Scorched

Snow could have started falling out of the sky, and I wouldn’t be able to pull my gaze away from Andrea. The glimpse I’d gotten of those curves the night before had been just a sweet hint and had in no way prepared me for this.

Andrea wasn’t just beautiful. She was stu

Curves in all the right places. Soft where a man wanted his woman soft. Her breasts were full, swelling over the cups of her top, and her waist curved in and flared out sweetly at her hips. Her body reminded me of those old-school pinup models I’d been obsessed with in high school. She was a fucking goddess, and didn’t even know. Lust pounded in me, like I was under a jackhammer. I was so still, my body so hard that taking a breath required effort I couldn’t spare. Every muscle in my body was rigid with need, with the desire to cross the distance between us and sweep her into my arms, and to feel her softness against my body.

Fuck me, I had it bad for her.

Her hands fluttered to her sides and then to the water lapping at her thighs. “Why are you staring at me like that?”

The quiet question blasted through me. “I can’t look away.”

Andrea’s cheeks pinked under the sun. “That’s weird.”

“Oh no, being able to look away would be weird. No. Not just weird,” I decided. “It would be fucking sacrilegious.”

Her lips parted and then she smiled, and fuck if it didn’t feel like I’d just won something. As she glided past me, I ground my teeth until my jaw ached, denying the urge to reach out and just…fuck, just touch her.

I watched her slip under the water, my starving gaze following her as she swam to the other side. When she broke the surface of the clear water and glanced over her shoulder at me, my heart thundered in my chest.

Like she was some kind of siren, her look alone lured me across the pool. I ended up next to her, both our arms resting on the ledge of the pool, our feet not touching the bottom.

The sun dipped behind a dark cloud, and Andrea looked up, her forehead scrunched. “Do you think it’s going to storm?”

“I don’t know.” I didn’t look away, which told me I was bordering on being a creeper at that point. “I saw that they were calling for some storms this week. It’s August. Expected.”

Her legs floated, brushing mine. The mere touch, the slight glide of her skin against mine, packed a hell of a punch. “I just hope they’re not caught out in the rain or something. I know they’re talking about going hiking again on Thursday or Friday.”

“You’re not going to go with them again?”

She shook her head and laughed. A curl fell forward, sticking to her cheek. “No.”

“Me neither.” I reached over, scooping up the curl and tucking it back behind her ear.

Her eyes shot to mine, the brown hue warm. There was a multitude of questions in her gaze. Silence stretched out as we studied each other, and I’d have cut off a finger to know what she was thinking in that moment. I knew what I was thinking. A whole lot of want. I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to see if her eyes darkened when she felt pleasure. I wanted to know what her expression looked like when she came. And I wanted to know what my name sounded like when she screamed it. Then she looked away, ducking her chin. The co

Man, I needed to get control of my head. And my cock. Especially my cock, because if she looked down between us, there’d be no hiding how aroused I was, and that put the dic in “fucking ridiculous.”

Searching for something to take my mind off the hard-on of a lifetime, I cleared my throat. “So what makes you volunteer at a hotline like that?”

She tilted her head to the side. “I…I don’t know. I guess…” Trailing off, she sighed. Several seconds passed while it seemed like she searched for the right thing to say. “Those people, you know, they’re just like you and me. They’ve hit a rough patch in their lives and most of them just want someone to talk to—someone to listen to them. Actually hear them. I can do that.”

Instinct told me there was more to it. “Still has to be hard.”

“It can be,” she said quietly, squinting as the sun peeked out. “I’ve had a couple of calls where the people wanted to talk, and you think it’s going to be a normal call, but then you realize that they’ve already taken pills or something like that. Those…those are hard,” she admitted. “We really don’t know what happens to them. If the police got there soon enough—if they are even alive right now. If they tried again or if they found someone else to hear them. So, yeah, that part is hard, but their world? Those people calling? Their world is a lot harder than whatever I deal with when I answer those phones.”

Working at the fire department meant I saw a lot of terrible shit. Car accidents. Burn victims. Floaters in the river. And sometimes we were called in when the police or EMTs couldn’t get through a door. Found a lot of OD victims that way.

“So why aren’t you going into psychology?” Curiosity consumed me. “Seems like you might have found your calling.”

She smiled a little. “I don’t know if I have the empathy to pull that off every day of the week for the next forty years. Syd does. I don’t.”

I wasn’t so sure about that.

“What about you?” she asked. “Why do you want to be a cop? You seem to like doing the fireman thing.”

My lips curled up on one side. “It’s what I’ve always wanted to be.”

“Because of your father?”

Surprise shuttled through me. I’d had no idea she knew that my father was a cop. Had to have been Kyler. “Yeah, but not the reasons you’re probably thinking.”

She twisted toward me, her thigh glancing off mine. “What do you mean?”

My father was the last person I wanted to talk about, but I found myself ru

Andrea blinked, obviously taken aback.

I laughed under my breath and looked away, casting my gaze to the woods surrounding the pool. “He couldn’t keep his dick in his pants and he couldn’t keep his nose clean, you know what I mean? He’d let people slide if they could do things for him, like cut him deals on shit. Not drugs and that kind of shit, but you’d be surprised by what people will do to get out of tickets. When I was younger, I didn’t get why my mom cried all the time or why my dad didn’t always come home after his shifts. I didn’t get that he was a bad cop, probably wouldn’t have if it wasn’t for his partner. She was the one who showed me what it was like to be a cop, to respect that uniform and your role in society. I have no idea how she dealt with my father as long as she did—or how my mom did—but because of her I knew I wanted to be a cop.” I took a breath, feeling the tops of my ears burn. “Anyway, I guess I wanted to be one because I could somehow make up for how shitty my father was at it.”

“Wow,” she said, placing her sun-warmed hand on my shoulder. “I didn’t know any of that.”

My gaze fell to where her small hand rested. Such an elegant and graceful hand, one that could’ve wielded a scalpel artfully, just hopefully not to my heart.