BlowingitOff (3 page)

It wasn’t until their weekend together that she realized it
was the two men making her so goddamn euphoric, of course. When that
realization hit her, it was too late.

She ground her teeth. No. She wasn’t going to be foolish.
Not again. It had hurt too much getting over them the first time.

She tilted her chin and straightened her shoulders,
swallowing the lump in her throat before licking her lips. “Is there anything I
can tell you about the fire?” she asked, shoving her hands in her hip pockets.
“Any questions you need me to answer?”

William and Damon passed a quick glance between them. A
tension settled over Damon’s body, his jaw bunching a second before William shook
his head. “Not at the moment, Pheebs,” Will answered, turning back to her.
“We’ll have to go over this place with a fine-tooth comb, however. Is your
mobile number still the same? We can call you when we’re finished.”

Prickling disappointment crept through her. They were asking
her to go away.

Of course they are, Masters. Isn’t this what you wanted?
To not have anything to do with them again? What did you think they were going
to do? Ask you to strip naked and become the filling in a manwich?

“Yes,” she blurted out.

Her cheeks filled with heat and she blinked. Jesus, what was
she
doing
?

Both William’s and Damon’s eyebrows pulled into slight
frowns. “Phoebe?” Damon took a step toward her, his size-fourteen foot somehow
silent on the charred and littered floor. “We—”

“Will call you when we’re done,” William finished, cutting
him off.

For a brief moment—the time it took Phoebe’s heart to thump
twice in her chest—it looked as if Damon was going to ignore his partner. Damon
was the senior investigator after all, and three years older than Will, but
then the man nodded, his expression becoming set. “Don’t leave town,” he
uttered, the grumbled command nothing like his normal humor-laced voice.

She laughed, a nervous little hiccup of sound. “What would
you do? Track me down and drag me back?”

Fresh heat flooded Phoebe’s face. Her eyes widened. Had she
really said that?

Damon’s nostrils flared, his dark eyes locking on hers.

“Yes, Pheebs,” William’s steady voice played over her
wrought senses, “we would.”

She jerked her stare to his, her pulse pounding.

Then why hadn’t you before?

The question sliced into her soul.

With a nod, she turned and left. Eager to be gone from the
depressing remains of her burnt-out studio.

Aching for the two men inside it who she’d sworn she never
wanted to see again.

* * * * *

Damon stared at his best friend. “What. The fuck. Was that?”

“That was a train wreck,” Will answered, walking across the
blackened debris to crouch before a particularly charred pile of rubble.

Damon shook his head, watching his partner inspect the
rubble with a keen, practiced eye. “Why didn’t we just corner her like we’d
discussed on the drive up and show her exactly what we had in mind?” He drew
his own well-studied inspection over Phoebe’s gutted studio, the sight depressing
him on a level he couldn’t indulge. When he turned his attention to a fire
scene, it had to be as an indifferent investigator, not a worried…whatever the
hell he was to Phoebe at the moment. “You saw the look in her eyes when she saw
us,” he said instead, turning back to Will. “Well, after she stopped coughing,
that was. She wants us as much as we want her.”

Will poked at the pile of charred debris with a finger
before standing and giving Damon a nod. “I did, and you’re right. But think,
Damon. Her studio has been destroyed. She’s pretty bloody highly strung right
now. The last thing she needs is two horny blokes coming on hard and fast.” He
narrowed his eyes, his hands coming to rest on his hips. “Besides, take a
breath for me, a deep breath, and tell me what you smell.”

Damon narrowed his own eyes, staring at his partner as he
did just that. The acrid, almost sour stench of burnt materials flowed over his
olfactory system, a distinctive odor of destruction his brain, after thirteen
years as a firefighter and arson investigator, catalogued without conscious
thought. With the next breath, however, he tuned out everything in his mind—his
concern for Phoebe, his desire for a past once had, his longing for a future
few dared hope for—and focused solely on the smell and taste of the air in the
studio.

Burnt wood and glass, melted plastics, sodden charcoal,
smoke-painted metal, all smells he expected to detect in the fire of a
glassblower’s studio. And something else. Something…wrong.

