Missing the Stars: Chandler County

by Melissa Sinclair

  “Well, what are you waiting for?” He tweaked her nipple, and she moaned, feeling heat flood her lady region again. He turned and shut the top half of the stall door. He turned to look at her and smiled. “Just because Coop left, and just because I think you’re stunning naked, doesn’t mean I want to chance him seeing you. I don’t share.”

  I don’t share. She was completely nude in a barn, a blanket was spread across the hay-covered stall, and she was in his arms kissing him like her life depended on it. He damn well better not share, was all she could think, and then she thought how everything was good for this small window of time, and she was going to make the best of it.

  She sank to her knees, and when he tried to follow her, she stopped him, slowly unzipping his jeans as she pulled his erection out and took him into her mouth, looking up at him as she did so. It was only a couple beats before he was hissing through his teeth and pulling away from her. Suddenly self-conscious she had done something wrong, she started to rise, only to have him gently tug her head back so he could bend down to kiss her once again.

  “I could let you do that all day, and it would never be enough. But, it’s too much right now; if you keep that up we won’t get to the best part, and I really want to get to the best part.”

  Cole watched her so intently that the blush began to rise on Jessie’s cheeks, and she knew he meant every word he had said.

  “I love when you blush. Don’t ever stop doing that.”

  “Blushing? I don’t think I could control it if I tried.”

  “What have you done to me? It’s like you’ve bewitched me. There'ss no other logical reason to be here in this barn—doing this—when I barely know you.” Cole. The man with the swagger. The man with the plan. Cole could handle any sticky situation. In fact, she suspected he prided himself in the fact that he rarely, if ever, got ruffled. Yet, she had managed to completely knock him off his stride. What was more telling was that he didn’t seem to care, not even a little bit, that he was behaving like a love-struck teenager. For some reason that was the biggest turn on of all, which she knew should give her pause, but it didn’t—not by a longshot.

  He reverently lowered her to the ground and pushed her back until she was spread on the blanket for him to stare at. She watched as he made quick work of undressing his extraordinary body. She could have whimpered just from viewing the whole package, and maybe she had because he raised his eyebrow and that wicked grin was back. Come on girl, have some composure. To hell with composure, she thought, because she needed him. As soon as his body was on hers, it was all she could do to maintain control. His mouth was all over her, kissing her from navel to nose and everywhere else until it landed on her diamond hard nipples, his teeth grazing one, and she gasped and jerked against him.

  “Gah, do that again…”

  “Bossy.”

  Her hands were in his hair, and she tugged his mouth down to her breast again. While he nipped and teased, she found her hips gyrating against him like a wanton woman. She wanted—no, she needed him inside her. She felt like she would combust if he didn’t make a move. She was about to beg him when, mercifully, he donned a condom that seemed to appear out of nowhere—be prepared, indeed—and eased into her.

  “Ah. Please…don’t stop,” she whispered. He pounded into her over and over as he continued to tease her nipples. She felt herself climbing that mountain once again; her whole body was tense, waiting, reaching for that final hurdle until she finally felt the release. But he kept going and she felt like the orgasm would never end until slowly it began to ebb, and he finally went rigid with his own release. He relaxed into her, and she held him tightly in her arms, enjoying the feeling of his body against hers. It wasn’t long until he rolled to the side and tucked her body against his until she was flush against him, and then he was pulling another blanket up and over them. As she snuggled against him, he kissed her between the shoulder and neck, causing her to shiver.

  “Mmm.”

  “You’re sensitive here?” he asked while he kissed her again, then he licked her neck, and kissed her some more until she felt him start to harden again. She rubbed her butt into him, and he slipped a finger into her from the front. “We know you’re sensitive here.”

  She ground her hips into his hand, trying to reach the precipice again. She was almost there when he removed his hand and rolled her onto her stomach. A hand under her belly had her bottom lifting up off the blanket to meet him as he drove into her from behind. She cried out from the sheer force. Everything was tender and over sensitized, and it wasn’t long until she was over the edge again. Still, he drove into her. After she rode the wave up and over one more time, he jackhammered into her until his body jerked. They collapsed to the blankets, and she burrowed into him as he covered them up again, this time they snuggled in tight, and it didn’t take long before both of them had fallen asleep.

