Read Ashes - Book 2 (New Adult Romantic Suspense) for Free Online Page A

this … a relationship. Relationships screw up everything. They tie you down. They are too much work.
    There’s so much I want to do with my life; my bucket list is really long. I can’t do that with a nag nipping at my heels.
    I’ve got to stop this.
    Now.
    Ken is going to kill me.

    “What the hell was that?” Ken asks as I pull out of his driveway.
    “Huh?” I really have absolutely no clue.
    “That head nod to Beth when we left. The frown. The ‘hurry up, let’s go’ shit.”
    “Just didn’t want to be late, that’s all.”
    “Right,” he scoffed. “Like when have you once cared about punctuality?”
    He’s got me there.
    “Just got a little creeped out is all,” I confess and stare out at the passing traffic.
    “Creeped out by what?”
    I lift a shoulder, trying to put it in words. “I don’t know. Everything. Last night. This morning. The future. The past. Just all kinds of shit, man. Don’t worry, I’ll be alright.”
    Ken’s fingers stop tapping the steering wheel and he relaxes a little bit into his seat. “Sorry, didn’t mean to jump your shit. I can’t even begin to imagine what last night was like.”
    The memory of the smell slaps the hell out of my medulla oblongata and I have to fight the urge to gag.
    “Yeah. It was bad. So damn unexpected. And the way those women were displayed was so … careful. Ritualistic. The only good thing about it is that now, hopefully, many of their families can find some sort of closure and they can be buried properly near people who loved them.”
    “And maybe they’ll find the bastard who did it.”
    I think about the complexity of how those women were placed in that cave. “Bastards,” I correct him. “I think it has to be bastards, plural. I can’t see how one guy could do all that on his own. Not impossible, but…” I trail off.
    “What should have been impossible was them being found. I mean, what are the odds that a kid would fall from a cliff on the same day a fireman trained in rescue would be right there with climbing gear in his bag? I’m betting you beat lottery odds on that one.”
    I snort. “Lucky me.”
    Ken glances over at me before taking the last turn to the station. “No, lucky them. That kid was … shit.”
    I glance up. “What?”
    “News crews at the station. Two. No three of them.”
    Sinking in my seat, I say, “Terrific. Can you go around back? I need to know what our official statement is going to be before I face them.”
    Ken grins. “Just like you, pretty boy, thinking this is all about you.”
    Then he grows serious and I know he’s remembering the way he was accosted by the news and other types of crazy tabloid magazine type people after everything had gone down with Stephanie last year.
    They’ve been offered big money to tell their story and Stephanie is still considering going on Sixty Minutes or maybe Barbara Walters. She thinks it would be good PR for the HEAL center and also be a platform for her drive to create new legislation that would enable victims of revenge porn to have their photos and videos uploaded by people like ex-boyfriends removed from online sites.
    Ken flips on his signal and does a u-turn. A few minutes later, we’re in the back of the station. I heave a huge sigh of relief, grateful that there wasn’t a microphone in sight.

    So far, so good.
    We’ve been lucky to have a quiet Sunday morning. Seems the Saturday night drinkers are sleeping it off or still drinking. We’ve done rig checks and re-stocked supplies. Cleaned toilets. Anything to pass the time.
    I remember how stunned I was when I first started training to be a firefighter to learn that between calls, the firemen didn’t just sit around waiting for the next alarm like they did on TV.
    Someone once said that a fireman had to have knowledge of something like twenty-five different skills to make it in this line of work — kind of jacks of all trades. We have to know about plumbing, maintenance, landscaping,