Except getting involved with them during her stay on the island could prove very, very bad in many, many ways. She’d made the final decision to take Kalvin up on his invitation, not because every fiber of her female being wanted to jump into bed with him, but because she’d realized how beneficial it might be to pick his brain. Kalvin was a firefighter. The fact that he’d had some training in fire investigation only gave her idea more stability. What if she could learn enough from him, through carefully brought up questions in idle conversation, of course, to figure out who was after her in Chicago? What if something he told her led her to discover something the Chicago fire investigator had missed? It was a long shot, but it couldn’t hurt to try.
Unless he figures out you’re using him, gets pissed, finds out who you really are, and turns you over to the Chicago authorities.
Yeah, there was that, but merely hanging out on Silver Island pretending as if she really were on a simple vacation wasn’t going to get her anywhere. She’d never found herself in a situation she couldn’t solve or knew nothing about. Yet, that was exactly where the scumbag who was after her had put her. She didn’t know what she had done to put herself on his radar and didn’t know how to stop it. If leaving Chicago had helped, her car wouldn’t have been found torched at the northbound rest stop where she’d abandoned it. She’d likely made everything worse on herself by running, but she hadn’t known what else to do.
God, I still don’t know what else to do.
“What do you like best, fighting fires or investigating how they started?” she asked, figuring he would take it as a casually asked, getting-to-know-you question.
“The bug for fighting them was passed down in my family.” Kalvin closed the locker and returned to stand beside her, his thumbs hooked in the pockets of his slacks. “My father was a firefighter before he retired. So was grandfather and great-grandfather.”
“Were any of them investigators?”
He shook his head. “I’m the first one in the family to do that. Fire is a complex creature. It’s a living thing. It breathes, it feeds, and it hates.”
“Most people think all there is to fightin’ a fire is grabbin’ a hose and sprayin’ water on it, but there’s a lot more to it than that,” Blaze chimed in.
“You have to learn to think like it,” Kalvin said, “it’s the only way to beat it before it beats you. You have to anticipate how it’s going to move, respect the destruction it can cause, and even love it a little. The same holds true for investigating it after it’s extinguished, only in the past tense. That’s when you find out why it did what it did, how it sparked to life, and what made it follow the path it took.”
“Fire possesses a beauty like nothin’ else on this planet.” Blaze’s eyes twinkled mischievously. “Well, nothin’ else except you, darlin’.”
Delilah snorted and rolled her gaze back to Kalvin. “You shared that website with him, didn’t you?”
Kalvin’s brows edged together. “What website?”
“The one where you got that pickup line you used on me in the café.”
Blaze hooted with laughter. “You stooped low enough to use a dopy pickup line?”
“It wasn’t a pickup line,” Kalvin said defensively. “She just took it as one.”
Delilah leaned into Blaze and dropped her voice, though not so low Kalvin wouldn’t hear her. “It was a pickup line.”
“Pickup line or not, it got you to have lunch with me.”
Delilah straightened and tipped her head at him, conceding his point. “Touché.”
She looked around the long, narrow firehouse bay with enormous garage doors drawn open on either end. She’d walked past one fire truck out in the driveway when she’d arrived. Another was parked at the back of the bay facing out. The punching bag hung from a rafter about halfway into the bay and the cinderblock walls were lined with lockers, shelves, and equipment.
“It got me here, too. And it looks like you have another visitor,” she said when she spotted a man walking up beside the fire truck parked in front of the building. She moved to her purse and bookstore bag on legs that had started to shake and bent to snag them off the floor. “I think I’ll take that as my cue to leave.”
“Don’t run off on my account,” the man said as he stepped into the firehouse bay.
Something about the man brought the tiny centipede feeling back again to tickle up her nape and crawl into her hair.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Blaze muttered. “If it isn’t David Goldman.”
She shuffled back, studying David as Blaze and Kalvin moved around her to greet the man. David was shorter than Kalvin and Blaze by a good two inches, with platinum-blond hair that slightly reminded her of one of the guys on the cover of the book she’d bought. He wasn’t a bad-looking man, though not near as drool-worthy as Kalvin and Blaze.
