Flames of Love

by Erin Wright

  She giggled. “I do like how you think. Should I go home and change?”

  He looked her up and down, taking in her jeans and sweatshirt. She looked gorgeous, of course, but then again, she’d even managed to make the Michelin Man outfit look good, so he probably wasn’t a great judge when it came to her outfits. “You look good to me,” he said with a shrug. “Plus, it’s snowing outside. You probably don’t want to wear a dress anyway.”

  She considered that for a moment. “Yeah, probably not,” she agreed. Practical to the end. “I guess we’ll just have to wait until spring for you to check out this dress that I have.”

  He began moving around the fire station, flipping off lights and shutting down his computer. As he came back to her side, she gestured to mid-thigh. “It comes up to here,” and then pointing right to her glorious tits, “and down to here.”

  He gulped. Hard. His vision might’ve gone a little double. He breathed in deep, trying to quell the surge of blinding lust at the vision dancing in his head. It’d been three weeks since they’d officially started dating, and he was starting to realize that rather than scratching an itch and then moving on, the more time he spent around her, the more addicted he became.

  She batted her eyelashes at him innocently, and he realized that she’d just been messing with his head. “You!” he growled, and pulled her against him, mock-glaring down at her. “You’re enough to drive a man wild, you know that?”

  She grinned all-too-innocently. “Who, me?” she asked in her best Old West twang. “Why, I just don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”

  Shaking his head, he pulled her out the man door. “C’mon, woman, let’s go. If you’re not gonna show me this dress, you might as well accompany me to dinner. I should get something out of this here deal.” Her laughter tinkled out as she followed along behind him, her short legs hurrying to keep up.

  * * *

  The maître d’ walked them to a table stuffed back in a corner. “Will this do?” he asked imperiously, staring down his nose at the two of them. It was probably the sweatshirts and his baseball cap that were unimpressive to the man, but Jaxson didn’t really care. He had Sugar there with him. Nothing else really mattered.

  “Looks great,” he said graciously. The man nodded and moved away to go stare down his nose at someone else.

  “He doesn’t seem to appreciate our choice in attire,” Sugar whispered to Jaxson, her eyes wide with worry. Jaxson pulled out her chair for her, and then slid into his own across the tiny table from her. He hoped the plates wouldn’t be too large. There wouldn’t be room to put them on the table if they were. Jaxson had visions of holding his plate in his lap as he tried to eat snails or something else equally as disgusting.

  “It’s fine,” Jaxson assured her. “All maître d’s are assholes. It’s in their bylaws. If they’re too nice, they get kicked out of the Maître D’ Club, which would just be a tragedy.”

  Sugar laughed, her shoulders loosening up. After ordering appetizers and drinks – thank God they had normal finger foods on their menus, no snails in sight – Jaxson looked around the upscale restaurant, candles flickering on every table, a live three-string orchestra in the corner playing elevator music. Sadly, whether it was live music or not, it was still dreadful, but Jaxson couldn’t bring himself to care. Not with Sugar there with him.

  He spotted a heavily pregnant woman being led to her chair by a doting husband. She looked about ready to burst. Jaxson mentally reviewed his EMT training on what to do if he were forced to help a woman give birth without anesthesia.

  This could be a long night.

  He jerked his head towards the woman while grinning at Sugar, deciding to make a joke out of the situation. Better that than worry about where he’d have the woman lay if she were to give birth right there in the middle of the restaurant. “You know, you have the perfect face structure for pregnancy,” he said mock-seriously. “Your cheekbones are exactly right – the way they curve down. I bet you’d be the cutest woman this side of the Mississippi if you were nine months pregnant.”

  Instead of laughing and modeling her perfect pregnancy cheekbones – as if such a thing existed – Sugar’s eyes got wide and she simply nodded, staring down at her menu. “What are you going to order?” she asked, eyes glued to the menu.

  Jaxson quirked an eyebrow at her. Hmmm…not exactly the reaction he was expecting, but okay. “Anything that didn’t previously live in a shell is fine with me,” Jaxson muttered under his breath as he picked up his menu.

