Hot To Touch (Book Three): Hot Pursuit, #3

By Layla Valentine

I'm the woman who has almost everything
But he's going to give me the one thing money can't buy…

Naomi:

I'm a businesswoman, a CEO, and a billionaire.
In business, I'm at the top of my game
But in love?… the numbers don't always add up.
So when smoldering-hot firefighter Ace gives me the eye
I figure it's high time for a hard-earned night off
And one night is all I planned, but it all went up in smoke…
How do I handle having a baby?

Ace:

She's a firecracker
The belle of the board room
And a freak in the bed
Smart, stubborn, gorgeous Naomi
She's been fighting so long, she doesn't even see that she needs rescuing
I'm gonna break down her walls
I'm gonna give her my baby
 

This is the third book in the Hot To Touch series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Layla Valentine
• Release date: Jun 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201981617

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

ACE

Naomi did call me when she got home, but she sounded exhausted, and I didn’t keep her long. I wanted to, just like I had wanted to keep her in Aspen. But I definitely knew better than to push it with her on anything right then.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. So that night, instead of prepping for work the next day, researching dad stuff or anything useful, I found myself back at the Silver Slopes, sharing a drink with an empty chair.

Well, Miguel, looks like I really fucked it up this time, I said and sighed.

Naomi had told me she wasn’t kicking me out of her life. She had reassured me of that when she had been at her most pissed off, so I’m sure she meant it to be true.

That didn’t absolve me of the mess I had made, though. Nothing could.

The bar was packed, as usual, with the warm, cheery vibe of people who are just drunk enough that life looked a bit better. They were dancing, laughing, talking animatedly, yelling over some hockey game I couldn’t bother following. I probably stuck out like a sore thumb with my lone, boozy moping, but I didn’t give a damn right now.

Naomi was being kind. She could have washed her hands of me and let me go to jail or end up sunk financially over that punch. As it was, I had fucked up her last chance to leave her company on her own terms, instead of with a gun to her head that I had helped to put there.

The sad thing was, few things ever in my life had felt more natural or right than punching that asshole Ian right in his smirking face. It was like following some deep, primal instinct to defend my woman from this creep who was trying to humiliate her in front of everyone—and treating our relationship, and the baby that had come from it, as something cheap and scandalous.

But this wasn’t the Wild West. Colorado was centuries beyond those days, and as much as I wanted to take pride in defending Naomi’s honor, I knew I had made a giant mess instead. And now, here I am drinking instead of figuring out how I’m going to fix it.

But I was out of ideas until I could talk to Naomi again. And I knew enough to give her some space after messing up like that.

I fucking hate waiting, I muttered under my breath.

It was worse that I had just learned that I was going to be a dad, that I had a shot at a family for the first time, and that this amazing woman wanted to talk options with me. That at a minimum, it meant I got to see her regularly and have her in my life.

Because I needed her in my life.

He deserved that punch in the face, I muttered, but it sounded more like I was trying to convince myself than anything else. If I wanted to be real about it, everyone on that board and every engineer who had dragged their feet on doing their job because of bigotry against Naomi—my Naomi—deserved to get pasted one for being pigs who acted like they had been teleported in from another century. But actually following through and doing it came at way too high a cost.

A cost that Naomi’s paying for me.

I had to make this right. The idea of never having Naomi’s trust or having her in my arms again made me crazy inside. I didn’t have to ask myself whether I was smitten with her. I already knew. If she walked away now…

Not happening. I’ll find a way to win her back. I have to.

It was two long days before we talked again. I had to force myself not to call her before then. To let her take the lead, something which ran against my instincts and my desires but which I needed to offer out of respect. She had made it very clear that she needed space and time to think this over. Pushing in before she was ready would have made it clear I didn’t care.

I spent a lot of time working those two days, mostly setting backfires and cutting brush. The drought continued, and with it, too many damn fires.

I had lost count of how many grass and brush fires I had put out this season already. It was as tedious as doing dishes: you finished handling one, and another two or three would pop up elsewhere. But wildlife, lives, and property were at stake, so all we could do was run out there again and again, take care of the problem, and grab what rest we could in between.

In my off time, I played with Benny a lot to avoid crawling back into the bottom of a beer stein. Hiking, the dog park, the big-box pet store where he could wander around picking out some new toys. He was a big, cute lovebug of a dog, almost like having a kid around at times.

I wonder how he’d react to having a baby around? For that matter, I wondered how having a baby around full-time would affect me. Or affect my relationship with Naomi, whom I already knew that I’d love to have around full-time.

If I got the chance.

You can’t take back