McKenzie, Cooper - Daria's Heroes [Men Out of Uniform 1] (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour)

Men Out of Uniform 1

COOPER MCKENZIE

Copyright © 2011

Chapter 1

Daria Tate pushed her way through the crowd of neighbors while trying not to scream in frustration. She moved past the yellow caution tape then continued forward until the wall of heat stopped her. She stared in stunned disbelief.

Yellow, blue, and orange flames totally engulfed the historic two-story house. Her home of the last eight years was burning to the ground, and there was not a damn thing she could do about it. She had only been gone four hours for the final exam of the EMT class Mrs. Stone had blackmailed her into taking.

She knew the old woman had not gotten out. She could not have, not without Daria’s strong arm to aid her.

“Miss, you’ve got to move back.” A firefighter in tan and red turnouts stepped between her and the fire.

“That’s my home,” Daria said. She was shocked that she could speak without screaming that her entire life was going up in flames just a dozen yards away from where they stood.

She turned to the tall, powerfully built man who did not look much older than her own twenty-four years. He wore a hat that read Lieutenant. Was he in charge of this chaos?

“Did anyone else live there?” the man asked. He took her arm and gently led her to the other side of the street. “Was anyone home?”

Daria nodded. “Mrs. Stone and Charlie.”

“Charlie?”

“Mrs. Stone’s cat,” Daria answered, though she kept her gaze locked on the hellish scene that used to be her house. The best home she had ever lived in.

The firefighters trampled the flowerbeds as they dragged hoses across the grass to fight a battle they could not win. The hundred-year-old house was too far gone to be saved. Daria winced when half the roof collapsed.

The man beside spoke into a radio clipped to his shoulder. She heard him shift the battle from saving her house to containing it so that the entire neighborhood did not go up in flames.

Two crews of men on hoses remained focused on battling the raging fire while others shifted their attentions to soak the sides of the neighboring houses. Thankfully, the high winds they had experienced all day had died to nothing when the sun set, but that did little to console Daria.

Mrs. Stone, her boss, best friend, and fairy godmother, was gone.

“Excuse me? Who’s Charlie?”

Daria shook her head to clear her thoughts. “Charlie was the cat. I guess…I guess…excuse me.”

Before he could stop her, Daria walked away. After pushing her way past two police officers and the growing crowd of neighbors, she kept going. Half a block away, a firefighter who looked like he should still be in high school stood guard over the hydrant supplying water to fight the fire.

She stopped to ask the only question she could think of. “Which shift is working today?”

“C shift,” he answered without hesitation, his voice deep and raspy as if he had already inhaled too much smoke during his short career.

Daria nodded. “Thank you,” she said before walking on.

If C shift was working, that meant Roman and Gage were sleeping soundly in their bed across town. They would not hear about the fire until morning unless they stayed up to watch the late news. She should have asked which shift worked tomorrow, but it did not matter. Someone would tell them about the fire.

After all, Mrs. Stone had been their savior as well, fighting the system to take them in as teenage foster children as she had Daria. Even after they had aged out of the system, the retired woman continued to mother, nag, and guide them.

Maybe by the time they tracked her down tomorrow she would have figured out a new plan for survival. Right now, her only option was to move deep enough into the Croatan National Forest that the rangers would not be able to find her and arrest her for being homeless on public lands.

When she reached her little red car parked under a “No Parking” sign, she did not climb in and drive away. She could not. She had a quarter tank of gas and nowhere to go. Except for her notebook computer, purse, and the clothes on her back, she had nothing. Everything else was ash by now.

She stared at her little car and could not help but smile. Mrs. Stone had helped her car shop and then find financing for the car. The little car was cute and energy efficient, but hardly suitable to turn into a long-term home, and who knew how long it would take to find a new job and rebuild her life. There were not that many live-in companion slash secretary jobs available in New Bern, North Carolina.

What the hell was she going to do?

Too bad she did not have the number for Heroes ’R Us or she would call and place an order for a man to rescue her. Tall, dark, and handsome with a strong, alpha-male personality would be her first choice. Dominant in bed with a creative sexy side might be asking for too much, but a girl could always hope.

Daria laughed, the sound startling her with its sad harshness. Mrs. Stone would be horrified. After eight years of dealing with the seventy-eight-year-old woman, she had built an inner core of strength that would see her through this. Mrs. Stone would have smacked her if Daria blindly kowtowed to the wrong man, no matter how desperate her situation, but her caregiver’s soul made it impossible to say no when someone said they needed her.

Mrs. Stone would be disappointed that Daria wished someone would step in and deal with life while Daria worked her way through the pain that hovered just outside the gray fog. If only she could talk to Mrs. Stone…

“But she’s dead,” Daria mentioned offhandedly to the bear statue dressed as a pirate as she walked by. “Mrs. Stone is dead.”

The statue remained silent as she continued down the sidewalk, but that did not matter. Daria would not have heard him even if he had spoken. The gray fog of shock settled fully around her, protecting her from the harsh realities of life and death that she would have to face come morning.

* * * *

Roman Foster froze when the phone rang. His gut clenched with the intuitive warning he always felt when Daria was pained or in trouble. No matter how much he wanted to ignore the gut feeling, he had to answer. It did not matter that only a few strokes separated him from blessed release. Daria would always come first.

Locking his jaw, he pulled his cock from the man beneath him who met every thrust with a writhing wiggle of his hips. “Bring me the phone.”