“What the hell are you doin’ on the island?” Blaze drawled.
“Taking a much-needed vacation,” David answered. “I figured I’d come and see how the laidback firefighters spend a shift.” His gaze shifted passed Kalvin and Blaze to her and his brows lifted. “Man, you guys do have it good here, huh?”
Delilah widened her smile, ruthlessly tamping down the instinctive urge to run, and walked slowly toward the men. What was wrong with her? David was obviously a friend of Kalvin’s and Blaze’s.
“David, this is Faith Randal.” Kalvin slipped an arm around her waist as he introduced her. “David is an old friend of ours. The three of us worked together at a fire department on the mainland in Billings.”
“Faith is takin’ a much needed vacation on the island, too,” Blaze added, sliding his arm around her just above Kalvin’s. A mischievous smile tilted his lips as he gazed down at her. “We were workin’ our way up to talkin’ her into spendin’ that vacation with us.”
Delilah didn’t know how to respond to that. Hell, she’d lost the ability to think, let alone speak, when both men had put their arm around her. Standing between them, being held by both of them, sent her system on a speeding race to want-to-get-it-on-ville.
David tsked. “I don’t know, guys. The woman looks a little uncertain to me.”
“That’s ’cause—” Blaze began, but Delilah bulldozed over him.
“She knows it’s time for her to go.” She politely extended a hand to David. “It was nice meeting you. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to let you boys do your reminiscing or whatever it is men do.”
“We’ll walk you out.” Kalvin used his hold around her to turn her toward the open door of the bay.
Blaze turned with them. Neither man dropped his arm from her waist. They shortened their strides as they walked her to the door and stopped next to the fire truck parked out front.
Kalvin slid his hand from the small of her back to her hip as he turned to face her. “Thanks for stopping by.”
She started to thank him for the invitation, but Blaze chose that moment to move his hand around her to her other hip as he stepped behind her. They sandwiched her between them, Kalvin’s solid body pressed to her front and the hard wall of Blaze’s body against her back. Jesus, and she’d thought having one of them standing on either side of her had short circuited her system. Having them hold her this way stole her freaking sanity!
Blaze nuzzled his face in the side of her neck, tangling several strands of her hair in the stubble on his cheek. “We’ll see you at breakfast tomorrow mornin’.”
That hadn’t been an invitation. His choice of words had made it sound like a sure thing. She gazed up at Kalvin and bit back a smile when he rolled his eyes.
“What he meant to say is will you have breakfast with us tomorrow morning?”
She let her smile loose, along with a half-laugh. “What time is breakfast?”
“Our shift ends at seven,” Blaze answered.
She widened her eyes. “A.m.? No way. I’m on vacation, remember?” Not that she really expected to sleep past seven in the morning anyway. If she got more than three hour
s of sleep tonight, she’d be starting a new record since the fires.
Kalvin chuckled. “How about dinner, then?”
She pursed her lips as she considered that. “Dinner is a better possibility.” Maybe by then she’d have her thoughts back in line. Damn it, that’s what she’d come to the island for in the first place. Instead, her thoughts, heart, and hormones were getting scrambled for an all-new reason.
“We’ll catch up with you tomorrow afternoon.” Blaze pulled her hair to one side as he turned his face into hers and brushed his lips over her cheek.
She inhaled a shuddering breath that stuck in her throat as much from the sensations that zinged through her extremities from the kiss as the fear that he’d see the scar between her shoulder blades. That scar was the reason she wore her hair so long. It made it easier to cover the blemish, no matter what blouse she decided to wear. That fear turned to icy shards that rained through her system as his fingers grazed over the mark, hesitated a nanosecond, and then danced down her spine.
“Have a good evening, sweetheart.” Kalvin dipped his head and brushed a kiss to the tip of her nose before both men released her and stepped back.
