Heart of the Storm (Triple Diamond Book 4)

by Gemma Snow

  Ryder probably knew exactly what he was saying when he said come up here, but Hollie elected to ignore it in favor of the more pressing responses.

  “I’ll head on down to the station,” she said, the room in which they had gotten naked and made love for hours before an open fire suddenly feeling rough and challenging to navigate.

  She gathered up her belongings and tried not to think too much about the conversation she had shared with the Hollis sisters as she navigated her Jeep down the hill toward the Wolf Creek Fire Station across town. Remnants from the night of the first storm were still visible in the felled trees and large puddles of water at the edge of the road, and it made the guilt roil in her stomach alongside the confusion and frustration. She was here to do a job—a job she loved and was damn good at—and all she could think about was the way that Lily and Maddy made it seem so damn easy to fall in love with more than one man at a time.

  Not that she was in love. Because she wasn’t.

  She had been—once upon a time she had felt the love of youth and innocence, the love of friendship and companionship. That love had bloomed and burst into something more, something terrifying and real, something that had sent her running far, far away without leaving a trace. And now it was time to atone for her cowardly actions.

  Hollie was so caught up in her own dangerous thoughts that she barely noticed the drive across town until she pulled up in front of the fire station. One of the engines was in the bay and the other open door was empty, leading her to believe that one of the teams was out doing cleanup before the worst of the storms came to hit. She parked, took a deep breath and headed inside the station, unsure of what she would find when she met with Sawyer alone. Her last meeting with Cade hadn’t exactly gone the way she had intended, and while her mind was awash of confusion and nerves, her body was responding to the idea of seeing Sawyer again with something akin to desperation.

  It’s been a while. It’s nothing.

  But Hollie couldn’t lie to herself. It had been a while before coming to town, but certainly not long enough to turn her body molten at the very idea of a secret moment with Sawyer. He had done something to her, something completely different and entirely as delectable as Cade’s something, and it made her crave for base desires she had no right to indulge.

  “Chief, you here?” she called into the garage, hoping she wouldn’t have to find him up in his office, where the door shut and the likelihood of her keeping control over her own desperate whims decreased by the second.

  “Come on up,” he called, his rough, deep voice echoing around the empty room. She climbed the stairs and stopped short at the sight of Fire Captain Sawyer Matthews wearing only a pair of blue jeans.

  He was turned away from her, and his back was a map of thick, capable muscles and spiraling ink, beautiful, haunting designs, forms she wanted to trace with her tongue and her fingers and her lips.

  On the top of one shoulder was the town’s symbol, a silhouette of a wolf at the bottom of the Black Reef Mountain Range, the same mountains threatening to flood them where they stood. A single word curled over the wolf’s back.

  Home.

  Her heart began to thud in her chest so loudly Hollie briefly wondered if Sawyer could hear it. Despite all that he had survived, all he had lived through with his son-of-a-bitch dad, Sawyer had still made Wolf Creek the place he went for that sense of returning. He had still turned the land and open sky into his home, even with the memories.

  And though she had grown up with love and connection and support, though things had been good for her—if hard, still good—Hollie hadn’t been able to make such a home of this town.

  Or so she had always believed.

  Before she could tear her gaze from the image to the other designs adorning his back, Sawyer turned around. It took all Hollie’s control not to let her jaw drop open at the sight of him. Sure, they had been more than intimate just a few days before, but things had all happened so quickly and they hadn’t removed much clothing before succumbing entirely to the heat and lust burning them all up. But now, in the bright light of the firehouse bunker, with just the two of them and too much time stretching in the space between, Hollie couldn’t stop looking. His arms and shoulders were thick with power and his chest rippled with the kind of strength born from use, from hauling trees and carrying heavy fire hoses and saving lives.

  The front of his chest had even more ink than his back, and Hollie focused on those designs rather than the smirk totally stretching across Sawyer’s face right now.

  “You have a lot more tattoos than I remember,” she said, trying to sound light and most definitely not admitting to him with just the tone of her voice how much she wanted to lick each and every one of those tattoos.

  “A lot has changed since you last saw me,” he said, and images came unbidden to Hollie’s mind of summers spent running through the woods and swinging into the lakes at the base of the mountain. Wolf Creek hadn’t bothered with a town pool, but on the hot, hot days of summer they had crowded those lakes and she had spent her formative years in the sunshine and blue-green water, dodging fish and Wes’ splashing. In her memories, Sawyer was just as tall, but he was lankier then, still a boy growing into his manhood, even with early lines of ink on his skin, ones he had gotten the day he had turned eighteen, ones she had stood by him as he’d winced through.

  There was no denying that he was all man now, and that the thick curl of dark red hair that nearly brushed his shoulders and the beard she had tugged on just two nights before, were delicious, masculine and begging for her touch all over again.

  “I got one to remember you,” he said, his voice soft and almost gentle. Sawyer had so much gentleness in him, freckles across almost rosy cheeks that belied the sweetness of such a large, powerful man.

