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“You carry a fire extinguisher like that in the back of your car?”
Now she laughed, and the little black smudge on her chin laughed with her.
“You guys are forgetting something.”
Reaching down, she tore a long strip of fabric off the bottom of her ruined dress. By the time she was finished, it looked almost like a miniskirt after all.
“I used to be a police officer. Remember?”
Thirty-Two
KARISSA
An hour later we were sprawled out in the living room, physically exhausted. We’d run a full perimeter of the property — twice. Inspected every other pallet and pile of construction material littered around the building site, front and back.
“I’ll get on the camera thing in the morning,” I said, lounging across the couch in my filthy torn dress. “Oscar knows a guy.”
We were all filthy, really. Roderick was covered in dirt and sweat, ditto for Bryce. Camden’s soot-covered chest still glistened with it. All three guys’ shirts were open to mid-chest.
It really was kinda hot, though.
“Who would’ve lit our supplies on fire,” Bryce asked for the third time. “And not the place itself?”
The bottle of wine we were passing around dangled from the end of my hand. By now it was nearly empty.
“Someone who wanted to hurt you but not cripple you,” I replied.
It was a good thing. It was a bad thing. Right now though, my brain was too scrambled to try and make sense of it.
“We’ll figure it out tomorrow,” said Camden. “The three of us will sit down and—”
“Ahem.”
“Sorry,” he smiled back at me. “The four of us will sit down and put our heads together.”
He reached for the wine, and my eyes fixed on the thick, corded muscles of his extended arm. The soot had settled in the hollows between the striations. They made his biceps stick out magnificently. His triceps and shoulders, too. Eventually I passed it to him.
“Other than that it was a pretty good night,” Bryce said trying to be cheerful. “Right?”
“Well yeah,” Camden snickered. “It sure was.”
“I’m not likely to forget the night you asked me to be your girlfriend,” I jumped in with a chuckle. “If you look at it that way, I guess that makes this our anniversary.”
Roderick nodded. “Guess so.”
“So… are we celebrating?” I asked coyly.
Camden finished off the last of the wine, then raised the bottle high. “I thought this was celebrating.”
“You know what I mean.”
The guys exchanged glances. Sitting in one of the antique chairs they’d dragged in from the parlor, Bryce sat up a little.
“Are you saying—”
“I’m asking if the three of you plan to finish what you started,” I purred, bending one of my knees. The jagged hem of my ‘dress’ rode up so high on my thighs it was practically a belt again.
All three of them were speechless. And that’s because they were staring at my thighs.
