Too Hot to Handle (Romancing the Clarksons #1) Read online

  “We were all laughing,” Rita corrected, moving toward the remains of Wayfare’s former world-class kitchen.

  “Thanks.” Aaron’s response was drier than dust as he set the photograph back down, his movements brisk. Dismissive. “She called me later that night and said, ‘There’s your first lesson in politics, son. Everyone you’ve fucked over shows up at the same party sooner or later.’ She was right.”

  Rita stopped beside a stainless-steel oven range, kicking it with the toe of her boot. Barely having spoken to her siblings in the last year, opening up to them took a fair bit of effort. But something about the funeral-esque feel of the burned-down restaurant erased that no-contact year for just a moment, bringing them back to a time when conversation came more easily. When they were still uncomfortable with one another but at least they were accustomed to it. And since someone else arranged time together—namely Miriam—they were saved from appearing to have made an effort, because God forbid, right? “I, um, I made my first osso buco on this big boy,” she said, nodding at the oven range. “It came out like shoe leather. Mom ate the whole thing, chewing every bite while the crew watched. And then she said, ‘Thank God that sucked. If you’d gotten osso buco right the very first time, I would’ve had to step down as head chef. And I like being the main bitch too much.’ Then she took a shot of bourbon and rattled off that night’s specials.”

  While I stood there like a naked teenager on the first day of school.

  Never again.

  “Ooh. My turn.” Holding Aaron’s shoulder for balance, Peggy stepped up onto an overturned steel refrigerator and spun in a pirouette. “After I broke my engagement to Harry, I didn’t want to leave my apartment…didn’t want to work. Nothing. But Mom picked me up and brought me to Wayfare.” Another ballerina-like move that had Aaron reaching without looking to steady her. “She sat me down in the dining room— at the center table in front of everyone—and gave me a skillet full of cherry clafoutis with a lit candle stuck in the center. She said, ‘There. Now it’s a real pity party.’ I went back to work the next day.”

  A wind blew through Wayfare’s ruins, swirling ashes around Rita’s boots. Despite the distance between them, having her brothers and sister there was providing actual comfort. But that comfort turned to thorns with Aaron’s next question.

  “What will you do, Rita?”

  Her mother’s journal had turned to stone in her back pocket, creating a heavy downward pull. The Clarksons were not a family of oversharers. In fact, they weren’t even sharers, which is why she hadn’t yet told them about the journal Miriam had left for her to find. Their individual problems—and they each had plenty to boast about—were their own. While Miriam had occasionally broken through those walls to make a point, she’d been just as comfortable with her children being solitary entities. Dysfunctional islands that occasionally passed in the night. Her illness had knocked them all on their collective asses, because it was fact that the Clarkson siblings loved the shit out of their mother, but they’d never talked about it. Never grieved as a unit. As far as Rita was concerned—and she suspected she wasn’t alone—that suited her just fine.

  But with the journal came responsibility. Her siblings deserved to know about Miriam’s final wish. A wish Rita was now determined to see through. Perhaps she was grasping at any excuse to leave California and her numerous fuckups behind, but the promise of a new beginning sounded better than melting butter. No more cooking. No more failing. She could finally indulge that secret fantasy of going back to school for anything but working in a kitchen. If Miriam’s journal gave her the excuse she needed, she would thank her mother and take it. Without or without her siblings in tow.

  “I’m going to New York. The way she wanted. You’re welcome to come with me, but I won’t fault you for saying no. Just…here.” Rita slid the brown moleskin book from her jeans and held it out to Belmont. “Bel, can I borrow the Suburban? Sort of…indefinitely?”

  Rita waited for her older brother’s stilted nod before she turned and left them with the journal. She sat in her car, pretending to organize a pile of old mix CDs, watching as her family took turns passing around Miriam’s penned thoughts, reading the first entry she’d marked. Although she couldn’t hear them, Rita could vibe Aaron’s incredulity, Peggy’s nervous follow-up questions, and Belmont’s silent, tangible gravity, his unawareness that the other two watched and waited, hoping he would weigh in verbally. It took them only ten minutes to approach the car looking like some kind of mobile intervention.