“Now?” Gage Mulligan stared at him, shocked amazement causing him to question his Master.

Roman lifted one eyebrow and met his slave’s gaze. Gage’s eyes widened when he realized what he had done. A microsecond later, he scrambled across the bed and grabbed the phone.

“I’m sorry, Master,” he whispered to the mattress as he handed over the phone. “Please forgive me.”

“We’ll discuss it later,” Roman said as he pushed the code to answer the phone and put it on speaker. “Foster. What’s going on?”

“Roman, it’s Kelso. Mrs. Stone’s house just burnt to the ground. A total loss, and I think Mrs. Stone and Charlie were inside.” He sounded on the verge of tears.

Kelso was another one of Mrs. Stone’s “kids.” One of the dozens she plucked out of the foster care system over her nearly fifty years as a foster mother. Kelso was now forty and a captain with C shift. When Roman and Gage joined the department, first as volunteers and then paid firefighters, he had taken them under his wing and mentored them even though they were assigned to A shift.

Mrs. Stone took in the children everyone else gave up on for one reason or another. It did not matter whether they were troublemakers, as he and Gage had been, or rescued from a troubled home like Daria. No one ever figured out how she chose the children she brought into her home, but with each one she worked magic. She turned bad attitudes around, built up shattered self-esteem, and encouraged learning. Every one of her kids had finished high school and gone to college or trade school. Each one had grown into a productive member of society. The joke around town was that Mrs. Stone’s kids filled so many public service positions that the woman could take over Craven County if she wanted.

Roman attributed the fact that he was not in jail to Mrs. Stone. He also gave her credit for allowing him and Gage to figure out they were monogamous bisexuals. His need to dominate and Gage’s desire to submit, sexually and otherwise, was a discovery they had never shared with her.

Staring at Gage, Roman swallowed hard to keep his own pain at bay. Gage’s sky blue eyes filled with unshed tears as he dealt with his own shock. Then Gage leaned in and wrapped himself around Roman’s middle.

“What about Daria?” Gage asked in a voice choked with emotion.

Roman’s gut clenched and heart tightened until he could barely breathe. Only Gage’s touch kept Roman from screaming with his pain.

“Riley said that he talked to a young woman who said she lived in the house. He walked her to the barrier, and she then disappeared. Daria’s car is parked on Front Street near the traffic circle, but she’s nowhere to be found.”

“We’ll be there in ten.” Roman stared deep into his slave’s eyes as he clicked the phone off and tossed it to the bed out of the way.

Instead of wilting at the shocking news, his cock had remained painfully hard and throbbing. There was no way he could leave this bed before he got relief.

“Master?” Gage asked, looking up at him.

“Hands and knees, ass to me,” Roman ordered, needing to find comfort in his slave’s ass.

As soon as Gage was in place, he guided his cock back into the man’s warm, slicked up, and stretched back hole. Both men sighed as he slid all the way in on the first stroke.

“Brace yourself, pet. It’s going to be hard and fast.”

“Yes, please, Master,” Gage moaned.

Roman said a silent thank you for his partner. Though Gage was six inches taller and outweighed him by nearly forty pounds of muscle, he was also the kindest, gentlest, most giving soul Roman had ever met. Since the moment they met in the principal’s office as eleven-year-old troublemakers, Gage had never questioned Roman’s lead. He followed willingly, whether they raced into a fire to rescue someone or entered into the Master/slave BDSM lifestyle they now lived on a daily basis.

“You have about thirty seconds to get yourself off,” Roman warned as his balls began to draw up and clench. He began to piston in and out of his partner, best friend, lover, and slave with increased power and speed. “Use your hand if you have to.”

Gage groaned in response as he moved in counterpoint to Roman’s thrusting hips. Three full strokes and Roman’s arousal surged back to the pre-phone call’s ball-twisting, spine-tingling level of impending release.

Another half dozen strokes and he felt his climax wash over him. “Now, pet. Come with me now,” Roman ordered as he shoved even deeper twice more before shooting his seed deep into his slave’s ass.

Half a second later, Gage cried out, his release spraying across the sheet beneath him. When tension finally relaxed its hold on him, Roman dropped forward to rest his forehead in the middle of Gage’s back. He wrapped his arms around his man’s middle and hugged him tight. Gage shifted his weight so he could pat Roman’s arms.

As soon as he could move again, Roman eased from his big man’s ass. “You have three minutes to clean up and get dressed,” he said as he rolled off the bed and headed to the bathroom. “We’ve got to find Daria.”

By the time Roman cleaned himself up and grabbed his jeans from the floor where he had dropped them earlier, Gage was smoothing down one of his T-shirts that identified him as a member of the department. Roman finished dressing as Gage took the spunk-covered sheets off the bed. Reaching into his top drawer, Roman pulled out the spare set of keys to Daria’s car that Mrs. Stone had given them.

Six months earlier, just days after Daria had bought her new little car, the old woman slipped him the spare set of keys and gave him
that look.
The one that said, “This is between us so keep your mouth shut.”

“I’ll put fresh ones on when we get back,” Gage said when Roman looked at him with one eyebrow raised in query.

Roman followed him to the kitchen where Gage shoved the sheets into the washing machine. After adding soap, he started the machine.

“What are we going to do when we find her?”

“We’re going to bring our girl home where she belongs. We’ll deal with the rest tomorrow. Question is where do we start looking?”