Ladder 54: Five Firefighter Romances

by Maren Smith

  He was standing just off the edge of her porch, a bag of donuts in one hand and a cardboard tray with two coffee cups in the other. Spotting her, he lifted his chin, painted on the kind of smile that could melt a woman’s panties right off her, and held his peace offering a little higher. “Morning!”

  Shit.

  Her immediate instinct was the same now as that night when she was thirteen and her uncle called her down to his office for a reckoning regarding her latest report card. All she’d wanted to do then was duck out the bathroom window and run until she didn’t have to think about the impending confrontation. She hated getting yelled at, and that’s all her uncle would do. Oh, his voice never once rose above a calm growl of scolding, but it always felt like yelling to her.

  The only problem now was, the second-floor bathroom window was right next door to this one, so she’d be climbing out in plain sight of him. There’d be no getting away there. Nor could she dash out the back kitchen door, because the ‘back’ in this house was really on the side and he’d see that too. She was trapped. Trapped in her own house with nowhere to go except out the front door, most likely with a sheepish smile (because that was what was expected) and a shyly offered, ‘Won’t you come inside’ (because that was polite).

  Shit.

  Much as she wanted to, she couldn’t hide forever. Plus, he’d already seen her and if she hadn’t raised his suspicions yet, she would soon enough if she didn’t stop acting like a lunatic and start behaving like a normal, guilt-free human being.

  A normal, guilt-free human being would go out there and talk to him.

  Double shit.

  Snagging her bathrobe off the foot of her bed, she pulled it on even as she hurried down the stairs. Tying it tight to hide that she was still dressed from last night—double shit, she hadn’t taken off her makeup and her hair was still done up, but it looked a little ratty from the few times she’d tried to lie down throughout the night—she paused long enough for a deep and calming breath, and then opened the front door.

  “Hi,” she said, her attempt at a smile falling flat of its mark. She imagined she looked exactly how she felt as she watched Walker ascend the three steps onto her white-painted front porch.

  His eyes flicked from her face, to her hair, to her bathrobe, and then back to her eyes again. She was still trying to coax her smile, but his was already fading.

  “Have you not slept at all?” he asked, a touch of concern creeping into his tone.

  “Of course I have.” Because why wouldn’t she be able to sleep? She slept all the time. Normal people slept. Rylee tried to laugh, that fell a little flat too.

  Quite deliberately, using only his eyes, he directed her gaze to the bottom of her bathrobe. It was two inches shorter than her little black dress.

  Crap in a hat.

  Hugging the door in tight to her side, Rylee gave up on normal, polite, and smiles and went on the defensive. “What are you doing here? How did you find me?”

  “Sophie gave me your address. And your name. All the things I didn’t quite catch from you last night.” The dark lines of his eyebrows twitched together. “Look, if you don’t want to do this, that’s fine, but I’m kind of curious. Why would you pay two thousand dollars if you didn’t want the prize? Were you feeling pressured?”

  “No!” Rylee recoiled. “No, w-why would you… even think… what makes you think I don’t want this?”

  He counted off using the fingers of his donut-sack-holding hand. “You ran away last night, you won’t talk to me, you haven’t returned my calls or my texts, and you haven’t invited me inside.” The fold of the paper sack now held pinched between his thumb and pinky finger, he arched his eyebrows at her and waited.

  Crap in a hat with pickles on top.

  She almost clapped both hands to her face and groaned. After what she’d done, the last thing she deserved was to have someone as handsome, kind, and wonderful as Walker Daniels come inside her house. Talk about the ultimate reward for the worst possible behavior, but polite social norms had her trapped. Inwardly cringing, hoping it didn’t show on the outside, Rylee stepped back far enough to let him pass. “Won’t you please come inside?”

  “I brought coffee and donuts,” he said, suave, sophisticated, perfectly polite.

