One Hot December

“Clean your metal. Acetone’s good. If you don’t have any in the house, you can borrow my fingernail polish remover.”

She gave him one last little look, maybe the last one she’d ever give him, and left his office. She kept her head up and her shoulders straight as she marched down the generic beige hall on generic gray carpets to the parking lot. Everyone was gone. No surprise there. Last day of work before the holidays, and everybody had shipped out the second they could.

The only car left in the parking lot was Ian’s new black Subaru, which she was pretty sure he bought because he couldn’t look at his old car without picturing the truck nuts she’d welded to the bumper. She headed to her red ’98 Ford Ranger, which had seen better days, trying to convince herself she was happy about leaving. And she was. She was excited about her new job. Clover Greene was about the kindest, friendliest woman she’d ever met, and she had a quirky green-haired teenage girl working for her as an office assistant—her kind of people. The nursery itself was like a well-manicured Garden of Eden. Everywhere she looked Flash saw inspiration for her metal foliage sculptures. Great people, safe place for women to work, nice location, good pay, good benefits and fuel for her art. So yeah, she was thrilled about the new job.

But.

But...Ian.

It wasn’t just that he was good in bed. He was. She remembered all too well that he was—passionate, intense, sensual, powerful, dominating, everything she wanted in a man. The first kiss had been electric. The second intoxicating. By the third she would have sold her soul to have him inside her before morning, but he didn’t ask for her soul, only every inch of her body, which she’d given him for hours. When she’d gone to bed with him that night she’d been half in love with him. By the time she left it the next morning she was all the way in.

Then he’d dumped her.

Six months ago. She ought to be over it by now. She wanted to be over it the day it happened but her heart wasn’t nearly as tough as her reputation. The worst part of it all? Ian had been right to dump her. They’d both lost their heads after a couple drinks had loosened their tongues enough to admit they were attracted to each other. But Ian had a company to run and there were rules—good ones—that prohibited the man who signed the paychecks from sleeping with the woman who wielded the torch.

She pulled her keys from her jacket pocket and stuck them in the lock.

“Flash? Wait up.”

She turned and saw Ian walking across the parking lot toward her. He wore his black overcoat, and combined with his black Tom Ford suit, he looked more like a Wall Street trader than the vice president and operations manager of Asher Construction. Ian told her once he’d started out doing cleanup at his dad’s construction sites twenty years ago. Then he’d gone to college, come home, and clawed his way up the ranks the hard way: by working his fingers to the bone while learning every job. If only he was still just a guy on the crew, maybe it could have worked. Now when she looked at him, she saw a man with money, power, and prestige, a man completely out of her league.

“What?” she asked, leaning back against her truck door.

He stood in front of her, face-to-face, but didn’t look her in the eyes. He stared off to the left where the peak of Mount Hood rose over the treetops.

“Ian?” she prompted when it seemed like he was going to keep her standing there in the cold all day.

“I need your help with something,” he said.

“That must have been hard,” she said. “Asking for my help.”

“It wasn’t easy.”

“What do you need my help with?”

“A project at my new place. It’s pretty delicate work. I don’t trust myself to do it.”

“What’s the project?”

“The house has a stone-and-iron fireplace. It’s what sold me on the place. But the fireplace screen is coming apart. It’s nice, original to the house. Would you maybe be willing to come up and take a look at it tonight?”

“Has to be tonight?”

“You busy?”

“Would you be jealous if I was?” she asked.

“You have a hickey on the side of your neck that you’re trying to hide under your collar. Not that I noticed.”

“Except you noticed.”

“Yeah,” he said with a sigh. “I noticed. Who’s the lucky guy? Or girl?”

“Nobody you know. Old friend from high school who moved back to town a month ago. We reconnected. And then disconnected.”

“Didn’t work out?”

“Do you care?”

“Yes,” he said. He said it very simply. Just “yes” as if what he wanted to say was “obviously I care.”

She shook her head, not at Ian but at her own stupidity for thinking she could have had something meaningful with this jerk she’d dated for a week.

