The Problem with Fire - M.E. Clayton Page 0,3

that’s for sure.

Chapter 2

Sayer~

What the hell was wrong with me?

I wasn’t a bad-looking guy. I did my best to keep in shape. I was friendly enough. And I even fought fires for a goddamn living. I had a heroic occupation where I saved lives and kittens stranded on tree branches.

My parents, Robert and Louise, were decent people who had raised us to be decent human beings. My father was a construction engineer, and my mother was a fulltime homemaker. And they had raised me and my brothers, Gideon and Nathan, without any hints of mental defects. Gideon had followed in my father’s footsteps and was a construction engineer, and Nathan played professional baseball. I came from a good family, damn it. Even my best friend and fellow firefighter, Kellen Everett, was a good dude.

So, why was I practically invisible to my next-door neighbor?

Okay.

Ego aside, her ex-husband’s hair was lighter than my own dark brown. The dude also had hazel eyes instead of light blue like mine. He was in his forties, so a few years more mature than I was. And he was a CPA; a nice, boring, dependable, successful CPA. He didn’t run into buildings engulfed in flames, placing the life of others before his own. And how did I know all this? A couple of weeks after I had moved into my house, he had been outside waiting to pick up their daughter for the week, and he had walked over and had introduced himself as he’d been waiting. He had given me no details about his ex-wife and had been quite content with talking about himself only.

So, it was quite possible, maaaaaaaaaaaaaybe, that I just wasn’t her type. I was nothing like her ex-husband, but then, that should be a plus since he was her ex, right?

And even though he hadn’t offered up any information regarding his ex-wife, our mutual neighbor, Kerry Florence, had been a wealth of information when I had moved into the neighborhood. She had given me the gossip on the couple who had owned my house before me, The Masons across from me, The Hendersons across from her, my sexy neighbor, Monroe Stewart, who was nestled between our two houses, and of course, Kerry Florence had made sure to let me know that she was a single florist who was surrounded by love all day, just waiting for her Prince Charming to come and sweep her off her feet.

It had been…awkward.

Especially, since I was more interested in the sexy divorcee with a teenage daughter and baggage in the form of a douchebag ex-husband than I was in a single florist who had no baggage.

Who knew?

But I’ve been living here for over two months already, and the woman hasn’t looked my way more than twice in all that time. She’s given me a quick wave and a couple of mumbled hellos, but nothing more than that. And it would totally suck if she were still hung up on her ex because I found myself really, really, really, really attracted to the woman.

She wasn’t very tall, but then, I stood at six-foot-three, so that probably put her at around five-foot-three, or so. And from what I could tell from the distance, she had dark brown hair with these whiskey-colored eyes. She mostly wore loose-fitting clothes when she was off work, but Jesus fucking Christ, the days I’d catch her coming from or going to work, she was dressed to the nines in sexy secretary office attire. And those slacks and pencil skirts she wore showcased curves for days.

I had a straight up stiff dick for my neighbor, and the woman couldn’t care less.

Now, it wasn’t that I didn’t date because I did. I was a healthy male with healthy male appetites. It was just that my job was demanding, and a lot of women couldn’t handle that. My parents had sent all us boys to college, and while Gideon and my father were partners with their own engineering firm, and Nathan was off breaking records in the MLB, I had gotten a Bachelor’s in arson investigation. However, I had found out, rather quickly, that desk work hadn’t been for me. I preferred the physicality of the job rather than the paper pushing and all the bureaucratic nonsense that came with it.

Since graduating from college, I’d only had one serious girlfriend, and that record sucked in my opinion. I was thirty-five, and only one girl has tried to stick it out over these past ten years.