Slow Burn (Forbidden Heat Book 3) Read online

  “Well, how do you know what any of these women might have to offer you if you don’t put yourself out there? And don’t give me the age thing again. We are the same age. I’m not feeling that pull any more than you are.”

  “You’ve been with the same woman for five years,” I reminded him. “You are set. Consider yourself lucky.”

  “I am,” Max said. “When is your luck coming?”

  “I do consider myself lucky,” I said. “But I’m lucky that I’ve had a lot of time to throw myself into my passions. I’m doing a lot of great things. I don’t need a woman in my life. And I’m not going to risk my career I’ve busted my ass for by trying to do something crazy.”

  “That’s good to know,” Max said. “You had me worried for a second.”

  We continued practicing the routine for several more minutes. When Shelly came back in, she sent us through several rounds of squatting routines until our legs were so sore we could hardly stand up. This girl was brutally tough. Standing was becoming something of an issue for me and we were just getting started.

  As we went through the exercises, I found that I tried to work just a little bit harder when Shelly was close to me. It was bit juvenile, but a part of me wanted to impress her with my abilities. I’ve always been in shape, ever since high school, but this was a workout that I had not expected and it was even harder than the grueling weight workout I’d already put myself through that morning.

  Maybe Max was right. I was developing something for this woman. The spark that I hadn’t felt in a long time for anyone was finally there. And it was the worst place that it could have happened. No, this was wrong. I had to be very careful here. I needed to remind myself of what might happen if I even gave any serious thought to pursuing this woman. Even if there was a mutual spark between us, I wasn’t going to let this flourish knowing what it would mean for both of our careers.

  No, I would have to keep it well hidden and do my best to ignore those feelings I was now having for her. She was perfect. I could have watched her all day. I loved the sweet sound of her voice, the smooth, confident manner that she explained things, and the way her body moved gently through the air as if she were walking through some sort of invisible water fall.

  When we finished the training class, my shift was over. I left the room and said goodbye to some of the fellas before heading home. But as I walked out of the training room, I noticed something peculiar. Shelly was looking at me. It was only for a moment and then she was gone, busy with something else. But I could have sworn that she was staring right at me with a little smile on her beautiful face.

  Wow… was this attraction mutual? From that look, I would have said yes, but I still didn’t have enough to go on. I wasn’t sure if the look really happened the way I hoped it did, of if she just happened to glance in my general direction. I wanted so badly for it to be real. That would at least lend validation to my own lust. And that’s what it really was. It was lust. I knew almost nothing about Shelly, but I wanted her badly. I was lusting after her with an animal instinct that was persistent and fully engaged. It was hard to ignore. I wondered what was really going on in that beautiful mind of hers.

  As I tried to go on about my day, my mind kept going back to Shelly. What did this mean? Was it some fleeting attraction that would end at some point in the near future? Or was this something that I was never going to be able to outrun and would literally have to live with for several years? As I sat down in my easy chair with a cold beer ready to kick back to catch a ball game, I found myself wondering what I was doing even having those kinds of thoughts. It was dangerous territory to tread in and the payoff just wasn’t worth it.

  I would have to make sure that I didn’t allow these feelings to grow and turn into something. That, I knew, was going to be much harder than I thought.

  Chapter Two

  Shelly

  I woke up screaming.

  The world had come crashing down on top of me and I felt utterly broken. My body, mind, my entire being was completely shot. I was gone. Worse yet, he was gone. Edward. He was totally gone. And I would never get him back. I could have done something more. I kept telling that to myself. It was all I’d told myself since it happened almost a year ago.

  I wiped my eyes. They were flooded with tears. My heart was pounding a mile per minute in my chest and I thought I was going to have a total nervous breakdown. I had to stay calm. It would be alright. I would be fine.

  But I knew that I would never really be alright ever again. I was broken in so many ways. I’d done my best to run from it, but it would always be deeply inside of me and I would carry it with me always. I wanted the pain to stop, but I never wanted to let it go. It was too precious, too special to me to ever bare to not have it.

  I was covered in sweat. The bed was wet. I felt sick to my stomach, but I knew all of this would pass. As I stood up, my head began to spin. This was the sickness, just the anxiety getting to me. It was not real. Those feelings were a smokescreen designed to give me the illusion that I had no power in my life. That wasn’t true. I had power. I had some control. I would never relinquish it. I was determined to beat it.

  Pulling myself out of the bed, I dropped to the floor and started doing military style pushups. Exercise always helped when I was in the grip of a panic attack. Most of them tend to happen after I’d been having the nightmares. I thought I had them under control, but they’d come back lately. It was probably just moving to a new place and trying to get on with my life. My mind was rebelling against these changes. The trauma demanded that I give it the focus it was after. It wanted to ruin my life. But I was stronger than that, stronger than it. I would prevail.

  I finished the pushups and jumped to my feet where I promptly started doing body squats. I was aiming to hit fifty. If the panic had not subsided by then, I would go back to the pushups. The activity was usually enough to get my mind and body on the same page, enough to distract me from the overwhelming feeling of impending doom. And this was the first step to healing.

