SCORCHED: A Firefighter Stepbrother Romance Thriller Read Free Page A

them . . . ”

 
    I put
my face to the floor, covering my eyes with my arm as the emergency operator
droned through a script meant to keep me calm. My muscles were starting to
spasm. It was getting hotter in my apartment. Too hot. Painfully hot. Yet I felt cold inside, melting and freezing all at the same
time.

 
    That
was when I heard them. The other people who were trapped on
my floor.

 
    They
were screaming. Oh, God, I’d never heard sounds like that before. I didn’t know
people were capable of making such raw, animal noises. Each one was a blade in
my heart, a keening wail that only just rose over the
snarl of the flames growing steadily closer, closer.

 
    “Oh,
God,” I breathed into my cell phone. “Oh, God, no. No. There’s more of them. More of us. Up here. Please, you have to tell them . . . Oh, Jesus, I think
I hear a kid!”

 
    There
was a baby crying. And then, just like that, I was crying too. Crying because
she was going to die before she’d even got to live. Because I was going to die,
too, before I’d had a chance to do anything right.

 
    “Fire
rescue is on the scene. I’ve advised them there are residents trapped on the
sixteenth floor . . . ”

 
    There
was a sound like something fluttering by overhead, and despite my teary,
smarting eyes, I looked up. Fire crawled along the ceiling, liquid and
terrible, like lava spilling out on Pompeii. Pieces of ceiling crackled and
rained down on me. I crawled feebly under my kitchen table.

 
    “Help . . . ”
I whispered. It was all I could say. I couldn’t stop coughing. I was getting
dizzy.

 
    So, this is really it, I
thought very dimly past the panic and the fear. I’ll never have a husband .Never have kids.
Never have someone who actually fuckin ’ loves me. I
don’t even get to say goodbye . . . 

 
    There
was a brilliant flash in my mind’s eye: a projector stuttering, flaring to
life, playing the story of my life to a symphony of
dying screams.

 
    There
was that time I’d baked cookies with Mom, my little, chubby hands making a mess
of the flour back when she was still healthy—before the cancer came and
sapped the life from her bones.

 
    There
was her wake, too, where I’d locked myself in my room and sobbed for three
straight hours until my stepfather stopped knocking and everyone downstairs
went away.

 
    Jim
pushing me in a swing. God, that had to
have been way back. I was . . . ten, I think. My
stepbrother was sixteen or so. Funny that in these memories, I didn’t think of
“steps.” Jim was “Daddy.” My daddy, pushing his little girl higher and higher,
touching the clouds . . . 

 
    Boyfriends,
long past. First kisses, and better ones. The day my
stepbrother left us, years after Jim took to whiskey like every other mean
drunk did. God, so stereotypical. Why couldn’t it have
been something cool? Absinthe. Now there’s a classy liquor . . . 

 
    The
look on both their faces that day was branded into my brain, into my eyelids,
into every optic nerve I had. But now the fire was consuming them too, the
projector screen fraying at the edges, burning, blackening, curling inward.

 
    Words,
blurry and shivering, fading into black: The
End.

 
    Oh, God.
I couldn’t even hear the screaming anymore.

 
    There
was an explosion then, as I was slipping into death’s cool embrace, and then
someone had their hands on me, yanking my shoulder, flipping me onto my back,
checking me for a pulse.

 
    Through
soot-heavy eyes, I saw his face mask , his respiration,
the red and yellow of his gear. I wheezed, trying to say something. I’m still
not sure what. Maybe it was a laugh. I was too tired to be properly hysterical.

 
    So
very, very tired.

 
    He drew
his fingers away from under my jaw and picked me up, flinging me like a ragdoll
over his shoulder. Blood rushed to my head and the fireman slung his arm
beneath my thigh, his