Almost there...three feet from the first porch step and then…I’m tackled from the side. My body slams into the ground and the air is knocked completely out of my lungs. I try to take in a breath, but my lungs aren’t working. Fuck it...I don’t need them to get to Marney. I start struggling with the lead weight that is on top of me, vaguely noticing that it appears to be a fireman.
I push hard against him, trying to get my legs up so I can kick him off me. I make another attempt to breathe but my lungs still aren’t cooperating.
Pulling on the last vestiges of air I have left in me, I rasp, “Get the fuck off of me.”
“Alright, kid...calm down,” I hear and then the weight is gone.
I suck in a huge lungful of oxygen. Replenished, I spring to my feet and start to make a dash to the porch but arms of fucking steel wrap around my waist and sling me away from the house. I stumble for a few feet then right myself.
Spinning around, the fireman is standing between me and Marney’s house with his arms held out in front of him. “You can’t go in there, kid.”
“The fuck I can’t,” I scream at him. “My girlfriend is in there.”
“I’m sorry...” he starts to say but I don’t have time for this shit.
Lunging for the house, I try to juke around the fireman but my skills must be rusty. He easily catches me again, wrapping me in a bear hug that I cannot break.
My body strains toward the house, the blazing heat causing rivulets of sweat to pour from my face.
“Marney,” I scream and my eyes frantically search the windows, hoping to see her somehow through the angry flames and billowing black smoke.
I try to lunge toward the house, time and time again, but the firefighter isn’t letting me go. I scream Marney’s name, over and over, until my throat feels like it’s riddled with glass shards.
And a look at the new contemporary New Adult Romance from Zoe Dawson
A Perfect Mess
Book #1-A Perfect Secret series
Available now where e-books are sold.
I know what you did last summer.
Aubree Walker, the perfect girl most likely to succeed, is sure there’s only one person who knows what she did.
Booker Outlaw, one of the three Outlaw brothers—all identical, all gorgeous, all from the wrong side of the tracks, and all pure bad boys. He was always the unpredictable one, the one who would be brash enough to make it big self-publishing horror novels on the internet. He promised never to tell, but everyone knows you can never trust an Outlaw.
Then a year later, in the middle of the night, she receives a phone call at Tulane. Her aunt, who took her in after her mother’s death, is in a coma under suspicious circumstances. Now she has to face that one person who knows all about what she did that summer—sexy Booker.
Returning to Hope Parish to be with her aunt, stirs up all those ugly memories. When Aubree starts getting threats, she can’t help but wonder if what she did last summer was tied to her aunt’s “accident.” Afraid, she turns to the only person who knows the truth and Booker doesn’t hesitate to offer his broad shoulder for her to lean on. But Booker has a secret of his own that could crush their fledgling relationship.
As the hot, sultry summer days move on, she finds that even a perfectly smart girl can lose her heart to a perfectly bad boy. What is she going to do when someone starts asking questions Aubree doesn’t want to answer? She’s knee deep into a terribly dangerous, wholly life changing, who-can-she-really-depend-on perfect mess.
***
Aubree
“This solution is incorrect, Miss Walker.”
I looked down at the formula and went back over it carefully. “No, sir. I believe that this is the correct answer. I’m sure I got it right.”
“No. It’s wrong.”
“Could you tell me why?”
“Because a mongoose doesn’t mate with a chicken.”