Standing Outside the Fire

by Jillian Neal

  With a harsh swallow she eased closer, unable to help herself. He was a work of art. For the first time since the fire, she actually appreciated all that the moon revealed. The lithe muscles of his back bunched and eased with his breaths. Even relaxed, the rolling muscles that comprised his arms looked mighty enough to keep anyone safe. The good lord had obviously chiseled Jamie Holder with a blade dipped in sex appeal. She found herself wishing he would turn over. There was so much more she wanted to see.

  In the muted silence of that thought, she remembered that Jamie wasn’t hers to appreciate this way. Girls like her didn’t get guys like him as anything more than a friend. She needed to walk out of that room, but her feet refused to move. Every cell in her body wanted to climb in beside him and see what happened. The fear be damned to hell.

  When Jamie shifted in his sleep, she panicked. What kind of weirdo would just be standing there staring at someone while they slept? With hasty tip-toed steps, she slipped back out of the room and returned to the couch, and the fireplace, and the frozen moon.

  * * *

  The explosion of heat woke her. “Becca!” Charlie couldn’t see her little sister’s bed. It was right beside hers. Where was Becca? Scrambling out of her own bed, she screamed for her mother. She couldn’t see anything. Something pressed in around her, filling her lungs, blinding her. A veil of smoke.

  Frantically feeling along in the blackened cloud of darkness, her hands landed on the other bed. “Becca,” she pled. “Please, please wake up.” She lifted her little sister out of her bed and stumbled to the bedroom door.

  “Put me down,” Becca finally whimpered.

  “No. We have to go get Mommy.”

  Charlie jerked her hand away from the doorknob as it scalded her palm. Gritting her teeth, she endured the pain and flung open the door anyway. Another explosion of heat knocked the girls backwards all the way to the wall. Flames blistered Charlie’s legs as she screamed into the roar of the fire. But the fire was louder. It drowned out everything.

  She had to find her parents. Becca scrambled out of her arms. “Come on,” she urged. She helped Charlie stand and they both ran, not for the windows, but for their parents’ bedroom. Their mother would know what to do. She always knew what to do. She would keep them safe and make everything okay again.

  The putrid odor of melting plastic and the sounds of Becca asking Jesus to protect them were the last things Charlie fully understood. She hit the ground. The pain wrapped its vicious fists around her throat and smothered her.

  “Charlie.” Panic speared through Jamie as he lifted her off the floor in front of the couch. He hated himself for not insisting she sleep in the bed. “Hey, shhh, it’s okay. I’ve got you.” He seated her in his lap on the couch. Her eyes were soaked with tears, and she was gasping for breath that didn’t seem to be coming.

  It took him entirely too long to feel around on the floor for her purse. He shook her inhaler. In his best soothing firefighter tone, he urged, “Deep breath for me, okay? Ready?” He placed it to her lips, and she did as he instructed.

  But she coughed the albuterol back out with her sobs. He tucked her head to his shoulder and rocked back and forth. “It’s gotta get in your lungs. Okay. Shh. It’s all right. I’ve got you.”

  Her chest rattled her body, making her tremble with each cough. “One more time for me. Look at me,” he soothed. She set her tear-stained eyes on his. “Ready?”

  This time she gave him a nod. Once again, he got the inhaler to her lips and managed to get the medicine into her lungs this time.

  When she was maintaining steady breaths, she tucked herself against him once again. She trembled in his arms, either from the meds or the terror. He cradled her tenderly and wished for the thousandth time that day alone that she’d be in bed beside him every fucking night. He’d starve those nightmares until they held no power over her. Hell, he’d slay dragons to have her. All of those demons that wouldn’t give her rest—he’d vanquish them to hell. They could burn there. He just had to figure out some way to make her understand that he’d trade his last breath for her. “Want to talk about it?” he whispered, but she shook her head and clung to him tighter.

