“I know.” Korbin took me into his arms and kissed me, one hand resting gently on the small of my back. “Hopefully, the police will be on her trail in due time, and we won’t have to think about it ever again.”
“I look forward to that,” I whispered, trailing my finger down his chest. “Hey, wanna go upstairs with me?” I started to turn around, holding his hand, but Korbin scooped me straight off the floor and into his arms, holding me against him as he carried me up the stairs and into the loft. With a small smile, Korbin set me down on the bed, then went to work undressing me, his warm fingers working at the seams of my clothes while I did the same to him. I almost couldn’t function, couldn’t get my fingers to work. I was so hungry for him.Ravenous.
“All that time spent away from you must have done me good,” I teased him just before Korbin’s mouth enveloped my own, silencing me. I grabbed his shirt's bottom and pulled it up and over his head, running my hands over the familiar granite slab of his abdomen, fingers trembling with yearning. He pushed his pants off and started to crawl back on top of me, but before he could, I sat up and flipped him over so that I was on top, controlling all movements from there. Korbin grinned, pleased, as I slowly lowered my naked hips onto his, allowing him to fill me completely. One of his hands shot up to rub my nipple, rolling it between his fingers, and as I rocked my hips, my head dropped back in ecstasy, and a low gasp of pleasure escaped me.
A slight growl rose from Korbin’s throat as his fingers took hold of my hips, digging into the sensitive skin, but it only drove me further, harder, faster. Just as I was about to come, Korbin grabbed my hips with his hands and flipped me over until he was on top again, taking control, his hands reaching for my wrists to pin them above my head as he fucked me, hard, until both of us collapsed onto each other, gasping for breath and glistening with sweat.
We laid there in silence for a moment, wrapped in each other’s arms, consumed in this moment of pure and utter bliss.
Everything was right in the world for a second, and when I closed my eyes, all I could see was happiness. Love.
Both of us were just about asleep in each other’s arms when Korbin’s pager began to ring, sending an alarm loud enough to make me cringe.
“Shit,” he said, checking the message. “I need to go to work.”
“What is it?” I asked sleepily. “Is everything okay?”
“Another fire,” he said, hopping out of bed to get dressed. “We need all hands on deck.”
“Please be careful,” I said, sitting on the bed to hug him. “Stay safe.”
“I will, baby. Go back to sleep. I’ll be home as soon as I can.”
I laid alone in the dark for a while long after Korbin left, feeling superbly more rattled than usual. I wanted to call and check on him, but I knew I couldn’t do that. But the nightmares, the ones of burning fires and dying people and even of Amanda’s face, haunted me. I rolled over and over in the bed until I finally found restless sleep at around two in the morning.
It was three-thirty in the morning when my cell phone rang on the nightstand next to the bed. I didn’t bother to check the number before pressing it to my ear. I groaned and rolled over, fumbling for the light on the lamp shade before grappling for the phone.
“Hello?”
“Is this Peyton Blake?”
“Yes, this is she,” I said, frowning into the phone. I sat up in bed, rubbing the sleep from my eyes, feeling alarmed suddenly. Was Korbin okay? Was someone hurt? Had they been killed? “Who is this?”
“This is Doctor Aaron Shaffer,” the man said. “I’m the attending physician in the ER. Is Susan Blake your mother?”
Something squeezed my throat, a painful, vice-like sensation that nearly made me fall. “Yes,” I said with a desperate squeak. “What’s wrong? Is she all right?”
“She’s stable, but you should probably come to the hospital. You are her emergency contact.”
“Fine,” I said, jumping out of bed to pull on some sweatpants and a tee-shirt. “What happened?”
“It looks like an overdose,” Doc Shaffer said. “On pain killers. We’ll know more when she wakes up.”
“Jesus.” I froze in the middle of the floor, the phone pressed painfully against my ear. An overdose? My own mother? “I’ll be right there,” I said. “I’ll be right there.”
Chapter37
Korbin
Flames roared above our heads, licking the sky like a dragon’s blaze. Even from where we stood, so far back, the heat from the firestorm heated our exposed skin. It was far too late for a rescue mission; anyone who might have been trapped in this building was now surely dead.
“Shit,” Hansen said behind me. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“No kidding,” I muttered, shaking my head in astonishment. Like the others, this fire had been started in a commercial office building—but by the time we’d arrived, the entire place had been up in flames.
Whoever was doing this was getting impatient. Whether it genuinely was Amanda or someone else entirely, they were no longer playing by the rules. They were out to destroy whatever happened to be in the way, regardless of the lives they might have sacrificed. For all we knew, death was what this arsonist would now be seeking out.
“Put the hose on the flames,” Chief Davis said behind us, hands on his hips as he stared at the burning building. “Make sure it’s out. And someone get an arson investigator out here.”
