Hot as Sin (Contemporary Romance Box Set)

by Katherine Lace

  Maddy is a hot single momma with attitude. She's only interested in a fake relationship, but I want her forever.

  I met Maddy when I pulled her out of a burning building. One minute I'm doing my job, the next there's a naked woman in my arms. Look, I'm a professional. I don't cross lines, but she's giving me every reason to. She's gorgeous and single.

  Jackpot.

  Except she wants nothing to do with me. All she wants is a fake boyfriend for a few weeks. Someone who'll go on dates with her, dote on her toddler, and treat her like the hottie she is.

  She's crazy if she thinks I'm pretending. I spend more time fantasizing about her curvy body than doing my damn job. I'm not going anywhere without her.

  She's mine-the only flame I will never extinguish.

  Hot Damn

  1

  Maddy

  Maddy

  The theme song to the original series of Star Trek has words, and I’m singing them at the top of my lungs while I’m blasting the soundtrack in my bathroom. The acoustics in here are awesome, and why is it that all bathrooms are great places to sing? It’s a mystery of the universe.

  The song ends, and there’s a moment of silence before the next one starts, broken only by the sound of the water pounding down on me. Then a full orchestra takes over, launching into the end-credit theme from Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

  I’m a girl who knows how to live it the fuck up, I’ll tell you what.

  It’s not often I get to blast music while I’m in the shower. I’m sure my neighbors are happy I don’t do it very often. On the other hand, the nights I can’t play music, they’re probably hearing Christopher cry, scream, or throw tantrums. He does that a lot. I know he’s just a stubborn toddler, but I’ve managed to convince myself on more than one occasion that he acts the way he does because he knows his mother is a failure at life.

  He’s at my sister’s tonight, though, so I don’t have to worry about the things I’m doing wrong that will lead to him having to pursue very expensive therapy when he becomes an adult. Also? I get to take a shower. An actual shower, without a two-year-old banging on the door wanting to know if he can play with the paring knives. Which, by the way, he can’t reach, so at least I’ve got that going for me.

  I also can’t do the “best of season two Original Series Star Trek” marathon I’ve been planning for weeks, because Christopher is inexplicably afraid of Mr. Spock. He’s going to have to get over that before long, or he and I are going to have major difficulties. Such a problem child, my son. But I love him.

  Something about the bass line in the song sounds wrong, but it’s not until the pause before the next song that I realize there’s actually another pounding refrain going on. What the hell? Somebody’s banging on my door. Not my apartment door or the floor above me, either, which is what I would expect if one of the neighbors had gotten pissed at the noise. No—this is the bathroom door. Which means somebody’s inside my house.

  Oh my God.

  I turn the water off and hold very still. What the hell am I going to do? I’ve got a shampoo bottle—could I bludgeon somebody into unconsciousness with that? Finally I decide on the spray cleaner that’s supposed to keep mold from building up on the tile backdrop around the tub. That ought to sting if it gets into somebody’s eyes.

  On the other hand, if the somebody is knocking, are they dangerous?

  “You need to get the hell out, ma’am!” a voice calls from the other side of the door. “This is the fire department. It’s an emergency. You need to vacate the premises immediately!”

  Fire department? Really? I don’t smell any smoke.

  “Leave me alone or I’m going to call the police!” I yell back. I actually have my phone in the bathroom, though I can’t quite reach it from the shower. It’s there in case Mel needs to get ahold of me to tell her how to get Christopher to stop tying ribbons around her dog’s ears or whatever he’s gotten into his head this time around.

  “They’re already on their way!” The voice is deep and masculine and has a nice timbre to it. I bet this guy would sound good singing in my shower.

  Oh my God, what a stupid thought to have when a stranger is pounding on your bathroom door while you’re standing there buck naked with no weapon but a bottle of soap-scum remover.

  “What do you want?”

  “I need you…” WHAM. “…to get out…” SLAM. “…of the bathroom…” SMASH. “…right away…”

  And then suddenly the door bursts open and there he is. A big guy, probably six two, wearing full fireman’s gear. Helmet, face mask—the whole nine yards. Even an axe, for God’s sake.