“He was cute, he was smart, he was a good kisser, and he thought my art was awesome. But after a couple week he said he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t date a professional welder when he worked as a teller at a bank. His friends would never let him hear the end of it, he said. He just couldn’t date a woman, no matter how hot—his words, not mine—who came off as more of a man than he did. I said that was fine. I didn’t want to date a guy who was less of a man than I was, either. He called me a couple nice words after that and then he was gone. Good riddance to him and his poor little ego.”

“You have to stop dating beneath you.”

“I slept with you.”

“Exactly my point.”

She laughed. “You’re cute,” she said. “I wish you weren’t.”

“It’s a curse.” He grinned at her. “You know, you could have told that guy you weren’t going to be a professional welder anymore.”

“I could have, yeah. But it doesn’t matter. I can’t sleep with a guy I don’t respect. A man who can’t respect a woman doing a supposedly ‘man’s job’ isn’t going to respect a woman who does ‘women’s work,’ either. I’m glad it ended before it got serious.”

“You feel that way about us, too? Glad it ended before it got serious?”

“It was already serious before you kissed me, Ian.”

“I didn’t know. I had no idea you... It never occurred to me you had feelings for me,” he said. “Except attraction. That I’d noticed.”

“You look as good in your suits as out of them and that’s saying something.”

“Let me take you out tonight,” he said. “Dinner. Then you can come back to the house and help me with the fireplace. We’ll hang out. It’ll be fun. It’ll be normal. We can end things on a good note instead of feeling shitty about what happened.”

“Or didn’t happen.”

“Or didn’t happen, yeah.”

“Do you even like me?” she asked. “As a person, I mean. I insult you, I welded truck nuts to your car, I scare the newbies and I make eighteen dollars an hour while you make eighteen dollars a minute.”

“Dad makes eighteen dollars a minute. I make low six figures. I’m on salary, you know. I don’t own the company. I just run it. If I screw up, I get in trouble or get fired just like anyone else who works for my father.”

“Except the rest of us aren’t senator’s sons who are going to inherit the family business someday no matter how badly we screw up.”

“Dad’s only a state senator.”

“And your ski chalet is only a fixer-upper.”

They were silent a long moment. She knew he was waiting for her to bend a little, to say yes to dinner, to say yes to ending on a good note instead of on this...whatever this was...this awkward painful note.

“I’m going to miss you,” he said. “You keep me honest.”

“I insult you. Often.”

“Somebody has to, right?” he asked. “Everybody else sucks up to me.”

“That’s the damn truth,” she said.

“Please? Hang out with me tonight. Take a look at this thing in my house and see if you can fix it. Then we can go to the brewery. My treat. A thank-you for your help. We can pretend to be friends for one evening, right? Then maybe eventually we won’t have to pretend?”

“Why do you want to be my friend?”

“You carry a blowtorch in your backpack and I had to pay five hundred bucks to get those fucking truck nuts off my bumper,” he said, meeting her eyes finally. It was his eyes that had gotten to her first—a blue so bright you could see the color from the other side of the room, the other side of the world. “Of course I want to be your friend. It’s safer than being your enemy.”

She smiled, because she had to after an admission like that.

“Please, Flash. One apology dinner. I’m even buying.”

Ian was strong and smart and it meant a lot to her that he wasn’t ashamed to humble himself a little. A real man. He wasn’t afraid of her even if he joked he was. Which is why she shouldn’t be doing this, having this conversation with him, thinking these thoughts. She cared too much about him already. He’d crushed her before and he could crush her again. She absolutely should not spend any time alone with him ever again, not if she didn’t want to get hurt like before, and God knows, she didn’t want to get hurt like before. She was still hurt.

“I’ll go get my torch,” she said. “But you better make good on the brewery or your fireplace screen won’t be the only thing I solder to the floor.”

“You’re sexy when you’re threatening permanent damage to my genitals,” he said.

She patted his shoulder.

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

2

IAN WATCHED FLASH walk back into the office to retrieve her equipment. Dammit, what the hell was he thinking? He was thinking he wasn’t over Flash, that’s what he was thinking. And he needed to be over her. He really needed to be over her.

And under her.

And all around her.

