Free Cooking up a Storm by Emma Holly Page A

hear. Marissa should have buried her head under the pillow, but the situation held her spellbound. She could not tear herself away until the last sigh faded. It was like watching a car accident, except she was the one bleeding her heart out in the wreckage. Worse, her own pain hadn’t prevented her from becoming aroused. Too hurt to masturbate, too hot to sleep, she slunk out the back door and grabbed her rusty, no-speed Schwinn.
    Though the ocean was closer to the inn, she wanted to ride to the bay side, the peaceful side. The Cape’s hook-shaped peninsula wasn’t wide here, three miles at most — barely far enough to raise a sweat. She covered the distance quickly and leant her rickety bike at the end of Old Man Weston’s pier.
    It had to be two in the morning but he was sitting at the end of the dock, his arms propped behind him, his silver hair glinting in the moonlight. She often found him here, sometimes with his camera, sometimes not. Either he never slept or he guessed when she was coming.
    Marissa wouldn’t put it past him. He was like a Zen master or something, the inscrutable native Cape Codder. Her ankle boots made a hollow sound as she walked down the worn planks. The old man didn’t even twitch. She looked past him. The tide was in. The sandbars slept beneath the inky water. She felt as though the night were lapping at her, mocking the painful, live-wire sensitivity of her flesh. What she wouldn’t have given for a good, hard fuck!
    She dropped down next to Jack, close enough to rub thighs. He had good thighs for an old guy, long and solid. His head turned as she sat, not all the way, just enough to catch her in the corner of his eye. Water slurped against the pilings.
    ‘You don’t even fish,’ she said.
    ‘Don’t need to.’ He shifted his hands so that his shoulder brushed hers, a reassurance kind of thing — or Marissa took it that way. ‘Watching the barnacles grow is entertainment enough.’
    She snorted. ‘Right, old man.’
    ‘My name is Jack.’
    She ruffled her hair so that the spikes stood up straighter. ‘You let other people call you “old man.” Why not me?’
    ‘You tell me.’
    His voice held a strange note. She turned sideways so she could face him straight on. Their eyes met and held, her chocolate brown to his olive brown — both black in the moonlight. A zing of sensual awareness tingled in her thighs, something she’d never caught from him before.
    She scrubbed her hair and shook the sensation off. ‘Nah, you’re not interested in me. I’m not the one you come to see every night at the inn.’
    ‘No, you’re the one I sit on the end of this dock for.’
    She bumped his shoulder. ‘Don’t kid a kidder, old man. You’ve got a thing for Abby. I can tell.’ But not as big a thing as I do, she added silently. Otherwise, you wouldn’t sit here letting some cocky LA playboy cut you out of the picture. You’re a man, after all. You’ve got half a chance.
    Jack drew a flat stone from the pocket of his jeans and skipped it across the rippling waters of the bay. It skipped six times before disappearing with a loud plunk. ‘Did that man come for her?’
    Marissa shivered. He couldn’t know. He’d been buried in his journal the whole time he and the stranger had shared the dining room. ‘What man?’ she said.
    ‘The man with the silver-blue eyes. Did he come for Abby?’
    ‘He came for a job.’ Jack’s silence said he didn’t believe her. Marissa squeezed her knees to her chest. ‘You may be spooky, old man, but you don’t know everything.’
    ‘I know you’re wasting precious young energy hankering after something you’ll probably never get.’
    ‘Fuck you,’ she said, furious, her eyes stinging with tears. She hadn’t come here for this.
    He caught her arm before she could get away; caught it and held. He didn’t say a word, didn’t move, but the hand on her wrist spoke for him. ‘I’d like to fuck you,’ it said. ‘We could do it right here,