by R. S. Elliot
“A candle?” I asked.
“What’s left of it,” Gerald said. “It was pressed up against a curtain in that room up there.”
“A candle?” The woman shook her head. “I never lit a candle. I never even went up into that room.”
“Was there anyone in the house with you?” Gerald asked.
“Not recently,” she said. “Everyone was in the living area this afternoon for the will reading, though. I left the house for a few hours to collect my things from my parents, then came home shortly after that. But there was no one with me.”
A will reading? Damn, now I really do feel like an ass.
She had clearly just lost someone important to her, and here I was scolding her like a teacher admonishing a child. It still left one question unanswered though.
“How did the candle get up there, then?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, and bolted up to a standing position.
She wobbled, teetering from one foot to the other before nearly collapsing. I caught her by the arms just as she fell, hoisting her back up to her feet. Immediately, I recognized my mistake. Now that I had her in my arms, there was no way in hell I was letting her go. She leaned into me. Her fingers curled around my shirtsleeves, and she pressed her forehead into my shoulder.
It took all the control I had to remind my dick now was not the time to spring into action. I tried to think about something else.
Cold showers. Alaska. Ice buckets.
The fact that this stubborn, willful woman was the last thing I should be looking for at the moment.
I turned to Gerald. “Are the paramedics still on their way?”
“Yes.” Gerald nodded. “They should be here any minute.”
“She’s going to need to go to the hospital.”
“I don’t need to go to the hospital,” she said against my shoulder. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine.” I looped an arm around her, as Gerald turned and headed back toward the others. I could have let her go, helped her to her seat on the back of the fire truck. Anywhere other than how I held her now. But greedily, I relished the feel of her in my arms. She felt perfect, made for me in every possible respect of the word.
“I just feel dizzy,” she whispered.
“That’s the smoke. That’s why you need an ambulance.”
“My grandmother’s house.” The words slipped past her lips so softly it was almost a prayer.
Was that whose will they read? Her grandmother? I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want to upset her and risk the tender moment between us. Instead, I said, “It’s fine. It looks much worse than it is.”
She laughed, a half-hearted sound, diminished by her weakening condition. “You’re a horrible liar.”
“Here,” I said, and held the oxygen mask up to her again. I helped her to her seat and turned the machine back on. “The paramedics will be here soon.”
Another moment or two strapped with the oxygen mask, and she was already feeling a little bit better. She tugged the blanket from around her shoulders and set it down beside her. It was nearly eighty degrees, even with the sun being down for several hours. Though the giant bonfire beside us certainly didn’t do anything to lower temperatures either.
Her story wasn’t making any sense, though. How on earth could she not remember lighting the candle? Much less being in the room where it started?
“Now, do you want to tell me about the candle?” I asked.
She snapped her head upward to face me. The same glowering heat returned. “I don’t burn candles. I light incense. I never went upstairs, either. I think someone set it there on purpose.”
Someone set her up? Great.
This chick was absolutely out of her mind. It was more rational to assume someone was out to get her, rather than admit she’d left the candle burning upstairs?
“Isn’t there a possibility you lit the candle? Or maybe someone else—”
“Aww, bless your heart.” She stopped me, leaning up to pat my cheek playfully. “You’re not listening to me, sugar. I know what I did and didn’t do. And I didn’t start the fire.”
I pressed a hand against my face. Now she was using the Southern equivalent of “go fuck yourself” and honestly believed she’d done nothing wrong. This argument was getting us nowhere. “Well, someone had to.”
“Exactly. So, shouldn’t you be figuring that out, instead of asking me the same questions over and over again?” The woman flipped one stray blonde curl back over her shoulder. Despite being dragged from a burning building half an hour ago, she looked relatively put together.
Despite being bat shit crazy, she also looked completely sane.
Trouble, I reminded myself.
Beautiful women were always trouble. The world revolved around them. They were never at fault. This was a classic case. Albeit severe, but definitely textbook level crazy here.
“Fine,” I said. “What do you want me to put on the accident report? Someone’s out to get you and started a fire in your home?”
“Is that so difficult?” the woman asked. “That’s what happened.”
“We don’t know that’s what happened.” I was losing my patience. I couldn’t just write foul play on the report without any foundation to base it off of first.
“I’m telling you I didn’t do it. So, someone else must have.”
“God, woman. You are infuriating.” I pinched the bridge of my nose, attempting to lessen some of the pressure building there. “All right, you win.”
I reached for a clipboard hanging on one of the interior walls of the truck. “Let’s see, I’ll put it down right here: ‘Came home, someone tried to kill her with a candle.’”
She tugged down on the clipboard and met my gaze with her own infallible glare. “You’re being an ass.”
“I’m being an ass? You’re being unreasonable.” Were we seriously having this conversation? “There’s no way anyone is going to believe you didn’t light that candle yourself. You were the only person in the house.”
“That I know of.”
“Look.” I held up a hand in truce.
