Blazed(9)

"I know how to pick my battles. Are you saying you'd come if we got married at my parents house?"

"No. You asked me for one good reason and I gave you one good reason."

"You're such a god damn brat sometimes, Emmeline. You can't always have it your way. You can't click your fingers and relapse to make the world revolve around you. Sometimes you have to accept that other people matter more than you do and make some compromises. If you have to grit your teeth and fake a smile to get through a wedding you don't want to be at, you should damn well do it because it means something to me to have you here. You're not hurting yourself this time, you're hurting the people you're supposed to love."

"Hunter?" I sucked in a deep breath and tried to gather myself before I launched a tirade in response. He was the most selfish person I knew, without a doubt, and nothing I ever did was right by him. Even when we were still in school, he had me by the proverbial balls every minute, trying to groom me into a miniature version of my mother. As much as I loved her, I had too much spirit to be a kept woman, something I still clung to by not accepting Henry's money. I had too much spirit to be downtrodden by elocution and deportment classes. I used to have too much spirit for a lot of things.

But when I really took a long hard look at myself, I knew that, despite his insinuation that I used my ill thoughts and actions to manipulate people, I'd hate myself for driving him away. So I simply said, "sayonara, you self-righteous, egomaniacal pedant," and hung up. Sometimes it was just easier to be the one who stepped back and let him think he'd won, and then pretend the conversation had never happened, than find out what would happened if I bit back.

I just wish I'd realised that I had company ear-wigging.





MY EYES TRACKED up from the varnished wooden cash desk of Double Booked up to the midriff of a man standing directly in front of me on the other side. His fingers slowly brushed along the oak towards me and casually flipped open the cover of my sketchbook.

"How long have you been standing there?"

"Long enough to know that pissing you off is a bad idea." My eyes snapped up to a grin I immediately and involuntarily mirrored. The thick, large pages covered in my drawings turned one by one at an almost tortuously slow pace, fanning me slightly when they dropped down. "Who's the self-righteous, egomaniacal pedant?"

"Best friend," I muttered, the smile quickly fading. I always found myself getting strangely defensive where conversations about Hunter were concerned, preferring to avoid them completely. The typical reaction of ridicule for being hopelessly attached to a man who thought little of me was quite firmly etched in my mind.

Noticing that the hands invading my art were empty, I forced my gaze down from the emerald eyes boring into the pages and focused on the fractured nub of my pencil. "Was there something I can help you with?"

The hands paused mid-movement. "Aren't you going to ask why I haven't been around lately?"

"None of my business."

"Are you annoyed?"

"No." I shrugged uncaringly and raised a hand to a returning Mrs Reynolds sneaking in from an extended lunch break. "It's just none of my business. So can I help you?"

"Actually, yes." The sketchbook flapped shut in front of me, then the hands splayed out on either side of it to support their crouching owner. There was no option to escape or evade him— Blaze was back in my domain, gorgeous and stubbornly persistent. "I was hoping for some company for lunch." If he heard my teeth grind, he didn't give it away.

"I'm not big on lunch." I wasn't big on food in the slightest.

"Smoothies?" Oh. My resolved thawed slightly at this suggestion. He held up a finger to ask for a minute and practically sprinted out to the goblin car I hadn't heard pull up, returning a moment later with two travel mugs.

"I thought you said smoothies?" Travel mugs were something I had only known to come hand in hand with chauffeur driven hot shots' morning coffees on the way into the office. Hot shots like Henry. At one point, when I'd practically survived on black coffee, I'd had one of my own.

Blaze pushed one of them across to me and clipped up the seal over the hole on my behalf. "I did. Super fresh smoothies. I made them myself."

"In travel mugs?"

"Sure. How else would I get them here without spilling them?" Baffled by the lengths he'd gone to just to bring me a nutritious liquid lunch, I shook my head and took an apprehensive sniff of the mugs hidden contents. There was an overpowering smell of banana with an undercurrent of what I suspected might be mango. My favourite.

