CHAPTER TWENTY
ARCHER
KELSEY WAS PRICKLY AND IRRITABLE MOST of the drive back to Mirror Lake. She snapped at me for leaving candy wrappers on the floor of the van, grumbled about her lack of sleep, and bitched about the classes she had to teach tomorrow.
Because I knew exactly what her problem was, I let her complain. She’d been thrown off, catapulted outside the safe, little comfort zone she’d built for herself and tossed into the path of a tornado.
Now there was the adrenaline crash. And everything else. For one, she hadn’t expected me to get along with her mother. Hadn’t expected her mother to like me—not a rough guy with a lousy past and no future to speak of. She hadn’t expected to love the risks we’d taken, and she didn’t know how to deal with it.
I didn’t, either. I liked jumping dirt bikes, driving too fast, fighting. I’d spent most of my life doing risky, sometimes illegal things. But nothing compared to facing down a tornado with a storm girl and winning.
When we got back to Kelsey’s house, I helped her unload her stuff and drove the van back to the university. She needed time alone to decompress. So did I.
I went to the Meteorology department to leave the van keys for Colton. As I approached the building, a young, skinny guy wearing a wrinkled suit came through the front door. He hurried down the steps, glanced at me distractedly, and stopped.
“Oh, hey,” he said. “You’re Kelsey’s… uh, hitman.”
“Hitman?” It took me a second to remember this kid had been there the day I saw Kelsey in the quad. She’d snapped at both of us.
“Right,” I said. “Who are you?”
“Peter Danforth. I took some undergrad classes with Kelsey.”
He stuck out his hand. I shook it and started toward the building again.
“Colton just told me Kelsey went out to chase a storm,” Peter said, coming up beside me as if I wanted to have a conversation. “Did you go with her?”
“Yeah.” I slanted him a glance. “Why?”
“It just surprised everyone, you know? She’s always been so against going out on her own. She structured her role in the Spiral Project around the idea that she would do everything but work in the field. She’d just sit at a computer and assimilate the data.”
An image of Kelsey in a cramped office rose in my head, alongside a memory of her burning with excitement and adrenaline during the chase.
My chest tightened.
“Whatever she does, she’ll do it well,” I told Peter.
“So did you guys see anything?” Peter asked. “Colton said you did.”
“Yeah, she sent him the video. She got some great footage of a tornado.”
“Really? Where?”
“A field in eastern Kansas.” I pulled open the building door. “You can ask her about it.”
“I will, thanks. Good seeing you again.”
I nodded and went inside. I left Colton’s keys in his departmental mailbox before returning to the Butterfly House. After unpacking and showering, I dug my notebook out of my duffel.
I leafed through the pages, then sat down and did some more drawings. Not until my mother had sent me all my stuff in a cardboard box did I remember I’d spent a lot of my school days drawing in the margins of notebooks. And everything else—math papers, spelling tests, and science reports. Drawing was always easy.
Around dinnertime, I texted Kelsey and told her I was coming over. When I arrived, she let me in without a word. Much as I loved the scotch-and-honey sound of her voice, I also liked the faintly annoyed look she gave me, her blue eyes sharp with that regal, take-no-prisoners expression. The one that had made me want to capture her.
“I’m working,” she said, gesturing to the kitchen. “Go get something to eat or drink, if you want.”
I tortured myself a little by watching her pick up a few folders from a chair. Her incredible breasts curved the front of her shirt, and jeans hugged her perfect ass. Long legs. Shiny hair. She was all woman. All mine.
Mine.
The word flared in my mind. I’d never had anything that was really mine. Even my family hadn’t been mine. But Kelsey… I would never think of her any other way.
My fists clenched. But after I left town, she’d be a free agent again. And though I’d told her we could have a hell of a good time together while I was here—and we were, more than I’d ever imagined possible—the thought of her with another guy made me want to slam my fists against a brick wall. Repeatedly.
I forced my fingers to unclench and went into the kitchen. I rummaged in the fridge and saw a carton of chocolate milk on the lower shelf.
I knew Kelsey had bought it for me. And stupid as the feeling was, I couldn’t help liking the idea that she’d been thinking about me while grocery shopping. God knew I couldn’t get her out of my mind, no matter what I was doing.
