Inextinguishable Love: Firefighter and Interracial Romance

by Kathleen Bunker

  Harsh bangs struck the floor. Ethan and Mason jumped out of the basement. The floor broke, and I slipped down into the dark. I took out my phone and switched on its flash light. Panic gripped me, bones of animals were scattered all over the ground. I shined the flash light down on my legs where I felt something fleshy. I freaked out it was a dead body of a man. I gathered up some courage and searched the body for identity. I found a card in the body’s left pocket. I flashed the light on it. The corpse was the real officer from the US Forestry Department. It was clear that Ethan had killed him, hid him here and took his identity. Somehow I managed to pull myself out of the basement.

  I got out of the cabin but couldn’t find them. I looked around and found Mason, in his human form, was sitting near a tree with his head down. I approached him, sat near him and asked, “Where is Ethan?” He prodded his finger at my back. I turned around and freaked out, Ethan, in his werewolf form was hanging dead on a tree with a conical branch was pierced out from his heart.

  I wrapped grieving Mason in my arm. “I never wanted to kill my brother,” he moaned. “It’s okay, it’s not your fault” I comforted. “I don’t know where Ethan has hidden Evelyn,” he grieved. I was suddenly reminded of Mr. Murphy who met me earlier today and said, “I know who is responsible for my Buffy. I will make her pay for what he did to my poor dog.” It was possible that he had abducted Evelyn. “I may know where she is?” I said anxiously to Mason.

  *****

  Mason and I rushed toward the car. I drove to Mr. Murphy’s house. All the way down Primrose Path and Ridge Street, I was summing the last three weeks of my life. I was leading a silent, yes it was day to day doing same boring stuff, but a peaceful life. For five years I was alone and single, and I didn’t regret it. But when I chanced up on love I never thought two werewolves will fall for me. I had read stories of monsters, I have seen them in movies, but had never thought one day I will be riding with one.

  We reached Mr. Murphy’s house and tried calling him. We knocked the door, but he didn’t answer. We then broke into his home. We searched for him everywhere in the house but didn’t find any trace of him or Evelyn. Suddenly we heard a bang down in the floor. We searched for the basement door. We stepped down the stairs to the cellars and saw the silver werewolf, Evelyn, was tied to a chair with iron chains. At the table beside her were some used needles which were used to sedate her to unconsciousness. Mr. Murphy was holding an electric milling cutter and was steadily approaching Evelyn.

  Mason leaped on Mr. Murphy and hit his arm. The cutter fell from his hand. He pushed Mr. Murphy to the corner of the wall and rushed to free Evelyn. I ran toward Mr. Murphy and stopped him from acting further. He was astounded to see me. I explained everything to Mr. Murphy. I told him about Ethan, how he has been hiding in the woods and one day appeared in front of us disguising himself as a forest ranger. I also convinced him not to tell anyone about Mason and Evelyn. He asked about Buffy I said he was dead. Mr. Murphy grieved.

  ***

  The week passed and today is the feast day. The entire Breckenridge is ready for Oktoberfest. Mason had renovated my shop. The Store has never been so beautiful as it looks now. Mr. Murphy bought a new dog and named him “Buffy”, and he is as happy as he used to be. We all got on the streets had Stein and beers. Katie, Nancy, and Amelia did polka dance on Mr. Jefferson’s Oompah tunes. The whole town rejoiced. Later in the evening, Mason invited me for dinner at his home.

  I drove to Mason’s barn, Mason welcomed me inside. He had cooked the meal, so he boasted about it. Evelyn, Mason and I had dinner together. Evelyn looked sad, but it was her regular face. Mason said he had a surprise for me. I wondered what can it be. Mason blindfolded me with a ribbon and took me upstairs in his room. “Ready?” he muffled gently in my ears. I laughed wondering. Mason pushed me down from my shoulders making me sit on a chair. I rubbed my palm over the arms of the chair. It was the same chair Mason had shown in his warehouse. He leaned toward me and murmured in my ear, “It’s a token of love for my love.” He then pulled off the ribbon from my eyes. Mason cupped my face in his palm and gazed in my eyes. I felt shy and closed my eyes. He parted his legs over my knees and sat on my thighs. He lifted my face and kissed my lips. I kept my eyes closed while he loved me top to bottom. I felt like a strong beast crushed my body and quenched my soul. He muffled at my lips. “Hey, will you do me a favor.”

