Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
TUCKER
Hazel Pierce had a black belt in avoidance. If emotional running were an Olympic sport, she’d have more medals than Michael Phelps.
There’d been a time when fixing things for her had been easy.
Back when we were just two teens trying to out-stubborn the world, sitting on her porch roof and making escape plans we were both too young to understand.
She used to laugh when I swore I’d build her a house someday, one with a lock I actually felt safe behind.
She’d been my first best friend beyond my siblings.
And she’d also been so, so much more.
But somewhere along the way, we’d stopped speaking the same language. Now she ran, and I let her, because chasing her hurt worse than watching her go.
Two nights after our talk, I dreamed about Hazel in those faded threadbare jeans she wore on the jobsite. The tees that were a modest cut but hugged her body as if they knew exactly what they were doing to me, a tool belt slung low on her hips.
No one had ever looked as good in a tool belt as Hazel Pierce, a tape measure on one hip, hammer on the other, a walking, cursing, perfectly built hurricane in battered boots.
All legs and opinions. Confident in a man’s world, not because someone gave her permission, but because she took up space and didn’t apologize for it.
She worked with an unconscious grace, like she’d been born with a nail gun in hand. Concentration furrowing her brow, tongue caught between her teeth—and every time she stretched, every time her shirt rode up just a little, it made me hard enough to forget my own name.
I jerked awake to my phone having a seizure on my nightstand.
It was 3:00 a.m. and Most Important Brother flashed on the caller ID. Caleb had changed his contact name in my phone forever ago, and since it annoyed Ryder, I’d left it.
I answered with “Someone better be dead.”
My back ached like hell.
I’d just finished a brutal forty-eight-hour shift, and this one had left scars.
Most first responders learned how to help without absorbing the pain.
I thought I was good at that. But today?
Today had bled straight through the armor, leaving me, along with Jayden, Tessa, Marcus, and Harlow, shell-shocked.
Our last call had been a head-on collision. Four teenagers, playing chicken. Two were in the ICU, barely hanging on. The other two were about to have their lives rewritten by charges and guilt.
I’d been running on fumes. Now I was running on dread.
“She’s at it again,” Caleb said in my ear. My brain was still fogged from the dream, but his tone cleared it fast.
I rubbed my eyes. “Who?”
“Hazel. Who the hell else? Guess where she is right now.”
That snapped me fully awake.
He didn’t wait. “Same warehouse she got arrested at in high school. Only now it’s a women’s shelter. And someone spotted her up on a ladder.”
I remembered. Seventeen, painting a mural. Had overheard dogfights and called the cops anonymously. Stayed until they showed. Had gotten arrested with the rest of them—paint on her hands, fury in her bones.
Hazel had always run straight toward the fire.
“Fuck,” I muttered, already out of bed.
“You gonna go get her before she gets herself arrested again, or should I?”
“I’ve got her.” I was already half dressed, yanking jeans over my hips.
From the foot of the bed, Her Fluffiness lifted her head and gave me a judgmental blink.
“Don’t wait up.”
Ten minutes later, I rolled into the alley behind the shelter, headlights off. The back of the building glowed in the work light Hazel had strung up on a rafter. Just off the building was a concrete pad, weeds growing through the cracks. Two picnic tables were the only furniture.
And then there was Hazel.
On a ladder.
Of course.
She was painting the fresh wood of a new overhang above a pair of picnic tables. Cherry red, from the look of the dripping brush. The siding back there had clearly been replaced. The overhang was new. And the flower pots flanking the back door? No way those were standard-issue.
Hazel stood there like she owned the night, her hair wild in the breeze. Fierce. Focused. Vulnerable in ways she didn’t let most people see.
Even from here, I could tell something was eating at her. The tight set of her shoulders. The crease in her brow. She didn’t move like someone looking for permission. She moved like someone who knew this world had tried to break her and she’d made art out of the cracks.
I walked into the pool of light and stopped beneath her. “What are you doing?”
She startled, swore, and dropped the brush—right onto my head.
“Oh my God!” She scrambled down, eyes wide. “You scared the crap out of me!”
I swiped red paint off my forehead. “And now I look like a murder victim. We’re even.”
She bit back a laugh and handed me a rag. “I’m sorry, but seriously, why are you here?”
“Someone reported vandalism.”
She blinked, shook her head, then muttered, “Of course they did.” She crossed her arms. “I don’t care.”
Lie. I could see it in her posture. That stiff, bracing-for-impact stance she always tried to pretend wasn’t armor. I knew that expression. She cared too much and didn’t know where to put it.
I looked around. New siding. Clean overhang. Fresh flowers in the middle of the night.
“It looks good,” I said.
She hesitated as if surprised. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. Really good.”
She stared at me, and then her gaze flicked to my mouth. “I feel like I should make a public service announcement that I try really hard not to do stupid stuff anymore.”
I felt a stupid smile cross my face. “Same.” I stepped closer. “But I don’t have regrets.”
She laughed low. “Me neither.” She reached up and swiped at the paint still in my hair. “Gave you red highlights.”
“At the risk of repeating myself—payback’s…”
“So you’ve said.” Her voice dropped. “I could hose you down.”