He’d been in the Newcastle studio Phoebe had shared with
another artist many times before she’d moved, knew quite well her working
practices. She was an “archaic” artist, which meant she worked with the
traditional glassblowing materials and techniques the ancient Romans used—three
furnaces used to melt and heat the glass, naturally derived pigments to color
it, metal blow pipes and marble and steel benches.

He drew another breath, through his nose and mouth, tasting
the air as well as smelling it…

And his gut dropped. “Ethyl Alcohol.”

Will’s jaw bunched. “An accelerant. Easily mistaken for the
smell of alcoholic beverages. But we both know Phoebe’s stance on alcohol so
it’s not the smell of wine or spirits she may have kept in the studio.”

Damon ground his teeth at Will’s words. He remembered all
too well Phoebe’s revelation a year ago about her abusive drunkard of a father
who had no qualms beating his wife and only child. Phoebe, as a result, almost
never drank.

He ran his stare over the blackened chaos around him, his
hands balling into fists. “So the fire was deliberately set.”

Will nodded, his expression unreadable, his body tense.

Damon’s chest squeezed. Hard. “You’re not thinking Phoebe
did it?” He couldn’t believe that. He wouldn’t. Despite what the Morpeth fire
captain had put in his report, Damon wouldn’t believe Phoebe had torched her
own studio.

Will dragged his fingers through his hair. “No. For three
reasons. One, she loves her art more than she loves life, we both know that.
Two, Sami’s father. After years of her best friend’s dad being the closest
thing to a real father Pheebs had, she would know a structural fire like this
meant an investigation.” He stopped.

Damon studied him, not liking the pause at all. “And three?”

Will let out a ragged sigh. “She would know
we
would
be the ones sent to investigate. And as much desire as I saw in her eyes, I
also saw hurt. A lot of it. Hurt and mistrust. She wasn’t happy to see us,
didn’t want to see us, and it had
nothing
to do with the fire.”

Damon drove his nails into his palms. “You’re right. Jesus,
she even told Captain Kilgour she didn’t want us up here. Fuck it.”

Will didn’t need to nod, his eyes said it all. Phoebe hadn’t
set her studio alight, which could only mean someone else had intentionally and
maliciously started the fire and destroyed her studio.

Why? Who would do that? And to what end? A knot formed in
Damon’s gut, a bloody tight and convoluted knot he recognized well. Fear. It
had been a long time since he’d experienced the emotion, and the last time had
involved Phoebe Masters as well.
That
time, however, had nothing to do
with a possible threat against her life and everything to do with an entirely
different emotion overwhelming him.

You can’t think about that now, Damo. For the moment,
you’ve got to be nothing else but an arson investigator. Not a man too
dumb-shit stupid to admit when he was falling in love.

He huffed out a breath, casting the burnt-out shell of
Phoebe’s studio another slow inspection. “We won’t tell her. Not until we know
who started it and why.”

One of Will’s eyebrows cocked. “You think that’s wise?”

Damon snorted. “No. But that’s the call I’m making. As
Senior Investigator.”

“As Senior Investigator?” Will narrowed his eyes. “Not as
the guy who came up here with the goal of seducing Phoebe back into his bed?”

The question made Damon growl. “As both. And I’m not the
only one who wants her back in his bed, am I?” He withdrew his keys from the
hip pocket of his jeans and tossed them to Will. “Now shut the fuck up, Tiny,
and go get our kits from the car.”

Will snatched the keys from midair. “Yes,
boss
.”

Despite the wholly disturbing discovery they’d just made,
Damon laughed. “Yeah, remember that later when I’m telling you where to put
that dick of yours.”

Will grinned. “As long as it’s not inside you.”

Damon laughed again. “Oh no. It’ll be inside a certain glass
artist we both know.”

Will’s grin turned wry. “That’s if she’ll have us.”

The knot in Damon’s gut rolled. “She will,” he said. But he
wasn’t sure.

And
that
scared the shit out of him more than
anything.

Chapter Three

It was no use. She was officially screwed.

