Kiss Me Gone by Christa Wick Read Free Book Online

shouted, my legs unsticking at last as I sprinted toward the puddle.
    Cam unleashed another bellow through my earpiece. "Nothing but a busted pipe! Get down before the stairs go!"
    Wearing seventy pounds of equipment, I still managed to shrug. I might die in the fire, but I knew I wouldn't be able to live with myself if we cleared the rubble days later and found some kid left home alone to burn to death while his mom was out snorting coke or turning tricks to pay for her addiction.
    "They go, they go," I shouted, lifting the axe. "Get Bailey out now. That's an order!"
    I might have been as crispy as a Sunday slab of bacon before morning rolled around, but at that moment in time I was still his team leader. He had no choice but to obey. He could argue with my corpse later.
    My back to the flames, I smashed the axe center of the door, weakening the panel. Lifting a leg, I kicked the same spot, my fire boot smashing through the cheap, aged wood like it was balsa. Holstering the axe, I stepped into the room and onto a soaking wet bed sheet. In the middle of the floor was a young woman on her hands and knees, another wet sheet wrapped around her. She had fisted one corner and was breathing through the material.
    Fire crawled across the wall on the left, its glow reflected in her hair. Soot smudged the pale skin of her face. I had maybe a quarter second in which to appreciate the way the fabric clung to her body and note the wild panic in her green gaze before I scooped up the wet sheet at the room's threshold and threw it over her.
    "Got a live one!" I yelled into my mouthpiece as I wrapped my arms around her waist. I gave a moment's prayer that she was near comatose with fear or wouldn't otherwise panic and fight me. It happened a lot and the city brass always shit a ton of bricks whenever we had to knock citizens unconscious to rescue their dumb asses.
    The woman shook like crazy, but she didn't struggle. I hefted her over one shoulder and ran back through the door I busted open. The fire had reached the stairs between the third and second floor, already eaten its way through the bannister and had started to nibble at carpet still damp from Bailey's hose.
    I felt the heat coming up from the area below through my turnout gear. The underside of the stairs must have caught, the boards cracking beneath my feet as the heavy boots pounded against them. Halfway down the last flight, the wood gave completely. I leapt, my fingers digging into the woman's flesh as hard as possible to avoid dropping her.
    We crashed against a wall. She grunted once in pain from the impact, but I figured bruised and breathing was better than burned alive. I kept running until we were out of the building and on the street.
    A med tech had Bailey on a stretcher and was stripping the gear from his inert body.
    "Congratulations, hero, you saved another crackhead." Cam, his helmet and mask still on, stalked toward me, already beginning to skull fuck me through the communications set built into our helmets. "City was starting to run low. Cost of pussy might have gone up a whole penny."
    "Not this one." I placed the girl on the back of the hose truck and peeled my gloves off. I had seen it in her eerily familiar eyes -- life in the neighborhood hadn't beaten her down yet.
    She was young, fresh and trying like hell to claw her way out of the damp cocoon wrapped around her enticing body. I helped and a tangle of wet hair emerged, then the pale skin of her hands and arms. One fist closed tight as if she were holding something she couldn't afford to lose, she stopped my efforts with a frantic one-armed slap at my hand when the sheets got down to her waist.
    I had a sudden, hard awareness of why she resisted.
    She wore nothing but a t-shirt and maybe a pair of panties. The shirt was soaked through from the sheet and had molded itself to her firm breasts. Seeing the chilled point of her nipples and their color through the thin cloth, the hard awareness jumped another