Page 43 of Her Silver Fox Firefighters
“Good. We’ll give you normal. Normal has become our specialty since we got back from the service. We’re good with normal,” I reply.
She gives me a wry smile. “You fight fires and save people from horrible accidents for a living. How normal is that?”
“As normal as men like us could ever wish for,” I say.
At the Jackson house,the guys and I sit patiently on the sofa in the living room while Olivia slips into the shower, probably crying her heart out for a bit. I’d like nothing more than to be up there with her, but the situation leaves no room for intimacy until we get the truth out.
Once she’s ready and changed into comfortable clothing, she comes down and settles into the armchair.
“I owe you an apology, first and foremost,” she says.
“For lying?” Dax replies curtly. I give him a frown.
He isn’t bothered. I guess his feelings of anger and betrayal ring true on a level for all three of us. He’s simply more vocal about it. But as I look at Olivia, I see her vulnerability, her softness, her desire to do good, to be better—it’s all out there, on display, impossible to deny.
“For omitting the truth,” Olivia sighs deeply. “I came to Ember Ridge to hide.”
“From the law?” Leo asks.
Her eyes grow wide as she shakes her head. “I had no idea he was going to do that, I swear, though I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s all bogus, and it’s complicated.”
“We can understand complicated if you explain it to us,” I calmly reply.
“I was raised in a good family until I was about fourteen,” she says, lowering her gaze and focusing on her hands, anxiously resting in her lap. “The Fairchilds were respected in the Devon community. We were well off, too, due to an inheritance and some good investments in the eighties. My dad did alright. He was able to provide a lot of jobs with his businesses across the district. Old New York money, youmight say. Then my mom fell ill with an aggressive form of cancer.”
My heart breaks for her because I know how it feels; the helplessness of a child losing a parent.
“Her treatment cost a lot,” she goes on, “but it didn’t help. We lost her when I was twelve. And from there, everything spiraled out of control.”
“How so?” I ask.
“Dad started drinking, started making bad investments. Slowly but surely, I watched our life get smaller and harder until he drove himself off a bridge. I had no immediate family, no one else to look after me. I’d just turned fourteen. So I ended up in foster care. I got bounced around a few homes, each worse than the last. My grades didn’t suffer, much to everyone’s surprise. I’m really good with numbers, with math, computers… it was all I had during that time.
“But I aged out of foster care at eighteen without a penny to my name. I had few friends, so I turned to the streets. Moved money around. Optimized a drug dealing distribution ring for one guy. I never touched the stuff. I never dealt with the product. I just spun the numbers and found good places for them to stash it, that kind of stuff,” she says.
“What about Chloe Jackson?” Dax asks her with a furrowed brow. “Isn’t she your best friend?”
“She is. Was. Or still is, if she’s alive,” Olivia replies, and I catch something there that I hadn’t noticed before—a new level to her fear. It’s making her hands tremble. “I didn’t want her to be associated with me, not with the kind of work I was doing. Chloe was going to a good college. When I turned nineteen, I got arrested. Not exactly a shocker,” she adds witha scoff. “Marcus Bennett was the arresting officer, a promising deputy at the time.”
Marcus Bennett. I make a mental note of that name. I’ve got a feeling he’s the key to everything.
“He gave me a second chance,” Olivia says, “and I believed everything he told me. I fell in love and I fell for his lies. That was the beginning of the end.”
The more she tells us about her past, the clearer it becomes: This woman’s softness and sweetness survived some truly horrific events. No wonder we’re so smitten with her. No wonder she snuck into our hearts and is now holding each of us hostage.
She belongs with us.
Whether she’s ready to admit it or not.
14
OLIVIA
Revisiting my past is a painful experience, but these good men deserve to know the truth. I respect them too much to keep it from them. My heart beats harder and truer when I’m with them.
“He took care of me,” I say after a long, heavy pause. “He made me feel seen and safe. Got me a small studio apartment to rent, covered my expenses, and kept me off the streets. He helped pay for my tuition while I worked a part-time job at the sheriff’s office in their IT department.
“I kept honing my computer skills, working and studying. I was able to spend quality time with Chloe because we were enrolled at the same college,” I continue. “Life was actually getting good, and Marcus and I were building a relationship that felt real, until the veil came off.”
