Page 11 of Angel's Smoke

“You always answer a question with a question?”

Then those jade eyes narrowed, and that earlier fire returned. The fire he’d last seen in his dream and had been chasing the warmth of ever since. “Listen, buddy. If you’re in the market for a Good Samaritan badge, you might want to check with the Aurora Police Department. I hear they still give them out to Boy Scout troops and when they teach school kids about K-9 units. As you can see, traffic’s moving again, and I’d like to get home before the sky opens up. So, yeah, thanks for . . . whatever it is you think you did.”

“Give me your phone.”

“Yeah, that’s a big old no on that one.”

“Wasn’t asking.” In the red haze of the brake lights only two cars ahead of them, Iron ducked into her open window and snatched her phone from the pocket in her center console.

“Hey, what the hell do you think you’re?—”

It was the work of a moment to program his details into her contacts and, yeah, favorite that shit at the tippy top. Might as well. “You need anything, you call me. Name’s Iron. I’m local. Your brakes sound like shit, and I don’t need to tell you that storms this time of year are unpredictable. Or maybe I do need to tell you that.” He smiled, then eyed her paltry provisions as she grabbed her phone out of his hand and threw it in her bag.

“You can’t take people’s stuff.”

“Didn’t take anything I didn’t give back.”

“Do you always do this?” she said, mimicking his tone from earlier, though with a heavy bend toward the obnoxious.

“Do what?”

“Act out what I suspect is your warped code of integrity?”

He smiled at that. Smiled big and wide.

She had no fucking idea.

Iron raised two fingers to his temple and saluted her off before ambling back to the sidewalk. Her window was up and sealed a moment later. And as he watched her drive off with the moving line of cars, he pulled out his phone to finish making those notes to himself from earlier.

Except this time, they’d have nothing to do with scanning school district rosters and everything to do with running her license plate.

Chapter6

As Anna tucked her newly acquired and equally laughable snowstorm rations into the pantry, minus the open bag of M&Ms, which had already been slotted for that evening’s dinner and dessert, the dormant analytical part of her brain took over, as it so often did in times of stress.

Numbers. Macros, calories, grams, fiber, protein, all of it boiling down to a tidy numeral that was neither positive nor negative. Numbers had no feelings, no preferences over the outcomes they projected. And they certainly didn’t play odds or favorites. They just . . . were.

Anna plunked her handbag down on her small kitchen table and leaned into her method of emotional dismantling.

Because, oh boy, did she need it.

Forty-five minutes. That was how long it had taken her to finally get home after she’d left the grocery store. About thirty minutes longer than it should have taken. The traffic had been the problem there, though. Traffic and . . .

Twenty-three sentences spoken by a stranger through an open car window after she’d narrowly avoided rearranging the front end of her slightly-less-reliable-than-it-used-to-be Subaru.

Like the tide called back to its master, shadowed images of frosty oceans parting overtook the quaint cabinetry of her kitchen and pulled her into the moment she hadn’t stopped reliving for forty-five turns of the minute hand.

Twenty-three sentences articulated in urgent rumbles that set her skin to scorching. Of those soul-searing sentences, the majority of them had been only a smattering of words and had still managed to flood humbler parts of her with more oxytocin than her starved brain could handle. If she took those words and divided them into the modicum of minutes she and the man had actually conversed for, the result would give each word far more power than they had any right to have over her. And that had only just been the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Anna’s mind reeled over yet more numbers it called forth from her jumble of an evening.

The number of digits he’d tapped onto her phone’s screen, which included no screen protector whatsoever and therefore had still held every drop of oil from the stranger’s skin? Ten.

Ten, plus the bonus four. I-R-O-N. Each letter stamped into his contact card in her phone may as well have been carved into the side of her car for all the shock it still left her with.

The guy’s name was Iron? Iron, as in he who pumps a lot of it at the gym and therefore must be known by it?

The need for security floated Anna’s hand down to her stomach, the gesture having become an anchor when her world started to spiral out of control, while her other hand, in need of something to judge, had its ever-indignant finger pointed in the air.

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