The Spark Between Us by Stacy Travis

Chapter Three

Sarah

Well,fuck a duck.

If ever there was an inauspicious start to my new life in my temporary home, crashing into a fire truck fit the bill perfectly.

I’d probably lose my license. Or my insurance rates would skyrocket. To say nothing of having my new roommate show up purely by chance, acting helpful and gracious in the middle of my mortification.

Karma, meet Murphy’s Law.

And on top of it, he was a far cry from the pale, doltish government employee I’d been expecting.

Damn Finn, for his vagueness about details. Only an economist—and a guy—would describe a hot firefighter as a city employee.

He might as well have called him a data point.

Braden Michaels was a gorgeous, decadent dessert of a man who seemed to have zero control over his smolder. It emanated from his dark eyes, his lazy smile, and his sharp jawline softened by sexy stubble. I normally didn’t get worked up over attractive men, but it was impossible not to notice this one.

Just try to ignore him, ladies. You’ll fail.

His gaze made me nervous, which didn’t help as I tried to keep myself from passing out. With a mind of its own, my tongue darted out and licked my lips.

Hello? Down, girl.

“So . . . I guess . . . nice to see you after all these years?” I cleared my throat and tried not to sound as mortified as I felt. The unsteadiness was new. I never went to pieces in a crisis. I was the one everyone else counted on to stay calm and rational. And I sure as heck never turned to jelly over a man. What? Was? Happening? “I sure know how to make an impression, huh?”

Braden grunted and nodded, turning even more into my image of a libido-driven caveman by the minute. “You hit the truck hard. Were you texting?” He still held one of my boxes in his large, strong hands, which almost distracted me from his frown.

“No, I don’t do that.”

“Good,” he grumbled, looking away.

Is it my imagination, or was he a whole lot nicer before he knew I was his roommate?

The firetruck stood ahead of us, barely a blemish in sight. My shoulders slumped as I looked at my car, crumpled like used tin foil, and my boxes piled in a pyramid on the sidewalk. How would I get to work without a car? Would I even be able to rent one with yet another accident on my record?

Eyes burning, I realized I was truly stuck.

One of the medics had my arm wrapped in a blood pressure cuff and continued the drills to test whether or not I had a concussion.

I felt pretty certain I didn’t, but I knew they wouldn’t take my word for it. “I’m not seeing double. I don’t have ringing in my ears. I don’t feel nauseous.” I knew the signs because I’d had a concussion last year, one more time when I didn’t notice my surroundings.

I’d bent down to pick up some cereal that spilled on the floor in my pantry and stood up quickly, banging my head hard on the door handle. So hard, in fact, that it knocked me out for less than a minute.

Fine, it was more than a minute.

When I came to, I felt awful. Like, drag myself to the bathroom and vomit awful. That was a real concussion. It came with a headache for two days, nausea, dizziness, and vertigo. I’d had the good sense to get checked out by a doctor who did the exact battery of tests performed by the medics.

“I promise you, I’m fine,” I insisted, wanting to retain some control over my circumstances. I hated having five different men assess my condition and debate the reason I’d plowed into a truck. It reminded me of so many science classes where I’d get the right experiment result, and my male classmates would gather, talking over me, certain they could prove me wrong. “Was she drinking?” “Did she have a seizure?” “Is she an awful driver?”

No. It was none of those things. I got distracted. Head in the clouds. Not the first time.

While the rest of the guys prattled on, I noticed Braden stood slightly apart from them, assessing me with his eyes. His cool expression gave no indication what he saw until his voice cut through the chatter from his colleagues. “Leave her alone. Accidents happen.”

As if guided by divine spirit, the men surrounding me stopped talking and quietly returned to the remaining tests on their checklist.

I shot Braden a look of gratitude with my plastered-on smile. “The main thing I’m suffering from is mortification,” I muttered. The burns on my arms hurt more than anything, and I probably had some bruising on my face from the damned airbag. “Also, there has to be a way to make an airbag that can protect a person without kickboxing her head in the process.”

“Not our area. You can take that up with the NTSB,” Braden intoned, face devoid of expression. He stopped unloading boxes from my trunk and stood before me, arms crossed and staring like a very stoic Michelin Man. I think he actually had several stacked tires for biceps.

I sized up my new roommate a bit more, in denial that my heart raced at the sight of his face. Earlier, distracted by the hard line of his jaw and the sharpness of his cheekbones, I hadn’t noticed the rest of him.

I’m not gonna lie—the rest of him was nice.

My eyes toured his features like he was a breakfast buffet—the muscled arms, tapered waist, dark head of hair which was slicked back yet nicely tousled. His gray T-shirt made sweet love to his broad shoulders, hard chest, and rippled six-pack.

All that muscle and capability made my heart ratatat with nerves. The people who looked like him belonged in Scotch ads or Avengers movies or, I supposed, at the fire station.

Not near me.

So even though I enjoyed the private tour, I tamped down on the adolescent butterflies and reminded myself I didn’t get all flushed and breathless over guys like him.

I didn’t. Most of the time.

And they didn’t get breathless over me.

Any of the time.

I knew where I fell on the social hierarchy. Some things never changed. Even if there was no homecoming queen and king in adult life, people paired off the same way.

Like attracted like.

My brainpower drew me to intellectual people in drab garments because understanding the energy capacity of subatomic particles as they degraded was more important than knowing Jimmy Choo shoes were just as pretty as Louboutins but sometimes went on sale.

I’d admit to knowing a little about shoes.

