HEART OF FIRE

by Venez, Sedona

  Putting on my helmet, I took off, turning onto the main road through town, and headed for Virgil’s, listening to the roar of my bike and the wind rushing past my ears through the helmet.

  As I rode up the street, I thought about the photographer issue. The chief was counting on me to find someone. Kendra used to take pictures, didn’t she? I remembered she’d won a few contests here and there back when we were in high school. She’d even told me a few times that she wanted to go pro one day, but I guess that never happened. Maybe she’d be willing to do the calendar for us. I grinned when I pictured Kendra taking photos of my half-naked friends. It would be funny, that was for sure.

  Pulling into the parking lot Virgil’s shared with a bait shop and a dry cleaner/tailor, I found a spot as close to the café as possible. It wasn’t the usual rush time, so it would be fairly quiet inside. I looked around and then realized I did not know what kind of car Kendra would drive—but I doubted she’d be hauling her grandmother’s jalopy around. I climbed off my bike, taking off my helmet and locking it to the bike. I headed around the front to Virgil’s. The café had stood in the town for longer than I’d been alive, maybe even as far back as my grandparents’ day. And even though Harlequin Bakery had some of the best cakes and pies in the town, Virgil’s had the best coffee cake probably in the entire state.

  I opened the door, and the little bells attached to it jingled. Glancing around, I spotted Kendra seated in a corner, talking to Lucia. They’d been friends in high school, not as close as Kendra and me but close the way girls are. Taking off my jacket, I walked to where Kendra sat. Both women looked up as I approached.

  “Here he is…the gorgeous town hero!” Lucia yelled. “You want the usual, Lukas?” she asked, batting her eyelashes at me.

  “Sure thing,” I said, sitting down. “Double on the coffee cake. I’ve earned it this week.”

  Lucia licked her lips before responding with, “I’ll just bet you did.” She leaned forward to give me an obvious peek at her cleavage.

  With amusement shining in her eyes, Kendra glanced from me to Lucia then back at me.

  “Kendra, did you already order?” I frowned, wondering if I’d been late.

  “No, I got here early, and Lucia and I got to talking.” Kendra turned to eye Lucia. “Same thing Lukas’s having, but half the coffee cake.”

  “Got it,” Lucia said before walking away with too much sway in her hips.

  Kendra laughed. “God. She’s still crushing on you. It’s like I never left.”

  “Things stay the same a lot in sleepy old towns,” I agreed. When I’d come back to town, Lucia and a few other women had been very transparent with me—they wanted to fuck me. But I wasn’t interested. I’d done my fair share of fucking around while I was in the military, and that shit got real old fast. At this stage in my life, I was looking for more than a quick fuck with a woman I had no interest in seeing in the morning.

  “The perils of small towns,” Kendra chirped. “It must be hell keeping hookups secret around here.”

  “I wouldn’t know…” I said, settling into the old, reupholstered chair. “I gave up that hit-and-run life years ago. Now I’m looking for a woman to keep.” I stared at her pointedly.

  “Hmmm… Well…” Kendra’s lips parted then closed.

  “Oh, I meant to ask you, are you still doing photography? Or don’t you have time since becoming a detective?”

  Kendra blinked. “I still snap some photos from time to time. I can’t believe you remembered that.”

  “Didn’t you used to want to be the next Ansel Adams?” I asked.

  “Not so much the landscapes,” Kendra said. “More Annie Leibovitz.”

  “Right!” I said, nodding. “That was the one.”

  “Yes, I used to want to do that,” Kendra confirmed. “I mean…” She bit her bottom lip before letting it go. “I still do photography. But it’s kind of hard to get a leg up in that industry. And it’s not any easier in New York. There’s lots of competition.”

  “Well, if you’re up for it, I’ve got a gig for you. We do an annual calendar, shirtless firefighters, cute puppies, kittens, and the occasional pot-bellied pig.”

  “You had me at shirtless firefighters.” Kendra laughed. “Wait a minute,” She snapped her fingers. “I think Grandma has a calendar like that in the kitchen. I didn’t know I should look for your month!”

