Saved by the Fireman

by Allie Pleiter

  Charlotte, who’d already set down the bag with the bread, walked over and stroked Mo. He arched his back up to meet her hand, keeping one yellow eye on Jesse as if to say “See? She likes me.” “Melba gave him to me as an early birthday present. She has a cat she loves very much.”

  “I remember.” They weren’t happy memories, that much was clear. He chose his next words carefully. “I’m surprised Melba failed to remember that working on the house with Pinocchio didn’t go especially well.”

  Mo apparently took offense to that, leaping in a brown, black and white streak toward what would be the dining room. Evidently he wasn’t going to stand around and listen to Jesse defame his character. She imagined he’d head up to the bedroom soon, as the mattress on the floor had become his favorite spot since this afternoon. “She mentioned it might be a bit of a bumpy ride at first. But I love Pinocchio, and he was great company curled up next to me in the guest room at Melba’s. Mo’s been fine and settling in all day. It’ll be nice to have company. You told me you were a dog person, but I didn’t realize that meant you were an anti-cat person.”

  Jesse began taking items out of the bag. “I’m not an anti-cat guy. I just recognize that construction can stress animals out. You may be in for a bumpier ride than Melba let on.” She watched him choose to get past it, pushing out a breath and turning to her with the bouquet of flowers from the grocery bag. “These are for you. Paid for, fair and square.”

  She didn’t want to let Mo ruin the evening, either. She’d considered Mo a convenient excuse, a way to cut the evening short if things felt as if they were getting too close. Now, looking at him all spiffed up and offering a bouquet of flowers, Charlotte realized she liked Jesse. She really liked him. And that could still be okay; one dinner with him didn’t constitute a lifetime of sirens and anxious nights. It was just a friendly dinner. She didn’t have to stress over it the way she might have over a real date.

  She took the flowers, delighted that he’d chosen a mixture of wildflowers and sunny pastels rather than something serious like roses or ordinary like carnations. The arrangement fit the room, fit the sturdy little table that would host their meal. “Thank you. They’re lovely. I brought a vase from my Chicago apartment, too. I was going to put some greenery from the backyard in it, but this is much nicer.” She reached into a box on another counter, found a doily Mima had crocheted and set it on the table with the vase right in the center.

  They worked together on the meal as easily as they had worked on the bathtub. Jesse was masterful in the kitchen, doling out small jobs like chopping shallots while hovering over four different pans of delectable-smelling food. It made the cottage feel like a true home. A meal with friends.

  Only it didn’t seem to want to stay just “a meal with friends.” Jesse would catch her eye every now and then, smiling confidently as he explained why this had to boil for just a minute more, or why that ingredient had to be added just a little at a time, and her pulse would catch just a bit. He sang snippets of Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me” while he worked, and his voice swirled around her as it filled the kitchen. Then he lifted the lid on one saucepan and spooned up a creamy white sauce that smelled delicious. Jesse tasted it, eyes closed in assessment, added a little more of something, then tasted again. His resulting smile beamed of victory. “Here, try this.” He held out a spoon, and Charlotte couldn’t have refused for all the world.

  Had someone told him Alfredo sauce was her favorite? Had he run into Melba or Clark at the grocery store? Or was this just another way Jesse Sykes knew how to keep his customer happy? “Oh,” she said, going beyond just a taste to lick the spoon completely clean. “Oh, my. Wow.”

  “My family may be Anglo, but Italian is my specialty. Douse that handmade fresh spinach fettuccine with this, add the Brussels sprouts I’ve got going over there, and you’ll think you’ve died and gone to heaven.”

  Charlotte winced. “I’m...um...not really a fan of Brussels sprouts.” Actually, she didn’t know anyone who was a fan of Brussels sprouts.

  “You haven’t tasted mine.” He said it as if resistance to his particular brand of vegetable would be impossible. The tone of his voice made her believe him. Or at least want to believe him. “Close your eyes.”

  She gave him a look. “A bit dramatic, don’t you think?”

  He gave her a look right back. “You’ll eat those words right after you eat my Brussels sprouts.”

