Saving You

Saving
You

Fire and
Icing Book Five

A
Summerville Novella/Short Novel

The one you save may be yourself…
Things in Summerville, Georgia are still hot, hot, hot—
Faith gets a send-off any bachelorette would envy—complete with
sexy male strippers from Atlanta.
Maddie and Jamison encounter the first bump in their relationship
(and a little grind, too).
Jake and Naomi are tested when a friend mysteriously
disappears.
Psychic Lucy Bledsoe must learn to trust her new firefighter
boyfriend, Brandon, as she struggles to save a life that hangs in
the balance.
Come along for the ride as Summerville's sexiest firefighters and
their soul mates take the final steps on the path to
happily-ever-after as the second Summerville series winds to a
close.

Always a Bridesmaid Series

BETTING ON YOU (Always a Bridesmaid Book
One)

KEEPING YOU (Always a Bridesmaid Book
Two)

WILD FOR YOU (Always a Bridesmaid Book
Three)

CATCHING YOU (Always a Bridesmaid Four-Short
Story)

TAKING YOU (Always a Bridesmaid
Five-Novella/Short Novel)

Fire and Icing Series

MELT WITH YOU (Fire and Icing Book One)

HOT FOR YOU (Fire and Icing Book Two)

SWEET TO YOU (Fire and Icing Book Three)

PERFECT FOR YOU (Fire and Icing Book
Four-Short Story)

SAVING YOU (Fire and Icing Book
Five-Novella/Short Novel)

Cupid Island Novellas (Short Novels)

AUDITIONING YOU (Cupid Island Two)

A Cupid Island Christmas Anthology by Jessie
Evans, Lila Ashe, and Ruby Laska

c. 2014 Smashwords
Edition

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Copyright © 2014 Jessie D. Evans

This book may not be reproduced or used in
whole or in part by any means existing without written permission
from the author. This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance
to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely
coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s
imagination and used fictitiously. Cover image by manifeesto for
Shutterstock. Cover design by Bootstrap Designs. Editing by Edited
Ever After Editorial.

Chapter One

Lucy Bledsoe woke before her 3:45 a.m.
alarm, filled with a sense of foreboding. Immediately—before her
eyes were fully open or the sleep haze faded from her thoughts—she
knew something bad was going to happen.

Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but
before the week was out, someone in this town would be in serious
trouble.

Lucy had a sixth sense
about things like this. She had a sixth sense about most things,
really. Lucy was always the first to know when two people were
falling in love, had an uncanny knack for guessing which horse
would come in first at the races, intuitively chose the route with
the least traffic congestion—without the use of a smartphone
app,
thankyouverymuch
—and had rescued more lost things than anyone she knew aside
from her grammy, Tutu, the other psychic in the family.

Grammy Tutu had been a fortuneteller in a
circus for thirty years before she settled down at the ripe old age
of thirty-eight and proceeded to have seven children in seven
years. She and her husband, Rupert, were some of the last people to
settle in Pottsville—a tiny country town that made Summerville look
absolutely bustling in comparison—and had remained on their farm in
the valley for more than fifty years. Grandpa Rupert was
ninety-two, and Grammy Tutu was ninety, and both of them were
determined to stay in their house until the Good Lord took their
hand and led them on to the next adventure.

The couple had weathered six floods, two
summers of drought so extreme the earth in their backyard look like
the cracked floor of a desert, and their fair share of personal
tragedy. They’d lost a son in Vietnam, their first granddaughter to
childhood leukemia, and were forced to have their daughter
committed after she tried to drive her car into the river—with her
infant daughter still strapped into her carrier in the
backseat.

Lucy didn’t remember much about her mother.
Grammy said they went to visit her at the psychiatric hospital a
few times when Lucy was little, but by the time Lucy was four,
Rose’s mental state had degenerated to the point Grammy didn’t
think it was wise to continue visits until Rose was feeling better.
A few months later, Rose passed away after a bad bout of
pneumonia.

The only memories Lucy had of her mother
were of her funeral, a horrible rainy day that turned the mud
around the gravesite slick and treacherous. Grandpa Ru had fallen
on the way up the hill to the cars, and Lucy had lost one of her
Mary Jane’s in the mud beside the grave. It was simply sucked away,
never to be seen again.

As she lay in bed now, listening to the rain
come down hard on the roof of the bakery, Lucy couldn’t help but
think back to that day, to the way the rain came down so hard it
shook the handle of the umbrella in her hand. Of the way the tears
flowed down Grammy’s cheeks as she laid her second child to
rest.

Grammy never cried. Grammy was the strongest
person Lucy had ever known, and always seemed to know how to sweep
the bad feelings away.

For a moment, Lucy was tempted to reach for
her cell, and give Grammy a call, despite the fact that it wasn’t
quite four in the morning. But Bledsoe women never slept. Grammy
was up by four almost every day, and Lucy was the same. Her job at
the bakery was a perfect fit for her high energy level and outgoing
personality. And baking half the day and waiting on customers the
other half was a heck of a lot less stressful than her last
job.

Lucy started helping the Atlanta police on
cold cases not long after getting her college degree in
archeology—and realizing how hard it was to earn a living with a
degree in digging stuff up. Grammy had consulted for various police
forces for years before Lucy started, and by the time Lucy was
twenty-one it was clear she had psychic ability that surpassed even
her gram’s.

In her first few years working with the APD,
she helped track down ten missing persons, one little girl who’d
been kidnapped by her nanny, dozens of leads that led to arrests in
high profile cold cases, and the burial site of the last victim of
The Peachtree Killer, a serial killer who’d been active in Atlanta
in the late seventies.

