Fred finished his sandwich and hoisted the nail gun again. “Everyone’s saying you really opened people’s eyes with all the committees you’re serving on. They say the handbook’s going to be the best ever.”
“Yeah, I’ve been researching the Bachelor Firemen curse,” added Mulligan. He turned a two-by-four resting on two sawhorses and brushed the sawdust off it. “Funny stuff. I’m starting to believe. Did you know the marriage rate for San Gabriel firemen is statistically speaking significantly lower?” He didn’t sound at all disappointed by that.
“Well, just look at us,” said Fred. “None of us are married. And some of us want to be.”
Vader glanced at Fred in surprise. “You, Stud?”
“Why not? Are you saying you don’t want a wife? A couple of kids to show off at the firehouse?”
The image was so similar to what his mother had said that he nearly laughed. And then everything else his mother had said came rushing back, and the answer burst into his mind with the clarity of a flashing neon sign. No, he didn’t want “a wife and kids.” He wanted Cherie. He wanted his and Cherie’s kids. No one else would do. Not now, anyway. And not for a long time. If he couldn’t bring Cherie around, it would take his heart years to adjust. Stubborn, pigheaded organ.
To hide his reaction, he turned on the table saw and ran the next piece of lumber through the blade. When he looked up, Fred was watching him with a knowing little smile. “You can do it, Vader.”
“You mean make captain? You think so?”
“That too.”
Vader’s mother looked a lot like him, with deep brown eyes and a vivacious smile. While her face was worn into lines that indicated pain, Cherie hadn’t seen her complain once. Mrs. Brown had a can-do, effervescent spirit that Cherie admired. She was a magician at finding things for Trixie to do. At the first sight of her little sister lounging on the couch, ten tasks would suddenly appear, from rolling balls of yarn to giving Izzy his worm medicine. In three days, more cleaning occurred on the first floor than during Soren and Nick’s entire stay. Ginny had Trixie dusting and scrubbing and Lemon-Pledging until the entire house smelled like spring cleaning.
Cherie had no problem with that. She and Trixie had both grown up with lots of assigned chores. Keeping busy was much better for her little sister. Trixie seemed to know it too. Both Cherie and Vader offered to pay her to help Ginny, but to her credit, she refused to accept any money.
“You’re putting me up and feeding me, Cherie. And Vader just lost his home. It’s the least I can do. But if Vader wanted to hook me up with one of the Bachelor Firemen . . .”
“Not going to happen,” Vader had told her, very firmly.
“Oh, fine. They’re probably too old for me anyway.” Trixie tossed her hair. “Cherie’s right. I should focus on myself and developing my own interests. So if anyone needs me, I’ll be online makeup shopping.”
Best of all, she got to see Vader on a regular, almost daily basis. Watching him move his mother into her room, set up her knickknacks just so, hang family photos on the wall so his mother would feel at home . . . well, it would be enough to make anyone melt.
She missed him during his shifts, but when he rolled in the door after a night at the station, she experienced a rush of giddy pleasure. Whenever she caught the rumble of his voice in conversation with his mother, a smile would spread across her face.
Vader brought a companionable, fun-loving energy into the house, the spirit of a man who made everything into a party. He dug out the grill she never used and made steaks for everyone, wearing his “Stand Back, I’m a Fireman” apron. He brought home cat toys for Izzy because his mother found them endlessly entertaining.
And then there were the firehouse videos, Ginny’s top form of amusement.
“I can’t make them anymore,” he told them gloomily as Ginny scanned through the files on her computer, looking for her favorites. Cherie had pulled up a chair next to Vader and was busy trying to ignore his nearness. “Not if I want to be captain.”
“Once you’re captain, you can make your own rules,” said Ginny.
“I can’t make my own rules. Captain doesn’t mean dictator.”
“Aha. Here’s one. Remember your Ella Joy investigation?”
“Yep. Came up empty.”
“Investigation?” Cherie inquired.
