by Jessica Gray
“Way to go little brother.”
“I’m going to be an uncle.”
“And I’m going to be an aunt,” Vivian added.
Hugs and congratulations flowed around. Annie was obviously overjoyed at the prospect of her first grandchild and all but danced around the garden with joy.
Tyler enjoyed the family reunion and especially the way his family had so readily accepted Jules into their midst. Even though he still needed to convince her, that she indeed wanted to be his permanent girlfriend and not just a fling for the season. The first part of the plan – introducing her to his family – worked like a charm. Now it was time to roll out phase two.
Half an hour later, he pulled Jules off to the side and asked, “How are you holding up?”
“I’m having so much fun, Ty. Thanks for inviting me. Your family is amazing.”
Tyler’s heart warmed, and he wrapped her into his arms, pressing a heated kiss on her lips. She didn’t protest, not even when someone clicked his tongue with approval. “I was thinking…since we’re already here, how about stopping by to see your mother tomorrow before we head back to Bear Mountain?”
Jules gave him an incredulous look and started shaking her head. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea. She’s nothing like your family.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’m sure we’ll get along just fine.” Tyler gave her a kiss and wrapped his arms around her.
Chapter 20
After a night full of bliss far away from prying ears, Jules woke up to the sunshine streaming through the window. She slipped out of the king-sized bed to use the bathroom, grabbed one of Tyler’s oversized t-shirts and took the opportunity to observe his apartment.
It wasn’t big or flashy, unlike Rock Marten’s mansion, but it was so him. A wooden table stood in the middle of the dining room, lined by six chairs. She grinned. A lot for a bachelor, but probably not enough for a man with that many siblings. The rest of the furniture was sparse. No couch. No coffee table. No knick-knacks. No paintings or posters on the walls.
Only two wooden bookshelves crammed with thrillers and fantasy books lined the walls, and two very comfortable armchairs standing opposite each other, plus a small stool to prop up feet.
She liked it. A lot. She loved the empty space in the room that alleviated the feeling of confinement she always felt at her mother’s place. Jules wrinkled her nose. Here she was, a twenty-seven-year-old woman still living with her mother. It had seemed like a practical thing to do, because she lived half of the year on the base and that didn’t justify spending that much money on rent for the other half. She brewed coffee and returned to the bedroom with two mugs, finding him awake and smiling at her.
“Hmmm…I smell coffee. Good coffee…” he said, sitting up.
“Here, no sugar, a bit of milk, right?”
“You paid attention.” He grinned and took the mug she handed him. “What’s better to start the day than being served coffee by an amazing woman in a sexy shirt.”
“I hope you don’t mind that I used your—“
“No way. I love how my shirt barely covers your gorgeous ass and I love the idea that you’re wearing my things, because you’re my girl. “
Jules felt herself flushing. The fling-deal wasn’t working out too well, it seemed. Someone would get hurt when the inevitable dirty ending of their relationship came, although up to now every day had been better than the last. And every day she fell a bit more for him, despite her efforts not to get her heart involved.
“Come here,” he pulled the bed sheet aside, exposing his marvelous naked body and padded the place at his side.
“That’s not fair,” she said, her eyes fixating on his muscled chest, stomach and all the way down to his primed cock.
“What’s not fair, sweetheart? That you’re going to wake the neighbors with your screams of pleasure?”
Jules felt wetness dripping from her core and her nipples sprang to attention, eagerly awaiting his hands and mouth on them. “You said nobody could hear us,” she said, putting the coffee mug in the nightstand and climbing into the bed with him.
“I may have underestimated the intensity of your screams,” he said with a smug grin on his face.
“God Tyler, you’re terrible.” She swatted at his shoulder. In that instant, he turned her around and before she knew it, she lay face down across his lap, his hand slapping down on her butt and his erection pressing hard against her stomach.
Next, she felt his hand move across her ass and delve down between her thighs rubbing it through the moisture, before he started teasing her tightest hole and slowly pushed his moist finger inside.
She’d never done that before, and the sensation was so overwhelming, she screamed out. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!”
“You like this?” Tyler asked while he moved his finger inside her ass.
“Oh yes,” she whimpered on his lap.
He pushed his other hand between her body and the bed, searching for her nipples. When he found one, he rolled the taut bud between his fingers making her whimper harder. With his finger rubbing inside her ass, while the other hand squeezed, rolled and rubbed her nipple, Jules thought she’d go crazy with the sensations flooding her body. She rubbed her core against his throbbing erection until she came with another scream loud enough to wake even the profoundly deaf.
Tyler held still for a moment, then pulled out his finger, and laid her on her back, climbing atop of her and pushing his huge erection inside her. She felt the explosive waves of yet another orgasm crushing over her as he buried himself to the hilt. Whimpering, squealing, and convulsing she grabbed his butt to shove him closer to her.
“I need more…harder…need to feel your weight…” Her breath came in spurts.
Tyler complied and crushed her with his entire weight as he came to lie upon her body, tightly connected from head to toe, while he moved his hips making her come and come and come. After what seemed like an endless hour of bliss, she was completely spent, her muscles shivering from the effort.
