Burned by Desire (Highland County Heroes Book 2)

by Lily LaVae

  Never had she wanted so badly she was prepared to beg, but he had her right at the edge of a deep precipice and damned if she didn’t want him to shove her over.

  “Do firefighters usually stoke a fire before they put it out?” She wiggled, trying to get him to put something of himself inside her. She needed to feel him deeply.

  He slowed his rhythmic circles over her until she feared he would stop. “I have no plan to put out your fire, Melody. I’m going to stoke it, again, and again, and again.” With each repetition he swept his thumb over her entrance. He guided her to him, then eased her on top.

  With a soft moan, she shifted, just as she’d done on the dancefloor, and he slid deeply inside, touching where she needed it most. He gripped her ass and slowly lifted her then settled her back, slow at first, then a little faster.

  “Touch yourself, Melody.” Gage slid until his knees hit the glove compartment, giving her more room. “You won’t come if you don’t and I can’t from this angle, as much as I want to.”

  She’d never been told to do that in the middle of sex. She slowly, tentatively, reached between them. His gaze burned even hotter as he watched her, giving her the incentive she needed to try something she wouldn’t have.

  “Yes,” he breathed, “you are so hot.” As she kept time with him, the coiled fever inside her melted every reserve. Gage flexed his hips as he plunged deeply in her, and then with a low moan, released. Every muscle in her tightened until she could stand it no longer, then let go, leaving a blissful relaxation. She slumped against him, kissing his damp forehead.

  His breathing was ragged and she raised herself on her knees to let him sit up, but when she tried to move away, he held her there, inside her still. “I’m not ready to let you go yet.” He drew her to his chest and wrapped strong arms around her. When had she started to tremble? “Don’t say anything just yet. I kind of like, liking you.”

  A fling. What the hell was a guy who had two careers, no time, and more stress than he knew what to do with, doing with a fling? More importantly, what would he do tomorrow and the next day if she thought this was more than a fling? He didn’t have time to give her more, nor had he even considered that when she’d whispered those words in his ear. I want you…

  “We do tend to be at odds every time we open our mouths.” She curled up close to him and he held her tighter, relaxing into her and letting the long, scented tendrils of her hair lay over his chest.

  “Not every time.” His laughter sounded different to his ears. Maybe he’d needed this more than he’d thought. “I should help you get dressed and take you home.” Once he got her safely away from him, he could take a good look at what had happened, and decide if he’d been wrong about her from the beginning, or if he’d just allowed his emotions to get them both tangled.

  “You don’t know where I live, and maybe I’d like to keep it that way. I wouldn’t want you to come looking for me in the morning when you regret this.” She rested her cool hand against his chest. Her hair smelled fantastic and he wanted to bury his head in her neck just one more time and drink it in before they had to face the reality that they were still too different, too opposite, for this to ever work.

  He leaned into her, drawing her nearer, and kissed her neck. Whatever she wore to make her smell so damn good, he wanted it. He wanted it on his pillow every night, to relax him as he fell asleep. Her nails flexed and sharp talons bit into him. She puffed out a raspy breath.

  “I can’t want you again so quickly. Damn Gage. Why do you have to be so honest? Couldn’t you have just given me what I needed? Enough to keep me happy for a while?”

  He almost chuckled, but held it in. He hadn’t been quite ready to let her go. She had been so velvety, amazing and hot. Watching her give herself an orgasm had pushed him over the edge. Harder than he ever had before. Her breasts were pert, incredible, and pressed up against him. There wasn’t one bit of her he didn’t want to taste and explore one more time.

  “I warned you I wasn’t going to put you out. What fun would that be?” He slid his hand down her thigh between them and roamed down to her milky center. She squirmed, gasping as she sat back and clutched his shoulders, her nipples immediately tightening right before his eyes.

  She whimpered softly as he drew her close again and nibbled her neck, her collar bone. She was a delicacy and he would have every morsel. She bucked against his hand, trembling until she screamed his name and melted against him.

  Now, he could take her home and let tomorrow worry about itself.

  Chapter 11

  The wreckage was still smoking in little wisps, especially in the areas where there had been a high concentration of clutter, boxes, and stacks of magazines. The owners had been packrats and had left mountains of mess to deal with. Coupled with the New Mexico heat, it just didn’t cool quickly. Procedure said they should’ve concluded their investigation right after the fire, but it had still been too hot inside and Gage had wanted Alexander to come investigate the scene with him. He waited in his truck for the agent to arrive.

  He glanced at the passenger seat and memories from the night before flooded back. He’d needed a release after a stressful week and she’d been on his mind. Then, when she’d appeared out of thin air, it had seemed at the moment like the perfect opportunity. Now, he wasn’t sure what to do about her. She was still the town reporter, and even if she didn’t write that damned story, she was pushing him to investigate the fires in her way, not the way he’d been trained.

  Alexander pulled up in his dark Suburban and parked behind Gage’s truck. The man wore dark clothes, had dark hair and with his sunglasses, looked like he just walked out of a suspense movie. Except he was there to do real work, in a real capacity. Gage got out and met him as Alexander shoved his sunglasses onto the dash.

