Page 10 of Sparks with the Firefighter

"It's a photograph⁠—"

"It's a set of measurements," he says. "It's a color, and a shape, and a lean on the last G. I've got a shop with a table saw in it and a stack of cedar I can't do anything with until Lumberjack Days pays for that pad." He shrugs one shoulder. "Send me the picture."

I stare at him.

"You want to rebuild my ugly sign."

"I want to build your sign." He says it like a man reading off a work order.

Something enormous turns over in my chest and I cannot get a breath around it.

"Thoran—"

"You don't have to hang it out front," he says. "Hang it over the dryers. Hang it in the back where nobody sees it but you. That's not my business."

And that's what does it. It’s not the offer. It’s the way he hands it to me and then takes his hands off it.

I look up at him in the gold light coming down between two buildings, with the whole town roaring on the other side of that wall about a couple who is supposed to be pretending. I take a breath because I know if I do this, I will lose myself in an instant.

I do it anyway.

I reach up and take a fistful of his shirt. I feel my way across the chiseled lines in his stomach. Thoran doesn't move. Not one inch. Instead, he lets me pull. He lets me be the one who closes the space between us.

In the half second before my mouth finds his I understand that he's been standing here this whole time waiting for me to decide. Then I kiss him, and he stops waiting. Our lips press together and he parts them with his tongue. It’s desperate and full of heat.

His hand comes off the wall and slides into my hair. He cradles the back of my head like it's something breakable. His other hand finds my waist and gathers me in. He kisses me the way he does everything else, unhurried and certain.

My back meets the block wall. His thumb moves along my jaw. Somewhere on the other side of six inches of concrete a crowd cheers about something that has nothing to do with us. Then I can't hear anything over the sound of my own breathing.

I lose myself exactly the way I knew I would. But the terrible part is that this kiss doesn't feel like losing anything at all. It feels like being handed something back.

He breaks first, barely. Rests his forehead against mine. His hand stays in my hair. "Vivien." My name comes out rough. “Let me take you home.”

CHAPTER SEVEN THORAN

Her house is quiet in a way I've never heard a house be quiet when we explode through the front door. The floors are old and creaky. A clock somewhere is doing its work. Drew’s at his dad’s house until tomorrow.

My pulse goes hard and fast and it's trying like hell to outrun my common sense. It’s working. Vivien looks up at me. Her eyes catch what's left of the streetlight coming through the window, and there's heat in them. More than that there’s a promise under the heat, and that is something that makes my chest hurt.

The air between us gets thick and charged. I lift her by her thighs and she wraps her legs around my waist. My manhood springs to life rock hard and desperate for more friction as my mouth plants kisses down her neck and into the swell of her breasts.

We don't make it out of the doorway with much on. Her hands are quicker than mine and a lot less careful. My shirt goes somewhere by the couch. I get the buttons on hers open two at a time and she laughs against my mouth. We leave a trail down the narrow hallway to her room.

Her bedroom's cooler. The window's cracked and there's night air coming in off the lagoon and moving across her bare shoulders. She shivers. I put my hands on her arms and rub the warmth back into them and she leans her forehead against my chest and just breathes there for a second.

That sentence pounds in my mind all over again. Oh. There you are. It comes with the same intensity as the firehouse. It makes the same clean turn in my chest, like a bolt dropping into a hole it was machined for.

There's a lamp on the dresser with a scarf over it, throwing everything soft and amber. Her quilt smells like line-dry and something faintly sweet. My shadow goes long across her wall when I move, and I take my time about it, because I know exactly what this is and I'm not going to rush a single second of it.

When I kiss her again it's different than the alley. It’s deeper, a promise. Her mouth opens under mine and her hands come up around the back of my neck. She makes a sound into my mouth that undoes about thirty years of self-discipline and threatens to undo me.

I bury my fingers in her long hair. She tips her head back and lets me. Her throat is bare and breath shaking. I put my mouth on the hollow at the base of her neck and feel her pulse hammering right there under my lips.

"Thoran I want to do this, it’s been a long time and I’m⁠—"

"I've got you. Trust me."

I lay her back on the quilt. Get my knee up on the bed and follow her down, and when my weight settles over her, her hands go flat on my chest like she needs to feel that my heart's doing the same thing hers is.