by Tawna Fenske
If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.
Her personal motto, one of them at least. Willa listened politely, then ordered a pasta dish that sounded filling and wasn’t too pricey.
Grady put in an order for cherry-glazed duck breast with a bunch of fancy-sounding side dishes. He handed the menu back to the server, who turned and hustled back to the kitchen.
“What did you mean earlier?” He turned that stormy gray gaze on Willa. “That comment about only getting two dates?”
She uncrossed her legs and spread her napkin over her knees, even though they were a long way from getting their dinner. “Just that,” she said. “I don’t date anyone more than twice. It’s a personal preference.”
He stared at her for so long, she wasn’t sure he’d heard her. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope. Dead serious.”
“Two dates? That’s it?”
She nodded, surprised he’d care. The guys she’d been with usually didn’t. “Sometimes it’s just one date, if there’s no chemistry,” she admitted. There was chemistry here, though. She’d noticed that the first night, and it seemed hotter now. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Two’s the limit.”
“Why?”
She shrugged before turning to accept her glass of wine from the waitress, waiting until the woman was out of earshot to reply. “I’m not really looking for a relationship,” she said. “And more than two dates starts to imply relationship, so…” She shrugged again, expecting that to be the end of it.
“I don’t get it.” Grady shook his head. “What happens if you’re really into someone?”
He sounded more curious than judgmental. She hated to admit it, but she kind of liked his interest in her thought process. “At this stage in my life, career comes first,” she said carefully. “I’ve worked hard to build my company. To build a safety net and a stable income stream. I’m not about to blow that for some guy.”
Some guy.
Some guy like her father, the kind of man who made her mom throw away everything to travel clear across the country for a life with a vagabond dreamer whose gambling problem meant they never had any money. And then later, much later, after her mother left—
Stop it.
Willa ordered herself to stay focused on the conversation, on Grady. Might as well make the most of their first and possibly only date.
The thought of having only one date with him bothered her more than she expected. It was silly, really. She hardly knew the guy. But there was something intriguing about him. Something that made her want to know more.
She swallowed back her overanalysis and concentrated on Grady. “How about you?” she asked. “You’re, what, late thirties?”
“Thirty-two,” he said, offering a wry grin. “Jumping into fires for a living tends to age a guy. Thanks for noticing.”
“Sorry.” She traced a fingertip through the condensation on her water glass. “So what’s your story? Divorced, never married, what?”
“Never married,” he said. “Never planning to get married.”
“Really?” Wasn’t that interesting. She took a sip of her wine. “May I ask why?”
He shrugged and swirled his own wine in the glass. “I’m gone for weeks at a time for most of the summer,” he said. “And when it’s winter here, it’s summer in Australia, and I usually go there to work their season.”
“Sounds busy.” What wasn’t he sharing?
“It can be,” he said. “It’s better now than it was when my old man did the job.”
“Your father was a smokejumper?”
Grady nodded. “A couple of my brothers are, too.”
“Sounds like quite the family affair.”
“Yep.” He cleared his throat. “Back in my father’s day, they were gone the whole summer. Literally, no days off. Made it tough on my mom with ten kids to raise.”
“There are ten of you?” Holy cow. And Willa thought Kayla came from a big family with four of them.
She started to blurt a nosy question about birth control, but stopped herself and focused on him instead. “Nine brothers and sisters,” she said. “What was that like?”
He laughed. “Exactly as nuts as it sounds. I don’t think I slept in a room by myself until I was eighteen years old. How about you, any brothers or sisters?”
Interesting. Willa jotted mental notes.
Doesn’t like talking about himself.
Still hasn’t answered the question about flaws.
Has lips that look like they’re made for kissing, lush and full and—
“Only child,” she said. “I lost my mother when I was little, so it was just my dad and me.”
She did her best to keep her tone breezy, like they hadn’t just tiptoed into a minefield of uncomfortable memories. Like she wasn’t remembering the sound of her grandfather’s strained baritone explaining that Mommy was never coming home. Like her nostrils didn’t prickle with the smell of cheap beer and her father’s desperation, her constant companions in the years following the loss of her mother.
Grady was studying her with such intensity, she had to look away.
“You still haven’t answered my question,” she teased with as much cheer as she could muster. “The one about flaws.”
Now who was avoiding talking about themselves?
He smiled and took a sip of his wine. “Not great at small talk. There’s one. How’s that?”
She picked up her wineglass and clinked it against his. Something they had in common. “Cheers to that.”
The tiniest flicker of relief played across his handsome features. “First-date conversation is always a little awkward, isn’t it?”
“Tell me about it.” It felt nice to have him admit it. “I guess we’re supposed to keep asking each other questions about ourselves, right? That’s how the first-date thing goes.”
“Great idea.” He looked thoughtful. “What’s it like jumping out of airplanes for a living?”
Willa snorted. “Um—”
Grady grinned and fingered the edge of his wineglass. “I figure both of us have the standard first-date questions other people ask us,” he said. “That’s a little tired and boring. Maybe we should ask each other instead.”
“You’re so weird.” Weird but creative. This was definitely a first.
