“You’ll heal.” Alana wiggled her fingers at him. “Do you like them?”
Aaron smirked and dropped her hand. “Fishing for compliments so early in our friendship.” He tsked and shook his head.
Alana pushed off him and laughed. “Don’t make me fish then!”
“I like your nails, your hair, your make-up, your dress, and you smell like vanilla. You look sexy as hell, and if Doucheface let you go, it’s on him.”
And just like that, Aaron had her remembering her tough skin. “Yeah, fuck him.”
“That’s right.” Aaron’s smile stretched wider. He grabbed her hand as they took a few steps down the sidewalk, bumped her shoulder, and muttered, “Fuck him.”
Alana stared down in shock at their intertwined fingers, his fair skin against her dark. There was something so beautiful about that connection. Aaron stopped walking and drew up in front of her. When she glanced up, he was staring at their hands, too, with such an intense look in his blazing gold eyes. His chest rose as he breathed in deeply, and when he lifted his attention to her face, he stopped on her lips.
Drawing closer to her, taking his time, Aaron cupped her neck with his giant hand and brushed his thumb gently over the scar on her lip, then across her cheek. A tender smile lifted and fell in an instant on his face.
Alana stood frozen, so hopeful that he would kiss her, but so scared because this thing growing between them felt huge now. It was one of those moments that had the potential to change her from the inside out. To make her look at the world differently.
How terrifying and exhilarating all at once.
Aaron leaned down slowly, and this was it. His lips were inches from hers, and Alana closed her eyes and leaned into him. And right as she could feel his body warmth seeping into her, a jarring alarm sounded.
Aaron tensed and jerked his attention to the firehouse as a woman’s voice came over the intercom. “Truck forty-eight, ambulance forty-eight, automobile accident, possible fire, highway nineteen and eleven-sixty-eight.”
Aaron pulled away and bolted for the flurry of chaos in the fire station. “I’ll see you in the morning,” he called over his shoulder.
Alana stood there stunned as she watched him disappear into the turnout room and then emerge with his crew, talking low and serious as they loaded up. The ambulance left the station just seconds before the fire engine blasted onto Main Street. Aaron was speaking into a radio from the front seat, but he locked eyes with her for a moment before he was gone.
A tsunami of worry washed through her middle. She’d never given a single thought to his job. Sure, she and her friends had joked about how hot firefighters were, but she’d never considered that someday she would have a stake in a firefighter’s safety.
Up the road, the fire engine’s blaring lights disappeared, and Alana wrapped her thick wool cardigan more tightly around her shoulders to ward off the chill that had suddenly taken her body.
He would be fine. This was what he did, and he was a Keller. A bear shifter. He was good at his job and could survive a lot more than a normal human. So why couldn’t she shake this sudden fear that had her paralyzed on the sidewalk of dark Main Street?
Caw!
Alana startled hard at the jarring cry of a bird and looked up at one of the trees along the street. A giant raven was bending a young branch under its weight and seemed to be looking right at her. Farther up the tree sat a snow-white owl, even more massive than the raven. Gooseflesh rose across her arms. Oh, hell no. She’d seen this movie before and was not about to get pecked to death.
Alana speed-walked down the street, daring a single look back at the strange birds in the tree before she escaped around her coffee shop and into her apartment.
Tonight had turned out weird. Disappointment over what a bulbous anal gland Trey had turned out to be, relief at Aaron’s sweet compliments, safety in his embrace, the almost-kiss, and then the jarring alarm that had flattened her world in an instant. She was crushing hard on a man with a dangerous job. Alana was falling so hard, so fast, it left her unsteady. And now, as she stood in her living room thinking of the ominous birds in the tree, a trill of fear expanded in her chest. She got this strange sensation of being a rock, tumbling down a mountainside, faster and faster, and soon nothing would be able to stop her from hitting the bottom.
What was she doing?
She’d planned to move away from here and start over. To get out from under the shadow of her twin sister and find her own sense of self. But with every second she spent with Aaron, he put all of her plans in jeopardy and tempted her to grow her roots deeper into this little town.
He made her feel differently, but she couldn’t figure out if that was a good thing or a very bad thing. In just three brief meetings with him, Aaron already wielded the power to make her reconsider her future.
Falling for a dangerous man like him was terrifying for a safe person like her.
Chapter Six
Deep inside of Aaron, the snarl of his grizzly was constant. A man had fallen asleep at the wheel and crashed into a ditch. The civilian who had made the call to 911 had pulled him and the man’s six-year-old niece from the old SUV before it went up in flames. The man didn’t make it. What kind of idiot didn’t wear a seatbelt? Aaron was pissed. The entire thing could’ve been avoided if he wasn’t toting his niece around late at night and had strapped the damn belt over his lap. It took one second to do and could’ve saved his life. It could’ve saved that little girl from going through all of this. She would be scarred inside for the rest of her life because she was the survivor. Watching her uncle die would be a part of her story.