inadequate. Tommy was a god. A king. The eighth wonder of the world. “Yes. A guy.”

IT HAD BEEN A LONG, long time since Jena had indulged in a genuine midnight snack. She, Dulcy and Marie used to make a habit of getting together at least one night a week to pig out on everything their little ole hearts desired and OD on old videos, but they’d stopped that a few months ago. She slowed her chewing, realizing that had happened just after Dulcy had met Quinn.

Is that what happened when women fell in love? Did everything else in their lives come a distant second within a blink of an eye?

The thought bothered her, but for only a moment. Because, right now, sitting across her kitchen table from Tommy in her old sweats, her muscles stretched, her skin refreshed from the brisk walk they’d given Caramel, for the first time she almost understood why Dulcy had stopped participating in their weekly get-togethers.

She slid her foot under the table to stick her toe under the hem of Tommy’s jeans, still hungry for him even though by all rights she should have had her fill. But when it came to Tommy…well, she was beginning to fear she’d never get enough of him. Caramel stopped her foot halfway there and she nudged the puppy out of the way.

“That pizza is two days old,” Tommy said, his brown eyes sexy, his hair tousled and reminding her how they had spent the past few hours. “How can you eat it?”

Jena distantly eyed the fruit he’d peeled and cut into precise pieces on a plate. “That fruit’s healthy. How can you eat that?”

She picked up the last of the nuked pizza, plucked a piece of pepperoni off the top, then leisurely stuffed the rest into her mouth, making loud sounds of enjoyment as she finished it off. Tommy swallowed hard as he watched her movements. Jena made sure to take extra care in sucking her fingers in a provocative way.

“So how’d it go today?” he asked, clearing his throat then putting two pieces of orange on her sauce-smeared plate.

Jena made a face as she fed some pepperoni to Caramel. “Where?” Was her voice a little raspy? “At work?”

“Didn’t you say you had to visit a client in jail?”

Jena’s shoulders instantly tensed. He would have to remind her of something she’d prefer not to think about just then. “Oh, that.”

“You know, that pepperoni isn’t going to help her, um, stomach problems any.” He looked at her. “It didn’t go well, I take it.”

“No, it went okay.” She moved the fruit out of the way to get at a gob of remaining cheese. “It’s just that…I don’t know. Do you ever feel like you know someone but have these awful flashes that you might not know them that well after all?”

“Never.”

She poked him with her cold toe. “I’m serious.”

“Sure. Everyone feels that way at one time or another, I guess.” He slid a peach slice into his mouth and made the same sounds of pleasure she had made moments before. Jena watched as peach juice dripped down the side of his mouth over his chin and felt her own mouth water. Oh, how she wished she were that peach.

“Do you know this client?”

“Know her?” She tugged her gaze from his decadent mouth. “No. Not very well anyway. I know of her. Her family is old society. The Glendales were friends of my parents.” Jena’s throat tightened at what she might have given away in the simple sentence. “Anyway, about four months ago Patsy Glendale murdered her husband. And I agreed to take on her case.”

“That’s the woman all over the news?”

“It reached L.A.?” Jena perked up a bit. She knew the case was high profile in Albuquerque. Had the national media picked up on it?

Tommy pointed toward the living room. “I caught a bit of the news earlier.”

Jena deflated. “Oh.”

His chuckle made her think of everything but Patsy Glendale and murder. “Don’t sound so disappointed.”

She shrugged, uncomfortable with having been found out. “It’s just that this case…it’s one of those make-you-or-break-you cases, you know? The kind that puts you on the front page of the local newspaper. Garners attention.” She wiped her hands on her napkin. “You can’t pay for that kind of PR. And seeing as Dulcy, Marie and I are still finding our footing…well, we can use all the PR we can get.”

“So murderers can beat a path to your door?”

“No, so high-paying clients can keep us out of the rain.”

She sat back and watched him cut another peach, putting a slice on her plate alongside the orange pieces she had yet to touch. “Did she do it?” he asked.