  “I brought masks, gloves, containers, and signed approvals from the homeowners. I had to have them go down to their local PD to sign them since we are almost twenty-four hours post fire.” Alexander handed him a mask and gloves. “We’ll start out here and do a thorough sweep, then move inward.”

  He knew the drill, but Alexander liked to be in control and since Gage had called him in, he had to let him be. “This fire both was and wasn’t like the last. It seemed to have originated in the basement like before, but was hotter and there was a second explosion while we were inside.” It had seemed the same at first, but since this fire had not involved danger to the homeowner, they’d treated it differently. Things had changed quickly once they were inside. Fires were only mildly predictable anyway, since they were dependent on a few things that weren’t quantifiable in terms of fires, like oxygen and weather. But he’d thought at the moment that the two were similar until the explosion.

  “Did someone on your team get statements from all the onlookers, take note of all the license plates, take notes on the fire, the arc, the heat, placement of furniture?” Alexander ticked off everything on his fingers in an almost bored monotone.

  “I can show you all our notes. We do the best we can with only a team of five.” Five only when he wasn’t on the EMT truck. He couldn’t be at the same emergency in two capacities. If he was fighting a fire, he could administer basic treatment, but he had to turn the injured over to the proper staff. At those times, his job was to fight the fire.

  “I’ll want to take a look at all of that before I go back to my office. Even though I think we are both assuming these fires are connected, since you haven’t seen an actual structure fire here since I was in elementary school and now we’ve had two in a handful of days, we have to check every possible point of origin and eliminate it. Once we have successfully ruled out everything else, we can look at incendiary devices, suspects, and motive.”

  Gage had to admit that the theory that had seemed so completely outlandish at first, now looked reasonable. But did it look that way because of what he’d done with Melody, or because it was really plausible?

  “I didn’t mention it at first, because there was no proo
f, both of these fires are in what the locals call Devastation Circle. It’s an area marked for demolition by a resort company who not only wants the lakeshore, but also about three-quarters of a mile in from the shore to complete all of the attractions that they want to include.”

  “That’s quite the spread, it means that a number of houses fit in this zone. What are the chances, statistically, that two fires could happen within this area and not be related to this company?” Alexander slid his gloves on with the professional aplomb of a surgeon.

  “Given that we haven’t had a house fire in so long and the second house was unoccupied…I would say the chances they’re not related are statistically insignificant. Which is why I brought it up.”

  “What are some of the things this resort will bring to town, who are they putting out of business and who stands to gain from the resort coming in? Just because the fires benefit the resort, doesn’t mean they’re caused by someone from there. It could be someone from town who sees they will never get what they want honestly, so they feel they need to take matters into their own hands.”

  Gage stopped for a moment and glanced around the landscape. This house was in much worse shape than the first one, with little left of the house but a crater. “We’re a small town. It isn’t like they’re trying to replace the grocery store, coffee shop, or gas station. They are trying to take our quiet way of life. We like our privacy. The only thing they’re offering to the townspeople is a gym. They said townspeople could use the indoor pool and the gym area. Everything else is for resort members only. They want to take our land and tell us we aren’t free to use any part of it. I guess people take exception to that.”

  Alexander nodded and tugged a note pad out of his pocket. He wrote down a few things. “We’ll need to talk to the resort people and find out just what they’re planning. See if we can get any accidental information.”

  It took hours to go through the whole scene, but in the end, they found a broken window in the back that hadn’t been removed by the firefighters, and it was in the only standing wall left in the house. That broken window was the point of entry. Alexander carefully removed what was left of the bucket from the dryer, and it looked exactly like the one from the first fire, though this time the detonator wasn’t lodged in the tumbler of the dryer.

  “I don’t think our guy’s very smart about fires, or arson. We’ve got that in our favor.” Alexander placed the device into a huge lidded rubber container and labeled it. “He used kerosene fuel last time, not expensive, and easy to get your hands on. This time, I’m not sure, but it didn’t burn clean or as hot. Look, the pattern isn’t as severe here as it was in the other house.”

  Gage had thought the same thing. “But we definitely heard another explosion when we were inside and nothing we’ve found supports anything naturally within the house being the cause.”

  Alexander glanced around the small basement laundry room. “If you had to guess where the explosion came from, could you?”

  If he put himself back into the situation, maybe. He turned away from Alexander and concentrated. Things were so cloudy after Rabbit was trapped. He remembered the blast and how it shook the house, but from where? It had shaken the whole floor, but also the walls. “If I had to make a guess that might lead us in the right direction. I would say, over here, under the main loadbearing wall.”

  Gage strode to the center of the basement and Alexander followed. They’d already searched all over the floors and along the walls. Gage glanced up into the floor joists and lodged into the floor he found another device. The bottom had blown out of it because of the cheap metal, and whatever had been used had incinerated before it even hit the ground.