  Parking a hand on one hip, Charlotte countered, “You know that sounds ridiculous, don’t you?”

  Jesse wagged his fingers in front of her face until she rolled her eyes before squinting them shut. She heard him fiddle with the top of a saucepan, then the sound of his voice very close and soft. “Open.” He sang the word more than said it, his tone smooth and coaxing. She felt him close with her eyes closed, smelled the soap on his skin now mixed with the marvelous scents of his cooking. Maybe Brussels sprouts had been given a bad rap. She felt the fork against her tongue and bit down on what he offered.

  Oh.

  Brussels sprouts were the epitome of gross vegetables, the thing universally turning up child and adult noses everywhere. These could not have been Brussels sprouts. They were crunchy and a bit crispy, with something savory hiding between the tiny green leaves. Half a dozen different tastes and textures mixed on her tongue. This was the chocolate cake of vegetables. It couldn’t be those nasty green orbs everyone avoided in the produce aisle. He was tricking her; he had to be.

  Charlotte opened her eyes wide, unprepared for the closeness of Jesse’s triumphant face. There was a second piece on the fork, which she immediately ate. “Wow,” she said with her mouth full. He was so close, so dauntingly handsome, and he had just fed her his cooking. At this very moment, Jesse Sykes was the most attractive man on earth. Denying it was just plain impossible. “That’s a vegetable?” she whispered, just for something to say because his nearness was fogging her thinking.

  “You should see what I do with butternut squash,” he boasted, “but this is a personal specialty.” He reached out and brushed a bit of sauce or butter or whatever that splendid concoction was off her chin. She shivered at his touch, fighting off the dizzying sensation his brown eyes kindled in the pit of her stomach.

  Talk. Talk before you do something else, something you don’t want to do right now. “Every Brussels sprout on earth should stand up and thank you.” She hated how flustered she sounded, hated how he knew exactly how he’d wowed her and was currently reveling in it. “I hope you made a lot of those.” She ducked out of the dazzle of his eyes to peer into the covered pan.

  “Pace yourself. You’ll want to save room for dessert.”

  The man had made dessert. That was just plain fighting dirty. If this man produced a cheesecake then all hopes of sensibility were lost. Charlotte puttered around the kitchen, fighting the sinking feeling that was like drowning but a whole lot sweeter.

  Jesse stood still, watching her, as in control of the moment as she was out of it. “You want to slice up some lemon for the water?” The words were mundane enough, but his eyes seemed to say “So I don’t kiss you right now up against the refrigerator?”

  There was a journal page upstairs in Charlotte’s bedroom listing all the reasons why dating a firefighter was a bad idea. Right now Charlotte couldn’t remember a single one of them.

  * * *

  Jesse had eaten in some pretty spectacular restaurants, had even done the firehouse’s entire Thanksgiving dinner last year, but no meal had ever filled him with the satisfaction of Charlotte’s little table currently spread with his cooking. Even Mo—the predatory little beast—had come in from the living room to view the spectacle, perhaps hoping to leverage his cuteness into a little creamy Alfredo sauce.

  Jesse gave him a “my turn” glare as he walked over to pull out Charlotte’s chair for her. The urge to run a hand through the cascade of her blon
d hair caught him up short, and he nearly tripped on his way around to his side of the table. His plan to keep the evening light and friendly was falling prey to the look of utter delight on her face. It sank deep into his chest and settled there like a craving. She took such a rich pleasure in the world, in small things, in things he often took for granted. What gave her such a rare capacity for joy like that? Even in the face of all the obstacles life had thrown at her recently?

  He settled himself in his chair and reached for the serving spoon. “Dig in.”

  She cocked her head at him. “No grace?”

  It took him a minute to realize what she’d said.

  “Grace,” she repeated. “Over the food.”

  “Um, sure,” he said, fumbling. “Why not.”

  Charlotte extended her hand for his. Jesse was sure a man ought not to feel the sparks her hand left in his palm while saying prayers. He told himself not to luxuriate in the softness of her hands while he closed his eyes. He’d never been the hand-holding kind of guy, but right now holding her hands felt to him like whatever he saw shoot through her eyes when she tasted his cooking.