God, I need a strong drink after dealing with this woman. “If this is about getting the insurance money, we can maybe figure something out. But—”
“This is not about the insurance money,” she snapped. “This is about someone having it in for me.”
Fine. I’ll humor her. “Like who?”
“My family, first of all.”
Of course. It was always the family. I was surprised she didn’t say the FBI, the government, or something along the lines of fuzzy green aliens. “Your family is out to get you?”
I had tried to hide the disbelief in my voice. In the least, I hadn’t intended it to sound as mocking as it did when the words tumbled out of my mouth.
“Oh, just forget it,” she said, and leaped to her feet. She craned her neck around me, searching for an unknown object off in the distance. “Where’s Gerald? I’m sure he’ll be more likely to believe my story.”
“You don’t need Gerald.”
She pushed past me, but I looped my arm around her waist and drew her back against me. I hadn’t intended to hold her in place, or even to hold her against me at all again. Once had been enough to warn me that this woman was unlike any other I’d ever encountered.
I can’t get involved with a crazy woman.
Yet, the way she looked at me now, eyes wide and curious, filled me with a renewed sense of wonder. I wanted every part of this woman, to know exactly what sparked such fire in her spirit. I wanted the soft curve of her mouth pressed against me, her body melting into mine.
“I’m guessing this is the part where you tell me you’re the only man I’ll ever need,” she said, this time laced with a hint of seduction she wielded all too well.
Not trouble, I determined. Dangerous.
The warning fell on deaf ears.
She could have been radioactive at that moment, and I still would have want
ed to kiss her. My hand slid into her hair. The fine strands entangled my fingertips like silk ribbons. Every inch of her skin blazed across my touch like tiny sparks of electricity. My thumb traced along the slope of her neck, tilting her chin and her lips upward. “I’d never assume to know your wants and needs, my dear.”
“You could just ask,” she whispered, breathless.
My gaze flicked to her lips, parted beneath me, ready to accept my kiss and whatever else she would let me have. How we had gone from arguing to this, I would never know. Nor did I care. So long as the argument always brought me back to this moment, I would gladly spend the stress and frustration to get there.
“Hunter,” Gerald’s voice sounded behind me. I tensed. Never in my life had I been so ready to strike a man as I was in that moment. “The paramedics are here.”
As if awakening from a spell, the woman pulled out of my embrace and quickly regained composure. “Thank you, Gerald,” she said, then promptly disappeared with the paramedics.
I hadn’t even asked for her name.
Sure, I knew where she lived, but how odd and uncomfortable would that be if I simply showed up unannounced one day? It didn’t matter. Madison was a small enough town. Eventually, someone would know who lived in the house, the mystery woman who would likely haunt my dreams for the next few days.
And once I learned her name…
What then?
Was I really ready to start a relationship with a woman who ran hot and cold in an instant? I told myself it was time to move on—time to find a lasting relationship with a woman content to live in Madison her whole life. Someone who wanted a family and to build a life and watch it thrive. The way my parents had. The way everyone else expected me to.
I couldn’t say for certain, but I knew the type well enough to guess that such a fate was not what the mysterious blonde wanted. An untameable, fiery lure in the wrong direction, she likely craved adventure, movement.
Freedom.
I’d dated enough women like her to know she’d never settle down. And yet...there had never really been another woman quite like her.
I groaned. What had I said?
Danger? Trouble?
Whatever it was, I was in it, completely and without any hope of escaping unharmed.
Chapter Three
Lyndsey
“Lord, help me. This week can’t get any worse.”
I stared up into the charred pieces of the second story room. A gaping hole replaced the space where the roof once stood, with pieces of moss draped over some of the jutting out corners. We’d removed all the furniture, a queen-size mattress, some antique wood chairs and a few knickknacks that were barely recognizable.
I hadn’t been in the room.
There was no reason a candle should have been burning, yet here we were: one eighth of Hummingbird Hollow left in a pile of rubble and ash.
This is going to cost a fortune to fix.
The insurance check would arrive any day now, but I would still have to tap into my inheritance in order to make all the repairs. At least one of grandma’s old friends brought over some supplies to block off the area until I was ready to begin the reconstruction process. Moving in with my parents was out of the question. I hadn’t done that since high school.
Even when I came to visit, I would always stay here.
It’s fine. I didn’t need the upper part of the house anyway. So long as nothing could get in and it was protected from the elements, I was happy to leave it that way for a couple of days. At least by then, I’d have a better strategy for how I intended to fix it.
I unrolled my yoga mat on the floor in the living room. I needed something to relax the tension. This wasn’t what I imagined when I came back home. Having to dodge the fiery look of rage in my cousins' eyes, an actual fire, and a smoking hot firefighter who I still couldn’t get out of my mind.
Normally, I’d have no problem telling a man like that how much I wanted him. But everything in my life felt out of place. It wasn’t the time to be flirting with some random stranger, especially in a town so small I was bound to run into him again and again.