  Hollie couldn’t speak, not to reply and not when Sawyer took the two steps closer to her and slowly pushed the side of his jeans down just enough to show a small holly sprig. It was done in the style of a classic botanical book, and the dark ink and shading contrasted with Sawyer’s light skin in a beautiful, almost artistic way.

  Hollie couldn’t help herself. She reached out and stroked the ink, the skin right above where his flank shifted and led to more intimate terrain—a path she so desperately wanted to follow.

  “Why?” she asked instead, looking up to his eyes and realizing he was so much closer to her than he had been just a moment before. “I left—I…” She looked away, no longer able to keep his gaze. “I don’t deserve it.”

  Sawyer took a deep breath.

  “It was my graduation present for you,” he said quietly. “I was going to show you that night, but…” He trailed off and Hollie was grateful for it. They both knew full well that had been the night she’d packed a bag and driven out of town, and she wasn’t entirely certain she could hear those words on his lips and not feel them directly to her heart.

  “I think we need to talk,” she said, because this was torture, this standing before one of the men she had cared about most in the world and not being able to say a damn thing, not being able to explain how much he meant to her but that they still couldn’t be together, not for real, not in the way she could only dream about.

  “Damn right we need to talk,” he said. “But first…” He walked through a door beside the bunkroom and came out with a manila folder straining at the seams. “We ran these two evacuation plans like you asked. I’m holding off the third until my team comes back from a call in Wilborn.”

  Hollie took the plans and put them into the bag at her hip, acknowledging that she was dawdling.

  “Any unforeseen complications?” she asked. She’d run a thousand evacuations in her time and there were always unforeseen complications, but if they did their job right, then no one would be the wiser for it.

  “We ran into some snags on the bridge road when we tested the second route,” Sawyer replied. “We’d have to give more stagger time or it’s going to back up, and we don’t want passenge
rs on the bridge when the river rises.”

  She made a quick note of it in her phone, then turned to him. “Okay then,” she said. “Should we do this thing?”

  Hollie made it sound like they were going into battle, and Sawyer had to resist the urge to laugh. Hollie Callihan was a woman who didn’t fear much. She was an adventurous spirit and he had always admired that about her—admired it until she had used that same spirit to head for distant shores. But that the idea of discussing emotions, of talking about the way she felt, was so terrifying to her was almost funny. It would have been, if it didn’t scare Sawyer just as much.

  He hadn’t been raised with feelings. He had been raised only with the idea of fear and control and never giving in. Learning how to come out of that sense of proving himself, of fighting everything and going hard with anger and a devil-may-fuck-off attitude, that had been hard won. He would hardly call himself a paragon of emotional stability, but he had a far better relationship with his emotions now than he had ever had before.

  “I’m not going to bite,” he said, suddenly needing to lighten the mood, though he wasn’t entirely certain why. He still harbored that anger toward her—even as it lessened by the day with the knowledge that Hollie really didn’t understand all she had left behind. Running due to fear was absolutely something Sawyer could appreciate it. “Unless you ask nicely.”

  She tried to give him a stern look, but it was undermined by the flash of heat he saw in her eyes, and Sawyer’s cock pulsed behind his jeans. God, she was pretty. Even with her hair pulled into a ponytail and that ridiculous regulation FEMA windbreaker, Hollie made his mouth go dry and his baser instincts take the wheel.

  “Sawyer.”

  “What do you want me to say, huh?” he asked. “Hollie, you were the person I always thought would be at my side. You were the person who made me believe I was more than my dad’s by-blow, okay, more than the shit hand dealt to me. I didn’t know what the fuck to think when you suddenly turned back up in this podunk town and I don’t know how to stop myself from wanting you.” He has almost let slip those damn dirty words, the words he hadn’t said the night she had left, the words he only thought about in the dark of night when he wondered where he had gone wrong.

  I don’t know how to stop myself from loving you.

  But if there was ever a way to scare off a woman for whom a cave dive was more enticing than commitment, it was saying those ridiculous little words.

  “You love this town,” she said quietly. “And you’ve always been more than what your father made you believe. He was a right bastard, Sawyer, everyone knew it.”

  “And I do too,” he said. “Because of you, Hol.” He ran his hand through his hair and couldn’t help but notice that her eyes followed his movements. He hoped she was thinking of their night in the dining hall, because he hadn’t stopped thinking about it in days and it was starting to seriously mess with his life. But Hollie Callihan messing with his life wasn’t exactly breaking news.

  “I didn’t do anything,” she said quietly.

  “Exactly,” Sawyer replied. “You treated me like a normal kid, like some punk-ass teen with something to prove. You let me be who I was outside of my situation, Hollie. No one else did that.”

  She hadn’t asked about his dad, not once in their entire friendship. It had been entirely understood that he had an ear to listen and a place to lie if he ever needed it, but she hadn’t pushed or looked at him differently or done anything other than be his friend when the rest of the world had been examining him through a microscope and passing judgment.

  “You helped me just as much,” she said quietly. “Wasn’t exactly like the transition was easy.” How could it have been, moving from the big city to a small ranching town after losing both her parents? What could possibly have been easy about that? And yet, Hollie had taken life with both hands and done something truly incredible with herself.

  And so have you, Matthews.

  It took reminding, but he was getting there.

