Blaze: A Firefighter Romance

by Lisa Lace

  My idea was simple. I wanted to get my car close to hers, shoot any unwanted passengers, and pull her body across to safety. As soon as her door opened, she judged the distance and jumped between the cars. I did a lot of military operations where I had to move my body through the air, but even I would think twice before leaping to my doom. Emmy didn't even think once.

  I was about to say I couldn’t fake her death when the car shook. A giant cannon was attacking us. I pulled Emmy down to the floor as the glass started to shatter.

  These guys were bastards. Emmy said they wouldn’t kill her, but I thought she was wrong. Our car swerved wildly all over the empty road. We were fortunate to be off the main highway. At best, they wouldn’t intentionally murder her, but considering their giant weapons they could easily have an accident.

  More importantly, they wouldn’t care at all if they killed me. I hadn’t survived ten years in the Stalwart military to die at the hands of random Earth goons.

  “Tell the car to go back to the spaceport. Let’s head for one of the staff entrances.”

  I opened the window and leaned out, holding the gun. With deliberate care, I aimed and hit a spot I knew would destroy their battery. All the cars on Stalwart ran on solar energy, which was renewable and good for the planet, but left them vulnerable to attacks on their power systems. Their vehicle began to fall back immediately. It would take them a few minutes to get the auxiliary battery online. By that time, I hoped we would be back in the spaceport.

  They half-heartedly shot a few more times at our vehicle, forcing me to duck inside. Soon their car was out of range, and their guns were useless. We turned off into a back alley leading to a small door marked for employees only. We clambered out of the car. I keyed in another destination. It sped off by itself as soon as we shut the doors.

  I ran up to the door and pulled out a device to open it. It would give me temporary clearance and wouldn’t leave a digital trail. I brought a few of my fancier gadgets with me when I realized I was going on a rescue mission. The door opened, and Emmy followed me without saying a word. I think she finally understood the gravity of her situation.

  Once inside, we rushed past people getting ready for work or coming off their shift. I tried to look friendly and like I belonged here, smiling at people and saying hi. When we exited the employee room, we found ourselves in the heart of the spaceport. It was a deserted region where no ships were scheduled to leave. Across the open room was a maintenance door. I grabbed Emmy’s hand, pulling her across the area.

  Something happened when I touched her hand. A pulse of energy raced up my arm. It was like nothing I had ever experienced before. I glanced back, wondering if she had felt anything unusual. Her eyes looked surprised, and she stared at her fingers. My hand tingled in the middle of my palm. I didn’t think about letting go until a group of five men and a dangerous-looking woman burst out of the employee door.

  We ducked through a maintenance hatch. “How did they follow us here?” Emmy asked.

  “They probably put a tracker on you. It’s the simplest explanation. There’s no other way they could have known which direction we went.”

  “There’s nothing on me, is there?” She stopped to look at herself.

  I followed her gaze and felt a shot of lust go directly to my cock. She was wearing the same tight, curve-hugging black pants as yesterday, but her shirt had vanished. Somehow I had missed this vital fact because I was so worried about keeping her out of danger.

  She only wore a sports bra. Her generous breasts showed a fair amount of cleavage. Now that I was taking the time to inspect her body, I realized Emmy didn’t carry extra weight. Her body had large breasts and swelling hips. But her waist was narrow. Looking at that bare skin made me want to put my hands on her hips and pull her close to me.

  I forced my gaze away from her body. I didn’t want to get distracted by her physical appearance. I reminded myself that she was annoyingly intelligent and possibly genuinely crazy. I had never seen anyone jump from car to car before. Emmy was the most maddening woman I could remember meeting, and she was not the type of woman with whom I ever wanted to get involved.

  My moment of fantasy was interrupted when her pursuers spotted us. We had to run. I pulled Emmy through the maintenance door, and we immediately crashed into someone coming through from the other side.

  “What are you doing?” he yelled. He grabbed Emmy and pulled out a gun. Belatedly, I noticed he wore a spaceport security uniform.

  Fuck.

  I put my hands in the air as he waved the gun in my direction.

  “We don’t want any trouble.” We were already in trouble. In about a minute, the people chasing Emmy were going to come through that door. We were sitting ducks.

  Chapter Nine

  VEN

  I wasn’t sure what the right thing to do was. I wasn’t prepared to risk being stunned. I wouldn’t be any good to Emmy if I were unconscious. Spaceport security was known for being trigger-happy.

  As it turned out, I didn’t need to do anything. Emmy rotated, throwing her body weight behind her fist and punching a hard uppercut to the chin. She hit him so strongly that she pushed his head back.

  She swore. Emmy had already twisted her other hand out of his grip. She drove a right hook into his temple that knocked him out cold.

  I stared in surprise. I knew women who could fight. I served with plenty of women who were tougher than me. However, it was disconcerting to see my wife beating up an out-of-shape, middle-aged security guard.

  Emmy caught me looking at her. “Do you have a problem? I know how to take care of myself.”

  She certainly did. Her words were enough to break me out of my trance. “Let’s go.” I pulled her behind me.

  “Earlier in the car they put something on my upper arm. I think it was the tracker. Do you know how to get rid of it?”

