She is looking at me, a small, embarrassed crease forming between her brows.
“Of course you came,” she whispers. “I mean, you’re a firefighter. It’s part of your job.”
My jaw locks.
My job.
I look down at her soot-streaked face and nearly lose what little control I have left because she is wrong.
I would have gone into that house for anyone.
But I would not have felt like this for anyone.
I would not have seen smoke and had every old failure tear open at once. I would not have run across a yard with my pulse hammering hard enough to make me sick. I would not have carried another person out with the insane urge to keep carrying them until nothing in this world could touch them again.
Kaia looks up at me with watering hazel eyes.
I want to kiss her.
The thought is immediate and brutal. I want my mouth on hers so badly I can almost feel it.
The place is wrong. The timing is worse. She is too young, too sweet, and too damn dangerous to every rule I have lived by for years.
Mine,some dark part of me says.
I crush the thought before it can take root.
Kaia’s gaze moves past me toward the house, and her body goes rigid.
“Ivy.”
I stop. “Who?”
“Ivy.”
My attention snaps to her face. “Is someone else in the house?”
“What? No.”
“Kaia.”
“My fern.”
I stare at her.
She coughs, then gives me a look that would be almost offended if she were not shaking in my arms.
“Ivy is my fern.”
For one second, I have no response.
Then I look toward the house. The lower windows glow orange now, and smoke pushes hard from the upper floor.
My chest tightens.
“Nothing in there is surviving this.”
Her face crumples a little.
