The Firefighter Meets His Match (Red Hot Reunions Book 4) by Jessie Evans

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    “Did you hear me?” the man asked, his voice so deep it made Bubba’s sound girly in comparison. “Are you okay? Who are you—”
    Mia leaned in, covering his mouth with her own, silencing him with a kiss.
    At first his lips remained hard, immovable—chiseled marble every bit as muscled and unrelenting as the rest of him. Mia’s pulse spiked with anxiety, worrying that she had just added assault-with-unwanted-lips to her list of sins against this man, but then it was like a switch flipped inside of him. His mouth came to life beneath hers, and Mia’s blood pumped faster for reasons that had nothing to do with nerves.
    The stranger’s big hand threaded through her hair, pulling her closer as his tongue slipped between her lips, swirling through her mouth with a skilled sensuality that took her breath away. He tasted of salt, summertime, the desert wind, and a dozen mysterious, manly things she couldn’t put names to. She only knew that they made her body ache, her fingers dig into his shoulders, and her tongue spar eagerly with his. He was…delicious, and each taste of him only made her want more. She angled her head, deepening the kiss, moaning softly when his fingers fisted in her hair, tugging at her scalp as his free hand skimmed down her back.
    Down, down, until his wide palm cupped her bottom and Mia’s nerve endings sizzled, even as a voice in her head insisted this was getting out of hand. She didn’t even know this man’s name, or exactly what he looked like. He was a complete stranger, who had been wandering around The Blue Saloon Hotel parking lot in the middle of the night. For all she knew, he could be an axe murderer, or a Peeping Tom, or a closet stamp collector, or one of those guys who aspired to eat an entire car, piece by piece.
    Or he could be a genuinely nice guy looking for a consenting adult to take home and pleasure all night long with his wickedly talented tongue. And while Mia had no doubt this man would deliver in the bedroom, she wasn’t in the market for a one-night stand, or a boyfriend, or anything else. She’d made a promise to herself when she came back to Lonesome Point—no romantic entanglements. Between her gruesome family history, and the nightmare she’d lived through in Los Angeles during her last year of graduate school, she knew better. The only way to keep everyone safe was to keep her relationships with the opposite sex purely friendly.
    Thankfully, just as she was trying to figure out how to extricate herself from the man’s arms, when something stubborn inside of her insisted it would rather stay and kiss him senseless, she heard footsteps coming from the far side of the parking lot. If she were lucky, it would be Bubba and Ross, returning from their mission. If she were unlucky, it would be Tallulah, circling around the shrubs with her shotgun, intent on punishing the defacer of her precious garden gnomes.
    Either way, Mia didn’t want to get caught with her tongue in a strange man’s mouth.
    “Someone’s coming,” she whispered against his lips, flattening her hands on his sculpted chest and pushing him away.
    But as she left the circle of warmth they’d created and scrambled to her feet, she couldn’t ignore the wave of disappointment that washed through her. It had been so long since she’d been close to someone, since she’d had anything but a hug from a friend, or a kiss on the cheek from her gram after brunch on Sunday. She hadn’t realized how much she craved this kind of intimacy. How much she longed to touch and be touched, to lose herself in someone’s strong arms, and for the first time since everything started to go to hell with Paul, to feel a little less alone.
    “What’s up?” Bubba kept his voice low, but he didn’t hunch behind the bushes as he crossed the parking lot near the hedge. It was too dark to see his face, but Mia could imagine the suspicious look he was shooting in her new friend’s direction. Bubba was