“That’s what I was told.” He waited a second, and then rubbed his hand across his forehead. “If this is about me—”
“It was the meeting,” I explained. “I walked out after the meeting.”
“Damn. Why didn’t you tell me?”
I reached over and smoothed the little lines that appeared on his forehead. “Because of that look. How do you feel right now?”
“Guilty as hell for putting you in that position.”
“Exactly. I’m a grown woman, and I made a choice. You shouldn’t feel guilty for my decision. It’s mine and mine alone.”
He cupped my cheek, and I leaned into his warm hand, savoring the way my heart soared and sank all at once in a way that only Bash could manage. “It’s all going to be for nothing. We’re still three slots shy.”
“We still have ten days,” I reminded him.
He looked away, and my nausea returned full force.
“What aren’t you telling me?”
“Ryker and I have both been called back. There’s a fire in northern California.”
I tried to ignore the icy tendrils of fear that wound their way around my heart. “Right. Because you’re on the same hotshot crew.”
“Yes. We’re flying out in a few hours.”
I nodded, pulling my head from his hands. “Okay. Right. Okay.”
“Emerson,” he said softly. “I’m so sorry. I never wanted to put you through anything like this.”
“It’s fine,” I answered, forcing a sugar-sweet smile. “Don’t apologize. This is your life. And it’s not like we’re...you know…” Together. No, I wasn’t that stupid. I was one hundred percent in love with him, but I always had been. That was never going to change, and he’d never stay.
“No, I don’t know.” His tone sharpened.
“Me either,” I whispered. “But you need to get going. Why would you even hike all the way up here?”
He picked up my hand and laid a kiss to the palm. “I made this huge mistake once. I walked out on a girl I was madly in love with, and if I had one choice to make again, that would be the one I’d do over. I should have told you, asked you to come with me, asked you to wait… hell, I don’t know. Anything other than what I did. But I was young, and stupid, and didn’t realize that what we had was rare. I wasn’t making that same mistake twice. ”
Breathe. I took in his words with the air around me and just as oxygen filled my lungs and cleared my mind, Bash fed my soul. But even as I fell harder with every kiss, every word, it didn’t help our ultimate problem. “You won’t stay,” I whispered.
He shook his head. “I can’t breathe here. All I see is death, and scars, and every single thing I fucked up in my life.” He gestured to the small trees around us. “Even this place. I should see hikes, and campfires, and the hours we spent up here with our families…with each other.”
“And all you see now is the point of origin.”
“Yeah. I see the unattended campfire, the stupid city kids who left it to burn. I hear the call going out, the sound of my mother’s voice telling me that we had to evacuate, the sound of her screaming at me through my cell when she realized I’d disobeyed. I hear my father’s frustration that they’d been at that other fire, recalled too late to do anything but give us that precious bit of time. I hear his orders to Spencer. There’s just…too much here.”
“But there was so much good, too,” I said softly, trying to keep my composure.
Those hazel eyes swept the ridgeline around us. “There was,” he agreed. “But what’s left of it? This will always be home, but I won’t spend my life somewhere where all I see is my past.”
Including me. God, I thought I’d built my walls thicker than that, thick enough to stop the evisceration of my soul those simple words could cause. But there was no armor strong enough to keep Bash out of my heart. Six years, and I was back to being that eighteen-year-old girl, waiting for a phone to ring.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“That I lost you before I ever had you.”
“Emerson—”
“No. It’s okay. You told me that we were inevitable, and maybe you’re right. You and I…we’re like magnets, drawn back to each other no matter our past, our mistakes…or our lack of a future. We’re kind of like this place, if you think about it.” I gestured to the trees around us. “Something draws us back to the good, but like you said, the bad will always be there, ready to remind us of everything we lost, and just like this is the starting place for that fire, it’s also the point of origin for our demise. We just didn’t know it.” I blinked back the tears that threatened to overflow, even though I’d sworn that I’d cried my last tears over Sebastian Vargas years ago.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have come back,” he murmured. “I’m doing more harm than good…the team, the town…you.”
Three days. We’d made it three days of impossibly hot sex and…what? What were we really? How often had I pictured what I’d say if I had it to do all over again? I had two choices: guard my heart, or lay it all on the line.
As appealing as option number one was, I was already too far down the rabbit hole to take it.
I moved his arm out of my way and swung my knee over his to straddle his lap. That jolt of electricity hit me just like always, the assurance that when it came to chemistry, he was my perfect match. That was the easy part. The rest would be a fight.
Good thing my father taught me to never back down.
I cupped his face in my hands, letting his scruff scrape along my palms. “I will never regret you coming home, or any choice I made while you were here, and that’s not dependent on what happens with the team. Our past is complicated, Bash. We have some gut-wrenching pain between us—around us. But we also have so much love. And if you don’t stay, that’s okay. I will hate watching you walk away, but that won’t change how I feel about this.” I kissed him softly, gently sucking his bottom lip. “I won’t be sorry for helping you bring a piece of them back to us.” I pulled back enough to meet his eyes and lost my heart all over again. “I don’t regret wanting you back then, or being with you, no matter how it ended. You were my wildest dream, and for a while, you came true. How could I ever second guess something like that?”
