Logan shuddered at the carnage on the suburban street. Both cars involved had lost control on their separate impacts. The first one had flipped over several times before slamming into a tree. The second one had mounted a gutter, hit two stationary cars in the street before ploughing into a third.
He glanced away from the screaming teenage girl who stank of booze. Her distress was emphasised by the crusted rivulets of blood down her face giving her an almost ghoulish look. Like some banshee in a horror movie.
Except she wasn’t.
She was a drunk fifteen-year-old in the driver’s seat of a stolen vehicle, now totally pulverised, badly pinned in while her three travelling companions lay dead, thrown around the inside of the car due to gross stupidity and a lack of seat belts.
And he had to cut her out.
Two teens from the other car, also stolen, had been ejected from their vehicle although had somehow miraculously lived. They’d been scooped up by paramedics and were being treated on scene. The driver was dead but the other passenger in the car had survived albeit in a somewhat critical condition.
His gaze fell on the real victim of this teenage stupidity. The twenty-four-year-old cyclist – a woman – who’d been struck by the first speeding car, tossed in the air into the path of the second speeding car. Witnesses, who had been out and about walking and playing and chatting with neighbours in the late afternoon on their quiet little street, said she’d landed, headfirst, driven straight into the ground. Her neck was broken, probably snapped at the instant of impact, before the second car had run straight over the top of her.
She lay lifeless under a white cellular blanket – her helmet unable to protect her neck from the spearing force of her impact. He could just make out the slight mound of her in between the legs of police who were surrounding her, talking and gathering evidence. Her mangled bicycle lay in the middle of the road where it had fallen, a police photographer taking snapshots of it.
He tried not to think about Bella – the same age as the dead woman when she too had been tossed off her bicycle. About how lucky she’d been. These last seven weeks with her had been the best of his life and he was so thankful for them.
Sure, there was no denying the nagging grief he felt over her memory loss. It had been like losing her all over again. And he still hadn’t quite gotten over the brief surge of dizzying hope he’d experienced when she’d greeted Flash by name. Somewhere deep inside he longed for that. He’d lost count of the number of nights he’d gone to sleep thinking – hoping, praying even – maybe tomorrow she’d wake up and remember him.
Them.
That it’d all come flooding back. That she’d remember everything. Even the bad.
But, that slight mound under the blanket reminded him, it could have been much worse. That she might not have made it through her accident at all and that was what he should be thankful for.
She was still here for him to love. Whether she remembered what they’d had before or not, he’d been given a second chance with her. Even if it meant starting from scratch.
The people who lived on this typical Australian suburban street stood on their footpaths looking around them clearly in shock. Some had pulled their kids away from the horror of it all at the beginning, the others watched silently, hands over their mouths. Some even wept for the stupid young people they didn’t know and for a neighbourhood that would never be the same ever again.
The street looked more like a crime scene right now. A dozen emergency vehicles – police, fire, and ambulance – were strewn along the length of it, their lights strobing into the early evening air and glittering in the broken glass that littered the road like some kind of grotesque disco.
Logan hated these scenes. He’d seen too many mangled cars and gruesome deaths. He just wanted to be home. With Bella. Instead of here, standing by while the paramedics stabilised the screaming girl before he cut her out. His gaze was constantly drawn to the unmoving shape beneath the blanket and the twisted frame of her bike and it was putting a real itch up his spine.
Give him a big nasty, vicious-sonofabitch factory fire belching black smoke and toxic chemicals and he was a happy little fireman. Attending traffic accidents like this was his least favourite thing to do. He’d rather be press ganged into inspection duties, travelling around to a variety of public venues, checking fire extinguishers and hoses and fire exits.
Hell, even school visits were preferable.
They weren’t exciting parts of the job by any stretch. Not like fighting a bushfire out west or smoke jumping in Montana, but it was better than a screaming teenager and a dead woman covered by a blanket in the middle of a road somewhere.
“You’re right now, Logan.”
Logan nodded at the paramedics as he and two others moved in to cut the door off the car with the hydraulic rescue equipment.
The end of his shift couldn’t come fast enough.
It was ten o’clock by the time he got home. Duncan was sprawled on the lounge watching tele but that wasn’t who Logan needed. He needed Bella. To hold her. To bury himself in her and assure himself that she really was alright.
“How was your shift?” Duncan asked as Logan nodded at him on his way to his bedroom.
“Accident,” he said, not breaking stride, not stopping to chat. “Drunk stupid kids. Four dead.”
