Coming Soon

Flash Point

Book 2 in The Kilgore Fire Series

6-2-16

Chapter 1

You and me. Bed. Now.

-Masen to her cat, Jetson.

Masen

“I hope these cookies taste okay,” I muttered to Mia.

Mia’s eyes turned to me.

“They taste fine,” she said. “Stop carrying on about them.”

I muttered something that sounded much like ‘fuck you’ to her under my breath.

I refrained from saying, ‘how do you know?’

I wasn’t trying to be a bitch. But I really, really didn’t want to be here.

Why?

Because Bowe was here.

Bowe was a guy I’d met online through a dating sight.

At first, I’d liked him.

I was ready not to be alone anymore, and he’d been great.

But then I started the comparing.

It happened with every single man, never failed.

I’d compare the hair. The eyes. The voice. The personality. Everything.

And I always found them lacking.

I didn’t think it was fair of me to hold them to standards that they’d never, ever compare to.

Nobody was Booth.

That was the end of it.

And I was destined to be alone.

Bowe, however, didn’t feel the same.

He thought we could work…and he was clearly going to keep trying.

I, on the other hand, wasn’t looking forward to what it meant to have him ‘try’ to win me over.

Something he’d said he’d be doing.

Bowe wasn’t a bad guy.

In fact, he was incredibly attractive.

He was tall, Italian, and stacked.

He had black hair, but I preferred brown.

He had deeply tanned skin, I preferred sun kissed.

He had a rich, deep baritone that was smooth like dark chocolate.

What I preferred, though, was deep and husky. The type of voice that always sounded like it’d smoked a pack a day, but had never touched a cigarette in his life.

See, nobody would ever win.

I had what I wanted in my mind, and nobody would ever touch that again.

Nobody but him.

“Hey there,” Bowe said once I entered the main room.

I hid my grimace. Barely.

I smiled congenially at him, but made no move towards him.

I wouldn’t be, either.

He took a step forward, my guess, to come to me, but I looked away and didn’t see any other progress.

Mostly because my eyes were trained on a man’s across the room.

The first time I’d seen those eyes, I’d been enraptured.

They were a rich green that really struck me stupid.

But then you got to the pupil of his left eye, and you never knew what hit you.

He had flecks of brown above and below his left eye’s pupil, making it look as if, from far away, as if he had the slit pupil of a cat.

It was amazing, and truly one of a kind.

People used to call him freaky…and maybe to someone else, it would have been.

But to me, it was pure and utter beauty.

Booth stared at me as I stared at him, watching me with those eyes that looked to be ravaged with indecision.

“Fuck,” Mia hissed beside me.

I ignored her and placed the cookies down gently on the first available surface, which happened to be the bumper of the fire truck.

Then I was running, straight past the man that would never measure up, into the arms of the man that everyone would always be compared to.

“Booth,” I breathed, hugging him so tightly that I was sure I was cutting off any and all air flow to his body.

His arms went just as tightly around me, and we hugged for long, long minutes.

“Should we leave them alone?” I heard someone mutter behind us.

I held on tighter.

I didn’t care what anyone else did.

Not a single bit.

A throat cleared behind us, but I didn’t turn around.

Not until I was physically released from Booth’s arms and placed to the side.

“Uh, hi,” I heard.

I turned to see a gorgeous blonde woman standing in the mouth of the fire station.

She looked to be my age, maybe a little younger, and she had a young girl on her hip. A daughter, maybe.

“Hey hubby,” the woman said cheekily, looking back and forth between me and Booth.

My head turned, and the words she’d just said filtered through my head.

Hey, hubby.

My world dimmed, my vision thinning out until all I could see was grey.

The world went on around me as I walked away from the two of them standing next to each other and put one foot in front of the other. I managed to get across the room to the box of cookies I’d set down.

I could do this.

I could do this.

“You should’ve seen him qualify as he ran the obstacle course,” I heard Tai, my best friend’s man, say. “Downy taped him running it. It was like watching Captain America run it. He had the fucking t-shirt on and everything.”

I rolled my eyes.

It probably wasn’t that impressive.

But it was. I watched the video.

I didn’t want to.

But they’d put it on the big screen, and I’d watched the video instead of torturing myself watching Booth and his wife.

Anything was better than that.