  “Something?” I asked as we ran, dodging workers and equipment. I heard someone behind us come through the door and crash into the security guard Emmy had just punched. He was having a bad day.

  “Was it a cream?” If someone spread a tracer cream on her body, they would be able to track her location for days. I had a device that would scramble the tracer’s signal, but I couldn’t activate it right now.

  We dashed to the right, moving down an empty hallway. I was impressed that she could run this far without running out of breath. She must be in good shape. And her abs were beginning to turn me on. I had never been into women who worked out excessively. I thought I liked my women naturally thin and on the soft side. Emmy was starting to grow on me with her fit, healthy body. If I weren’t running for my life, my cock would be hard.

  What was I thinking? I needed to focus before the bastards behind us took Emmy away. That would wreak havoc with my plan and her life. Because as soon as they got any information from her, she would no longer have any value to them and they would kill her. That wasn’t going to happen. I had sworn to protect her. Whether she wanted me to or not, I was going to do my duty.

  “Let’s go in there.” She pointed to a door that read Docking Bay #12. The line of doors down the hallway stretched away from us, with numbers that seemed to advance all the way to infinity, but I knew there were only about ninety docking bays. We were at the main spaceport for Stalwart. Almost all of the shuttles coming to the planet passed through this building.

  I opened the door and ran through, turning and locking it behind us. Thirty seconds later, we heard it rattle and bang from the other side. We didn't stop as we ducked around the spacecraft.

  We heard the sound of blaster fire, and the door exploded. Five people barged into the docking bay, which seemed deserted except for us and our pursuers.

  “Where did they go?”

  I didn’t hear anyone answer. Emmy and I continued to move around the shuttlecraft looking for anything that could help us. We needed to find a place to hide or a way to get out of the docking bay. As we crept through the shuttles, I started a program on my co
mputer that would block the signal coming from the tracer on Emmy’s body.

  We couldn’t find another way out. We were either leaving through the same door we entered or out the giant door for spaceships. Neither option sounded good. A man was guarding the other side of the door, and I didn’t want to roast inside the engines of a ship.

  “How long will the tracker remain active?”

  “The blocker takes a few minutes to start working. If they used a cream on you, the effects are temporary.”

  “That’s not reassuring. They can still track me right now?”

  “Yes. It will be harder for them to find you. But it’s the only way they could know we were in this particular bay.”

  We needed to find a better hiding place quickly.

  Emmy eagerly tried all the door handles we passed to see if any hapless souls had left them unlocked. We got lucky. A door led into a mid-sized private spaceship. She beckoned to me, and we both slipped inside, pulling the door shut. A moment later we heard footsteps approaching our location.

  Even though we were trying to be quiet, we had not closed the door tightly. We wanted to listen to any movements of people trying to find us. Emmy and I positioned ourselves on either side of the door. Neither one of us dared to take a step or make any noise.

  The narrow entrance to the spacecraft was tight. If I moved another inch closer to her, her breasts would brush slightly against my chest.

  I tried to ignore her proximity. I focused on controlling my breathing until it was calm and quiet again. The footsteps came closer. I heard someone pull on door handles.

  They would reach our spaceship in a minute. When they did, it would be obvious our door was open. I prepared to fight, flexing and releasing my muscles.

  I waited for the door to fly open when a loud voice came from the vicinity of the docking bay door.

  “What are you doing in here?” There was a pause until the voice start yelling. “Security! I need security here right now!”

  We heard the sounds of a scuffle followed by silence.

  I let out my breath. Emmy and I looked at each other. She motioned her head toward the interior of the ship. I nodded, hoping I could understand her without any explanation. The spaceport worker had bought us some time, but we weren’t out of trouble yet.

  EMMY

  I noticed Ven was good-looking before I married him. But once I found out that he was an annoying, stuck in his life, stuffy billionaire, I lost interest. It didn’t matter how sexy he was.

  I didn’t have anything against wealthy aliens, but he wasn’t the guy for me. I didn’t need a man at all. But if I were going to pick someone for myself, it wouldn’t be an alien who pursued his interests all day and would do anything to maintain the status quo.

  Anyone who wanted to be with me needed an interest in adventure. I was an archeologist who hunted down precious treasures, and there wasn’t anything normal about my life. I loved it, and I knew it wasn’t for everyone. I couldn’t imagine being with someone like Ven. He was so desperate to keep his life the way it was that he would marry a stranger.

  Right now, I wondered if there was more to Ven than I had originally thought. He certainly handled the gun smoothly. The shot from a moving car to take out the other car’s batteries had been difficult. It took a lot of practice to be that accurate with a civilian weapon.

  Today he wore casual clothes. I don't know if Earth was exporting its clothing styles to Stalwart, but he wore a tight T-shirt on top that showed off an incredible body with well-defined biceps and a broad chest. His bare arms had a purple stripe here and there in different locations, and I momentarily wondered if there were any markings on his cock.

  My mind wouldn’t stop. I remembered when he took my hand. Fireworks ignited inside of me that went straight to my core. I might not have noticed all of Ven’s attributes yesterday, but I was certainly seeing them today.