  “Yes,” I replied with passion.

  “Hide me in your heart so that no one could ever find me.”

  I slid my hand on his shirt and unbuttoned it. I leaned my face and kissed his heart and said, “As long as I remain in your heart, I won’t let you go away from my heart.” His eyes got filled with desire, and he pushed his hand right on my breast to feel my heart beats and wrapped his lips around mine.

  THE END

  Another bonus story is on the next page.

  Bonus Story 11 of 44

  Her Highland Love

  Description

  Beautiful, resourceful Aila lives in blatant distrust of men and road travel, a legacy from a devastating highway attack many years ago that claimed the lives of her family and left her severely injured.

  Now she lives alone on the outskirts of the quiet sleepy village of Reay, visited occasionally by obsessive Ross, a gusty laird with the highland regiments.

  One quiet morning, a Scottish mercenary turns up at her doorstep with terrifying news surrounding the murder of her family and a looming threat to her peaceful and uneventful life.

  It is a visit that forces Aila to confront years of suppressed, embittered emotions - and underneath it all, the grudging stirrings of unbridled sensuality.

  The fierce Scot in her won't go down without a fight, but she wonders about this ruggedly imposing stranger and the vulnerabilities he awakens in her.

  She wonders about the help he offers.

  Can she really trust him?

  *****

  Ye' knowin'

  Aila hurried homeward from the farm, her long skirt scooped up by the hem, as the first drops of moisture began pelting the earth. She imagined the despairing sigh of the whole village at her scandalous display of bare skin. But the whole village wasn’t there. She was virtually lost in her own world on the uninhabited outskirts of Reay, which was at least three miles from any semblance of civilization.

  By the time she got to her door, panting and laughing breathlessly, her jet-black hair was sleeked back with rain and her tartan shawl soaked. An avid onlooker at that moment would be struck by how her deep green eyes turned a radiant shade when she was excited, complementing the startling ruby redness of her full lips.

  She did not mind getting wet in the rain much. A girly fantasy of hers was dancing in ghillies in the rain to the shrill frantic wail of bagpipes.

  The smell of rain always stirred an old longing for her mother’s Arbroath smokie and colcannon, savored with a pint of dark ale out in the open overlooking Reay. Because highland air was a quintessential flavor itself, her father would explain.

  But tonight, the rain only brought an unfamiliar scent, not quite hidden under the mustiness of dampened yew leaves and rotted wood. If a person were to ask her to describe that scent, she wouldn’t be able to describe it with anything that her nose had ever experienced.

  Her mother, who would wake some nights to a stench akin to rancid flaxseed oil and then discover the mangled carcass of some stray animal the next morning, called it “ye’ knowin’.”

  But that night her family journeyed to Edinburgh, when English border reivers had swooped on their family carriage like ravenous hawks drawn to carrion, neither she nor her mother had smelled anything. Oh death, where was your stink?

  It was one of those cruel ironies of life she had made an uneasy peace with.

  When the MacLeans were robbed of cattle by—supposedly—the MacDonalds and the resulting conflict cascaded like a wild fire across the highlands, she smelled little but burning farms, burning houses and burning corpses on a daily basis.
It was about this period she moved to the outskirts of Reay accompanied by a maternal uncle.

  Sebastian was a retired Scottish warrior who had fought in the Hundred Years’ War as both a soldier and a mercenary and her mom once hinted that he was sort of a swick as well. His living with her was an arrangement that afforded her some protection from the occasional local marauders and persistent suitors while providing lodgings and food for him.