  13

  Jessie was having a strange dream. In it the horses were going wild, neighing, and kicking the stalls. Something had them in a frenzy, but she didn’t know what. She was looking for Cole—she’d been safely in his arms when the horses started going bonkers. The barn was hazy in her dream as if a fog had seeped into the very foundation and was slowly obliterating everything in its path. The fog was acidic and was eating the barn from the ground up. The sound of wood disintegrating was nearly deafening. A cacophony of crackling sounds. The fog had reached her. She couldn’t find Cole, and she was desperate to find him. She reached blindly around her to feel him to no avail. Where had he gone? She began to cough. Her body shook with the force of the wracking coughs as the fog seeped into the room and got closer to her. Jessie was desperate to wake up—it was as if her life depended on it. Wake up, her mind screamed. The fog had finally made its way to her, and when it touched her arm, it was like her skin melted. She screamed from the pain and tore herself from the dream only to wake up to a bona fide nightmare all around her.

  Because it wasn’t a dream at all. Her mind had been registering the terror around her and had been urging her to wake up and take action. The smoke, not fog, was so heavy around her it took a moment for her to realize where she was. The barn. They were in the barn. And it was on fire. Cole! She reached for where he was on the ground and shook him. Hard. He woke with a start.

  “What’s wrong?” His voice was groggy.

  “Fire! The barn is on fire!” She was scrambling for her underwear, but she couldn’t find them. Cole was already moving and had thrown his T-shirt at her. She slipped it over her head as he pulled on his boxers. Time was of the essence if they wanted to get the animals out. Cole was already at the water trough dousing the blankets they’d just been wrapped in.

  “Put this around your head and over your face and then get out. I’ll be right behind you.”

  “We can’t leave the horses.” She could hear them going wild.

  “I’ll unlock the stables, they’ll get themselves out.”

  “You can’t do it alone. The barn is already engulfed. It’ll go faster if two of us are doing it.” He didn’t waste time arguing with her, just nodded, wrapped the blanket around his head, grabbed her hand, and tugged her toward the exit. There weren’t that many horses in the barn, and they were in the last stall. That would make it easier. As soon as they were in the main hallway, by an intuitive and unspoken agreement, she ran to the right, and he ran to the left. Royal Flush was the first stall she got to.

  “Come on, girl!” she yelled. The horse didn’t need any additional encouragement. She bolted out of the stall and tore out of the barn. It wasn’t long until she had all the horses out on her side of the barn and that was a good thing because the smoke was so thick she could barely see. Her eyes burned, and she couldn’t stop coughing. She could feel the heat singeing the hair on her arms and in her nostrils. She held the blanket tight against her mouth and burst out of the barn where she doubled over, coughing. Coop came flying toward her and was about to run into the barn when she stopped him.

&n
bsp; “The horses are all out.”

  “It’s not the horses I’m looking for.”

  “Cole’s right behind me…” It was then that she noticed Cole wasn’t outside. “Cole!” she screamed, but her voice was so raspy, it was barely more than a whisper.

  She tried to pull away from Coop to go back in the barn, but he wrapped his arms around her and held her back.

  “Let me go! He’s still in there.” She sobbed. In her terror, she could see the anguish on his face.

  “I can’t let you go in; it’s not safe. You know you would die if I let you go in. The fire department is on its way.” In the distance, they could hear the sirens, too far away. Too damn far away. “I didn’t know you were inside, I thought you were in the house. I would have gone in…”

  “They won’t get here in time.” She buried her face into his chest and sobbed.

