Fire and Love

by Erin Wright

  “Just a moment,” she murmured, and stepped over to the window where she drew the blinds. “I don’t want the neighbors to be able to peek inside,” she told him as she moved back towards him, an extra sway in her hips as she moved.

  Levi opened his mouth to tell her that the bedroom window was angled so that it was almost impossible for anyone outside to see inside but the sway of her hips…

  What was I going to say again?

  Whatever it was, it wasn’t important. Not as important as getting his hands on Tenny’s body. He picked her up easily and she wrapped her long legs around his waist, clinging to him as he plundered her mouth while carrying her towards the bed.

  I love this woman so damn much.

  Which turned out to be the last coherent thought that he had for a very, very long time.

  Tenny shook his shoulder, slowly pulling him up through the layers of sleep. His eyes fluttered open to find her laying on her side, her hair flowing in a tangled mess over her body, hiding and exposing her body to his gaze much as her dress had done, except now, she looked thoroughly loved.

  If asked, he would’ve sworn earlier that it was impossible for Tennessee to be sexier than she had been there in the Grace Valley Church, but looking at her now…

  He realized he would’ve been wrong. Hair mussed, lips swollen from kisses…

  Yeah, he would’ve been wrong.

  He reached out a hand and traced it over the curve of her hip. “Hi, baby,” he murmured, his voice roughened from sleep. “Ready for another round?”

  She grinned at him naughtily. “I am sad to say that I have to turn that offer down. Unfortunately, we need to get going.”

  His hand had already captured a brilliant blonde curl, letting it wrap around his finger. “Go where?” he asked lazily, not at all convinced that they needed to go anywhere, except maybe to Sexy Time Land again. He was pretty sure that was a good idea.

  “You need to drive me to Georgia’s house so I can change into something more appropriate for a street dance, and then we need to go to the street dance.”

  His mind was still playing catch-up – focused as he was on the to-die-for body in front of him, it was hard to think with any body part north of the belt line – so she prompted him. “Sugar and Jaxson got married today? You’re one of the groomsmen? So yeah, we should probably attend the dance, considering. Plus, food from the Muffin Man! I try not to eat too many carbs but I’ll make an exception for this dance.” She slapped him on his naked ass. “C’mon, handsome, let’s go.”

  He sat up with a huge stretch and mumbled, “You think I’m handsome?” around a jaw-cracking yawn.

  She stopped, her dress halfway pulled up her thigh.

  Mmmm…thigh…

  Maybe he could just talk her into staying here and he could play the game of seeing how many kisses it took for him to go from her knee to her hip—

  “Have you looked in the mirror lately?” she asked him, yanking him out of his daydream.

  “No. Why? Is my hair sticking up or something?” He swiped at his head, trying to push his unruly curls into submission. His hair had a tendency of sticking in any direction but the right one roughly 84.1% of the time. People loved to ooh and aah over his hair, but that’s because they weren’t the ones trying to style it.

  She shook her head with a laugh as she pulled the dress up over her delicious body, covering up her curves. Before he could protest, she said, “You are literally the sexiest guy I’ve ever seen in my life, bar none. Your hair, your eyes, your Superman curl over your forehead, your abs, your ass, your—”

  “Superman curl?” he said, interrupting her flow of compliments. He hated to do that – he had no idea she’d been checking out his ass, for one, and any compliments that she wanted to dish out, he was pretty damn sure he wanted to hear – but he couldn’t let that one go. He had no idea what she was talking about.

  “Superman? Clark Kent? You get this curl over your forehead that is just adorable.”

  “Adorable?” he echoed. He could stand to be compared to Superman, of course, but being called adorable made him sound like he was seven years old.

  “Yes, adorable. And kissable. And very, very lovable.” She walked over and leaned down to lay one on him.

  Hmmmm…

  As the spit swapping and tongue dueling commenced, Levi decided that maybe being adorable wasn’t so bad after all.

  They started walking towards the street dance from Georgia’s house; Levi was pretty sure that the police would have the streets blocked off, making traffic a nightmare. Walking, even in the fading late afternoon heat, was definitely the better plan.

  He snuck a look at Tennessee as they walked, hand in hand. Strappy sandals, short shorts, a thin t-shirt that said Princess in Training, and her blonde hair cascading down over her shoulders…she looked exactly the same as she had that day in the grocery store, when he’d overheard her conspiring with Georgia.

  Except not only had she changed, willing to leave her parents and stand on her own two feet, not to mention learning how to weld – who could forget that?! – but his perception of her had changed, too. He’d been so sure that she was a spoiled rotten brat without a care in the world. He’d thought she was heartbroken over Moose breaking up with her. He’d thought she loved nothing as much as she loved playing the piano.

  Despite years of hanging out together, her with Moose, him with Georgia, he hadn’t really known her. He hadn’t known her at all. He’d secretly been in love with her, but he was starting to realize now that he’d been in love with her façade.

  But now that he was beginning to know the real her…

  There were depths he hadn’t known existed.

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked softly, looking up at him through the fan of her eyelashes.