  I took a chance and stole a quick peek at him for a moment as we moved through the spaceship’s dim interior. He stared back at me without speaking. He was talking volumes with dark eyes that seemed to hold many secrets.

  I didn’t mind secrets. I had some of my own. There was something about Ven that made me want to discover the answer to every one of his. I wanted to know what made him tick. I wanted to understand him. And I guess I wanted to fuck him, too.

  My knees had felt weak when we waited at the door together, hoping no one would find us. There were so many different emotions pulsing through my body that I could hardly sort them out. Fear had been predominant, but there was longing too and a desire to be closer to him. If I had only moved one more inch, we would have touched chest-to-chest.

  “How about in here?” he whispered, opening the door to a cargo space. There were several large cartons providing cover. “I don’t think they’ll search every ship. The person they knocked out already alerted security. The cops should be here soon. Even if they do explore this ship before security arrives, we’ll have a chance to shoot whoever comes through the door.”

  I nodded. “Okay.”

  We shut the door behind us. There was a round window at one end of the room and two jump seats that could be pulled down for additional passengers. The extra seats had restraints. I imagined this area was where the workers stayed during take-off. This spaceship had a lot of bells and whistles. It was a luxurious personal vessel, and I imagined a rich and famous Stalwartian owned it.

  “When things settle down out there, we can sneak out and make our escape. I’m going to increase the power of the signal scrambling their tracer. It should make it harder for them to track you.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” I sat on the floor and tried to slow down my racing pulse. Ven hovered next to me. I was acutely aware of his presence. He was just close enough to touch me, but he was careful to leave a little distance, like an invisible barrier. Ven typed some information into his computer until he felt satisfied and sat back.

  Adrenaline filled me after our race through the spaceport. Having Ven so close to me was doing interesting things to my libido.

  I had never even been interested in a human male before. I was attracted to certain actors, and there was one person in school who I daydreamed about, but those were all fantasies. It was entirely different when I wanted a male who was right beside me and who might be thinking about me too. That had never happened to me before. I wondered if I had always secretly yearned for an alien to sweep me off my feet.

  Nah. I was probably just too busy.

  Merely making it to university had been a challenge. I finished high school when I was seventeen and worked two jobs, studying the rest of the time to pass my classes. After university, it was more school all the time.

  I never had time for a man. I could have had a boyfriend when I was working on my Ph.D., but no one was interested in me at the time. If they were, I wasn’t interested in them.

  All of a sudden, I felt insecure. I had never been in this situation before, and I didn’t know what to do. Should I kiss him?

  “Emmy.” Ven stared straight ahead.

  The sound of his voice brought me out of my daydream and back to reality.

  “What?” I felt nervous. How old was he, anyway? He looked like he was a few years older than me, but the way he was acting right now made him seem even older than I thought. He turned his head and he had an intimidating look in his black eyes.

  “You are going to tell me everything immediately.” I couldn’t look away. I knew he was right. I tried as hard as I could to keep him out of my mess of a life, but he was here despite my best efforts. Now his life was in danger. He had a right to know.

  “This is going to sound strange, but there’s a ladle. It’s all the ladle’s fault.”

  Chapter Ten

  VEN

  I closed my eyes, shutting out the view of the cargo hold. With my vision cut off, I could smell a faint stuffy odor. The shuttle had taken a long space flight recently, and they hadn’t had the time to recycle the air. When
I drew a deep breath in through my nose, I caught a whiff of Emmy’s scent. The fragrance was both sweet and foreign in an intriguing way.

  “A ladle? You mean, like a spoon for dishing out soup?” I stared at her blankly, knowing my face was a mask of disbelief.

  She sighed, looking down at her knees which were drawn up to her chest. The position of her legs crushed her breasts and made them temptingly bulge up out of her bra.

  One of the drawbacks of tall, skinny women is that they have small breasts. All of my former women had been deficient in their chest. I couldn’t stop staring at her breasts, which rose and fell as she breathed. My mind wondered what it would feel like to hold her plump mounds in my hands and take one red bud into my mouth. What color were her nipples?

  Did I want her nipples in my mouth? Wasn’t this woman crazy? If I was honest with myself, I had to admit that I wanted her breasts and much more. But I couldn’t let myself get carried away with Emmy. I was sure she was more trouble than she was worth. I just needed her to stay with me for a year as I had planned with Montana.

  After we had finished our time together, it wouldn’t matter if she needed to go somewhere for work or personal business. We had to live in the same residence. It was a big house, and we wouldn’t get in each other’s way.

  I reluctantly drew my attention away from her breasts. How could all this nonsense be because of a magical spoon?

  She gave me a rueful smile. “If it weren’t for the Silver Mestolo of Zelia, or informally, Zelia’s ladle, I wouldn’t be here right now. I would probably be working in a museum on Earth, cleaning dirt off arrowheads.”

  “Emmy.” I tried to restrain my temper. The woman was irritating but simultaneously so attractive that I didn’t know what to think. “Try to say something that makes sense soon, or...” I broke off, not sure what I would do, but imagined it would involve our bodies pressing together.

  “Or what?” She glared at me with a challenge in her eye.