My fashion-savvy sister Cherry made it her mission to keep me out of what she called the Fashion Dungeon, so I’d tucked away a few sexy dresses and some awesome designer shoes, but I rarely wore anything to work that wasn’t practical. What was the point? My colleagues didn’t judge me for wearing Chuck Taylor high tops. And my students thought they were cool.

I tipped my chin in Braden’s direction, already feeling like I was imposing by living in his spare room. Now he was dragging my boxes around? “You don’t need to deal with my stuff. I’ll get it later.”

“How?” His eyes glinted with challenge.

I pantomimed carrying boxes. “Like this.”

He shook his head. “No. You’re not carrying five hundred pounds of books after a car accident. I’m already here. Just let me help. I’m going back to the house to get my truck. Okay?”

There was no dissuading the hero fireman from doing his rescue thing. Besides, I really had no plan for getting my stuff to his house. So I relented.

“Sure. Thank you. That’s great.” I hated how his gaze rested on me with a combination of pity and concern. I was a self-sufficient problem solver, and it bugged me that his first impression was of a helpless basket case. Even more, I hated that for the moment, I was one.

Amid the beeping of the machines the medics used to run more tests, I heard a motorcycle rev and saw Braden tear off into the distance. Of course hottie fireman dude rode a motorcycle. And looked like a badass hero doing it.

I turned back to the medic, who had taken a pulse ox clip off my finger and was checking the reading. “Look okay?”

“Blood pressure’s elevated, but that’s normal in the circumstances. All other vitals look strong. No evidence of a concussion. We’re done here, but if you start feeling worse, you should get checked out at the hospital.”

“I’d just like to go home, er, to my new home, since I’m moving here today.” I didn’t want to go to the hospital, mainly because my head hurt, and my neck was stiffening up. I really hoped Braden’s spare bedroom came with a bathtub. A little bit of soaking and a decent night’s sleep, and I’d be as good as new.

The medic smiled and nodded. “Oh, that’s what it was about with Michaels? I heard him say roommate, but it didn’t make any sense since he’s lived alone—”

“Hey, enough out of you,” said a firefighter, whose nametag identified him as Mitch. My head began pounding in earnest, and I didn’t bother to wonder what they were talking about. I’d have plenty of time with my new roomie to shoot the breeze and let him tell me all about his loner tendencies.

The medic dabbed some kind of ointment on the chemical burns caused by the airbag and wrapped my forearms in a swath of white bandages. I gritted my teeth against the sting of the ointment. “Sorry,” he said. “You’re lucky you shielded your face, or the airbag could have broken your nose.”

I didn’t remember doing that.

Fireman Mitch looked at me and nodded. “Anyway, if you’re Braden’s roommate, you’ve got nothing to worry about. He’s a trained medic. He’ll take decent care of you.”

“You guys are friends?” I asked. Captain Obvious.

“Brothers, actually.”

Before I could ask him more, a giant black truck pulled up behind my car. I saw Braden’s motorcycle boots hit the pavement before he strode around and started loading my stuff into the back of the truck. Those boxes weighed thirty pounds apiece—I’d weighed them on my bathroom scale—but he tossed them around like feather pillows.

It had taken me seventeen trips to get everything out of my house and into my car, and he’d unloaded the whole thing in minutes.

Fireman Mitch waved at Braden, who sauntered over.

That’s right, he sauntered.

The man didn’t walk like a normal person. His long legs commanded respect as he moved, taking long, fluid strides while his broad shoulders led the way with an easy glide. He had a gait that said, “look at me,” and at the same time said, “there’s nothing to see here, nothing available to you, anyway.”

Fascinating. I wondered if he’d had to master his carefree walk as part of his job. I glanced at the other firemen for comparison, but nope, they did not saunter.

Braden tipped his head in my direction as the medics helped me to my feet. “I swear, I’m fine,” I told them. Then I disproved it by taking a clumsy lurch in Braden’s direction.

The man’s reflexes were sharp. He had his large palms on my shoulders in a split second and turned me to look up at him. I saw a tall, broad-shouldered, human version of a redwood tree. “You sure you’re okay?” His gaze bore into mine like he was trying to see more than an acknowledgement of good health.

I nodded. “I’m good. Just a little head rush. Got up too quickly.”

The tow truck had cleared a space behind my car and was lifting it onto the flatbed using heavy twin chains. The driver didn’t even ask me where I wanted my car taken. Maybe in this town, there was only one auto repair shop. Or maybe he was taking it to the scrap yard. A problem for another day.

“Bye, car.” I rolled my eyes at the situation and turned away.

Braden directed me toward his truck and pulled open the passenger door, where a step lowered so I could get in. The truck was gigantic, so I needed the extra step to avoid the kind of gymnastics I only did during the privacy of pole dancing classes I took as a workout. I certainly didn’t want Braden lifting me inside.

He shut the door, said goodbye to his colleagues, and jumped into the driver’s seat. If there was a step on his side, he didn’t use it. He didn’t speak much on the drive to his house, so I filled the dead air space with small talk.

“I heard Carolwood has a great rodeo in June. Guess I’ll miss that, which is too bad because I do like to look at horses from afar.”

“From afar?”

“Meaning I don’t like to ride them—it just feels really awkward in my opinion to straddle something with that kind of girth.” A garbled cough erupted from his throat, and I felt my face heat. “Do you ride?”

“Just my bike.”

“Mountain bike? One of my sisters does that. Well, not really. She hikes. But she’s near mountain bikers.”

“Motorcycle.”

“Oh, sure.”

I had more to say, but within minutes we’d reached Braden’s house. Then I was stunned speechless.