Flash Point (Kilgore Fire Book 2) (3 page)

“Did I pass?” I asked.

“You passed,” Luke confirmed, sounding slightly amused.

Another of the men, the red head this time, started to laugh.

“Did you pass?” He asked laughingly. “Man, you obliterated nearly every man’s record that has ever run this course. In work boots and slacks. With two guns, one on your hip and one on your ankle.”

It didn’t alarm me that they saw the ankle gun.

Any trained officer would.

What did alarm me, though, was that they were talking to me.

Was I expected to talk back?

I hoped not, but alas, I was surrounded by the men offering handshakes moments later.

“We’re glad to meet you,” one said. He was the one with the limp. “We’ve heard a lot about you.”

They had?

From who?

The one with the limp grinned. “You were the hometown hero of the week last month.”

Ahh, that made sense. I’d heard about that.

“Got it,” I muttered, backing away.

“You need anything else from me?” I questioned the two men.

Both Luke and Chief Allen shook their heads. “No. Not today. My secretary will be in touch with the paperwork for your new hire. You’ll have to go through a mandatory class on ethics and bylaws of the fire department.”

I nodded.

“Okay,” I said.

Luke offered his hand. “My secretary will be back with you for some paperwork, too. We’ll need your peace officer’s license, as well as your certifications.”

I nodded.

“Fine,” I said, then walked away from them all without another word.

You and me. Bed. Now.

-Masen to her cat, Jensen.

Masen

“I hope these cookies taste okay,” I muttered to Mia. “You know how I suck at baking. And these are being sold for this fund raiser bake sale that they are having for that burned firefighter. What if someone dies from food poisoning?”

Mia’s eyes turned to me.

“They taste fine,” she said. “Stop carrying on about them.”

I muttered something that sounded much like ‘fuck you’ to her under my breath.

I refrained from saying, ‘how do you know?’

I wasn’t trying to be a bitch. But I really, really didn’t want to be here.

Why?

Because Bowe was here.

Bowe was a guy I’d met online through a dating site.

At first, I’d liked him.

I was ready not to be alone anymore, and he’d been great.

But then I started the comparing.

It happened with every single man I’d ever dated since Booth had left me, never fail.

I’d compare their hair. Their eyes. Their voice. Their personality. Everything.

And I always found them lacking.

I didn’t think it was fair of me to hold them to standards that they’d never, ever meet.

Nobody was Booth.

That was the bottom line.

And I was destined to be alone.

Bowe, however, didn’t feel the same.

He thought we could work…and he was clearly going to keep trying.

I, on the other hand, wasn’t looking forward to what it meant to have him ‘try’ to win me over.

Something he’d said he’d be doing.

Bowe wasn’t a bad guy.

In fact, he was incredibly attractive.

He was tall, Italian and stacked.

He had black hair, but I preferred brown.

He had deeply tanned skin, I preferred sun kissed.

He had a rich, deep baritone that was smooth like dark chocolate.

What I preferred, though, was deep, husky and rough. The type of voice that always sounded like it’d smoked a pack a day, but had never touched a cigarette in his life.

See, nobody would ever win.

I had what I wanted in my mind and no one else would do.

Nobody but
him
.

“Hey there,” Bowe said once I entered the main room.

I hid my grimace.
Barely
.

I smiled congenially at him but made no move towards him.

I wouldn’t be, either.

He took a step forward, my guess, to come to me, but I looked away and didn’t see any other progress.

Mostly because my eyes were trained on a man across the room.

The first time I’d seen those eyes, I’d been enraptured.

They were a rich green that really struck me stupid.

But then you got to the pupil in his left eye, and you never knew what hit you.

He had flecks of brown above and below the pupil in his left eye, which, from a distance, made that one eye look almost like a cat’s eye, with the thin, slit-like pupil.

It was amazing and truly one of a kind.

People used to call him freaky…and maybe to someone else, it would have been.