  At least, that was what the therapist I used to see had said. He was a good man, but in the end I realized I had to leave town. I’d lost the love of my life, and I’d lost my job, which was the other love of my life. I’d been fired because I ran to save Edward, and not the victims. In the end, all had perished. I’d saved no one. Except myself. But I was broken, seemingly beyond repair.

  I’d been given a prescription to help with the anxiety, but I never had taken it. I hate drugs. I’ve never been a person who thinks that I need to introduce strange chemicals into my body to create a natural state.

  I had developed some post-traumatic stress after the fire. But I was ok. I would get through everything even if I had to climb and claw tooth and nail to make it happen. I was a fighter. And now I was fighting constantly.

  It was a quarter after five, a little earlier than I wanted to get up typically, but I grabbed my clothes and decided it was a good time to start my jog. I was already feeling better. The panic attack had subsided for the most part and now I was free to start my day.

  After the jog, I felt totally rejuvenated. No matter how badly I woke up feeling, I always felt better after I had a few miles under my feet. I got into the shower, and then fixed myself a nice breakfast of scrambled eggs, toast, and some fruit. Then I headed out the door to work.

  So far, everyone at work had been treating me very nicely. It seemed like a great crew to get to work with and so far the first training class had gone very well. Speaking of which, I found that the man I had worked with during demonstrations, Gary, his face kept popping up in my mind. He was so handsome. He was tall, muscular, and very fit. I enjoyed heaving his heavy form onto my back and carrying him a few feet for the demonstration the day before. He felt great against my skin, and I loved the way he smelled. There was something strong and musky about his scent. It was delicious and I found myself thinking a lot of naughty thoughts about him, such as running my tongue alongside his hard body.

&n
bsp; But that was not going to happen. The chief had made it very clear right from the start, that there would be no fraternization among crew members. It had been like that at the station I’d worked before in Detroit also. I fully intended to make sure nothing like that happened again. Not after Edward, and not after I’d been fired. I had lost everything.

  In fact, I shouldn’t have been allowed to be here. But I’d faked my references on my resume. When Chief Walker called my former Chief, Dwayne Riley, he was actually talking to my previous neighbor Chuck. It was a silly ruse, but it had worked. This station, here in Chicago, did not need to know anything about my past. I was determined to make sure they never found out anything.

  I walked into the breakroom and saw a few of the other ladies there. The department was predominantly men, but there were more women getting involved all the time. This unit had almost ten. And so far, most of them seemed very nice and accepting. Of course, there was the girl who thought she was top dog and would make sure to enforce that upon the newbies at first. I was used to it and I was used to ignoring it as it went into the toilet and I began to establish myself.

  I didn’t play those silly games.

  “How’s it going, Shelly?” Becky Wheeler said when I entered the room. I grabbed the pot of coffee and poured myself a cup. Then I sat down beside her to drink it.

  I smiled after the first sip. I loved that morning cup of coffee. It was a nice reward after all of the hard work I’d already put in that day.

  “It’s going,” I said. “You ready for another fun filled day?”

  “Always. No news is good news for us, but I have to admit I’m pretty bored just sitting around here. The past month we’ve been slammed, and now we are dead as can be with nothing.”

  “Yeah, these things tend to come in cycles. It was that way in Detroit, too.”

  Becky nodded. “So, who do you have your eye on?”

  I looked at her. What did she just say?

  She laughed. “Don’t worry. I would never say anything, but it appears that you are a bit distracted. I typically know that look, mostly because I see it on the face of several girls around here every single day.”

  I laughed. “But what about the no fraternizing rule?”

  “Oh, it’s a rule,” she said. “And no one is going to break it, but we all have our eyes locked on the guy we want if that rule ever goes away.”

  I laughed. “You think that this rule has a shot of not appearing in the annals of history anymore? Good luck with that.”

  “Well, you have to be somewhat optimistic,” she said. “But seriously, who would you choose?”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to play this game. I didn’t know anyone here that I trusted that much with a secret. I wasn’t sure why, but I had the feeling that Becky was fishing for something that she could use against me somehow. I felt that she was a little bit threatened by me in general and wanted to take me down a peg, maybe make me feel inferior.

  “No one,” I said. “I wouldn’t think of breaking that rule. It’s in place for a good reason.”

  “Hey, ladies,” Jasmine said entering the room. She also grabbed some coffee and let out a wide yawn as she did so.

  “Rough night?” Becky asked.

  “Yeah, I was out too late. My girlfriends dragged me to this new club opening up called the Hell Beast club. What in the world was I thinking?”

  “Hell beast club? What type of place is that?” I asked. It sounded curious, but not the type of place that Jasmine might hang out.

  “It’s some dive heavy metal bar, but somehow it’s getting really popular and poppy at the same time. It feels like the owners are totally stuck in the eighties.”

  “Well, that sounds like my kind of place, then,” I said.

  “Uh, oh. Are you getting into this eighties nostalgia scene, too?” Becky asked.

  “Yeah. I love the eighties. They had the best music and the best movies. All my favorites.”

  Becky shook her head smiling. “Why does that not surprise me?”