  “That you’re a surprise to me,” he responded honestly, “even after all these years. We’ve known each other practically since birth, or at least known of each other, and still, I didn’t know a damn thing about you.”

  She laughed lightly, the laughter tinkling out into the warm, still summer air. “Moose said the same thing to me, actually, months ago when he broke up with me.” She shrugged and then lapsed back into silence, obviously not feeling the need to add anything else to the conversation.

  So typical…

  “I understand being private,” Levi started to say as they neared the street dance, and then stopped. The country music was pounding and shouts of laughter were ringing out – they weren’t going to have any privacy in roughly 3.7 seconds if they kept walking, so impulsively, he pulled her into the shaded doorway of the hardware store instead. Surprised, she stared up at him, her large blue-green eyes as mesmerizing as ever. He wanted answers, yeah, but he also wanted to just stare at her all day.

  Some days, it was a tough decision.

  “I understand being private,” he said again, “but Tenny, you take it to a whole new level. Why? Why do you hide who you are from the world?”

  She pulled her hand out of his and began to rub her arms as if she were cold. He just waited patiently for her to talk, knowing that getting her to say something to him was half the battle.

  “My parents…you probably think of them as overbearing, meddling, smothering, invested in seeing me succeed…right?”

  He nodded, not sure where she was going with this but willing to give her all the time in the world to get there.

  “Well, they are all of that, it’s true. But…” She worried her full, bottom lip with her straight white teeth, staring off into the distance as she tried to decide what to tell him. The truth, Tennessee, just tell me the truth. But he kept his trap shut. He didn’t want to scare her off.

  “But honestly,” she said, pulling her gaze to look back up at him, “they don’t give a damn about me. Not me. They care about how I make them look. They care about who I marry, how well I do in a competition, what clothes I wear, but only in terms of how it makes them appear. I’m the child version o
f a trophy wife. A trophy child? Yeah, one of those. Quite literally, actually. My parents have a room in the house with nothing but trophies and ribbons and sashes for me and Virginia. Oh, and my crown from being Miss Idaho, First Runner Up, of course.” Her lips quirked into a ghost of a smirk and then flattened out into a straight line again.

  “My thoughts, my feelings, my desires, what I want to do or say or where I want to go – none of that matters to them. It would be like asking your car if it really wants to go to the grocery store today. No, you just get in the car and drive to the grocery store. I am the means to an end; a way for my parents to get what they want out of life.”

  She was rubbing her arms harder now, faster, looking close to a breakdown. Her hands were becoming a blur against her skin.

  “I’ve been told all my life that what I want does not matter. What I think, what I feel…none of it matters. There are only so many times that you can be told something like that before you start to hide shit from the world. Why tell you what I’m thinking if you’re just going to tell me that it doesn’t matter? It’s easier to just hide it all. If I don’t reveal my innermost thoughts to someone, then they can’t hurt me by telling me that those thoughts don’t matter; that I don’t matter. So, I don’t give them that chance to really twist the knife. Pretty soon, I’m not telling anyone any thoughts ever, because I’ve just shut myself down.”

  She shrugged nonchalantly, as if it was no big deal, but tears – fat, hot tears – began rolling down her cheeks, giving the game away. He pulled her against him and stroked her back, letting her get it all out. As he held her in his arms, he realized that this was the first time he’d seen Tennessee cry in all of the years he knew her.

  No, that wasn’t true. She’d cried while they were up camping and he’d been an ass to her. He’d almost forgotten that. But otherwise…he searched his memory and drew a blank. Tennessee Rowland was not a crier.

  And after what she just told him, he understood why. If she cried, then she was exposing her soft underbelly to the world, just inviting them to stab her there. It was much better if she plastered a smile on her face and pretended that nothing hurt.

  After what seemed like ages, she pulled back and snuffled, wiping the backs of her hands across her cheeks and looking up at him ruefully. “We’re going to a party, you know. Now my makeup is all messed up.”

  She had just a small smudge in the corner of her eye, and Levi wetted his thumb and wiped it off. “There,” he said softly, “good as new.”

  She stepped back, wiping at the front of her shorts nervously, her hands back to doing that dance that shouted to the world that she was nervous. “You always seem to do this,” she said out of nowhere, shoving her hands into the back pockets of her shorts and rocking back on her heels. “I tell you things that I don’t tell other people, and I’m not even sure why. I’ve wondered before if you’re able to cast some sort of magic spell over me or something.”

  Levi let out a snort of laughter at that one. “Baby, if I was gonna cast a spell over you, it wouldn’t be for you to tell me all of your secrets, although I’m honored that you have. No, I’d be turning you into my sex slave and we could—”

  Her cheeks flushed a brilliant red and she smacked at his shoulder while she howled in protest. “I cannot believe you just said that! You’re such a guy sometimes.”

  “Well, if I were a girl, this would be a very different relationship between us.” He winked at her. She rolled her eyes and looped her arm through his.

  “Are you done prying things out of me that I have never told another soul in my entire life?” she asked rhetorically, already dragging him down towards the street dance.

  “For now,” he said, if only to keep her on her toes.