I didn’t have much time left. The Butterfly House was almost finished. I had maybe two weeks left of this candy-box town, pine trees, mountains, and crystal blue lake. Two weeks before I had to go back to the dry, desert heat and sand, the smell of gasoline, the fireball sun.
Two weeks left of Kelsey.
I opened the cabinet to find a glass, noticing the door was tilting off the hinges. I checked a few of the other cabinets for a toolbox but found none. I opened a door that I assumed led to the basement and went down the stairs. I fumbled for the light switch and turned it on.
I blinked at the sudden glare and stopped. The room looked like something out of a magazine. Pale blue walls lined with white shelves, a wide, marble-topped table sat in the center of the room, surrounded by high-backed, cushioned chairs. The shelves were stacked with folds of bright fabrics, rolls of satiny ribbons, baskets, and jars of beads and buttons.
“Archer?”
Kelsey’s voice broke me from my surprise.
“In the basement,” I called.
Her footsteps sounded on the stairs. “What are you doing down here?”
“Looking for a toolbox. One of your cabinet doors is off the hinges.” I turned to face her. She was watching me, her expression wary behind her glasses.
“I didn’t know you had a craft room,” I said.
She flushed. “No one does.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s a craft room.”
A strange feeling uncurled in my chest. Something warm and sort of soft. I approached her and reached out to run a few strands of her blue hair through my fingers. Her face was still pink.
“I like your craft room, storm girl,” I said. “I like you, too.”
“You mean you like me like me?” she asked. For the first time all day, she looked amused.
“Uh huh.” I lowered my head to brush my mouth against hers. “And I like that you make crafts. It must be the daredevil in you. Sharp scissors, hot glue guns, pins and needles. Dangerous stuff.”
The wariness eased from her expression as she laughed. “Or it’s the girl in me. I don’t like many people to know she still exists.”
“No way you can hide her from me.” I didn’t want her to. Didn’t want her to hide any part of herself from me. Even knowing I had to give her something in return didn’t change that desire one bit.
“What kind of stuff do you make?” I asked.
“Some jewelry and mixed-media collages. I have an online shop where I sell stuff. Mostly I make Ukrainian painted eggs, which my mother sells in her gift shop.”
“You mean all the eggs in her shop were yours?”
She nodded. “She’ll only stock eggs I paint. That’s why I wanted to visit her. I had to drop off a box of pysanky to restock her supply.”
“Can I see more of them?”
Kelsey hesitated before nodding. She took several baskets from under the table and handed me a bright, intricately decorated egg that felt light and fragile. It was painted a glossy black and wrapped with an incredible geometric pattern of red, gold, and green.
“Where did you learn to do this?” I asked, pulling the basket toward me so I could look at all the other eggs. In truth, I hadn’t paid much attention to the eggs in her mother’s shop. But now, knowing Kelsey had made them, I was kind of awed.
“My mother taught me when I was a kid,” Kelsey said. “We always painted them around Easter, though we also did them throughout the year as gifts. Even in my wilder days, I always liked sitting down to paint eggs with her.”
She picked up a blue-and-gold egg and studied the pattern. “She developed arthritis in her hands and couldn’t do the work anymore, but even now she still gives me ideas and suggestions. Or direct orders.”
I could well imagine her mother issuing orders. Nice as Mrs. March had been, I sensed the same core of steel in her that Kelsey had.
“How do you do it?” I asked, nodding to the egg.
“It’s a special technique using wax and dye.” She dug around in a box and produced a tool that had a wooden rod and a metal tip. “This is called a kistka. You use it to apply the wax pattern, and then dye the egg. The parts of the egg that aren’t covered by wax end up colored.”
“Show me.”
“You’ll find it pretty boring.”
“Nothing you do is boring to me.”
She glanced at me, one eyebrow lifting. “Not even if I start talking about data assimilation?”
“Not even then. Especially not if you do it while standing in front of me wearing a sexy suit and holding a pointer.”
“Dream on, baby.”
“I will.”
Kelsey smiled and opened a box filled with dye-stained jars. “Okay, you asked for it. If I show you the technique, you have to paint one of the eggs, too.”
I looked at my ugly, callused hands that I used to turn socket wrenches. “I’ll break it in two seconds.”
“Not if you’re careful, you won’t.”
“I’m never careful.”
Kelsey looked up. Something crossed her expression that I couldn’t define.