  “What?” I asked with a giggle.

  “I sometimes think you have nineteen eighties John Hughes, teen girl hair.”

  I was confused. My hair is mostly straight down my back and there has never been that much style in it. I like to keep things natural and no one has ever said it needed changed. And even if they suggested it, I wouldn’t bother.

  “I’ll take that,” I said. “I love those movies.”

  “Me too!” Jasmine chimed in. She gave me a high five and we shared a giggle.

  “There is too much fun going on in here,” Teri Calendo said arriving on the scene. Out of the group of us, Teri had the most style and spent the most time in beauty salons. She was a tough girl, but she spent way too much time worrying about her looks. It seemed that she was always going on about some new guy she was dating, and we were just supposed to keep up. Never mind that she dated another guy every few weeks, or at least that was what the girls had been talking about yesterday. I’ve always done my best to stay out of cliques and I hate gossip, but this was too sweet to ignore. Besides, I was trying to make some friends. I was the new girl in the great big city. It was very intimidating.

  “Right on schedule!” Becky announced giving Teri a high five when she walked in. Teri was a pretty redheaded girl with a bubbly spirt and a huge heart. Whereas Becky could be cold and even vindictive, Teri was quite the opposite.

  Teri sat down at the table and leaned back in the chair. She had been through something that she wanted to talk about, that much was clear to me. I was only mildly interested. Teri was the shallowest of the girls, from what I had gathered thus far, but then again she might actually have had the most interesting story.

  “What’s up with you Teri?” Jasmine asked.

  “Mark, that’s what,” Teri replied. “That man is on so much thin ice with me.”

  “Do tell,” Jasmine encouraged. “Spice up our lives as much as you can, please,” she said.

  “Ok, well the jerk takes me out last night to a nice dinner at Shawn’s Palace. You know the place? It is usually awesome, right? Well, the dinner was fine. The service was fine. I didn’t see a problem.”

  “So, what happened”? Becky asked. She appeared to be getting annoyed that the story was taking too long.

  “Well, towards the end of dinner, I catch him checking out this sexy girl walking by with another man. This guy looked like her father. This girl could not have been more than twenty-one. She had to have been celebrating a birthday or something. The man blatantly looked at her right in front of me!”

  “That man would be missing some testicles if he’d done that to me,” Becky said.

  “I would be down for keying his car,” Jasmine added.

  I had to giggle. These girls were ruthless.

  “Then after he can tell I’m clearly pissed at him, he wants me to get all sexy later on. What is it with men that they think sex can fix everything?”

  “They have two brains and the one down below is the boss,” I added.

  “Right you are,” Jasmine laughed. She turned back to Teri. “So, did you do it?”

  The other girls laughed and gave each other high fives. Teri looked annoyed. “What makes you think that I gave in after that?”

  “Because we know you, and we know how charming Mark can be. The guy has your number. No matter what wrongs he does, he will always end up in your bed.”

  Teri tried to keep a straight face, but after a few seconds she could no longer hold it together. “You know me too well. Yes, I gave in.”

  The girls cheered and clapped. Teri tried to defend her actions. “But the man is just too sexy. He is wild in bed. And he knows it. That’s like my kryptonite. Sex of that level is so hard to find in a mostly decent man.”

  “Mostly decent?” Jasmine asked.

  “Well, he doesn’t commit crimes, and I’m very certain that he would never actually cheat on me. I have that security, which is tough to find in a man. He just has a fe
w rough edges I need to iron out.”

  Hearing these ladies talk about their romantic woes was refreshing. Even though Teri was complaining about her man, it was obvious that she loved him and that she was really glad to have him in her life. It was a luxury of a happy woman, to complain about the little things her man did that drove her crazy.

  I missed that. I really missed having that in my life, but since Edward, there had been nobody else. I was alone and right now, that’s how I felt it should stay. I had too much baggage to push on someone else. Nobody wanted to start a relationship with a woman who had that kind of heavy burden hanging on her. It wasn’t right.

  And I knew that my heart couldn’t take it. It had been through the ringer. I’d moved on and I was trying to start fresh in my life. Right now it was important that I just focus on doing a good job, and slowly rebuilding my life. Maybe one day I would be ready to love again. But I truly felt that would be a long time in the future.

  How wrong I was…

  Chapter Three

  Gary

  I slide onto the bar stool and wince slightly. My leg was hurting a little bit from the sparring session I’d had earlier. I went to the Wicked Fist dojo a few times a week to practice kickboxing. I’d been into martial arts since I was a teenager and it was one of those things that helped me stay in great physical shape, but the real payoff was the great stress relief it offered me. In a job like mine, you really needed something to keep your sanity. Kickboxing was a fairly healthy option.

  But sometimes it did leave a few bruises. I’d misread Charlie’s movements, and he had caught me with an oblique kick to the inner thigh. It would be a bit sore for a couple of days, but I would live. Charlie and I had been sparring together for a few years now. He was a good guy and he surprisingly got along great with the guys in the crew, despite being an office manager in a local real estate office and not a fireman.

  “So, how’s life been treating you?” Charlie asked me.