Too Hot to Handle by Aleah Barley

together.
    “You were lucky.”
    “Luck didn’t have anything to do with it. Logan did. They forgave my bad grades, found me a tutor, and let me skate through classes until I got my feet back under me. You helped with that.”
    Had he? He’d never been able to tell what Honey was thinking—not the week they’d been together, and definitely not afterward. Not when she’d been more interested in making his life a living hell than pouring out her heart.
    “I hated it. Everyone in that school—they all knew I didn’t belong. My family didn’t have money, power, or influence. We weren’t from Black Palm Park, and no one ever let me forget it.”
    The experience Honey described was completely foreign to Jack. But then, he’d belonged, in every sense of the word. He’d never really thought about what might happen to the kids who didn’t. “I never treated you like an outsider.”
    “You were different,” she said. “You were special.”
    If he was so special, why had she turned him away after one kiss? It was a question he’d wanted the answer to for years.
    Nine days. Three dates. One kiss. Then his entire world had turned upside down.
    He’d asked her once why she’d left him, but she’d never answered. The possibilities were endless. Insanity, homosexuality, a vow of celibacy.
    Or he was a really bad kisser.
    Jack’s cell phone rang, providing the distraction he needed. He leaned sideways to pick it up off the floor, wincing at the pain in his ribs. “Hello?”
    The call was from a doctor he knew at St. Anne’s emergency room, where the other car’s driver had been taken after the morning’s crash. The doctor was calling to tell him who the victim was: a low-level thug. Not a name that Jack recognized. Not the kind of person who could orchestrate a villainous plot involving fires on two sides of town. The sort of guy who could be hired on a street corner and trusted to do something bad.
    The police weren’t interested in him. With Jack’s encouragement, they’d classified the morning’s crash as an accident. The most they could charge the thug with was reckless driving.
    A broken collarbone and a mild concussion meant the driver was one bad guy who wouldn’t be bothering them again for a while, but he could still use the phone. Jack could only imagine the kind of information he would pass on to his compatriots. Detailed descriptions—maybe even a license plate number or a name.
    Jack was a police officer, an active member of the community.
    He was in the phone book.
    “We need to go.”
    “Where?”
    “Someplace safe. Someplace with security.” His head was pounding. He desperately needed a cup of coffee and an Advil. Or twenty. There was only one place he could think of where he knew they’d be safe.
    “You’re not going to like it.”

Chapter Eight
     
    Honey Moore had been going to hell for most of her life. Sitting poolside at the Ogden manse meant she’d arrived.
    Jack had promised he’d be gone less than half an hour, taking a cab back to the Valley to pick up the Super Bee. She could wait inside.
    She wasn’t a kid anymore. In another couple of months, she’d be twenty-eight, a fact too bizarre to believe. But walking through Jack’s palatial childhood home, she’d felt like she was five years old and someone was about to yell at her for getting smudges on the polished table or—worse yet—breaking a vase.
    At least no one here was trying to kill her.
    After forty minutes spent pacing through the house, she’d gone outside. Now she was stretched out on a wooden lounge chair in a scarlet one-piece bathing suit the housekeeper had insisted on finding for her. It probably cost more than her truck.
    The pool was beautiful—clear blue water laid out like a blanket, long enough to make an Olympic swimmer happy—but she was more interested in the view. Across the backyard, down a small hill, and over a six-foot fence, Logan Burrows’s castle smoldered ominously.
    She’d never