"How about a flask?" Blaze's mouth opened slightly, but as soon as his face registered his disappointment that I might just be right, he waited until I took a sip and trapped his tongue between two rows of perfectly white and straight teeth. The banana hit my taste buds first, closely followed the odd combination of mango and cherry, then a flavour I recognised but couldn't put my finger on until it's after-burn made me cough. "Did you put rum in this?"

He laughed and shushed me, nodding his head towards the ever pricking ears of Mrs Reynolds hiding just out of sight. "Call it belated hair of the dog."

"How did you know I'd be hungover?"

His head cocked cheekily. "Call it a foregone conclusion on the basis of your admitted self-destructive tendencies." What I wanted to call it was arrogant and annoying. It seemed as though my day was headed down a path towards being a victim of relentless antagonism.

I pushed the mug away with a sneer and forced my attention to fiddling with the shop's old-as-hell computer. He couldn't see the screen— he didn't need to know that I was being evasive. "Well, thank you for the consideration but I can't drink that at work."

"Isn't it your lunch break?" Blaze took a long drink from his mug and licked the rogue drops of smoothie from his lightly scarred Cupid's bow. The corners of his mouth twitched at my awkward shuffle on the spot. He was just so... hot. "Come for a walk with me. No wheels of any kind, I promise. You can walk without injuring yourself?"

"I can walk quite capably, thank you," I shot at him, taken aback by my own temper. Hunter's sour words had left me reeling as always. I forced my tone to soften. "I usually just work through my lunch breaks."

"Emmeline..." He sighed and rounded the desk to heave me to my feet. It didn't matter that I tried my best to be uncooperative and went lax and jelly-legged, he pulled me up effortlessly and so quickly I had to grab onto his arms for support. His biceps were solid and thick with muscle. Instinctively, I knew my cheeks must be pink. "I didn't—" Blaze coughed to clear his voice of the sudden, unexpected huskiness. I smirked. There was no way he was immune to the sexual tension. "I didn't come here to be told no. Humour me."

He had no idea how little me and humour had in common.



WE mingled with the frantic flow of businessmen pacing to lunch meetings, sightseeing tourists and lecture skipping students roaming the packed out streets. The slight fuzziness left by the rum smoothie did little to ease my growing panic in the unfamiliar situation— thrust into a finite tidal wave of unknown, scrutinising faces flooding my senses with harsh, judgemental stares. Every single one of them watching me, rating me, identifying my flaws and failings with passing glances faster than I could process. My feet began to fail and I could feel myself lagging behind, battling to anchor myself with both hands clasped around my travel mug.

The majority of my life from adolescence had been spent seeking to avoid anxiety-ridden scenes like these. Central London on a Friday lunchtime was my worst nightmare and a small, dark, neglected piece of me missed the ostentatious but peaceful suburban palace I'd grown up in, with it's tall imposing walls, looming security gates and pre-approved guest list.

The foreign sensation of an arm wrapping around my waist grounded me slightly and slowed the surge of strangers who almost seemed to part for us. No, not us. They parted for the Adonis who had picked me up like, what? A pet project because I was commitment-phobic?

"Hey," Blaze whispered down at me, driving me to look up and find his eyes beating down on me like two shimmering green comets. Even though he'd spoken so quietly, his voice was still louder than the roar around me. "Are you alright?"

"I don't like crowds," I muttered, "sorry."

"Don't apologise." His arm tensed around me and he pulled me closer to his body, fingers kneading into my left side tenderly. All of my breath got trapped in my chest and my brain shut out the rest of the world around me. The combination of dumbfounding fear and unexpected comfort kept my feet moving when I might have crumbled to the floor in a heap, and before I knew it the streets began to clear and quiet. Blaze had damn near guided me safely through Hell.

He pulled me into an inconspicuous restaurant and up a staircase with ornately carved spindles to a sheltered mezzanine area overlooking the street below. I was sure I recognised the red table cloths that matched the immaculate parasols from a magazine. My anchoring travel mug was prized from my grip and set down on the table in front of the chair he ushered me into by the shoulders, and a glass of water crammed with shell shaped ice cubes quickly placed next to it.