Burning Love Read online

  “How long have you been working?” he asked, as he poured himself a mug and went back to study the painting, one hand on his hip, the other nursing his mug.

  “Since you fell asleep,” she said from the sofa behind him.

  “You’ve been at this all night?”

  “I had to, once I figured it out. I’ll sleep later. I’m too happy to sleep now.”

  “You should be. It’s brilliant.” He tilted his head to the side and brought his coffee to his mouth.

  “Hang on,” she said suddenly. “Don’t move.”

  He half turned, hearing her scrabbling around behind him. “What?”

  “No. Go back the way you were. Hand on hip, looking at the picture. That’s it.”

  “Ava?”

  “This won’t take a moment. Just stay like that, okay?”

  He heard soft noises behind him, the swipe of pencil and the rub of her thumb against the page and he stiffened, feeling a little like he was under a microscope. “What are you doing?” Ava had never used him as one of her models and it was strangely unsettling.

  “Doing what I do. Capturing something of beauty.”

  He snorted at that. “Yeah, right.” But still his skin tingled all over with every skating stroke of her pencil. He knew he was in good shape physically. Keeping fit was part and parcel of the job and it was never a hassle to get on one of his bikes and ride or work out at home or in the station gym. It was something else entirely to be told he was a “thing of beauty.”

  “So is this how it feels to be objectified?” he asked, half joking.

  “You tell me. But speaking of objects...’

  He heard the slap of her sketchbook against the leather of the lounge, heard the roll of her pencil across the page and the soft plop as it landed on the sofa.

  “Are we done?” he asked, wondering if he was ever going to get to drink this damn cup of coffee.

  “Not quite. Stay there. Just a minute longer.”

  He took a breath and waited. “Now what are you doing?”

  The brush of her bare nipples against his back and her slim fingers circling low on his waist told him all he needed to know, even if he did nearly drop the mug in the process. “Oh.”

  She pressed a kiss to his shoulder blade and he felt the smile on her lips and the smooth curve of her belly against his butt. “Can I move yet?”

  “No rush,” she said, her nimble fingers working at his zipper, sliding it all the way down while her nipples kept making lazy circles on his back that set his flesh on fire. “I like you like this.”

  He swallowed, feeling the kick in his pants before her hands even found him. “Someone’s in a good mood today.” His voice had suddenly gone down an octave, but then, why should his blood be the only thing headed in that direction?

  “I am,” she purred, raining kisses over his skin. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realise how frustrated I was yesterday.”

  “You’re not feeling frustrated now?”

  “No, not at all.”

  At least that made one of them. She released his hardening dick from his pants and squeezed her hands around it and he groaned. “Ava,” he warned.

  But she was already on the move, liquid silk weaving around his body. She slid one hand around his, leading his mug to her mouth and taking a sip of his coffee, before kissing him on his lips bringing coffee and heat and the warm, sensual taste of Ava swirling in his mouth.

  He reached for her then, and she brushed his hand away.

  “No.” She took the mug, placing it on the bench alongside, and looked up at him, her cognac eyes flickering with wicked intent. before dropping to her knees before him, her seeking hands already encircling their target and introducing it to her mouth.

  Oh. My. God!

  “I want to thank you,” she said, as she watched his face while her lips danced like satin against his straining tip, the slick heat of her mouth and her warm breath combining into a delicious tease, “for helping me work it out.”

  “My pleasure,” he croaked through a throat two sizes too small, although he really didn’t have a clue what he’d done to deserve it.

  And it was. His pleasure. Every bit of it. Every hot flick of her tongue, every sizzling wrap of her lips around his cock. Every deep suck of her hot mouth. And he had every good intention of being a considerate lover and choosing when the time was right to flip her over and pleasure her likewise before burying himself deep inside her, when she surprised him by skidding her hands down low and squeezing her fingers into the tight bunches of his butt, her fingernails spiking into his crease, there was nothing else to do but tangle his hands in her hair and hang on for dear life.

