Fuel for Fire

by Julie Ann Walker

  “How bad is it?” Chelsea asked.

  “Colder than a w-witch’s t-tit in a brass b-bra.” Emily’s teeth chattered. She wasted no time turning to tread water toward shore.

  And then there were two.

  “Let me go first,” Dagan told Chelsea when he saw her gather herself to take the plunge. He wanted her in the water for the shortest time possible. Blowing out two big breaths and steeling himself, he said, “Screw it. Here goes,” and shoved overboard.

  The instant he hit the water, his muscles contracted, shrinking away from the shock of the cold. When he surfaced, it was to find Chelsea bobbing next to him. The wonderfully willful woman must have waited a full half-second before following him into the drink.

  She was always trying to prove herself. It made him absolutely crazy. The risks she took? The shit she volunteered for?

  This entire mission, for instance? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

  Then again, she’d demonstrated just how capable she was time and again, so maybe he was the one with the problem. Still, he couldn’t help growling at her. “What happened to me going first?”

  “B-best just to get it over w-w-with,” she chattered. Her dusky-pink lips were already tinged with blue.

  “Stubborn, confounding woman,” he groused, motioning for Rusty to toss down the remaining waterproof bag.

  Chelsea began stroking toward the others, but not before saying, “Oh, sh-shove a sock in it, Werewolf of London.”

  If his face hadn’t been frozen, he would have smiled. There had been awkwardness between them after their conversation in the belly of Rusty’s boat. But her words gave him hope that it was a passing phase.

  Wasting no time, he tied the line attached to the float bag around his chest and swam after Chelsea. Instead of focusing on how cold he was, on how much he hurt, he turned his mind back to the catamaran’s hold, to the flame Chelsea had become in his arms. Her passion had burned so hot, so bright that she had set something inside him ablaze. The fire burned still, slowly turning to ash all his fears of the future and the great unknown it held, all his reasons for not agreeing to her terms.

  Chapter 18

  Chelsea was in… What was the word she was looking for? Oh, right. Hell. She was in hell.

  But unlike what she’d been led to believe, hell wasn’t a fiery pit filled with the shrieks of the damned. Oh no. It was thirty yards of frigid water. It was waves that lapped icily over her head and tried to grind her against the massive pilings. It was muscles that ached with effort, fingers and toes that had frozen solid. It was the inability to cry out when her shoulder raked against a clump of barnacles attached to a piling and her soaked sweater—along with the tender flesh beneath—tore free.

  They were all struggling to fight the wave action beneath the giant shadow of the Folkestone Harbor Arm. So even if she had had the breath to exclaim or curse—which she didn’t—she wouldn’t have. She couldn’t draw attention to herself. She knew that the second she did, Dagan would turn his efforts toward helping her. Considering he was already dragging what looked like a bazillion pounds of gear behind him, she reckoned the only person he needed to worry about helping was himself.

  In a far, distant corner of her mind she registered that Rusty had engaged the catamaran’s engines and was piloting the boat back to open water. She had a vague sense of Dagan beside her. Was he shortening his strokes to keep pace with her? She couldn’t be sure. Her brain felt fuzzy, like someone had glued cotton around the inside curve of her skull.

  “J-just a little f-farther,” Dagan said, spitting water from his mouth when a wave washed over his face.

  She couldn’t respond. Her jaw was locked tight. Her arms and legs were completely numb, yet they continued to move. It was a miracle.

  “That’s it.” Dagan’s teeth chattered. “You d-did it. Now, p-put your feet down.”

  Blearily, she looked over to see his shoulders shedding water in sheets. The collar of his woolen sweater hung down to the middle of his chest, and the drooping neckline revealed the upper bulges of his pectoral muscles as well as a dark smattering of hair. Even without her glasses, she could see just how amazingly well put together he was. A man in his prime. Fit as a fiddle and wholly, unabashedly virile.

  She was lost in admiring him, grateful for anything that took her mind off her misery, when he said her name.

  “Wh-what?” Her teeth chattered so fast she reminded herself of a woodpecker. The shadow of the harbor arm lent the whole scene a time-slip feel. How long had she been swimming? Minutes? Hours? Had it been days?