  Damn, he was good. Tsking, she took the sack from his hand. It was everything she could do not to cringe as she led the way to the kitchen. She ought to confess. Now, before she became entrenched any deeper in his kindness, but—oh!—she could already see the look that was sure to come over him. That disgusted, appalled, ‘what’s wrong with you’ and ‘how could you’ look. She couldn’t face it. She just couldn’t, so she did the only thing she could do. She grudgingly waved him on to the dining room table and passed into the kitchen to fetch two plates.

  “Do you want cream or sugar?” she called back.

  “Black is fine,” he returned, just as her gaze fell on the red and white cover of a book by the stove. Despite the comfy chair by her two-shelf bookcase in the living room, the kitchen stove was where the majority of her reading took place. Cooking all by oneself was incredibly boring, especially once everything was chopped and all there was left to do was stare at the back-splash and stir. She only got through a page or two that way, but it helped to pass the time.

  Currently, she was working her way through I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar. Chapter five was all about shedding one’s past insecurities to free the courage within. Setting the donut sack on a dessert plate, she quietly picked up the book.

  Don’t let past mistakes dictate your future. It was the first line her eyes went to when her fingers flipped through the pages, taking her straight to her bookmark and straight into her past. It wasn’t even a horrible past. She had no dark skeletons in her closet. No history of abuse. She was just… awkward. She’d always been awkward. Raised in the middle of nowhere, home-schooled by her mother all the way up to her last two years of high school, from day one, she had felt like a dandelion in a field full of tulips. With no way to relate. Just an alien surrounded by people she didn’t know how to interact with or strike up a conversation with. Or go on a date with, even if it was a date paid for in an auction.

  Midway down the next page, she spotted the section heading, Set Them High and Learn to Fly. And then, of course, that lovely little gem that she had wasted no time perverting into yesterday’s disastrous misadventure: Don’t get mad; get even. Which didn’t actually champion getting ‘even’ with anyone but herself, and only as a way of rallying her flagging spirits and whipping them back into forward-marching shape.

  She couldn’t even self-help right. Certainly, the only thing flying right now was her guilt. She almost shut the book again, except that she spotted another little gem: If you don’t go after your dreams, you’ll never catch them. You will always feel exactly the way you feel now. You will never be anywhere except where you now are. Are you happy here?

  Rylee read that three times before, finally, she lay the book aside. Chapter one had emphatically stated there were no mistakes, only setbacks on the road to success. So, if that was true, then yesterday was one hell of a setback, but she had to keep moving forward. The last thing she wanted to do was remain stagnant, locked in the shadows, forever watching while others lived out the fantasies that had haunted Rylee’s dreams for as long as she could remember.

  And look who was sitting in her dining room: Walker Daniels, uninvited but in the flesh.

  Creeping as far as the edge of the kitchen island, Rylee stole enough of a peek to know he hadn’t quietly left while she’d been taking her time. Nope. Still there. Her heart caught just looking at the back of him. Nose to the wall, he was leaning in to examine the tiny details in a cluster of old family photographs her aunt had hung there long before Rylee had inherited the house. Everything was exactly as her aunt had made it. She’d thought about redecorating half a million times. The problem was, she just didn’t have the knack.

  “Everything all right in there?” he
called without looking back.

  Ducking back behind the island where the kitchen wall and a refrigerator blocked his line of sight, Rylee struggled to calm her panicking heart. “Yeah, um… I-I’ll be right out.”

  She grabbed the donut sack, hugging it before catching sight of herself in the shiny silver backs of the frying pans hanging on hooks above the cooking island. They weren’t mirrors. The reflections were muddled and distorted, but she could see enough to know if she let herself chicken out of this right now, not only would she regret it for the rest of her life, but she might as well just give up afterward. She couldn’t do anything to change what she had done yesterday, so—like the book said—it was time to move forward. Walker could help her with that, couldn’t he? He did it all the time. That’s why the CCC submissives vied so hard for his attention from the moment he arrived on party nights.

  She was just another CCC submissive, right? Like all the others, all she had to do was ask. Right?