Jena was reminded of her conversation with Marie earlier. “Yes.”

She waited for his response. Only he didn’t indicate one way or another what he thought of her pronouncement. He merely continued peeling the peach then cutting it into easy, precise pieces. “Premeditated?”

“You’re up on your legal jargon.”

“I watched the Simpson trial like every other American.”

She cracked a smile. “No. Self-defense.”

“Intriguing.”

“Yes, I’d say that’s the word that definitely applies in this situation.” She didn’t catch herself putting fruit in her mouth until she was already chewing it. She paused, grudgingly finding it good. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had fruit. The only thing that came close to qualifying were the lemons she’d sucked on after shots of tequila at Dulcy’s bachelorette party. The night she met Tommy.

“My father used to cut fruit like that,” Jena said. Her eyes widened at the casual reference.

Tommy smiled. “Only child?”

“How’d you guess?”

“You have that only-child air about you. You know, confident, self-sufficient, a loner.”

“You mean selfish, greedy and arrogant.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No, I did.”

He slowly chewed on a piece of peach and motioned toward the corner of the kitchen. Jena found Caramel had given up on the two of them and the hope of any more tasty tidbits and was circling around and around before finally plopping down on top of her dog bed with a long-suffering sigh.

“You know, she could do with a little discipline,” Tommy said.

Jena stared at him. “She just got back from three days at obedience school.”

“I said discipline. From you. Dogs like to know who’s in charge. And from what I can tell so far, she’s in control of you instead of the other way around.”

Jena made a face. “I’ll take your words under advisement.”

He chuckled. “You know, I always wondered what it would be like to be an only child,” Tommy said, drawing her gaze back to him. “I have four older sisters.”

“I always wondered what it would be like to have siblings. Brothers. Sisters. Didn’t matter.”

“Living hell.”

“Being an only child wasn’t exactly heaven on earth,” she said quietly. Especially when you lost both your parents at the same time and ended up alone.

“You said that in the past tense.”

She realized she had. She shrugged, trying to adopt an air of nonchalance. In truth, she hadn’t spoken about what had happened to her parents in so long, she’d forgotten the stories she used to come up with to explain their absence to strangers. Car accident. Plane crash. Anything that made the loss less painful, less real. Anything but the truth. Only Dulcy and Marie and a few others knew that. And not even they suspected that she needed to take on the Glendale case as a result of that truth. “Yeah. They died. A long time ago.”

“Aunts? Uncles? Cousins?”

“One aunt. She moved to Washington State a few years ago.” She shook her head to move her hair from her eyes. “You?”

“Both parents still alive and kicking. They live in the same house they bought thirty-five years ago. My four sisters are in various stages of engagement, marriage and divorce. All of them live within a mile of my parents in Minneapolis.”

“How did you end up in L.A.?”

“They matched my price.”

“Ah.”

The corners of his eyes crinkled in a way she found irresistibly sexy. “Yeah, ah.”

“Do you miss them? Your family, I mean.”

“Sometimes. But I try to get home at least once a month. I was just back there for Thanksgiving.”

“And the knee brace?”

He fell silent although his expression didn’t change. “Injury, eight weeks ago. It put me out of commission.”

“So you haven’t played since then?” Jena asked, her brows rising.

“Nope.”

She considered that. What would she do if something happened and she wasn’t able to be a lawyer for two months? “How do you feel about that?” she asked quietly.

His grin made her curl her toes against the kitchen tile. “Like picking you up and continuing a nonverbal conversation in the bedroom.”

Jena laughed. And it felt so good to do so that she continued doing it until she discovered that Tommy had stopped chuckling and was watching her through suspicious eyes.

“Careful or you’re liable to give a guy a complex.”

“A big jock like you?” Jena reached for her plate only to find she’d demolished the fruit he’d put on it. He held out another piece, but waved her hand away when she reached for it. She leaned forward and opened her mouth, waiting until he slowly put it inside. She drew her lips along the length, then took it full in along with his fingers. His gaze fastened on the movement, he slowly withdrew his hand. She took her time chewing, watching his face as he watched her. His eyes darkened. His jaw tensed. And a restless kind of energy seemed to emanate from him and reverberate off of her.