  “P-put your f-feet down,” he said again.

  The words made no more sense the second time than they had the first. She frowned dully.

  “Damnit, Ch-Chels.” He palmed her shoulders and dragged her half out of the water. “Put your feet down. You can touch.”

  She could? Had she really made it? Could it possibly be true?

  Straightening her legs, she was amazed to find that it was. But the minute her feet touched the rocky bottom, she cried out in pain. Her frozen soles sent agony slicing through the bones of her feet, up her shins, and straight into her knees. They buckled.

  She thought she heard Dagan curse. But between the sting in her torn shoulder and the pounding ache in her feet, it was hard to concentrate. Then, before she could make another attempt at standing, she was lifted out of the water and pulled tight against Dagan’s broad chest. Icy water sluiced off her in all directions, and she could feel the immense power of Dagan’s thighs displacing waves as he surged through the surf.

  The salty smell of sea life was overwhelmed by the scent of his shampoo. Beneath that was the unmistakable aroma of strong, healthy man.

  She knew she should tell him to put her down. But she was so cold, and he was so warm. Of their own volition, her arms wrapped around his neck, and the words she heard tumbling from her frozen lips were “Y-you’re ridiculously s-sexy. You know that, r-right?”

  His jaw was clenched against the cold, but when he glanced down at her, there was unmistakable heat in his eyes. “Th-that’s a different tune than the one you w-were singing earlier.”

  “I blame the c-cold.” She attempted a grin, but feared it probably looked more like a grimace. Her shoulder was starting to bark at her like a rabid dog. “Words are b-bypassing my brain on the way t-to my m-mouth.”

  “Maybe you should turn off your brain more often.”

  She pulled back to look at him. He clocked her interest with a raised eyebrow. How was it possible to still want to jump his bones when she was colder than a well digger’s butt in January? That had been another of her father’s little gems. “And th-that’s the same tune you were singing earlier. If memory serves.”

  “What can I say?” He shrugged his shoulders, still powering through the water. The float bag dragged behind him, bobbing lazily in the surf. “I figure if I say it enough, one of these times it’ll sink in.”

  And then he smiled, his teeth flashing brightly.

  Once again, she felt his smile in some deeply fundamental place inside her. A place she dared not name. Following the impact was a hard fist of regret and shame. There was safety in his strong arms, but she suddenly remembered she had no right to claim it.

  “Put me down, Z.” She wriggled in his embrace. “I g-got it.”

  “And I’ve got you,” he insisted, clomping through the waves that now circled his knees.

  “Hey.” She swatted at his chest, doing her best not to get distracted by the dark hair there. The hair that seemed to beckon the stroke of her fingers. Or her lips. “I might be short,” she told him, “b-but I’m far from small. Put me down before you get a herniated disk.”

  The pilings loomed around them like giant, limbless trees. “Every single inch of you is…” He stopped and swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing below his beard. She waited with breathless anticipat
ion for him to finish. When he did, her heart grew so huge she feared it might exceed the limits of her chest cavity. “You’re perfect, Chels.”

  H-h-holy wow.

  His admission felt enormous. Too enormous. “Perfect, huh? Even when I’m volunteering for jobs I’m not qualified for?”

  “Especially then,” he whispered, trudging onto the pebbled shore. “Especially when you’re brave and self-sacrificing and throwing caution to the wind. It makes me insane, but…that doesn’t mean I’d change a damn thing.”

  She couldn’t answer. She was too overcome.

  Everything felt so right and so wrong as he slowly lowered her to the ground. He didn’t take his hands from her waist, and she became mesmerized by the droplets of water that clung to the sleek, dark strands of his beard, by the way his wet hair curled over his forehead and around his temples.

  Her breath hitched at the fierceness in his stormy eyes when she sucked a drop of water from her bottom lip. The world shrank around them. Suddenly, the whole planet was reduced to the inches separating them, to the air they shared when he breathed out and she breathed in.

  “Dagan.” His name tumbled from her lips unbidden.

  His nostrils flared. He leaned forward and she found herself going up on tiptoe, anticipation tightening her belly into a fist. Then Emily’s voice broke the spell.

