Oxygen Deprived (Kilgore Fire Book 3)

by Lani Lynn Vale

  “Cheater.”

  He shrugged. “I’m older and know more tricks. Cheating in cards is relative. It’s more like knowing all the ways to play the game.”

  Chapter 8

  Why bother spraying Febreeze after you shit? All it does is make it smell like shitrus, not citrus.

  -Text from Aspen to Naomi

  Drew

  So the nights at Aspen’s house continued.

  We were on day six of our fucked up winter storm.

  I’d worked a double shift the two nights before, and today was the first time I’d seen her in nearly fifty hours.

  I felt like a fucking juvenile. All I could think about was if Aspen was warm enough, or if she was keeping herself well entertained.

  Then I’d pulled into my driveway to see a massive snowman in her yard the size of which I’d never seen in Texas.

  The sign on the front of the massive snowman said, ‘Do you want to build a snowman?’

  I’d laughed all the way up her driveway, and when she opened the door and I’d smelled the bacon cooking, I’d come inside and hadn’t left since.

  “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” Aspen asked, egging me on.

  I lifted my beer, the ninth or the tenth, and stopped when I realized it was empty.

  “You want the truth?” I asked.

  “We are playing truth or dare,” she said, laughter filling her voice.

  I shrugged.

  “I was in college,” I said, apologizing ahead of time for what I was about to tell her.

  “Okay…” she said, looking at me out of the corner of her eye before taking another swig of her bottle.

  She passed it over to me, and I took a drink of her wine.

  “I thought you said you weren’t allowed to have alcohol,” I said after I took a long swig.

  “I’m not.” She took another swig. “But it’s either I drink, or I run away. I think drinking is the better end of the spectrum.”

  I didn’t argue with her. I just hoped they didn’t randomly show up and test her.

  That would suck.

  Aspen giggled, causing my gut to clench even more tightly than it had been throughout the day.

  God, the way she laughed, so uninhibited, was so sexy.

  In fact, the woman had a way of making me feel things I’d never experienced before in all my forty-two years of life.

  Just by laughing.

  “When I was in college, my roommate used to always come in and steal my stuff. Nothing was sacred. My clothes. My shoes. My food. My deodorant.” I took another swig of the wine and passed it back. “Then, one day, I came in to half of my tube of toothpaste gone and I just…snapped.”

  Her eyes widened so far that it was almost comical.

  “What did you do?” She pushed.

  I closed my eyes.

  “Did you just blush?” She asked.

  I started to laugh.

  “I’m not proud of myself,” I admitted. “Now that I’m a firefighter, I realize how terrible bodily fluids are to share, but then…” I shook my head. “I was well and truly pissed, so I masturbated into a Ziploc bag and then squeezed it all into the toothpaste tube.”

  Her mouth dropped open.

  “You didn’t,” she said, almost sounding envious.

  I nodded again.

  “I did,” I winced. “And I felt terrible about it after it was all said and done,” I told her. “I forgot about the toothpaste, having put it in a drawer and never looked back at it again,” I smiled slightly at the memory. “Then one day I happened to glance in the drawer to find it nearly all the way gone, and I wrote my roommate a note.”

  “What did the note say?” She leaned forward, listening intently.

  She was now on her knees, waiting for me to finish the story.

  “I said, ‘It’s wrong to steal, and I don’t appreciate your using my stuff without asking first. I hope you enjoyed brushing your teeth with my jizz in your toothpaste over the last month’,” I admitted.

  She gagged, slapping her hand over her mouth before she rolled over onto her side and started laughing uproariously.

  I watched her roll around the floor on her back, tears coming down her cheeks as she laughed too hard to control her bodily functions.

  “That’s…” she wheezed. “Epic.”

  “What about you?” I asked her.

  “Truth?” She said, raising her brow in question.

  I nodded, practically vibrating with the desire to hear her answer.

  “It’s not really funny like yours. Mine’s my worst shame. I have nightmares about it,” she sighed softly.

  I looked down at her, purposefully letting her see my disappointment, and then nearly laughed when she sighed so exaggeratingly.

  But what I expected to be funny, was anything but.

  I could’ve guessed just about anything would’ve come out of her mouth than what did.

  “I’m not my father’s kid,” she whispered darkly.

  My mouth dropped open.

  “And that’s a shame to you…how?” I wondered.

  She bit her lip.

  “If I tell you this…you have to promise not to tell anyone, ever,” she ordered fiercely. “You cannot ever tell. If you tell, I’ll probably be disowned by my mother, and I love her so much that I’d probably kill myself.”

  I blinked.

  “If it’s that big of a deal…” I started. “Then I don’t want to know.”

  She waved me off.

  “Downy’s father died before I was born…” she started.

  I nodded.

  I’d heard that in our previous talks.

  “Okay,” I circled my finger for her to continue.

  She bit her lip.

  Then she opened her mouth and said words that I would’ve never expected to come out of her mouth.

  “I’m not Downy’s half-sister. I’m his full sister,” she blurted.

