Burning Up

by Anne Marsh

  He wanted to talk about what she needed, not about her damn plants.

  “Those beautiful bushes were going to get you killed.” Carefully, he laid the shovel in the bed of his truck and dragged on his shirt.

  “Really?” She didn’t look up, just moved to the next stump. “Last time I checked, Jack, these poor bushes of mine didn’t have feet. They weren’t chasing me anywhere, and I don’t want to hear anything more about fire lines and tinder and—and . . .” She waved a hand.

  “I know fire.” Crossing his arms over his chest, he leaned back against the sun-warmed metal of the truck.

  “Yes, Jack, you’re the expert,” she mocked.

  “About this, I am.” He leaned forward. “I warned you, Lily. My job here is to keep you safe. It’s too damned bad if you don’t like my methods.”

  “And that’s something else,” she continued, as if this conversation was all one-sided and she didn’t want to hear what he had to say. She stood up, all long, sun-kissed legs in those little denim shorts of hers. She was driving him crazy, and he wasn’t sure how long he could keep his baser instincts under control. How much longer he could stop himself from pulling her right into his arms and kissing her until she was melting for him and this discussion of theirs no longer mattered.

  “You need to stop and listen, Jack. This is my life, and you don’t get to come barging in here and take charge of it. Of me.”

  “Maybe you’d like that.” He knew damned well that was an erotic game he’d enjoy.

  The way her eyes widened, he figured she knew exactly what he meant. Her nipples were all tease, hard little nubs beneath the fragile fabric of her tank top. He could tuck a finger into the tempting hollow between her breasts and just stroke that impossibly soft skin while he sucked on those perfect little nipples like they were candy and he was a man with a sweet tooth.

  “Don’t look at me like that, Jack,” she warned. She brushed dirt off her hands, her thighs, and he didn’t think he could get any harder. She had to know, too. It wasn’t as if his jeans were hiding the evidence. “I’m not some helpless thing you need to take care of.”

  “Then make the choice, Lily,” he growled, frustrated. “Let me do what I can do here. Choose to let me keep you safe.”

  “This isn’t about my choosing.”

  “It is, baby. Trust me.”

  “Trust you, Jack?” she cried. “You think I should trust you? I know what your reputation is.”

  “Is this about my firefighting abilities—or something else? I’m not giving you a catalog of my lovers.”

  “You tell me, Jack. Is this just another job for you? Do you move in with all the happy homeowners you’re hired to protect?”

  “You know I don’t,” he said calmly, loading the neat bundles of oleander branches into the truck’s bed. “But we practically grew up together, Lily. Your uncle and Nonna are closer than close. He asked me to help out, so I am. You just have to decide to let me do what I do best here.”

  “Which would be?” She was spitting mad. He shouldn’t have found it endearing. He shouldn’t have wanted to keep pushing her, to see what she would do or say next. She’d kept all that fiery passion tamped down, locked up her feelings as if letting herself go would be a bad thing. He grinned. He’d wanted her passion ten years ago. Guess things hadn’t changed all that much in Strong.

  “Keeping you safe, baby. That’s what I’m doing.”

  “Then leave me alone, Jack,” she cried. “You’re not helping me, not really. Even if there is someone out there watching me, we don’t know that he’ll stop just because you’re here. I can’t do this.”

  “I’m not leaving.” She was headed right for him, but she kept on going, up to the house. She smelled even better than he remembered, and he wanted to lower his head, ease his mouth right on over hers, and kiss her until she forgot everything but kissing him back.

  Given what she was muttering, though, he didn’t think she’d be kissing back.

  Not anytime soon.

  Chapter Eight

  Ma’s was a deliberate hole-in-the-wall. Tucked behind the town’s main street so a man had to go looking to find the place, Ma’s had the only neon sign in town, with the obligatory light-up martini glass. The bar wasn’t precisely flush with martini drinkers—Ben would have bet most of Ma’s customers had never tasted a martini in their lives—but the drink was on offer. Live music on the weekends, three pool tables, and an honest-to-God jukebox—a man didn’t need much more than that. The owner had talked once about putting in an Internet jukebox, but the patrons had resisted. People here liked the comfort of the same-old-same-old. The world outside might be changing, but there were some things you could still count on. Ma’s, a cold beer, and some quarters in the jukebox were among them.