  “Ah, Christian, I knew you muscle-bound meatheads were g-good for s-something!”

  When Chelsea ripped her gaze away from Dagan, it was to find the others already gathered on shore. Emily and Ace looked like drowned rats—frozen drowned rats—with their arms wrapped around themselves for warmth. Christian was squatted among the multicolored pebbles, tearing open the float bag and handing them their dry things.

  “R-right,” Christian said. “I’m your b-bloke if you ever need help opening a s-stingy lid, have a burning desire to engage in a s-spitting contest, or need someone to haul your g-gear through thirty meters of s-surf.”

  Chelsea felt Dagan’s hands leave her waist. The spots where his big, rough palms had been instantly cooled in the icy breath of the breeze.

  Dagan wasted no time untying the cord around his chest and hauling in the waterproof bag hand over fist. Once it was on shore, he dragged it over the pebbles and out of the reach of the waves. After unrolling the top few inches of fabric, he ripped open the Velcro fitting and lifted out her dry backpack. Once he’d handed it to her, she fumbled to swing it over her shoulder without disturbing her wound any more than was necessary.

  “Girls to the left.” He waved a hand toward a piling in that direction. “Boys to the right.”

  On her way to the appointed spot, Emily stopped beside Dagan and teased, “Next time, it’s my turn to be carried ashore.”

  “If there’s going to be a n-next time, just shoot me now,” Ace grumbled, shouldering his pack and traipsing toward another piling.

  Dagan handed up Chelsea’s socks and boots. Next came her soft, downy coat. The urge to shrug into its promised warmth was only overrun by the desire for it to still be dry once she peeled off her sopping clothes. Of course, just like always, her body temperature jumped ten degrees when Dagan’s fingers accidentally brushed hers.

  Or was it an accident?

  When she glanced at him, there was a definite twinkle in his eye.

  It was insane, this effect he had on her body. And now that he was in full-on seduction mode? It wasn’t an exaggeration to say it was insanity raised to the power of ten.

  How was she supposed to keep resisting him? How was she supposed to—

  “Yo!” Emily called from behind one of the pilings. “Give a s-sister a hand, will ya? My zipper’s stuck!”

  Ripping her eyes away from Dagan’s bold gaze actually made them burn. Or maybe unshed tears were backing up behind Chelsea’s eyeballs. Tears for a dream that might have had a chance to come true if only—

  She stopped her thoughts right there. If only was for suckers and fools, and she was neither.

  Marching behind the piling where Emily was, Chelsea found the woman gritting her teeth and wrestling with the zipper on her…uh…jeans?…with fingers that looked clumsy and numb.

  “Exactly what kind of jeans are th-those?” Chelsea asked, her teeth chattering again now that Dagan’s nearness wasn’t causing her temperature to spike. She eyed the false pockets stitched into the front of Emily’s pants and the zipper that didn’t run down the front of the garment like regular jeans, but down the side of Emily’s hip.

  “They’re not j-jeans.” Emily huffed out a frustrated sigh. “They’re l-leggings made to look like jeans, but they’re way more c-comfortable because they’re made from cotton and elastane and… Ow! Damnit!” Her frozen fingers slipped, and she scraped her knuckles down the length of the metal zipper.

  “Oh, for P-Pete’s sake.” Chelsea dropped her backpack on the beach, ignoring the dirty names her wounded shoulder called her, and fished around in her boot for her glasses. That’s where Dagan had stored them to keep them safe.

  Never accuse that man of not using his head.

  After sliding her purple frames onto her nose—Mistake! Now she could see just how dingy and dirty it was underneath the pier—she approached Emily. “Let me give it a try.”

  “Thanks.” Emily held up the hem of her dripping, long-sleeved T-shirt. The top sported a cartoon face with the words “Melk Man” printed below it. Chelsea knew the slogan was a reference to Melky Cabrera because it was impossible not to keep up with Chicago’s South Side team while living and working with Emily Scott. Come April, the woman ate, slept, and breathed White Sox baseball.

  Squatting, Chelsea grabbed hold of Emily’s slippery zipper and gave it a good tug. Nothing. It didn’t budge an inch. She frowned and pulled the denim…er…elastane out far enough from Emily’s hip to see that some of the thin fabric was caught in the teeth of the zipper.