  Sugar didn’t respond to that, either.

  He looked up and studied her face. Her mouth was pinched and she was staring at her menu like it contained the code to eternal life.

  “You okay?” he asked, reaching out and touching her hand.

  She looked up and back down again so quickly, he was a bit afraid she’d just given herself whiplash but she was smiling as she stared down at her menu. “Of course,” she said to her menu. “Just fine.”

  Which had the undesired effect of not being the least bit believable. He stared at her several moments longer, mentally willing her to look up at him, but she wouldn’t, so his eyes dropped back down to his menu. The words swam in front of him as he stared down, his world swimming around with it.

  Something weird had just happened, and he’d be damned if he could begin to guess what.

  Chapter 32

  Sugar

  Jaxson helped her into her coat and they left the restaurant, not saying a word as they headed for his SUV.

  Which was exactly the amount of conversation they’d had through dinner.

  Okay, so they may’ve exchanged a few words. Sugar couldn’t remember, to be honest. The whole thing went by in a haze of pain and worry and she’d be hard-pressed to even say what she’d ordered for dinner.

  Jaxson helped her into the passenger seat of the SUV and then hurried around to the driver’s side. Instead of starting the vehicle, though, he turned in his seat and demanded, “What in the bloody hell is going on?”

  He was shouting.

  She slid down in her seat, staring at the front dashboard, wanting and wishing and hoping with all her might to just die.

  She waited a few heartbeats. Dammit, she was still alive.

  Now what was she going to do?

  “Sugar, you need to talk to me,” Jaxson growled. He put his hand under her chin and forcibly turned her head to look at him. “I need to know what’s going on in that gorgeous head of yours. You were fine, and then…you were not. What happened?”

  She looked at his face, open and trusting and so damn handsome, and choked back a sob. He wasn’t going to be looking at her like that much longer.

  Not after he heard what she did.

  He just continued to stare at her, unblinking, and she knew deep down inside that they’d still be sitting in the parking lot of the most expensive restaurant in Franklin come morning, matching ice blocks frozen to their seats, if she didn’t start talking. She knew she was stubborn, but she was pretty sure Jaxson had her beat by a mile.

  She looked out the front windshield. It was easier that way.

  “I was pregnant. Before. With Dick, my ex.” She whispered the painful truth because if she whispered it, then maybe Jaxson wouldn’t hate her so much. She began shaking from cold and worry and pain, and Jaxson started the vehicle, realizing that she was quickly losing body heat in the cold winter air. He backed out of the parking spot and pulled out onto the road, wandering through the darkened streets of Franklin. He didn’t say anything. He simply drove, and listened.

  Listened to a story she’d only ever told Emma.

  “I didn’t want to be. Dick and I had been married for almost five years by that point, and our marriage was pretty much destroyed. But I missed a period, and after spending a couple of weeks internally freaking out, I finally went to a doctor here in Franklin. I didn’t want to go to a local doctor for fear that he’d tell Dick.

  “Anyway, my worst fears were realize
d – I was pregnant. I came home in a daze. Dick was…he was a horrible husband. He’d make a horrific father. I’d have to shield the child from him, both physically and emotionally. Also, I knew that if we did have a child together, Dick would never let me go. I’d wanted to divorce him for a long time, but without any family support and no money of my own, I couldn’t. Didn’t mean I’d given up on that dream, though.

  “So a child…it would be a life sentence for me and I knew it. I would never be free of Dick Schmidt. Not as long as I lived.” She took in a deep, halting breath, trying to make herself just focus on telling the story, and nothing else. Like reciting a poem in English class. She could do it. Just pretend it all happened to someone else.

  “So I get home, and I’m in a daze. Upset, you know? I know now that I was in shock, but of course, you never recognize it when you’re in it. I’m trying to cook dinner and I’m not paying attention, and I burn it. Black as tar, and about as tasty.

