Shit, shit, shit. I hold the towel with one hand, making sure it stays put, and open the oven door.
Wrong idea.
The instant urge to cough out a lung comes with the alarm blasting and even more smoke pouring out like it’s going out of style.
Jesus.
I stick my hand in to grab the pan. “Ouch!” I shout, dropping the pan I just tried to grab with my bare hands—only for it to land on my foot.
“No!” I hop on my unburned leg. No, no, no! What the fuck was I thinking?
“Hello?” a voice shouts from the door.
“It’s fine!” My reply comes back frenetic, making sure they know I’m okay. “Nothing to worry about here. Just a litt—”cough“—le mis—”cough“—hap!”
I open the faucet and stick my hand under the cold water.
“What in the—” The words trail off; the voice is closer to me than before. I turn to find Dom in front of me. He’s shocked at first as his eyes roam from the stove to the pot pie in shambles over the wooden floor, then to my foot as he flinches. Yeah, it’s nasty red. And then, everything happens in slow motion.
His eyes climb up my body, and his expression shifts from concern to something that makes his light, almost sienna, skin flush red with surprise before he looks away. The hell?
Oh.
My.
God.
Oh my God. I search for the towel I must have dropped at some point and pick it up while coughing and covering my body—or attempting to, at least. I step on the pot pie. “Fuck!” I shout as I move my previously uninjured foot off the hot as fuck, now ruined dinner.
“Stop moving!” he commands.
“Easy for you to say! You’re not the one showing the new neighbor all your bits while your cabin is on fire!”
The lines around his eyes crease deeper as he shakes his head, and, holy shit, he picks me up, my ass out—though he doesn’t take a second to look at anything.
“Put me down!”
He struts through the house, ignoring my demand until we’re outside. I fix the towel as soon as my feet touch the ground, blowing away the piece of hair stuck to my face.
“Don’t move,” he adds, stepping back into my house, firefighter-style, and saving me from danger.
4WELL, FUCK
Dom
Well,fuck.
If my parents saw me inside this house instead of checking on her injuries, they would disown me, but if I stayed close to her and her intoxicating scent for one more second, I was going to lose my composure. So instead, I’m here, making sure her cabin does not burn down.
It won’t. The oven is off, the alarm stopped beeping, and the smoke will clear out. I’ll come back and pick up the food later, but for now, I have to go check on her.
Riley.
The woman in the bright orange Jeep who looked way too out of place not to stop and check on. The woman with the brightest blue eyes I’ve ever seen, who stole my breath away when her dazzling smile and relief-filled breath charged the space between us. The same woman whose jeans hugged her ass in all the right places and showcased strong legs underneath them. A woman who is now my neighbor, and whom I cannot, for any reason, think of as more than what she is—my neighbor.
But then, she sounded like she was in pain, and walking in to see her red foot and her even redder hand, in contrast with her wet, golden skin, it was impossible not to notice the way her body looked with tiny beads of water everywhere. I had to shake myself out of her trance. There’s no other way to describe it.
That, or the fact that I haven’t gotten laid in years. I’ve been so focused on making this work, I haven’t even looked at a woman twice.