  “This wouldn’t happen with r-real denim,” Chelsea griped. If her fingers weren’t frozen into ten little sausages, she might be able to pick the fabric free. As it was, she had zero dexterity. It was going to require brute force.

  “But real denim is uncomfortable and hard to m-move around in,” Emily insisted, rubbing her arms and shivering so that Chelsea had a hard time getting hold of the recalcitrant zipper.

  That was another thing about Emily. She might have one of those slim, long-limbed figures that most women would kill for—Chelsea included—but she never flaunted it. In fact, Emily usually hid her lithe physique behind floppy T-shirts and yoga pants. Comfortable clothes.

  How wonderful would it be to still look chic and sexy in comfortable clothes? Chelsea had to rely on a good pair of Spanx, a support bra, and tailored pants and shirts in order not to look like she was wearing a potato sack.

  “And s-supportive,” Chelsea argued around her chattering teeth. “Denim is supportive. It holds in all the w-wiggling. If I tried to wear these things”—she pulled at the elastic material—“it’d be ass and thighs and hips bouncing all over the place.”

  “Braggart.”

  Chelsea’s chin jerked back. “You think that’s bragging?”

  “Have you looked in the mirror lately?” Emily asked, genuine disbelief in her eyes. “You’re a c-centerfold come to life, and I’m…” She wrinkled her nose.

  “Slim and lovely,” Chelsea finished for her. “I’d trade you bodies so fast your head would spin.”

  “Really? Where’s a Freaky Friday dealio when you need it, huh?”

  “Victory is mine!” Chelsea crowed, lifting a triumphant fist when, with a good, hard yank, Emily’s zipper finally came free.

  “Thank you.” Emily groaned in relief. “I thought I was going to have to live in them.”

  Offering a hand down, Emily pulled Chelsea to a stand. The jerk on her injured arm made the wound there grumble with displeasure, but she ignored it as
the two of them shucked their wet clothes.

  The shadows beneath the pier created privacy from the outside world, and the thick piling provided privacy from the men. But Chelsea still hurried to get changed. For one thing, the place was pretty disgusting. A dead, bloated fish lay on the shore not ten feet away among the litter the tide had left behind: a beer can, part of a fishing net, half of a small Styrofoam buoy, and… Was that a fork glinting among the pebbles? The whole place had a smell like wet cement and old decay.

  With her jeans and sweater lying in a soggy heap, she rummaged around inside her backpack, looking for her favorite sweatshirt and a pair of clean jeans. Real jeans. Made of denim. But before she could find either, she heard Emily snort behind her and say, “Jeez, Chelsea. That bra looks like something invented by the Holy Roman Inquisitor.”

  Chelsea glanced down at her flesh-colored bra with its one-inch-thick shoulder straps, industrial-strength underwire, and four heavy-duty hook-and-eye snaps that kept her girls both lifted and strapped in at the same time. Then she looked over at Emily’s dainty black bra with its cute pink bow between the wee cups. The thing’s straps were no bigger than spaghetti noodles. “Now who’s bragging?”

  Emily laughed, and Chelsea shot her a dirty look before turning back to dig through her backpack. She had no time to play tit for tat with Emily—Ha! Tit for tat. Get it?—because she was about sixty seconds away from succumbing to hypothermia.

  Once again, she was thwarted in her endeavors when Emily yelped and said, “Oh my God! Chelsea, you’re bleeding!”

  “What?” she heard Dagan bark from somewhere nearby.

  Glancing down at her shoulder, she saw that her encounter with the barnacles on the piling had resulted in a two-inch gash with ragged edges and sluggishly seeping blood.

  “It’s nothing a little Bactine and a Band-Aid won’t fix.”

  “Oh, for the love of…” Emily sputtered. “My brain hates my eyes for what they’ve just seen.”

  “What?” Chelsea spun around, expecting a crab or a lobster or maybe another big dead fish to be rolling up the beach toward them. But what she saw instead was Emily in fresh black yoga pants with one hand covering her bra-clad chest and the other covering her eyes.