  I blinked.

  “Ummm,” I asked in confusion. “How?”

  She got up and ran to her bedroom, then came back a couple minutes later with some documentation in her hands.

  “Out of spite, one day when I was eighteen or nineteen,” she started. “I got really mad at Downy, and I was going to prove to him once and for all that we weren’t related.”

  I nodded.

  “Don’t ask why, I was a kid,” she ordered.

  I held up two fingers in a scout’s honor.

  She gave me a dirty look that clearly told me she’d fuck me up if I ever thought about telling.

  “So I steal some of his hair, and then sent some of my hair in, to have it analyzed.” She handed me the paperwork.

  “What’s this?” I asked, looking at the lines, dashes, and percentages.

  “Okay,” she took a deep breath. “This right here shows the likelihood of me being related to him.”

  She pointed to a number.

  It read: 99.99%.

  My mouth dropped open.

  “That’s impossible unless…”

  She was nodding before I had a chance to finish.

  “Exactly,” she said. “So I started to dig. I hired a private investigator to find out how. After running the test two more times.”

  “How, at eighteen, were you able to afford this?” I questioned.

  She shrugged.

  “My parents are wealthy, and when I turned eighteen, a small inheritance hit my account. I blew through it so fast my head spun, and I only have a few things to show for it,” she sighed. “Anyway, so I have this man trying to figure out why, and when he comes to me with the news that I was conceived through artificial insemination from a sperm bank out of Dallas, it all started to make sense.”

  “So they froze your father’s…sperm.”

  She nodded again emphatically. “That’s what I think, anyway.”

  “And have you ever figured anything else out ab
out it, or did you stop once you’d gotten that far?”

  She shook her head.

  “That’s the shameful part of all this. I went through a hundred and fifty thousand dollars trying to figure it out…but I’d gotten shafted by the PI. He’d taken me for a naïve girl, and I had been,” she admitted.

  I shook my head.

  “That’s ludicrous.”

  She agreed with a grunt.

  “But I count it as worth it…to know. I just wish I could have more information without bringing it up to my mom. This would break her for sure,” she whispered, picking at invisible lint on her shirt.

  A shirt that was clinging to her breasts like a fucking second skin.

  My eyes jerked up to her face, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw she wasn’t paying attention to where my eyes were aimed.

  She was too busy looking at the fire.

  Her hands wringing in her lap as she thought about what she’d just told me.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  “I want to tell Downy, but I’m scared he’ll tell my mom. Then my father will leave,” she hesitated. “Again. My mom—she tried to leave him once for doing some stupid shit when it came to Downy a few years ago—but she couldn’t function. When he got done serving his sentence, she went back to him. This is the last thing they need right now—me making it harder than it needs to be.”

  “You’re thinking like a kid,” I told her. “Think like an adult. You deserve to know who your father is. Why are you so worried about your parents? They’re adults, too.”

  She pursed her lips, thinking long and hard before she gave voice to the words that were just at the tip of her tongue.

  “My father’s what you would call…difficult,” she finally settled on. “He’s not the nicest person in the world, and he’s just an okay father. Not great, but not the worst either. I wasn’t beaten. I never wanted for anything. Not a day went by that I worried if I would eat the next day, and I always had a roof over my head and a place to sleep.” She exhaled. “But he’s mean. Very mean, and it’s my mom who ends up taking the brunt of it if we do something that displeases him.”

  “Take it, how?” I wondered.

  “Doesn’t take her to the business functions he attends, which she loves. Doesn’t allow her to go out with him at all, in fact. My mom’s pretty needy and clingy. She’s very emotional, and although she’s the best mom in the world, she’s high maintenance,” she explained. “She’s not the kind of woman who would make it on her own. She’d fall apart if my dad left her.”

  “Hmmm,” I murmured. “Then I’ll just have to bow to your experience with her. If you think she won’t be able to handle it, who am I to argue?”

  “I’ve been fighting with myself about telling my brother, but …” She stopped when I held up a finger for her to hold on.

  Pressing the green phone button, I answered my phone.

  “Hi, Attie,” I said. “How was your day off from school?”

  She didn’t bother to answer.

  “You missed the pickup time,” she grumbled loudly.

  I looked at my watch and cursed.

  “I’m sorry, honey. I thought we’d said we weren’t doing it today because of the snow?” I said.

  “And I told you,” she said with not a little amount of attitude. “That I didn’t want to reschedule.”

  I didn’t argue with her. I’d figured out long ago that it was easier to just let the attitude go rather than confronting her about it.

  “I’m sorry, pickle lily,” I said softly. “Do you want me to come…”

  She hung up, and I was left looking at the black phone like a dumbass.

  “So…she sounds…nice,” Aspen teased.

  The corner of my mouth kicked up, and I stood, taking our plates and dishes to the trash.

  “She’s my baby, and I think she’s trying to stay loyal to her mom without cutting me out of her life altogether. She doesn’t really know how to balance that, and I think I get the brunt of it when she’s on the phone. She doesn’t do that when we’re actually with each other. I think she puts that show on in front of her mom to make her feel better,” I disclosed.