  Swallowing her guilt, Rylee squared her shoulders. Grabbing a plate and the near-nonexistent tatters of her inner courage, she marched back to the table to do what she should have done last night. What she’d practiced in front of the mirror for weeks leading up to the auction, complete with a speech, which she had memorized, but which also came with carefully printed cue cards in case she forgot a line when the stress overwhelmed her.

  The dining room table was fully between them and Walker was still studying the photographs when she planted herself with confidence and authority (just like all the books said to) and promptly stammered out a furiously blushing, “You can do this.”

  Crap! Admittedly, every time she’d practiced her speech that was how she’d start it, but that was self-encouragement. She wasn’t supposed to say that part out loud.

  Walker turned, eyebrows arching. “Thank you,” he replied, much more calmly, without the slightest hint of the same nervousness currently chewing her up inside. He even returned the compliment. “You can do this, too. Would you like to sit down so we can discuss the details?”

  She was going to throw up.

  No, she wasn’t, Rylee quickly corrected herself. She could do this. She could totally do this. He might be head and shoulders taller than she was, outweigh her by a good eighty pounds, be a drop-dead gorgeous hunk with all that dark wavy hair and smoldering gray eyes, and be possessed of a smile that both scared and excited her and reached right down through the very middle of her being to tickle at her libido, but she… well, she wasn’t ugly. And she had put good money down on this man. All she had to do, like the book said, was take charge of her method of journey and ride it all the way to her happy destination.

  Walker waved her to sit down at her own table, but she clasped her sweaty hands tightly together and didn’t move.

  “A-all right, listen up.” Her voice only trembled a little bit. Maybe he wouldn’t notice. “This is my date. I paid a lot of money for it, so I-I-I think it’s not unreasonable that things go the way I’ve planned them.”

  Walker nodded. “All right.” Taking his own advice, he came around to the head of the table, pulled out a chair and, giving the legs of his jeans a tug for comfort, sat. He folded his hands, one elbow on the arm of the chair, the other resting on the edge of the table. “You have my attention. What are you thinking?”

  “I have all our scenes plotted out,” she informed him. “Y-you don’t need to do a thing… regarding that part.”

  “I see.”

  “Because a person should get what they paid for.”

  “Oh, absolutely,” he agreed.

  It was encouraging that he didn’t seem at all upset by her assertiveness. Rylee relaxed a little. Rubbing her stress-damp palms against her bathrobe, she ventured half a step closer. “I also think it only fair that you should know—j-just so there are no misunderstandings later on—I intend to make the decisions while we’re together.”

  A corner of his mouth twitched, but Walker didn’t smile. Not exactly, although she thought she spotted the hint of one right before he turned his gaze and his hidden thoughts to his lap. “I see.”

  Had she gone too far? Maybe this was going to be a problem. She didn’t have a lot of confidence to begin with, but what she did have wavered and her stammer returned full force. “A-a-all the decisions. B-because I’m the boss,” she finished faintly.

  At least they were clear.

  Nodding, Walker raised his absolutely smiling gaze back to hers. Amusement danced in his eyes, but there was nothing mocking in his tone when he said, “I understand. This is your night, you did pay for it. I have no problem whatsoever allowing you to make a few—”

  “All,” she corrected, trembling in both body and voice. She clenched her hands tighter. Her face was burning. She could feel her heart beating in the flaming heat, both in her cheeks and in her tightening chest.

  His smile widened. “All,” Walker capitulated. “But just for clarification, you are aware that I am supposed to be the dom in this relationship, right?”

  She rubbed her hands on her bathrobe again. “Yes.”

  “That means power will be exchanged and you’ll be asked to submit.”

  She breathed out, a little relieved. “Yes, I know.”

  “And you agree to that?”

  She nodded. “I’m a submissive.” Was she being too authoritative? Maybe he couldn’t tell, but she wanted what she wanted and she’d waited a very long time to get it.