“I hurt you.” One of his hands stroked down my back while the other buried itself in my hair. “I regret that every day.”
“But I don’t, not anymore, because I finally realize that it means that what we had was real. I don’t regret a single moment of loving you then…or loving you now.”
His body tensed under me. His grip tightened, his eyes widening in surprise, then turning dark, fierce. A heartbeat later, he crushed my mouth to his, kissing me breathless, all lips, tongue, and teeth. It was as raw as our emotions, as volatile as the very place our relationship was in. It was everything we were.
I held him to me and kissed him the way I’d wanted to for years, the way I’d done in my dreams, wishing I’d been able to make him stay. I flayed my heart open and left it in that kiss, knowing that if this were the last time, it would be the best damn kiss of his life…and mine.
Then I retreated when he sought more, hard and insistent beneath my hips. “You have to go.”
“For the first time, I don’t give a damn at the moment, not when I have you in my hands.” He looked at me, eyes glazed with need, and I nearly gave in.
“Fire. You. Ryker. California.” I punctuated each word with a light kiss.
“Fuck,” he growled. “Why do you have to make it so hard to leave?”
Because you know this is where you belong. “Come back, and I’ll do more than kiss you.”
His grin was lethal, panty-melting. “Promise.”
“On my life. Now you’d better run, Bash. And I mean sprint.”
“I’ll hold you to it,” he said as we stood. With one final kiss, he took off, and I couldn’t help but smile at the way he hurtled a downed tree. Always a showoff.
God, I loved him, and admitting
it had only thrust my heart higher, flung it faster. But I wasn’t a little girl anymore, I was a woman who knew that the faster it flew, the harder it would crash when he walked away.
I knew where this would inevitably end—the only piece of Bash I would hold would be the team he’d resurrected.
***
“What do you think?” I asked Knox eight days later as we stood in front of the whiteboard in Bash’s office.
“I think you might pull this off for him,” he said.
I looked at the list I’d spent the last week sweating, bleeding, and nearly crying over. It had kept me sane between phone calls, texts, incessant checks of the news just praying he was safe. At least containment was underway. He’d be home soon.
Bash had already lined up seven experienced hotshot firefighters who wanted on the team, which left us with twelve names to fill. Even with all the calls I’d made, Indy, Lawson, and the Maldonaldo brothers, we’d had to agree to take Taylor Rose, our youngest member at eighteen to get her older brother, Braxton to agree. The ironic thing? He’d been furious. I would have loved to peek inside those family dynamics. Adding Derek Chandler, our youngest guy at nineteen years old left us short one name. “If he won’t lead the team, who is taking that slot?”
“He has someone in mind,” Knox said cryptically.
“And if you build it, they will come…” I mocked. “Seriously. I’ve put my actual ass on the line here, so could you not give me some creepy, prophetic answer?”
One thing about Knox’s dark brown eyes? They didn’t give much away. He raised one eyebrow and said, “Not my slot to fill. Not my secret to tell. And if I tell you, and it doesn’t work out, you’d just be more disappointed.”
“But it’s not Bash.”
That must have come out more mopey than I thought, because he put his arm around my shoulder. “Bash doesn’t have the experience to be a superintendent. A captain might even be pushing it. But baby girl, by all that is holy, please do not get your hopes on him staying. He’s never really healed enough to be here for long.”
“What if I went to him? I mean, not that I expect him to want me or anything, but maybe there would be a chance if I moved there.” A piece of my soul cried out at the thought of leaving Legacy, of leaving this team we were trying so hard to make work.
“Emmy, never doubt for a second how much he wants you. I wish I could tell you how many times he dialed your number but didn’t press ‘call,’ or how many emails, text, letters he wrote without sending.”
“But he never did. That says something, doesn’t it, Knox?”
He sighed. “He’s scared to death of you. Of what you represent, what you mean to him.”
“His past. I know.”
“No. You are all that’s left of the home he remembers. You’re his only shot at a second chance, and if he blows it…I don’t want to see what he’d become.”
“I’m in love with him,” I whispered.
Knox leaned his head down to mine. “That, my dear Emerson, is the one secret everyone already knows.”
“It’s not enough to keep him here.”
“How many times has he texted you since he’s been gone?”
I blinked. “At least a couple times a day and a few phone calls.”
“Yeah, that seems to me like he might not be here, but he’s still here. But Emerson, if he sees that name on the alternate list, he will kill you, whether or not he loves you.”
I shrugged, trying to do the same with my heart to the fact that he’d used the “L” word. “It won’t come to that.”
“Promise me.”
I refused to give my word on something I couldn’t keep. If it came between calling out that name and Legacy—and Bash— not getting her hotshot team back…I’d say it, consequences be damned. I looked over our confirmed list and tallied up who had already arrived in town.
“It won’t come to that.” A small spark of hope lit in my chest, but I was careful not to let it catch fire. Hope was a dangerous little bitch. Hope was what killed you when everything went inevitably wrong. But that little flame was there, stubborn and bright.
