He stopped stroking himself and knelt on the floor by the edge of the bed. Then he grabbed her by the hips, pulling her toward him. Her legs he let fall on either side of his shoulders, pushing up her knees so she was as open to him as she could be. He could have knelt there for hours, taking in the view. The curve of her skin against his sheets. The swell of her breasts. The need in her eyes as she lifted her head and gazed down.
She dropped her head back and tangled her fingers in his hair. “Please,” she whimpered as her hips arched up to him.
“Please what?”
“Lick me. Fuck me. Make me come.”
“One thing at a time, baby,” he said, making sure she saw his grin. Her nose wrinkled in frustration. God, he loved teasing her. Abbi acted like she was in control all the time, but when he licked along the sweet, wet slit between her thighs, she was his.
She came on his tongue, gripping his hair, her strong thighs clenched around him. And then she came again after he entered her, sliding her legs up, pushing so deep all he could do was close his eyes and let the sensations overcome him, the feel of her skin, the sounds of her breathing, the press of her hands, her hips, her thighs. The way she enveloped him.
He slid his cock out, pulled off the condom, and jacked himself all over her quivering stomach. He wanted to see the look in her eyes as he came. He wanted to see the desire there, the hunger for him.
She may have started this thing as a one-time deal, and he may have started off using her, too. He’d just wanted to get out of his head, get out of his life, forget himself in her body for a while.
But not now. He didn’t feel further away from himself when he was with her. He felt closer to something than he’d ever been before.
“You’re spending the night after we shower, right?” he said as he hovered over her, the evidence of his desire painted on her skin.
She didn’t move, and he wasn’t sure if that meant she’d gone frozen, that just making that assumption was giving away too much and now she was officially going to back away.
But when he looked down, she was smiling. “Where else do you think I want to go?”
…
Abbi woke up alone.
She thought for a second that Tyler had left, but then she heard heavy breathing coming from the living room—what the fuck? When she padded out wearing nothing but his T-shirt, she saw him doing pushups, pounding them out one after another in a blur.
She leaned against the doorframe. Was it possible to have an orgasm just by watching a man’s back muscles flex? She was about to find out.
Realizing he had an audience, Tyler looked up and dropped one knee down.
“For the love of all that is holy, don’t stop,” Abbi said.
He grinned. “I can’t wait to make you say that in bed.”
“Let’s get practicing, then.” She turned, lifting the T-shirt of his she was wearing to give him a view she hoped he’d appreciate as she walked to the bedroom.
She was disappointed he’d stopped doing pushups, but she wasn’t disappointed with the speed with which he leaped up to follow her. A man she didn’t just want to fuck but wake up with? And talk to?
And hike with? Maybe even…go grocery shopping, out for breakfast, to Mackenzie’s with her friends?
A man she might be able to…trust?
No. She was moving too fast, too out of control. Too unlike her.
She didn’t even know if he felt the same way, if he was thinking anything beyond fitting in as much fun as possible before he said good-bye and moved on.
She needed to throw him down on the bed and have a good wake up session. Then coffee. Breakfast. At some point, she’d figure out what came next.
She walked around the bed to the nightstand where Tyler had gotten the condoms last night. She was reaching in search of the box when she noticed something. There was a picture frame in the drawer.
His? Or did it belong to whomever he was renting the place from? The furniture was certainly eclectic. Maybe there had been some weird-ass photo left on the nightstand and he’d tucked it in the drawer to get it out of sight.
But when she opened the drawer wider to see, it was clear the picture wasn’t from the house owner, or something random he’d shoved away without thinking.
The picture was of Tyler.
He was young—even younger than he already looked with that smooth skin of his—and his hair was freshly cropped close to his scalp. He was decked out in his firefighting gear, a kid dressed up for the big leagues. It was so fucking cute her heart tugged.
He was standing next to another guy, also baby-faced, short hair, the same goofy grin like the whole world was laid out at his feet. She could sense their closeness even through the picture. They could have been brothers, even twins, despite looking nothing alike.
“Who’s this hottie?” Abbi asked, showing the picture to Tyler. “And why’s this nice frame in a drawer?”
She expected some great story about the start of his firefighting training, the friends he’d made. For the first time, it occurred to her to wonder why he’d left for the summer when there must have been plenty going on in L.A. Why he wanted to move somewhere else next.
It was strange to feel close to him in some ways and yet have so many aspects of his life she hardly knew at all. And so many of her own secrets she never planned to tell.
She was thinking about how she could want that closeness and not want it at the same time. She wasn’t thinking at all about the look on Tyler’s face, until she realized he wasn’t speaking. He was just standing there, no longer a swelled up man with his muscles twitching and a hard line in his jaw but a boy again, the one in the photograph. Someone who believed in the world but was so very terrified of it.
“I’m sorry,” she said, faltering. “I shouldn’t have pried.”
That ought to make it clear where they stood. Nothing too personal. Nothing too heavy. She should have been glad about that.
