Page 6 of Spellbound By the Firefighter

I close my hand around his wrist, over the filthy cuff, and pull him across the threshold into the light. He comes. The door swings shut behind him. The cold’s gone, the char-smell close, the orange light on both of us. I don’t step back, and I don’t let go.

“You want me to clean up,” he says, low, watching my hand on him.

“No.” My voice has gone somewhere I don’t recognize. “I don’t.”

I’ve spent my whole life choosing the safe kind of scared—the kind I can control. He’s the other kind, standing in my shop straight off a fire. Every part of him says danger—smoke and soot and char—and I don’t want him to wash a bit of it off. I’ve never wanted anything as much as I want him right now.

He goes still, reading my face. Whatever he finds there settles him into that certainty I caught from the podium hours ago and couldn’t explain.

He lifts his free hand slowly, giving me every second to move, and fits it to my jaw. His thumb drags one clean line through the soot he’s leaving on my skin, and I feel it everywhere.

“Audriana.” Just my name, worn down to the grain.

“Don’t you dare go clean up,” I tell him, and I close the last of the space myself.

4

TANNER

She closes the last of the space and kisses me, and the whole mountain goes quiet in my head.

I hold still for one second, both hands loose, giving her the room to think better of it. She doesn’t take it. She gets a fist in the front of my filthy shirt and pulls while rising on her toes.

That’s the end of holding still. My hand finds her jaw where I already left one clean stripe through the soot, and I tilt her up and kiss her back the way I’ve wanted to since she looked up from that podium.

She tastes sweet, and I have to make myself slow down. I came off a fire. My hands aren’t gentle to start with, and now they’ve got twelve days of mountain ground into them.

“I’m filthy,” I tell her against her mouth. “I’ll get it all over you.”

“I know.” She says it low, pulling me down by the collar. “That’s the point.”

I draw back an inch to look at her. Soot smudged along her jaw now, a gray smear at the corner of her mouth where I’ve been, and she’s not wiping it off. She’s looking up at me like the mess is the best part.

“You spend all night selling fright,” I say. “Little safe scares, filed on a shelf. And here you are wanting the real thing all over you.”

“Says the man who walks into fire so he never has to sit still and want something.” Her chin comes up. “A fire, you know what to do with. But wanting somebody, staying, letting it matter—that’s what scares you. So you keep running at the flames instead.”

That hits somewhere deep. She’s not wrong. She’s so far from wrong, it steals my next breath.

“That obvious?”

“To me it is.” Her hand flattens over the soot on my chest, holding there. “We’re the same broken. You just point yours uphill.”

I’ve spent four years telling myself I’m not built to want the quiet life, the lit kitchen, the person who’s still there at dawn. I told her a version of it without meaning to, up on that threshold. And now she’s standing in her shop full of her safe little frights with her palm over my heart, saying out loud the exact thing I hide. Every wall I’ve built is just gone.

“Audriana.” I get both hands in her hair, tipping her face up to the orange light. “I’m going to say this once. I have never in my life wanted anything as much as I want you right now. Not the job. Not any woman before you. Nothing.”

Her breath goes uneven. “You don’t know me.”

“I know I’ve never been this sure of a single thing.” I brush the soot mark at her mouth with my thumb and don’t wipe it away, just trace it. “You want the real scare? Here it is. I’m not going anywhere. That’s the one that should terrify you.”

“It does.” Barely a sound.

“Good.” I feel my mouth lift at one corner. “That’s the best kind of scare. The other kind’s a cheat.”

My own line—the one I gave her across the horror shelf hours ago, before any of this was real. It breaks something open in her face—half a laugh with all the fear right under it—and then she has both hands on me, and there’s no space left for talking.

I lift her. She wraps around me, and I carry her back through the shelves, out of the window’s reach, into the low orange dark at the heart of the shop. I lay her down on the pile of floor cushions and throw pillows carefully, because whatever comes next, I already know it’s her first time.