  “It’s just a barn,” came a raspy voice. She looked up and saw Cole stumbling toward them carrying a foal in his arms. A horse was trailing after him, clearly the mother to the foal. He set the foal down and then collapsed next to it. The first of the fire trucks pulled up as Coop and Jessie rushed to his side. As the firefighters rushed toward the barn, she called to one of the EMTs climbing out of the ambulance that had pulled up behind the first rig.

  “How did they get here so fast?” she asked between fits of coughing.

  “They were all in town for a meeting. That’s where I was. I saw the glow of the fire as I was driving home. I called them and told them there was a fire, but I didn’t know where the glow was originating from. They kept me on the line, and when I got closer, I knew the fire was here.”

  “Thank God for that,” Cole said.

  “Over here, he inhaled a lot of smoke!” Coop yelled to the EMTs.

  The EMT ran to them and immediately began assessing Cole, even though he tried to bat them away.

  “I’m fine, something hit me in the head when I was trying to get her to leave the stall, but she wouldn’t leave without her foal. I grabbed the baby and ran for it, hoping she would follow, he said as he coughed. “Take care of Jessie.”

  “It was a boneheaded move on your part.”

  “I forgot about the foal…you mentioned her to us,” she said absentmindedly.

  “Right. Suzie Q was born that afternoon...” Coop let the sentence end there. Both he and Cole knew what he meant.

  “Suzie Q, that’s a cute name.”

  “Creedence Clearwater Revival,” Cole said quietly.

  “What? How hard did you hit your head?” she asked Cole worriedly.

  “No, it’s not that. CCR was our parents’ favorite band and ‘Suzie Q’ was their favorite song by them.” The look on both men’s faces was enough to nearly break her in two. She didn’t have much time to dwell on it because of the chaos that suddenly took over around them.

  A second EMT came over and began to check her vitals. Unlike Cole, she didn’t argue. She just sat quietly next to him on the ground. Suzie Q was lying on the ground, and her mom was nudging her, but she wasn’t getting up. One of the firefighters came over, his nametag said Johnson, and placed an oxygen mask over the horse’s nose. For some reason that was what broke the dam. Tears slid down her face as she watched the man work to save the foal. Cole reached out and grabbed her hand, lacing his fingers with hers. She sniffled and held on tight. He was still just in his boxers, and she became aware of the fact that she was only wearing his T-shirt. She had dropped the blanket because it was sopping wet. Otherwise she would have used it to cover herself. No sooner had she thought it than the EMT came back with a blanket for each of them and covered them up.

  She wrapped it around herself and watched the barn burn. The horses were milling around as if they didn’t know what to do, and she could understand that feeling. Jessie could see Royal Flush, but King was nowhere to be seen. Knowing him, he was long gone. She laughed to herself. She couldn’t blame him. Actually, she was surprised more of the horses hadn’t thought to hell with this and run for the hills. The activity around them was best described as organized chaos.

  “Aiden, I’ve got this,” the EMT said to the man still by the foal. He grimaced and stood, shouting orders to the other firefighters on the scene.

  “Get that line ready!” Johnson yelled.

  Firefighters were running a hose toward the barn, but the fire was out of control. Jessie watched in horror, knowing the whole barn would be cinders and ash before long. It was the perfect set up, with the dry hay in the stalls. At least the horses got out safe. Not to mention Cole and herself, though Cole was very quiet next to her, and she was worried when she looked over and saw his ash-streaked face. She hadn’t noticed the blood on his face, sliding down in a steady trickle.

  “What hit you in the head?” she asked, moving closer to him. The EMT assessing her gripped her tighter as he checked her blood pressure and gave her a pointed look before turning his attention to Cole. He flashed a light in his eyes, then quickly cleaned the gash in his head which must have been the source of the blood. Head wounds bleed a lot, and this one was doing just that.

  “I’m fine,” he said. At least that’s what she thought he said—it was hard to tell. His words were raspy from the irritation the smoke had caused, and he was mumbling as well.

  “We need to bring you both in to have you looked over,” the other EMT, a woman, said. She raised a hand quickly silencing the protest that was sure to be mounted from Cole. “Non-negotiable. Sorry, Cole.” The EMT sent a sympathetic and somewhat flirtatious smile toward him.