  Aaron rapped on the window until Rita rolled it down. “Look, it’s just not happening. Next year is an election year and campaign season is critical. I don’t have time to fly to New York and dive into the goddamn ocean.”

  Peggy chewed on her thumbnail. “They just promoted me at the store. I’m up for manager next and Christmas is our busiest season. They’d ax me for sure.”

  Belmont stayed quiet.

  Rita was unsurprised by their reactions. If you’d asked her two days ago if a trip to New York was on the agenda, she might have sighed over the far-fetched fantasy of such a notion but scoffed nonetheless. Just then, however, looking out over the charred remains of her career, guilt a smoky cloud around her shoulders, she couldn’t remember a time when taking off wasn’t part of the plan. If it were feasible to begin driving that morning, she would have done it without wasting a second.

  Rita gathered her hair on top of her head and let it drop, addressing Aaron’s statement first. “You know I don’t fly. I’m driving.”

  Aaron cocked an eyebrow. “You’re actually going. On this weirdly specific mission to catch hypothermia.”

  “Looks that way,” Rita answered, cranking the car’s air conditioner. Their scrutiny was making her hot, and San Diego’s elevated climate in late November allowed her to get away with the nervous action. Her heart was thumping in her chest, her decision cementing itself. Pride wouldn’t let her change her mind now that she’d said it out loud, in front of her brothers and sister.

  Rita hid her inward flinch when Aaron and Peggy sailed off toward Aaron’s Mercedes, muttering to one another, Peggy throwing him the occasional shove. Belmont stood in the middle of the street, head down, but clearly halfway to bailing. Fine. She’d been without them for a long time. She certainly didn’t need them or their stupendous neuroses now. Add the dysfunctional Clarkson clan to the list of things she would gladly leave behind when she hit the road.

  Done.

  Starting the car’s engine, Rita was a second from throwing the car into reverse when she caught Aaron, Peggy, and Belmont closing back in, varying degrees of irritation etched into their familiar features. Without turning her head, Rita rolled down the driver’s-side window and waited.

  “All right, look.” Aaron smoothed a hand down the front of his still-pristine dress shirt. “The front runner for the presidential nomination—Glen Pendleton—is going to be stumping at the Iowa primaries on December tenth. Senator Boggs already recommended me as a campaign adviser; I just need to make contact. If we can pause our little road trip long enough for me to meet with him and secure the position I want…” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but I’m in.”

  “I have a condition thingy, too,” Peggy chimed in, unable to stop herself from bouncing. “We stop at U of C between Iowa and New York. There’s an old friend I’ve been meaning to visit.” Rita narrowed her eyes at Peggy’s blush. As far as Rita knew, Peggy had mostly maintained contact with her cheer squad from the University of Cincinnati, but why would that turn her face red? “I’m only asking for one day,” Peggy added. “Maybe two, depending on how things…progress.”

  Nothing with her family could ever be cut and dried, could it? She jerked her chin at Belmont. “What about you? Any special requests?”

  Belmont’s gaze was locked on his shoes, but he tipped his head down in Peggy’s direction. “I need…I might need—”

  “Sage,” Peggy supplied,
surprising Rita. “You want me to invite Sage.” Belmont didn’t answer, remaining eerily still, but Peggy only nodded. “I’ll ask her if she can take the time off, big guy.”

  Sage—as in Peggy’s wedding planner? Why would Belmont need his sister’s best friend along for the ride? Rita traded a baffled look with Aaron, but neither of them commented. Prying never worked with Belmont. He would only clam up more.

  But they were actually considering coming along. There was a spark of gratefulness—maybe even reluctant excitement—in Rita’s chest, but she doused it. “Look, if you guys are doing this because you feel sorry for me and my burned-down pile of bricks, I don’t need your pity.”

  “Does that sound like us?” Aaron asked.

  “Not even a little bit,” Rita admitted, hands twisting on the leather steering wheel. “So…fine. I need a week to handle the insurance company and tie up loose ends. Unless Peggy has another wedding scheduled I’m not aware of, we leave Tuesday. December first.”

  Aaron did a quick check of his phone and sighed. “Fine.”

