Explosive Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  PRAISE FOR BETH KERY AND WICKED BURN

  Winner of the All About Romance Reader Poll for Best Erotica 2009

  “A web of sensual suspense . . . Wicked good storytelling.”

  —Jaci Burton, author of Riding the Night

  “Kery gives readers beautifully written prose with amazingly descriptive sex scenes. But be warned—this is a very sensual tale. The well-crafted characters are full of raw emotions that are right on the page for the reader to experience.”—Romantic Times

  “After reading Wicked Burn by Beth Kery, I have a new favorite author! . . . With passionate love scenes, poignant romance, and a touching story, Wicked Burn is the kind of book that I will read again and again—it will certainly have a permanent place in my personal library.”—Wild on Books

  “A book you will never forget.”—TwoLips Reviews

  “[Kery] brings her characters to life with her descriptive prose and realistic dialogue . . . I held my breath as they came together in some of the sexiest love scenes I have read this year.”

  —Romance Junkies

  “Beth Kery has written a tale filled with intense emotion and wickedly hot sex.”—Joyfully Reviewed

  “A poignant contemporary romance . . . filled with real characters.” —Midwest Book Review

  “A remarkable tale that mesmerizes to the core.”

  —The Romance Studio

  Heat titles by Beth Kery

  SWEET RESTRAINT

  PARADISE RULES

  RELEASE

  EXPLOSIVE

  Berkley Sensation titles by Beth Kery

  WICKED BURN

  DARING TIME

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196,

  South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2010 by Beth Kery.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form

  without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in

  violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  HEAT and the HEAT design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Heat trade paperback edition / December 2010

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kery, Beth.

  Explosive / Beth Kery.—Heat trade pbk. ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-44565-5

  I. Title.

  PS3611.E79E97 2010

  813’.6—dc22

  2010023003

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many thanks are due to several people for this book. I’m so grateful to have a husband who knows the world of business as well as he knows technology, tax law, and how to fix a sink. His information is always invaluable to me when it comes down to the details. I’d like to thank Lea, Sabra, Mary, and Robin for beta reading Explosive and providing feedback. I’d be lost without you, ladies. Thanks to Sabra and her husband for giving me valuable information on the EOD. And Fi—you’re a saint for helping me brainstorm and putting up with me when I worried incessantly. I would also like to extend my gratitude to the members of my Yahoo reader group, Total Exposure, for cheering me on and offering me support. Your kind words of encouragement keep me going at times.

  CHAPTER ONE

  She was so caught up in the lazy mood of the first evening on her summer holiday that at first she couldn’t compute the fact that Thomas Nicasio was standing on her dock. He stared fixedly at the rippling lake, the golden sunlight bringing out the burnished highlights in his uncharacteristically mussed brown hair. If it weren’t for that singular profile she would never have recognized him in these surroundings.

  Thomas was an inhabitant of her work world, after all, a denizen of the city and the high-rise where they both worked. For Sophie, he only lived within the confines of 209 South LaSalle, wearing his perfectly tailored Armani suits, always moving with a brisk sense of purpose through the corridors or paging through his BlackBerry distractedly while he waited for his brother in the waiting room of the medical practice where Sophie worked.

  They’d shared nothing more until that moment but heated glances, a few flirtatious conversations. On several occasions, she’d noticed Thomas sitting in the waiting room, studying her covertly while she interacted with her patients as she escorted them to the reception desk. It was clear to Sophie that Thomas was attracted to her, but he’d always seemed to make a point of keeping his distance.

  The single exception to their sterile acquaintance had been the charged, brief exchange they’d shared in the waiting room of her office just last evening. Thomas certainly hadn’t seemed contained or aloof on that occasion.

  Still, until that moment he’d always hovered on the periphery of her life, never fully entering it, but never totally absent from it, either. She thought of Thomas Nicasio a lot, usually in a sympathetic manner following her consultations with her psychologist friend, Andy Lancaster.

  More recently, she had good reason to consider Thomas with c
ompassion while watching the ten o’clock news.

  He might occasionally creep up into her thoughts whenever she saw another tall man out of the corner of her eye while she was grocery shopping or jogging by Lake Michigan. Certainly the faces of her fantasy lovers often morphed into Thomas the closer she got to climax, but surely that was no surprise. Sophie suspected the same was true of a majority of the women who caught sight of him.