  He came toting a cache of most of his old weapons, more out of sentimental attachment than necessity. He would leave his room at dawn to go and practice dagger thrusts under the huge yew tree leading up to the house. Aila would join him, admiring the grace with which his arthritic fingers still wielded the dagger. One day he held out the dagger to her, smiling. “A yoong quine main learn tae protect herself.”

  That was when her dagger thrusting lessons began. She remembered his early morning cries of “Get aff yer erse, yer lyin' aroond the hoose like a store dug" to wake her. He never said much during practice but she came to recognize his grunts of approval or disapproval. In a few months, she had not only mastered the use of the biodag, but also a halbard effectively.

  One morning, she smelled something similar to crushed common myrtle. Later that day, Sebastian passed away during his mid-day sleep. It was then she not only got back “Ye knowin’”, but she deduced that the odd smells had a relationship with the events that happened afterwards. Later, she placed a bunch of myrtle flowers on his chest, as was the custom for the dead, and erected a cairn over him.

  The muffled clatter of hooves and the neigh of a horse outside scudded away her thoughts. Her fingers tightened around the grip of an old biodag above the fireplace, its warm coarseness comforting to her blistered palms, as a set of impatient knocks landed on the door.

  ‘Who is that, I pray?’

  Perhaps it was because of the rain but the visitor didn’t respond. The knocking intensified. She approached the door. Ross was the only male who had ever come up to the house, a lone stranger who had lost his way to Kinlochleven. It might be Ross, but by the sound of their hooves and if she wasn’t mistaken there were at least half a dozen horses out there. So this was what the “knowin’” was about this time.

  She opened the door with her left hand so her knife hand was hidden behind the door.

  It was indeed Ross. He stood soaking wet in a hooded bearskin coat with a poke slung over his left shoulder, his hulk filling the door way. A certain wild animal scent suddenly filled the room. His tiny pink lips parted in a fierce grin. The edge of his lips met a diagonal badly healed scar across his cheek so when he smiled it created a rather disconcerting appearance. This appearance was not softened by his grey slate eyes which no laughter or humor ever seemed to touch. “Awrite mah hen!”

  Behind him were about seven armed men waiting on their horses, which were laden with huge rope pokes and one wooden chest. The lightning flashed briefly and she noted a hostile looking fellow with lank hair framing a bald crown.

  ‘What in Saint Andrew’s name are you doing out here in the rain, Ross?’

  The man grinned fiercely. “Jist returnin' frae some wark ower at thurso.” He held out the poke. “An' thes is fur ye, mah hen.”

  “I thank you, Ross.” She peered at the poke dubiously. “But I’m hardly done with the last portion of cow you brought the last time. It will all go bad.”

  His work may have comprised robbing families of their cattle and by the look of the wooden chest, their gold. He was a laird who stood to inherit more land with the demise of his uncle so it may have all been done in reckless fun. The thought sickened her to the very depths of her belly.

  He chuckled, stretching the poke to her. “Weel hae a swatch first. thes is nae meat.”

  She said thank you and dropped it in one corner of the room without looking into it. Her movement revealed the biodag.

  “Plannin' tae stab me wi' 'at.” He sounded amused.

  “I’m still considering it.” She tossed the weapon on an oak stool. “You came all the way out here in this storm to give me a present?”

  “Yes, ye can pretend it was fur thes wee present.” He grinned. “Weel willnae ye swatch intae th' poke?”

  “Not until your shadow leaves my door,” she smiled, crossing her arms.

  “Willnae ye at leest invite me in?”

  “No, Ross.” She shook her head. “And I won’t leave your men in the rain even if I did invite you in.”

  He turned around as though surprised that indeed some people were waiting on horseback in the rain. “They ur loch rain an' fields ay corn in sprin', these ones,” he cackled. “Dornt fash yerse.”

  The Ross’ of this world took a mile when you gave them an inch, The last time she had let him take off his fur coat at her fireplace, he had wanted to undress her as well. Occasionally she longed for company but there was no companion in Ross.

  “I must prepare for bed now.”

  He appeared crestfallen. “Ye ken Ah loove ye.”