  Peggy clapped her hands once. “I’ll bring snacks.”

  Rita’s three siblings left her feeling as if the earth had shifted beneath her feet. In a matter of twelve hours, everything had changed. Everything.

  What else could she have expected after committing arson?

  Chapter Three

  The Suburban’s fan belt blew two hours after they crossed the Arizona–New Mexico border.

  Looking back on the day of departure, calamity had been inevitable. Having spent two days meeting with insurance adjusters and calling in favors to get replacement jobs for her Wayfare employees, Rita had shown up half asleep in her pajamas, drawing exasperation from Aaron and an offer to borrow clothes from Peggy. Each of them still wary about the whole trip and what it symbolized, the siblings had ridden in relative silence throughout the first night and into the morning, Belmont a steady presence at the wheel. Despite Rita’s negative predictions of squabbling and battle cries of shotgun, leaving San Diego had gone almost…smoothly.

  She should have known Murphy’s Law would take effect sooner or later.

  After all, disaster was the Clarkson way.

  When Rita was sixteen, Miriam had taken the four of them camping. For their family, camping had roughly translated into a borrowed Winnebago parked beside Carlsbad Beach, mere feet from convenience stores and a busy highway. Not exactly braving the harsh conditions of nature. Although, after one night, they could have fooled the emergency room staff at Tri-City Medical Center into thinking they’d just spent a week in the swamp.

  Peggy had sneaked off with the son of their neighboring campers, skinny-dipping in restricted waters, leading to a nasty jellyfish sting. Upon hearing his sister’s distressed screams, Aaron had sprinted toward the beach and carried a towel-wrapped Peggy back to the Winnebago, stepping in a gopher hole on the way and spraining his ankle.

  That was the Clarksons’ first and last family vacation, but the misfortunes hadn’t started or ended there. Belmont had fallen into a well on a class field trip in third grade and stayed missing for four days. Later, they’d found out he’d shouted himself hoarse on the first day, leaving him unable to call out to the search party that passed by. On the fourth day, when firemen had managed to extricate him from the obscured thirty-foot-deep well, the media attention had been intense, complete with cameras and flashes going off and questions being hurled at young, filthy, and starving Belmont. At the time Rita had been too young to process why Belmont had withdrawn into himself after that, but the television footage she’d found on the Internet as an adult explained a lot.

  Rita’s personal misfortunes had once occurred with less notoriety or incurred medical costs, but were no less imprinted on her psyche. Such as slugging a classmate for Photoshopping her head onto a porn star's body and circulating it online. Hello, expulsion.

  Little did she know her claim to fame would also come once again via the Internet a decade later. And for the first time, irony didn’t amuse her.

  Now, at the unmistakable sounds of car engine trouble, Rita shot up in the far backseat and pushed her dark hair out of her face. “The hell happened?”

  Belmont jerked the Suburban into park and sat perfectly still, white-knuckling the cracked steering wheel. Peggy sat up slowly from where she’d been sleeping in the middle row. She sent Rita a troubled glance over her shoulder, then returned her attention to Belmont. Rita’s concern for her oldest brother laced through her alarm. Ever since Peggy had shown up without her friend, Sage Alexander, Belmont had been wound more tightly than usual. Rita had been able to glean only a fraction of the story from Peggy before they’d been locked up in the car and private conversation had become impossible.

  Sage had been Peggy’s wedding planner for all four failed wedding attempts, and they’d become close friends. Best friends. As the stand-in for their absent father who would walk Peggy down the aisle, apparently Belmont had developed some sort of attachment to Sage, too. Because his reaction when Peggy apologized and told him Sage couldn’t make the trip had been nothing short of extraordinary.

  Rita wasn’t being insensitive in using that description. Belmont rarely showed a reaction to anything, let alone women, whom he barely gave the time of day. But something about being without this Sage girl had turned him to ice.

  Aaron roused in the passenger seat, tugging the headphones from his ears. “Is there something wrong?” He looked out the windshield just in time to see smoke curl from under the hood. “Oh, for the love of God. Tell me you have Triple A.”

