Page 79 of Full Moon Frenzy

Trapp laughed, stroking her back. “Yeah, we all need therapy. Like, real bad. It is not a good idea to have a kid for a competition with my brothers. Learn from me. It is not worth it. Jackson and Grayson have been in a death match since infancy, and despite his outward performance, Jackson is just as bad. It’s never going to end. They just keep upping the ante. Gray is probably right, though, about Owen, that sneaky fuck. Doing what I did and not getting in trouble for it. Fucking typical."

Adriana hummed. “Well, I don’t think we need to have a baby tomorrow. I’m just saying, we did say we were open to the idea. If we could win a contest in the process . . .”

She got up to brush her teeth, and Trapp picked up his phone, ensuring his alarm was set for the next morning. The calendar invite from Gray was there in the corner.

Groomsmen anal sunning appointment - NON-NEGOTIABLE -Trapp’s idea

Trapp closed his eyes, smiling in the darkness. He hadn’t lost his person at all. He’d found her again and learned an important lesson.

It turned out he had a type of favorite person, and he was surrounded by them.

Adriana

She had lived in the city for years, and the nonstop sound of traffic and sirens was background noise to which she was completely immune.

Here, though, in Cambric Creek, that nonstop city churn didn’t exist. Here, she was able to hear the rush of water from the downtown falls, the buzzing of cicadas in the trees, the merry little bell of the trolley. That night the air was rent with the wail of sirens. Adriana might have slept through it, if it hadn’t gone on for so long.

She could pick out the long, sonorous call of a hook and ladder, the more piercing wail of an ambulance, the sirens coming in an endless wave. Stations Two and Twelve. Battalion Two. Medic Forty-three. She’d never understood why civilians had police scanners, but now . . . She would’ve given anything to have known what units had been called in for whatever calamity was happening. All of them. You already know it’s all of them.

She paced around her townhouse, down one staircase, down the next, peering out her front door, walking all the way back up to the very top, deciding at length that she could not stay indoors for another second.

The air already carried the smell of smoke, and she hunched against it, twisting in agony. She had spent fifteen years hating Trapp Hemming, and only realized in the past several months that hatred was just love on a discordant frequency. And now, the thought of him in peril made her frantic.

She was a fool, she told herself as she slid behind the wheel of her small SUV. Foolish, but she knew herself. There was no way she could do anything but twist in agony until she knew he was safe. As she drove to the firehouse that night, she wondered if his mother was pacing the floors of her giant house at that moment, wondering the same.

It felt as though hours had passed before the vehicles began returning, one by one, in a silent, dark line. She was parked across the street from the station, in the same angled spot she’d parked in during their shift together. Her eyes scanned the ambulances, picking Oleg out almost immediately, but Trapp was not with him. He wasn’t in the next rig that pulled in, nor was he part of the crew piling out of the water tanker.

She swung around, facing the big garage where the two fire trucks had pulled in. Her feet were carrying her across the street before she could make the conscious decision to do so.

“Trapp?”

Her lungs were tight, unable to draw breath, and then — there he was. Already shrugged out of his heavy turnout coat, blue station T-shirt tight across his pectorals, his face smudged in black, hair sticking up haphazardly. Safe.

He did a double take upon seeing her, walking out of the garage with his hands up questioningly. “Adi?” His eyes slid down her body, and Adriana realized she was still wearing her pajama shorts and a thin tank top, with nothing over it but her ancient waffle-print robe, her feet stuffed into her rubber clogs. “What the hell are you doing here? It’s the middle of the night!”

“The sirens woke me up, and I just, I just had to know.” Her voice broke, and her mouth kept moving, sound already drying up, her breath hitching, heat rushing to her face. I was anxious about going to the cabin tomorrow, and I was spiraling, and I thought I had invited karma to do something terrible. “I just had to know that you were okay.”

His smile was blindingly white through the grime and sweat on his face. “Oh, baby, I can fight fires all day. This shit is easy compared to the box.”

She choked out a laugh, realizing that she was crying. “I just had to know.”

“I would pick you up and do some sort of sexy fireman carry like in the movies, but I’m literally contaminated right now, so, you know. BSI. You look adorable, though.”

She was still laughing, still crying, hugging herself as she nodded. “BSI. Copy that. I’ll see you at home.”

“I love you,” he called out, laughing.

He was safe. He was fine. “I love you too.” And tomorrow night, you’re going to turn with someone for the very first time, but it’ll be fine. You’ll be with him.

* * *

The forest, at night, was a revelation.

The smell was intoxicating. Wet loamy soil on the bank of the lapping water, the aromatic stickiness of pine pitch, and then the lake itself, tickling her nose. Her sharp, amber eyes could pick out so many tiny details that were lost to her eyes in her upright bones. She could see movement in the brush, the scurrying of tiny rodents. Heard the flapping of wings above her head — bats and owls and fluttering moths, a nocturnal symphony caught in the branches of the trees.

She hadn’t wanted to be here. She could not remember the conversation that had taken place earlier that day in her other skin, when they’d arrived, but she could still taste the fear she’d felt, the trepidation and self-consciousness.

The cabin was larger than she’d expected, set back from a beautiful, private lake. There was a boat dock, several canoes in a little shed, peaceful and secluded, deep in the woods. Sunlight dappled through sugar maples and towering pines, making the water glitter on the lake’s placid surface.