by Jan Irving
Table of Contents
Legal Page
Title Page
Book Description
Dedication
Trademarks Acknowledgement
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Epilogue
New Excerpt
About the Author
Publisher Page
A Totally Bound Publication
The Protective Dominant
ISBN # 978-0-85715-666-2
©Copyright Jan Irving 2014
Cover Art by Posh Gosh ©Copyright March 2014
Edited by Stacey Birkel
Totally Bound Publishing
This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher, Totally Bound Publishing.
Applications should be addressed in the first instance, in writing, to Totally Bound Publishing. Unauthorised or restricted acts in relation to this publication may result in civil proceedings and/or criminal prosecution.
The author and illustrator have asserted their respective rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book and illustrator of the artwork.
Published in 2014 by Totally Bound Publishing, Newland House, The Point, Weaver Road, Lincoln, LN6 3QN
Warning:
This book contains sexually explicit content which is only suitable for mature readers. This story has a heat rating of Totally Burning and a Sexometer of 2.
Men of Station 57
THE PROTECTIVE DOMINANT
Jan Irving
Book three in the Men of Station 57 Series
Firefighter Taz watches over wounded innocent Jenny Green, but as he helps her to heal, she comes to need her guardian angel’s touch.
Night after night, wounded innocent Jenny Ann Green sleepwalks, reliving a nightmare. Her nearest neighbor, firefighter Taz—short for Tasmanian Devil—is a legendary sexy bastard of a dominant, but he’s breaking his heart over this girl. He needs to find a way to heal her. Her silent pain awakens his own past.
Soon Taz forces Jenny to leave the safety of her house, taking her shoe shopping at the mall—even though he hates women’s shoes—to a barn raising for the local coffee house and to the SPCA to adopt a forlorn golden retriever. It’s not the way he’d ever thought he’d use his natural gift for dominance, protective and gentle, but the fear in Jenny’s eyes is melting. Now she needs him to do more than watch over her—she needs him to touch her. But small town girls like Jenny always fall for bad boys like Taz…
Dedication
To Lyric Kinard for her book Art + Quilt, which is not just about art quilting, but about being creative in this world.
Trademarks Acknowledgement
The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:
Beauty and the Beast: Walt Disney Pictures
Gatorade: Pepsi-Co, Inc.
Laura Ashley: Malayan United Industries Berhad
Ford: Ford Motor Company
Disneyland: The Walt Disney Company
Victoria’s Secret: L Brands, Inc.
Home Depot: The Home Depot, Inc.
Superman: Marvel Comics
Cool Water: Coty, Inc.
Another One Bites the Dust: John Deacon
Bowflex: Nautilus, Inc.
No one can see their reflection in running water. It is only in still water that we can see.
—Taoist proverb.
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than
the risk it took to blossom.
—Anais Nin.
Chapter One
Jenny Ann Green was digging in her garden again.
Taz watched her from the open door of his kitchen, rubbing his bloodshot eyes.
Dirt shot like it was geysered out of the ground, hitting her face, hitting the ratty-looking things in her gardening basket. She dropped her trowel and began tunneling into the earth with her bare hands, more dirt whipping out, shooting onto the neatly kept grass.
“Fuck this,” Taz growled.
He reached her in seconds. Stood there, trembling. Closed his eyes. Don’t touch her, asshole. You can’t touch her.
But it was hard, so freaking hard not to yank her off the ground and into his arms.
“Jenny?” His voice was rough. He cleared his throat, balling his fists. Don’t scare her.
She kept on digging. She probably hadn’t heard him.
“Jenny, look at me, sweetheart.” A memory of a female voice mocking him for using the word ‘sweetheart’ came to him. Dharma, his friend Fred’s smoking new girlfriend. Yeah, she’d pointed out that using that word hadn’t suited him at all since he was such a bastard with women.
She’d been right.
He was.
He didn’t like women. He didn’t trust them.
They had their use and he kept what he wanted from them tightly compartmentalized.
With his head thrown back, he dragged in deep breaths, trying to center himself. As an experienced dominant, he knew the first rule was to master yourself before you tried it with anyone else.
But it was so hard because Jenny got past all that. She was the crack in his armor that kept getting wider and wider, and it scared him because what the fuck would spill out if he kept letting her in? Nothing good. Absolutely nothing good, he knew.
When he had control, he knelt beside her, ignoring the dirt that she shoveled in his direction. Hell, the girl couldn’t even see him out of those spacey eyes so the dirt coming toward him was nothing personal.
Jenny was too polite, too sweet to ever throw dirt his way, much as he deserved it for the way he’d treated her.
He remembered the evening he’d come home and found that she’d planted flowers along his drive. “If I want fuckin’ flowers, I’ll plant them myself. Now get your ass off my property.”
Yeah, he’d been a real prince.
