Fearless

by Kimberly Kincaid

  His right arm tightened around her body, his fingers sweeping up. The ridge of his cock pressed hard against her lower back, and even though he was obviously as aroused as she was, he didn’t rush. Keeping his easy grip on her left side to anchor her, Cole cupped her breast from behind with his right hand, skimming his thumb over the tight peak of her nipple.

  “Oh God,” she whispered, arching her spine to maximize the contact.

  But Cole lightened his touch. “Easy, baby. I promise I’ve got you.”

  Savannah stilled. He returned his thumb to her nipple, letting his forefinger join in a slow, seductive roll. Her breathing quickened in time with her pulse, but she forced herself to simply slow down and let him explore her. She dropped her chin, watching as his fingers circled and slid, first over one aching nipple, then the other. His touches were both sexy and reverent, his breath strong and steady over her shoulder, and she let herself drown in the feel of each one.

  “Cole.” She lifted her right arm, linking it around his neck to keep him close. Their bodies fused together, his chest to her back, and when his clever fingers moved all the way under the water, Savannah’s knees fell open in invitation.

  Cole didn’t refuse. Keeping his movements soft and slow, his hand traveled over the flat of her belly. She bit down on the urge to cant her hips upward, to thrust wildly against his touch, to drag him out of the bathtub so she could skip everything else and have him inside her right this second. He moved his fingers lower, until finally, mercifully, he reached the apex of her thighs beneath the warmth of the bathwater.

  “Savannah.” Her name crossed his lips with pure intensity, and he slid one finger down the length of her sex.

  “Ah.” Savannah’s voice formed more of a raspy, needful sound than an actual word. “Please. I want—”

  “I know. Just stay with me. Right here,” Cole said, letting his finger follow the same path again on a slow, sinuous circuit. Over and over, he teased and traced, her clit throbbing harder with each pass over the rest of her.

  Savannah’s knees parted as wide as the tub would allow, her pulse pounding in desire that bordered on despair. She pressed back into Cole’s chest, letting him bear the weight of her upper body, another thick moan escaping from her as he parted her folds to touch her where she needed it most.

  “That’s it,” he whispered, working the swollen bud in tight strokes. “You can let go, Savannah. I’ve got you. Come for me.”

  He increased the pressure between her legs, sending a tremor from the depth of her belly. Dropping his left hand into the water, Cole pushed into her sex with one smooth thrust of his fingers, and the sensation combined with his words sent her over the edge.

  She climaxed on a gasp, her body vibrating in waves of release so bright, she trembled. Cole scaled back on his touch, holding her close as she came back to her body. But as intense as her orgasm had been, still, she wanted more.

  Savannah wanted him. Pure and simple.

  Indefinitely.

  “Cole,” she whispered, tilting her head to look at him. “I want to have you, too. Please. Take me to bed.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Cole lifted Savannah out of the bathtub with every intention of giving her exactly what she’d asked for even though he knew damn well he had no business touching her. But after the train wreck of emotions that had been crashing through him ever since he’d crossed the threshold of that nightclub fire, the only thing he’d been able to think of was having her close. All the anger, all the despair and the outright fear—none of it threatened to bury him alive as long as Savannah was close.

  He might have no control otherwise, but he could take care of her, just in this moment. Just him and her.

  Although he’d needed Savannah in his arms so badly it knocked the breath from his lungs, he hadn’t planned on having her in his bed right now, too, especially after this morning. But Cole’s composure didn’t stand a chance against her seductive request, and he couldn’t deny how deeply he wanted her.

  Savannah was the only thing keeping his emotions from unraveling at the seams. She was his calm. His control. His center.

  She was his everything.

  He lowered her feet to the bath mat, making sure she had her balance before reaching for a towel. He dried her off with a quick pass of the cotton, then guided her down the hallway to his bedroom. Early evening light slanted through the blinds, illuminating the space around them in soft, golden tones that played on Savannah’s tawny skin, and Christ above, Cole had never seen anything so beautiful in his entire life.

