All Fired Up (Green Valley Heroes #7)

Chapter 16

Chapter Sixteen

HUNTER

C leaning up the tree in Madeline’s yard is easy enough work, though she told me herself she wouldn’t have the first clue how to get started. Funny how she can be so smart about other things and not know how to do something like this.

She watches me work for the first five minutes or so, but when I ask her if she likes ogling my muscles, she scowls and heads inside. Laughing to myself, I continue working, my thoughts turning—yet again—to last night and that hot kiss in her driveway as I’d dropped her off. Who knew she had it in her to be that seductive?

It’d been obvious she was teasing me, cleverly turning my dare against me. And damn her if it didn’t work. It had been all I could do to keep my hands to myself as she’d wrapped her arms around my shoulders and pressed herself against me, her body soft and yielding. Pretending to be that into the kiss had been a low blow on her part, but she had no idea how much it had meant to me. How much I had wanted to kiss her. How pathetic I’ve become to resort to begging for a kiss from her, when girls normally beg me.

But those other girls aren’t Madeline.

If I had called her bluff and really kissed her, gripping her ass and pulling her into me, making good on all she was promising, she would have freaked out. Would have told me I took it too far. And she would have been right.

Lusting after Madeline Woodward hadn’t been on my radar that first day of firefighter training, but here we are. She’s just...so much more than I expected.

When I’m nearly finished, she brings a cold water bottle out for me, and I gratefully accept it, downing half of it in one go.

“Mom’s making lunch and insists you stay,” she says, a hint of exasperation in her tone.

So, her mom wants me to stay, but does she? The last time I was over, I stayed at her mom’s invitation to spite her. But things are different now.

“Do you want me to stay?” I ask her.

Her head tilts to the side. “Why wouldn’t I?”

I shrug, feeling dumb now. “I don’t know. The way you phrased it...Never mind. Yeah, I’ll stay for lunch.”

She steps closer, laying a hand on the back of my arm for a brief second, her touch imprinted there even after her hand returns to her side. “I’m sorry if I didn’t make you feel welcome. You are, you know. And I really do appreciate you working on this today. I, um...” She presses her lips together. “I actually made you something inside as a thank you.”

She made me something? “What is it?”

“Come in when you’re finished.”

She walks away, leaving me staring after her. She’s going to leave me in suspense like that?

I finish as quickly as I can and cram the cut branches into the yard recycling bin, then join her indoors, the air conditioning blessedly cool.

Madeline is in the kitchen, pulling a pan of heavenly smelling brownies out of the oven.

“There better not be sponges in there,” I tell her.

She laughs and my heart beats a little harder, loving the sound of it. It’s only in the last few weeks she’s opened herself up enough around me to do that.

“They’re brownies, I promise. I’ll even take the first bite myself.”

“What are you two laughing about in here?” her mom asks, bustling in and pulling deli cold cuts out of the fridge.

“Nothing,” Madeline says, her eyes still dancing with mirth.

I’m glad we can laugh about it now. That it feels like our own private joke.

For lunch, we have sub sandwiches with all the fixings and a homemade baked potato soup that has me wanting to lick the bowl it’s so good. In my opinion, it’s a perfectly fine trade-off to have to listen to Madeline’s mom talk all throughout the meal if it means I get to eat her food.

This time, Madeline doesn’t seem as annoyed or embarrassed by her mom, that is until the topic turns to more things that need to be fixed around the house.

“Now while you’re here,” Vera says, “it would mean the world to us if you could take a look at the outside hose that’s been leaking. Oh, and do you know anything about fixing cabinet knobs? The one in the kitchen fell off the other day.”

“Mom,” Madeline grits out. “Hunter isn’t our personal on-call handyman. It was already so generous of him to help us out with the tree.”

“Oh, I know it was.” She gives me a warm smile filled with Southern charm. “But it’s not every day we get a big, strong man over here. We have to take advantage while we can.”

Madeline’s hand slides along her temple, as if she’s trying to hide, and mutters something unintelligible under her breath. The only words I can make out are his ego .

“I could take a look at it, Mrs. Woodward.”

“You call me Vera, honey.” She wags a finger at me good-naturedly and pushes her chair back from the table. “I’ll get my list.”

“Don’t get your list,” Madeline calls after her mom, who’s already left the kitchen. She turns to me next. “You’re not actually doing anything on that list.”

I lean back in my chair, crossing my arms over my chest. “Why are you so resistant to me helping?”

“I’m not. But I’m also not going to take advantage of you. She’s ridiculous for thinking you’re going to come over here and do all this stuff for free.”

“Why is it ridiculous?”

A line forms between her brows. “Because it is.”

My lips curl at the corners, unable to help my smile. “I’ve never met anyone with a stronger sense of fairness than you.”

That line between her brows deepens. “What?”

I shrug. “Fairness. Justice. Quid pro quo. Whatever you want to call it. Not everything has to be a completely equal exchange, you know.”

She looks down at the table, circling a figure eight in the wood grain. “I guess I do like things to be fair.”

“Of course you do. That’s why you couldn’t let my pranks slide.”

She blinks up at me, seeming to consider my words. “I never thought about it like that. When did you get so insightful?”

I lean forward, resting my elbows on the table. “You think I haven’t noticed anything about you?”