  Though, as it turned out, hanging on wasn’t an option. Not for long.

  He erupted in a blinding flash of wildfire that consumed his mind and his thoughts and left nothing but the strangest feeling that nothing in his world had ever been so right.

  Caleb made a second pot of coffee to replace the one that had gone cold, while Ava slipped on her shirt and picked up where she’d left with her sketch book on the chesterfield. “Can I see?” he asked, when he got back.

  “Sure.” She turned the book towards him and there he was, or at least his back, shaded in charcoal, from his neck bunching of muscle at his shoulder to the shaded curve of his spine and the loose wrap of denim at his hips. “Wow.”

  “I know. It’s good. I think I’ve worked out my next few works for my exhibition.”

  “You have?” He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear this.

  “This is what I needed.” She waved her arm around the canvases lining the wall. “These are good, but I knew I needed something more, something to take it to the next level, and this”—she held up the sketchbook—“this will give the collection more depth and give me more chance of picking up commission work. Plus, I bet they’ll sell like hotcakes too.”

  He snorted. “You mean beefcakes.”

  “I’m serious. You have a beautiful body, Caleb. It’s a work of art. Why shouldn’t it be immortalized on paper and admired?”

  “Look Ava,” he said, lifting up her feet so he could park himself alongside her on the sofa before pulling them over his lap “Is that such a good idea? I thought you wanted to keep this thing private. If you go slapping up a whole heap of pictures of me on a wall wearing not a hell of a lot, somebody’s going to twig.”

  “Nobody will know it’s you. I’ll just do torsos, no heads. You’ll be identified only as ‘Male Nude’ numbers one, two, three and four. Okay?”

  “You want to do four of these? Seriously?”

  “One’s not enough. I’m seeing these on an end wall. And they won’t be all the same. There’s just something about the way your body moves. I’ll know what I want to draw when I see it.”

  “But no heads?”

  She crossed her heart with a finger. “I swear.”

  “And no anything elses, for that matter.”

  She smiled. “It’s a deal.”

  Chapter Four

  Caleb was whistling when he clocked on for his shift the next day. He spent forty-five minutes in the gym sweating his way through crunches and planks and push-ups before he hit the weights room and set to enough repetitions to lift his own bodyweight ten times over. He was still whistling when he hit the showers. God, he felt better than when he’d walked out of the station thirty-six hours ago, but spending time with Ava could do that. She didn’t ask for anything. She didn’t take anything he didn’t want to give. And what she gave him was pure gold.

  She’d sketched him again too – made him stop when he was getting dressed to leave and pulling his shirt over his shoulders – and he’d had to stay there immobile for five minutes while his skin tingled and her pencil worked overtime on the page.

  Him, a life model. Who knew? He snorted with the sheer improbability of it.

  Richo was tying up his boots as Caleb uniformed up. “Somebody’s sure in a good mood today.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be? It�
��s a beautiful day.”

  His mate glanced out the window unconvinced. “Nope, that doesn’t cut it. If a man didn’t know better, he’d say someone was getting laid.”

  Caleb slapped his crew mate on the back. Richo was known about the station as a lady’s man. At least, that was what he liked to tell anyone who cared to listen. There wasn’t a woman in the station that hadn’t been propositioned. Probably in the entire force.

  “What’s the problem, Richo? You not getting any?”

  Richo puffed up his chest. “Hey, I get plenty.”

  And Caleb just laughed as the incident bell sounded and said, “Congratulations.”

  “What have we got?” Tina, another crew mate asked a scant minute later, as the crew piled into the truck. He could read the faces of his crew and knew they were already on full alert, primed for action and whatever the day could throw at them.

  “Something a bit different,” he told them as the truck pulled out of the station, not bothering with the siren. “We’ve got a woman who’s apparently got a bunch of birds nesting in her chimney.”

  “What the fuck?” said Richo, looking sideways at the others.

  “Could be worse,” Tina said with a laugh. “Could be bats in the belfry.”