The last case affected her the most. She
knew she would never forget the sight of the long-decomposed body
or the horrible energy surrounding that part of the woods. It had
broken her heart to be confronted with the work of the blackest
part of humanity. She’d seen terrible things before then, of
course, but nothing so completely evil.

She’d continued to work with the police for
a few months after, but she could tell no one was surprised when
she decided to stop consulting. Detective Pew, her main contact
within the Atlanta PD, had actually seemed glad to see her quit,
despite the fact that she’d been a useful addition to his team.

“
Take care of yourself, and
be happy,” he’d said, pulling her in for a hug. “This world has
enough broken people walking around in it. It would be a damned
shame to see you join them.”

And so Lucy had moved back in with Grammy,
applied for the least angst-filled job she could imagine—working
the counter at Icing, the new bakery in town, a place so pink and
girly and happy it was impossible to think a tragic thought within
its walls. The fact that the bakery was owned and operated by three
of the nicest women Lucy had ever met was the icing on Icing. Lucy
had settled right into working for Aria March and the Whitehouse
sisters, letting the easy-going routine and sweet smells of the
bakery banish the darkness from her heart.

After a few months, she’d earned enough
trust to be charged with opening the store once a week. And barely
three weeks ago—after Maddie Whitehouse got engaged and moved in
with her fiancé—Lucy had moved into the tiny apartment above the
bakery, the better to fulfill her new, three-days-a-week opening
duties. Naomi and Aria both had new babies, Maddie was busy
planning her wedding, and Lucy had made it clear she was thrilled
to take on more responsibility.

And thrilled to live in the cozy bakery
apartment, as well. She loved Grammy and Grandpa to bits, but the
farmhouse in Pottsville was starting to feel crowded. Her cousin,
May, and her two kids had moved into Lucy’s old room after May was
laid off and Lucy had been sleeping on the couch in the living
room, where May’s dog, Tick, felt free to crawl up on her chest in
the middle of the night and do his best to suffocate his favorite
member of the household any time he pleased.

The apartment felt like paradise, a tiny
refuge from the world—at least until this morning…

The ominous feeling lingered in Lucy’s chest
as she slid out of bed and turned off her alarm. It hovered around
her as she dressed in a long red peasant skirt and a black tank-top
and pulled her short brown hair into pigtails that stuck out in
stubby tufts on either side of her head. The sensation was so foul
that Lucy took a few extra minutes to line her dark brown eyes with
brown liner and apply mascara, hoping eye makeup would lift her
spirits, but if anything the sense of looming dread only got
worse.

She felt like she was fighting through
emotional sludge as she fired up the ovens to preheat and started
scooping cookie dough out onto the massive cookie sheets. Weighing
out the bread dough Maddie had prepared yesterday and getting the
loaves in the oven to cook took twice as long as usual, and she
barely had the potato rolls out of the shaper machine and set to
baking in time to make sure they’d be ready for Icing’s eight a.m.
opening. She fetched the cakes and pies Naomi and Aria had made
yesterday from the refrigerator with a heavy heart and by the time
she was ready to settle down for breakfast and coffee before the
bakery opened, she knew there would be no avoiding what had to be
done.

For the first time since she resigned as the
Atlanta PD’s psychic consultant, Lucy closed her eyes and reached
out with that nameless part of her—the energy that lingered in her
chest until she sent it seeking into the world. When she was first
learning to use her gift, Lucy had pushed too hard, trying to give
the energy a destination, but now she knew better. She simply let
the energy go, and usually, within a few minutes, she had some
sense of what had triggered the blip on her sixth sense’s
radar.

She waited patiently, eyes closed, thoughts
meditating on the steady rhythm of the rain hitting the sidewalk
outside, but several minutes passed and Lucy was no closer to
discovering the source of the bad feeling. She was still sitting in
her chair beside the bakery window, cooling coffee clenched tightly
in hand, praying for a clue, when the bakery door opened.

The bells tinkled and seconds later, a very
drippy figure in a Summerville Fire Department raincoat stepped
inside.

“
It’s really coming down
out there,” the man said as he slid his hood off, revealing a dark
blond buzz cut and blue-gray eyes set in a no-nonsense
face.

Brandon Nordstrom was one of the newest
members of the SFD, but he was every bit as serious as his Captain,
Jake Hanson. He was a six-foot one-inch alpha male with broad
shoulders, a sharp nose, and earnest manliness practically oozing
from his pores.

In short, he was the polar opposite of every
man Lucy had ever dated. She tended toward artists and musicians,
men who were as in touch with their feelings as their physical
bodies and made a living with their brains, not their brawn. But
Brandon was good people, and he couldn’t help not being Lucy’s
favorite firefighter.

Jamison Hansen—the youngest Hansen brother,
and her boss, Maddie’s, fiancé—was Lucy’s firefighter spirit
animal. Not in a romantic way, of course, but she appreciated
Jamison’s enthusiasm for life, the way he wasn’t afraid to wear his
heart on his sleeve and always found something to laugh about.

Laughter was precious. After the things
she’d witnessed working for the Atlanta PD and the loss she’d
suffered last year, Lucy believed that with a ferocity matched only
by her belief that animal testing was an abomination, and the
melting polar ice caps were the biggest threat facing mankind.

“
Would you rather I stay
here by the door?” Brandon asked, running a hand over his face,
wiping away the raindrops clinging to his nose. “I don’t want to
track water everywhere.”