Read Online Rekindle the Flame by Kate Meader - Free Book Online

and call?”
    Rage boiled up. “For God’s sake, Dad, have you been following me?” His keeping tabs should not have surprised her. Given some of his past stunts and his preference for gold jewelry, he had more in common with an old-school Mafioso than with the upper echelons of power he so wanted to control.
    “He’s not worthy of you, Darcy. He never was.” Hestared her down for a moment, then turned and walked into Grams’s room.

    “Keep your fists up,” Wyatt said.
    Shoulders back, Beck adjusted his stance, putting more weight on his back foot, and delivered a one-two to the bag with his chin down and fists proud. Only three weeks since he’d started his leave, and his muscles bitched at every unfamiliar motion. Sweat rolled off his neck, soaking his tee, the impurities of his body sloughing away with every punch. Not the impurities of his mind, though. He held on to those like a drowning man whose life flashed before his eyes in bursts with each desperate second above water.
    Darcy writhing under him, encouraging him to take her harder, do her right. Darcy’s hands exploring his chest and rasping his nipples. Hell, sexy shit she hadn’t even done!
    The bag hit his head so hard that his ears popped and rang.
    “The fuck?”
    “You’re distracted,” Wyatt said as he steadied the bag he had just used as a weapon to usher Beck back to reality. If reality meant the cramped gym at Engine 6 on Chicago’s North Side, he’d take his fantasy life, thanks. The old quarters could do with a face-lift, which given the city’s budget woes and the fact CFD came last on their good mayor’s list of priorities, would not be happening in any Dempsey’s lifetime.
    Wyatt cleared his throat. “Keep that shit up and you’ll get your head bashed in by the Five-Oh.”
    “It’s not until April,” Beck said, referring to the annual Battle of the Badges. “Plenty of time to get undistracted.” Two more weeks should do it. She’d be gone, off to Texas and some cowboy hick who would learn every inch of her tattooed body, and what each image meant.
    “So you are.”
    “Are what?”
    Wyatt’s flinty expression said Beck shouldn’t even bother playing it cool.
    “Yeah, I’m distracted.” He had Darcy on his mind. Then. Now. The future with a heaping side of regret if he didn’t act and lock her down. She’d lied to him about this amazing woman she had become while he lodged his body deep within hers. But as mad as that made him, he understood that deficit of trust on her side. Maybe she was right to keep the real Darcy from him; maybe he didn’t deserve to see the woman behind the ink, not while past mistakes were milling around in his brain.
    Beck knew he was going to rue the next words out of his mouth because Wyatt was the worst sounding board ever, but sometimes talking to a human wall was better than a lady-feelings exchange with Gage or Luke.
    “There’s this girl.”
    Wyatt hoisted an eyebrow. Already overseas with the Marines when Beck and Darcy had started dating, his oldest brother had missed out on all the drama from back in the day.
    “I cut her loose years ago and now she’s on my radar again. She was this big bright light that made me feel like I could do anything, y’know?”
    “I know,” Wyatt said with uncharacteristic feeling. Guy was completely cryptic when it came to his sex life, so that was about as effusive as Beck had ever heard him.
    “Keeping her close would have been the best thing for me, but it would’ve dragged her down, dimmed all that radiance. She had college and this golden life ahead of her, and she would have given it up to stay with me.” She knew he couldn’t leave Chicago, not when his future involved suiting up in CFD bunker gear. Which left the option of a long-distance relationship, or Darcy staying put and possibly giving up her dreams—for him.
    He threw a punch at the heavy bag, keeping his top knuckles centered in the glove to absorb the shock. “I needed to