Logan didn’t have to go into any detail for Duncan. Had Bella not been around, his brother would have gone and got him a beer and sat and listened to Logan rage about the total waste of human life.
But Bella was around and his brother knew without Logan having to say a word that she was all he needed right now.
She was sitting cross-legged in bed in his T-shirt, surrounded by papers, her laptop balanced on her knees. Flash dozed at the end of the bed. She glanced up with a smile as the door slid open. Flash, instantly awake, lifted his head and thumped his tail.
God, she was a sight for sore eyes.
His. She was his.
“Outside Flash,” he said.
Flash obeyed immediately, padding past his master, rewarded with a quick pat.
“Are you okay?” she asked with a frown.
Logan shook his head, shutting the door behind him before striding towards her, stopping only to toe his shoes off. By the time his first knee hit the bed, she’d scooped up the papers and placed them and her laptop on the bedside table and was opening her arms to him.
He didn’t say anything, just went into them, his arms circling her waist as he sprawled across the bed on his stomach, his head buried in her lap. She didn’t say anything either, just stroked her hand through his hair, her fingers ruffling through the short ends at his nape, before pressing into his hairline and kneading gently.
Goose bumps skated down his neck and across his shoulders. He shivered as the sensation streaked down his spine, his glutes squeezing tight. He kissed the patch of thigh his nose was pressed against aware of her hand sliding down the furrow of his spine to the small of his back, pulling his shirt out of his waistband then drawing it up and over his head.
Logan glanced at her as she pulled it free, balancing himself on his bent elbows. He saw compassion in her blue-green gaze and concern. But she wasn’t asking him for an explanation – not now. She was offering him solace.
He loved that she understood what he needed. She’d always known that, for some things, there weren’t words. And finding comfort in each other’s bodies was an acceptable form of communication.
His heart crashed against his ribcage suddenly feeling too big and full of emotion to be contained in his chest cavity. “I love you,” he said.
It was too soon and too impulsive and just plain crazy but it was the truth – it had always been the truth. He hadn’t ever stopped loving her. And his heart was fit to burst with it.
She smiled. “I love you too.”
He reached for her then, awkwardly half rising to his knees as his mouth found hers, fitting against hers, pushing her backwards with the sheer force of his urgency, his hands grabbing her ass, dragging her under him as he fought to get them both horizontal.
She opened her legs and he sank into the welcoming cradle of her pelvis, her palms smoothing down his back to his ass then around the front thrusting her hands between them to grope blindly at the button and fly of his trousers as his hands pushed under the hem of her T-shirt, pushed it up, dragging her underwear down past her knees.
Her hands delved into his Calvins and pulled his cock free, palming him up and down and he groaned, breaking off the kiss. “Christ,” he muttered, burying his face in her neck, his lips brushing the frantic flutter of the pulse at the base of her throat.
She guided his cock, her hands firm and sure, straight to the wet heat between her legs, notching the head at her entrance. Logan’s head spun, his breath coming in short, sharp pants. He was losing all sense of time and place as the world narrowed down to just him and her in the moment. The smell and the taste and the feel of her and the blind imperative to thrust.
She flexed her pelvis and the slick heat of her enveloped the plump head of his cock. He gasped as he looked down at her. “Condom.”
“No. Just you.”
Logan’s heart beat a little faster. He was way too turned on to be thinking straight about this. She had a contraceptive implant and they’d talked about their clean bills of sexual health before. But...
“I want to feel just you,” she said, her voice husky, her ankles locking tight around his ass.
Christ. Logan hadn’t thought his heart could go any faster or feel any fuller – he was wrong. He currently didn’t even know his own name but he knew he wanted that too.
Just him. Just her.
He thrust then, swallowing his groan and her gasp with his kiss, swallowing all their nonsensical utterings with his kisses as he thrust and thrust again, the slippery clamp of her around him tight and hot and perfect. He rocked into her over and over until his arms trembled and his back was slick with sweat and they were coming, hard and fast.
Stars popped and fizzed behind his closed eyes as her nails raked down his back and she chanted his name over and over and over.
The steady thump of his heartbeat was reassuring beneath Arabella’s ear. So was the solidness of his chest beneath her head, the even rise and fall of it and the warmth of his palm as it cupped the ball of her shoulder. He seemed calm and settled, all traces of their lovemaking frenzy long since oozed from his body.
And it had been lovemaking. Not fucking or screwing. It wasn’t anything so purely physical. Their emotions had been along for the ride. He loved her. And she loved him. And she had taken him into her body tonight to show him just how much.
