Burnt

by Lacy Hart

  Burnt

  A Small Town, Single Dad Romance

  By Lacy Hart

  Love Hot, Steamy Romance?

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  Copyright © 2018 by Lacy Hart & Scarlet Lantern Publishing

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  This book contains sexually explicit scenes and adult language.

  All characters in this work are 18 years of age or older.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  1

  Travis

  I could hear the fire in the house before I even entered it. My team at Ridgefield Engine Company 32 had set up their perimeter and were working on the outside of the house while Tommy, one of the guys I trusted the most on my team, and I steadily worked our way into the small ranch home on Recker Street that we had gotten the call about just minutes ago. It didn’t take long for us to realize that this was a delicate situation. As soon as we entered the front door smoke and heat blasted us. We had both been on the job long enough to know what to do, how to work through everything, and how to move to find if anyone was inside. Neighbors had indicated they thought a mother and daughter were in here somewhere, and we needed to get them out.

  I steadied myself through the living room and could see flames were starting to lick the carpeting and the ceiling. We needed to move fast and get to the bedrooms to see about finding anyone and getting them out of here as quick as possible. Tommy and I moved quickly towards the hall. I took the lead, checking doors to make sure they were safe until we got to the back bedroom. Smoke and flames were starting to fill the hallway quickly, and I moved urgently to push the door open and get inside.

  There we found the mother, a woman in her thirties, face clearly filled with fright, clutching her daughter. The girl looked up briefly as we came into the room and she looked to be no more than five or six. The woman began shouting in Spanish at us, and neither one of us understood what she was saying. Tommy reached for her and moved her off the bed. I tried to get her to hand me her daughter so we could get out safely, but she kept clutching the girl tighter and tighter. Neither of us understood the other, and I couldn’t afford to waste any more time arguing about it. I took the lead and began to work my way back toward the front door.

  Tommy, the woman, and the girl were all following closely behind me. Flames were stronger than when we first came in, and they were engulfing the ceiling now, making an exit more treacherous. As I reached the front door, with black smoke now billowing out the door, I turned to Tommy and the woman to pull them towards the exit. Before I could reach them, the ceiling collapsed on top of them as the girl tumbled to the floor in front of me. Instinct took over, and I lifted the girl off the floor before flames could reach her and darted out the door. I quickly passed the girl off to one of my fellow firefighters and turned to go back to help. I had reached the front porch when more of the home collapsed under the weight of flames, water, and smoke, taking me down through the porch up to my waist. I felt my head bang roughly on the wood and knew there was a piece of flooring that had gone right through my suit and into my leg. The combination of the pain, heat, and smoke was overwhelming. My mind raced to Tommy and the woman, to the young girl, and to my own young girl waiting for me at home. I thought about Abby and what would happen to her, and in the haze, I saw her standing there smiling, alongside a familiar face that I had not seen in a long time. I blacked out, struggling against the darkness and the visions.

  And then I woke up.

  2

  Travis

  “Dad, I’ve been calling you for about ten minutes.”

  Abby looked at me with that frustrated look that any twelve-year-old gets when they think they know more than their parents. I had just peeled my eyes open after having that dream again, the one I had become all too familiar with over the last two months or so since I was injured. I had been placed on disability since the incident, and while the investigation into the fire and the events had cleared me of any wrongdoing, I still felt the weight of heavy guilt over what had happened there. I tried to trudge through each day for Abby’s sake, trying to make her last weeks of summer vacation before school started up again a bit better. Of course, she didn’t see it that way at all.

  “Dad, are you even listening to me?”

  I looked up at Abby and saw her standing there, her shoulder-length red hair moving along with the breeze from the air conditioner in my bedroom. She was already dressed in a t-shirt and shorts, ready for another hot August day, and now she was prodding me on to get me moving for something.

  “What’s up?” I asked her as I wiped my eyes clear and pushed myself up out of bed. The wound in my leg and healed nicely, thankfully, and left me with quite a scar and a bit of a limp after surgery and physical therapy. I hobbled a bit, and Abby braced my right arm and helped me through the door and out into the kitchen.

  “I said that guy is on the phone again. The lawyer,” she huffed, and she handed me the cordless phone from the kitchen. At this point, I wasn’t sure just what lawyer she was talking about since there had been so many of them over the weeks, so I just picked up the phone and started talking.

  “Hello,” I said gruffly into the phone as I went to pour myself a cup of coffee. Abby quickly reached over and poured it for me instead, so I didn’t spill any on the floor or the counter. Thank God for her.