“Archer,” she said. “You’re always careful with me.”
A blade twisted inside me. I wasn’t careful with her. I was too rough, too demanding, too greedy. I’d started this whole thing because I’d wanted to make her lose control, to admit she was wrong, even to break her a little. Being careful had never entered my mind.
And I’d known she’d respond with fire and lightning. I knew she could take it, that she wanted it, that she’d beg for more. I’d give her more too, as much as I could, push myself to the edge right along with her.
Hell, we’d challenged a tornado together. I was more alive now than I’d been in years.
Her blue eyes. I didn’t want to drown in them. I wanted to live in them.
The blade twisted harder. I pulled my gaze from hers.
“Where do we start?” I asked.
She showed me how to get the supplies organized—making the dyes, cleaning the hollow duck eggs, sketching a pattern with a pencil. She lit a candle and demonstrated how to melt beeswax into the funnel of the kistka before using different styluses to trace the pattern with wax.
“Why the nice, cozy secret room?” I asked her as we sat at the table, each of us concentrating on drawing wax lines.
“It’s comfortable.” Kelsey shrugged, looking faintly embarrassed again. “I like to come down here, put on some music, maybe have a glass of wine. I wanted a place where I could shut everything else out and just be… I don’t know. Quiet. Alone.”
“You’re not alone now.”
Our gazes met across the table, a crackle of energy lighting the air. I wasn’t alone, either. For the first time in a very long time. Maybe for the first time ever.
Kelsey picked up another stylus and drew it over the surface of the egg.
“I’ll be alone when you leave,” she said.
I was this close to telling her I didn’t have to leave. But I did have to.
I was no fool. I’d wanted to make Kelsey admit she was wrong about me, but she was in a class of her own. One that was way above me. A place I’d never belong.
A drop of hot wax fell from the stylus onto my egg. The pattern smeared.
“I’m messing this up,” I said.
Kelsey came around to my side of the table. “You might have overfilled the kistka with wax. You can get that off with some wax remover. Hold it in your palm for a sec.”
She poured the remover onto a tissue and took my hand, pulling the egg closer to her. She dabbed at the wax and used a cotton swab to clean it off the pattern. She’d taken off her glasses to do the detail work, and I could see the individual strands of her thick eyelashes.
I watched her face, the crease of concentration between her eyebrows, the way the blue locks of her hair fell over her forehead, the fine-grained silk of her skin. She had a tiny beauty mark just under her left eye, small as the head of a pin. I inhaled her scent of almond milk and honey. Her lips were full, and without lipstick they were a pale pink like the inside of a seashell.
So goddamned beautiful. A fierce, sexy, brilliant woman who loved to chase storms and disappeared into her secret craft room to paint eggs when the world closed in on her.
She glanced up and caught me staring.
“What?” she asked defensively.
I slipped my other hand under her chin and lifted her face to mine. Her breath caught, and her lips parted. I couldn’t remember if I’d ever kissed her gently. She sparked my lust so powerfully that most of the time I just wanted to grab her and crush my mouth against hers. To get inside her as fast and hard as I could.
This time, I forced myself to kiss her gently. Her lips softened against mine, a murmur of pleasure passing from her to me. Filling me with heat.
I put the egg down and wrapped my arms around her waist, tugging her into the V of my legs. She settled her hands on my thighs and leaned in to deepen the kiss. I liked the way she tucked her body against mine without hesitation, as if she knew that even if I couldn’t be careful with her, I’d never hurt her.
I lifted my head. She was already flushed, her eyes darkening to navy. I tugged a few strands of her hair. I knew I had a better chance of getting answers from her when her defenses were lowered.
“Because it’s the color of the sky, right?” I asked, twisting a strand of blue around my fingers.
Kelsey blinked, paling a little. I’d struck a nerve.
“It was…” She pulled away from me and went around to the other side of the table. “It was something my father used to say. A Russian proverb, I think. When he missed Russia or when I moved away, or when things got rough. He said the sky was still blue no matter where you were or what happened. Even if it was raining… behind the clouds, the sky was blue.”
She ducked her head, her hair falling over her face as she picked up an egg.
“Tell me,” I said.
“No.”
“Why do you blame yourself?”
The egg cracked in her hand. In her fist. I saw her internal struggle. She lifted her head. Eyes like a glacier.