  Jack Donovan, now, he looked like a man in need of a real cold beer.

  Mimi gave him a friendly smile, deftly sliding a beer across the bar top to him when he picked himself a stool and sat down next to Ben’s booth. Jack signaled that he’d run a tab and reached for the cold bottle like it was a lifeline.

  “You cut her oleanders down? Man, you do have a death wish.” On the other side of Ben, Evan shook his head and smiled. Even Rio, silent Rio, just gave him a commiserating look.

  Jack had to know he’d never hear the end of this. “I didn’t cut them down,” he grumbled. “I pruned them.”

  “Out of existence,” Evan observed. Like any good brother, he was ready to give Jack a hard time. “I didn’t know our Lily knew that many curse words. She sure learned a lot living in San Francisco.”

  Lily obviously had Jack at sixes and sevens. Jack might think this was just a summer gig, but Ben was thinking differently. Still, even if Jack and Lily had a history, that didn’t mean she’d want to pick right up where the pair had left off ten years ago.

  Even if Jack clearly wished she would.

  “She shot him down.” Rio nodded knowingly.

  “Of course.” Evan tilted his beer bottle toward Jack in a mock toast. “He cut down her flowers. Bet he didn’t even ask first, just swooped in there, acting all fire chief.”

  “I asked,” Jack pointed out. He didn’t lose his death grip on the bottle, though.

  Ben shook his head. “Did you spell it out? You don’t cut a woman’s flowers until you’ve pre-approved every tiny slice.” Ben had spent way too much time in places like Ma’s when he’d first hit legal drinking age. More after Lily had joined him in Strong and Nonna had acquired her trio of boys. The pair of them had often hashed out tales of woe—and success—over a beer or two. Christ, those boys had been a handful and a half. He still didn’t know how Nonna had managed them.

  “It’s time we talked about Lily.” Ben got right down to the business of their meeting. “Things are heating up.”

  Jack just nodded. “I agree. I’ve seen the fire maps. You know what those patterns say. Little fires. Getting closer and closer together. More frequent. Our boy’s losing patience, or she’s pushing his buttons.”

  Thirty-plus years after he’d done four tours of duty with the Marines. Three hundred and sixty-five days each of those years. Ben had done his thing, done his best to protect his town from the danger of fire. But, damn, some days he felt like Chicken Little squawking at a bright blue sky. There wasn’t always smoke. But he knew firsthand just how fast a blaze could grow.

  And lately there had been too many little fires for a town this size. Little, harmless fires you could dismiss as someone being careless. Those fires you put out and moved on from. No worries. But when his Nonna worried, Ben worried. That was why he hadn’t put up a fuss when Jack showed up. He knew that Nonna had pulled some strings behind the scenes. And he was okay with having some extra help on this one.

  “Someone has a real big issue with our Lily. Question I’ve been asking myself is, who? Who’d want to hurt her like this, bad enough to follow her from San Francisco?” His baby girl was hurting, and he hadn’t forgotten the look on her face when she
’d first come home. I was ready for a change, she’d said. Hell, he’d known then that there was more to her story.

  Much more.

  He might not be her daddy, but he was her uncle. They had blood in common, and he’d raised her since she was five years old, when her mother had decided she couldn’t do it anymore. He knew Lily, and he damned sure knew when she was running scared.

  Jack leaned forward. “So who do you think is behind this?”

  Ben considered for a moment and then had to admit the truth. “I don’t know. If I knew that, Lily wouldn’t be constantly looking over her shoulder. But we’ve got to figure it out. Fast.”

  “What makes you think we’ll do any better than those cops in San Francisco did?”

  Ben snorted. “You taken a good look around you recently? This is as small-town as it gets. We look after our own here. And any new face sticks out in Strong. No matter how careful our guy is, he’ll make a mistake at some point.”

  Jack shook his head. “I don’t think this is a stranger, though. I think she knows this guy.”