  She almost pitied him but then she thought: the border reivers who had punctured her father’s torso with dorlochis, the one who had plunged a halbard into her mother’s heart, laughing maniacally as they did had probably cried at a lady’s doorsteps before. Thaur was aye a wolf in th' sheep, her father would say. There was always a wolf in the sheep.

  She would argue, there was no sheep in Ross. This was a predator that lived by his nose and his teeth.

  “Ah wee marry ye, Aila,”’ he said. “Nae matter whit it takes.”

  In the cold darkness of the evening and storm, his words sounded like a threat.

  “Ah will see ye suin again mah hen,” he said, and tugged the tip of his bearskin hood. A devilish glint lit his eyes briefly as he added, “An' dornt ye bury thes gift loch th' lest a body. th' groonds hae got een.”

  A cold shiver ran down her back as she stood watching until he mounted his horse and the gang disappeared into the storm, the muffled pounding of the horses’ hooves receding with the distance. Only then did she shut the door and bar it. So, he had been spying on her? Had one of his men sniffing around the lake house?

  She’d actually buried the last present he’d brought over to her the next morning. Was the spy hiding all night or just happened to arrive at the same time she’d buried the item? Either way, the thought Ross had a spy or might be the spy himself was worrying.

  She wasn’t sure when, but she knew that a time was coming when Ross would grow more aggressive in his advances and she would fill the space between them with the blade of a halbard. And possibly his gut. There was no other outcome she could envisage.

  She emptied the contents of the poke directly into the fireplace without examining its contents. The smell of burning meat instantly filled the room and she spied the shiny smoothness of an organ before the fire engulfed it.

  Ye could expect little else from a wolf.

  Dinner was some leftover pork chops, vegetables and cider. Then she spread an old bearskin in front of the fire and lay down.

  Her final thoughts, as her eyelids yielded to slumber, was the unfamiliar smell that had come to her that morning. It had not left with Ross’ visit.

  *****

  The Man Out of Nowhere

  The day woke sluggishly, with a patch of sunlight peeking from behind swatches of gray clouds. Regardless the day promised to be sunny at some point.

  Aila had a breakfast of biscuits and gravy and then practiced her thrusting with the halbard and then the biodag from sunup until the sun ascended halfway to the middle of the sky.

  Her arms were leaden weights and her belly on fire with hunger as she trudged back to the house.

  The familiar rise of the house as one approached was a view that filled her with much melancholy. She recalled a time when she would return from the fields with her father and brother, and meet her mother outside milling corn for the cornbread at dinner, her tartan shawl wrapped protectively around her shoulders. She recalled her quiet but glad welcome, the warm fragrance
of cinnamon and liquorice oozing from her embrace. She found herself half-expecting to see the familiar outline bent over the grinding stone or smell of cornbread wafting deliciously from the house. After all these years.

  She approached a small lake somewhere behind the house framed by surrounding woods. This was where she usually bathed. Perhaps it was because the lake was what her father had particularly loved about the house. Or so he said, before paying a hefty sum for the house and six acres of surrounding land. During summer and sometimes during winter he would travel six miles on horseback to spend time alone in the house for over three days at a time. At other times, he would travel with the family to the lake house but never for long holidays. Whenever they asked their mother about his strange trips, she would smile and respond that their father was taking care of some business. But she never missed the look of apprehension that crossed her features whenever she explained. It was as though any mention of that house filled her with concern. Whatever bothered her about the house or her father’s trips never revealed itself. But whenever her father returned he seemed cheerful and their worries never spanned beyond his absence.

  Her moving to this house was due in part to her desire to be lost in that same mysterious air that her father donned whenever he returned from the outskirts. There was a quiet reassurance within the walls, in his old bearskin coats she often wore out and the pervading scent of pine wood. She had never been very close to her father, but he was a very kind man. As a member of the highland regiments he was almost always caught up in travels. Sometimes he was gone for half a year to a whole year. On his return, he would regale the family with stories of far reaching conquests in Europe and Africa. His gifts were often as generous as they were exotic. He had once brought back ivory and intricately carved gold ornaments from Asia for Mother.