Shaken by confusion, fear, and desire pumping through her veins, Delilah turned and made her way down the firehouse driveway, feeling their gazes on her with each step she took until she disappeared from their sight.
* * * *
Kalvin laced his fingers between the back of his head and the arm of the sofa in the firehouse TV room, propped his booted feet on the arm at the opposite end, and closed his eyes. Faith filled the darkness behind his lids, a smile lighting her eyes as she gazed back at him. His mind kicked into his own little version of Photoshop as he wondered about her natural hair color.
“She’s frightened,” he said, knowing Blaze was kicked back in the recliner adjacent to the sofa. In his mind’s eye, he replaced the jet-black hair on her image and made her a brunette. He wrinkled his nose as he considered the possibility. “Just like Ari said she’d be.”
“I caught a glimpse of it in her eyes a couple of times.” Blaze pushed a hard, audible breath from his lungs. “Never did for the life of me figure out what’s causin’ it, though.”
Kalvin stripped Faith’s image of the brunette hair and put fiery red strands in its place. “I think I might have.” He removed the red hair almost as quickly as he’d superimposed it on her and tried out a rich, yellow-blonde next. He liked it better than the red, but now he was in a toss-up between the blonde and the brunette.
“You wanna share the knowledge, my friend?”
Kalvin gave up on Faith’s hair, opened his eyes, and pushed himself to sit upright on the sofa. He turned his upper body toward Blaze and tapped the Silver Island Fire Department insignia on his shirt. “This.”
Blaze dropped a puzzled glance to Kalvin’s finger before meeting his gaze. “Your chest?”
Kalvin rolled his eyes. “No, dumbass. The fire department logo. That’s the first time I saw the fear in her eyes. She saw it on my shirt today at the café and her face went as white as a sheet. I saw it again when I stood to leave and asked her to drop by here. I told her about you, her attention locked on the logo again, and the fear was back.”
“Maybe that was lust you saw and you just thought it was fear,” Blaze suggested. “Women go all gushy over men in uniform all the time.”
Kalvin glared at him. “Not a woman like Faith. Besides, do you really think I don’t know the difference between lust and fear, man?”
“Naw.” Blaze raked a hand down his face. “I was just hopin’ Ari was wrong, you know?”
“Yeah, I was hoping so, too, but shit.” Kalvin gave a short, dry laugh. “She’s been right so far. I guess there’s no reason to doubt her now.” He hesitated and then asked a question that had been twisting in his mind. “Do you think this attraction we’re feeling for her is real? I mean, what if it’s just provoked because of what Ari told us and we’re going along with it?”
“You’ve got a bad habit of pushin’ your personal feelin’s aside and focusin’ on facts. The facts in this case are that Ari predicted Faith would come to the island, she gave us an idea of what she’d look like, and she told us she’d be runnin’ from someone or somethin’. Now, push those facts aside for a chance and focus on your personal feelin’s. What really came over you when you saw her today? ’Cause I know what came over me and the only damn thing that provoked it was Faith.”
Unable to argue and even glad that he couldn’t, Kalvin let the subject drop. “Back to the whole on the run thing…”
“You think that somethin’ has to do with the fire department,” Blaze concluded, as if that’s what he’d been about to say before Kalvin had taken them on their conversational detour.
“Maybe.” Kalvin dragged his tongue between his bottom lip and teeth. “The impression I got is more that the someone is a firefighter.”
Blaze leaned forward in the recliner and rested his forearms on his knees. “It could be a boyfriend or, hell, even a husband.”
Kalvin clenched his teeth together at the thought that she might have a husband out there somewhere. “If it is, the bastard has abused her. That’s the common reason for a woman to run like she’s done. I didn’t see any bruises on her, though.”
Not that he’d been looking for them, but he felt damn certain he would’ve seen them if there had been any. He’d watched her during their lunch and for a while out in the firehouse bay before she and Blaze realized he was there. He’d drank in every visible inch of her exposed flesh like a warm shot of whisky and hadn’t seen so much as a scratch on her sultry body.