  “Thank You, Father, for this wonderful meal Jesse has set before us.”

  Jesse wasn’t prepared for her words. He was expecting some rote little poem, some Sunday school verse said in memorized monotone. Charlotte was praying. Real, actual, as-if-she-talked-to-God-every-day conversation. Over his food. “I’m grateful for this house, for all You’ve made possible, for all the work that went into this delicious food. I am, quite surprisingly, thankful for Brussels sprouts, too. Who’d have thought?”

  Jesse opened one eye to see her smiling, eyes closed as she carried on the easy dialogue. He’d not seen grace—or even prayer—ever look like this. It startled him, shaking something loose that felt as if it didn’t belong rattling around under his ribs.

  “Bless the hands that prepared this food,” Charlotte tightened her grip on Jesse’s hand, making his pulse gallop for a moment, “and may it nourish our bodies. In Your Son’s name, Amen.”

  “Amen,” Jesse gulped out, hoping that was the right thing to say. He was still trying to work out what had just happened. Chief Bradens had been known to say a formal grace over meals at the firehouse, but they never sounded like that, and they never made him feel as though someone had just hit him with a thousand-watt floodlight, dazzled and blinking for focus.

  “This looks incredible. I want to stuff myself silly—I’ve tasted all of it and I think you’re about to meet my piggish side.”

  “Knock yourself out.” He wanted to see her piggish side. He wanted to see her unrestrained enjoyment, to hear her groan with delight and lick the sauce off her fingers and ask for seconds if not thirds. He’d enjoyed lots of compliments on his food before, but those mostly fed his ego. Her pleasure in his cooking only made him want to make her happier. That wasn’t the kind of selfless gratification Jesse was used to, and he didn’t know how to deal with the feeling. He only knew he liked it, and he wanted more of it.

  He ate with enthusiasm. He watched her eat with relish, going on about this project and that fixture between raves over the food and sighs of what could only be termed gastronomic infatuation. The combination of Charlotte gushing over his food and espousing big renovation dreams was like catnip to Jesse—to put it in Mo’s terms. His insides were buzzing like live wires, sparking with every small touch, every adorable look. More than once he yearned to kiss the Alfredo sauce off her cheek, off her lips, no matter how stridently Chief Bradens and his own sense of caution had warned him off. He had found women disarmingly attractive before, but this was a whole new scale of allure.

  “I think I should go ahead and get the custom ironwork for the front steps. I just don’t see anything I like as much in the catalogues. I love the idea about Mima’s quilt motif worked into the front railings.” He could see it as clearly as she could. The price tag started not to matter. There was something about being near her, as if she gave off some kind of magnetism he was helpless to resist. “Irresistible” suddenly wasn’t a clichéd description—he found Charlotte wholly, genuinely irresistible. This was becoming dangerous on any number of fronts.

  By the time he made coffee and doled out French vanilla ice cream to start melting all over the berry cobbler he’d pulled out of the oven for dessert, Jesse felt his personal and professional warning system completely short-circuit. She was talking about imported glass tile backsplashes and granite countertops while she tore off a piece of bread and mopped up the last bit of sauce off her plate. He knew just the color stone that would set off her eyes, and it no longer mattered that it was the most expensive. She was Charlotte. The world would line up to do her bidding because at that moment, he would have said yes to anything she asked. Even the dumb cat. She had him hooked. What made him most nervous of all was that he could already feel the ache that would start when he walked out this door tonight and never let up until he was near her again.

  It scared him to death. He knew he was on the verge of a terrifying loss of control he wouldn’t have predicted and couldn’t contain. Jesse knew guys who got this way about fire—it drew them, fascinated them, nearly possessed them in a way that made them fearless. It’s also what gets them hurt or killed, he reminded himself. When emotion overpowered thought, damage happened. The very thing he’d hoped to give Charlotte in this project—an objective eye, a grounded opinion as to what was a worthwhile splurge and what was reckless spending—was about to go out the window. This was not good.