  “Mr. Travis Stone?” I heard a squeaky, inquisitive voice on the other end of the phone. He clearly wasn’t the lawyer from the union, the disability company or any of the other lawyers I had talked to lately.

  “Yes, who is this?” I said, already losing patience with this. I could hear I was on a speakerphone as the person on the other end was rustling paperwork while talking to me.

  “Mr. Stone, this is Irv Rogers, I’m a lawyer here in the town of Canon. I’ve left you a few messages, but I never heard back from you.”

  Canon was a place I thought I had put behind me a long time ago. Sure, I still had family and friends that lived there, though not nearly as many of either as I had when I left there to go to college. I was pretty sure I knew why this guy was calling now.

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Rogers?” A smile crept across my face after I called him Mr. Rogers as I imagined him sitting there in his red sweater and slip-on shoes. I chuckled as I took a sip of my coffee. Abby looked up at me from the kitchen table like I had two heads, shook her head lightly and sighed, and went back to reading her book.

  “It’s still the matter of your father and his estate Mr. Stone. I really need for you to come out here so we can settle everything.”

  I sipped some more coffee slowly to clear my head some more. The whole mess of my father passing away had happened just days after the fire, and I had hardly had any time to comprehend it. I had missed the funeral, though I don�
��t know that I would have gone anyway. My father and I hadn’t spoken since just after Abby was born, and I didn’t really think he had anything anyone could call an estate to leave to someone.

  “Isn’t this something we can take care of over the phone, or email or fax or something?” I told him as I placed my cup down on the counter. I heard Abby say, “Who uses a fax anymore?” as she giggled at me. I shooed her out of the room with my hands, and she slammed her book closed and headed to her bedroom down the hall. I sat down at the kitchen table, trying to get a handle on what this guy was saying.

  “I’m afraid not Mr. Stone,” he said to me in a shaky tone. “There are papers and forms to sign for legal purposes. Do you think you can get out here?”

  I knew I could get out there; it was more of a question of if I wanted to go. I was on disability, more than likely permanently, and had nothing keeping me here in Ridgefield, which, while a lot bigger, sadly, was not much more exciting than Canon.

  “Sure, I can be there tomorrow,” I said to him in a resigned tone.

  “Oh, fantastic,” he replied. I could hear more papers shuffling. “That’s wonderful. Just come by my office tomorrow then. I am here by 9. My address is 24 Reese Place. Do you know where that is?”

  I only spent the first twenty years of my life there buddy, I thought to myself. I took a deep breath before answering him.

  “Yeah, I think I remember where it is,” trying not to sound too sarcastic.

  “Okay then, I’ll see you tomorrow. Have a good day,” Mr. Rogers told me as he hung up.

  I pressed the off button on the phone and laid it on the table. I stood up, groaning a bit as I heard my knee creak. I looked down at my leg and traced the part of the scar that was visible, going up my right leg from my knee and disappearing under the hem of my sleep shorts as it went further up my thigh. I righted myself and walked down the hall towards Abby’s room.

  I gently knocked on the door and waited for her to tell me it was okay to enter. This was something I was still getting used to now that she was twelve and demanded a bit more privacy than the days when she begged me to leave her bedroom door open so it wasn’t so dark in there. When she didn’t respond to my knock after about ten seconds, I slowly opened the door.

  Abby was sitting at her desk, her earbuds in as she listened to music on her phone. She was typing away on her laptop as I walked up behind her and placed my left hand on her shoulder.

  She spun around, looking at me with shocked eyes, and then slammed her laptop closed.

  “Dad!” she shouted at me. “You’re supposed to knock before you come in.” She pulled out her earbuds, clutched her laptop, and got up and sat cross-legged on her bed.

  “You’re supposed to respond when I knock,” I answered her. Since this wasn't an argument I wanted to get into right now, I decided to just let it go.

  “You need to pack some things. We have to go to Canon.” I scanned her room, barely recognizing it anymore. Gone were the little girl adornments that she wanted on her walls just a year or so ago. Now her walls had posters and pictures of music bands. Gone were the Disney princesses, replaced by the faces of female singers, actresses, athletes, and writers I barely recognized.

  “Why are we going to Canon? Are we going to see Grandma?” Abby’s eyes lit up at the prospect of seeing my mother. The two were something of kindred spirits, and my mom was really the only female role model Abby has had in her life since she was born.

  “Yes, we’ll see Grandma, but I have some other things to take care of there too. We may be there for a bit.”

  “How long?” Abby asked. She was already getting her suitcases out of her closet and arranging things to pack.