She’d wanted the ultimate intimacy of no barriers between them. She’d wanted him to be closer to her than any other man. She’d wanted to express the depth and the breadth of her love in the only way she knew how.
With her body and his moving as one, nothing between them.
Something had happened to Logan tonight. She worried when he went on shift about the inherent danger of his job. Made him promise he’d be careful. He didn’t look hurt but something had obviously affected him. The turmoil etched on his face had been too awful to bear. His gaze had told her he’d needed her and she’d offered him what he’d wanted – her body – and she snuggled herself closer, continuing to offer him comfort.
“What happened?” she asked into the quiet around them, the sound of the television outside a muffled murmur.
His hand tensed slightly around her shoulder and for a moment or two she was worried he was going to clam up. But then his hand relaxed and he spoke. “A car accident.”
Arabella slid her hand to rest over the top of his heart, the steady thud a comforting touchstone. “Bad?”
It had to have been for Logan to have looked so devastated. She knew firefighters attended traffic accidents. She’d seen enough news footage in her life to know that. They’d probably attended hers for all she knew. But she hadn’t thought about that aspect of his job or the emotional impact of it on first responders. About the effects of witnessing firsthand the kind of carnage and trauma that was regularly flashed on televised news bulletins and how dangerous it could be to mental health.
“Two stolen cars, full of drunk, joyriding teenagers. Four fatalities.”
The grim news was startling. Poor Logan. No wonder he needed a bit of human comfort. “That’s terrible,” she murmured. “I’m so sorry.”
“It was awful. But what was worse was that one of the fatalities was a twenty-four-year-old woman, an innocent bystander, riding her bicycle home from work when she was struck by the car and killed instantly.”
Arabella’s pulse accelerated as she glanced up his pec at him. God – that was a little close. The man would have to be a professional automaton or a sociopath not to have a human reaction to that. “And you...”
He nodded. “I just kept thinking about you. And how similar it must have been to your accident scene. How close you’d come to lying under a blanket somewhere...” He squeezed her shoulder. “And how lucky you were. I’m just so grateful that you’re alive. I know you’re still confronting things that your accident took from you but at least you’re still here.”
“I am here,” she said because he looked like he wasn’t and she wanted to ground him in this bed with her, bring him back from whatever was giving his face that haunted look. She turned on her stomach and propped her chin on his chest so she could look into his face, make eye contact. “I’m fine. And I’m not going anywhere. Not now that I know you love me.”
The cleft in his chin winked at her as a slow smile spread over his face. He’d shaved before his shift so it was easily found and she traced the indent with her thumb as his fingers brushed a lazy pattern over her shoulder.
“Too soon?” he asked.
Arabella shook her head. “No.” It was just right.
“So it’s not crazy?”
“Oh, it’s totally bat shit crazy.” She gave a little laugh. “But...” She shrugged. “It is what it is.”
He lifted his hand to brush her fringe off her forehead and Arabella shut her eyes beneath the light, drugging touch.
“It was like that the first time around too. This crazy, headlong rush into each other. I think that’s our M.O.”
“How long before we said it back then? And who said it first?”
“It was at the end of the Contiki tour, at Heathrow, on our way back home.”
Arabella’s eyebrows practically hit her hairline. “Three weeks?”
He grinned. “Yup. And you said it first.”
It didn’t sound remotely like the sensible, measured girl she’d been in high school but Arabella knew if she’d felt even an iota of what she felt now there’d be no way she could have kept it to herself.
“And then I said move to Brisbane and live with me and you said yes.”
Arabella laughed and shook her head, his pec a soft pillow for her chin. “God. My parents must have freaked.”
His fingers momentarily stopped their lazy pattern but started up again quickly.
His grin was still there but it had slipped a bit. “They weren’t thrilled. But you were resolute.”
Arabella could just imagine. She might not remember a big chunk of her life but she could be determined when she put her mind to it. It had taken steel and guts to get through all her therapy, to defy the odds to talk, walk, and live again. “I’m impressed with myself.”
He chuckled. “You should be.”
She dropped a kiss on his pec, her gaze following the strong line of his jaw and the angular edge of his cheekbones. He was sexy and she loved him and she didn’t want to give this up.
Her pulse accelerated as a little more crazy took up residence in her heart. “I’ve been thinking...” Her finger still played with the cleft in his chin, running up and down then around his mouth then back to the cleft again. “What if I didn’t go back once the court case is done? What if I stayed on here in Brisbane? With you. If”—she smiled, confident in his feelings—“you’ll have me.”