AllFreeNovel
Share Us
My gaze flicked to her lips, parted beneath me, ready to accept my kiss and whatever else she would let me have. How we had gone from arguing to this, I would never know. Nor did I care. So long as the argument always brought me back to this moment, I would gladly spend the stress and frustration to get there.
“Hunter,” Gerald’s voice sounded behind me. I tensed. Never in my life had I been so ready to strike a man as I was in that moment. “The paramedics are here.”
As if awakening from a spell, the woman pulled out of my embrace and quickly regained composure. “Thank you, Gerald,” she said, then promptly disappeared with the paramedics.
I hadn’t even asked for her name.
Sure, I knew where she lived, but how odd and uncomfortable would that be if I simply showed up unannounced one day? It didn’t matter. Madison was a small enough town. Eventually, someone would know who lived in the house, the mystery woman who would likely haunt my dreams for the next few days.
And once I learned her name…
What then?
Was I really ready to start a relationship with a woman who ran hot and cold in an instant? I told myself it was time to move on—time to find a lasting relationship with a woman content to live in Madison her whole life. Someone who wanted a family and to build a life and watch it thrive. The way my parents had. The way everyone else expected me to.
I couldn’t say for certain, but I knew the type well enough to guess that such a fate was not what the mysterious blonde wanted. An untameable, fiery lure in the wrong direction, she likely craved adventure, movement.
Freedom.
I’d dated enough women like her to know she’d never settle down. And yet...there had never really been another woman quite like her.
I groaned. What had I said?
Danger? Trouble?
Whatever it was, I was in it, completely and without any hope of escaping unharmed.
Chapter Three
Lyndsey
“Lord, help me. This week can’t get any worse.”
I stared up into the charred pieces of the second story room. A gaping hole replaced the space where the roof once stood, with pieces of moss draped over some of the jutting out corners. We’d removed all the furniture, a queen-size mattress, some antique wood chairs and a few knickknacks that were barely recognizable.
I hadn’t been in the room.
There was no reason a candle should have been burning, yet here we were: one eighth of Hummingbird Hollow left in a pile of rubble and ash.
This is going to cost a fortune to fix.
The insurance check would arrive any day now, but I would still have to tap into my inheritance in order to make all the repairs. At least one of grandma’s old friends brought over some supplies to block off the area until I was ready to begin the reconstruction process. Moving in with my parents was out of the question. I hadn’t done that since high school.
Even when I came to visit, I would always stay here.
It’s fine. I didn’t need the upper part of the house anyway. So long as nothing could get in and it was protected from the elements, I was happy to leave it that way for a couple of days. At least by then, I’d have a better strategy for how I intended to fix it.
I unrolled my yoga mat on the floor in the living room. I needed something to relax the tension. This wasn’t what I imagined when I came back home. Having to dodge the fiery look of rage in my cousins' eyes, an actual fire, and a smoking hot firefighter who I still couldn’t get out of my mind.
Normally, I’d have no problem telling a man like that how much I wanted him. But everything in my life felt out of place. It wasn’t the time to be flirting with some random stranger, especially in a town so small I was bound to run into him again and again.
Especially when I was trying to stay away from any reason that would force me to spend more time in this god-awful town.
“It’s nice to see you taking some initiative after all of this.” A voice came from behind me.
I’d been so caught up in my thoughts and yoga, I hadn’t heard anyone enter the house. I turned back to see my parents standing in front of me, both with a briefcase in hand as if ready for court.
“You have a case?” I asked, and returned to my stretches.