  Yeah, he was “such a guy” pretty much all of the time. As they walked towards the crowd of people, laughter and shouts and country twang ringing out, the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen on his arm, he decided that wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

  Once they got to the party itself, the crowd swelled around them, people chatting with them both, shaking hands and hugging. It was pretty rambunctious, even for a party, and Levi quickly realized the reason for it – someone had set up a free beer table down at the end of the block. Hmmm…maybe he should head on down there and grab one.

  But before he could figure out the best way to navigate through the crowd with Tenny in tow, he felt a hand clamp down on his shoulder. “How’s it goin’?” Moose asked in his ear.

  Holding on tight to Tenny’s hand, Levi turned to look at his best friend cum brother. Looking at him, it washed over Levi yet again how painfully obvious it was that they were related. How he’d missed it all this time was beyond him, honestly. They were both stupidly tall, same dark curly hair, same jaw, same thick eyebrows…

  Yeah, it was obvious, all right.

  Sometimes, you only see what you want to see.

  “Good, good,” Levi said finally, clapping Moose on the shoulder with his free hand. He’d let go of Tennessee about the time he’d agree to only watch rom-coms for the rest of his life. “Is Georgia here with you?”

  “Yeah, here somewhere,” Moose said, craning his neck to look over the crowd. One of the bennies of being so tall – seeing above people’s heads was as easy as simply looking around. “I think she went into the Muffin Man to get something to eat.”

  Just then, Adam Whitaker – the town’s vet – caught Levi’s eye. He had his arm around the thickening waist of Kylie VanLueven, looking pleased as punch. Levi was shocked. How long had they been dating? How could they have conceived a child together when Levi didn’t even know they were dating?

  Moose followed his gaze and read Levi’s expression correctly. “Not his kid,” he said, talking close to Levi’s ear so not everyone in a 15-mile radius could overhear them. “She got knocked up and came back home. Went to work out at the clinic, and apparently, Adam ended up examining more than just the animals.” He waggled his eyebrows mischievously.

  Tenny leaned in close and smacked Moose on the arm. “You and Levi,” she scolded him. “A bunch of guys.”

  Moose looked between Levi and her, a smirk playing around his lips. “What, did you think we were girls?” he asked teasingly.

  Tennessee rolled her eyes. “Men. Why did I put up with you for so long?”

  “My charm and good looks?” Moose supplied helpfully.

  Levi bust up laughing. Moose looked at him, one eyebrow quirked. “Considering how much we look alike,” he drawled, “I wouldn’t laugh so hard at that statement.”

  Tennessee tugged Levi away before he could volley back a suitable retort. “Let’s grab a beer,” she shouted in his ear over the twang of Red Solo Cup. “We’re both walking, right?”

  But still, Levi flipped Moose the bird casually over his shoulder as they walked away. What else were best friends for?

  Chapter 33

  Tennessee

  Georgia’s landline rang again, but Tenny ignored it. The last three times, it’d come up on the caller ID as being her parents, so the chances were damn good that it was them again. Or, more specifically, her mother.

  With a lack of other leads to follow, she must’ve finally realized that her darling daughter did, in fact, abscond with every piece of clothing in her old room. No doubt she wanted to grill Tennessee into submission, and into admitting that Virginia had helped her.

  Nope, not gonna happen. Despite the fact that Virginia and Tennessee were the only children of Robert and Roberta Rowland, the significant age difference between them had always made Ginny seem more like the bratty kid from next door who followed her around and annoyed her constantly, rather than her sister. Asking Ginny to help with the Great Clothing Theft of 2018 had brought the two of them closer together than they’d ever been before.

  Tenny wasn’t about to ruin that by ratting her out. No way, uh-uh.

  Just then, her iPhone buzzed in her hand and she looked down at it with a grin on her face. Sure enough
, it was Levi, sending her a text that simply said, “Miss you,” with a sparkly heart. He was never going to win any writing contests with his texts, but they meant a lot to her because she knew he wasn’t the 21st century version of Shakespeare. Words and writing didn’t come easily to him, making each one he sent to her even more precious.

  She sent back a kissy face and sighed happily as she switched over to the camera app to take yet more clothing pictures. A picture of the shirt as a whole, the tag showing the name brand and size, any neat details, then one with accessories to punch it up. Move the shirt off to the side, start again with the next one.

  As she worked, she silently thanked Levi yet again for buying her the iPhone. After he got the job at WMI Fabrication, he’d brought the phone over as a surprise for her. She’d protested and told him that she should earn her own way in the world…even as she was eagerly logging into all of her social media accounts again. Being cut off from the world for the last couple of months…

  Painful. Let’s just put it that way.

  What she hadn’t realized was how much help the iPhone would be when it came to selling her stash of clothing. There were a couple of apps designed especially to sell high-end, used clothing, so that combined with the camera made the process a whole lot easier.

  She looked at the mountain of clothes off to the side and let out a sigh. Maybe “easier” was stretching it. The evening gowns had been the worst. Too many memories wrapped up in each of them – this was the dress she wore during the Junior Miss competition. This was the dress she wore to her senior prom with Moose. This was the dress she wore to the national piano competition in Washington, D.C.