  “Nope,” Belmont said, his voice sounding rusty. “I have a toolbox in back, but that isn’t going to help if we need a new part.”

  “Let’s just call a tow truck.” Rita was already searching through her purse for her cell. “Anyone know where we are?”

  “Hopefully near a bridge, so I can throw myself off of it,” Aaron answered briskly before pushing open his door and climbing out. They all watched as he rolled up his tailored sleeves, mouth moving to form what were obviously curse words.

  When Aaron popped the hood, Belmont shook his head. “He has no idea what to look for, but I’m going to give him a minute to try.”

  Peggy popped a stick of gum into her mouth. “Didn’t he negotiate his way out of shop class in high school?”

  “No, that was Ethics,” Rita said. She held up her phone, trying to map their location, but was thwarted by the lack of a signal. “Kind of gives him plausible deniability as a politician.”

  Belmont sighed when Aaron started to pace, holding his cell phone up in the air much the way Rita was doing. He shoved open the door and went to join his brother outside the car, followed a moment later by Peggy and Rita. When the sun hit Rita, she cowered back into the Suburban’s shade. Sunshine was not her thing. Really, being outside at all went against her entire life philosophy. Inside good. Nature bad. Trips to the farmers’ market for cooking ingredients was the typical extent of her excursions, and even then she rushed through the process as if she had a sun allergy. Those trips to purchase vegetables were over now, though, weren’t they? Experiencing a rush of buoyancy at the thought, Rita peeked around the lifted hood into the steaming engine, where Belmont was busy waving smoke aside to inspect the damage.

  “What’s the verdict?”

  “Not good.” In a familiar gesture, Belmont rubbed his thumb along the crease in his chin. “There was a town about three miles back. Small. But probably has a garage. I’ll go.”

  Aaron walked up between them. “Remind me again why you don’t fly, Rita?”

  “Because of crashes. Don’t turn this on me.”

  “I won’t.” Her younger brother held up both hands. “I won’t point out that we could have been in New York in under six hours.”

  “You’re acting extra dickish because that stupid video went viral, huh?” Rita said, kicking the front left tire of the Suburban and swearing she heard it groan. “So what…we should all have to live
like Tibetan monks because you decided to become a politician?”

  “You went after someone with a knife on national television.” Aaron finally lost his closely cradled cool, raking frustrated hands through his styled dark blond hair. “Do you have any idea how much shit I had to eat over that at work?”

  “Oh, stop. You eat shit for a living. It’s your job.” Rita stomped away, circled back. “And that cheese soufflé was perfect. You have no idea.”

  Peggy edged close to the group. “Aaron, don’t do it.”

  Ignoring his sister, Aaron straightened his sleeve. “The soufflé looked decent, but it certainly wasn’t knife-attack worthy.”

  “Decent?” Rita forced out the word through a throat that felt rubbed raw by a sandstorm. The blinding sunlight turned her vision white, her siblings winking in and out of sight. Anxiety that had been building up since her disgraced departure from In the Heat of the Bite exploded from her nerve endings, and she launched herself at Aaron. Belmont caught her at the last minute, throwing her over his shoulder with little effort and stomping toward the rear of the Suburban.

  “You’re letting him get to you,” Belmont said, setting her down and nudging her into a sitting position on the bumper. “Don’t.”

  “What were we thinking?” She let her head fall back against the rear gate. “We’ll never make it to New York without a murder being committed.”

  “I heard that,” Aaron called from the car’s front. “Should we check your luggage for knives?”

  “Aaron,” Peggy whined. “Not cool.”

  Rita launched herself off the bumper, only to be wrangled by Belmont once again, who gave a weary sigh.

  That’s when the motorcycle pulled up.

  * * *

  Good Lord. I should probably just keep on my way.

  But Jasper Ellis had been raised with better manners than to leave folks stranded by the roadside, so he slowed his Harley to a stop, parking across the two-lane highway from the motley crew just to be safe. He might be disinclined to leave four obvious city dwellers to their respective fates, but he also valued his hide. And the dark-haired girl glowering on the bumper—seemingly against her will—looked hell bent for leather. In his thirty-three years, he’d learned better than to provoke a female when her eyes said Bring it on.