Chapter 9

FLAMES

I HAD BEEN shot before. The kind of shot that left my body a few feet from joining the eternal flames of sulfur in hell.

This…this was different because I hadn’t seen it coming. The delirium, the haggard breaths, the feel of a woman’s hands all over my body without my permission. And not just any woman but her.

Fucking her. The bad shooter. The disobedient minx. The blonde devil. The scarred witch.

Honestly, I could have gone on and on about how bad I loathed Mia but the situation stopped me.

Just what the fucking hell?!

A jut of pain coursed through my veins up the damn place she’d shot at, disorientation bit me in the fucking head and I stifled a hiss, my dick the damn thing…I could feel it painfully poke my briefs and my pants chose the wrong time to be tight.

Morning wood, they called it because I refused to believe that my dick responded to the woman beside me.

The woman’s whose bare pussy hugged my thigh, the woman whose pebbled nipples poked my chest like hot irking bullets and the woman who was too damn near my face I couldn’t help but resist the urge to lash out.

Push her off me. Scram to the other side of the room. Fucking pretend we hadn’t slept naked for whatever bullshit reason Mia came up with.

Her blonde curls fell messily over her shoulder, her lashes fluttered lightly-subtly-softly as her chest adopted a common rhythm of in and out, her lips formed a pout mostly because her upper lip was plumper than her lower one, the proximity between us allowed me to see that and I couldn’t unsee it even if I wanted to.

Those freckles…faint and chocolatey above her nose, that face…damn that face. She looked innocent and I might have known she was but I refused to believe that. I couldn’t look at her any different whether she was lap-dancing in front of me or stripping.

All I saw was Elise’s replacement. The reason I felt shitty. The reason my life was fucking shitty.

Killing the moment in an instant, I got off the couch untangling our legs, untangling every place my skin touched hers.

She squirmed on the sofa, her lips kissing the fabric of the dusty thing and I couldn’t fucking take looking at her a minute longer.

“She handled everything like a pro”, Snakes clowned, I couldn’t give a fuck as I drove around town in a beat-up jeep looking for a pharmacy for Mia’s ointments.

“Is she there? I’d like to have a word with her”

I ground my teeth.

“She doesn’t like you”

She didn’t, really.

She had a certain type. The Bryant Knox type, her husband. The one who liked it rough, so much rough that he would beat her up for the fun of it.

I liked rough and I was not going to give a shitty explanation about how much of a good guy I was by not beating women up. I had done some shitty things to women to make my dick feel better, rough, hard, fast that was me but I never not once hit a woman—well if you exclude slapping asses and pussy in the context of hitting.

And the whole fucking point was it was consensual. The rough, hard and fast part not so much but they enjoyed it nonetheless.

Back to Mia’s type of guys, she might have run away from Bryant but those God damn sapphire eyes didn’t hide the fact that she was a submissive in bed.

The type that liked being dominated, ordered around, the type that came while sucking a man’s off, the type that begged to be fucked like no tomorrow, the type that—fuck, untrammeled lust spiked up my legs, tugged at my balls at the thought of Mia sucking anyone-me off, the sensation travelled up my length and I was fuming now.

This was her fucking fault.

Her nakedness.

Those full tits, those slender legs wrapping around my leg, my hand grazing that supple rich skin of—

“I’d like to think we got off on a rocky start. You know we bonded while you were unconscious-“

“Snakes, we are not having this conversation. You want to chase after a married woman? Not my fucking problem, what bites me in the ass is I’m the one out here getting shot in the fucking neck when I should be out there putting a stop to Knox”

And not lying naked all night with his fucking wife and having a raging boner right at this damn second.

“You got shot last thing you need is to be out in the field. You should be resting as we are speaking right now”

“This ain’t my first rodeo. I’ve been shot before”, I said between gritted teeth pulling up in front of a shabby pharmaceutical named ‘Dundy’s and some shit covered with snow.

“Tell that to Mia, she was almost convinced you were dead. She cried for your sorry ass”

“I never asked her to”

An image of Mia crying over my death sounded ironical. She might have needed me enough to resurrect me from the death but she disliked me and my ass.

“Whatever you tell yourself to sleep, Flames. Lots of rest, tell Mia to call me when she needs help”

She wouldn’t…call him not if I had anything to do with it.

Once the job was done, I didn’t need Mia having a reason to come back to B&A. Much less for dorky doctor Snakes.

He hung up, I was out of the jeep past the sidelines with my head hung low, my neck stinging and into the little pharmacy that dinged the minute I opened the door.

“Hey, how can I help you?”

A good rack, a puffy purple flannel jacket, red lipstick shining against thin lips, the woman—receptionist smiled at me, her mouth forming an ‘ooh’.

Same expression I got from ladies since I grew balls and learnt how to flirt. The type of ooh that had her wondering just what I could do with my hands and if my chest was any proof that I was stacking a massive dick underneath all these clothes.