  “You’re not sleeping on this couch,” he ordered, and he no longer cared if she wanted to argue with him. Standing with her in his arms, he whisked her to the bedroom and laid her gently on the bed. He crawled in beside her and guided her head to his chest. Friends who sometimes kiss with enough need to make him hard-up for weeks also share a bed on occasion, apparently. Fuck it. Rules had never been his forte anyway.

  “I’m sorry I woke you up,” she croaked. She sounded a great deal like a terrified frog.

  “Nothing to apologize for. Nightmares suck. I’m glad I’m here with you. It’d kill me to think that you have them like that when you’re alone.”

  She cleared her throat. “I’m always alone when I have them.”

  “Not anymore.” He gave all sense of caution and discretion a big middle finger. He was done with it all.

  She tucked her face tight to his chest and mumbled out, “I dreamed about the fire.”

  He’d figured that. Turning on his side, he tipped her face back up. “Does it happen in the dream the way it really happened?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes I can’t get Becca to wake up, and….” Another violent shiver coursed through her.

  “Okay,” he cradled the back of her head with his hand and kissed the top of her head. “It’s all over now.”

  “When they got me out of the house, I woke up for a few minutes,” she choked out. She rarely said anything about the fire. What little Jamie knew he’d found out by searching the records from the OKC fire department. She didn’t know that he knew anything at all. He assumed she wouldn’t want to know that. He nodded, afraid to say anything at all that might not let her talk this out. “I hurt so badly I kept passing out, but I woke up when the fireman was carrying me out to the ambulance.”

  He knew both girls had been rescued by a man named Clint Masterson. That night had been his first structure fire. Guy had to have been scared out of his mind. Jamie had called Clint one day a decade ago to thank him and tell him that both Becca and Charlie were doing well. They’d spoken on the phone numerous times since then, just talking firefighter shit. Jamie didn’t have anyone he could talk business with. Charlie was terrified of his job and his family just didn’t get it. Clint always asked how the Tilson girls were doing. Jamie always filled him in. As a firefighter, he knew what it meant to get those calls, to know you’d made a difference. “That’s our job, sweetheart.”

  “I know, but I never thanked him.” Panic seemed to bolt through her again. She sat up off of his chest. The absence stung. “I should thank him.”

  Taking another reckless chance, he sat up with her and brushed more soothing kisses on her cheek then he guided her back down beside him. “I thanked him for you.”

  “You did?” He could see the questions painted in her eyes as she lifted her head.

  “Yeah. I did. He’s a lieutenant on a ladder truck now, but he was a newbie the night he saved you. He remembered pulling you and Bec out of the house that night. He’s a good guy. Got a few kids of his own now.”

  “That’s the same as you are now. A lieutenant on a ladder truck, I mean.” Even her sniffles were adorable.

  Jamie smiled at that. “Yeah, but it’s harder to get up to that rank in OKC, since they have a hundred times more people than we do out in Holder County.”

  His mind was a little sluggish. It took him a beat too long to understand what she’d been saying. If she’d passed out from pain, that meant…she’d been burned. But that made no sense. She’d never said anything about actually having been burned in the fire.

  Scared? Of course. Lung damage? He knew all about that. But pain to the point of losing consciousness? How had she never spoken of that? He was her best friend.

  Chapter Twelve

  Charlie was so touched that Jamie had thanked the man w
ho’d saved her life, but of course he had. That was such a Jamie thing to have done. “I can’t believe he remembers us. He must do that kind of thing all the time.”

  She wished she could talk to his wife. She wanted to understand how the woman was ever able to exist even moderately peacefully when her husband was at work.

  “That was his first fully-involved house fire. You never forget that. Plus, I think Becca tried to bite him when he was getting her in the ambulance.”

  Charlie cringed. “That sounds like Bec.”

  “She was scared,” Jamie gently reminded her.