  I stare at him. He sets the axe aside and takes one long stride across the tile to the tub and grabs at me.

  Which is when I scream, because I’m naked, and he’s dragging me against him. I scrabble for the shower curtain and it tears down with a ripping sound accompanied by the metallic ting of the curtain holders.

  “Let go of that!” he orders.

  “No!” I scream into his face. “What the fuck is wrong with you? I’m naked!”

  “There’s a fire,” he shouts back. “I’m saving your damn life. Or should I just toss you back in there?”

  Before I can answer—assuming he actually wants an answer and it’s not just a rhetorical question—he’s yanked me halfway across the bathroom, dripping shower curtain and all. At this point I’ve gotten a good look at him, even through the mask. Black hair. Gray eyes. A face that should be looking out from a movie screen. Good God, this man is hot.

  Hot. Fireman. I let out a noise that might be a laugh, but it sounds more like a hysterical half-scream. I jerk backward, trying to dislodge the hand he’s got locked around my arm.

  “You seriously need to get out of here,” he says, clenching me tighter. “We’re evacuating the whole building.”

  “Then why isn’t my alarm going off?”

  “I don’t know. Everybody else’s is.” He glances at the iPod stand on the bathroom counter. “Not that you could hear it with all that noise.”

  I grab at the towel I had ready for when I finished my shower and wrap it around myself, dropping the mostly transparent shower curtain. I give him another once-over. He’s got a name tag stitched on the outside of his fire gear: JESSE.

  “That isn’t noise. It’s music.”

  “It’s loud enough I’m surprised anybody else on this floor could hear their alarms, either. Now come on.”

  “No. I’m going to grab something to put on—”

  He picks me up. Just picks me up like I’m nothing, and after two years of single-mothering, I can guarantee you I weigh a lot more than nothing.

  I don’t have much more than nothing on, though, and I try to jerk at my towel to cover as much as I can. He just shifts his arms, rolling me closer to his chest. I can’t tell if my bare ass is hanging out for the world to see or if it just feels like it is.

  “What are you doing?” I scream at him.

  “Saving you from a fiery death.” His voice is loud but matter-of-fact.

  “Put me down!”

  He ignores me as he carries me toward my own front door, which I now notice has been bashed in much like my bathroom door. Jesus, how did I miss that? Oh, right. I couldn’t hear it past the music.

  I pound him on the shoulder, which doesn’t slow him down one bit. “Put me down! I’m going to sue the city for this!” Is that who you sue when you’re dragged naked out of your shower by a hot fireman? I don’t even know.

  “This is my job, ma’am,” he replies, and turns sideways to head through the door.

  “Your job is to drag naked women out of the shower?”

  “When they’re not listening to my instructions, yes. Sometimes they even thank me.”

  No way in hell.

  But then I see the lights outside, through the windows along the hall. They’re flashing red. He heads for the stairwell and backs through that door, and as we hit the stairs, I start to smell smoke.
<
br />   “Can you smell that?” he says.

  “Yes,” I admit. My tone is pouty, but in truth my heart has started a shaky, panicked beat, and my fight-or-flight responses have kicked in in the form of a dizzying dose of adrenaline. It’s probably a good thing he’s carrying me, or I probably would just collapse on the concrete stairs and take a header right to the next landing.

  I’m starting to notice how strong he is, how easily he’s carrying me, how hard the muscles of his chest feel through his fireman’s gear. This guy is stacked. He’s the kind of fireman you’d find in one of those steamy calendars they sell online for charity.

  Shit. He’s still talking.

  “This is standard procedure. The main alarms go off in this building, and everybody has to evacuate, regardless of the size of the fire or where it started.”

  “So it’s not a big fire?”

  “I didn’t say that. I won’t know until I get down to the trucks to talk to the other guys.” He shoulders through the door to the ground floor. “Judging by the amount of smoke, though, I’d say it’s probably fairly minor. Just situated so it triggered the main alarms.”