She tucked a strand of hair nervously behind her ear, battered her lashes while she was at it, the whole shebang women did when they wanted to communicate, they wanted you to mount them, fuck them, show them fucking stars.

With a raging boner, I was down for anything. She seemed to run the place, it wouldn’t take minutes to bend her over that clean counter, eat some pussy and steer away every damn thing I thought of Mia this morning.

Instead, I didn’t. Didn’t give the missus any hints I was interested because the Gods were trying to test me.

Blonde hair. She had blonde hair and blonde hair up to this very second reminded me of the woman I had left snuggled to my couch this morning all naked and all fucking seductive.

Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

I cooked but that didn’t mean I was the type that fucked a woman and cooked for her afterwards.

Frankly speaking I wasn’t the type that fucked a woman and stayed behind to the point of small talk. I hated small talk. What was the point of small talk when the message was pretty clear from the start and that was sex.

Yet switching from my jeep to another car that led to the cabin, I couldn’t help but glance at the ingredients I had snagged from the little retail shop in town.

She must have been hungry. I mean sure if she had brains she could have eaten the canned foods from the attic but they were shit. Canned beans, canned meat that might have expired a long time ago and knowing how messy Jason had left the cabin, I was hundred percent sure the kitchen looked like a shit hole.

Ergo nothing was cookable in there.

Bringing me back to the ingredients. Pasta, alfredo sauce, some chicken if she liked meat, fruits, a few chocolates…women liked stuff like that right?

And maybe deep down this was me trying to apologize for being gone for five hours and leaving her all alone in that cabin.

Imagine my surprise when I found her with a fucking axe outside.

“Mia?”

I called leaning against the beam of the cabin.

A bobble hat on her head, one of my pairs of army boots gracing her legs, my jeans and my shirt peaking through the large thermal jacket, she turned around.

Those baby blues locked with mine and she fucking waved.

Like a small child exploring Disney world, she smiled, wiped her hair from her face and waved.

I was too sidetracked by the action to actually figure what the fuck it was she was doing.

“Um…whatcha doing?” I asked, voice harder than the gush of wind pushing relentlessly between us.

She placed the axe down, I caught a glimpse of her chapped nails. Jesus Christ was this what she was doing all day? Since I left her?

“Huh?”

She shouted. She couldn’t hear me.

I pointed a finger at the axe and the stump next to it.

“Wood, fire, cabin”, Came her reply.

I stared at the snow beneath her feet, the axe digging into the stump I used to cut firewood on then glided down to the branches stacked neatly next to her.

Branches that were either soggy and too damn light to start a fire.

A wise man, a man who had a boner about this woman and fucking hated it should have turned around and went straight back to the warm cabin, sat his ass on the couch and enjoyed the liquor that tasted like fermented piss.

The dumber man who was me in this fucking case started moving to where she was, mildly aware that if she shot me one time there was nothing that would prevent her from putting that axe to good use and chopping my head off.

I took the chance anyway.

“And you are doing what exactly?”

Her eyes lingered on my neck and I hated the sympathy glinting across her eyes at the moment.

“Wood, it’s cold in there so I figured we need fire so this is me chopping wood”, she pointed at her hard work.

Which was a bunch of twigs that would last seconds in the fire.

“You didn’t need to do that Mia. I would have done it”

“You are still recovering, should be recovering after what I—”

“After you shot me”, I laid the truth, she bit her plump lip. The upper one. The one that made her lips dip in this motherfucking way that was rare in women.

Natural, no fucking fillers and she didn’t deserve those lips. Not her of all people.

“Yes, after I—I shot you which you constantly reminded me of yesterday”

“It’s the fucking truth”

“I was just trying to save you from the wolves. They would have ripped you apart then ripped me apart”

Her way of saying sorry.

“I ordered you to stay and you disobeyed and that led to all of this”

Wound on my neck.

Her rose scent engraved on my mind. The feel of her skin on my fingertips. Her fucking fault.

“Is that the reason why you left? To teach me a lesson because if that’s the case, it worked Andro. I learnt my lesson”

Her voice broke, her azure eyes avoided mine and I didn’t know what to fucking say.

What was going on? What was she thinking about? Why was she biting her lip like that? Like she was trying not to sob.

Witches didn’t sob. Red horned women didn’t get to act like my absence struck a cord in their hearts.

We weren’t friends.

“You are doing it all wrong”, I veered to another subject.

“What?”

“The axe, you are holding it wrong. The wood, Mia those are fucking twigs not wood meant to last us a night”

“Ooh, I didn’t—no one taught me how to chop wood or how to use an axe”

For a proper reason too, I wasn’t giving her another gun anytime soon.

Her eyes lifted to meet mine, her baby blues got even bigger, radiant fucking mellow it almost gave me a toothache. She opened her mouth to speak,

“Can you teach me?”

To use an axe? Fuck no.