  “I know.” She tucked herself closer to him once again. It felt so right to be where she was. So warm and safe in his arms. He didn’t seem to mind that she was there or that she’d woken him with one of those stupid dreams. Until her engagement made it to the papers, she hadn’t had the nightmares in years. Lately, they came once a week, minimum. “I really appreciate you calling and thanking him. That was so sweet of you. But I need to thank him too.”

  Jamie brushed a kiss on her forehead, and she told herself not to think too much about it no matter how good it felt. “I enjoy talking to Clint. We’re the same rank on the same kind of truck, like you said, so he knows what goes on with that.”

  Charlie had always been distinctly good at reading between the lines. Jamie liked talking about firefighting with Clint, someone he’d likely never met in person, probably because he couldn’t talk about it with anyone else, especially her.

  Guilt swiped through her belly. She swallowed down bile-soaked fear. “I know…well…that it scares me when you…you know…talk about fires and training and stuff. But I can learn. I can be okay if you just give me some time. I’m your best friend. I want you to tell me things.” There. She’d gotten the words out. Now, she just had to work on actually believing them.

  “I don’t want you to have to learn. Things work for us the way they are.”

  His voice had fractured on his lie, like the words themselves were icy shards. She stared up at him and watched that still eerie moon shimmer in his gorgeous eyes. In the reflection, she found that she didn’t mind its presence so much. She kind of liked it even. It was then that she was suddenly awake enough to realize that she was in bed with Jamie Holder, and he was naked. Deliciously, perfectly, gorgeously naked.

  Her mind scrambled. Her breasts were heavy. The right one pulled on the damaged muscles and scar tissue on her side. It made her all the more aware that nothing in this world was as real as he was in that moment. Right there beside her. Heat emanating from him. Life itself in the breaths she could feel cascading through her hair.

  The desperate desire to share a small piece of heaven with this man who would walk through hell for her won out over every potential complication this would inevitably bring.

  She let her hand drift down his chest. His evident strength tensed under her touch. His breath grew ragged. It stirred the need she swore was coiled tightly beneath all of the fear she let rule her life far too often. “If you could do anything in the whole world you wanted to do right now, what would you do?” she whispered. His eyes drifted closed and a hungry grunt filled her ears, but he said no words. The grunt spoke a compendium of lust, however. It drove her onward. “Please tell me.”

  “I can’t.” He shuddered against her and caught her hand in its track down his abs. “Can’t,” he managed the word again. It was laced with raw defeat.

  “Why not?”

  He shook his head against the pillow and refused her an answer. Her bottom lip slipped through her teeth as she considered. The movement triggered a choked curse from him, like he was being tortured. Charlie couldn’t stand the sound of him in pain. She had to rescue him, to rescue them both.

  The words quaked as she spoke them, but she refused to shut them away again. “I’ll tell you what I would do.” He gave her a single nod, like he was afraid to make more movement than that. “We’d make some kind of plan where whatever happens tonight in this bed doesn’t change us. And then, I’d do this.”

  She cradled his cheek in her hand and let the friction of the whiskers of his slight beard enliven her. Her mind instantly wished she could feel that friction between her legs. She tried to guide his lips to hers, but he held himself away from her for entirely too many seconds. He was so much stronger than she felt.

  “Mean what you say,” finally rumbled from him, low and pierced with hunger. “Don’t start something you don’t want to finish. I’ve fucking dreamed…fucking needed you…too damn many times to stop once I start.” The ragged warning pumped some kind of dangerous form of yearning through her veins. Strong and urgent. More desperate than anything she’d ever felt before. It should’ve frightened her, but instead it tore away a little of her practiced caution. She could feel the tantalizing evidence of his arousal, fevered and thick, against her thigh. Slick need leaked from him, marking her.

  A frantic, desperate noise she’d never heard from her own lips before filled the air between them. “I don’t want you to stop, unless you want to.” She felt she should offer that. This wasn’t only about what she wanted. She needed this to be for him.