  “Dick came home, drunk like always. He smells the burnt food, and starts yelling at me. We start to scuffle – I’m worried that he’s going to hurt me and then…I lose my balance.”

  The tears come then, trailing down her cheeks as she stared out of the darkened windshield at the frozen world around them.

  “I don’t know, really, if I lost my balance, or if Dick ‘helped’ me on my way. I’ve replayed that moment over and over again in my head, trying to remember, but it’s all a blur. Either way, no matter how it happened, there I was, tumbling down the stairs to the basement. The entrance to the basement was right off the kitchen, and I hadn’t even noticed how close I’d gotten to the stairs until I was falling…

  “I’m lucky I didn’t break my neck, honestly. I should have, by all rights. Or a leg or something. But instead, as I sat up, even more dazed and confused than before, I realized that there’s blood spreading everywhere – coming out of me like the world’s most over-the-top period. Dick was running down the stairs – stumbling, actually, ‘cause he’s still drunk as a skunk – and when he saw the blood…he thought I was dying. From internal bleeding.”

  The tears were still coming then, trailing down her cheeks, flowing out of her like the blood that night at the bottom of the stairs. The tears should’ve been stained red, but somehow were clear as always.

  Some things just didn’t make sense.

  “Instantly, he was sweet as pie,” she said, her voice shaking. “He thought he’d almost killed me, and if he didn’t get me medical help right away, I would be dead, and as everyone knows, the police always look at the husband first. Even with his father as the judge in town, and even as stupidly drunk as he was, he knew he couldn’t get away with murdering me. So there he was, helping me up, strapping me into the car, and driving to the hospital here in town, and the whole way, I’m terrified that I’m going to die because Dick is still fall-down drunk and I’m just sure he’s gonna plow us into a telephone pole or something…

  “But we make it. There’s Dick, thoughtful and worried about his wife after her terrible, terrible tumble down the stairs, and the staff are only kinda buying it because Dick is well known around town as being a dick,” she smirked to herself for a moment at the pun, the only smile she’d managed to muster up in quite a while, “but then, my worst nightmare happens. The doctor delivers the ‘bad’ news to us: I’ve lost the baby.”

  She took in a shaky breath, looking out the windshield as ever-growing-in-size snowflakes began to pelt it. The storm had died off while they’d been in the restaurant, but appeared to be growing in strength again. She wondered for a moment if the Explorer was a 4x4 or not, and thought to ask Jaxson, but then the thought disappeared again, as ephemeral as the flakes hitting the windshield.

  She was back in the hospital again, mentally begging the doctor not to say anything in front of her husband, pleading, and then he did anyway, and Dick pretended sorrow and shock, until the doctor left them alone.

  “Pregnant?” he’d hissed at her. “You’re pregnant?! When were you planning on telling me about this?”

  “It started almost right away,” Sugar said aloud. “Dick began saying that this had been my plan all along – that I hadn’t told him the news because I knew that if he knew, then he would be more careful around me. That I’d wanted to lose the baby, so I’d hid it from him so he’d hurt me and cause me to lose the baby. Then I could blame it all on him, you see.” Hysterical laughter spilled out of her and then she stopped laughing and she was whispering, “He was right.”

  Jaxson drew in a sharp breath at that, and she laughed again, sharp and cold. “Not about everything, of course,” she clarified. “But that part about me not wanting the baby. I didn’t. I really didn’t. And when I lost it, instead of being saddened, I was glad. Not happy – not joyful – but glad. I didn’t want that baby and all that came with it. Losing it was a blessing, and I’m an awful human being for thinking that, but I can’t help it.”

  Before he could tell her that she was right, that she was awful, that she deserved all that happened to her and more, she rushed on, eager to get to the end of the story. “It was too early to be able to tell if I was gonna have a girl or a boy, of course, but Dick became convinced that it was a boy. Someone to carry on the Schmidt line. Which made my conniving even more awful. If it’d ‘just’ been a girl, well, that’d almost be forgivable. But it was gonna be a boy, Dick just knew it, and therefore…I deserved all that I got. And I got a lot at his hands.”