  Jesse turned back from returning the ice cream to the freezer and found her already digging into the cobbler right there at the counter—she hadn’t even waited for him to set them down at the table. She had a spot of purple right at the corner of her mouth, and she let out this intoxicating little hum as she found it with the tip of her tongue.

  That was it. Without a thought to the consequences, without even wondering if she’d welcome the advance, because every cell in his body already told him she would, Jesse kissed her.

  The taste of his cooking on her lips was enthralling. When her initial surprise melted into surrender, he lost the ability to think straight. But when Charlotte began to return his kiss? That put him over the edge. Who cared what Bradens thought? It was one night, one dinner, one kiss. One really amazing kiss.

  “Jesse...” She gasped his name, falling back against the counter as if the house had shifted off its foundations. He felt the same way, as if the world was whirling around him, spiraling out from the place where her hand still lay on his chest.

  He put his hand atop hers, wondering if she could feel the pounding. “I...um...” He knew he should say something smooth, something casual and clever, but he came up empty. She’d undone him with one kiss, frightening as it was. He craved another kiss so much that he feared being able to control himself if he took one.

  Not good, Sykes, not good at all.

  Chapter Eleven

  Crash. The moment came to a loud halt when a dish clattered to the floor. Mo had, at some point, leaped up onto the countertop in an effort to get at the melted ice cream and had succeeded in knocking over the cobbler dish. The cat screeched and bolted back into the dark of the living room. They both looked down to see white cream and purple cobbler splattered all over the floor and Charlotte’s light-colored pants.

  Charlotte didn’t know whether to thank Mo or to kick the furry, meddling feline to the curb. The moment—whatever it was—was gone, replaced with a sticky mess and the casualty of one of her favorite pairs of pants.

  Jesse had already grabbed a towel from the counter and was picking the pieces of the plate off the floor, muttering unkind things about cats. She stared at him, wanting to blink and shake her head, needing to know what had just happened and whether or not she should regret it.

  It had been a spectacular kiss. The kind that made her sensibilities go whit
e like an old-fashioned flashbulb, the kind that ought to be the first kiss between soul mates. Only now that the bubble had popped, she could name half a dozen reasons why Jesse Sykes was not the mate of her soul. And as for Jesse himself, if the kiss had affected him the way it had her, it no longer showed.

  “See, not too hard to clean up.” Jesse slid the broken china into the wastebasket and tossed the purple-blotched towel into the sink. “I don’t think you can say the same for those pants.” He turned to her, an “oh well” smile in his eyes, as if it had been a simple kitchen mishap. “There’s enough dessert to start over.”

  “I don’t think we ought to.” She knew she didn’t sound at all convinced. She wasn’t—confused was closer to accurate.

  His disappointment was so appealing. “Really? My cobbler’s even better than my Brussels sprouts.”

  Charlotte leaned against the cabinets. “Jesse...”

  He leaned up against the same cabinets, inches from her. “Hey, it’s okay.” He shrugged. “But it was a really nice kiss.”

  She shut her eyes for a moment, slipping her hand up to press it to her own lips while she launched a prayer up to heaven for the right words. “I know there’s something...here.” She opened her eyes again, wanting to make him understand. “The meal, the kiss—you know how to sweep a woman off her feet. It’s just that...” How could she make him understand when she wasn’t even sure what she wanted at the moment herself?

  He put a hand to his chest as if wounded. “I feed you fettuccine Alfredo and you shoot me down? Ouch.” His words were harsh but his eyes held that teasing glint she found most irresistible about him.

  “I need to take it a whole lot slower than this.” That much was true. She still hadn’t figured out if, in the space of one meal, Jesse Sykes had truly disintegrated her conviction not to get involved with men in his line of work. Had she truly overcome that fear? Or was it just pushed aside by Jesse’s...Jesseness, just to return later when her guard was down? “I like being with you,” she admitted, “but we have a lot of ground to cover and a bunch of things we have to...I have to work out. Or through. Or something.” She let her head fall back against the cabinets. “‘It’s complicated’ sounds so stupid, but it is.”