“Jenny Ann.” His voice was calm. “Jenny, wake up, sweetheart.”
No response. She was putting the weedy-looking things into the hole she’d dug. Damn, it was as deep as one Bo, his friend Mike’s golden retriever, routinely dug in Mike’s backyard.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m…” She frowned and looked down at the bulb in her fist. “Saffron bulbs. Come up in the fall,” she said in her honeyed Southern lady drawl.
“That’s good, Jenny,” Taz said. “But do you have to do this now?”
“Now…” She blinked. He could see her mind slowly coming back online. Suddenly she shuddered violently, looking around her.
It was killing him. He had to put his arms around her. “Jenny.”
She was ice cold. Ice cold. Shivering in her little threadbare nightie. No slinky red gown and red shoes for Jenny Ann. No, she went to bed alone in soft cotton, worn from too many washings.
He tried not to look at her nipples through the gown. She had larger breasts than he’d thought. She had a way of hunching her back or wearing too-large clothing so he hadn’t been able to see the
m clearly. He wanted to take them in his hands. Bastard, to be thinking that now.
“Let me go, let me go!” She was tearing at him, clawing, smacking—all of it so ineffectual because he was a big muscular guy and she was a tiny little thing.
Aching, he let her go. Watched her fall on her butt in the earth, watched her glance around frantically, getting her bearings. Her chest rose and fell. Finally she curled up in a little ball, a thready sound coming from her.
Panting, he stared.
“Oh, Jenny.”
When she didn’t move, he couldn’t take it anymore. He reached down and picked her up, tucking her ball shape under one arm.
And she growled at him.
Taz blinked. Frowned. That was new.
Women as nice as Jenny Ann didn’t growl.
“Stop that.” He tapped her butt then froze. What the hell was he doing? She wasn’t one of the women he used. But his palm wanted to stay on the warm, lush fullness, wanted to squeeze. She was not a stick woman. If a man made love to her, he’d sink in, be surrounded by feminine warmth.
Probably why she was so self-conscious about her looks, he thought with annoyance. Women shaped like women weren’t found on magazine stands or in movie theaters. They were made to feel ashamed of their curves.
He paused, realizing belatedly that he’d automatically carried sweet little Jenny Ann to the door of his kitchen. What was he doing?
He rubbed his eyes with his free hand. Just hadn’t been getting enough sleep…
“Put me down.” Her voice was timid, uncertain. It would have broken his heart—if he had one.
Screw it. He shoved open the door and plunked Jenny on one of his kitchen chairs. She immediately pulled her legs up to her chest, shielding her body from him.
“Aw, hell.” He backed away from her, rubbing the back of his neck. “I just thought”—he blew out a breath and she jumped—“I’d make you an omelet.”
“Omelet?” She looked up at him, her dark eyes serious.
“Yeah. You know, it’s not just for breakfast anymore?” he cracked. She didn’t smile, but she also didn’t run, so he took it as a good sign.
She rubbed her forehead. Her long brunette hair was free of its habitual no-nonsense bun and he saw that it must be long enough to reach her plump ass. Jesus, what would it be like to lie down with her and have all that dark, silken stuff on his body?
He looked away.
“Anything you don’t like in your omelet?”
“Ah…” She blinked. “No. I’m not picky.”
“Good thing if you’re going to eat my cooking, sweet cheeks.”
He had a pan out before she said, again so softly he could barely hear her, “I don’t like being called ‘sweet cheeks’, thank you very much.”
He grinned, unaccountably happy to get a rise out of her. It sure beat coming home to her sitting on her porch swing, staring out at the horizon with haunted eyes. Or, worse, hiding in her house like she had for weeks after she’d been attacked.
Taz squeezed his eyes shut and blocked that thought. He couldn’t… He couldn’t think about that. Whenever he did, it made him crazy.
She was so delicate. A man his size could knock her over without a second thought and she’d been attacked by three men…
Don’t think about it. The pan rattled against the burner in his shaky grasp. He released it, then ignited the flame. A flashback of what she’d looked like in her hospital bed hit him. Her face covered in bruises, as if a man had beaten it with his fists, one eye swollen shut, the stitches on the side of her neck—
“I have some Jack cheese.”
“Okay.”
He glanced at her and saw she was sitting up at his table now, her head in her hands. “What time is it?” she asked, her voice sounding too tired for someone in their early twenties.
“Just after three a.m.”
Her lips stretched into a smile with no warmth. “Oh, that late, huh?”
“Because last night it was one thirty when you did your midnight gardening routine? Yeah, things are looking up, sweetheart. You’re getting closer to daylight hours.”
She swept him a look out of eyes the color of moss agate. “You don’t have to get up every night and rescue me when I go bonkers.”
“Yeah, I do.” His voice was flat, uncompromising.
“Because you’re a professional fireman. I get it.”