  I realize he’s heading toward the glass doors that lead into the lobby. There are people out there. A lot of people. All my neighbors and tenants I’ve never met, who will now see far more of me than I ever wanted them to. Not to mention more firemen.

  Fireman Jesse, though, rolls me toward his chest and tweaks my towel. When he moves through the glass doors he turns his body so I’m mostly sheltered from prying eyes, then he carries me to a bench under a tree that’s several yards from the front of the building.

  “There,” he says, his arms loosening. “You can sit here. It’s dark, so nobody can really see you, and if you keep that towel just right, you should be okay.”

  He’s being considerate. He’s being nice. But all I can think about is the fact that he barged into my bathroom, saw me completely naked, and then dragged me out without so much as a by-your-leave. And now he’s leaving me here in the dark with nothing but a towel, with all my neighbors and probably half the residents of the two adjacent buildings all lining the streets so they can see my hoo-haw if I move wrong.

  I look up at him as I take a seat on the bench. He’s still standing there, poised as if he thinks I might need more help, and our eyes lock. I clench my teeth, ready to rip him a couple more new ones, but then…

  It’s a moment. I’ve had moments before, so I know them when they happen, and this is definitely one. His blue eyes are bright and sincere even in the near-dark, even through the face mask of his helmet. His lips part slightly as if he’s about to say something, then he closes them and his tongue slips out, moistening the top lip. Whatever he was about to say, it looks like he decided against it.

  That doesn’t keep me from staring at his mouth, at the way his tongue strokes across it, and it doesn’t keep my thighs from slicking up, which is all I need while I’m sitting on a wooden bench outside in the dark in nothing but a towel. And that makes me really angry.

  “So it was a tiny little fire, and you hauled me out of my apartment by my hair like some kind of goddamn Neanderthal for no good reason?”

  Those eyes go from clear, open sapphire to a sparking fire-blue. “You were in an active fire zone.”

  I look at the smoking apartment building. “Doesn’t look very active to me.”

  “It takes seconds for a fire to get out of control,” he says with a growl, losing his professional monotone. “It was bad enough to set off the alarms—” He breaks off, eyes narrowing. “And why didn’t your alarm go off? Everybody else in the building had smoke detectors blazing.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s broken.” I snarl it out, beyond angry now, not sure if I’m mad at him because of what he did or because he’s so damned good looking it should be illegal.

  “You don’t know?” He’s annoyed now. “You’re supposed to change the batteries when you change your clocks, in the spring and the fall. So you don’t forget. So you don’t get caught in a fire. How is that hard?”

  “You’re also not supposed to drag naked people out of the shower!” It’s a weak counterattack, since we’ve already gone over that, but I’m still pissed about it. “How is that hard?”

  “If your alarm was working, it wouldn’t have even been a problem. You’d have been out of there already.”

  He’s right. Which makes me even more pissed. And the reason I didn’t change the batteries when the clocks changed is that they were fine when I tested them, and I didn’t see the point in spending money on new batteries when the alarm is working and I’ve got bills to pay and a kid to feed. But I’m sure Fireman Jesse doesn’t know anything about that kind of dilemma.

  “It doesn’t give you an excuse to come charging in like some kind of caveman.” Weirdly, the thought gives me a not-unpleasant tingle.

  “Actually, it does.”

  Gritting my teeth, I grab the towel where it’s bunched together just above my breasts and hold it tight while I push to my feet. “I’m not standing out here in the dark and the cold in nothing but a towel when there’s nothing at all wrong with my apartment.”

  I start to stomp back toward the building, but he interrupts my perfectly choreographed angry exit by grabbing my arm.

  “You sit your ass down,” he snaps. “No one can go back into the building until we’ve checked everything and given the all clear.”

  “Hey, Chief!” The voice comes from near one of the fire trucks, and Jesse’s head jerks up in response. Interesting. So he’s the chief? So that probably means it’s his fault the all clear hasn’t been sounded yet. He looks like he has, indeed, been caught out, and he half backs toward the man who called after him, still waving a pointy, judgmental finger in my direction.