  “Just checking,” he said. “I don’t want any confusion when we get to the cabin about who’s submitting to whom.”

  “Oh.” She relaxed. “No, you’re the dom.”

  “But you’re making the decisions,” he clarified, his smile looking suddenly more wolfish than friendly. “Admittedly, this is a different kind of power exchange from what I’m used to. Would you be up for a practice run, do you think? That way, when we’re at the cabin on our date, we’ll both know what to expect.”

  A practice run. Just the thought of it made the skin along the backs of her thighs prickle. She had never been this close to getting what she wanted… what she needed… He was so calm and cordial, too. Which made the merits of his argument make all the more sense. This was a new kind of power exchange. One every bit as new to her as to him. Not only would a little practice allay some of her nervousness, but it might even wipe out the guilt of how she’d come to be standing here instead of Tammi Lou.

  Funny how, all of a sudden, standing here in front of him like this, in last night’s dress and a bathrobe, rubbing her sweaty palms against her thighs, while he sat in that sturdy dining chair in front of her, seemed to take on a whole new perspective. She looked at his lap, halfway trying to convince herself that he didn’t really mean what he’d just said, just in case he didn’t follow through. That way, she wouldn’t be disappointed. She looked at his hands too. Broad, thick, masculine hands that she knew from a year’s worth of voyeurism were as experienced at lighting fires in submissive behinds as they were in putting out the real deal for Ladder 54.

  The prickling in her thighs spread up onto the lower curve of her bottom as Rylee nodded her consent. “O-okay. Sure. I guess.”

  Scooting his chair back from the table, Walker braced his feet apart and presented her with a very capable lap. That twinkle in his gray eyes made her stomach twist. She folded her hands over it, forcibly pressing in to make it still.

  “Rylee,” he said in a mock severity so realistic that her acrobatic stomach took an immediate fall. It tumbled all the way down to her toes, especially when he pinned her with that knowing, teasing, and yet semi-serious smile. “I’m going to spank you now. Since you want to make all the decisions, I’m going to give you one. You have ten seconds to lay yourself willingly across my knee or safeword out. If you do neither, I’m going to assume bratting behavior and I’m going to respond accordingly. Your time starts…” he checked his watch while her stomach somersaulted across her toes, “…now.”

  Her knees tried to buckle. He looke
d so… believable. This right here was why women lined up from the moment he arrived at a play party until he stopped taking requests. She didn’t for one second doubt a thing he’d just said, and the way he’d said it… oh! Every inch of her inner submissive felt electrified with the need to obey and yet, her mass of insecurities held her captive where she stood.

  This was just the practice run, he’d said. He wasn’t really going to spank her. She’d only paid for twenty-four hours of his time and it hadn’t started yet. She was going to look very stupid if she tried to put herself across his knee right now, especially if he had to stop her and say, “Just kidding. Practice run, remember?”

  Her stomach sank even lower.

  “That’s very good.” She made herself smile, so he’d know she wasn’t taking this too seriously. Once she cleared her throat a little, she even killed that tell-tale trembling running rampant through her vocal cords. “It was very believable.”

  “Thank you.” He tipped his head in a half-nod, but then he checked his wristwatch. “Six seconds.”

  An explosion of sensation burst like fireworks, shimmering through the flesh of her bottom. “I-I—” She blinked twice. “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m going to spank you, Rylee,” he clarified, still every bit as calm and gentle as he was believable. “You see, what you paid for was a date with a dom from the CCC. You made your decision when you won my auction. Now, I don’t know why you fled last night, but I have a few suspicions. You still haven’t safeworded,” he noted, then added, “and you have five seconds left.”

  Her stomach fell all over again, this time straight through the floor. Was it guilt or embarrassment burning at her now? She couldn’t tell, but she could feel it, sizzling up the same path that prickling sensation had taken, across the backs of her thighs and up over the soon-to-be un-neglected curves of her bottom.

  He didn’t mean this. She tried to laugh, but her mouth wouldn’t cooperate. “B-but…”