Free One Hot Summer by Melissa Cutler

still in his arms.
    Alex closed the front door behind him and walked to the porch rail. “Hey, just a sec. About something you said in there.”
    Micah drew a patience-mustering inhalation. “What’s that?”
    Swallowing hard, Alex shifted Ivy higher in his arms. “It’s not an intrusion to me. You, being here.”
    Well, butter Micah’s butt and call him a biscuit. Was Alex actually putting himself out there with a gesture of kindness? Could he be trying to bury the hatchet?
    â€œOkay. Good to know.”
    â€œYou’re like family to Xavier,” Alex continued, “which means you’re like family to me. Maybe not my favorite family member, but, hey, we don’t get to pick our families, right?”
    So close to kindness. So maddeningly close. “Right. That we don’t. ’Night, Alex. Go easy on Xavier. The twins gave him hell today.”
    On Micah’s drive through the web of pitch-black, twisty, two-lane roads leading across town and through the backcountry hills to the resort, his annoyance at Alex and Xavier’s situation gave way to thoughts of Remedy Lane again. What the hell was he doing, going out of his way tonight to spar with her? He hadn’t crashed a Briscoe wedding reception in more than a year, probably longer. True, it wasn’t a bad idea to make sure she understood that he followed through with his threats and all that logic—but that wasn’t why he was headed to the resort. Not if he was being honest with himself.
    She got his blood pumping.
    For that reason alone, he should have flipped a U-turn and headed home. Nothing could come of his attraction. Nothing. Because fraternizing with a resort executive would stink of corruption, of selling out. It would set a horrible example for the men under his command.
    He was still wondering why he lacked the mental fortitude to turn his truck around and reject Remedy’s pull on him as he eased to a stop in the guest parking lot near the resort’s chapel. From his truck bed he pulled a supply bin onto the tailgate. Being that his current shirt was covered with banana mush, dried tears, and snot, he pulled out a spare collared uniform shirt with the fire department logo silk-screened on the chest and made a quick change.
    After a moment’s debate, he pushed his shirtsleeve up to show off the barbed-wire tattoo that circled his upper arm, then completed the look with a black Stetson and a toothpick in his mouth. Pure redneck, just because he knew it’d crawl under Remedy’s skin. He would’ve added a proverbial cherry on top of the look by strapping on a hip holster and Taurus pistol if he’d been in civilian clothes, but guns and official fire department business didn’t mix. That was one rule he was in no danger of fudging.
    He’d shoved the last of the shirt hem into his pants when he noticed that one of his favorite people in the world was seated on a bench on the hilltop next to the chapel, gazing dreamily at the resort and the wedding in the distance. June Briscoe, better known as Granny June—the paradoxically ancient-yet-ageless matriarch of the Briscoe family and Ty Briscoe’s mother. She was an itty-bitty thing, all moxie and wrinkles, who delighted in perpetuating the rumor that she was off her rocker and senile. Micah knew better.
    A long time ago, he’d learned that the secret to having any kind of clout at the resort meant going along with whatever crazy notion the Briscoe matriarch cooked up, but somewhere along the line the two of them had bonded in a genuine, irrevocable way.
    The truth was, even though the chapel parking lot was out of the way, Micah had taken to parking there because he loved catching Granny June in her quiet moments, when her crazy antics gave way to the reflective, wise soul she kept close to the vest. She reminded him of his own grandma, his dad’s mother, who’d died not long before the Knolls