Heat Wave
By
Eden Bradley

Chapter One

    “El Nino strikes again with the worst heat wave to hit Southern California in twenty years...”
    Leigh reached over her kitchen table and shut the radio off, then stood up to lift her long hair from her neck. If only she had air conditioning! One of the reasons she'd moved to this small Craftsman cottage in Santa Monica was because of the temperate weather. The mercury rarely rose above the low eighties this close to the beach, even at the height of summer. No such luck this year.
    She grabbed a dishtowel to stroke away the perspiration pooling at the base of her throat and trickling between her breasts. Even the light cotton sundress she wore felt like too much weight on her skin.
    She watched through her kitchen window as the sun began to set in a splashy blaze of watercolor orange and pink, the colors filtering through the leaves of the date palm in her yard. Hoping the evening air might be cooler outside than in, she took her glass of iced tea and wandered out to her small front porch.
    Settling onto the narrow wooden bench, she leaned back, stretching her long legs out in front of her. Languid with the heat, she sipped her tea and gazed around her neighborhood.
    Somewhere a dog barked in the deepening twilight, and she heard the faint swoosh, swoosh of somebody's sprinklers. The banging of a screen door caught her attention, and she watched her new neighbor across the street step onto his lawn. He was a large man, his height and bulk casting a long shadow in the amber glow of his porch light.
    She'd noticed him before, had watched the muscles in his big forearms flex when he'd moved his furniture in a week earlier. He was built like a football player, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist that tapered into a pair of low-slung cargo pants. His sun-streaked light brown hair was a bit too long and fell into his eyes. She hadn't been close enough yet to see what color they were. But the man was sexy as hell, and she'd been waiting to catch another glimpse of him.
    Leigh liked big men. She was tall herself, and a large man always made her feel more feminine. Her ex-husband had been well over six feet tall. Don't think about that now. No, better to think about the basketball player she'd dated briefly in college, his long, lanky form draped over hers on the too-small single bed in his dorm room. Sweaty afternoons there when she should have been in calculus. Math had never done her as much good as an afternoon of sex had.
    She stroked the beads of sweat from her icy glass with an absent finger as she watched her neighbor move across his lawn to bend down and pick up a few tools at the edge of his driveway. Like her, he'd probably waited until the heat of day had passed before venturing outside. He was graceful for a man of his size. Even in the dark she could see how the fabric of his pants stretched taut over his firm backside. Nice. Made her want to cross the street just to touch it.
    It had been a long time since she'd touched a man, which was probably why her thoughts were treading down such a lustful path now. She'd been divorced for about a year, and hadn't dated since she'd caught her ex with a co-worker. The woman was everything Leigh wasn't: petite, with a lush figure, dark and exotic. Leigh herself had always been too tall and lean for her own taste; she stood five-foot nine and had an athletic body with small breasts. But her ex hadn't cheated because of her breasts. He'd cheated because he was a selfish bastard with no    more >>