  “You stay right there. Do not move.”

  “Right,” I say. I cross my arms over my chest and plop back down on the bench.

  This is not the way I wanted my evening to go.

  2

  Jesse

  Jesse

  There’s still smoke in the air, the guys are waiting for me to tell them what to do, and all I can think about is the hot, naked girl I yanked out of her shower like it was no big deal.

  Like a fucking Neanderthal. Yep, just like that. Not exactly the kind of thing that happens to a guy every day. Not even a firefighter.

  I can still feel her glaring at me. Never mind that quick moment of connection we had—she’s still hella pissed. It’s all I can do not to look back over my shoulder at where I know she’s sitting, just to take in all that heat in her eyes. Okay, it’s more than all I can do, because I give in and look.

  I can’t quite catch it, though. She’s half in the shadows where I put her so the other guys couldn’t gawk at her, and she doesn’t look like she’s going to move out into the light anytime soon. I don’t blame her. In fact, I’m glad. I don’t want those testosterone-fueled assholes I work with at the fire station ogling her.

  Harsh, dude. Way to talk about your coworkers.

  Okay, no, they’re not assholes. But there’s a protective streak about ninety-seven miles wide running through me right now. I don’t want anybody else seeing her.

  I focus back on the courtyard where the fire truck sits, still flashing red light across the side of the apartment building. I shake my head, trying to dislodge the image of her that’s floating in the backs of my eyeballs. Completely naked, pale skin, brownish nipples. Reddish-gold hair, soaking wet, trailing down over her breasts. Nice breasts, too. More than a handful. More than a nice mouthful, in fact, and suddenly I’m feeling the hard, rough textures of a nipple on my tongue. Damn.

  And yes, I looked. The triangle between her upper thighs matched the hair on her head. That reddish tint doesn’t come out of a bottle, that’s for sure. I’m not sure why that’s such a turn-on, except every damn thing about her is a turn-on. She’s like a walking Viagra bottle. Cialis on a stick.

  It’s not like I haven’t carr
ied naked chicks out of houses before. Usually, though, it’s been in my role as paramedic rather than fireman. Usually they’ve been unconscious, elderly, or both. This one was neither. I can almost still feel her wiggling against my chest. Damn. It’s enough to make me want to turn right around and go grab her, take her back upstairs, and fuck the hell out of her, fire be damned.

  Not that she’d let me after I tore into her like that, though. I shouldn’t have done it, but it just seemed to happen. Like my brain was trying to find some way to distract itself from her body, and the only way it could come up with was to chew her out.

  Interesting, since what I’d really like to do is eat her out.

  “Chief King!” Whitaker’s running up to me. “Are we going in yet to be sure everything’s clear?”

  It takes me a second to register that he’s talking to me. I’m still not used to being called “Chief.” I might not be chief long enough to get used to it, as a matter of fact. Especially not if I can’t start acting more professional.

  I blink hard to get my thoughts refocused. “Yeah. You’re with me. Let’s go.”

  Whitaker joins me at the front entrance, and we head into the apartment building.

  “Best we can tell, it’s isolated to 2B,” Whitaker says. I nod and lead the way up to the second floor.

  The smoke gets thicker as we move up the stairwell, so I know we’re getting closer to the origin of the fire. It wasn’t too thick on the fourth floor; I’d noticed while I was up there evacuating a certain shower. Maybe that was why her alarm hadn’t gone off. Maybe she hadn’t deserved to be yelled at, after all.

  Of course she didn’t deserve to be yelled at. You were just mad at your own dick.

  Wouldn’t be the first time.

  I step back and let Whitaker precede me into 2B. There’s quite a bit of damage in this apartment, and it reeks of burned fabrics. It’s a plasticky stench—polyester and Styrofoam, I’d say. Sure enough, as we move into the living room it becomes immediately apparent that the fire started there, on the couch. The char patterns all point straight to it.