“A big jock like me still has an ego, you know,” he murmured, blinking up into her eyes.

“Trust me, baby, you don’t have a thing to worry about in that department.”

His grin was just this side of completely wicked. “I know.”

“Has anyone ever told you you’re also bigheaded?”

“Depends on which head you’re talking about.”

She rolled her eyes to stare at the ceiling, but before she could make a jab about his adolescent remark, he was sweeping her off her feet and up into his arms. She automatically clung to his bare shoulders, feeling his broad, hard chest against her side.

“Now, how about I go and show you just how bigheaded I can be?”

“Sounds like an idea to me.”

4

TOMMY STRETCHED LANGUIDLY across the empty bed, aware of the morning light filtering through his closed eyelids. How long had it been since he’d slept in? Right after his injury bed rest had been the order of the day, but by six every morning he’d been wide-awake, cruising through the news channels and absorbing every word in the newspapers and medical journals while eating the breakfast the visiting nurse delivered.

Now Tommy squinted at the bedside clock, surprised to find it half past nine. He picked up a note propped against the lamp. “See you at five” was scrawled in barely legible letters along with a capital J. He put the note back down then joined his hands behind his head and grinned.

Coming to Albuquerque to see Jena had been his best idea yet. No Greek-American sports agent who spoke a million miles a minute knocking down his door. No physical therapists telling him what he was doing was all wrong for his knee. No team owner telling him via the coach that they needed him back on the ice now. No one but him and Jena and the sexual playground they’d made out of her ultra-modern apartment.

He glanced around, having gotten used to his surroundings remarkably quickly. His own place in L.A. was done in pale woods with wood-framed furniture covered in overstuffed brightly colored pillows and cushions, the walls dotted with framed old movie posters. Bogart was a favorite of his, as was Spencer Tracy. And, of course, you couldn’t go wrong with Paul Newman and Steve McQueen, although their posters were a little more recent. Growing up with the long winters in Minnesota, there seemed to be little more to do than go to the movies or play hockey. He’d preferred the matinees where they still showed the old films, while his sisters attended the new runs at night. And while he’d taken to hockey, Jamie, Sandie, Mandie and Lainie had trained as figure skaters.

He rubbed the stubble along his jaw and wondered what Jena had done at the same age.

He remembered her two friends from the bar. Childhood friends, Jena had said. The blonde—Dulcy, Jena had told him later—had looked like she’d needed some lightening up, while Marie…well, if he’d had a younger sister, he guessed she would have looked pretty much like her. Cute and hungry, appearing not to know what part of life to bite off first, and too scared to try.

But Jena… He couldn’t quite figure her out. Which was likely the reason he was so drawn to her. So many people he could pigeonhole in two minutes flat. But he’d spent the past four days with Jena and still didn’t have a clue what she was all about. A daring wildcat in bed, and remarkably bold during conversations, it wasn’t until much later that he’d realized she hadn’t revealed a bit of herself while she’d gotten him to tell her his life story.

Most guys probably wouldn’t question her behavior. Hell, they’d likely celebrate it. What man wouldn’t want a woman with apparently no past who wanted you and didn’t have an agenda when she jumped into bed with you?

She’d said her parents had died….

Tommy dry-washed his face with his hands. Had she mentioned how they had died? Or how old she’d been at the time? If she had, he couldn’t remember. He’d been too busy concentrating on her decadent mouth as she devoured first her pizza, then inadvertently inhaled the fruit he’d fed her. And, of course, he’d been busy answering the questions he was now afraid were meant to distract him.

He pushed up to sit, gingerly moving his leg over the side of the bed and doing a few stretches before standing on it. He checked the brace, then grabbed a pair of skivvies from his duffel before heading for the bathroom, intending to catch a shower before responding to the soft whining on the other side of the kitchen door. He had a good half hour before twelve-year-old Paula showed up to walk Caramel. Maybe he’d leave a note for her and see to the task himself. He could use exercise that didn’t include a mattress. And perhaps the cold morning air could help clear his conflicting thoughts as far as the dog’s mistress was concerned.