  “I just…I’m leaving again.” Her voice was soft by firm. “I’m not going to stand here and lie to you and say the other night was some big mistake. It complicates the living hell of out things, but I don’t regret it.” She paused, and had there ever been so weighted a quiet space in his life? “But I’m not staying. Wolf Creek”—she seemed to struggle—“Wolf Creek isn’t my home anymore. And I need to put the cards on the table from the start.”

  Sawyer was quiet for a long moment, absorbing the things she had said. He hadn’t ever expected her to stay. Fool him twice and the naivety of youth would have been at play there. But that she was so open about her plans to leave, with all the unfinished business and the way they were together? It made him forget the anger, if temporarily, and replace it with something…sad.

  “So what, then?” he asked. “We screw your brains out once and shake hands and leave it at that for the rest of our lives?”

  She winced and Sawyer realized it wasn’t because of his intentionally crude words.

  “You’ve seen Easton again, haven’t you?” he asked, doing his best to keep the rising anger well below the tide line. “When, today? I think I deserve that much truth from you, at least.”

  “Yes, for fuck’s sake, I saw Cade yesterday. It is my job to speak to Cade—and you, I might add. And things progressed from there. I don’t need to go about reporting on my every move to you, thank you very much, Captain.”

  “So what then?” Sawyer asked. “Tell me what you’re looking for here, Hollie, because I’m lost.”

  “So am I, Sawyer.” That came out loud, nearly a yell, and it paused him in mid-speech. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing here, okay? I came back to do a job and it seems like I can’t keep my head straight around either you or Cade long enough to do that. There is some obvious and complicated history between us, Lord above knows it, but whenever I am around either of you, all I can think about is stripping you down and having my way with your naked body and that terrifies me. So you tell me. So what?”

  Sawyer looked as though he had been about to say something, about to refute her argument or push the matter further, but he stopped before he started and simply looked at her, a wild, intense desire radiating from those deep green eyes, his freckles dancing when he arched one thick eyebrow and parted his lips. The small movement was enough to make Hollie’s body ache for him, to make her want things she really shouldn’t want, let alone have.

  But why not?

  She hadn’t left Cade’s office the previous day feeling any worse than she had for having slept with both of them the night before. Why couldn’t she have Sawyer right here in the firehouse bunker? He was already half-undressed and looking at her if he was so, so hungry and Hollie didn’t know how to handle that expression with anything other than a ‘yes please, sailor.’

  “You’re playing with fire, Hollyhock,” he muttered, low and guttural, taking another step toward her, which had Hollie’s back up against the wall and her bag slipping from her shoulders and landing on the ground.

  “Good thing you’re a firefighter, then,” she murmured, though God, that barely sounded like her voice, not with the husky tinge and the extra breathiness.

  “But, darlin’…” He was towering over her now, and had Hollie truly ever been so aware of a man before in her life, what with his bulk and his straining muscles and that expression in his eye that promised, promised, promised? “I’m the fire you’re playing with.”

  God, he was. Because when he bent down and captured her lips with his mouth, Hollie didn’t hesitate, didn’t protest. She simply gave herself fully over to him, allowed Sawyer to be the next extreme jump she took, the next mountain she climbed…

  Interesting turn of phrase.

  But, then again, she did have every intention of climbing the man like a tree and there was no use denying it to herself. Instead, she simply pressed back against the kiss and Sawyer’s big, powerful body, sliding her leg up the side of his muscled fla
nk until she was drawing him as close to her body and her throbbing center as she could. It hardly made sense that she was still so aroused, so easily turned to needy, pulsating lust after all the delicious experiences she’d enjoyed over the last few days, but there was something about this man and the way he stripped down her defenses and made her feel like she could truly be herself again that had her opening up and letting him in.

  And hopefully in more ways than one.

  “Bed,” he murmured.

  Hollie just gave her head a shake. “Here is fine,” she managed, barely. Her entire body was on fire and she ached for more of his touch, for the way his thick beard felt against her skin, for how she would undoubtedly yield to him when he parted her legs and…

  One of his calloused hands found her nipple through the fabric of her shirt and twisted slightly, making Hollie moan and writhe at his touch. She unzipped her jacket as quickly as she could and tossed it off to the side, working alongside Sawyer’s rough movements to pull her shirt free as well.

  Her bra was a light green number—simple but pretty and if the way Sawyer looked at her in it was any indication, he wholeheartedly approved. The more important matter was getting them both out of their jeans as quickly as possible.

  But Sawyer was making that challenging, because he wasn’t just turning her mind to a puddle of desire, but also nuzzling soft, sweet kisses against her neck and her collarbone and the swells of her breasts and, God, it made it hard to think about anything else. He dipped his head into the valley and slid his tongue across her sensitive flesh, and Hollie bucked into his touch and brought her hands up to pull at his long, soft hair. He groaned at the movement and she did it again, then scraped her nails across the nape of his neck, which made a guttural sound tear from the back of his throat.

  “Hollie…” His tone was thick and right on the edge, and she loved how it made her feel, how it caught up in her belly and sent shivers of anticipation racing up her spine.