  “Come here,” she said, leaning back over the bed. The sheets were rumpled from the night before, and Savannah nestled beneath them, beckoning.

  Need surged through him, reckless and hot. Her nipples beaded into hard peaks, her sex swollen and slick with arousal, and his cock jerked almost painfully against his belly. Cole wanted to take it slow, to maintain the last shreds of the control that had been slipping from his tenuous grasp all day—hell, ever since he’d laid eyes on Savannah five weeks ago.

  But one “please” from her perfect, heart-shaped mouth was all it took. Cole’s last thread of control shattered in the face of his need to have her, and he whipped his nightstand drawer open, rolling a condom over his erection in record time. Parting her legs with both palms, he sank into her to the hilt, barely stopping to revel in the squeeze of her tight inner muscles around his cock before starting to thrust.

  Savannah threw her head back, moaning her approval. “Oh God. Oh God, don’t stop.” She knotted her legs around his waist. Canting her hips to meet the rhythm of his thrusts, she rocked against him, and he met every move with nothing but wild need. She was so gorgeous, so strong and fearless yet with her own brand of sweetness beneath, that Cole was lost. He filled her again and again, drawing her to the edge of pleasure just so he could push her over, and when she came on a scream, his own climax razored up from the base of his spine. He pushed into her one last time, the wet heat of her core still gripping his cock with the waves of her release as he called out her name and free-fell into his own.

  A few minutes passed in the hush of slower movements and softening breath. Cole pulled back, but only far enough to angle his shoulders against the mattress, tucking Savannah close to his side. Her breathing grew deeper, and even though he’d tested her strength way more than he’d intended to today, he wrapped his arms around her even tighter.

  As much as Cole knew he needed to, he simply couldn’t bring himself to let her go.

  * * *

  . . . Mayday, mayday, mayday! Firefighter down . . .

  . . . I will burn your fucking career to the ground . . .

  . . . Cole, I’m sure . . . take care of me, please . . .

  Cole’s eyes flew open, air expanding his lungs on a sharp inhale. The final scraps of daylight cast deepening shadows over his bedroom, and the last twelve hours rolled through his brain in a slideshow of emotions he tried desperately to keep in check.

  Oz was deliberately setting fires, or at the very least, covering them up. And not only was there nothing Cole could do about it, but his career—not to mention Savannah’s—sat in the center of the dirty lieutenant’s palm, just waiting for Oz to crush it if Cole so much looked at him sideways.

  No strategy in the fucking universe could make this right without destroying them both in the process.

  “Mmm . . . oh, ow.” Savannah stirred, her forehead creasing in obvious discomfort as she rolled beneath the covers and opened her eyes in a series of slow blinks.

  The unease in Cole’s gut tangled worse. Christ, he was such a shit for letting his emotions lead him into bringing her back here instead of taking her home so she could rest. “Take it easy. Here.”

  He hooked an arm around her rib cage, guiding her slowly upright. Her bare body was warm against his, and despite his edginess, it took all of his willpower to make himself pull back to look for his clothes.

  “I’m okay,” she said, her voice thick
with sleep and raspy from inhaling all that smoke. “Just a little sore.”

  Cole slid a pair of jeans over his hips and shouldered his way into a clean T-shirt. “I’ll grab your bag. You should probably take a few more of those high-grade ibuprofen and put something in your stomach.” Their breakfast at Scarlett’s felt like eons ago rather than a little more than twelve hours.

  The same breakfast where Oz had captured those damning pictures of him and Savannah kissing. They’d been in public, for fuck’s sake, and Cole knew better. How could he have been careless enough to let go of his common sense so completely?

  The answer was sitting right in front of him, in all her sweet and sexy glory.

  Cole took a deep breath, although his lungs made him earn every last molecule. “Be right back.”

  The quick round trip between his bedroom and his kitchen did little to alleviate his growing dread, and he capped it off with another tour down the hall to throw some sandwiches together while Savannah got dressed. A few minutes later, she padded into the kitchen, wearing yet another of his T-shirts over her low-slung jeans.