  She realized that they’d pulled up in front of her apartment and were idling in the guest parking spot. He was probably trying to get rid of her, now that he knew. He wouldn’t want to be around someone like her. No one would. That’s why she’d been so smart and had kept every guy who came around at an arm’s length.

  Except Jaxson. She’d let him in, and she’d told him the truth, and now she couldn’t bear to look him in the eye and see the judgment registering there. She’d break into a million little pieces for sure. “I’ll go now,” she whispered, her throat raw, and she opened the passenger-side door and tumbled out into the snow, scrambling up and heading towards the safety of her apartment. Away from Jaxson and his hatred of her.

  She could grab Hamlet and some food and clothes and leave. She could drive to Denver, where Emma lived. She could move in with her best friend and start over again and this time, not screw it up by dating some man and telling him the truth.

  Telling a man the truth was never a good idea. Then he’d just use it against her to hurt her more. Hadn’t she already learned that lesson?

  So dumb. So stupid.

  Her hand was shaking as she tried to get her key into the lock, scraping the paint on the door in her haste and then Jaxson’s hand was on hers, holding it in place, and he was standing behind her, trapping her in and she began fighting, punching and twisting and jabbing to get free, away from a man who would hurt her yet again and she couldn’t breathe and she was sure the smell of alcohol was in the air and Dick was back again, here to finish the job this time…

  The world swirled, the white snowflakes dancing in front of her eyes, and she couldn’t see and then they swirled less as the blackness overtook her.

  Chapter 33

  Jaxson

  For someone who prided himself on being able to act in cases of emergency – basically the very definition of a firefighter – he’d sure been damn slow to react when Sugar had thrown herself out of the vehicle and into the snow, stumbling towards her front door. He’d been frozen in place, staring out the windshield, shocked into doing nothing. She’d been in the middle of telling him the worst story he’d ever heard, and then she’d been running through the snowstorm.

  His mind was still processing what that son-of-a-bitch Dick Schmidt had done to Sugar, trying to understand how anyone could hurt someone as sweet and kind as her; how anyone could do the kind of screwing with her head that he’d done, and still look himself in the mirror in the morning.

  He remembered then why Sugar owned Hamlet – to
ward Dick off. How many times had he come by after she’d left him? How hard had he pushed her to take him back?

  It was her keening, high-pitched wail that jerked him back to the present; back to reality. He yanked his seatbelt off and practically threw himself out of the SUV, running through the snow to Sugar, who was scratching at the door with her key, nowhere even close to the keyhole, and making the most heart-wrenching sound he’d ever heard in his life.

  He put his hand on hers, wrapping his body around her, trying to show her how he would be there for her, protect her from the world, and instead, she was fighting him – kicking and jabbing backwards. She got a lucky hit to his solar plexus that knocked the wind out of him but she otherwise wasn’t able to do much damage. She was probably too distraught to aim for any…important body parts.

  Then she began melting in his arms, sagging against him, and through his gasps for air, he realized that she was fainting on him, literally.

  He felt along her arm until he got to her right hand, pulling the key from her grasp and putting it into the keyhole. As he turned it, he realized that the door was already unlocked; she hadn’t bothered to lock it before she left to find him at the fire station. In the midst of all that was happening, he couldn’t help but let a small quirk of the lips pass across his face. Such a small town thing to do, leaving her door unlocked like that.

  He pushed the door open, a swirl of snow and cold entering along with him, and found Hamlet on the other side, frantically waiting for Sugar. He must’ve heard the noises, and knew she was in pain. He whined as he licked her face, his tail wagging not out of happiness but worry. Jaxson carried Sugar over to the couch and laid her down, and Hamlet followed along every step of the way, glued to his mistress’ side.

  “I know, buddy,” Jaxson said softly. “I’m worried, too.”

  He sat down on the floor, leaning against the front of the couch, Sugar’s hand clasped in his, as he stared into the dark of the living room. What kind of man would be willing to do something like this?