Olivia squeals again, and it shakes me out of my momentary trance. I turn to open the door to the back seat, but he reaches me first.
"Hey." He speaks the word angrily, and I turn to face him as I pull open the car door to grab Olivia. The man is close to me, only a few inches away, and when I look in his eyes, electricity rushes through my body even though he hasn't so much as laid a finger on me.
There's something both threatening and sexy in the way he stands near me. I'm not sure if he's trying to intimidate me, or if he wants to cover my mouth with his, and the fact that I can’t tell which sends a shiver up my spine. "Is this your place?"
"Yeah. I'm the owner,” I say, looking into his icy blue eyes framed with thick dark lashes. Shit, he's got to be in his twenties. He's young. Too young.
He points back toward the orchard. "I don't know what the hell kind of operation you're running here," he starts.
I bristle immediately at his tone. "Excuse me?"
He points his finger at me, and I nearly reach out and smack it away. This guy might be the hottest thing I've ever seen, but he's clearly the kind of guy who thinks he can get away with anything just because he's gorgeous. "Are you trying to singlehandedly burn down the fucking county, or just get people killed?"
"Who the hell are you?" I ask.
He ignores me, instead continuing with his lecture. "You've got a piece of shit foreman who's fucking drunk on the job, you know that?"
"I don't know anything right now. All I know is that I don't know you. And that you need to quit cussing and back the hell away from me before I slap you."
Olivia howls, “Mama!” and I pull open the car door all the way, half-hoping I smack him with it. Okay, totally hoping I smack him with the door. I've never seen this guy before in my life and he's yelling at me in front of my toddler? Anyone who does that is a total dirtbag.
I slide Olivia out of the seat and turn around with her on my hip, only to find him standing there gaping at me.
"I didn't know you had a… kid."
All I know is that I don't want Olivia around this guy who's clearly an asshole, so I slam the car door and shield her from him as I move toward the other firefighter who’s far more reasonable. “And it’d be fine for you to yell at me if I didn’t have a kid?” I ask. “It’s totally normal to just go around screaming at women?”
I don’t bother to wait for an answer. I don’t need some twenty-year-old kid lecturing me about how to run my own damn property. Hearing about my foreman already hits a nerve with me. He's the third foreman I've had, and I thought I smelled alcohol on his breath the other day, but I wrote it off as just my own paranoia. I don't even know how much of the orchard was destroyed or—holy shit—if anyone got hurt.
"Ma'am," the firefighter I spoke with before greets me.
"No one was – I mean, nothing happened – No one got hurt, right?" Olivia kicks at me, hanging over my arm and trying to get down. "Hang on a second, baby. There's too much going on out here for you to be running around."
The firefighter shakes his head. "Your foreman could have been, though. Ambulance brought him down to the hospital, treated him for smoke inhalation."
"What happened?"
"Foreman passed out. Looks like a lit cigarette started the fire."
"Oh my God."
"He's lucky," the firefighter tells me, "and so are you. He woke up in time. But he apparently tried to put it out himself, which wasn't smart. Probably didn't try to call the fire department because he was drunk. The Saint boy over there was driving by and saw it, jumped in to help. He called us. You're lucky he was going by. This whole place could have gone up in flames, you know. It’s been dry out here, with it being fall and all.”
I'm trying to process what he's saying. All the while, the gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach grows more insistent. At least no one was hurt.
The Saint boy… the firefighter's words echo in my head. That's the asshole who was yelling at me.
That's the guy with the ice-blue eyes, the one who sent a crackle of electricity running through my spine when he stood close to me.
Of course, that was before he opened his big freaking mouth.
Olivia leans over in my arm, and lets out a loud howl, and the firefighter shrugs. "You want to take care of her? All this smoke out here isn’t good for her anyway."
"Thank you." I make my way inside and set Olivia down on the hardwood floor as soon as we get in the house. She toddles forward a few unsteady steps before the screen door even shuts behind me, and I follow her down the hallway, grateful for the silence.
The reprieve is short lived. The knock on the door echoes loudly, and I look over my shoulder, exhaling heavily as soon as I see who it is. "You again? You didn't get enough of an opportunity to yell at me already?"