  Richo snorted. “Sure she hasn’t got bats in the belfry?”

  Caleb listened to the banter between his crew mates. This was a new one on him too, but that was okay. They were always being called upon to rescue animals and wildlife in odd circumstances and they were always happy to help if they weren’t already busy attending a major incident. Just the other week they’d had to use the Bronto Skylift to reach an injured koala with a joey that had been hit by a car crossing a road. The joey had been found crying on the side of the road and fauna rescue notified, but by the time they’d arrived, the bleeding mother had managed to clamber her way up to the top reaches of a nearby gum tree.

  Caleb had accompanied the wildlife experts in the cage of the Bronto to reach the frightened animal and force it down the tree to the ground where it was scooped into a cage and reunited with its baby, before being whisked off to a local vet for attention to what turned out to be, thankfully, minor wounds needing only a few stitches.

  Yeah, incidents like this made for a pleasant change.

  They pulled up outside an elegant old Queen Anne villa set high in the foothills amongst what must have been two acres of orchard and gardens. A “for sale” sign out the front brandished a big “sold” sticker.

  “Bloody hell,” Richo said as they walked down the driveway towards the house. “Check out the turret.”

  Tina snorted. “You’ve got a one track mind, Richo.”

  Caleb appreciated the joke even as he was busy taking in the house. Not only the turret and the crenelated entry porch with a grand arch below, but the chimneys. Big ones. They sure didn’t build them like that anymore.

  “Thank heavens you’re here,” said a sixty-something woman bursting out of the front door to greet them. “I didn’t know who else to call.”

  She introduced herself as Eleanor and led them into the sprawling house, talking nineteen to the dozen as she wove her way through expansive rooms shrunken by the old, overstuffed furniture and stack of packing boxes in various stages of being filled. “It started just before the auction, you see. First a fluttering sound, and then squeaking. At first I was afraid they were rats. Imagine that, rats, just when you’re trying to sell your house! So I called a chimney sweep but they said they don’t deal with live animals in chimneys and I had to call a pest exterminator. And I called a pest exterminator but they asked if I was sure they were rats and by that stage I wasn’t because their squeaking sounded more like cheeping and maybe they could be parrots. At least, they sound more like parrots now than rats. We’ve got fruit trees outside and the parrots are always into the fruit and so it could be. And so I called Fauna Rescue, because if they’re parrots, they’re protected, you see, and they’ll take the chicks and care for them, but they needed to be old enough to survive the trauma and they needed someone to get them out because they don’t have the equipment and how on earth are they supposed to get out otherwise? Learn to fly straight up a chimney?” She stopped in front of a massive open fireplace topped by an equally massive mantelpiece bearing a mirror that went all the way to the ceiling which had to be twelve-foot high if it was an inch, thought Caleb, and then there would be a few feet of the chimney through the roof above. How indeed could they fly out of there? It would be nothing like falling out of a tree.

  “But if you can get them out,” Eleanor continued, “I’ve got the name and address of a local carer who’ll take them and I’ve promised to deliver them. If you can get them out, that is.”

  Caleb nodded. At least she’d got that angle covered. Now all he had to do was work out how to get them out. “And the birds are somewhere inside this lot?

  “I think they’re somewhere behind here,” the woman said, pointing to the timber frame below the mantelpiece, “just behind this. There’s a baffle over the fireplace, and it’s closed when it’s not in use, and I think they must be nesting there, but I tried to move the handle and it seems to be jammed shut. You can hear them, especially at meal times. They’re so loud then. When they go quiet, I worry they might have died. But it would be terrible if they died in there wouldn’t it? Imagine the smell! But they could die if anything happened to the parents and they didn’t come back. Anything could happen. And the new owners move in next week, and I just didn’t know what to do and I’m just so glad you’re here.”

  And four firies in yellow uniforms blinked at each other and lined up along the wide fireplace, which had been brooding silently by while the owner voiced every one of her fears in almost the same sentence, and put their ears to the wood, and listened and heard...