  “You sure her stalker is a guy?”

  Jack thought for a moment, set the bottle down on the table, and ticked the reasons off on his fingers. “Most arsonists are white. Male. Under the age of thirty. Maybe our arsonist here is female, but I don’t think so. This feels personal. I haven’t told Lily that she probably knows who it is. It’s an ugly thing to accuse anyone of.”

  Rio nodded slowly. “Any new faces in town? Other than ours? Because I’m assuming you’re letting us off the hook for this one.”

  “None that stick around. People come and go—that’s what happens when you live in a historic town.”

  “This stalker of hers, he’s sticking to her. He’s watching her, Ben.” Jack ran a hand over his hair. “What about family?”

  “I never knew who her daddy was,” he said regretfully. “Just a mistake—that’s all her momma told me. Mistake for the two of them, maybe, but Lily was the sweetest mistake that ever happened to me. I had no idea what I’d been missing out on when she landed in my lap. Thank God for your Nonna,” he added, laughing, “or I would have been washed up the first week. I didn’t know jack shit about little girls, and Lily was none too happy about being dumped here with an uncle she’d never met. I didn’t realize a five-year-old could think of that many ways to say no,” he said fondly.

  “She was lucky she had you.”

  “I’m still here for her. She’ll always have me. That’s a given.” Ben gestured for another round. He’d go all out tonight. Make it three beers instead of his usual two. “You have any thoughts on who might be stalking our girl?”

  “Ours?” Jack raised an eyebrow, the bottle frozen in his hand.

  “Ours,” Ben confirmed. “We both know it, Jack. She was yours before you left all those years ago, and some things don’t change.”

  “Lily might have something to say about that.”

  “Well, I figure you’re every bit as much hers,” Ben said. Christ, the seats in the bar didn’t get any softer as he got older. “Two-way street and all. But she took it pretty hard when you left, followed that road right out of town damn quick.”

  “We were just kids.”

  “Maybe,” Ben allowed. “You did the right thing there, holding back. You were both too young to handle a serious relationship.”

  Jack shot him a look that didn’t take much interpreting. “She wasn’t my first girl, Ben.”

  “First one that meant anything to you,” Ben pointed out comfortably. When Jack didn’t say anything, he figured he had that one right enough. “She needed to do some more growing up before she could give what you needed from her. She was a sexy little thing but not old enough to do some things.”

  Yeah. That was definitely a flush on Jack’s face. Maybe it was truth hitting home or simply the fact that Ben wasn’t dead and buried yet. Lily was like his own daughter, but there was no skirting some truths. She’d been a pretty, pretty girl. Pure trouble. He’d been glad enough when she’d taken an interest in Jack Donovan, because he’d known, even then, that Jack was on track to be a good man. He hadn’t taken advantage of Lily.

  “You did the right thing, Jack. You left, because sticking around would have meant trouble. She was too young. You weren’t old enough, either. Question really is, what are you going to do now?”

  Jack’s eyes measured him, and that face of his didn’t give away a damn thing. “I’m going to find her stalker, Ben.”

  “That all?” Ben raised an eyebrow, just to see what Jack would do next. He wasn’t looking for the man to pop out a diamond ring—not yet—but damned if he’d loose the man on Lily without getting some kind of commitment from him. “I figure you’ll do the right thing by Lily. No matter what folks here had to say about you boys, I always knew you were good at heart. Honorable men,” he said pointedly.

  “I’m not going to hurt her.”

  “Good to know.” He nodded. “But I wouldn’t expect any less from you. Question is, what happens if she needs more than a strong pair of hands, someone to beat the crap out of the bastard making her life hell?”

  Jack sucked down his beer and tried desperately to pretend Ben hadn’t just dropped the conversational equivalent of the bomb that had hit Hiroshima. For a long moment the only sounds filling up the silence were the country music playing on the jukebox and the soft clack of balls colliding on the pool table. Mimi chatted up a newcomer who couldn’t drag his eyes from the tall blonde’s face. Her pretty voice was giving a shout-out to the local eateries, but Ben figured her audience wasn’t too interested in dinner unless the bartender was along for the ride. Which meant the newcomer was plain out of luck, because he’d seen Mimi ride into Strong on the back of Rio Donovan’s Harley. He knew what that meant.

