Rescue Me: A Valentine's Day Story - Smashwords (2 page)

“Good to know my safety is your first thought,” he said dryly.

She smiled, and wrapped the blanket more tightly around herself. She realized, sheepishly, that she was looking forward to having him up here with her. She was looking forward to having him rescue her. And yeah, she could totally admit it to herself, she was looking forward to having him hold her hand, and maybe more of her.

Valentine’s Day rebound
, she thought, just as his dark head appeared over the top of the ledge.

“Huh,” he said. “I should probably tell you at this point that this kind of thing is not my forte.”

“No, don’t admit that. Just pretend that you do this all the time. You’re a firefighter, or something.”

He looked startled. “Sadly, no. I’m an intermittently successful software entrepreneur. But I have these very vivid fantasies of being extremely handy some day. I will get up on ladders and fix things and build kitchen cabinets and tree houses.” He flattened his hands on the ledge and began pulling himself up. She watched with no small amount of pleasure as the muscles in his shoulders and arms bunched visibly under his thick wool sweater.

“Shit!”

Suddenly he was dangling in mid-air, his legs flailing. The ladder clattered into the street. Her rescuer cursed again and pulled himself the rest of the way onto her ledge like something beached. He was panting. Probably her reaction to his near death experience shouldn’t be to think he was sexy when he breathed hard, but it had been a long night, and she forgave herself. He was, after all, safe.

“Well.” He sat up and dangled his legs alongside hers. “That was totally terrifying. Maybe I should downgrade the tree house portion of the plan.”

“No. The tree house sounds nice. I’m sure your future wife and kids will be very grateful if you cling to the dream.”

“But now we have no ladder.”

“You said you could help me get inside from here.”

“You said you’d rather use the ladder. I bet if we wait a few minutes, someone will walk or drive by and we can ask them to prop the ladder again in a better spot.”

She felt a wave of relief at the idea of
not
having to maneuver back along the ledge. “That’s not a bad plan.”

Close up, he was nearly irresistible. They’d only ever passed on the street or on the wide front steps, and there’d always been a foot or two of distance between them. Now he was sitting right next to her. And he smelled good. Like some kind of spicy aftershave, and yeah, quite a bit of sweat. She’d read somewhere that underarm sweat contained important pheromones, and she did not doubt it in the least. She was reading his whole genetic message right now in some primitive part of her brain, and it was saying, “Yes, good babies in there.”

“In the meantime, what?” she asked. “We just hang out, and share our life stories?”

“You have a better idea?”

“I could put on my big girl panties and get myself inside,” she said, then blushed furiously. Because, of course, she could use some panties, big girl or otherwise.

“Are you blushing? Because you said ‘big girl panties?’”

She wondered what would happen, exactly, if she were to respond by saying,
No, because I’m not wearing any panties.

It would certainly keep Valentine’s Day from being boring. Not that she was bored. She was—well, for someone who’d started the evening by being dumped and then endured several different phases of physical peril and humiliation, she was having a pretty good time.

“Do you want me to show you how easy it will be to get back in?” he asked.

“Sure.”

He started inching toward the window, then said, “Ow!”

“Roofing nail?”

“I hope it’s not rusty.”

“You okay?”

“It missed the most tender parts,” he said. “Luckily.”

“I think you’re best off standing. That was my conclusion, which is why I’m still here.”

He stood slowly, and she watched him, feeling sick to her stomach. She couldn’t stop herself from saying, “Be careful.”

“I will. I am.” He took a few tentative steps toward the window, but just then, the ledge made an ominous noise, and he drew back toward her. “Shit.”

“What?”

“It’s starting to—” he hesitated.

She peered around him and saw what the noise had been. What he’d seen.

A small but noticeable crack had opened between the ledge and the house, in the expanse between them and the window. It was only a few inches long, but she could see a little bit of light shining up through it from the streetlamp below.

He took another backward step toward her, and sat beside her again. “I don’t think we’re in any danger. That said, I think we’d be best off waiting for someone to pass in the street and lift the ladder for us. Or we could call the fire department.”