And inside her. He needed that more than anything else.

“Pathetic, Asher. Just pathetic,” he muttered to himself as he fished around in his coat pocket to find his keys. Begging for crumbs from this woman when he wanted to feast on her. But he’d fucked it up with her so badly he knew she’d probably never lower her guard around him again. Not enough to give him anything but hope. Certainly not her love, which is what he wanted. Nothing else would do. And yet he knew it was over, all the way over. He’d had some hope when she welded metal testicles to his bumper. Only a woman with very strong feelings for him would pull a prank like that. But after that, nothing. Even the silent treatment would have been better than what he’d gotten from her. She’d treated him like she treated everyone else—with a mix of dark humor and utter disdain. He didn’t want her to treat him like she treated everyone else. He wanted to be special. But this was Veronica “Flash” Redding, and if making men feel like they were nothing special was a game show, she’d go home with one million dollars and a brand-new car.

And today she’d quit her job. Which meant he’d likely never see her again unless he did something hasty, drastic and stupid like beg her to help him fix up his house in the hopes of buying a little more time with her. Maybe he could talk her into forgiving him. Maybe he could talk her into another night. Maybe he could talk her into welding metal wings and flying them to the sun. He was dreaming too big here. Unlike him, Flash was already out there dating other people. He hadn’t gone on a second date since his one night with her. Why? Because he liked women and didn’t want to be an asshole to them, and only an asshole would take one woman out on a date while thinking about a different woman the entire time. A woman with punk red hair, a perfect face and a body that fit his so well he could believe she’d been sculpted to fit him. She wore loose canvas pants every day to work and T-shirts with no sleeves that showed off both her strong shoulders and the tattoos on her biceps. She wore that distressed bomber jacket every day of her life, no matter the weather. Brown leather, not black leather because Flash wasn’t trying to look cool—she just was cool. Too cool for him.

But still...he had to give it one more shot with this woman or he’d regret it the rest of his life.

Flash emerged from their office into the parking lot, a heavy-duty army-green duffel bag over her shoulder. With any other woman he would have taken the bag from her and carried it. But he’d learned the hard way not to try that with Flash. It wasn’t the implication she couldn’t carry a heavy load that pissed her off when he’d tried to be gentlemanly one day. She just didn’t want anyone else touching her tools.

“You want to ride with me?” he asked. “Mine handles in snow better than yours.”

“I have chains if I need them,” she said. “This isn’t my first winter on the mountain, remember?” She opened her truck door and put her bag on the passenger seat.

“My new place is a little hard to find so follow me close. If you get lost, call my cell.”

“I won’t get lost,” she said as she slammed the passenger door and got in behind the wheel. “Lead on, Macduff.”

“That’s Macbeth, right?” he asked.

She looked at him, raised her eyebrow and then slammed her driver’s door shut. Maybe now was not the best time to discuss the Complete Works of William Shakespeare.

“You’re an idiot, Asher,” he said to himself.

Ian got behind the wheel of his Outback and pulled out of the parking lot onto Highway 26. His construction company was located a few miles outside of Portland in Sandy, and Government Camp was a good thirty miles east, right up to the snow-covered top of the mountain. When they started their drive the temperature was about forty, brisk and cool, but not biting cold. As they climbed the mountain, the temperature started to drop. In twenty miles it went from forty-one, according to the Outback’s readings, to thirty-one and falling fast.

Signs of civilization disappeared as they drove. The little towns faded in the rearview mirror and soon there was nothing but massive moss-covered trees of Mount Hood National Forest looming on either side of the road. Then they really started to climb. The trees fell away to the right as the highway edged along a valley that seemed to drop endlessly. Nothing stood between him and that eternal drop but a low concrete wall. The trees in the valley were white with snow and the road’s shoulder was piled high with the stuff tinged gray by highway soot. He glanced back and saw Flash right behind him in her little red pickup. As old as that thing was, he couldn’t believe it still ran. But it did and it kept up with him.

