“Stand back,” I roar. “Do you understand me? All of you. Back.”
“Yes,” a small voice answers. “We’re safe.”
With one mighty swing, I split the door right down the middle, the wood splintering and coughing like something alive, and then I stride into the room.
And there she is.
Am I hallucinating?
There’s the woman I’ve been waiting forty-two long, long years for.
She’s wreathed in smoke but I can see that her hair is sun-blonde, and her face is open and kind and her eyes are a startling, vivid green that remind me of long walks in luscious landscapes, and her body is the very definition of curvy, her hips child bearing and making me want to grab them, to feel the subtle gradations on her plus size perfect form.
Of course, I don’t just stand there gaping. I’ve got work to do.
But as me and my men move across the room I find myself having to tug my attention back to the task at hand, because it wants to gallop away and dream up a million different scenarios with this woman.
As Max and Sonny approach the other person in the dressing room, I approach her, her beauty tugging at me, roaring at me to do something, and it takes every honed instinct I have to do my job instead of just ravishing her amidst the flames.
I grab her and lift her up, feeling her body through my gloves, how thick and full and sexy it is.
Then I carry her out, like a robot, focusing on my footsteps and nothing else, focusing on the path through the mayhem.
When we break out onto the street, I immediately take her to the waiting ambulances, putting her down and turning away so that I don’t have to gaze into her face one more time.
I turn to find Mark walking toward me, and have to blink away sunlight and smoke to convince my mind that my eyes aren’t lying.
Mark Thompson, wearing a plaid shirt rolled up at the sleeves, big chunky steel toe capped boots telling me he just came from a construction site, his face so tan he’s almost orange and my best friend since I was just a kid.
“Mark?” I mutter.
“Thank you, thank you,” he blusters, gripping me by the arms. “Jesus, man, Jesus Christ, thank you so much.”
“What’re you talking about?” I ask.
He tilts his head at me as though wondering if the fire has damaged my senses.
“You saved her.”
“Who?”
“You saved Lilah,” he breathes, gesturing to the woman behind me, the woman I’ve already mentally claimed as mine. “You saved my daughter.”
Chapter Two
Lilah
I lie in the hospital bed with the sun blazing through the closed blinds, casting a glow across the room, my head on the pillow and my eyes closed. My eyelids are red with sun.
I can feel Mom and Dad in the room, Dads boots shuffling around, the crisp sound when Mom turns the pages of her book.
But I keep my eyes closed as my mind drifts back to the theater, to running lines, to rehearsing for the play – the play where, somehow, I’m the lead – and then everybody is screaming and a fire is blazing with stunning speed through the building.
It's been a sweltering day and the building is old, Cassie shouldn’t have been burning candles backstage, and of course we all should’ve been way, way calmer.
But the fire and its aftermath isn’t what continuously stabs at my mind.
It’s the way Dominic Dallison looked as he stood in the doorframe, overfilling it, his body like something out of a fever dream as he stood six foot seven in his fireman’s uniform.
His piercing brown eyes were barely visible with the smoke and the helmet, but I remember him from my childhood, before he went off to fight wildfires in Australia for three years.
I know he’s tall and has salt and pepper hair, his jawline strong, his body bulging at the seams like his skin can barely contain his tight, well-practiced muscles, but not the muscles of a bodybuilder, inflated just for the sake of it.
These are the muscles of a man who knows what he’s doing.
I flinch when the door creaks open, the idea that it could be my stalker, Craig, lurching through me so that I’m forced to throw my eyes open just to be sure.
Craig has been quiet lately and I try to convince myself that this is it, that he’s done playing his twisted games with me.
It’s not Craig, though. It’s my brother.
Finn strides across the room, a wiry twenty-one year old with a shock of ash blonde hair and a skinny face, his long arms covered in tattoos as he sinks down next to me.
He looks at me with big brother eyes even though I turned eighteen a few months ago.
“You good, sis?” he asks.
“Yes,” Mom says, with a sly smile. She wears about a bajillion bracelets and her hair is tied back with a Bohemian bandana. “Are you done pretending to be asleep?”
“She wasn’t pretending,” Dad says, still in all his construction gear.
“No,” Mom says, winking at me. “Of course she wasn’t.”
I repress a giggle as my family settles around me, Finn with a severe grimace plastered across his thin lips.
“Was it him?” he says. “Was it that stalker psycho?”
“Jeez, Finn,” I snap, surprised by the fire in my voice. Fire. Ha ha. “Not everything is related to that. He hasn’t followed me in months now.”
“What was it, then?”
“One of the girls was burning a candle,” Dad says with a major eye roll. “She’s lucky I don’t sue her for almost killing your sister. What the hell was she thinking, burning candles in this weather?”
“You’re not suing Cassie, Dad,” I groan with an eye roll of my own.
“Why are you in bed?” Finn asks. “Are you sick?”
“Can you please all stop fussing over me?” I say, laughing and sighing at the same time. “I’m fine, really. They’re just keeping me for observation to make sure there’s no smoke inhalation damage, which they’re ninety-nine percent sure is the case, but they had a case last year where they let somebody go early and it didn’t turn out well. So, you know, they’re legally obligated to keep me here. It’s no biggie.”
“No biggie,” Finn repeats, shaking his head. “Can you believe this girl? No biggie. You almost died.”
Another eye roll. And this one is nuclear. “I thought I was meant to be the drama queen, Finn?” I say.
“Why are you so happy?” Finn asks suspiciously.
“What?” I hiss. “I’m not allowed to put a brave face on?”
Mom places a hand on Finn’s tattooed forearm. “She’s allowed to process things in her own way,” she says, ever the hippy. “The main thing right now is not to upset her.”
I want to tell her, Mom, I’m not made of glass.
But she’s just trying to be nice and there’s been enough excitement in the room already.
I let my head fall back and close my eyes, but immediately the insides of my eyelids explode with Dominic, standing there wreathed in smoke, and then his uniform explodes to reveal his muscled, fire glistening body, and I have to throw my eyes open again because I feel my body screaming out for him.
Not here.
Not ever.