  When I made it back to the living room, it was to find Aspen on her back next to the fire.

  The orange flames cast a shadow throughout the room, and all over her body it looked like there was a soft orange glow playing across her porcelain white skin.

  Skin that looked so soft that I wanted to rub my lips along her entire body just to see if it was as soft as I thought it might be.

  My eyes drifted down the length of her body, stopping on the skull leggings that were covering her lower half.

  My gaze caught on the apex of her thighs, and I nearly groaned when I saw how well those leggings hugged her pussy. I could almost see the outline of her pussy lips, and the seam that separated them.

  I tore my eyes away from the tight pants and her pretty pussy, turning and gazing out the window in the living room.

  My gaze fell on the house directly next door to mine.

  “Is the house next to mine, the one with the green shutters, occupied?” I asked.

  I’d never seen anyone there, but then again they could just have different hours than me.

  That was possible.

  I’d only been in the neighborhood for a short time period.

  “That’s Doris McQueen’s house,” she answered, curling up until she was standing. “That house is about to be foreclosed on, I think.”

  “How do you know?” I asked. “It looks deserted, but well kept.”

  “I saw them nail that pink sign on the door, which she then ripped off as soon as they left,” she explained. “She’s gonna be one of those people that stay there even when the wrecking ball is waiting outside, ready to knock the building down.”

  I snorted, my eyes going back to my house, then to the one on the other side of mine.

  “What about the others,” I pointed.

  She stood up on her tiptoes, then moved in between me and the window as she tried to look over the car that I just now realized must be in her way.

  And her ass rubbed against the tip of my cock, causing me to nearly jump out of my skin and jerk back a step in my haste to get away from her.

  She looked behind me in confusion as she felt me abruptly pull away, but then turned around and looked back at the house next to mine.

  “I don’t know who that is,” she said. “I’ve been watching this neighborhood for a while now, and I’ve never once seen anybody come in or out of that house. But someone has to be, because the paper is always picked up and so are the mail and packages. I just never see anyone doing it.”

  “Weird,” I muttered, turning my back to her and walking back to the fire to stoke it, hoping during the couple of seconds it took for me to get it back up to life that my cock would learn how to control itself.

  She knelt down on the floor, reaching under the coffee table and coming back up with the huge box I’d seen earlier.

  “The mailman delivered this today,” she said.

  I blinked.

  “The mailman?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “Sure did,” I said. “They had a tractor come down the road and clear the snow off, followed by a truck with some sand.”

  “Probably because this is one of the busier roads that everyone uses,” I said. “I didn’t realize they were getting off their asses to do anything today.”

  Her brows rose as she lifted the flaps on the box.

  “I’m sensing some hostility there,” she heckled.

  I winced.

  “The fire department, as well as the police department, has to run regardless of road conditions,” I told her. “So it would’ve been nice for them to start doing that shit three days ago rather than today when it’s finally clearing up.”

  “It’s still raining,” she said.
“And is supposed to rain for the next week.”

  “It’s supposed to rain, not snow. And that’s a completely different thing,” I said. “It’s like comparing apples to apple pie. Same fruit, but one’s more complicated than the other. And tastes better.”

  She snorted at the comparison. “I don’t like apple pie.”

  I gasped in affront. “What kind of Southerner are you?”

  She stuck her tongue out at me.

  “Shut up,” she sniffed. “Look what I got today.”

  I looked down into the box.

  “What…is that?” I asked, staring at the tube filled with white powder.

  “This,” she lifted it. “Is a new product that I’m testing out.”

  I read the label and my jaw dropped open.

  “That’s…insane,” I groaned. “What are you going to do with it?”

  She grinned, showing a perfectly straight row of white teeth.

  “This is where you come in.”

  And I had to add…had I not been on my second six-pack of beer, along with more than a couple long swigs of wine, I would’ve never considered doing it.

  But I did.

  And it was the best day of my life, ever.

  ***

  Thirty minutes later, Aspen was a hot mess. Literally and physically.

  “You should’ve never turned that battery powered heater on in here. I’m literally dying,” she groaned, wiping sweat off her forehead with her elbows.

  The heater was working well; I’d give her that.

  It was something the boys at the firehouse had rigged up using a car battery. It put out a lot of heat and allowed me to sleep comfortablly in my bed for the last week without having blankets piled a mile high on top of me.

  I took a swig of my beer, well and truly buzzed now.

  I couldn’t even say how many I’d had at this point in the night.

  A smile overtook my face when I realized I’d have to tell Luke, my boss on the SWAT team, that I couldn’t come in if a callout were to happen right then.

  I was well and truly drunk, and enjoying every minute of it.

  “I’m going to be naked here in a few seconds,” I said somewhat loudly, never able to control my mouth when I was this far gone. “You’ll have to forgive me if I wanted to make sure there was no shrinkage. Have I mentioned that I can’t believe I’m doing this right now?”