“I didn’t either, but I felt somethin’ on her back when we had her between us out front. I pushed her hair out of my way so I could kiss her cheek and let my hand fall down her back. Whatever it was I felt started right above the material of her tank top between her shoulder blades.”
“A scar?” Kalvin asked, his mind already bouncing around the possibilities of what could’ve put a lasting mark on her back. Most of what he came up with was accidental, though a few set his blood sizzling.
“Maybe.” Blaze lifted a shoulder. “We’ll know more when we get a thorough look at her naked flesh.”
Kalvin nodded. “Ari said the jet black wouldn’t be natural. What color do you think her hair really is?”
Blaze leaned back in the recliner again and folded his hands over his gut. “Dunno. It’s a helluva dye job. She did her eyebrows, too.”
Kalvin frowned and stretched back out on the sofa and closed his eyes once more. “Yeah, I noticed that.”
“I guess that’s something else we’ll have to wait and see when we get that thorough look at her naked flesh.”
Faith’s image returned to the darkness behind Kalvin’s lids, this time in a full-body shot. His cock stirred to attention as he tweaked his Photoshop and stripped off her clothes, his attention zeroing in on her pussy. He preferred his women with a smooth pussy, but he wouldn’t mind discovering hers covered in hair, if only long enough to figure out what color the hair on her beautiful head was supposed to be.
* * * *
Delilah sniffed the herbal sachet Elen had given her before tossing it into the tub of running water. She identified the lavender scent mingling with something woodsy and sweet. Shrugging, she picked up the bottle of oil, twisted the cap, and covered the opening with her middle finger as she turned it. She brought the finger to her nose, pursed her lips at the perfumed fragrance and dabbed a drop beneath each ear and over her heart as Elen had instructed. She grabbed the book and the glass of wine she’d poured before entering the bathroom and carefully settled both on the edge of the enormous garden tub as she tiptoed inside.
The warmth of the water spread through her as she stretched out her legs and leaned against the back of the tub. She closed her eyes and listened as the water continued to pour from the faucet, the sound so relaxing she didn’t want to turn it off. Knowing an overflow would draw a quick end to h
er serenity, she sighed, sat up, and twisted the knobs to staunch the flow.
She covered her belly with her hand as she laid back again, her mind shifting to her memory of dinner. Rather than ordering room service, she’d decided to dine in one of the resort’s restaurants on the main floor where she’d run into David Goldman. Also eating alone, David had asked her to join him. She’d been leery at first, still unable to shake the funky feeling she got around him, until she’d reminded herself that he was a friend of Kalvin’s and Blaze’s. There was no way he could be the man after her. What would he have to gain by ruining the life of someone he’d never met? Reluctantly, she’d finally accepted his invitation more out of politeness than the desire for company.
“Don’t be so hard on the man,” she muttered to herself as she rested the back of her head on the pillow covering the back rim of the tub and closed her eyes. “You had a good time, even if you weren’t with Kalvin and Blaze.”
She might as well have been. David spent the majority of the dinner talking about the men. By the time he’d paid the check, she’d felt as though she’d known Kalvin and Blaze as long as David obviously had.
“Hero worship.” She giggled and shook her head as she blindly reached for the glass of wine. “Gotta love it.”
It felt good to enjoy herself, even if only for a little while. Images of Kalvin and Blaze started to fill the darkness behind her lids as she sipped her wine, and she welcomed the distraction. She held that sip in her mouth, letting the tart taste of grapes glide over her tongue as she studied the men. Swallowing, she decided since both men possessed the build of Adonis, maybe they deserved to be worshiped.
Her admiration for them made her extremities tingle as her imagination took hold of the images and controlled them like puppets. They stripped in turn, pulling off shirts to reveal the hard planes and ridges of their torsos and shucking away their slacks and underwear so their cocks hung free. She found herself wondering who had the bigger cock and felt the heat growing in her pussy shoot to her face.
Safe and Burning with Ecstasy [The Heroes of Silver Island 3] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) Page 5