He shrugged because no, she didn’t. Rescuing someone had always been secondary to him. It was the thrill of the dare, the risks he took that had made him who he was. He knew he lacked Battalion Chief Fred James’ commitment to serve and his best friend Luke Cade’s passion for helping people. He knew it but could experience only emptiness.
For him, it was the rush of doing something that might, just might, get him killed.
When he pictured what it meant to care about someone, he heard the snap of a lighter, the sound of his mother’s voice.
Hiding in a closet when he was very young. Making breakfast for her to sweeten her temper. He knew to run if any of her johns looked at him with interest but sometimes…he couldn’t get away…
“I have, what do you call them, fresh yellow peppers?”
A faint warmth in her eyes, like a spark in the darkness. “You raided my vegetable garden again.”
His lips quirked. “Guilty. But they are great with fresh steak.”
“I wouldn’t know. Vegetarian here.”
“Of course.” She was too nice to even eat meat. He had to stay away from her. He’d been trying for months but somehow she’d snuck under his armor, so he watched her and wondered. Made it impossible for him to sleep through the night.
And made it impossible for him to leave her alone in her grief.
She hurt and he could feel it. It haunted him like wrenching music.
The contents in the pan sizzled, the only sound in his kitchen until the birds woke up and began to chatter outside as he made her omelet. When it was done, he cut it in half and placed it on two plates.
He sat down at the table next to her but not too close.
The strung wire tension of her shoulders seemed to ease. He wished he could reach out and push her hair behind one of her ears.
“It’s good.” She looked so surprised that he cocked an eyebrow.
“Glad you like it. It’s the first time I’ve ever made breakfast for a lady.”
She blinked. “You have, ah, ladies here all the time.”
He gave his attention back to his early breakfast. “They don’t sleep over.”
It was quiet again except for the sounds of their eating. When he glanced over to measure how much she was putting away, he relaxed when he saw she had plowed through most of her omelet. She was a little thing, which oddly only made those lush breasts look larger.
“You’re right,” she said. “I never realized it, but your visitors’ cars are always gone in the morning. I, uh, just thought they were early risers.”
He had to grin at that idea, but then it sank in, how she’d had that insight into his private life. She was his neighbor, she knew things about him—when he forgot to put out the trash, what time he came home on a Friday night—and possibly insight into his unconventional love life.
The thought sent a burn of heat to the base of his neck. He didn’t know if it was embarrassment or arousal.
Jenny never made things easy on him. She was not an easy woman.
“Have you…talked to anyone?” He’d been dying to ask her the question for weeks, but she’d been so fragile when he’d first caught her in her sleepwalking act that he’d been afraid to push.
She swallowed hard and he got up, grabbed a mug and filled it with coffee fresh from his timed maker.
“Yes,” she said again in that very soft voice.
More questions rose to his lips. He strangled them down. She’s not ready to talk to me about this.
Although why Jenny would ever be ready to confide in him was an audacious thought. Just why did he im
agine she’d want to do that? She was a shy little mouse and he…was not.
He fought off the urge to reach out and pull her onto his lap. Make her confide in him.
Patience.
She sipped the coffee. Her hands shook so that the liquid sloshed. Belated shock?
“Jenny.” He steadied her hands with his own until she settled. Her face tightened but she didn’t scream the way she had the first couple of times he’d woken her out in her garden. “Will you try something with me?”
Worried eyes studied him.
“A breathing exercise. You know I, uh, teach yoga?”
Her eyes widened. What had been running through that agile and secretive mind of hers? “Yoga, really?”
Color burned his cheeks. “Yeah. I took some classes a while back and… Well, now I teach it, okay?” His tone sounded annoyed to his own ears.
She smiled. “Okay.”
“Breath work can be very calming to the body,” he continued, unable to meet the innocent curiosity in her gaze. He knew she was curious about him. She must sense that he had secrets. “Do you want to try?”
“Would I have to sit in the lotus position or something?”
“Nope. Just put down your mug and close your eyes. You can follow the directions of my voice.”
“I won’t, like, suddenly want to do handstands with one arm or something?”
He laughed, delighting in her sense of the ridiculous. “No, that’s hypnotizing someone. I won’t do that.”
He reached out, took the mug from her and put it on the table. He saw with satisfaction that she’d eaten every scrap off her plate. Feeding her gave him a primitive kind of satisfaction, as if she was his woman to care for.
“Close your eyes.”
She chewed her bottom lip, which was pink and slightly less full than the top one owing to an overbite. He thought it was sexy as fuck.
“Close them.” Without thinking, he had used his commanding tone with her but oddly it didn’t seem to freak her out. Instead, she instantly obeyed.
“Now I want you to take some deep breaths. In and out, that’s it. Let your shoulders fall as if you’re sliding into a hot tub of water.”