The Firefighter Meets His Match (Red Hot Reunions Book 4)

BOOK: The Firefighter Meets His Match (Red Hot Reunions Book 4)
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

All Rights Reserved

About the Book

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Sneak Peek

Also by Jessie Evans

About the Author

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE FIREFIGHTER

MEETS HIS MATCH

 

Red Hot Reunions

Book Four

 

By Jessie Evans

All Rights Reserved

Copyright
The Firefighter Meets His Match
© 2016 Jessie D. Evans
www.jessieevansromance.com

All rights reserved. 2
nd
Edition.

Previously published as Saving You by Jessie Evans. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. This sexy contemporary romance is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners. This ebook is licensed for your personal use only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with, especially if you enjoy hot, sexy, emotional novels featuring alpha firefighters. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work. Cover design by Helen Williams. Edited by Edited Ever After.

About the Book

The firefighters of Summerville 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.

CHAPTER ONE

Lucy

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.

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