  “I’m Mr. September. I posed with some adorable bunnies that we helped get adopted.”

  Kendra raised a brow. “With no shirt?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, I know what I’ll be looking at when I get back to Grandma’s house.”

  I grinned. “So, would you be interested in taking the job? I promised the chief I’d get us a new photographer.”

  “What happened to the old one?” Kendra asked, frowning.

  “Passed away from pneumonia,” I replied. “We’d be able to pay you for your work. Not a lot, but at least enough to justify spending the afternoon snapping photos of a bunch of shirtless dudes with dogs.”

  “I don’t know…it’s been a while since I’ve taken photos,” Kendra said.

  Before she could go on, Lucia bounced up to the table with our orders, coffee with double milk and no sugar and plenty of coffee cake.

  “I’ll leave the sugar for you, just in case,” Lucia said, winking at me.

  “The cake is plenty sweet,” I told her, breaking off a piece with my fork and extending it to Kendra. “Try it.” She opened her mouth, allowing me to feed her. “It’s good, right?” She nodded while chewing, and I dove into the cake.

  “Well…” Lucia’s eyes shifted from me to Kendra. “The two of you look thick as thieves.”

  “Just catching up,” Kendra said. “I needed to get all the news from Mr. September.”

  I nearly choked on my mouthful of cake.

  Lucia asked, “Kendra, have you seen his picture? Whew,” she said, fanning herself with a menu from the table. “Girl, the Army did him good.”

  I rolled my eyes while swallowing coffee.

  “I can see that,” Kendra replied, giving me a once-over. “He’s all bulging muscles with a handsome face…” She batted her eyelashes. “I’m so proud of Thor the firefighter.” She gave me an impish grin.

  “Okay, enough, smartass.” I shoved another forkful of cake into her mouth. “Maybe if we get Kendra to do this year’s shoot, we can get some eye candy for the men of this town,” I suggested. “Like a second calendar with the ladies of Wampanoag.”

  “There aren’t all that many ladies in this town,” Lucia pointed out.

  “True enough, but I guarantee it’ll sell,” I said. “Especially if we feature Kendra as ‘Ms. September,’” I finished with a waggle of my eyebrows.

  “Not happening, Thor,” Kendra grumbled.

  “Y’all work out the logistics and get back to me,” Lucia said before heading back to the counter to take care of another customer.

  “You will not get me on the other side of the camera,” Kendra said. “Lucia might do it, though. Maybe she can rope in some other women looking for husbands.”

  “But it’s for charity.” I gave her my best smile.

  “Forget it.” She pinched off a piece of cake and chomped on it.

  “But I can handle your equipment,” I said. “And I’ll even let you wear a black swimsuit for the pic. We’ve got to show some skin.”

  Kendra laughed. “No way. If I do this—and I haven’t fully decided yet—I am keeping my ass behind the camera.”

  “Fine, fine,” I said. “But you’ll do it, right?”

  Kendra sipped her coffee and sighed happily. “I’ll think about it,” she said. “And it’ll depend on when you need me to do it. I may not even be in town for that long.”

  My heart raced at the thought of her leaving town—and me. “Did you have a set day to go back to New York?” I asked, keeping my voice as neutral as possible.

  “Not exactly,” Kendra said. “I’ve
got some meetings I should go to, people to talk to…but nothing set in stone. They want to make sure I recover as much as possible before I decide.”

  I relaxed a little. “Sounds sensible,” I agreed. “You need to know what you’ll be working with, physically.”

  “Right,” Kendra agreed. “They want to do a psych evaluation and all that, too. Make sure I haven’t lost my mind.”

  “Well, in my unprofessional opinion, you’re doing fine,” I said, breaking off a chunk of the coffee cake and popping it into my mouth. “So, tell me all about your daring NYPD career.”

  Kendra chuckled and shook her head. “It’s not all that daring. They have a saying about daring cops…they die young.”

  “You’re a careful cop, then?”

  “I guess.”

  I quirked a brow. “That doesn’t seem like the Kendra Powell I knew.”