Especially when I was trying to stay away from any reason that would force me to spend more time in this god-awful town.
“It’s nice to see you taking some initiative after all of this.” A voice came from behind me.
I’d been so caught up in my thoughts and yoga, I hadn’t heard anyone enter the house. I turned back to see my parents standing in front of me, both with a briefcase in hand as if ready for court.
“You have a case?” I asked, and returned to my stretches.
“Yours,” Mama said.
Great. Just what I wanted to hear.
“Lucky me,” I said. “Are you here to take down the person who set my house on fire?”
“You’re telling us this wasn’t you?” Daddy asked.
“It wasn’t me. I don’t light candles,” I explained.
Of all people, they should have known I wouldn’t do something like this. But then my parents were always more concerned with their work than they were with me. Ask them about the latest supreme court case, and they’d recite it by heart. Ask them my birthday, and they’d at least get the month right.
“Honey, come sit down,” Mama said, and directed me toward the large table in the breakfast nook.
It started off great. Because every great situation started with a prompt to sit down. Though after having the house catch fire, I wasn’t sure how this could get any worse.
I took my seat, with both my parents sitting across from me. It was like a middle school parent-teacher conference all over again.
“We have some concerns,” Mama started. “You’ve been directionless for too long. And maybe that’s our fault for giving you too much freedom, but it’s time to settle down.”
“What’s wrong with freedom?”
“Too much of it is unhealthy,” Daddy explained, pushing up the frame of his glasses on his nose before folding his hands in front of him. “You’re becoming reckless. We turned a blind eye to taking an extra year of college. I mean, it’s fine. You were still searching for what you wanted to do in life. But where did that get you? What did you end up with?”
“Honey, seven changes to your major?” Mama leaned across the table and stared me down, a look of pity and confusion in her face—as if she were addressing an addiction I had rather than my choices in education.
“Five,” I grumbled.
She shrugged. “Like that makes it better.”
“What’s the point?” I asked. This was clearly some sort of intervention. Though what they wanted me to get out of it was beyond me. Usually in these types of things, it was about the person quitting something they couldn’t stop. How was I supposed to stop being me?
“That’s what we want to know,” Daddy said. “What’s next? What do you plan on doing with your life?”
“I don’t know.” I flicked a hand into the air. “Don’t I get some time to think it over?”
“You’ve had five years.”
“That’s insane.” They were crazy. Who was expected to know their life’s purpose after only five years? Just because they always knew what they wanted to be since they were ten, didn’t mean the rest of the world worked that way. “There are plenty of people who don’t know what they want to do with their lives until much later in life.”
“Yes, but at least they try different things in between that time,” Mama said. “You’re not going to know what you do and don’t like until you try out a few things first.”
“I’ve had jobs before.”
“For like three weeks.” Daddy turned to my mother, squinting in an attempt to hold onto some distant memory. They stared at each other like that for a moment, as if one held the other half of the missing puzzle piece. “Actually, have you ever had a job longer than a month?”
“I think...once.” This was getting me nowhere. What did it matter what I did with my life? We were rich. We’d always
had money. I was never expected to be anyone other than myself. So why now? Why all these changes now?
“This is what we’re talking about,” Daddy explained, his voice climbing another note higher. “You’ve lived this fantasy life for too long. It’s time to grow up.”
“There’s no rush,” I shouted back. “I can live off of my inheritance. Grandma left me with more than enough to live comfortably until I’m dead.”
Daddy glanced around the house, his eyes resting on the smoke stains on the ceiling. “Which, if yesterday’s debacle is any indication, will be sooner than later.”
Here it was. The real reason for this conversation. I was given a house and couldn’t even take care of it for a day. Whether it was my fault or not, I’d never hear the end of it. “It was an accident. One I didn’t create.”
“See, that’s another problem.” Daddy shoved one accusatory finger in my direction. I resisted the urge to crumble like a child back in elementary school. “Take some responsibility.”
“For a fire I didn’t cause?”
“For protecting this house,” he said. “You need to learn some real-life skills, Lyndsey. Responsibility, hard work, dedication. All things you would learn from working at a job, even if you don’t love it.”
This was insanity. There was no way I could be held responsible for the fire. The whole job thing, sure. I could do it. But the lecture behind it all was unnecessary. Hell, it could have even been a text message. Hadn’t I been through enough as it was already?
“You’re telling me you and Mama don’t love being lawyers?” I asked.
“No, we love it. But we had ambition,” Daddy said, irritation on his face giving his words a note of disbelief. “We had direction. You don’t. Which, again, is our fault, honey. We coddled you too much. Gave you everything you ever wanted. Well, we’re going to fix that now.”
My blood ran cold. “What do you mean?”
“This is the notice for your inheritance,” Mama said, calmly passing me a sheet of paper from her briefcase.
I read it over quickly. The thudding in my chest erupted into a powerful explosion, deafening all thoughts until only silence remained. There was no way they could do this. Could they?