  Still . . . she wondered at times if his sober, watchful gaze had the same effect on most females that it did on her.

  Usually Thomas existed for Sophie only within the confines of her office lobby or the eight-by-eight confines of a crowded elevator, his head easy to see over the other early-morning elevator riders, his eyes unfailingly meeting hers, his gruff, quiet, “Good morning, Doctor,” tickling her ear before the elevator doors opened and Sophie stepped off on the twenty-third floor.

  The overlap of their lives was so minimal that it made her wonder if she was hallucinating—conjuring her dreams into reality—when she saw him standing on her dock wearing a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt.

  Her brain just couldn’t seem to get a handle on the image.

  And there was something about his stance that caused a muted alarm to start ringing in her head. She considered calling Andy Lancaster, who had been treating Thomas’s brother, Rick. Thomas had been asking to see Andy just last night.

  But what could Andy do, even if she got a hold of him? He was in Chicago, after all, over one hundred fifty miles upstate.

  And Thomas had never been his patient.

  Sophie knew that multiple tragedies had befallen Thomas Nicasio’s family recently. His brother and nephew were dead. Thomas’s adoptive father, Joseph Carlisle, was being investigated for several federal crimes. The FBI was in the midst of building an indictment against the wealthy businessman.

  Did those things relate to the fact that Thomas was standing on her dock, looking dazed and shell-shocked? And if so, what was he doing here? There was no way he could understand that she, of all people, knew details about the dark labyrinth of his family life.

  She placed the paintbrush she’d been gripping into a coffee can filled with water and headed toward the side door. She glanced down at herself, hesitating. A few swipes of dried lavender tempura paint decorated her bare ribs and abdomen. She wore a bikini with a pair of jean shorts pulled over the bottoms and white canvas tennis shoes that were so ancient the cloth was separating from the soles in spots.

  She should go and change—throw on a shirt at the very least.

  But then she recalled the way his head hung at a queer angle as he stared at the sunset-infused lake and she descended the steps.

  The closer she got to his rigid figure, the more anxious she became. Before her feet hit the dock, she saw the way that his rib cage moved in and out. It struck her as strange—eerie, even—how he stood so still and yet appeared to be panting, as though from some invisible exertion.

  She gasped when he spun around as her foot hit the wooden dock, looking like a ready, lethal warrior anticipating attack. A sensation like flowing, hot liquid sank through her lower belly.

  For a few seconds, they just stood frozen in each other’s sights, his stare unnerving her. His jaw was covered with whiskers that were two shades darker than the hair on his head. He typically combed his long bangs back in a conservative style that suited his polished work image. Currently, they hung loose, bracketing his dark brows and eyes that had always reminded Sophie of a deep forest wood with shards of sunlight breaking through the topmost branches.

  Sophie heard a speedboat motor hum in the distance through the increasingly loud throb of the heartbeat in her ears.

  After a moment she summoned her voice, trying to grasp on to a fleeing sense of reality.

  “Thomas? What a surprise. It’s me—Dr. Gable? Sophie? From Dr. Lancaster’s office?” She waved lamely at the glistening waters and laughed. “I hadn’t realized we shared space at Haven Lake as well.”

  Despite her growing uncertainty, she’d forced her voice into the level, reassuring tone she took with someone who was agitated or panicked. She’d had her share of crisis training to become a physician, but even before she’d gone to medical school she’d worked for a year as a clinical social worker with abused children. She’d long ago learned to soothe instinctively . . . without thought.

  She was so caught up in the bizarre, electric moment that it never occurred to her to question why she would treat a six foot four male in his prime, a man who typically moved through the minutes of his life with the easy grace of a prince, like an agitated child. Especially since Thomas Nicasio hardly seemed childlike to her at that moment. If anything, he reminded her of a wild, cornered animal.

  A wild, dangerous animal?

  The worn black T-shirt he wore carried the inexplicable caption Mighty are those that flirt with fate, EOD. The material skimmed across his long, lean torso, making it easy for her to see his rapid breathing. She’d never seen him in anything but a suit before, but she had to admit his broad shoulders, narrow hips, strong thighs, and long legs were perfectly suited to jeans. Her gaze skittered across his crotch. She glanced guiltily back up to his rigid face in time to see a spark ignite in his eyes.