  “Don’t push me, Ben.” Jack went on the offensive, which was usually a move Ben would have applauded. But since this was Lily they were discussing, the tactic wasn’t going to fly.

  “I’m asking you to tell me whether my girl is a little summertime fun for you, or if there’s something more going on between the two of you.” Blunt but to the point, he decided. He didn’t have Nonna’s more delicate touch, but Jack had always appreciated the straight-up.

  “I have a job to do here.” Jack slammed the bottle back down on the bar, and Mimi stopped her heart-to-heart and looked over. Shit. He didn’t want an audience for this conversation, or Nonna would hear about it. “Lily is up to her sweet little ass in trouble, and we both know it. She needs someone to keep an eye on her, to keep her in line before she goes and does something that ends badly. Fire-boy isn’t sane. I don’t think he’s going to go away, and neither do you, or you wouldn’t have welcomed me in here in the first place.”

  “So you’re keeping her safe.” Ben took a long sip of his own beer and decided, what the hell. He’d go for broke in this conversation he was having. “There’s no romance. Just a whole lot of business.”

  Next to him, Rio snorted and just about fell off his bar stool trying to hold in the laughter.

  Jack glared at his brother, but then he pulled it together. “I don’t know.”

  That was honest enough. Ben wasn’t surprised his Lily had the other man all turned around.

  “The way I see it,” Jack continued, “we have some unfinished business of our own. I’d like to see Lily, but you know me, Ben. You know the job. At the end of the summer, I’ll be shipping out again. There will always be another fire.”

  Chapter Nine

  Two days. She’d managed to avoid Jack for two days, but Lily figured she couldn’t run forever. After all, they were sharing a house. Her house. He knew damned well she couldn’t hide much longer.

  All he had to do was wait her out. The devilish gleam in his eye was warning enough.

  He wouldn’t wait much longer.

  She should have been fighting him harder, but she couldn’t hide from the delicious sense of anticipation building in her. God, it was going to be so good w
hen they finally landed in bed together. They both knew it. She just wasn’t ready to admit it yet, wasn’t ready to end this game they were playing.

  So, when he pulled up in that beat-up old pickup of his, she was waiting. The fire he’d been called out on had been every bit as small as he’d expected. She’d called Ben to find out. Typical small-town stuff. The guy four houses down from Nonna’s hadn’t cut back the grass around his barbecue pit, and the whole world—with the notable exception of the mad barbecuer himself—knew the man was no grill master. Too much lighter fluid, and the corn the idiot had decided to grill became tinder. At least he’d had the presence of mind to dial for help when the shooting flames had leaped the pit and gone for the grass.

  “Fire out?” she called through the screen door while he stripped on the sunporch.

  “Yeah,” he hollered back, just as if they were Miriam and Daniel, married for thirty years, with a backyard full of grandkids. “Man’s got himself a big black bald patch in his backyard, his wife’s still hollering at him, but his house is standing. Not even scorched,” he added, and there was no missing the satisfaction in his voice. He’d won another round.

  Whistling, he dropped his gear on the floor, Nomex fire pants following his steel-toed boots. She didn’t know why he couldn’t leave his stuff at the firehouse or in that damned plane hangar where his brothers and the rest of their team were camped out. Instead, he left it all right there on her porch, like a dog or a big predatory cat marking his territory. She could absolutely imagine him as a tiger, rubbing his cheek against the wood of her house to mark it as his. Mark her as his.

  When he came in, he still had soot on his face, as if he’d scrubbed a hand over it in the heat of the moment. The little breeze from the open door brought her the too-familiar, woodsy scent of fire.

  She couldn’t shake the memory, couldn’t forget those little fires that had upended her life. Just a whiff of smoke was enough to send her over the edge. Someone was out there, watching her. Choosing what to take away from her. He knew what she was reading. He had probably brushed elbows with her in the general store. He was coming for her.