by Christa Wick
Catching my wrist before I could open the door, Dare brought my hand to his lips and kissed the back of my fingers. For the first time ever, I caught a shy glint in his gaze as the neighbor's porch light bounced off his dark blue eyes.
He kissed my fingers again, his lips lingering a few seconds longer than the first time.
"I understand about the whiskey and I don't want you to think I was mad about it before I knew what that little fuck did," he started to explain. "It's just...well, you're not even eighteen yet and I was kissing you and the things I want to do to--"
His words stopped and I waited, suspended with need and hope until his face changed. Something beyond my shoulder had caught his eye.
Something at the front of my house.
With Dare looking at me like that, kissing me, even if it was just my fingers, I had forgotten all about the drama waiting to play out. My head whipped toward the front door. Two shadows moved at the threshold, their bodies a silhouette against a single lamp in the living room. Frank O'Donnell had my mother pressed against the door frame, his mouth over hers and his hand between her legs. She wore the short, silky pink robe Michael had bought for their last anniversary. Its bottom hem barely reached the top of her thighs when she stood upright.
She wasn't exactly standing upright at that moment in time. I blinked, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. When I finally did, I choked on the urge to puke.
Frank O'Donnell was fingering my mother's pussy for anyone out that late to see.
Continuing to stare, my other senses shut down. I didn't feel Dare release his hold on me, didn't hear his truck door open and then slam shut. It wasn't until he broke my field of vision as he stormed up the front walk that I even realized he had left the vehicle.
I fumbled with the door, put too much weight against it and tumbled onto the sidewalk. I could hear Dare and his father talking, Dare trying not to shout and Frank barely above a terse whisper as he told his son to get back in his truck and they would discuss what had happened later.
The only contribution my mother made was laughter.
"Fuck later!" Dare turned on his heels and started toward his vehicle. His gaze fell on me, accusation burning in his eyes before he looked away. In that one flash, I became invisible to him. He passed me without a word or a glance, got into the truck and sped off so fast and hard I could smell the burn of rubber over asphalt.
Helen waved dismissively in Frank's direction. "Time for you to leave."
He looked ready to argue but then his head swiveled on his thick neck until he was looking at me. There was just enough light for me to see the fire go out in the man. Shame flooded his cheeks. Dropping his head, he started walking, cutting a wide path around me as I approached the house.
"Do give my regards to Mary," Helen called out, her voice ringing loud against the backdrop of crickets and distant traffic.
"Mom, what have you done?" I whispered as I stepped onto the porch.
"Taught that Irish cunt a lesson." Drawing me inside, Helen locked the door. A monstrous smile occupied the bottom half of her face as she steered me toward the hall. She looked like she could swallow my entire head in one gulp and had the appetite to do so.
"Look, I don't have time for you to throw a fit about this," she chided. "I promised Philip we would leave for Connecticut before dawn. There's some fancy dinner tomorrow night and I'll need time to get extra dolled up for it."
Bracing against the doorframe to my bedroom, I looked at Helen. "Philip? Connecticut? What the hell are you talking about, mom?"
"Ladies don't swear," she reprimanded with a cold voice that made me sick with dread.
As worried as I was, a derisive snort still exploded inside my head. Ladies didn't swear but it was apparently perfectly acceptable for them to get fingered on their front porch by another woman's husband. My mother's logic was as fucked up as Molly Quade's had been.
"I've mentioned Doctor Miller to you several times," Helen continued, her hand locked around my elbow. "He transferred to another hospital a few months ago to become their Chief of Radiology. Before he left, he proposed to me!"
My head wagged left, then right as I tried to do the math. Michael was barely six months dead. Dr. Miller had proposed to her a few months ago, we were leaving tomorrow before dawn, she had just a few minutes before been the recipient of a hand job from an entirely different man.
And she somehow thought I should see the sense in all this.
I slapped at her tight grip. Just her touch made me feel dirty, my skin crawling in every direction. "How can you marry Doctor Miller when you just fucked Frank O'Donnell?"