It didn’t sit well with him, knowing that while Jena shared herself with him completely on a physical plane, emotionally she was as much of a mystery as she’d been when he met her. Perhaps even more so, because he was sure her block wasn’t inadvertent but intentional. The mystery was fine for a one-night stand. The exchange of names wasn’t really necessary in those cases, much less the details of one’s childhood. But as the nights accumulated, no matter how much time separated the first from the second, their bond was deepening. Although, he suspected, not on an emotional level. Not for Jena.

And he didn’t think it wise to explore that avenue just yet. Not knowing what he did—or didn’t—about Jena.

As he stepped under the shower’s hot spray and began to soap up with her spicy soap he suspected didn’t come off a regular store shelf, he wondered about her personal life up until now. She was, what? Around the same age as him? Thirty or pretty near to that. Had she ever been married? Ever come close?

Of course, he hadn’t told her that he had been married once. Very briefly. Back when he was still young and stupid enough to mistake lust for love. It was his first year on the circuit and one of the rink groupies who followed the team to as many as the games as they could had targeted him in her crosshairs. His career had been going like gangbusters at the same time. The new up-and-comer with a bright future. Landing the cover of Sports Illustrated hadn’t hurt.

A month later they were married.

And a month after that he returned to their hotel room after a game in Toronto to find her in bed with one of the team’s longtime heroes.

He shut off the water and scrubbed himself with a thick, black towel. The strange thing of it was that neither his ex-wife nor his fellow team member had seemed particularly shocked that he had found them. Rather, they’d been surprised that he’d cared that his friend was boinking his wife.

She’d argued that certainly he’d known of her goal to bed every major hockey star in the western hemisphere, hadn’t he? The expensive rock on her finger hadn’t changed that. And it was all right with her if he slept with groupies, she’d told him. He would anyway once the honeymoon was over.

The only thing that was over at that moment was their marriage—if there really had been a marriage to begin with.

He’d pretty much accepted life as it came after that. And had never really met anyone he wanted more than a quick roll in the hay with. Until Jena, that is.

But it was important that he get to know her if this—whatever was happening between them—was to go any further. And he found he wanted that. Very much. Or else he would have left days ago.

The sound of the doorbell pealed through the apartment. Tommy slowed his movements and stared in the direction of the front door. Too early for Paula, but maybe she had something else on tap this morning and was getting an early start. Stepping out of the tub, he wrapped the towel around his midsection then strode to stare through the peephole. A deliveryman stood in the hall holding a package, about to ring the bell again.

“Yes?” he called.

He watched the man’s gaze fix on the peephole. “Delivery for a Tommy Brodie.”

Delivery? For him?

Damn, how had Kostas found him so quickly? He raked his fingers through his damp hair and unlocked and opened the door. As he signed for the package he heard footsteps on the staircase coming from upstairs. Paula bounded to a stop as Tom handed the deliveryman back his clipboard.

He waited until the guy started out before he told Paula, “I was thinking I’d look after the little mongrel today, give you a break.”

Jena had introduced him to the preteen the morning after his arrival and since then the red-haired girl with braces had stared at him as if he walked on water. He grimaced. Hell, he’d settle for walking without a limp right now.

“Okay, Mr. Wild…I mean, Brodie.”

Tommy grinned and handed her the money she would have made for the day’s activities, then went back inside the apartment and closed the door, package in hand.

The return address was local. He frowned and ripped open the end as he walked to the kitchen and opened the swinging door with his shoulder, letting out the ecstatic pup.

His brows rose high on his forehead as he got an eyeful of the box’s contents. A tux?

He stared at the monkey suit as if it might grow legs and challenge him to a choking match even as Caramel ran circles around his ankles, yipping up a storm.

Tommy shoved the suit back into the box, then ripped the envelope from the top.