I didn’t want a hose. I wanted her. But not just physically. I wanted to pull her in and ask what she was running from tonight. And then promise that she didn’t have to run anymore.
“Tucker?”
Her eyes were locked on my mouth, and my hands found a home on her hips. “Hazel.”
She drew in a shaking breath. “What would you say if I told you I had an urge to do something…wildly ill-advised?”
Every blood cell in my body saluted, then rerouted south. This woman was going to ruin me in the best possible way. “If it involves you, me, and a reckless disregard for common sense, I’m fully on board.”
The night was still. A dog barked in the distance. Wind rustled the trees and my paint-soaked hair as she nudged me up against the new siding.
Heat and hunger swamped my bones. “You going to be gentle?”
“Not a chance.” Her arms wrapped around my neck, and her mouth found mine, slow, deep, hot as sin.
One taste was all it took. I reversed our positions, pressing her against the wall now, pinning her wrists above her head. She moaned into me, wrapping her legs around me like we were built for this. When she sank her teeth into my bottom lip and tugged, I growled.
She laughed low in her throat. “Love that sound.”
“Your turn.” I freed my hands to explore, smiling against the hollow of her throat when she whimpered as I worked my way south.
Her hands slid beneath my shirt to touch my bare skin, and my control slipped.
“Cheating,” I murmured against her throat.
“I don’t play fair.”
God, I loved her not playing fair. When I teasingly closed my teeth around a peaked nipple over the thin material of her shirt, she gasped and clutched me hard. “Tucker.”
“Anything. Name it.”
“I need—”
Headlights blinded us as a car rolled into the alley. High beams. Shit.
Police.
“Don’t move!” Officer Joey Morgan jumped out, eyes wide on me. “Jesus, Colburn, is that blood?”
Hazel and I looked at each other. We did have red paint…everywhere, including a handprint across her chest that was so perfect, they could’ve gotten my prints off it.
“It’s paint!” she called out to Joey.
He blinked, then laughed. “Holy hell. I cannot wait to tell this story.”
Hazel slid down my body and glared at him. “You ’bout done?”
Joey scratched his head. “I don’t know. You causing any trouble? I mean, other than with your tongue?”
“Go away, Joey,” I said.
Still chuckling, he backed out and drove off.
Hazel crossed her arms. “Maybe you should go too.”
Even with paint in my hair and Joey’s amusement ringing in my ears, my body hadn’t caught up with the fact that the kiss was over. My heart definitely hadn’t. “Or I could help you finish up here.”
An hour and a half later, we packed everything into her van, the back of which was organized down to the last inch. She slammed the doors shut, nearly catching my nose.
“We need to clean up,” she said, staring at her handprints all over me like maybe it meant something she wasn’t ready to say out loud.
“Why do you do this in the middle of the night?” I asked softly.
Her almost smile slipped away like mist. Wind tugged her hair, and her mouth trembled just enough for me to notice. Then there were the smudges of exhaustion beneath her eyes…
“Because you can’t sleep,” I guessed.
She looked away. So yes.
“Is that because you’re sleeping in your childhood home where…?”
“Where my mom died. Where I found her,” she whispered, looking away.
The words cracked something wide open in me. I studied her profile, aching to reach for her. “I didn’t understand then what that must’ve felt like,” I said. “Not truly, but I do now.”
Her eyes came back to mine, full of ghosts. “Because of your job?”
I nodded. “My first call ever was a doozy. Still haunts me.”
“Tell me,” she said.
“It was maybe a year after you left. I was still volunteering with the fire squad. We got called to a house fire—a foster mom and eight kids. We saved everyone except the youngest. A two-year-old. He’d hidden.”
The breath shuttered out of her lungs as her hand found mine. “You didn’t find him in time.”
“I found him, but definitely not in time.”
“Oh, Tucker.” Her fingers tightened around mine. “And you still carry it.”
I still carried all of it—my own mom, that boy…especially Hazel.
I stared down at our entwined fingers. “Are we back to a truce?”
“Maybe,” she whispered. “A temporary one.”
I’d take it. I pressed her back against the van, flattened a hand on the door next to her face, and leaned in, dropping my gaze from her eyes to her mouth. “I’m going to kiss you now.”
“Yes.”
Sliding an arm around her waist, I pulled her flush and brought my other hand up to cradle the back of her head. Our lips were a fraction of an inch apart as we stared at each other.
“You know you have to actually make contact to call it a kiss, right?”
“Smart-ass,” I said and touched my lips to hers.
The kiss was nothing like the first. It wasn’t wild or reckless. It was slow. Sure.
Unshakable.
Pleasure jolted through my heart, and then again when she moaned and clutched at me like I’d tilted her world on its axis.
Tilting her head, I kissed her again, deeper. And again…
When we ran out of air, we pulled back and stared at each other, and apparently she was equally at a loss for words as me because she backed up a step. “You are…”
“Sexy? Charming? Something you can’t live without?”
“Dangerous.”
And with that, she got into her van and drove off.
I stood there, heart still threatening to break free of my chest, watching her taillights disappear, wondering if I’d just gotten closer to her, or lost her all over again.
The alley went quiet. The streetlight flickered. A breeze kicked up the scent of paint and pine, and somewhere inside me, hope and fear went to war, and neither was willing to back down.