My mother broke into a fit of laughter. Tears streamed down her face. She wiped them away, pressed her hands to her cheeks and drew a deep breath. She released it in a puff against my face.
"Who's going to tell Philip what I did? Frank? Mary?" Her eyes slitted as she jabbed a finger in my direction. "You?"
"Not me," I answered, feeling the blood drain from my face as I shook my head in denial. I knew what Helen would do if I told. The marriage to Michael had offered a long reprieve from her punishments, but Michael was dead. I had been lucky to suffer only neglect and indifference at her hands since losing him.
"Of course not you, my darling daughter." Cradling my face, she planted a short kiss on one cheek and then the other. "Now, you need to pack a few bags to last you until the movers come. Clothes only."
"Have you packed the photo albums already?" I asked. Shortly after his death, she had sold off Mike's tools, his record collection, the set of golf clubs, pretty much everything that had been distinctly his. The photos were all that remained to keep my memory fresh.
"The movers will put those into storage. You absolutely will not bring any photos of Mike to Philip's home. That would be an outrageous insult!"
My hands shook with the need to punch my own mother.
"I said clothes only and I mean it." She emphasized her point with a vicious pinch of my arm, the act and her expression reminding me so much of Molly Quade that my stomach hurt. "And none of your sketchbooks or art supplies. Michael spoiled you with those. You really need to move on to something you might actually be good at."
Numb, my stomach churning from my mother's hateful words and actions, I entered my bedroom, shut the door and collapsed on the bed. I buried my face in a pillow to muffle my sobs for a few minutes and then I began packing. I disobeyed her in only one respect. I wrapped a small picture of Michael and me standing outside the firehouse, his arm around my shoulder, inside a tissue and stuffed it in my bra.
The next morning, the sky still dark, I watched Hagersburg disappear in my side mirror and knew Dare O'Donnell was out of my life forever.
Chapter Five (Part Two)
Dare -- more than three years later
"You stupid Irish bastard!" The voice of Cam Stevens bellowed through my helmet's earpiece. "Get your ass down these stairs now!"
I could tell that Cam was out of breath, struggling with the heat and the extra two-hundred-fifty pounds or more of firefighter and equipment slung across his back. Bailey, another Irish bastard who was the team's second hose man, had gone down, knocked out by a falling beam.
We had just cleared the top floor when the beam fell. Cam had scooped up Bailey and made it to the second floor, but I stood frozen, axe in hand, at the third floor landing.
"Dare, the whole fucking roof is going. Come on!"
We were in an old hotel, four stories tall and the size of a football field. The place had once been the pride of Hagersburg, but the city had spread out, moved on and left the building to decay. Rooms could be had by the hour, night or week. The hourly and daily units had vibrating beds and televisions playing whatever fuck movie the clerk had on the hotel's feed. The weekly rentals had a small excuse of a refrigerator and a hot plate in place of the television.
I would have bet a year's pay that every last tenant was either a crackhead, dealer, pimp, hooker, or some unfortunate child
born to a piece of shit parent. A buzzing sixth sense and the thought of kids left alone in the rooms cemented my feet to the blistering floor. Only the units along the exterior walls had windows. That left more than seventy-five percent of the tenants with nothing more than a door to escape the fire.
With flames licking along the length of the hall, there would be no escape.
"Something isn't right," I said, yelling into my mouthpiece.
"Nothing about this shit hole is right!" Cam shot back, wheezing under Bailey's weight.
As Cam argued with me, I finally figured out which detail from the scene was the one chewing at the back of my brain. Through the dancing flames in the corridor, I saw a puddle of water on the floor as it seeped from under a door. The spot was halfway down the hall, everything around it on fire.
"Water!" I shouted, my legs unsticking at last as I sprinted toward the puddle.
Cam unleashed another bellow through my earpiece. "Nothing but a busted pipe! Get down before the stairs go!"