  “I’ll never want to stop,” was the last warning she received before he expertly rolled her underneath his impressive body. The weight of him, pressing her into the mattress, centered her. She was right where she was supposed to be. The doubts distanced themselves until she could no longer make out their bothersome reminders of why this was going to blow up in their faces.

  “Please, Jamie.”

  He had to be dreaming. This, her, the delicious words she’d just uttered, her begging him—it had to all be a dream. He’d never deserve this. What if she regretted it? He told himself to stop. It’d kill him if she regretted anything that had to do with them, but he knew he couldn’t.

  She’d just had a nightmare. She was supposed to have married another man that morning. There were a thousand reasons why he should refuse, and not a single one of them was enough to get him to do what was right. Yet another reason he didn’t deserve the angel in his arms begging him to own her.

  But damn him to hell if he’d ever turn her down. He just wasn’t that strong. He’d fantasized about this too many times to deny himself the forbidden fruit that lay before him, begging to be tasted.

  He had to get some control. Jesus Christ, what if he was too rough with her? What if he hurt her? His dick was hard enough to drive fence posts into concrete.

  “Whatever you’re thinking right now, stop,” she ordered. “You don’t have to be gentle with me. I’m not a china doll.”

  “You can’t say shit like that to me.” His warning was too rough, too urgent. She had to stop, or he wasn’t going to be able to. His cock was already fucking weeping for her. Weak bastard that he was.

  “Why not?” she whispered. “It’s true.”

  He kissed that nonsense off of her lips. The kiss became a warning itself. He wasn’t gentle, had no finesse. He sought her surrender like that would make him somehow less insane with need. Every time his lips touched hers, he swore he tasted his future. She tasted like his.

  He just took and, my god she gave in return. He was certain she was out to prove that she wasn’t delicate, didn’t mind him getting rough. He knew better. He’d spent the past twenty years certain that she’d come equipped with a halo that must’ve been burned up in that fire. But that didn’t mean the shadow of it didn’t still exist in its rightful place.

  Maybe she didn’t even know she was lying to him, but he knew. She was too sweet, too good, too perfect for him to fuck her the way he’d always wanted to. Holding her down. Making her drip. Slamming into her over and over again until the only name she knew was his. Her long auburn hair tied up in his fist while he came hot and fast down her throat. Punishing that alabaster skin until he’d left his marks of ownership. Things he was ashamed of. Things he’d never wanted with any other girl. Never with anyone else had he ever wanted to imprint himself on her. Not with anyone but Char
lie. The urges to dominate her were rooted in raw possession. His. He had to make her all his.

  Her hips were already restlessly bucking against his cock. His precum marked the deliciously innocent cotton. How the hell was he naked and she fully clothed? That was not how he did things. Seeking to rectify that situation, he slid his hands to the warm smoothness of her belly. She quivered under his touch. Oh fuck yeah.

  But as he slid the T-shirt upwards, seeking the lush mounds of her breasts, she pinned her arms tight to her side. “Please. Don’t.” Her eyes begged him as well.

  “Why the hell not? I want all of you. You’re so goddamn gorgeous. Let me see you. Don’t be shy with me.”

  She winced, but he wasn’t certain if that was from his filthy language or if she was afraid he was going to force her out of her shirt. He was sure as hell not into making women do anything they didn’t want to do, but her begging to be taken, rubbing her heat up and down the stiff ridge of his erection, and then not wanting to be undressed made no sense.

  To further his confusion, she wiggled until he leaned up off of her, and she proceeded to shimmy out of those sinful little sleep shorts, or whatever the hell it was she called them, and panties exposing her ripe little pussy all for him.

  And as he stared down at the moonlit glistening heaven she was offering, he decided he’d deal with the shirt issue later. He dragged rough fingertips over her creamy little peach already swollen up nice and tight. “You’re soaked, baby.”

  She shuddered and a half-starved moan echoed from her lungs. “Please. Jamie, I need…” She sank her teeth into her bottom lip, afraid of the end of that sentence, he assumed.