“I get it,” I told her. “I blame myself for shitty things all the time. But that doesn’t change the fact that they happened.”
“I never expected anything to change,” she muttered. “Dead is dead.”
“Does blaming yourself make it easier or harder?”
Her jaw tightened. “I didn’t know psychoanalysis was part of our deal. Or your rules.”
I shook my head. Christ, she could still get wound so tight.
“You think your father would want you to blame yourself?” I asked.
“Goddammit, Archer.”
“Tell me.”
“He shouldn’t have died, all right?” Kelsey snapped, her voice trembling beneath the surface. “We got into a fight… it sounds so stupid now. I was such a fucking loose cannon, especially when I went to college because I thought I could do whatever I wanted. My father and I still argued, but I felt like I didn’t have to answer to his disapproval anymore.”
She clenched her fist around the broken egg.
“In my junior year, I told my parents I was leaving college,” she continued. “Quitting. I was going to travel to South America with some guy, hitchhiking and living off the land or whatever. My father said no way in hell would he let me do that. We had a huge fight about it. I stormed off with the guy anyway, in a fit of fucking stupid rebellion.
“My mother tried to stop me. My father was furious. I didn’t care. I thought I was so goddamn cool, so free and independent. I got as far as Ecuador when my mother called to tell me my father had had a heart attack. He died before I got home.”
She opened her hand and threw the broken eggshell into the trash.
“Since you want so badly to know, that’s why I blame myself,” she said. “My father died because I was a selfish bitch who thought quitting school and running off to South America would be fun.”
“And that’s why you self-destructed,” I said.
“Yeah.” She gave a bitter laugh. “You’d think I’d have learned my lesson right away, but instead I kept the hurt going. I didn’t even think what it would do to my mother if something happened to me. Thank god she showed me what real strength was. I’d spent too many years acting like a spoiled child, and it was finally time to grow up. To take care of my mother for a change. So I went to grad school and started my career. The rest is history.”
“So all these years you’ve played it safe.”
“I’ve been responsible.” Her eyes hardened with irritation. “I’ve gotten stuff done. I’ve been an adult, Archer. You can’t say the same, can you?”
Her turn to jab at me. She didn’t like that I was pushing her to open up and now she wanted to retaliate. I could take her punches. Hell, I’d let my guard down if it would make her feel better.
“What have you done all these years?” she snapped. “You can’t find a steady job, can you? You just spend your time taking odd jobs, hanging out at bars, and sleeping around, right?”
“Pretty much.”
My response threw her. She rubbed her temple and averted her gaze. “So why did you come to Mirror Lake?”
I shrugged, embarrassed by the answer even though I knew I owed her the truth. “Nicholas, I guess. Thought I should meet him. Didn’t expect to meet you.”
Kelsey was silent, but some of the anger seemed to drain from her. I felt her watching me again.
My heart was beating too fast. I pushed away from the table and went around to where she stood. I took her by the shoulders and pulled her in for a kiss, needing her sweet heat to dissolve the tightness in my chest.
It did. She did.
She pulled her mouth from mine. Faint desperation flashed in her eyes. “I need structure, Archer. I need a routine and—”
“I know you do.” It was the reason she escaped the world to paint. She needed quiet solitude as much as she needed excitement. She wasn’t only a risk-taker or a scientist or a crafter. She was finding ways to be everything.
She made me think I could be everything, too.
I put my hands on either side of her face and kissed her again.
“You need peace,” I murmured, “and you need storms.”
Her resistance slipped away as the kiss deepened. She put her arms around my neck and leaned into me. I loved how responsive she was. How she just gave over.
She ran her fingers over the feathers on my tattoo.
“You’re not scared of anything, are you?” she whispered.
“Yeah, I am.”
“What?”
“Leaving.”
She was quiet for a minute before she confessed, “I’m scared of that, too. Scared of how I’ll feel when you go.”
My insides twisted. I couldn’t help wondering how she’d feel if I stayed.
I tightened my hands on her waist. “Do you trust me?”
“You know I do.”
“How much?”
“Why?” She moved back to look at me, her eyes narrowing. “Is this about some freaky sex thing?”
“No, but now that you mention it…”
She poked me in the chest. “Haven’t I already proven that I trust you?”
I patted her ass. “Not like this.”