  “I’m not really sure,” I said to her. “We’ll have to see how things go.”

  “No problem,” Abby replied. “There’s nothing in this town for me anyway.”

  “You’re too young to sound so jaded,” I told her. “I’ll go start packing myself.”

  “Fine,” she said to me, walking me to the door. “I’ll be ready in ten minutes.” Abby closed the door on me as I stood there facing the door. I was going to open the door again, but thought better of it and just headed down to my room to start packing. At least going to Canon was going to be easy for one of us.

  3

  Sophie

  I sat in my classroom, not quite going over the curriculum I was setting up for the new school year set to start in just a week or two. I kept finding my mind wandering, staring out the window to the grassy areas that were freshly mowed by the groundskeeper, and to the places further out and beyond, where you could almost see the back of Stearns’s ice cream stand. I heard myself let out an audible sigh, wondering about the world that was outside the school walls, past Stearin’s, past the old Howard place where they had a farm for generations, and even beyond Highway 32 and out to the rest of the world.

  A light knock on the open classroom door startled me out of my daydreaming. I turned to look and saw Mary Connors, the eighth-grade math teacher in my section of the school, standing there smiling at me. She slowly walked over to my desk and sat herself down on the corner of it.

  “What’s up Mary?” I asked her as I shut my planner. I knew I wasn’t going to get much more accomplished today anyway.

  “What’s up with me? What’s up with you?” she said to me quizzically. “I’ve been standing there for five minutes watching you stare out the window like you were watching the grass grow. What were you daydreaming about?”

  I grabbed my planner and a couple of books from my desk and shoved them into my backpack, the same leather backpack I had managed to hold onto since my college days.

  “Oh nothing really,” I said to her absentmindedly as I closed the backpack. “Just enjoying the last waning days of summer I guess.”

  “Sure you were,” Mary said sarcastically. Mary and I had started teaching here at Canon Middle School at the same time about eight years ago. Just thinking that it had already been eight years that had gone by was hard to imagine.

  “There you go again,” Mary said to me as she playfully pushed my shoulder. “We need to do something to snap you out of your doldrums. How about we grab some dinner tonight?”

  “I don’t know Mary,” I told her as we slowly walked down the freshly waxed hallway.

  “Come on Sophie,” Mary whined at me lightly. “What are you going to do? Spend another night at home reading…” she reached into my open backpack and grabbed one of the books out. “The Short Stories of Henry James? Just the thought is making me fall asleep.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with reading,” I told her as I snatched the book from her hands. I placed my backpack on the floor and put the book back inside, making sure to clasp the bag closed this time.

  “No, there’s nothing wrong with reading at all,” Mary retorted, “But you could spice things up a bit once in a while too. Maybe throw in a little Fifty Shades book now and then for good measure.” She smiled wryly at me as she said this and I could feel my cheeks start to blush at the thought.

  “You know I don’t go in for trashy romance books Mary,” I said as I tried to make my blushing cool down a bit faster.

  “Well I like a little trashy now and then,” she said as she twirled around a bit and laughed, causing her floral print skirt to spin open a bit.

  “Who’s talking about trashy?” I heard the voice echo down the hall as Mary and I turned quickly to see who it was.

  “Oh geez,” Mary groaned as she rolled her eyes at me. It was too late for us to make a quick break for the exit. It was Kenny Price, the school vice-principal ambling down the hallway towards us. Kenny, oddly enough, had started at the school the same time we had, but he looked as if he had aged ten times faster than we did. Even though he was the same age as us at thirty-two, his hairline was starting to recede and what was once a fit and toned body had softened quite a bit over the years. The cheesy, bushy, brown mustache he had had flecks of gray in it already too, earning him th
e nickname “The Walrus” with students and teachers alike.

  Kenny stood before us, wearing khaki shorts and black dress socks with his loafers, and Mary and I had to do all we could to stifle laughter.

  “Hi Kenny,” I said. “Mary and I were just talking about books.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” Kenny said, hoping perhaps for a juicier story to latch on to. “So, what are you up to tonight Sophie? I was going to see what was playing at The Royal Theater tonight. Care to join me? We could go there and then to Stearn’s for ice cream after.”

  Kenny had the hopeful twinkle in his eyes that he had every time he asked me out. I had gone out with him once or twice years ago when we first met but had been regularly rebuffing him since then when he tried to get a little too handsy for my tastes on the second date. He apologized back then, but he kept trying to get me to go out with him anyway.

  “I’m sorry Kenny,” I said, trying to sound sincere. “Mary and I already have plans to go out for dinner tonight.”