Burning Up. Susan Andersen

lost it in the first place.

      Not since he was sixteen, at any rate. For a couple of years there, he’d been monkey wild. Fighting anything in pants. Screwing anything in skirts.

      But that was a long time ago. The man he was now was deliberate. In control. Master of his rare way ward impulse.

      So what had he been doing out in the hallway with the music-video princess? What the holy hell had he been thinking?

      He snorted. Yeah, right. Like thought had been a big part of the equation. He’d simply acted on instinct. Because he’d known in his gut that he couldn’t watch her close that soft, pink, smart-ass mouth around her finger. Still, he could have, should have just released her hand and walked away.

      Tossing his towels aside, he strode for the dresser. Yeah, well, you didn’t, so get over it. The deed was done. He thought of the series of garbage-can fires around town that he’d been dealing with for the past few weeks. That was what he should be concentrating on, tracking down the reason for those, not wasting his time rewriting a here-and-gone run-in with the new resident flirt. Either that or…

      “Shit!” Grace. How the hell had he forgotten his date with Grace, even if only for a few minutes? Guilt crawled down his spine. This was the second time he’d gotten so caught up in Macy’s sexual pull that it had blown every single thought of the woman he was actually dating clean out of his mind.

      Yanking open the second drawer, he collected a clean pair of jeans, then strode to the closet and ripped a cotton shirt from its hanger.

      As he dressed, however, he found that merely thinking of the teacher he was scheduled to take out for a glass of wine smoothed over the minor irritations of his day. Because Grace was aptly named. She was quiet. Restful. Nice.

      All of which were attributes he appreciated more than he could say considering his early life with his tumultuous party-girl mom, the fury years after she’d abdicated her responsibilities by dumping him on the system, and his time in the Detroit FD, the last six years of which he’d spent as an arson investigator forever juggling too many fires and not enough hours in the day. Taking this county fire-chief job had been the first step in alleviating the overload of stress he’d lived with for too long. Being with Grace, absorbing the tranquility she radiated, felt like the next.

      A little peace was something he’d been in search of for a long time. He’d had enough craziness and tension to last a lifetime. So, hell, yeah. Given even the prospect of a little serenity injected into his life?

      He’d be a fool not to latch on to Grace.

      MACY STRODE INTO the kitchen where her aunt was washing up the pans from breakfast. “Hey, Auntie Lenore,” she said, grabbing an apple out of the bowl on the counter and polishing it on her shirt. “Janna’s settled in our room for a while and Tyler’s over at Charlie’s. Charlie’s mom said she’d get the boys to their game, so I sent along everything I thought he might need.” She bit into the apple. Seeing her aunt in her natural milieu gave her a surge of pleasure every bit as strong as her first glimpse had last week.

      Lenore turned off the faucet and turned to face her, taking in Macy’s severe ponytail, bloodred lipstick and Goth eye makeup. “Let me guess,” she said dryly. “You’re heading into town.”

      Macy took another bite as her aunt inventoried her short pin-striped pleated skirt and stretchy black U-neck girl-T. The older woman’s gaze lingered for a moment on her black spiked dog collar before moving on to—

      “Oh, honey, no. You got a tattoo?”

      “Nah.” She smiled at the pained expression her aunt couldn’t hide, then glanced down at the flame-winged skull on her inner forearm. “Though I may be one of the few of my generation who hasn’t—at least in L.A. This is just for fun, a press-on/wash-off. And yeah, if it’s okay with you, I am gonna run into town. I won’t be gone long. I have a check I need to cash. I should have done it earlier in the week but I enjoyed just hanging around and catching up with you guys. Don’t worry, though, I’ll be back in plenty of time to get Janna ready for Tyler’s game. Do you need anything while I’m there?”

      “No, sweetheart, thanks. I’m good for a while.” Lenore flashed a crooked smile. “I actually remembered my shopping list the other day. It’s amazing what a difference that makes.”

      Macy laughed and slung an arm around her aunt, stooping to press a kiss on her cheek before heading out the back door.

      It was only a couple of miles to town, and within minutes she was whipping her Corvette into a parking space a few doors down from Sterling Savings and Trust. But then she simply sat in her car, staring at the gold lettering on the plate glass window of Smokey’s Grill.

      She’d reached the turnoff to Bud and Lenore’s boardinghouse the other day before the highway passed through Sugarville, so this was her first time in town in… Wow. More than a couple of years now.

      Not that anything had changed. It still looked like a town caught in a time capsule, with its lack of fast-food chains and its two-story-maximum historic brick or stone buildings that comprised the three blocks of Commerce Street. For the same reasons, it was an exceptionally pretty town.

      And despite her trying junior and senior years in high school or the fact that she’d barely flipped her tassel to the other side of her mortarboard before blowing town, there had been times she’d missed it dreadfully.

      But mostly, she acknowledged, leaving had been the best present she’d ever given herself.

      Sitting here patting herself on the back over it wasn’t getting her check cashed, however, and impatient with her procrastination, she snatched her purse off the passenger seat and climbed from the car. She sauntered to the bank on the corner, feeling as if prying eyes were watching her every move but knowing she was likely being paranoid.

      Air-conditioning pebbled her nearly bare arms as she stepped into the oak-walled, marble-floored lobby a moment later. Digging her check from her purse, she crossed to the nearest old-fashioned, iron-barred teller’s window. “Hello—” smiling at the maybe-twenty brunette manning it, she read the girl’s name plate “—Lucy. Can you cash this for me?”

      She signed the back of the check and slipped it beneath the iron grill, then pulled her wallet from her bag to root for the identification that, given the size of the check, she was sure to need. But as she withdrew her driver’s license she realized the girl hadn’t responded and, raising her head, discovered the brunette staring at her.

      “Omigawd,” the young woman breathed. “I can’t believe it. It is you. You’re That Girl.”

      Damn. She would’ve thought the teller was too young to remember her, but apparently her fricking reputation back in high school had filtered down even to the elementary level.

      “You’re that girl in all the videos—Jack Savage’s girlfriend.”

      Ah. It wasn’t her old rep the brunette was talking about but rather her newer claim to fame. Some of the tension went out of her shoulders. “Jack and I are just friends,” she said cheerfully. “We’re not—and never have been—lovers.”

      “No kidding? Wait ’til I tell my friends I got the inside scoop straight from the horse’s mouth! This is ginormous!”

      “I’m happy to help you one-up.” She inched the check farther beneath the grill with her fingertips. “Would you mind cashing my check?”

      “Oh! Sure.” But when the teller looked at it, she frowned. “Oh,” she said, glancing back at Macy. “This isn’t drawn on us. Do you have an account here?”

      “No.”

      “I’m sorry, Ms. O’James,” she said with patent regret, “but this is something I have to have approved. Let me just get our manager, Mrs. Thorensen.”

      The young woman let herself out of the teller’s cage and Macy turned to watch her cross the lobby to a woman in a black suit presiding over an ornate desk in