Oh,
God
. She envisioned her whole street flashing with lights, clanging with sirens. “Can we wait a few minutes and see if we get rescued before we have to resort to that?”

He sighed. “If only I were as handy in reality as in my fantasies, we would still have the ladder right now.”

“There was ice. It could have happened to anyone.”

He flashed her a grateful expression. He was not as aloof or distant as she’d supposed. Right now he seemed almost accessible. Just a guy.

She wondered if Peyton would have thrown her a blanket. Found a ladder. Climbed up, dragged himself onto a ledge. Offered to sit and keep her company.

It was hard to picture. Of course, he wouldn’t have left her sitting there.

He wouldn’t have. Right? If they were strangers and he’d seen her up there, incongruous and shivering?

Was it insane to feel the tiniest bit lucky right now that her evening had gone the way it had? “This is not how I planned to spend Valentine’s Day,” she said, then realized it sounded like a complaint, when in fact she was relieved.

Peyton, I’d rather be stranded on a roof with a strange guy than out to dinner with you on Valentine’s Day.

It was all the revenge she needed, and a weight fell away.

“How
did
you plan to spend it?”

She took a deep breath.

“You don’t have to tell me.”

“I don’t mind.” There was a point after which trying to save your pride no longer made sense. “But you should probably tell me your first name. I know your last name is Jenkins because it says so on your doorbell and your mailbox.”

“Dave.” He put out his hand for her to shake. It was warm and strong, and his fingers lingered a little longer than necessary over her wrist.

“I’m Molly.”

“So do I get my story now?”

“You see that shoe over there?”

“Yes.” Light seemed to dawn for him. “Does that shoe have something to do with your being out on this ledge?”

“I didn’t dress like this to sit out on the ledge in forty-five degree weather,” she said. “My boyfriend was supposed to pick me up and take me to Sergio’s, this new, see-and-be-seen restaurant in Cambridge, but he broke up with me instead. So I—” she hesitated. “So I threw a shoe.”

“Out the window?” he asked.

“I meant to throw it at the wall. The open window kind of jumped in front of my throw.”

“Your luck sounds even worse than mine. I was supposed to go to a Valentine’s Day eight-minute dating tournament. With elimination rounds. But it turned out they signed up one too many people, and they randomly drew my name to come on a different night.”

“Are you telling me you got stood up by speed dating?”

His mouth quirked. “It probably would’ve been a disaster anyway. I don’t know how I let myself get talked into it.”

She tilted her head. “I have to say, you don’t seem like the most likely candidate for speed dating. You aren’t the most talkative. It’s hard for me to imagine you blabbing for four whole minutes.”

“You might not be seeing my best side. I clam up around attractive women.”

She felt a flush of pleasure at that, reawakening the parts of her that had been stirred up earlier. “But you’re talking to me now. Does that mean you no longer find me attractive?”

“Hell, no. No danger of that.”

Oh, she
liked
that. She liked it all the way down to her toes, with some stops for more intense reflection on the way.

“The situation distracted me. But I’ll probably clam up again now that I’m sitting two inches away from you and—would I be way out of line if I said you smell amazing?”

That set off a chain reaction of sensation in her hyper-aware body—breasts tightening against the restriction of her impractical outfit, a surge of wet heat between her legs. Which—probably—he could smell. She should be embarrassed about that, but she wasn’t, not so much. She was pleased. The lotion and powder and makeup, all the self-inflicted pain in the name of beauty, had not been for nothing.

Before she could answer, a car turned up the street.

No!

Uh-oh. Good sense had abandoned her. She no longer wanted to be rescued. She wanted to sit on a possibly dangerous ledge wrapped in a blanket, panty-less, with this guy she didn’t know. Maybe she was in shock or her brain was too cold to function properly.

The car swerved to avoid the ladder, then sped onward.

“Huh,” he said. “I don’t understand some people. They see a ladder in the middle of the street, a potential hazard to traffic, and they don’t even stop to investigate?”

“You might be an unusually thoughtful person.”

“I don’t know.”

“You stopped to make sure I was okay.”