But to me, it was pure and utter beauty.

Booth stared at me as I stared at him, watching me with those eyes that looked to be ravaged with indecision.

“Fuck,” Mia hissed beside me.

I ignored her and placed the cookies down gently on the first available surface, which happened to be the bumper of the firetruck.

Then I was running, straight past the man that would never measure up, into the arms of the man that everyone would always be compared to.

“Booth,” I breathed, hugging him so tightly that I was sure I was cutting off any and all air flow to his body.

His arms went just as tightly around me, and we hugged for long, long minutes.

“Should we leave them alone?” I heard someone mutter behind us.

I held on tighter.

I didn’t care what anyone else did.

Not a single bit.

A throat cleared behind us, but I didn’t turn around.

Not until I was physically released from Booth’s arms and placed to the side.

“Uh, hi,” I heard.

I turned to see a gorgeous blonde woman standing in the mouth of the fire station.

She looked to be my age, maybe a little younger, and she had a young girl on her hip. A daughter, maybe.

“Hey hubby,” the woman said cheekily, looking back and forth between Booth and I.

My head turned, and the words she’d just said filtered through my head.

Hey, hubby.

My world dimmed, my vision thinning out until all I could see was grey.

The world went on around me as I walked away from the two of them standing next to each other and put one foot in front of the other. I managed to get across the room to the box of cookies I’d set down.

I could do this.

I could do this.

“You should’ve seen him qualify as he ran the obstacle course,” I heard Tai, my best friend’s man, say. “Downy taped him running it. It was like watching Captain America run it. He had the fucking t-shirt on and everything.”

I rolled my eyes.

It probably wasn’t that impressive.

But it was. I watched the video.

I didn’t want to.

But they’d put it on the big screen, and I’d watched the video instead of torturing myself watching Booth and his wife.

Anything
was better than that.

Hours later, I was trying not to get too drunk in the bar area of Applebee’s.

I had to work tomorrow.

But my head didn’t care.

It was doing what my heart wanted.

Which was to forget.

My eyes caught on the young girl directly in front of me.

She was sitting at a bar sized table with both of her parents, and I guessed to be her boyfriend.

I didn’t know. The guy was weird. He hadn’t taken his eyes off of me all night, either.

“What do you think he’s staring at me for?” I asked my best friend, Mia.

Mia turned to stare at the seventeen-year-old cheerleader across the room from us, then shrugged.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Why don’t you go ask her?”

I ignored her, and tried my best to ignore the glares I was receiving from the peanut gallery.

I also tried to ignore the man that was across the bar in the dining portion of the restaurant staring at me. Not that I’d actually caught him looking. Every time I looked at him his eyes were on his
wife
.

It was safe to say that I was in a bad mood.

Today I’d seen Booth for the first time in a very long time.

Which meant it’d been eight and a half long years.

And he hadn’t changed one freaking bit.

Well, the beard was new.

Before he hadn’t been allowed to have a beard. Now, though, he had a good one.

One that made me want to sit on his face.

I tore my eyes away, then decided I needed a bathroom break.

I’d just pushed into the bathroom and headed straight for the sink where I stared at my face. I was pitiful. I was the lowliest of low. I was the worst person in the world.

The bathroom door opened, and a gaggle of women crowded in, talking about a sexy man in a superhero shirt that was sitting close to the door. Meaning I needed to go or I just might get into a fight.

Especially when I knew the sexy man to be Booth.

Fucking Booth and his superhero fetish.

I slammed out of the bathroom, the door colliding with the wall as I went.

All eyes turned to me, even the bitchy little cheerleader.

“What are you looking at?” I snapped at the girl as I walked past her.

She sneered. “A slut who won’t stop looking at my married father.”

“Bitch, I will fuck your dad and make you my stepdaughter. Back the fuck off!” I hissed at the girl.

The girl’s eyes widened in shock that I would use such crass language in front of her and her parents.