  “The Kendra Powell you knew was a kid,” she answered. “They drilled into us in the academy it’s better to know exactly what you’re doing before you do it—on all fronts. You might have noticed the NYPD has gotten a lot of bad press in recent years.”

  “I wouldn’t mention it,” I said. “But I know there’ve got to be other good cops on the force, too. There’re upright people in the PD here.”

  “I do my best,” Kendra said. “But in a city like New York, we do a lot of community outreach. I wouldn’t mind, at this point in my career, getting into that part of things more.”

  “Slowing down in your old age?” I teased.

  “Are you?” Kendra replied, raising an eyebrow.

  I popped another bite of the coffee cake into my mouth, chewed, and swallowed before saying, “Eat your cake, Powell.”

  “Stop asking me so many questions, and I will, Koch,” Kendra countered. “Now, tell me about your Army heroics.”

  Leaning back in my chair, I eyed her. “Not so much on the heroics,” I said. “I was just happy to get out in one piece—physically and mentally.”

  She reached over, weaving her fingers with mine. “Tell me about it anyway.”

  Tightening my hand around hers, I shifted in my chair and got ready to talk to the one person who understood me the most in the world.

  6

  Kendra

  The café had gotten busier after Lucia had brought our coffee and cake, so Lukas and I had plenty of time to ourselves. But after talking about the kids we went to school with and where they ended up and about Lukas’s time in the Army, both of us had finished our food and drink.

  My eyes locked with Lukas’s. “You know, I think I like this new, in-command Lukas,” I said, sitting back a bit in my seat, taking in his authoritative posture and powerful presence. Damn…he’s sexy.

  “Oh, do you?” Lukas asked. Frankly, his rising eyebrow and questioning smirk made me hot. “You sure you don’t prefer to be in control of everything? That’d be more like the girl I knew back in the day.”

  I checked my coffee mug, but there wasn’t anything in it anymore. How long had we been at Virgil’s?

  “It isn’t my fault I have yet to find someone I can trust to be in control,” I said lightheartedly. His green eyes flashed brighter with something I couldn’t identify.

  One eyebrow quirked as he surveyed me with a tilt of his chiseled jaw. “Don’t you trust me?”

  My sex clenched just imagining all the sweaty, wicked things he was probably very good at in bed. Shit. Am I thinking about fucking Lukas?

  “Lukas…I…”

  Lucia stopped by the table. “We’ve got the Baptist bible study group coming in,” she said, sounding apologetic. “I don’t want to boot you, but we could really use the table.”

  I looked at Lukas. Technically, we’d only agreed to coffee together, and that was over with. The coffee date could end, and we could go back to whatever we’d been doing before we left to meet up at Virgil’s. But I didn’t want to just go back to Grandma’s place and start rehab exercises or help her clean things around the house. I wanted more time with Lukas.

  “We can go,” Lukas said. “Let me pay, and we’ll free up the table for you.” He got up, keeping me from even making an offer to pay.

  I sat at the table, waiting for him and trying to decide what to do next. I felt tingly all over—the first time I’d felt that way in years—and tense, but not the tension I got at work. It was the kind I got on a first date. It was crazy; I’d known Lukas for years, but it was like I was seeing him for the first time all over again. I watched Lukas pay for our orders and then turn around to come back.

  When we’d been in high school together, he’d been this tall, pale, gangly, awkward kid with green eyes and black hair he’d kept long as a protest against his father. But the military had toned him up, and I couldn’t help wondering what his broad shoulders and slim waist looked like under his T-shirt and jeans. I’d seen him naked before—but that had been on a skinny-dipping adventure when we were sophomores.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” I suggested when Lukas came back to the table and gathered up his jacket. “It’s nice out.”

  “And you don’t want to go home just yet?” Lukas asked with a grin. “You can admit it.”

  I stood carefully, making sure I didn’t put too much weight on my bad leg. “I just don’t want to clean Grandma’s silverware,” I told him. Lukas snickered.

  “You up for a walk?” he asked quietly.