Then he swallowed, and she remembered the first night in the bar, watching his Adam’s apple move and knowing she had to kiss him. She couldn’t pull away.
“That’s me and my best friend, Scotty, in one of our early days out of training,” he said.
Abbi smiled. “You guys are adorable. You look so young!”
She could do casual. See?
“Hard to believe, isn’t it? Scott and I met during training, and we were both taken under the wing of my supervisor, Aidan. We lived together, worked together. He was like family to me.”
“Was?” Abbi couldn’t help picking up on the tense.
And then suddenly things weren’t so casual anymore.
Tyler came around to the side of the bed and lifted the photograph from her hands. Gently he placed it back in the drawer where she’d found it. Then he slid the drawer shut.
“Was,” he repeated. “He died.”
“Tyler.” Her hands, now empty without the picture frame, flew to her mouth. “I’m so sorry. When?”
“June.”
He walked around to the other side of the bed. “I guess I shouldn’t keep it where the condoms are. I just…can’t stand to look at it. Can’t stand to get rid of it, either.”
Abbi’s heart hammered. Something hard and hot had risen in her throat.
“Tyler,” she said, then wished she had something more effective than that. “Do you mean this June?”
He nodded.
She sat on the bed. The condom, the morning she’d had in mind, were forgotten. She had no idea what to do. No idea what to say. She almost didn’t want him to tell her. It was too much, too serious, too far from the lies and the jokes where they’d started.
But how could she do that to him? She extended her arms, and somehow his huge frame fit just right with hers.
“That’s really, really recent,” she said.
“I know.”
“Is that why you came here for the summer?”
“I needed to get out of L.A.,” he said, and she sensed wha
t it cost him to make this confession. That he’d been running from something. That he wasn’t okay.
“What happened?” she asked, unsure if she wanted to know. Hoping somehow it might make the knot in her stomach loosen. Knowing even as she asked the words that of course it wouldn’t. Tyler didn’t do things halfway. He wouldn’t have packed up his life and escaped California and planned some big career change if anything about this story were remotely okay.
She couldn’t be the keeper of his sorrows—not if it meant he’d expect her to share her own pains. But neither could she up and leave. When Tyler shifted, she let him draw her down to the bed, his body curled around her like a blanket. A strange thing, to feel this comfortable while also on edge. She had a feeling he’d chosen this position so he had something to hold on to. And so he didn’t have to look at her when the words came out.
“There was a fire,” he said. So simple. So matter of fact. But the shudder of his body against hers told her there was nothing simple about the memories Tyler kept locked in that drawer.
Chapter Nineteen
“There was a fire,” Tyler told Abbi, and he marveled at how easy it was to say those words, how simple they sounded, how many stories about his life could start that way.
There was a fire and my team and I worked around the clock to put it out. There was a fire and it raged across the San Gabriels for days but in the end we got it, in the end it burned down. There was a fire and I got the call. There was a fire and I fixed it. I saved people. I saved houses. I saved land. I saved lives.
There was a fire and I lost it.
There was a fire and I let my best friend die.
“There was a fire,” he said again, and his grip around her tightened as the memory coursed through him, the heat of the flames, his shouts, hoarse and useless, lost in the smoke. How he’d called and called for Scott to answer but didn’t hear a word.
“It was one of those ordinary things. Not ordinary,” he corrected himself. “Every blaze is different. But it started off so routine.
“Aidan, that’s my supervisor, he got the call. There was a fire up above the foothills. Dry land, too much brush, you know how it is. This one was small, far enough away that it wasn’t a major priority. But there were thunderstorms, reports of high winds. We had to get over there fast.”
He felt Abbi’s breathing, in and out, such calm. He clung to it as he relived what came next.
“Scotty was finishing his shift. He should have been leaving. He shouldn’t even have still been there, but he was horsing around with me as I started my rotation and hadn’t gone home. Aidan said he needed bodies, was going to call some of the other guys who were off and tell them to suit up, but Scott—he was such a go-getter, you know? He just wanted to help out, do right by the team. He was selfless like that.
“So he said to Aidan, don’t worry about it, let them sleep. Let them be with their families, take some time off. Scott was unattached, hopelessly so, always bouncing from one to the next like he had all the time in the world to settle down.” He laughed to himself at the stories he could tell Abbi, stories he would tell someday if she still wanted to listen after what he was about to say.
“I think he wanted it, you know? He didn’t see the fire as a danger, and that’s where the real problem was. He saw it as a chance to spend more time with his buddies while he got to do the right thing.”
Abbi turned in his arms to face him. “So what happened?” she asked, touching a hand to his cheek.
“We went out,” he said. “And I thought we had it. I thought we were good. They were dropping retardant from the helicopters, there was plenty of water to go around, and Scott and I had a good crew, good people leading us. We knew what we were doing.
“But there was a lightning strike that started up a second site and we weren’t prepared for that, we didn’t have enough power. We were digging down a fire line to stop the first blaze, and Scott decided he’d run ahead. We’d dig toward each other, fill in the gap, cover more ground that way.”