  “That’s the best-looking ham and cheese sandwich I’ve ever seen,” she said, smiling even though her body language radiated full caution.

  Sure. He was plenty observant now. “Here. Go ahead and get started, and I’ll grab some water so you can take that pill. Now that we’re up, we need to talk.”

  Cole forced his feet toward the fridge, but three quick steps had Savannah blocking his path.

  “Look, you might as well just jump right in and say it. I know you’re mad at me for the stunt I pulled with my mask this morning, and I know I really scared you. I’m so sorry, Cole. I wasn’t thinking, and—”

  “I’m not upset about the mask.” The words burned with the metallic aftertaste of a lie, and he inhaled, trying to tamp down his welling emotions. “I mean, I’m upset about that, too, but . . . Savannah, Oz knows.”

  Her lashes fanned all the way up in shock. “He knows we’re onto him?”

  “He knows we’re sleeping together.”

  “He . . . what?” Savannah whispered, frozen to her spot on the kitchen floor. “How could he know that? We never told anybody.”

  “He doesn’t just know. He’s got pictures. He must have gotten suspicious that I knew something was off about the fires after I asked him all those questions last week, and I guess he started following me. Probably to keep tabs on whether I went back to any of the scenes again, but . . .”

  It had taken all of half a day for Oz to catch him in the parking lot with Savannah, exchanging that textbook and a bunch of innuendo-laden stares before they’d impulsively driven off to his place.

  “Oz isn’t an idiot,” Cole said, biting down on the thought that at least that made one of them. “He put two and two together and started snapping pictures, the latest of them from this morning.”

  Savannah’s pretty face turned pale. “In front of Scarlett’s?”

  He nodded. “Oz is threatening to tell Chief Williams about our relationship if I say anything about the suspected arsons. He’ll use it as leverage to get me kicked out of the FFD, claiming that I threatened to ruin his career if he blew the whistle on us being together.”

  A flicker of anger sparked in Savannah’s shell-shocked expression. “But that’s bullshit! He’s setting fires, Cole. Indiscretion is a whole lot different from fucking arson!”

  “And how do we really know he’s committing arson?” Cole shot back.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Savannah took a step back to stare at him. “You can’t possibly doubt that Oz is involved in setting these fires after he just threatened to blackmail you.”

  “It has nothing to do with what I believe, Savannah,” he said, his frustration climbing. “Other than the fact that he did both scene investigations, we still can’t connect Oz to these fires in any way. There’s no clear motive and he has a stellar record with the FFD, and the causes of both fires can be plausibly explained by something other than foul play. The only thing that matters here is what we can prove in black-and-white, and right now, that’s nothing.”

  “That’s not what Brad said,” she insisted, and shock sent Cole’s pulse into a spiral.

  “You went to your brother with this?”

  His composure slipped another notch. Getting her brother involved jumped the chain of command, not to mention betraying the hell out of her word. If the FFD brass opened a formal investigation on these fires now, Oz wouldn’t hesitate to jam a high-res picture of Cole and Savannah’s intimate lip-lock into every in-box in the chief’s office, and both of their spots at Station Eight would go into the toilet at the same time.

  Savannah winced, clearly hearing her words on a five-second emotion delay. “Sort of. I didn’t say anything specific about Oz. I just asked Brad what might make an AC unit burn up like the one at the warehouse, but I told him it was a textbook scenario for an electrical fire.”

  “And he told you he thought it could be arson.” Her brother couldn’t be an idiot. Textbook cases were supposed to be just that. Textbook. The guy’s red flags were probably waving like mad.

  “Isn’t that all the more reason to say something?”

  Cole’s irritation snapped, hot and low in his gut. “It’s all the more reason we should be watching our asses. We had a plan, and it didn’t include going to your brother for a reason.”

  She hiked her chin. “I know, but our jobs are on the line. Yours and mine. I needed to be sure.”