“So take your best shot at it,” he said. “What’s it like jumping out of an airplane into a forest that’s blazing all around you?” he asked. “You’re hundreds of miles from the nearest town, and you know there’s a chance your chute could get caught in a tree and you’ll have to climb a hundred feet to the ground before you can start revving your chain saw.”
Willa looked at him—really looked at him, hard—and considered what sort of guy he was. What it might feel like to do his job. “It was scary at first,” she said. “Airplanes are a little terrifying to me, actually. I’ve never even flown.” She cleared her throat and offered a shy smile. “Before I was a smokejumper, I mean.”
“No kidding?”
She nodded, not sure whether to stay in character as herself or pretend to be him. “But I got used to it,” she said. “Jumping out of planes is kinda awesome, and I like being a hero. Eventually it became like any other commute.”
Grady laughed. Picked up his wineglass and took a sip. “I’m definitely no hero, but for someone who just met me—and hasn’t been in an airplane—you’re not too far off with the rest of that.”
His grin was disarming, and so was this silly game. She should probably keep her guard up, but this was more interesting than any first date she’d had in…well, she couldn’t remember. But she was having fun, and that was saying something.
“Why’d you go to that stripper show the other night?” she asked.
Such a bizarre question to ask, and she watched him process it. She wanted him to guess
why someone like her—frugal, serious, not at all a party girl—would have ended up at a bar with men taking their clothes off to music.
“My friends,” he said. “Kayla and Ainslie—”
“Aislin,” she supplied, surprised he’d even gotten close.
“Right, Kayla and Aislin,” he said. “We’re really close, though we don’t see one another as much as I wish we did. They wanted to go, and I like spending time with them, plus I like to keep an eye out in case someone tries to slip something in their drinks or they need a wingman to rescue them from some douchey guy.”
“Wow.” She stared at him. For a man who’d known her less than an hour, he’d gotten pretty damn close to her reality.
He grinned. “How’d I do?”
“Very nice.” She cleared her throat and waited for his next question.
“I hear you did two years in the military right out of high school,” he said. “What was that like?”
Willa bit her lip and considered him carefully. She’d figured out fast that he wasn’t the type to open up easily, so the fact that he was sharing seemed noteworthy. “Everyone just assumed I’d be a smokejumper like my father.” A total guess, but she could tell from the lift of his brows that she wasn’t far off. “I wanted to try something different. Shooting guns and beating people up—”
“That’s totally what the military’s all about.”
She grinned and kept going. “Anyway, I eventually realized I was meant to hurl my body out of airplanes for a living. The rest is history.”
He gave her a smile that held equal notes of surprise and approval. “Well done.”
“Thank you.” She grinned and took a sip of her wine. “My turn.”
She flipped through the notebook in her brain. What would she like him to guess about her? “Tell me what you like and don’t like about owning your own company.”
Grady twisted the stem of his wineglass, spinning it on the table without taking his eyes off her. “Having control is nice,” he said. “Being in charge of my own destiny, making all the decisions, being self-reliant.” His huge hand made the wineglass stem look like a toothpick, but it wasn’t his hands taking her breath away. It was how close he’d gotten to her truth.
“I like having control,” he continued. “But it’s also my least favorite thing.”
She swallowed hard, wondering how he’d read all that about her. How he’d guessed so accurately. “Sounds like a lot of responsibility.”
“It is, but I enjoy it,” he said. “I like what I do for a living. I just wish I could relax a little sometimes.”
Willa bit her lip. Was that a wild guess on his part, or was she really that transparent?
She picked up her water and took two big gulps, figuring that was safer than chugging the wine.
“How about you?” he asked. “I understand you really love baking. That you’ve thought maybe when you stop jumping out of airplanes someday, you’d like to open a pastry shop.”
Willa laughed, charmed by this new insight into Grady’s life. “Oh, I love to bake,” she said, even though she knew as much about baking as she did about jumping out of airplanes. “All that flour and butter and sugar and”—what the hell else did people use for baking?—“baking powder,” she said, taking a wild guess. “Can’t get enough of the baking powder.”
Grady snort laughed into his wineglass. His gray eyes were twinkling, and Willa had the sudden urge to ask the waitress to box up their meals so they could go back to her place and get comfy. What would it feel like to kiss him? Or more, maybe—
“Maybe if I play my cards right,” Grady said softly, “I could come over sometime and you could make me your world-famous lava cake.”
Willa’s mouth watered, though it wasn’t for the lava cake. It was the thought of Grady in her kitchen, that broad chest stretching the front of an apron. Damn, this man did things to her brain. And her body. She uncrossed her legs, conscious of the clamminess of her palms.
“Lava cake.” Willa swallowed to keep from drooling on the table. “That sounds amazing.”
She glanced toward the restaurant and wondered what was taking so long with the food. Was it bad to admit she wanted to get out of here? That she really did want to take Grady home with her, and not just for the lava cake.
That was the thing about the two-date rule. If she decided early that she wanted to sleep with a guy, there was no playing games and waiting till the third date. She could go after what she wanted on date one with no worry about how it would affect things later in a relationship.