Chapter Ten
Bash
“Damn it, this is at least the seventh message I’ve left for you this week. The least you could do is call me back.” I took a deep breath, bracing the phone against my forehead to get control before finishing. “Please. Yes, or no… just let me know. Our deadline is tonight, man.”
Running into him at that fire had been a huge surprise—or fate, but either way, it gave me a chance to lay out my proposal and opened the door for him to shut me down. Which he did.
But I knew under that hard, callous exterior, he was dying for the same thing that I was—a second chance. But unlike him, mine depended on his damned decision.
I swiped my phone off just in time to see Ryker come out of the gas station, and tried to get my anger under control. “Fucking hurry up,” I snapped as he climbed into the Rover.
“Chill the hell out,” he said, shutting the door and clicking his seatbelt. “We’re maybe fifteen minutes out, and she’ll be there.”
“What makes you think this is about her?” I asked.
“I’ve been your best friend for twenty years. It’s always about her. Even when it’s not…it still is.”
I pulled onto the state highway toward Legacy, ignoring the posted speed limit. “I…may have fucked up. Again.”
“You? Never. Pray, do tell.”
“You’re lucky I’m driving,” I muttered.
“Well, you certainly have me as a captive audience. Now, what could you have done to possibly merit a claim like that?”
“She told me she loved me.” The words tasted sweet in my mouth, like caramel apples and redemption.
“Okay? She’s always loved you, and you’ve always loved her and blah, blah, blah. What the fuck is the big deal? She knows you’re too chicken shit to move home, and you know she’ll be miserable anywhere else but Legacy. All your issues are on the table, so what’s the big deal with loving each other? That’s like saying, ‘hey, man, the sun rose today,’” he mocked with a deep-voiced impression that was too close to my actual timbre.
I opened my mouth and then shut it again, unable to vocally process or admit to what I’d done.
“Oh, fuck. You didn’t say it back, did you? You left her hanging. Again. You let her pour her heart out and played stoic-asshole-of-the-mountain, didn’t you?”
I nodded once, and he groaned. “For being a tech genius, you’re a giant emotional moron. But it’s not that bad—totally salvageable. She’ll forgive you.”
“Really? Not that bad? What if it was Harper?” I asked.
His head swung my way. “Don’t even fucking joke about my sister, or make me think you’re joking. No. No fucking firefighters. She’s been through enough shit.”
“Right. And I’m the emotional moron.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I shook my head. “Nothing, man.” If he hadn’t put it together, I wasn’t about to lay the pieces out. Not when our deadline was tonight, and we all needed to present a united front. What Harper wanted wasn’t my business. Or Ryker’s.
But Knox on the other hand…well, that was going to be interesting to watch.
I blinked. I wasn’t going to be around to watch. Not any of it. I wouldn’t see the team operate, wouldn’t be in on their barbecues, their family time. I’d put everything in place, but I wouldn’t watch it grow except by sending the checks.
I wouldn’t be around to see Emerson. To hold her, kiss her, get my hands on her insanely sexy body, hell, hear what plans she’d cooked up for the team. She’d stepped into a managerial role so easily it was almost like she’d been born for it.
The team was in her blood too.
How the fuck was I going to walk away from her?
Maybe I could come in once a year, just to see how things were going first-hand.
“Earth to Vargas,” Ryker nearly yelled
. “For fuck’s sake.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I got a little lost in my own head.”
“Yeah, well, as I was saying, you can fix the Emerson stuff.”
“Really?” I questioned, speeding up another five miles-per-hour. I needed every second I could get.
“You just need to be honest with her. Tell her you’re in love with her, the mushy shit chicks want to hear.”
“And what? Fuck her over when I leave again? Come in once a year for a booty call?”
He snorted. “Glad you’ve got it planned out. I hate to break it to you, my brother, but unless you’re prepared to watch the years go by as Emerson finds someone she can love, gets married, starts having little brown-eyed babies with said guy, you’d better rethink that.”
Emerson. Married. Touching someone else. Curling up in their arms at the end of the night. It was just…wrong.
No one else knew that she only liked to be held for a few minutes before she went to sleep, but then she wanted her space. No one else knew that spearmint Tic Tacs were the only ones she wanted, that peppermint pissed her off. No one else knew how to touch her so that her breath stuttered, her lips parted, her hips bucked. Just the thought of someone else between her thighs—
“You know it’s the ten year anniversary for our dads, right?” Ryker asked.
“And?” I fired back.
And those brown-eyed babies? They’d have her exact shade, her brains, her courage…and my build, my hair—because damn it, I was the only one who’d be giving Emerson Kendrick babies. I’d be the only man attaching my last name to hers, sleeping next to her, loving her, fucking her, buying her god-forsaken Tic Tacs. No one else. Just me.
“Well, you’re going one hundred and ten, and it would just be really ironic if we died today, seeing as we’re supposed to lay wreaths at the memorial, and all.”
Only Ryker could say that without a hint of panic in his voice.
I checked the speedometer and immediately eased my foot off the gas, slowing back down to seventy-five.
“We need to make a stop at the Chatterbox before the Clubhouse,” I said as we pulled into town.
Point of Origin (Legacy #1) Page 8