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Prologue
“I am strong. I can handle anything, as long as I take it a step at a time, stay calm, and think it through.”
Said no one when they were drowning and sinking fast into darkness. The mantra she’d applied to the last few years of her life meant nothing.
The rain hammered down on her in the hospital’s serenity garden. Les was cold and wet, but it was the inescapable anguish that permeated her bones. Broken heart syndrome, an agony so powerful it strained the heart muscles, suddenly made a lot more sense to her.
“I am strong… I can handle anything…” Seized by sobs, her voice failed. Les wanted to shut her eyes, but she couldn’t. Closing them meant seeing the truth of how spectacularly she’d failed. All the tears, all the ways to be the best, to try to make it better…she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t meet the challenge. She’d been running a race she’d lost before she started, and worst of all, she’d always known it.
No. What was worst of all was who had paid the price for her delusion that she was smart enough, strong enough.
When she slid down the rough surface of the brick wall behind her, it had snagged her scrubs, making them ride up in back. More cold water dripped down the prominent bumps of her spine. She tightened her arms around herself because the chattering of her teeth and pointless sobs were making her jaw and neck hurt. The rainfall increased. Her tears meant shit to the deluge.
She turned to hunker against the wall, her shoulder pressed to the unyielding surface. This wasn’t sensible. It was irresponsible. She wasn’t a child. She needed to get up and go into the building. Get her stuff out of her locker and calmly ask if anything was required before she went home. As she’d been told to do.
But she couldn’t do it. Her conscience slapped her, called her a coward. She’d never thought of herself as a coward.
Get up. Get up. Goddamn you, get the fuck up.
She made a fist and hit the brick. She hammered it until the drops on her knuckles were tinged red and the physical reaction to pain made her draw her hand back against herself. Her head fell to her chest. Her overwrought heart thudded painfully. Trying to find some meaning, some path, she reached out again.
This time when her fingers slid over the rough mortar to the slick red brick, she followed it like a blind person reading Braille, looking for the answer to a question. Two answers came. One for comfort, one for punishment.
Though she didn’t deserve comfort and she didn’t know why she thought punishment was something she could seek from him, both answers were the same.
Brick. Not the apathetic force that shed her blows like the rain rolling down it, but a person. Brick.
She’d last seen him four weeks ago, when he’d shown up out of nowhere. Every stolen spare thought she’d had since then had been coated with an incendiary residue of cravings.
Ironic for a man who’d been a firefighter and was now an arson cop.
She had to go to him. It was the only thought capable of making her push against the weight of the world and struggle to her feet.
She didn’t need to go to her locker. She carried her wallet, keys and phone in her scrub pockets. As she cut across the courtyard and took the least populated route to the staff lot, she held him in her mind, a target for a desperate arrow.
She took shelter in the memories of that visit four weeks ago. She needed to be steady enough to drive, but more than that, she preferred the baffling emotions and needs he’d roused in her that day to facing the truth.
With one decision, everything she’d believed about herself had been proven a lie.
Confusion was a better driving companion than despair.
Chapter One
Four Weeks Earlier
“Please tell me we have a new neighbor who’s single,” Beulah said. “One horny enough not to care about dating and feelings, shit we don’t have time for. I can’t even see most of him, and I’d fuck him for his biceps alone.”
Les rolled her eyes, but like her other three study partners, she turned to see who her roommate had spied. The shiny black truck cruising through their condo parking lot had a red and gold firefighter’s plate on the front. Because of the waning light of early evening, she couldn’t make out the lettering on the Maltese cross, which might have told her the town and station number. However, as the truck rolled closer, giving them a better view of the driver, she blinked, sure she wasn’t seeing who she was seeing.
Denial. In her third year of medical school, when her studies and clinical rotations consumed every ounce of free time, Les denied any need that didn’t support that effort. However, denying that Jefferson “Brick” McGuire was parking his truck in front of her condo was impossible. Because instead of being miles away in Richmond, Virginia, here he was, her first serious girlhood crush and her brother Rory’s best friend.
Relationships were a time suck. Worse than social media. Even casual sex fell under that axe, at least for Les. Since her broken undergraduate engagement, which was fortunately well in her rearview mirror, she’d had a couple times where her body’s needs had overridden her good sense. She’d then faced the awkwardness of making sure it wouldn’t happen again with that person, without leaving bad feelings. Her mother had raised her right, after all. Never make last night’s mistake feel bad.
She was absolutely certain her mother had never intended that to apply to a one-night hookup. But hey, rules of courtesy had a universal application.
The closest she got to “sex done right” was with her very private fantasies and her vibrator. And the main star of those fantasies was pulling his truck into a parking space.
There was no way he was here to bring those imaginings to life. She resented her subconscious for ignoring that logic. Resented him for getting it stirred up.