  “You said you were sure when we agreed to stick to the chain of command and tell Westin,” he said, unable to keep his frustration from seeping into his tone. This whole scenario was spinning out of control, and fast. “You can’t just lead the way with your emotions all the time and do whatever you please.”

  “I’m not stupid. I was careful when I talked to Brad.” Savannah moved to jam her hands into her hips, yelping in pain as her splinted hand made contact with her body, and the reminder of her injury twisted something dark and deep in Cole’s rib cage.

  “Right. Like you were careful yesterday? Jesus, Savannah, breaking protocol and taking off your mask could’ve killed you, but still, you jumped right in without thinking. Our careers are absolutely on the line here. We can’t afford to make knee-jerk decisions without thinking.”

  “Wait . . .” She paused, her eyes narrowing for just a second before going round with realization. “Are you saying you don’t even want to go to Westin now? You just want to sit on these fires and pretend nothing’s going on?”

  Another thread of his already questionable composure frayed, the slam of his heartbeat warning him that he was dangerously close to redlining. But losing his grip now would spell certain disaster, and he dug up the defenses that had kept him on the straight and narrow for the last nine years.

  “We can’t prove that anything’s going on. If we say something right now, to Westin—to anybody—we’ll be committing career suicide for nothing. Oz can counter every accusation we’d make on those fires, and he’s got hard proof we’re involved with each other. Even if he’s guilty, he’ll walk, and he’ll ruin us for our trouble. We can’t win.”

  “Of course.” Savannah laughed, although there was no humor in it. “It all comes down to strategy. God, Cole. We can’t just put this under your emotionless microscope and wait for the perfect plan to come sliding into place, all nice and neat and feeling-free.”

  As if they’d heard the challenge crossing her lips, every last one of the emotions Cole had been trying to control bubbled up, edging toward the surface. “So it’s better to just say screw the odds and the consequences, even though Oz has us by the short hairs? If we had proof, this would be different. Of course I’d fucking say something—I’d howl it at the goddamn moon. But I can’t recklessly piss everything away when there’s no chance he’ll go down for these fires. It’s not just my job on the line. It’s who I am. It’s all I know.”

  “Believe me, I get it—”

&
nbsp; “No.” The word shot from his mouth, shattering another layer of his composure. “You don’t. You’ve been on the job for less than eight weeks. I’ve been a firefighter for eight years. I left my family, my home, every single thing I ever knew so I could throw all I had into being here. Doing this. I don’t have anything else.”

  Savannah’s spine went rigid. “And you think I do?”

  “You have options,” Cole said. All the fear and anger and despair he’d been trying so hard to control rushed at him now, pouring out in his words. “You have a family who loves you. Your father is a battalion chief, for Chrissake. You can go back to Texas, join the Dallas Fire Department, and not have this mess between us follow you there.”

  She flinched. “So my job isn’t as important as yours. You’re so certain you’ve got more to lose.”

  He rammed a hand through his hair, and God help him, despite the look of sheer hurt on Savannah’s face, he couldn’t fight the bulletproof defenses screaming at him to buckle down and kill all the emotions threatening to end his career.

  He had to cram this back and focus, not feel. If he let his emotions rule his actions, he’d never survive.

  “I don’t just have more to lose. You and I might have made some impulsive decisions together, but it’s my name Oz is out to ruin. If I go spouting off at the mouth about a twenty-two-year rescue squad veteran without proof, no matter how guilty he is, I will lose everything. My firehouse, my livelihood. My life. And I’ll never get it back.”

  Savannah stood completely still on the kitchen tiles, her eyes betraying the depth of her hurt for just a split second before her brass-knuckle demeanor roared back to life.

  “Well,” she said, turning on her heel toward the hallway. “At least you won’t have to worry about any further repercussions from our impulsive mess of a relationship.”

  “Savannah—” he started, but she whirled back to nail him with a fiery stare.

  “Do yourself a favor, Cole, and stop talking, since it seems to be what you want to do anyway. I may be brash and I may not always make the smartest calls, but I always had your back, just like you taught me. And even though it makes me a fool, I actually believed you had mine.”