  “If that had been planned better, Rabbit and I would be dead.” The realization hit hard. If he died, what would he leave behind? His life of work, trying to keep the mess at bay, seemed meaningless in the face of death. His dad had been military. The house always spotless. He’d kept people from his house, from his life, just to maintain order. But if he’d died, who would remember him? They had both been in the living room, right over the second device, and it would’ve caved in with the amount of heat and flame if it had been executed as well as the dryer devices.

  “We’re dealing with a local. Someone who came to the scenes and no one thought twice about. They may be in law enforcement, so expected to be there. It may be someone you’re so used to seeing, you didn’t think twice if you saw. You have notes from both scenes, take down a list of who matches on both. He had to be nearby to set off that second device. The cops wouldn’t have let him leave the scene. Assuming you can trust the reporters, consider using them to draw out our arsonist. Make them angry so they do something stupid.”

  Though it was reassuring to know the list of suspects was short, it also burned like crazy in his stomach. Melody would be on the list, and he wasn’t so sure he could trust her.

  Chapter 12

  Stretching didn’t help. Melody had gotten more of a workout in Gage’s truck the night before than she’d bargained for and her muscles were stiff. Not that she didn’t wish she could do it all again. She stared at her naked body in the mirror hanging on her bathroom door from where she stood beside her bed. He’d wanted that body, not to hold his power over her head, but for them both to enjoy. And she certainly had. The professor had never made her orgasm. She’d faked it every single time, but Gage had done it twice.

  She’d gained ground with Gage, but did that change anything?

  Yanking open her top drawer, she slid out a pair of panties and put them on. It had taken quite a few minutes to find everything after they’d untangled from each other and even longer to get dressed in the confines of the cab. Once she’d gotten home, she’d stripped and left everything in a heap beside her bed. Neither of them had feared getting caught when they were in the heat of the moment, stripping outside the truck, but that worry had kept them inside to get dressed after the fact.

  When she’d gotten her clothes on, she gathered her phone and her laptop and headed for her living room couch. A fresh cup of coffee would put ideas in her head that were focused on work. Not a smoking hot fireman. There had to be information on the second fire now, and Gage would be more likely to tell her what he knew. She’d refused to let him drive her home the night before, so he’d given her his number and told her to text him when she made it. She’d done as he’d asked and now had his number for other reasons, like her story.

  She sent him a text to see if he wanted to meet for lunch and talk shop, then opened up her computer. Her email was a brief distraction and so was other social media. Finally, Melva sent her a text.

  Melva: Are you going to hand in a story this week? Perhaps you hadn’t heard there was a second fire in Devastation Circle?

  Melody groaned and ignored the text for a few minutes. Gage would get back to her and then she could talk to her boss with story specifics. He wouldn’t redirect her to the agent now. Would he? She stared at her phone. He had to be awake, he wasn’t in the EMT shed, so he’d be volunteering at the station.

  Her phone rang and Livy’s number popped up. Melody answered, “Hey, you made it home last night?”

  Livy yawned, then sighed. “I relaxed a bit, but there was no one there I knew. Please tell me you had better luck than me. I noticed you disappeared after a while.”

  While the rule used to be “never kiss and tell”, she and Livy had never followed it. Melody had heard all about Livy’s exploits, and regrets. Other than her professor, she’d never had much to share. She held tight to her excitement, not wanting Livy to know she was as taken with Gage as she felt. “Let’s just say that truck isn’t as big as it looks.”

  Livy giggled. “You had truck sex? Well, you’ve officially done something I haven’t. Weren’t you worried someone would walk by and see you?”

  It hadn’t even occurred to her to worry about anything until they were done. “Honestly, I was so into him that I didn’t care.”

  “So, now that y
ou’re one of the five percent of people who actually kept their New Year’s resolution, what will you do next year? Rock two men?”

  Melody chuckled, but it wasn’t funny. She had no idea how to handle “the morning after”. While Livy was the type to love them and leave them, Melody wanted more of a connection with Gage. She didn’t want him to just walk away and treat last night as nothing. “No, I’d like to see where this goes with Gage. I’m not really interested in doing this often.”

  Livy was strangely silent, then sighed again with as much dramatic flair as a teen. “That’s not how this works. You don’t pick a guy up in a bar, take him out to rock his truck, then expect him to call for a date the next day. The date is over. Whatever you could’ve expected if you hadn’t done that last night, was forgone for the moment. The minute you took off your pants you told him what kind of girl you were, and it wasn’t the relationship kind. Guys don’t say ‘I love you’ after that.”

  Melody gulped back the bile in her throat. There had to be more to it than that. She’d really been attracted to him. There had been no ping of a text while she’d been on the phone and she’d sent her text over an hour before. “I don’t believe you. He wouldn’t just do that. He cared enough to give me his number last night so I could call and tell him I made it home. A guy who didn’t care wouldn’t do that.” Would he? Or was he just feeling bad because he’d followed her lead?

  “That was because he’s an EMT and a firefighter. He didn’t want to have to come to your rescue. He won’t be calling you. If you think you’re uncomfortable this morning about what happened, just think what he’s going through. Your article castrated him in the paper, then he had sex with you? Not alpha. Not at all.”