Government Camp—a town that was neither a camp nor affiliated with the government—was on the left and he made sure Flash followed him into the turn lane behind him. It wasn’t easy watching the road and watching her the entire time. He’d wished she’d ridden with him so he wouldn’t worry so much. She was the most stubborn woman on the planet, easily. The next road had been scraped clean, but there were still four-foot walls of snow on either side of the street and a thin layer of ice underneath him. But he shouldn’t have worried. Flash handled her truck as well as she handled her torch. No wonder she intimidated men. She was so skilled and self-sufficient a man couldn’t help but feel a little useless around her.

But he’d spent one incredible night with her and knew a little something about Flash Redding—she did find men useful for at least one very specific purpose and he would be more than happy, ecstatic even, to make himself of use to her in that capacity again.

At the end of a long street, Ian slowed his car to a crawl, turned right into the driveway nearly hidden by snow. More trees—hundred-year-old evergreens fifty feet high—shadowed his house. He hoped Flash liked it. It wasn’t bad to look at. A classic A-frame Swiss-chalet-style house with a green metal roof and cedar siding, it already felt like home to him even though he’d only been living there a month. It would feel much more like home once he had someone to share it with.

He waved her into his garage while he parked beside it. Before exiting his car he paused to take a few breaths. He could do this. He could have a nice evening with Flash without screwing it up again. He would be cool. He would be funny. He would impress her and to impress her was to impress himself because anyone who could impress Flash was impressive as hell.

He found her in his garage with her duffel bag over her shoulder.

“Thanks again for coming up here,” he said as he unlocked the door to his house.

“No problem,” she said. “I was thinking earlier today how much I wanted to drive to the top of a volcano covered in a foot of snow to do even more work.”

“Two feet,” he said. “We got dumped on two nights ago. Hope your truck has heating.”

“It does. Although mine doesn’t have fancy heated seats like somebody’s does. You have a hot ass, Mr. Asher. Very hot...” As she walked past him into the house, she patted him on the seat of his pants, which were still warm from his new car’s electric heated seats. He took a moment to gently beat his head against the door frame before following her into the house.

He squared his shoulders and walked through the mud room into the living room. Flash stood in the center of the room, glancing around.

“Like it?” he asked.

“It’s nice,” she said. “I thought you said it was a fixer-upper. This all looks good. Is the knotty pine floor original?”

“It is,” he said. “But I had to strip it and refinish it.”

“You did it?”

“Yes,” he said. “Believe it or not I am capable of doing some home improvement projects on my own. I do run a construction company, after all.”

“You look supercute in your suit with your little hard hat on when you come to inspect us on-site.”

“I wasn’t always a suit,” he said, throwing his coat and briefcase down on the kitchen counter. “I used to hang drywall and put down flooring. Let’s see... I also poured concrete, painted, did a little basic masonry work and framed houses. I think I can strip and refinish a floor in my own house.”

“I know,” she said. “I just like giving you a hard time.”

“Yeah, I’ve noticed.”

“The floors look great with your dark green walls. Your paint job?”

“Yeah, thanks.” He smiled hugely and then realized his “being cool” plan was already out the window if he was grinning like an idiot for the sole reason she’d complimented his wall color.

“Come here,” he said. “I’ll give you the ten-cent tour. The house was built in the 1940s. Three stories, cedar exterior, knotty pine floors. First floor is the living room and kitchen, second floor is the master bedroom, guest room and two bathrooms, top floor’s the loft.”

“What’s in the loft?”

“Me,” he said. “I sleep up there. Heat rises. Warmest room in the house at night. Plus it’s the only room where you can see the top of the mountain in the morning. Very good view.”

Ian paused, hoping she’d say something, anything, about wanting to see that view. But no, not a word.

“Um, all the furniture is made in Oregon,” he said, pointing at the wood-framed couch, the rustic dining table and the cane-back rocking chair. “There’s a hot tub outside.”

“Oh, my.”

“You like hot tubs?” he asked, a very pleasant image appearing unbidden in his mind, one that involved him and her and his hot tub and absolutely no clothing.

“Nope.”

“Let me guess—you also hate puppies, kittens and chocolate.”

“Yup.”

“Liar,” he said. She nodded, but that’s all she did. No flirting, no teasing, no winking, no nothing.