“Please, Tyler, I can’t take it anymore,” she begged him, since he showed no intention of stopping.
“Just a bit more,” he said, “I love when you come hard like this.” He raised up on his elbows, removing some of his weight, and letting much needed cool air between their sweating bodies. Then he hammered into her with such a force, she had to press her hands against the headboard to keep from being shoved against it. Her entire body pulsated, convulsed, shivered, when he finally spilled his semen deep inside her.
“Are you nervous?” Tyler asked her, as they parked the car in front of her mother’s pretentious house.
“A little,” she sighed, feeling like a little girl. Bringing Tyler to see her mom was more than a little daunting and she had a foreboding that her mother wouldn’t be impressed. Worse yet, that she wouldn’t be able to mask her displeasure.
“Hey, relax. It’s just your mother, right?”
“You can talk. Your family is wonderful,” Jules said, ringing the doorbell. Her mother answered the door and greeted them, “Jules, honey. And who’s this handsome young man?”
“Mother. I’d like you to meet Tyler Armstrong.”
Her mother looked him up and down and then pursed her lips. “Armstrong? Hmmm, that name doesn’t ring with me. But come in and sit down.”
Tyler and Jules followed her into an elegant sitting room done in all white. “So, tell me Tyler…what do you do for a living?”
“I’m a firefighter.”
“A firefighter? You’re pulling my leg,” she laughed and offered them iced tea.
“Thanks, Mrs. Cooper, but I’m serious. I worked as a firefighter in L.A. before I joined the hotshot group in Bear Mountain, where I met your daughter.”
“Oh.” She finished pouring the tea and plastered a fake smile on her face.
“Mom—,“ Jules said.
“Don’t ‘Mom’ me! Isn’t it bad enough that you insist on doing this dirty and da
ngerous job? No, now you have to bring one of your colleagues here? When will you finally come to your senses? You could have any A-list actor. You really don’t have to settle this low.” With those acerbic words, she excused herself to bring biscuits.
Just as her intuition had told her, it had been a mistake to come here. Her mother only was interested in the material aspects of a man, not his personality. Jules turned to Tyler with a ready apology on her lips, but he shook his head. “Tyler, I’m so sorry…”
“Don’t be. She’s exactly what you said she was. No harm, no foul. Her opinion doesn’t matter to me.”
She heard his words, but she knew her mother’s callous behavior still stung. She knew she would have been devastated if Annie had treated her like a second-class citizen.
Before she could mount another explanation, her phone range and she glanced at the caller ID. Chief Carter. Jules frowned, a strange queasiness taking over her stomach. Both of them were marked off the boards for the weekend, so it must be something really important if the chief interrupted her personal time. Like a massive wildfire.
“Hello Chief, what’s up?” she answered the phone, seeing a deep frown appear on Tyler’s forehead. He observed her every expression as the phone call unfolded.
“There’s a monster of a fire in Sequoia and they’re asking for help from every other hotshot across the country. I’m really sorry to cut short your weekend off, but the beast’s gaining traction by the minute and we’re the nearest crews to get in.”
“Sure.” Jules sighed, adrenaline taking over. It wasn’t the worst of things to have the terse meeting with her mother cut short. “Where and how?”
“I’m sending a helicopter to get you. Florence and Denis will be on it already with your gear.” Chief Carter gave her the coordinates of the meeting point.
“We’ll hurry and be there in time.” Jules disconnected the call and then turned to Tyler who glanced expectantly at her.
“We have to go. Sequoia called in for help from every other hotshot company. Our teams are already on the way,” she explained.
“Sequoia? Well, I for one hate seeing those gorgeous trees burn.”
“Chief’s sending a helicopter to meet us. He said he was sorry to cut our weekend short, but all of the men were needed immediately.”
“Hey, that comes with the job, right?” Tyler hugged her, saying, “You say your goodbyes and I’ll meet you outside.”
Jules nodded, bid her mother a terse goodbye and then joined him outside. Once she sat with him in the car, she smiled. “It kinda was perfect timing. Don’t you think so?”
Tyler reached for her hand and kissed the back before saying, “Don’t worry about your mother, or the cancelled weekend. As long as I’m with you, I’m happy.”
Jules smiled at him and for the first time she gave serious thought to possibly hanging onto him after the season ended.
Chapter 21
Tyler parked the car and they rushed over to the helicopter that had landed just a minute ago. He and Jules were greeted by Blondie and Denis, who helped them don their Kevlar suits.
“Off we go,” Tyler murmured to himself, his voice drowned out by the sound of the rotors.
He watched Jules slip the headset over her ears and did the same, the noise instantly dimming and providing him a way to communicate with her and the pilot. Tyler watched Jules face as they lifted off into the air, sensing a rare nervousness in her that he hadn’t witnessed before.
As they flew over the city and toward the mountains, he could see the growing smoke plume rising into the air. It looked massive from this distance, and the closer they drew to Sequoia, the bigger it became. Everywhere Tyler looked on the horizon it seemed to be lit up by fire.
“Wow!”
Jules kept watch out her own window and merely nodded. He reached for her hand and she gripped it tightly, communicating without words that this was bad. Really bad.
