Free Blaze: (Naughty Neighbors 1) by Olivia Aycock

Chapter 1
    I t was one of those late-summer nights when even wishing for oblivion took too much effort. The air pressed in so hot and wet that thinking was too taxing. Breathing, next to impossible.
    If death were to come, it wouldn’t be by her own hand.
    The air-conditioning unit had gone out approximately seven hours and forty-three minutes ago. And now it was Friday night and all the tricks she knew to play on the fussy old thing had failed, and getting someone out on the weekend had failed too. It was August. During the third consecutive week of one-hundred-degree temps. The last AC repair dispatch operator had suggested she’d have more luck flying in an entire rocket ship full of glacier ice from the moon.
    Her apartment was on the second floor of the graceful old duplex. That meant she was closer to the moon, right? So why was her place so freaking hot?
    See, impossible to think.
    Laurie let her eyes drift closed and meditated on frosty images. A Swiss chalet. A mountain stream in winter. Being buried under a glacier of moon ice.
    She sucked in a particularly hot breath and almost choked. A puny misting from the water bottle she’d filled earlier served to cool her for only the moment her ceiling fan evaporated it on her skin. It had been seven hours and forty-five minutes since she’d felt like anything but a disgusting mess.
    Too bad she didn’t have hot Friday night plans. Of course, hot wasn’t a word she wanted in her vocabulary right about now.
    Maybe she should just suck it up and book a hotel room.
    She’d spent a good hour looking at prices online earlier in the afternoon, about three o’clock when temperatures hovered around 102 and she’d been almost willing to put a dent in the nest egg she’d been working so hard to build back up after buying out her brother’s share in the duplex.
    But knowing that, come Monday morning, Laurie would have to bite the bullet and replace the piece of crap air-conditioning unit, she couldn’t justify two hundred dollars for a night at the Omni. And even eighty bucks at the skeevy place by Love Field was too much to spend. No, she’d just lie here with her trusty ceiling fan, a spray bottle of water, and meditate on the luxury of cool.
    Lord help her if the electricity went out, too.
    It was quiet without the ancient AC unit running nonstop, though through her open window she could hear the soft whir of the other unit. It had been replaced last summer. She now regretted the frugal and prudent decision to not replace them both at the same time. Laurie gave a brief thought to using the master key and hanging out in her downstairs tenant’s still cheerfully air-conditioned apartment. She spent a somewhat longer time thinking about the ice maker her brother had installed in the kitchen in the last renovation. And that king-sized bed she’d seen the movers lug in took up an extra-large space in her fantasy. Just think of all those miles and miles of cool cotton to roll on.
    Maybe she could—
    No. Grant Everton didn’t strike her as the accommodating type. In fact, in the weeks since he’d moved in, they’d exchanged possibly fourteen sentences in passing. Most of them at their siblings’ wedding last month. Most of them hey, how are you? Good. Good, I’m good, too. Good.
    Did it count as conversation if they just said the same words to each other over and over again?
    And even if they’d been on the best terms, she wouldn’t dream of violating his privacy—and the rental agreement—by going into his apartment without cause.
    Although maybe she should check his AC filter just in case.
    Curses, he wasn’t even home to enjoy the perfection of chilled air. Probably wouldn’t be home tonight at all. He seemed to be a fan of working late. And by working late, he was probably working some graceful, statuesque blonde over while the steady whir of her penthouse apartment air conditioning brought chill bumps to their sweat-slickened bodies.
    She’d feel the heat