  Alarmingly, she found herself feeling a twang of jealousy due to the familiarity from the very attractive EMT. While it was an alien feeling, she was more unnerved than embarrassed. Jessie had never been a jealous person. Apparently, not until she met Cole. There wasn’t anything she could do at the particular time to remedy the foreign feeling. Not when the barn was burning, and horses were running loose. She would just need to compartmentalize, like she always did, and deal with her feelings later. For now, she needed to focus on what she could do to help a man she genuinely liked and one she might feel more than lust for, even if she had only known him for a day. On top of all of those things, they still had to find her brother. She watched absently as the female first responder bandaged Cole’s head. Lost in her thoughts, she wasn’t paying close attention to the conversation around her until she heard Coop say “arson” quietly to Cole. Suddenly she was able to focus past the roaring sound in her ears, and her hearing was top-notch.

  “They don’t know. There’ll be a fire investigator on the scene to look at everything. Aiden thinks it’s highly likely, though he doesn’t want to go on record saying as much, he said due to the intensity and how quickly the fire got out of control an accelerant may have been used.”

  She sucked in a breath, because if it was arson, then it was too much of a coincidence for it not to involve her somehow. Of course, she had already thought as much, hadn’t she? Then she sucked in another breath when she felt a searing pain in her arm. What the hell? She looked down and saw the blanket had slipped down off her shoulders and her arms were now exposed. She was shocked to see the raw flesh on her arm, but as soon as she saw it, she couldn’t unsee it, and it was like that alone caused the pain to really kick in. The heat from the inferno seemed to pulse through her tender flesh in tandem with the flames. It was as if the blanket had blocked her senses from noticing the pain. Holy shit! She was dumbfounded she hadn’t felt anything until then. The male EMT must have noticed her looking at her arm because he was suddenly at her side.

  “That’s one nasty burn. You should have said something.” His voice was sympathetic but also worried. Like he was reprimanding a child.

  “I didn’t notice it. It was like the blanket falling off somehow irritated it.”

  The brothers’ heads snapped up in near unison and Cole tried to push the female EMT away from him. Against the tall, blonde, and busty protests, he was able to inch toward her.

  “
Air hitting the damaged nerve endings would cause intense pain. This is second-, maybe third-degree. On nearly your entire forearm. We need to get you to the hospital.”

  “Well, that makes sense, I guess. Because I definitely feel it now,” she said with a wry smile.

  “I bet you do. I’m going to give you something for that. It isn’t necessarily SOP, but I know how bad this hurts, and I owe the Davenports a lot.” He turned to his kit and pulled out a syringe, and she watched as he injected her with some kind of painkiller. Cole had moved closer to her and was gripping her hand tightly.

  “Why didn’t you say something?” he asked through gritted teeth, his eyes fixed on the man who was currently digging in his kit. Even though he’d given her painkillers, she could feel way more than she wanted to and had broken out in a sweat. She didn’t understand why Cole was pissed at her. It was her arm, and she didn’t even know it had been burned, for goodness’ sake. Then she felt him lift her hand to his mouth and kiss it before he gently released it and began to gingerly check her other arm, then he carefully lifted the blanket and scanned her legs. “Are you burned anywhere else?” The words were still clipped as if he were chewing them as they came out of his mouth. He made quick and discreet work. He must have realized she was wearing nothing underneath the T-shirt.

  “I don’t think so. It’s fine, it hardly hurts at all…” She hissed as the man, whom she’d finally surmised was named Peter, began to pour water on the wound. She felt dizzy from the combination of pain medication kicking in and the pain in her arm and felt arms wrapping tenderly around her to offer support.

  “Liar,” he whispered. “You don’t always have to be so tough. I know how much a burn hurts when it’s small, so lean on me for a minute. Okay?”

  Warmth spread through her, and she suddenly felt fuzzy around the edges, her eyes were a little tired and she closed them.