“Someone kept feeding Channel Six inside information on the firehouse. I interrogated everyone at the station on camera and asked them incriminating questions. I’d start them off with softball questions like, ‘How do you like your peanut butter sandwiches?’ Then wham. I’d slam them with something like, ‘Speaking of food, are you feeding information to Ella Joy?’ ”
Cherie laughed. “How’d that work out?”
“See for yourself.”
He gestured at the computer, where a short clip had just started. It showed Sabina flipping the bird at the camera, followed by a shot of Double D doing the exact same thing. Then came Fred, who gazed thoughtfully toward the ceiling, finger tapping his chin. “Do you need the question again?” asked Vader from off screen.
“No, no. I’m just thinking.” Finally he seemed to come to a decision. “Strawberry jam, with a glass of cold milk. Has to be whole milk. And I like cracked wheat bread.”
“That was the first question. What about the next one?”
“You mean the one that’s too stupid to answer?” With a roll of his eyes, he wandered away from the camera. “I’m hungry. Did anyone pick up more peanut butter?”
At that point, the camera turned a hundred and eighty degrees so Vader could address it. “And there you have it. Who is the traitor? Inquiring minds want to know. But inquiring minds still don’t have a clue. As you can see, this inquiring mind”—he knocked on his head—“got shut down like a leaky nuclear reactor. In the meantime, he—or she—is still on the loose, spilling firehouse secrets and royally pissing me off. Until next time, reporting live from Station 1, I’m Vader Brown.”
Ginny closed the file and beamed. “He’s good, isn’t he? My boy could have been a newscaster. So photogenic and well-spoken.”
“Definitely network material.” Under her lashes, Cherie looked sidelong at Vader, who made a face at her.
“Don’t encourage her. I did it purely for the love of the art.”
“He did it for me,” corrected Ginny. “It was like my own personal soap opera, those videos. I never liked the soaps much, but I could watch those firehouse videos for hours.”
The affection between mother and son was, quite frankly, adorable. Damn the man.
She wondered why he didn’t come to her bedroom the way he’d promised—or was it threatened? Whatever the reason, she spent each night of that first week alone, wishing his big, warm body was next to hers, dreaming of the touch of his skin, his heavy bones and hard flesh and hot mouth.
Then one night, it wasn’t a dream. His mouth really was planting warm kisses along the inside of her arm. He really was naked in her bed. The night air really was charged with electric excitement.
“Vader?” That part wasn’t in doubt; she’d know the feel and scent of him anywhere. But she wanted to make sure it wasn’t a dream.
“Shhh.” He pushed her nightgown up to her chin, exposing her body.
“What took you so long?”
He nestled his face into the softness of her stomach. “Did you nearly give up on me?”
“Yes.” He licked the outer swell of her breast, close enough to her nipple to make it sing. “No.”
“You’d better not. I told you I was going to come.” He reached between her legs and dragged his hand across the soft furrow, already wet. “Mmmm. Have you been thinking about me?”
“No.” He pressed the heel of his palm against her pulsating clitoris. She groaned. “Yes.”
“Thank you. The truth, Cherie. The truth will set us free.” Her hips lifted against him, longing for a taste of the silky, hot skin of his pelvis.
“Is that right, Fireman? The
n why didn’t you ever tell me about your mother?”
He paused, and she could have kicked herself. The last thing she wanted was to make him stop the delicious things he was doing. “I should have. I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t want anyone seeing me as some kind of charity case, I guess.”
She squirmed under him. “Can you . . . ?”
“What?”
“Can you . . . um . . . keep doing that thing with your hand?”
“I’m pretty sure that qualifies as begging, so sure.” He resumed the steady, circling pressure of his palm against her sex. Pleasure flooded her senses. Maybe it was begging, maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he’d kept his distance for a week so that as soon as he touched her, she’d ignite. She didn’t care. Right now, she wanted him.
She held on to his shoulders with a kind of death grip. With anyone else, she would have worried about hurting him, but Vader was so built, his muscles so rugged. He was like a Mack truck of male flesh.