Wearing seventy pounds of equipment, I still managed to shrug. I might die in the fire, but I knew I wouldn't be able to live with myself if we cleared the rubble days later and found some kid left home alone to burn to death while his mom was out snorting coke or turning tricks to pay for her addiction.
"They go, they go," I shouted, lifting the axe. "Get Bailey out now. That's an order!"
I might have been as crispy as a Sunday slab of bacon before morning rolled around, but at that moment in time I was still his team leader. He had no choice but to obey. He could argue with my corpse later.
My back to the flames, I smashed the axe center of the door, weakening the panel. Lifting a leg, I kicked the same spot, my fire boot smashing through the cheap, aged wood like it was balsa. Holstering the axe, I stepped into the room and onto a soaking wet bed sheet. In the middle of the floor was a young woman on her hands and knees, another wet sheet wrapped around her. She had fisted one corner and was breathing through the material.
Fire crawled across the wall on the left, its glow reflected in her hair. Soot smudged the pale skin of her face. I had maybe a quarter second in which to appreciate the way the fabric clung to her body and note the wild panic in her green gaze before I scooped up the wet sheet at the room's threshold and threw it over her.
"Got a live one!" I yelled into my mouthpiece as I wrapped my arms around her waist. I gave a moment's prayer that she was near comatose with fear or wouldn't otherwise panic and fight me. It happened a lot and the city brass always shit a ton of bricks whenever we had to knock citizens unconscious to rescue their dumb asses.
The woman shook like crazy, but she didn't struggle. I hefted her over one shoulder and ran back through the door I busted open. The fire had reached the stairs between the third and second floor, already eaten its way through the bannister and had started to nibble at carpet still damp from Bailey's hose.
I felt the heat coming up from the area below through my turnout gear. The underside of the stairs must have caught, the boards cracking beneath my feet as the heavy boots pounded against them. Halfway down the last flight, the wood gave completely. I leapt, my fingers digging into the woman's flesh as hard as possible to avoid dropping her.
We crashed against a wall. She grunted once in pain from the impact, but I figured bruised and breathing was better than burned alive. I kept running until we were out of the building and on the street.
A med tech had Bailey on a stretcher and was stripping the gear from his inert body.
"Congratulations, hero, you saved another crackhead." Cam, his helmet and mask still on, stalked toward me, already beginning to skull fuck me through the communications set built into our helmets. "City was starting to run low. Cost of pussy might have gone up a whole penny."
"Not this one." I placed the girl on the back of the hose truck and peeled my gloves off. I had seen it in her eerily familiar eyes -- life in the neighborhood hadn't beaten her down yet.
She was young, fresh and trying like hell to claw her way out of the damp cocoon wrapped around her enticing body. I helped and a tangle of wet hair emerged, then the pale skin of her hands and arms. One fist closed tight as if she were holding something she couldn't afford to lose, she stopped my efforts with a frantic one-armed slap at my hand when the sheets got down to her waist.
I had a sudden, hard awareness of why she resisted.
She wore nothing but a t-shirt and maybe a pair of panties. The shirt was soaked through from the sheet and had molded itself to her firm breasts. Seeing the chilled point of her nipples and their color through the thin cloth, the hard awareness jumped another inch closer to my navel and an aching grunt tumbled past my lips.
I lifted the fire mask just enough that she could hear me speak. "I'll get you a dry blanket."
She nodded, her shaky hands trying to brush the hair from her face.
Cam ear fucked me again. "Not exactly your type, but Jesus on a bicycle. Now I know why you weren't ready to come downstairs."
Letting the mask drop, I stalked over to the back of the med tech's truck. "I think I know her--"
"Mister Dare O'Donnell been down here getting blow jobs and not telling his buddy Cam?" Stevens snickered. "That makes Cam very sad. We could work a discount."
"Asshole," I growled. "That's why you never get any pussy."