  Her heartbeat amplified in her ears.

  A strong sexual current had often leapt between them in the past, but at the moment, Sophie felt burned by the heat of his stare. She tensed when he took a step toward her.

  “Tom. Call me Tom.”

  Her mouth fell open at the sound of his deep, hoarse voice. Why did he sound like he hadn’t spoken in days? Her expert eye took in the pinched look of his bold, masculine features, the whiteness at the corners of his mouth, the look of exhaustion that seemed to reside behind the maniclike intensity of his gaze.

  She turned her shoulder to him in a nonthreatening stance and beckoned with her hand.

  “Why don’t you come inside, Tom. You must be thirsty.”

  For a few seconds she had no idea what he would do, this man who was both familiar to her and yet a stranger, a man who had never said much more than a few dozen words to her at a time if he spoke at all. He might have laughed. He might have flown at her in a rage. Anything and everything seemed possible in that gravid moment. Considering her readiness for catastrophe, what he did next should have seemed mild.

  Instead, it jolted her to the core of her being.

  He walked toward her with a long-legged stride that ate up the space between them in a second. She tensed and a tingling sensation ran beneath her skin when his gaze traveled over her naked torso.

  He halted less than a foot away from her.

  Close.

  Closer than casual human contact.

  “I came looking for you.”

  She felt his warm breath tickle her upturned face. He reached for her. His hand felt hot and dry encircling her own, as if he had a furnace working overtime inside him. She just stared up at him, speechless.

  “I came looking for you, Sophie,” he repeated.

  “Why?”

  He just nodded soberly toward her house. She was still stunned when he gently urged her to accompany him, his stare never leaving her face.

  The wraparound porch was a landscape of golden light and shadow when they approached the side entrance to the house. The door squeaked open, and she led him onto the screened-in portion of the porch. Their hands were still locked, so she felt it when he paused. She turned back to see him staring at her work in progress. He glanced from the painting to the lake, and back at the canvas again, his expression unreadable.

  “It’s not very good. I just do it for fun,” she said, wondering why she whispered. Maybe it was because the atmosphere suddenly seemed electrically charged, expectant . . . like the air before a storm. Her breath stilled when he suddenly transferred his gaze to her naked abdomen.

  “I was wondering why you had purple paint on you.”

  She gave a small laugh when she saw how his well-shaped l
ips quirked—very slightly—in amusement.

  “I used to tell Rick you were like the little girl in the neighborhood who was always so clean; the kind that Mama wouldn’t let play rough with the other kids . . . the kind that was never allowed to get dirty.” His palpable gaze flickered over her breasts and neck before he met her stare.

  Her mirth faded.

  “Rick said that was just my lame excuse not to ask you out,” he finished.

  Sophie swallowed thickly. This situation just kept getting more and more bizarre. She knew from her friend Andy how close Thomas had been to his brother, Rick Carlisle. Not that she wouldn’t have already guessed it the few times she’d witnessed the two men’s easy camaraderie when she’d glimpsed them together in her office or in the building.

  “You must be upset, Tom,” she whispered. “Is that why you’re here? Are you hurting . . . after your brother’s and nephew’s death?”

  His eyes glittered with emotion in an otherwise masklike countenance.

  “Come inside.” She tightened her hold on his hand and guided him down the dim hallway to the kitchen. The windows there faced east, depriving them of the sunset light. She flipped a switch, chasing away the dark shadows.

  If she’d thought that electric lights and her cheery, homey kitchen would bring a sense of normalcy to this surreal situation, she’d thought wrong. One glance at Thomas’s tall, whipcord lean body and rigid features and she existed in the Twilight Zone all over again. Perhaps it was the thick, nearly tangible cloud of tension that surrounded him that contributed to her sense of floundering for familiar territory.

  She released his hand and headed toward the refrigerator, trying to shake off her sense of unease.

  “I made fresh lemonade earlier today. Would you care for some?”

  “Do you have anything harder?” he rasped.

  She glanced back over her shoulder. “I have some wine in the pantry.”