“Okay, the fireplace is in the sitting room. Want to see it?”

“Please,” she said. “That’s why I’m here.”

Luckily she was behind him and couldn’t see him wince when she said that. All his hopes were fizzling like a wet firecracker. Why did he think he could make things right with her just by bringing her out to his house, getting her alone with him, hashing things out? Flash had already made her decision about him. If he were a gladiator and she the empress of Rome, she would have looked down on his beaten, bloodied and bruised body in the ring and given him a thumbs-down.

He led her through the living room to the rustic sitting room—oak bookcases, pine coffee table and his stone-and-iron fireplace, which was about to fall apart.

Ian pointed to a weak spot in the old irons screen.

“You can see that some of the joints are broken, and there’s some rust.” He grabbed a bar of the decorative iron grate and shook it so she could see how the central part of the design had come loose from the joints. “What do you think?”

Flash didn’t say anything at first. She knelt onto the wood floor and ran her hands over the iron scrollwork.

“Ian...” she breathed. “It’s beautiful.”

He grinned again, like an idiot again, but this time he didn’t chide himself for it.

“It’s ivy,” he said. “The whole thing is iron ivy. I thought you’d like it. It looks like the sort of thing you’d make.”

“I would.” Her eyes were alight with happiness and wonder as she ran her fingers all over the twisting and looping iron bars. “A real craftsman made this. Or craftswoman. This is art. Real folk art.”

“It sold me on the house.”

“It would have sold me, too,” she said. “Wow.”

“Oh, my God, did I hear Flash Redding say ‘wow’ to something? I never thought I’d live to see the day.”

“I am not a hipster,” she said. “I’m an artist with high standards. There’s a difference. Hipsters pretend they aren’t impressed by stuff. I’m genuinely not impressed by stuff. But this...this is wow. You done good. You have better eyes than I gave you credit for.”

“I have a good eye for beauty,” he said. She looked up at him and said nothing. But he could have sworn he saw a ghost of a smile dance across her lips before it disappeared into the hard line of her mouth again.

“I’ll fix it,” she said. “An artist needs to fix this, not just any welder. This is delicate work.”

“Flash is on the job,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Flash again? Not Veronica?” she asked.

“You want me to call you Veronica?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll call you Flash. Why, I don’t know. I assume you flashed someone at some point in the past and the name stuck?”

She shook her head in obvious disgust at his ignorance.

“Poor Ian. You’ve never seen Flashdance, have you?”

“Flashdance? The dance movie?”

“Yes, Flashdance is a dance movie.”

“No, I haven’t seen it. Why?”

“The main character in it is a woman who works as a welder by day and an exotic dancer by night. When I started welding in high school, one of my friends started calling me Flashdance. But I don’t dance so it got shortened to Flash. I’ve been Flash ever since.”

“Should I rent the movie?” They were having a good conversation. This was progress. This was an improvement. This was giving him hope.

“If you like to watch sexy girls dancing, maybe. And welding.”

“I’m more into the welding than the dancing. I feel like I’ve missed out on something,” he said as he knelt on the floor next to her and watched her test all the connections to see which ones were loose and needed to be rewelded. “Before my time, I guess.”

“Before mine, too. But my mom did her job and showed me all her favorite movies when I was a kid.”

“You have a mother?”

“Did you think I didn’t?” she asked.

“Don’t take it personally, I just assumed you were forged in the fires of Mordor.”

She laughed softly. Yes...a laugh. Ten points for Asher.

“No, I have a mom. A cool mom. Everyone has a mom.”

“I don’t.”

“Were you forged in the fires of Mordor?”

“I had a mom,” he said. “But she died when I was a baby.”

Flash looked at him and he looked away.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I’m an asshole.”

“No, you aren’t. You couldn’t have known. She was hit by a drunk driver.”

“Oh, my God, that’s awful. I thought your parents were divorced. I didn’t know your mom had been killed.”

“They were separated when the accident happened. Dad’s always felt bad about that. They’d eloped when she got pregnant with me and both families went to war. Her family hated him. His family hated her...”