  Absolutely nothing.

  Richo looked at Caleb, his eyes ducking horizontal towards the anxious woman standing nearby, before he winked and mouthed “bats’ and Caleb curled his hand into a fist and slammed the side of it into the wood, and somewhere inside all hell broke loose and there was cheeping and fluttering and mad swooping sounds.

  “You see,” said the woman triumphantly. “I’m not imagining it, am I? There’s definitely something in there.”

  “Something sure is,” Caleb said, instructing Richo to grab some tarpaulins from the truck to lay on the carpet. He wasn’t the most junior in the crew – Matt was the rookie – but Richo deserved to be made to fetch and carry after the crack about the woman. She might be able to talk nonstop for ten minutes without drawing breath, but she wasn’t imagining anything. “Now we just have to work out how to get whatever it is out.”

  Tina radioed back to base to let them know what they were faced with while they lay the tarpaulins down in front of the fire place in preparation for opening the baffle, which just as the woman said, was stuck fast when Caleb tested it, with bits raining down and what sounded like something tap dancing on the top.

  “Do you think the birds have jammed it with their nest?” the woman asked.

  Caleb suspected it was probably jammed up with bird poo, but he didn’t want to say so. “If it’s parrots, there shouldn’t be a nest,” he said. “They usually nest in hollow tree trunks and the like, just using whatever space is available. Here,” he said to Richo, “help us out with a bit of grunt, and see if we can’t move this thing.”

  They combined their efforts and gave the lever an almighty shove and finally they budged it a fraction, and then a fraction more until it ground open with a rush, bringing down a cloud of debris and soot until the air in the room was cloudy and filled with the pungent scent of birds.

  Richo coughed and flicked a few bits of dried bird poo from his hair and tiny feather from his eyebrow. “That’s foul!”

  Caleb smiled – he’d managed to duck the worst of it – and had Tina pass him a torch. “Nope. They’d be chickens in that case.”

  “Ha, bloody ha,” said his mate, still swiping at the
flecks on his uniform.

  “So where are the birds?” said Tina, squatting down and looking up the dusty chimney to follow the beam of Caleb’s torchlight. “I can still hear them.”

  “They’re playing hard to get.” He turned to their hostess. “Eleanor, have you got a box or something?”

  “Would a packing box do?”

  “Perfect,” he said. “Hand it to Sooty over here. Richo, you stand by for incoming. And just be ready to cover the top.”

  And Caleb grabbed hold of the mantelpiece with one hand and leaned low under the fireplace and reached up with his other, searching the top of the now open baffle lid. Funny, he thought, because in all his years of training and all his scores animal and wildlife rescues, he’d never once come across anything like this. But he’d grown up just up the hill at Reynolds Ridge where the parrots lived in the hollows of trees and drove the orchardists crazy in cherry season, and he must have learned something useful along the way.

  He shook his head though, at the crazy bloody birds that chose a chimney to nest in. Safer than a tree hollow where a passing kookaburra might hear the chicks and fancy a light meal perhaps, but god only knew how the parents thought their chicks were going to learn to fly. He’d heard of the expression, helicopter parents, but this was ridiculous.

  He skated his gloved hand along the metal roof. Little buggers were in here somewhere. He’d caught a glimpse of them darting away from the beam of light, trying to hide in the shadows.

  Finally, he got his hand around flailing creature and brought it out and down. About six to eight inches long with soot disguising its bright plumage, the nestling wasn’t giving in easy, squawking a mighty protest. Richo held the box lid open and Caleb pushed in the unhappy bird to a flurry of feathers and shrieks.

  “Oh my,” Eleanor said, “you got it. Well done.”

  “There’s more,” Caleb said, already going back under the mantel. He had a feel for the terrain this time and he managed to scoop the second one up even faster. The third proved trickier just because it had more space to run around to try to evade capture, but finally that one was safe in his gloved hand too. He did a final sweep with his hand and the torchlight but couldn’t find any more.