They landed and the atmosphere at the base of operations was tense. Nervous energy always simmered before they got into a fight, part fear and part excitement, but today was different. Tyler could feel the air crackle. Fear could be healthy, because it kept you from doing stupid things, but too much fear could paralyze a person, making it a very dangerous emotion.
He’d learned that as a city fireman, but out here it seemed even more important. Out here you were on your own, sometimes for up to a week and your comrades couldn’t just carry you out of the building and into the next hospital within minutes.
While Jules checked in with operations from the leading Sequoia hotshots, he made a body check with Denis.
“All clear,” Denis said. “How was your weekend.”
“Hot,” Tyler grinned at the memory of the heated session between the sheets this morning, “but I assume it’ll be getting a lot hotter where we go.”
“Yeah. Not good news. There’s four or five local teams already on-site working to get the head of the fire to lie down.”
“And our crews?”
“Two went in about an hour ago. The third one was just waiting for us to arrive,” Blondie said.
Jules came back from operations and gathered her crew of twenty around her. “Sorry guys you had to wait. Here’s the plan,” she showed them a map of the Sequoia national park and circled the location of the fire with her fingers. “There’s the head with the local hotshots fighting, then there’s two of our crews here…and here on the western flank. We’ll go here… on the eastern flank. It’ll be a tough walk up, I estimate at least one hour, maybe two.” She glanced around, looking at each and every person.
“What about air support?” Gunner asked.
“Smokejumpers from Arizona are on their way, but it’ll take several hours for them to get here. Operations doesn’t know yet where exactly they’ll jump. But we have slurry planes dropping flame retardant. They’ll radio in so we can get to cover.” The flame retardant might be a blessing to slow down a fire, but the pinkish red slimy liquid was a curse when it hit skin. It stung and itched like hell.
Once they’d reached the burning area, Jules gave everyone their assignments, and Tyler cringed when she assigned him to the squad making a saw line, leaving her and Kevin to go up the hill, circling to the head to connect with the other hotshot crews from their base.
His heart tensed at the idea of being separated from her, but this was the job and he couldn’t let emotion stop him from getting to work. He did keep his radio on and his ears peeled for information as it came in. The fire had started in very dry country with lots of ground fuel and stands of dead trees to help keep it moving and growing.
Hours later, Jules voice came across the radio notifying base command that one of her co-workers had been hit by a bullet-like branch from an exploding tree and needed an airlift out. Her location meant nothing to him without a map, and he and his fellow co-workers were in the middle of getting the better of a small finger of fire.
Sweat and soot running down his face, and his back, he tucked the information away, happy Jules wasn’t injured and continued hacking, sawing, and stepping out spots. His back hurt like hell, and his arms and shoulders wanted to quit moving…taking a break, stretching, sounded like paradise.
But it took only one glance at Blondie’s determined face working at his side to double up his efforts. Every now and then he took a big gulp from his flask and hours later, when he thought it wasn’t humanly possible to stay on his feet for another moment, he retrieved an energy bar from his pack, stuffed it into his mouth and continued working. The night had already settled, and his eyes burnt with the smoke when he ate the last bite of his provisions.
After twelve hours of back braking work that Tyler felt in every single cell in his body, relieve hotshot crews from other states arrived and Denis, their squad leader, called it a day and ordered them to retreat into the black to set up camp.
Air support had dropped food and drinks, since there was no way to get in by truck. Tyler and Gunner heated their MRE and down
ed at least half a gallon water each.
“Let’s wash down the water with something more substantial.” Gunner grinned and added a sachet of Ginger Ale syrup to his water. “Want some too?”
“Sure, why not? Have beer flavor?”
“You wish. Cola or Lemon?”
“Cola it is. I hope it won’t keep me from sleeping,” Tyler said on a yawn, although he was pretty sure, nothing short of a bomb explosion would keep him from sleeping tonight. He fought his drooping eyelids while eating.
Meanwhile the other squad of their crew had arrived at the campsite and raided the dropped provisions. Tyler walked over to ask, “Any news of Jules and Kevin?”
“Kevin returned to our position hours ago, but Jules stayed to get the injured man onto the chopper. She radioed in that she was on her way back to us, but the last we heard she had to retreat her steps because the fire was coming after her,” Castor, the squad leader of the other team said.
Tyler’s heart stopped, and his worry surged to all-out panic. “We have to go looking for her!”
“Calm down, Armstrong,” Castor said. “We have no idea where she is now and there’s no way to get through to her last known position. I’m pretty sure she radioed operations and they’re trying to get her from the back of the ridge.”
If she makes it over there. Tyler had seen the ridge; even from far away it seemed impossible to climb up. “We should do something,” he insisted.
“Until the fire moves on, we can’t really do anything. There’s too much burning land between her previous location and us here. We’ll have to go around the burned-out area to search for her. We have to wait it out.”
“There has to be something we can do,” he looked around for anyone who would join him in that assessment. “What about air support? We have to help her.”
“And we will, but for right now, you need to finish eating and get some rest. When the time is right, if we haven’t heard anything from her, we’ll send a search party out.”
“I want to be on that party,” Tyler all but demanded.