“Mrs. Dunne, open the door.”
For once, I hope for my mom to be in one of her frosty moods. The kind where she’ll blatantly ignore whoever is hammering her door down or call the cops on them without warning.
Instead, she answers it.
Is she deliberately trying to piss me off? Does she want me to murder someone on her front porch?
The men loom over her.
Army guy clears his throat and then spits a disgusting something at my mom’s feet.
“It’s about time. Thought we might have to break your door down. We’d hate to damage our property.”
“My property, Mr. Howser,” my mom corrects in an icy clip. “This is still my home and you boys aren’t welcome.”
She’s met these shitheads before. And she’s kept this all to herself all this time?
“It’s your home for now, but not much longer. You knew that when you signed for the loan. Well, now it’s come due and, if you don’t pay up soon, your old ass will be out on the streets. Or worse.”
“What do you mean ‘worse’?”
“Does the English teacher need us to spell it out for her? I thought you were a smart bitch.”
My gun’s in my hand. And Tiffany tightens her grip on me.
“Blaze, put that away. That won’t solve anything for your mom,” she hisses.
“It’ll feel fucking grand, though,” I say.
A warbling shout. My mother’s voice filled with fear and anger. “Get the hell away from my house, you cretinous mental malcontents. You disgusting, rank thugs. Get away or I will call the cops.”
There’s a heavy slam as my mom shuts the door in their faces.
Low shouting erupts below. Vibrations from a heavy thud ripple through the floor at my feet. Those assholes are fucking pounding on the door.
“You stupid fucking bitch.”
The wind carries those words up to my ears through the open window. Other words follow: “whore” and “stupid fucking old cow”. And a dozen others.
Then one of them calls my mother a cunt.
Halfway to the door, gun at the ready, red burning in my eyes, I’m ready to murder and oblivious to everything else in the room before Tiffany sinks her fingernails into my arm — hard — and the sudden pain stops me in my tracks for a second.
“What are you doing?” She hisses.
“You heard them. You heard what they called her. No one speaks to her like that.”
“Do you know what will happen if you go down there and confront those thugs?”
“Yes. They’ll die and I’ll be down a clip of ammo. I think I can live with that.”
Her nails dig in deeper. Blood wells from a few pinprick breaks in my skin. Her eyes glisten bright with fear and her voice shivers with urgency.
“If you kill them, it’ll bring down so much hell on us. There’ll be the police, maybe even the FBI because three people got murdered in broad daylight by a man wanted for attempted bank robbery. Do you want that?”
Smart as she is, as persuasive as she can be, as nice as she is to look at, I’m not paying one shred of attention to her; I don’t even feel her nails in my arm, though they’re drawing blood. That sexy, hobbling, whip-smart woman — the first woman I felt like I could open up to about my past — is now far from my mind; all I can think about — all I want — is to press the barrel of my gun to the head of whichever of those sons of bitches called my mother a cunt and pull the trigger until I need to reload.
I pull away from Tiffany. She stumbles, loses her balance on her crutches, and I start toward the door, intent on a whole lot of murder.
“Blaze, wait,” she calls after me.
But I have my gun out and I’m ready for a rampage. My sight is blood red, and my heart is burning hot with murderous intent.
Then her hand’s on my shoulder again.
I turn on her; she needs to learn when to stay the hell out of my way.
Then she does something unexpected. Something I’m not prepared for. Something that roots my feet to the ground and makes the gun clatter from my hands.
She kisses me.
Chapter Eleven
Tiffany
If this kiss had meaning, it would be nothing more than ‘stop’. But this kiss — the first I’ve given in years, the first since Stanford — has no purpose beyond the minute goal of saving someone’s life, even if it happens to be with a man who used to haunt my high school dreams; Blaze needs to stay put and, if I can’t keep his attention by appealing to his common sense, I’ll appeal to his baser urges.
It works.
His focus shifts to me and, with all the intensity of a man who finds his purest joy in the middle of an inferno, he kisses me back.
Suddenly, I’m not so sure of this kiss’ purpose.
Suddenly, my back is against his mother’s desk, my stray arm is swiping from that desk every last shred of paper, and my back is flat against the hardwood, my hair a wild mess behind me, his beard scratching my face in the most spine-tingling way, his lips meeting mine, again and again, as one innocent kiss sparks a forest fire.
Suddenly, I’m moaning.
Suddenly, he’s moaning, too.
All our concerns about the world, about outstanding warrants for bank robbery or the bank-sponsored thugs just a floor below us, turn to ashes.
It’s all down to him and me.
I never meant for this to happen. Didn’t even think I wanted it. But when he kisses me, my heart raises its voice in a way that drowns out my sensibility.
It screams to me. Here