Her mom didn’t look too happy, either. Her dad, on the other hand, looked calculating as he thought about the possibilities.

I wasn’t saying that I wouldn’t do him, because holy shit the man was hot for an old man. However, I didn’t do married men. Ever. Period. End of fucking sentence.

Which was why knowing Booth was married really gutted me.

I’d always harbored a secret hope that one day he would come back and let me explain. Let me try to grovel my way back into his life.

But now, with him married, that was never going to happen.

Never.

Ever.

The alcohol wasn’t cutting it.

Neither was the ignoring him.

I had to get out of here.

I looked at my watch.

It was thirty minutes past eight, and our dinner hadn’t come yet.

I’d promised Mia a girl’s day out, but there was no way I could make it through the rest of dinner with that man in the same room.

What were the chances that he’d pick the same exact restaurant that we were in?

My stomach felt queasy as I made a decision.

Stopping behind the bar next to the jukebox, I stood on tiptoes and surveyed the room.

I could just barely make out the top of Booth’s red hat he’d been wearing declaring him the newest member of KFD.

Mia sat at the bar with a plate of food in front of her, and I started to feel a wave of guilt.

I roughly pushed it back, though, instead pulling out my phone and texting Mia.

She’d understand.

If there was anyone in this world that would, it was her.

Then, without another word, I slipped out the delivery door and hurried across the parking lot to my Jeep.

It wasn’t much to look at.

In fact, it was pretty boring.

I’d gotten her when I turned sixteen and hadn’t looked back since.

I didn’t spend much time in my car, and, when I did, all I needed it for was to drive me less than two miles to work and or the grocery store.

I was a homebody.

I read.

I wrote the occasional review for a blog, and I worked.

That was the extent of my life.

I was as boring as boring could be.

And my Jeep proved it.

Opening the Jeep door without bothering to unlock it since it didn’t lock anyway, I started it up and backed out of the parking spot, unaware of the eyes that watched me the entire way.

My eyes stayed looking ahead as I ignored the motorcycle that I knew was his.

He’d had it for a long time, now.

It’d been in my parent’s drive enough, and I’d been on the back of it so many times, I’d know that bike anywhere.

I’d done things on that bike that were inappropriate, and there would never come a time that I didn’t look at that bike without remembering the infinite possibilities that Booth had shown me were possible on it.

My drive home was short, thankfully, because by the time I arrived in my driveway I was crying so hard that I couldn’t see.

Sobs wracked my frame as I opened the door of my Jeep, then promptly busted my ass on the concrete due to the slickness of it.

And so I sat there, in my driveway, with rain pouring down on me, and cried.

Real men don’t have beards. Beards stop their masks from sealing properly.

-Firefighter’s do it better

Booth

“She’s the one, isn’t she?” Emily asked softly.

I looked up from the bottle I was peeling the label off of.

We were sitting at a booth in the Applebee’s on the main drag in my hometown of Kilgore, Texas.

It was exactly like it used to be eight years ago.

Fuck, but even the booth we were sitting in still had the same shit up on the walls as it did the last time I’d been there.

I looked down at the table and saw the scarred wood where I’d carved mine and Masen’s initials into it on our first anniversary.

We hadn’t been the first, and we hadn’t been the last.

But I knew the instant that the hostess sat us in the booth that it wasn’t a good idea.

Too many memories had been made in this booth.

“You should go talk to her,” Emily said.

I looked up at her and grimaced.

“I don’t want to,” I lied.

I did.

Very much so.

We’d both been young and stupid when that thing with her sister had taken place.

Emily laughed, catching the attention of a very pissed off woman that was sitting at the bar next to Masen.

Mia. Her best friend.

I was only married because Emily was pregnant with my best friend’s baby and was losing her insurance coverage. To help her out, I offered my name and my benefits. Both of which she took me up on while she had her baby and then got back on her feet after losing her boyfriend to an IED.