What would Grady say if she suggested it?
“I actually don’t live all that far from here,” she said. “And I’m pretty good with sharing my kitchen and my baking ingredients.”
Good Lord, that sounded like a lame entendre. She hadn’t meant it that way, but Grady smiled like he’d picked up the vibes she was laying down.
“Well,” he said slowly. “I think we could arrange to—”
Squeeeeeeeeee!
His eyes blazed wide, and Willa jumped in her seat. Grady sat up straight, scanning the restaurant door.
Was that smoke she smelled?
Grady leaped to his feet, knocking back his chair.
Willa was two beats behind him, trying to identify the sound.
“Fire alarm,” he called over his shoulder as he strode with purpose toward the restaurant. Toward the smoke getting thicker by the moment.
Into it, not away from it, and that told her a helluva lot about Grady Billman.
Chapter Three
Grady smelled smoke before he made it inside, but it hit him full force in the face as he burst into the dining room. The other customers—all two dozen or so—were lurching to their feet and rushing toward the door, a few of them grumbling over the screech of the smoke alarm.
He ignored them, focused on locating the fire. It didn’t take long.
Smoke billowed from the private dining room off to the right. He knew the space well, since he’d helped a bandmate propose by serenading the girlfriend over dinner. It looked empty at the moment, minus the tower of fire erupting on a table. What used to be a table. Flames danced across the surface, licking their way up the curtains.
Off to Grady’s right, the waitress flew in from the kitchen and gasped. “Oh my God. The candles. There’s a proposal and—”
“Fire extinguisher,” Grady barked. There had to be one in the kitchen. “Find it. Please.”
She spun around and sprinted away as Grady moved forward. Spotting two pitchers of ice water on the bus station, he grabbed both and made for the table.
“Grady, be careful.” Willa’s voice came from behind him, but he didn’t turn. Didn’t lose focus.
“Stay back,” he called as he tossed the first pitcher at a patch of carpet where the fire was just getting started. The baby flames sputtered out in a furious burst of smoke while the bigger ones kept rising.
“See if there’s a mop in the kitchen,” he called over his shoulder. “Or a broom, anything with a handle.”
He had to get those curtains down to keep the flames from spreading. God, the smell. Fucking polyester tablecloths. He yanked up the hem of his T-shirt and pulled it over his mouth and nose. Then he tossed the second pitcher of water at the table.
Tssssssssss!
The flames gave an angry sizzle, and a few flickered out. Most didn’t, and the fire kept climbing the curtains, its greedy orange fingers clawing at the ceiling. Didn’t this place have a damn sprinkler system?
“Here! I found a broom by the door,” Willa called from behind him.
Grady tossed the empty pitcher aside and held out a hand. “Thank you.” He caught the handle and pulled it to him, grateful when Willa scuttled back to safety.
Holding the broom handle out like an extension of his arm, he took a swipe at the curtains. Mis
s. He tried again, desperate to keep those flames from spreading.
“What the hell is— Oh shit.”
Grady glanced behind him to see the chef staring open-mouthed. His jowls wobbled, and his white chef’s coat was spattered with something. “Extinguisher!” the man shouted.
“Right here.” The waitress popped up behind him, coughing as she made her way toward Grady.
He held out his hand for it as one of the curtains dropped to the floor like a dying butterfly. Ash billowed around it, fleeing the scene of the crime.
“Get back, please.” He yanked out the pin, breaking the tamper seal. A good sign it was in working order. So many of them weren’t. Clutching the hose in one hand, he aimed it at the base of the flames.
“Be careful.” Willa’s voice again, and Grady felt an odd surge of affection.
He aimed low, nozzle pointed at the puddle of flaming chiffon that had once been a curtain. Gripping the hose tighter, he gave a sharp squeeze.
Whoooosh!
Flames spit and jeered in protest, then fluttered out. Sweeping side to side, Grady blasted the floor, then up to the table with steady, even strokes. Retardant whooshed out, smearing the table and wall with foam. The fire fizzled and hissed and vanished under a blanket of white. It was like flocking a Christmas tree, if the Christmas tree were on fire.
Grady thought he heard Willa’s voice say the word “firefighter” behind him but couldn’t be sure. Not like he spent a lot of time putting out little candle fires like this one, though in some ways, that’s what being a smokejumper was all about. Being on the front lines at the very start of the fire and fighting like hell to keep it from getting bigger.
He aimed for the last curtain, blasting it down into a soggy heap of charred cloth and sizzling embers.
And then it was over. He surveyed the wreckage, looking for straggling embers or hot spots. Nothing. No sign of flare-ups. The fire was out.
Lowering the fire extinguisher, he turned to face his audience.
Willa’s eyes were the first ones he locked with, and he stared into those green-brown depths and felt his chest clench. Bringing her hands up, she began to clap. The waitress followed suit, and so did the chef. The rest of the customers joined in, too. Cheesy as hell, but Grady only saw Willa. Saw the wonder in her eyes, the ripple of her hair around her shoulders, the gentle curve of her breasts in that killer green dress.