“I stopped to mock you for being on a roof in February.”

The almost-smile again. It occurred to her that if she could make him laugh, it might totally rock her world.

“When you discovered I wasn’t okay, you immediately started trying to fix it. You brought me a blanket. You brought me a ladder.”

“I dropped the ladder.”

“It slipped on the ice. Why won’t you let me give you credit for being awesome?”

He sighed. “I guess because it’s been a while since I thought of myself as awesome. I think of myself as—efficient. Business-like. Reasonably effective at my job. Creative at idea generation, savvy about risk. But ‘awesome’ seems like another league.”

“You’re in it, dude,” she said.

“It’s possible,” he said, “that there’s something about you that brings out my buried inclination to at least
try
to be awesome.”

Something winged skyward in the middle of her chest, and she felt bigger and better and wide open. Her heart beat hard, steady and demanding. “You wouldn’t—” She’d lost the moment before, but she wanted it back. “You wouldn’t be out of line at all. If you said I smelled amazing.”

He smiled. Really, truly smiled. It changed his whole face, lit him right up. It started a hot glow down deep in her, too.

“You smell amazing.”

He’d leaned a little closer to better breathe her in. Her breath caught. “You do, too.” Her voice seemed to have dropped away to a whisper.

“You know who I think is the unluckiest soul in all of this?”

“Who?”

“Your boyfriend. Your
ex
-boyfriend. What an idiot. He could be sitting across from you in a great restaurant. I’m sitting next to you on a window ledge, and it’s still the most fun I’ve ever had on Valentine’s Day.”

More tightening awareness, as if the skin all over her body was as snug-fitting as her clothes.

“Are you warm enough?”

“I could be warmer,” she said.

“What can I do to help?” He leaned in close, so close she could feel his breath against her cheek. His lips slid, so slowly, barely perceptibly, down her jaw. “How’s this?”

“Warmer,” she breathed.

“God,” he muttered against her neck.

He was taking her apart, molecule by molecule, his breath and his lips and his tongue against her skin. She raised her chin to bare her neck, and he put his hand on her back, slid it up to her hair and tugged her toward him. His mouth met hers, warm and sure, a touch first—
hello
—then a long moment when his lips clung to hers and he made a rough sound in his throat—
we’re really doing this
. He coaxed her open and came on strong, his tongue stroking hers. He held the side of her face and turned his body toward hers, as greeting turned to need and need mounted to demand.

She whimpered.

He broke the kiss. “Make that noise again.”

“Kiss me again.”

He didn’t need to be asked twice. He kissed her and kissed her, exploring her, claiming her, quite possibly ruining her for all the rest of the kisses in the world. Certainly no one had ever kissed her like this before, or tasted so good, or held her head in that way that made her feel coddled and required at the same time. She whimpered obediently, and because she honestly couldn’t help herself.

He fumbled in the folds of the blanket, his hands moving roughly over the stretchy material of her dress, finding the tightly restrained curve of her breasts. If she’d known that being bound like this would intensify sensation this much, she would have turned it into her own personal kink years ago. Her nipples were small, hard, bumps buried layers-deep in fabric, but that didn’t stop Mr. Magic Fingers from finding the perfect formula for driving her crazy, nudging and pinching, rocking his thumb back and forth over both nipples until she moaned.

He stopped, abruptly.

“Um,” he said.

“We’re outside,” she said.

“Yes. On a ledge.”

“Call the fire department,” she ordered. “Tell them we need to get down from here, and quickly.”

He gave her a quick sideways glance. “Or they’ll have a real f—”

“Nooo. Don’t do it.”

“I don’t think I can help it. Seriously. Show me the guy who could restrain himself from making a bad fire joke in this situation. He doesn’t exist.”

“You know what? You’re probably right. I’m going to count myself grateful you didn’t make a hose joke.”

He smiled, generating a buzzy, alchemical response in her chest. “You should feel grateful.” He took out his phone, then hesitated.

“What?”

“They’re going to show up and get you down, and you’re going to fall in love with the handsome firefighter who rescued you and forget all about the guy with the blanket.”