Her eyes widen the slightest bit. “I didn’t know you were looking.”

“Yeah,” I murmur. “I’ve been looking.”

She ducks her head again as her mom returns, but she can’t fully hide the faint flush that steals over her cheeks.

Her reaction has something hot settling in the pit of my stomach. Something I don’t want to examine too closely at the moment, especially with her mom in the room.

Vera hands her a page that appears to be ripped out of a notebook. “Why don’t you show Hunter the hose outside? Oh, and that wasp nest out there, too.”

Instead of arguing, Madeline silently gets up and leads the way out of the house through the garage. She hits the button for the garage door and stops in front of an ancient-looking toolbox on a shelf off to the side.

“I tried tightening the thing around the hose last week, but I didn’t know what I was doing.”

I sift through the random assortment of tools, none of them matching. “Is it leaking from the spigot or is there a hole in the hose itself?”

“The spigot. Listen, you don’t really have to?—”

“Madeline. I like being able to do this for you. I like feeling...useful.” It’s weird saying that out loud, even putting it into words to begin with. But it’s the truth.

She looks up at me, studying my face. “That’s why you joined the training program?”

I lift a shoulder in a shrug. “I guess.”

“Okay. But I still feel like I should do something for you, too.”

I shake my head. “There’s no keeping score anymore. We’re a team. And I wouldn’t do this for anyone else. Just you.”

I’m not sure what I’m trying to tell her, but she picks up on it all the same, seeming to shift closer without moving as she nods in agreement.

The urge to kiss her again is overwhelming, filling me up, screaming at me to close the distance and fit my mouth to hers. With any other girl, it’d be a no-brainer. But I don’t want to mess this up. Everything is so different with her. More...important.

I take too long, though, and the moment slips by. She steps away, her face angled away from me, and she grabs a can of wasp spray off another shelf.

“I’ve been meaning to use this stuff for a while,” she says, something in her voice off. “I never seem to have time to do everything I need to do.”

“Yeah,” I agree dumbly, staring at the back of her head, cursing myself for not taking the chance when I had it.

What if she wasn’t feeling the same way, though? What if this attraction is entirely one-sided? Because I can’t deny it to myself any longer.

I want Madeline.

“Let me show you the hose,” she says, walking toward the open garage door.

I grab the toolbox and follow her, finding it’s a simple fix with the right wrench. We power through most of the list in the next hour, though there are a few things I can’t do without making a trip to the hardware store. Madeline forbids me from doing that, though. She says she’s taken up enough of my weekend already.

I want to tell her she could take up all of it and it wouldn’t be enough.

Jesus, where is this coming from? It’s like that kiss last night unlocked a need for her I hadn’t admitted to myself. Hadn’t known could be this strong.

I soak up the praise her mom heaps on me as I leave, and Madeline promises to be over at my house at the normal time for our workout later. Today is chest and back, then a twenty-minute run. Pretty soon, I want to start her on interval training, but I don’t think she’s ready quite yet.

I linger for a second, wanting to kiss her goodbye, but that’s not what this is. That’s not who we are. I need to remember that. Just because I dared her to kiss me, because she actually did it, doesn’t mean anything’s changed for her.

Only me.

When I return home, I slump on the couch, glancing at the clock. Three hours until Madeline gets here. I’m fucking pathetic. I can’t remember the last time I even pursued a girl. Girls come to me, as evidenced by Josie at the bar last night. I have a feeling my normal tactics wouldn’t work with Madeline, though. She doesn’t care about shallow things like sex appeal. That hadn’t been anywhere on her list of things that attracts her to a guy.

And, to be honest, that’s pretty much all I have going for me.

My reputation is a point against me in her book, not a benefit. And even if it was, I’m not looking for one night with her. Not that I know exactly what it is I’m looking for, but it’s more than that. One night would only be the beginning. I want to discover everything about her. What makes her gasp. Makes her moan. Makes her call out my name.

But also the other things I’ve never thought all that much about with another person. What makes her happy or laugh or cry. I’m already well versed in what pisses her off. It makes me realize there’s really no one in my life I know all that about. That I only know the most superficial things about the people I sometimes hang out with on the weekends, about my coworkers, even about my goddamn family that I actively avoid.

For the first time, I want someone to know all those things about me, too. I’ve held others at arm’s length, not letting them get close. Not letting them see the real me. Why?

Because then they’d know for sure how stupid you are.

The little voice pops up out of nowhere, and as awful as it is, I can’t dismiss it. Maybe it’s right.

Madeline has to know by now, though. Right? She’s with me all the time at the library. She knows how slow I read. How it takes me a couple of passes through to understand it. How it’s easier for her to tell me everything I need to know rather than read it myself.

After we started working together, she hasn’t brought it up. Only asked me those weird questions earlier today. I forgot to ask her about it at her house, but she said she’d tell me the next time we study. Guess it can wait, then.

On the side of the coffee table, the book Madeline gave me from the library sits, and I pick it up, opening to the spot I’d stopped at last night. I’d been motivated to read more after talking with her about it yesterday, and I’d made more progress than I expected. I’ve got time to kill this afternoon, too. Maybe I could even finish it.

I chuckle to myself. And maybe pigs will fly.