Dangerous Lover by Lisa Marie Rice

Author:Lisa Marie Rice [Lisa Marie Rice]
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2007-01-18T07:00:00+00:00

Eight

Summerville

“Caroline, go back upstairs. Please.” Jack kept his voice gentle, but he wanted to growl in exasperation. The unheated basement was dank and damp and cold. It would take him at least another half hour to get the piece of shit Caroline laughingly called a boiler going.

She was standing next to him anxiously, eager to help though she couldn’t distinguish a lug wrench from an eyebrow pencil, shaking with the cold. Her nostrils were pinched and white, and her hands were milky blue even though she surreptitiously tucked them under her armpits when he wasn’t looking. He couldn’t stand seeing her like this.

“No,” she said, through chattering teeth. “That’s okay. I want to help.”

“You know what would help me?” He put down the screwdriver and pried away the backing plate. “You’d really help me if you went back upstairs where there’s still some warmth left. Your teeth are distracting me. They sound like castanets.”

“Sorry.” She clenched her jaw.

He sighed. “That was a joke. Obviously not a very good one.” He wrenched the plate open and contemplated the rusting wires and leaky pipes with disgust. “Please go up, I can’t stand seeing you like this. I mean it.”

“If you can stand it, I can. I mean you’re a soldier. Were a soldier. Don’t soldiers stick together?” She edged closer to peer past him into the bowels of the boiler, as if looking into the face of a long-despised enemy. “So that’s the inside of the beast? Doesn’t look like much, does it? I mean considering how much damage it causes.”

Jack clenched his own jaw. No, it didn’t look like much. It was the worst, oldest, crappiest boiler he’d ever seen, and he couldn’t believe she was trusting this piece of shit to keep her warm. It should have been tossed onto the garbage heap ten years ago.

“You need a new filter.” And a new casing and a new feed-water drum.

“Tell me about it.”

“You’re spending more in fixing it than a new one would cost. And you’re just guzzling up electricity.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And you’d save even more money if you bought—”

“A condensing boiler,” she finished for him. “I know. Believe me I know. I’ve been told all of this, repeatedly. What can I say? I don’t have the money for a new filter and—trust me on this one—I certainly don’t have the money for a new boiler. Maybe someday. But definitely not now.”

Jack gritted his teeth. He was going to buy a brand-new filter Monday and fit it while she was out. Mack the Jerk was never going to touch her boiler again, so she’d never know. He’d give his eyeteeth to be able to buy a new boiler for her, but it would be hard to install on his own, and she’d notice.

Fuck! He hated this! He hated to see her pale with the cold, shaking and frightened that she’d be without heat. It was insane that Caroline had to spend even one more second without money when he had so much. What

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