“Oh, sweetheart,” she murmured. “You have no idea what you do to me.”
“I just hope it’s enough.”
“Enough for what?” She felt drugged by the sensations flickering from her sex.
“Enough to make you do what I want.”
“I’ll do anything you want.” She sighed, because in that moment it was completely true. She couldn’t deny him anything. “What do you want?”
“First I want to lick you until you scream. Quietly, of course. Then I’ll tell you. Deal?”
The word “deal” rang a distant alarm, but she didn’t listen. She was too riveted by the way he was shifting his body toward the foot of the bed, his hair brushing against her stomach as he settled between her legs. With strong hands that heated her inner thighs, he pressed her legs apart.
“Oh mercy me,” she muttered, and dug her fingers into his hair.
“Oh no, you don’t. We’re doing this my way.” With a sudden surge of movement, he rose to his knees, swept her hands over her head, and pinned them together.
“Don’t you dare use your socks again, Vader.”
“Hey, I learned my lesson. I’ll use this.” With his other hand, he dragged her nightgown all the way over her head and maneuvered it up to her wrists. Somehow, in that ingenious Vader way of his, he snagged her hands in it, completely immobilizing them. She responded with a soul-deep sigh of relaxation, every muscle giving up a bit of its tension, every bone luxuriating. He traveled back down her body, swirling a path of flame with his tongue. By the time he reached the apex of her thighs, her body was jumping with eager pulses of anticipation.
“You know, I love seeing you like this,” he murmured, the stubble on his chin brushing her sensitized sex. “My own personal juicy little shish kebab. You’re my Cherie kebab. Tastiest thing I ever nibbled.”
With exquisite stabs of his tongue, he parted the folds of her sex. How could such a muscle-bound man be so very sensitive with his tongue? It made no sense, and yet when she looked down her body and saw his large frame bent over her, his dark head between her legs, her eyes wanted to roll back in her head. The way he licked and soothed, tormented and tantalized, made her lose all pretense of control. As the sharp pleasure built, she twisted against the bedcovers, urging him on with thrusts of her hips and incoherent babbling.
He doubled her legs back against her body, bending her knees, manipulating her as if she were a rag doll. In his hands, she was. He gripped her hips in those huge, powerful hands, thumbs digging into the quivering flesh of her inner thighs. And all the time he kept his mouth latched to her sex, lapping and suckling, the maddening friction driving her up and up until her head wanted to explode.
She needed to scream, to shout out the extremity of her pleasure, but some part of her was still tethered to reality. She pressed her lips closed, so nothing more than frantic whimpers came out. Until he put two fingers inside her, sandwiching her clit between his hot tongue and the teasing pressure from inside. Then, helpless as a kitten in a tsunami, she let out a cry, her body arching in utterly abandoned bliss.
“Next to you,” growled Vader against her sex. “Pillow.” She buried her face in her pillow and let the long, racking convulsions lift her up, spin her around, and cast her down in a roller coaster of release.
“Oh my heavenly angels,” she murmured as she came down from the intoxicating rush. “Mercy on me,” she managed when she recovered her breath. “That was incredible. Lord, I missed you, Vader.” He rested his chin on her knee, which was splayed open, and grinned. Lazily, she rubbed her other calf along his strong, brown back. “Your turn now.”
He sat up on his knees. He was fully aroused, his erection nearly vertical between his thighs. “That’s right. My turn. We made a deal. Luckily, my needs are simple.”
Whatever he wanted, she’d give him. “Untie me and I’ll fulfill your every need.”
“Sure. But you don’t need your hands for what I want.”
She tried to frown, but was too high on post-orgasmic bliss to manage it. “What, then?”
“All I want is one answer. I ask one question, you give me one answer.”
Chapter Nineteen
Cherie narrowed her eyes at him. She should have seen this coming. Vader was persistent, and at the moment he had her utterly sated, her defenses down. In the intimate darkness, the soft, cocooning privacy, it would be so easy to let go of her resistance.