Grabbing a blanket, I returned to the young woman, my mind puzzling over how I might know her despite the rundown location in which she lived. It could have been nothing more than her coloring making her look familiar. The dark auburn in her hair had been more than the fire's glow and I had grown up in a neighborhood that consisted mostly of redheads. Her irises had looked a middling green in the half-lit hotel room. I would know better when I got a second look.
I approached with the blanket. She stood watching the building start its final collapse. With her attention focused on the flames, I had a good chance to study her. She was twenty, give or take a year. She had cleaned some of the soot from her face with the wet sheet. The efforts revealed patches of flawless ivory skin and bone structure that would make any fashion model jealous if the rest of the girl's obscured features were a match.
Her body was beyond rocking. Curvy in all the right places, she had enough meat on her to make my mouth water in an instant -- even before I noted how the wet sheet and t-shirt sucked at her skin. The January air turned her nipples into thick pebbles that had my dick hard and throbbing beneath my gear.
Looking like that, she didn't belong in Hagersburg's Pole Town area with its junkies and hookers. Even if the girl did sell herself, she should have been able to afford a penthouse with her looks.
I knew I'd give a month's pay just to find out if she had panties on under the wet sheet.
Unfolding the blanket, I held it up as a shield just as Joe Pearson, the coordinator for the city-run women's shelter, came over with his clipboard in hand. Behind my mask, the corners of my mouth sank with a disapproving frown. It was just like Joe to zero in on the young, hot-bodied victims first. The old lech started talking, asking her if she had any family or someplace to stay.
Still shielding her body from the crowd's view, I turned my head so she wouldn't think I was watching while she removed the sheet.
Not that I wasn't watching -- damn straight I watched.
My cock jumped with the realization that I had been correct about her panties missing. From the corner of one eye, I kept looking until the sodden material slopped against the ground. Then I wrapped the dry wool blanket around her, a protective need surging at the way her body trembled from cold or fear.
Facing Joe, her gaze darted nervously in my direction before returning to the old man.
"No family," she answered. "No place to go..."
She sucked in a deep breath, her face appearing on the verge of tears. "My wallet's still inside."
I looked toward the building. No "inside" remained, just collapsed boards and a growing pile of ash. I took the fire mask off to finally ge
t a good look at her face. Even her voice sounded unforgettable, the pitch higher than her modestly-sized breasts would suggest. A quiver of nerves ran through the few words she had spoken, turning the mundane information into an exotic language that was sexier than hell.
Having held her, having seen the wet drape of the sheet around her body and the peek of silky auburn hair between her legs before I covered her with the blanket, the woman's voice wiped out the last bit of professional sense I had left. My cock came to full attention just as Joe asked his next question -- her name.
When she answered, I felt like someone had just dipped my dick in ice water. I really did know her and, the way my body was responding, I wished like hell I didn't.
The soot covered beauty was Eden Burke and I knew I would never survive her breaking my heart a second time.
Chapter Six
Eden -- a few hours earlier
Kneeling on the narrow strip of bathroom floor in a hotel room I rented by the week, I rolled a pair of jeans in a towel. I had washed the heavy denim in the bathroom sink and wrung out most of the water by hand, but they were one of only two bottoms I owned and I needed them dry by morning. Once I had made a fat jelly roll of the jeans and the hotel's cheap terry towel, I put both knees on the bundle and let the weight of my body squeeze the remaining water from the pants into the terry cloth.
After a few minutes in that position, I unrolled everything and hung both items over the shower rod to finish drying alongside two t-shirts, the pair of yoga pants that were my other bottoms, a pair of panties and two pairs of mismatched socks I had rinsed earlier. Reaching up, I touched the underwear to find the material too damp to put on.
"Fuck it." I pushed my only other pair down my hips then fumbled in the cramped space as I lifted one foot and then the other to step out of them. Running fresh water in the sink, I avoided looking in the mirror. It was the same face I had always possessed, but my eyes had started to look desperate and a little crazy lately. Plus, it was the face of a loser.