Phoebe stopped pacing the converted mechanic’s garage that
was her home and dropped herself into the old, worn armchair she’d only five
minutes ago flung herself from. She should be worried about her destroyed
studio. She should be worried about her materials and supplies and all the
works she’d lost in the fire, all the tools and equipment now damaged beyond
repair by the flames. She should be freaking out about how the fire started.

Instead, she was obsessing over the naked want she couldn’t
miss seeing in Damon’s and William’s eyes.

She scrunched up her face and gnawed on her thumbnail,
staring at the large abstract sculpture sitting on the floor in front of the
window opposite her. She’d only finished the artwork the day before yesterday,
a commissioned job for the Prime Minister that would soon be collected by
courier. Thank God she’d brought it home with her to photograph, otherwise it
would’ve been destroyed along with the rest of her studio.

She let out a sigh around her thumb. She was exceedingly
proud of the evocative piece. Tall and elegant, the twin glass columns stood
pressed together, two blown forms of black glass manipulated to the brink of
shattering and yet still dominating the space they held with irrefutable power.
When she’d created it she’d done so purely from the heart, with no pre-planned
conception of how it was going to finish. Looking at it now, she couldn’t help
but wonder if somewhere along the line it had become prophetic.

The two forms, one darker in its blackness and slightly
taller than the other, could be Damon and Will.

“You jinxed yourself, Masters.” She glared at the artwork.
“You bloody well blew them into existence and now they’re out there in your
studio picking over the remains of what was once your life.”

Jesus, how melodramatic can you be, woman?

She curled her lip, glaring some more at the sculpture.
“Very. Example, only two hours ago you were holding a scorched piece of glass
in your hand and referring to it as an accidental dildo. How’s that for
melodramatic?”

Actually, if you take into account you created an artwork
that was meant to represent the mystery of forever that instead embodies the
two men who forever changed your most secret fantasies, I’d say the accidental
dildo was Freudian.

With a groan, she flung herself from the armchair. Again.
And paced the area of the converted garage designated as her living room.
Again.

Ten paces to the left. Spin. Ten paces to the right.

She chewed on her thumbnail some more. She shot the glass
sculpture—until about a minute ago titled
Untitled Time
, now more likely
due the title
Oh Fuck, Why Can’t I Get Them Out of My Fucking Head?
—a
glance over her shoulder. Her sex twinged with unsubtle insistence over the twin
shapes.

“Damn it.”

She came to a halt, nowhere near the armchair this time, and
closed her eyes, pulling a deep breath. Of course, her brain told her she could
smell Damon and William on the air. They had, after all, held her, their
fingers wrapping around her arms as she was coughing, their thighs so close to
her hips she wanted to whimper—
would
have whimpered if she hadn’t been
so asphyxiated by burnt studio air. In the six months since she’d left
Newcastle, she’d imagined their smell on every item of clothing she owned, no
matter how many times said item had been drowned in a washing machine. It was
only natural her deluded, pathetic, lovelorn brain would tell her their smell
lingered on her flesh now. Clean, distinctive, evoking memories of days and nights
in their arms, their bodies moving over hers,
inside
hers, their mouths
on her throat, her lips, her breasts, her—

“Sex.”

The word fell from her lips on a whisper.

That was the answer. Sex.

The two men in her studio, less than a mile away from where
she stood now, had awakened in her a sexual appetite she hadn’t been prepared
for. Her stupid heart—to match her stupid brain, it seemed—had insisted what
she’d been feeling for them was love, but it wasn’t. It was just sexual fantasy
stuff to the extreme. What women didn’t want to be made love to—no, no, wrong
word—
fucked
by two hot, sexy guys at once? They’d awoken in her that
fantasy and she’d buggered off before she got that fantasy out of her system.
That was all.

One more night in Damon’s and William’s arms, in bed with
them, and she would have been able to move on. One more night of fucking and it
wouldn’t have mattered they didn’t want what she’d
thought
she’d
wanted—a happy-ever-after, bucking-society’s-convention threesome.

All she needed to do was sleep with them one more time and
they would be out of her system. For good. And she could get back to the
important things in life—blowing artworks that didn’t make her think of Damon
Hunt and William Bradley, and freaking out about how her studio had become a
showpiece symbolizing the dangerous force of fire.