He reached up and untwined her nightgown from her wrists. “One question, that’s all.”
“What kind of question?” Her Arkansas accent thickened, the way it always did when she was relaxed.
“Something that tells me a little more about Ms. Cherie Harper. I am living in her house, after all. Trusting my mother with her. Seems like I ought to be able to ask a few questions.”
“You said one question.”
He smiled, clearly sensing victory. “We’ll start with one. But I’m off shift tomorrow, so I got all night. You never know, you might get inspired.”
She hauled herself into a sitting position and wrapped her arms around her bent knees. The moonlight filtering from the window kissed his muscular torso with silver. He was rock-solid, this man. She could trust him. “Fine. What’s the question that’s so important it beats an orgasm?”
“Who’s the man with a grudge against you? And why does he have a grudge?”
“A two-part question? That’s a cheat.”
“The firefighter promotion exam is full of them. If I can handle them, you can.”
She buried her face in her knees. Jacob had sworn her to secrecy—in blood, no less—but she was so tired of it. Everything in her longed to share the story with Vader. Maybe then he’d understand. Maybe then she’d stop hurting him.
It’ll be okay, Jacob. It’s time.
“His name is Frank Mackintosh. He’s a friend of my father. And I struck him on the head and nearly killed him.”
Speaking it out loud felt so strange, like stepping onto a new planet. One with lighter gravity, where you might take big, goofy missteps before you got the hang of it.
“Did he hurt you?” The icy rage in Vader’s voice made her shiver.
“No.” She shook her head quickly. “Not like that. He tried, but he didn’t get that far. Jacob and I had it all plotted out. He wanted to run away too, because he’d figured out he was gay and our father would have killed him for that.”
Vader growled low in his chest. Cherie could have kissed him for that. Protecting Jacob was such second nature to her. She loved that Vader felt that way too.
“Not deliberately killed him,” Cherie said quickly. “Prophesize would have performed an exorcism on him. Really gruesome. If Jacob had survived, he would have had to get married and try to be fruitful, like the rest of us. From the age of thirteen he knew he’d be leaving. But we were always close, being fourteen months apart, and he wanted to stay and look out for me.”
“Were things that bad in your family?”
“My father lives in his own crazy world.
He’s not a bad man, he’s just kind of a natural-born cult leader. Some of his beliefs make sense. He believed in growing our own food, being as self-sufficient as possible. All us kids know how to do stuff like pickle collard greens and slaughter pigs. If I had to, I could rig up a pee bucket that would knock your socks off.”
“Pee bucket?”
“We lived out in the woods. With fourteen kids, we were digging new outhouse holes every other year.”
She glanced at Vader, suddenly aware of how strange it must sound. “You want to take your question back now?”
“Hell no,” he answered quickly. “It’s just getting good. So your dad was some kind of survivalist?”
“Sort of. Mostly he wanted to raise his kids away from TV and school and other bad influences. He called it brainwashing. Only one person could brainwash us, and that was him.”
“But it didn’t work out so well.”
She shrugged, amazed by how much she was telling him. It didn’t feel wrong either. The opposite; it felt right. “It did for some. Most of us are still there. It wasn’t a terrible life. Lots of fresh air and healthy food. We had fun, us kids. I learned some interesting skills. I can shoot the tail off a squirrel from two hundred feet.”
“And here I thought you were the ultimate girlie girl.”
“Oh, I am at heart. I’d choose brunch at the Lazy Daisy over a squirrel any day.”
Vader reached for her, found her calf, and began massaging the muscle there. Maybe he was trying to keep her relaxed and talking. If so, it was working. She let out a sigh of pleasure.
“I have to say, I’m impressed, Cherie. I mean, you were already supremely hot in my eyes. Throw in the sharpshooting, and damn.”
“Don’t forget the pee bucket.”
“I’m trying to, but you keep bringing it up.”
Four Weddings and a Fireman Page 19
