Page 30 of Wish You Were Mine

We followed them around several corners to an unassuming single story house. Flames issued from one of the front windows, but it appeared the fire hadn’t spread yet. The acrid scent of smoke filled the air.

While the fire crew got started with the house, Maia and I went straight to the couple standing beside the road. I frowned, recognizing the male as James, a guy I’d gone to school with. He wore only boxers, his slightly flabby belly on display to the world, and pale, red burn marks dotted his forearms.

I had no idea who the woman with him was, but one of James’s sweaters covered her torso and hung to the tops of her thighs. She certainly wasn’t his girlfriend, Tia, who worked with Heather Braddock at the local information center.

I scowled at James as I approached. I liked Tia. She was a nice person. And the fact James and this woman were half-dressed didn’t fill me with confidence that they’d been respecting the boundaries of his relationship.

“Is anyone else inside?” I asked.

“No.” James shook his head. “It’s just us.”

I raised my eyebrow. “Tia isn’t here?”

He flushed and glanced at the ground. “She’s working.”

“Right.”

Maia elbowed me and shot me a look, silently warning me to mind my own business. “What happened?” she asked. “Where are you hurt?”

Behind us, water was now being pumped through the broken front window, and the flames were already receding.

“Um, we had some candles lit,” the woman said, huddling against James’s side. Her face was pale, and I felt a pang of unwanted sympathy. Despite my disapproval of her choice to be with a man who was dating someone else, she’d had a shock, and it showed.

“We’d been using massage oil earlier, and some of it had spilled on the floor,” she continued. “We were, um, you know, and I accidentally knocked over a candle. It landed on the massage oil and caught on fire.”

“The oil was all over the bed too,” James added. “It went up so fast we barely had time to react.”

“Do you have any injuries other than burns?” I asked, doing my best to ignore my disdain and get into a professional mindset.

“I’m fine,” the woman said. “No burns or anything. Just scared.”

“That’s good.” I turned to James. “Show me the worst of it.”

He angled his right forearm to show me a darker mark on the inside of his wrist. “I tried to put the fire out, but it got too big too quickly.”

I inspected each of his burns. “The good news is that you don’t need to go to the hospital, or see a doctor. We can patch you up and after that, you’ll just need to change the dressings regularly and keep an eye on them for signs of infection.”

I treated his burns while Maia kept the woman company. By the time I’d finished, the fire had been put out. Liam walked toward us, his blue gaze flicking from James to the woman and back again.

“We’ll station someone here for a while longer, just to make sure there are no signs of the fire restarting,” he told James. “You should be safe to enter in a few hours though. If I were you, I’d get on the phone to your insurance company as soon as you can. We tried to limit the damage, but there’s only so much we can do.”

James nodded. “Thanks. I’ll call them as soon as we’re done here. I guess we’ll need to find some clothes.”

“Yeah.” My voice had no inflection. “You might want to get in touch with Tia too. You know, since her house is partly burned down and all.”

He grimaced and picked at the edge of one of his dressings. “I’ll do that. Just got to think of a good story first.”

“So you—” I stopped when Maia elbowed me again. I glared right back at her but shut my mouth.

“She doesn’t need to know what really happened,” James said. “It will only upset her more. I’ll figure something out, and it will be fine as long as no one contradicts me. But that’s all right. You guys have taken some kind of privacy oath, right?”

“Something like that,” Maia replied.

I strode away, anger burning in my chest. Tia deserved better. It was guys like James who made the rest of us look bad. Fuck him, and fuck the fact he’d been able to settle down with a lovely woman and yet was so willing to throw it away.

If I had the woman I wanted, you can bet your ass I wouldn’t make a mistake like that.

I packed away our gear and waited in the driver’s seat until Maia joined me.

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