  I nodded. “Marchman Park isn’t far from here,” I pointed out. “We can head that way, maybe claim one bench if my leg gets tired.”

  Lukas put his hand on the small of my back, and I felt that tingle again, that little burst of sexual spark. What is wrong with me? Lukas is just a friend.

  Yeah, but you haven’t seen him in years, and he isn’t the bean pole he used to be. He’s hot.

  I’d known that, at least, in theory, back when we’d been friends, but it just hadn’t connected for me despite how many girls wanted to get with him. It had connected over coffee when his green eyes collided with mine, and a welcome bolt of heat slammed into me in pure female appreciation. He had a little scar on his cheek from what he’d called “an incident” in Iraq, and it made him look manlier somehow.

  He steered me through the crowded café and out onto the street. We were maybe three blocks away from the park, and it was still nice outside. Lukas grabbed my hand, and as soon as the ridges of his calluses slid across my skin and his fingers tightened on mine, a shiver of awareness shot through me. We made our way up the street toward the park, maybe a foot of space between us, and I realized that Lukas was keeping pace with me—slowing down to make sure I wouldn’t have to limp to keep up.

  “You know, I haven’t seen Marchman Park since I’ve been back—not since the week I left,” I said.

  “We planted a bunch of new trees there this past spring,” Lukas told me. “I think they’ve got plans to build a new playground at the other end—where the old one used to be.”

  “About time,” I said, thinking about the old playground. “The old one can’t be safe.”

  “They’ve cordoned it off until they finish the new one,” Lukas said.

  We kept walking, talking about town gossip, and after about two blocks, my leg spasmed. I cringed, and Lukas stopped, looking at me with worried eyes.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I can manage a short walk. I used to run a damn mile in eight minutes.”

  “You got shot,” Lukas said. “Come on, grab on to my arm.”

  “Someone will see us,” I pointed out. “Everyone will talk about it.”

  Lukas shrugged. “So?” he said. “Take my damn arm unless you’d rather they talk about me picking you up and carrying you around town.”

  I looked at him for a second and knew from the stubborn gleam in his eyes he wasn’t joking. I took the arm he offered.

  We walked the rest of the way to the park, and Lukas pointed out the trees they’d planted, which were finally setting in and getting themselves established in the summer heat.

  �
�Hopefully there’s enough time for them to flourish,” I mused, reaching out to touch the new growth on one sapling. “In this part of the country, storms get intense by winter.”

  “The tree people said they’d be fine,” Lukas said. We followed along the trail that looped around the park. “Hey, there’s a bench,” Lukas told me, pointing it out. “Let’s sit down for a second.”

  “You covering for me or getting tired yourself?” I joked.

  “It’s such a nice day, I figured sitting in the park would be nice,” Lukas said. “Besides, if you were hurting a block and a half ago, your leg can’t be fine now.”

  I wanted to argue, but there was something in the way Lukas spoke that made me give in—willingly. I sat down, and Lukas sat down next to me, reaching out for my hand.

  “You must really want the town’s rumor mill to go crazy,” I said, but I didn’t take my hand back.

  Lukas chuckled. “I don’t mind if it does. They’re already talking anyway, after we danced at the party.” Lukas reached out and tweaked one of my curls.

  “Are you flirting with me, Lukas Koch?” I asked him before giving him a wide grin.

  “Well, Detective Powell,” Lukas said, “what are you going to do about it if I am?”

  I could feel my heart beating faster. “Let you have your wicked way with me…” I answered huskily.

  “Right answer,” he replied. “Tell me more about the NYPD.” He didn’t take my hand out of his, but he stopped playing with my hair, and I was almost disappointed. “I’m curious about that life. I almost went to the police academy after I got out.”

  “I’d been hoping to make my way up the ranks, eventually transfer to the FBI,” I said. “Since I had a dual degree in psych and criminology, I figured it was a good career path.”

  “You figured? Plans have changed?” Lukas asked.

  I shrugged. “I’m sort of rethinking my options now,” I said. “I mean, it’s not like the first time they have shot me, but mostly it’s been a graze or the vest caught it—things like that.”