The Fireman's Feisty BBW by Ella Roane

Author:Ella Roane [Roane, Ella]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-12-15T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

Stella

“I found it!” my six-year-old niece Samantha cries from somewhere outside my childhood bedroom. “I found your wedding veil!”

I’m standing in front of a wood-framed, full-length mirror, and I’m dressed head to toe in an antique lace wedding gown. It’s beautiful. I’m beautiful. The sun filtering through the window is gentle. The day is perfect.

Yet…

The sound of Samantha’s stomping run reaches my ears before she comes into view, reflected in the mirror. She’s got my delicate veil held triumphantly and proudly out in front of her.

I turn to face her just in time to see her trip face first. The girl catches airtime. Panic has it happening for me in slow motion. Samantha is fine, but when she stands back up and holds the veil up in front of her, the handcrafted lace is ripped nearly in half.

I hurry forward and grab the lace, hoping it can be fixed, but my fingers close around a newspaper. It has a picture of Brad and me. The tear goes through the picture, ripping the two of us in half. Not separate, but in half, as if a magician’s saw trick went very, very wrong.

There’s a headline above the picture. It reads, “Man with eight wives adds ninth!”

My heart drops into my stomach. My mouth opens to cry out, but the sound that comes out is an annoying trill-like bleep. I open my mouth to try again. More bleeping. I try to yell, but all I manage is…

Bleep. Bleep. Bleep.

My hand starts slapping around next to my head before my mind figures out what my body is doing. It finally sinks in. The alarm on my phone is going off.

No no no no no… I just went to bed!

It feels as though no time at all has past.

That’s when the next layer of awareness inside my head sparks. It’s not my alarm clock. It’s my phone’s ring tone, but not just any ring tone. It’s the one I assigned to my partner, Marcus.

I push through the remaining cobwebs of sleep, get the phone to my ear, and mumble as intelligibly as I can.

“Yeah, what?” I sound terser than I feel. I’m worried, not upset. Thankfully, Marcus isn’t put off by my gruffness.

“Finally! We gotta get in to work.”

“Huh? What’s wrong?” I wake up a little more as my adrenaline surges. My mind fills with scenarios that could trigger extra hands being called in. A massive pileup on the interstate. A plane crash. A bomb in a crowded location. Images of carnage flash inside my head.

“Rubin and Granier’s rig crashed.”

“Was anybody in it?” I know that Marcus will understand what I’m asking.

“No, Rubin and Granier were heading to a call. No passengers.”

I blow out a breath, relieved. “They okay?”

“They will be. Minor scrapes and bruises. Rubin got a good knock to the head. Anyway, we’re getting tapped to fill in for them. How soon can you make it?”

I do some mental math before answering, then say, “Thirty-five.”

“See ya there, partner.”

I get to work in thirty-two minutes instead of thirty-five.

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