Grace on Fire

“Grace Muscat’s totally frigid. I’d be scared my dick would freeze off if I put it in that icebox of hers.”

The man’s voice carried just far enough so that Grace and her friends, Tally and Sophie, couldn’t mistake any of his words. Grace peeked around the booth partition to see Don Marshall grab the neck of his beer and take a swallow. She whipped her head back around to gape at her open-mouthed friends. Gorgeous firefighter Don Marshall had just called her frigid.

Embarrassment burned Grace like fire whipping through an autumn forest—embarrassment, then a horrible, sinking feeling as a memory flashed over her. “You suck in bed, Grace. You’re as sexy as a friggin’ drowned rat, and you look just about as good.” The memory caught her, clutched her in its claws, and tried to pull her down to the black pit. She dropped her gaze to stare at her hands framing the base of a martini glass in front of her, and felt her mind start to slip away.

No. She gave her head a quick shake. She wouldn’t let herself go there. She wasn’t going to let her mind sink into that dark hole, not after she’d worked so hard for the last two years to banish that cruel and nasty voice from her mind. She sucked in a deep breath and focused on regulating her breathing.

“But she’s cute, though.” Grace could hear one of Don’s friends adding his opinion.

“Yeah, she’s cute, and she’s a total sweetheart, but I wouldn’t ever go to bed with her. She totally lacks sex appeal.”

In, out. In, out. She focused on her breath, willed the muscles in her diaphragm to relax. With tight fingers, she clutched the stem of her martini glass as she stared into its ruby red contents, wishing she could click her heels three times and be back home. Or in Kansas.

Or anywhere other than here, at this particular martini bar. She peeked back up. Her two best friends stared across the booth at her with twin expressions of pity. Had the guy of her dreams really just compared her vagina to a freezer?