Abbi nodded for him to go on.
“I don’t know what happened. Our communications went down. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t hear. In a fire—it’s so loud, all that roaring around you. And the smoke. The wind. There’s so much going on and I just…” He choked on the memory. “I lost him. One minute he was there and the next…I just fucking lost him.”
“You said he went on ahead,” Abbi said. “Was that protocol?”
“I shouldn’t have let him go,” Tyler said, shaking his head at the irrelevance of the question. “We should have stuck together. Or I should have been the one to go first. It wasn’t even his shift. I let him go when I should have said no.”
“Or your supervisor,” Abbi said. “Or Scott himself shouldn’t have said yes. It’s not on you, Tyler. You weren’t responsible for everyone’s actions that day.”
He pinched his eyes shut. Didn’t she understand? It was because of him that Scott was in that fire. It was because of him that Scott was dead.
“I was the one who found him,” Tyler said. “We were looking for Scott but it was hard to get too close with the fire raging all around. We had to get that under control but when there was a break I went in, I followed where I thought he’d gone. I kept looking for the glint of aluminum, a sign he’d deployed his fire shelter. I’d hoped he’d still be safe inside. But I didn’t see it. I tripped right over his body, Abbi. I thought it was a tree. Just another charred log.”
“Jesus,” she breathed, and he was so grateful for her arms around him, for the flutter of her lips to his eyelashes. For the fact that she hadn’t called him a monster for leaving his friend. She hadn’t pulled away.
“We call them widow maker trees, the ones that fall when you least expect it. Normally they come after a fire, when you’re walking through a burned area and the trees are still weak. You think the damage is over but it’s not, and that’s when it gets you.
“Aidan always pressed on us the importance of looking up. No matter where the fire is coming from, always look up. I did finally see that glint of aluminum, when I turned him over. Scott must have stopped to look down so he could get out his fire shelter. He’d been looking down so he could save his life. And that must have been when the tree fell.”
He was crying now, but he didn’t care if she knew it. This was who he was. The good and all of the bad.
“I loved him like a brother,” he said. “And then I had to carry his body out of the burning embers and explain to his mother, his sister, his nieces and nephews, and everyone in our crew that I let him die.”
“Which is why you left L.A.?” Abbi asked.
“I can’t go back,” Tyler said. “Fighting fires is the only thing I know how to do, but I can’t be out there anymore. This position opened up and it’s the only chance I’ve got. No one’s going to hire a quitter who fucked up so badly at his last position. But my mentor pulled some strings to get me this job in Gold Mountain, and I can’t let it go to waste.”
Abbi pressed her palm to either side of his face and locked her eyes squarely with his. “You’re not a fuck-up,” she said. “You were in an impossible position in a dangerous place, and you made the best decisions you could. You supported Scott, you looked out for him, and when the worst happened, you still had his back. You’re a good man, Tyler. You did not let him die.”
How could it feel so awful to talk about what happened and still feel so good in her arms? How could he want to keep lying here, feeling her fingers in his hair, the press of her lips to his?
He knew more than anyone that life was short, that it was possible to think you had all the time in the world to spend with someone and then, too soon, realize you never got to say the things you meant. He knew he might never have a chance like this again.
“Abbi,” he said.
“What?”
But even as the words pressed on him, they wouldn’t come out.
“Tell me,” she said.
But he couldn’t
say it. He wasn’t even sure if it was true. Did he love her? Or did he just love this feeling, the fact of having someone here?
He didn’t deserve it—her hands in his hair, her lips on his cheek. This wasn’t supposed to be his reward.
She must have known that, too, because instead of holding him closer, she planted a soft kiss on his lips and said, “I think I should go.”
“Too much?” he asked, even as he was afraid of what she might say.
“No.” But her voice sounded small. Farther away than she’d been all morning. As far as she was that first night when she sprinted across the field, away from him.
“I shouldn’t have told you. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“It’s not that. It’s just…I’m late.”
She got out of bed and reached for her clothes. When she’d buttoned her pants and hooked on her bra, she came over to where he was sitting. He put his hands on her hips, and she bent down and kissed him.
“Let’s talk more about it later,” she said.
“Are we having a fight?” he asked.
“Of course not. I have to go to work, remember? As much as I know you need this firebreak, I still have my own job to do.”
He swatted her ass as she bent over to pick up her shirt off the floor.
“Don’t you think you’re overreacting about the spotted owl thing?” he said with a sigh, getting up to stretch. “An endangered species petition—it’s serious business. Especially when you consider the potential benefits to Gold Mountain of putting in this break. Don’t you want to protect the place you call home?”
She straightened and frowned at him. “I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what I’m trying to do. It’s a lot more important than what you’re aiming for, which is to have something to put on your resume before you bust out of here in a matter of weeks.”
“I guess I’ll call you later then,” he said dryly. Just so everyone in the office thinks we’re happy.
They’d both certainly found a way to kill the mood.
Make Me Want (Men of Gold Mountain) Page 12
