Claimed By The Possessive Fireman: An Instalove Possessive Alpha Romance (A Man Who Knows What He Wants Book 187) Read online

  CONTENTS

  Claimed by the Possessive Fireman

  NEWSLETTER

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Epilogue

  Extended Epilogue

  NEWSLETTER

  A MAN WHO KNOWS WHAT HE WANTS

  BRATVA BEAR SHIFTERS

  LAIRDS & LADIES

  RUSSIAN UNDERWORLD

  IRISH WOLF SHIFTERS

  About the Author

  CLAIMED BY THE POSSESSIVE FIREMAN

  AN OLDER MAN YOUNGER WOMAN ROMANCE

  _______________________

  A MAN WHO KNOWS WHAT HE WANTS, 187

  FLORA FERRARI

  Copyright © 2020 by Raquel Quintanar Hernandez

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The following story contains mature themes, strong language and sexual situations. It is intended for mature readers.

  CLAIMED BY THE POSSESSIVE FIREMAN

  The intense, handsome six foot seven fireman saves me from the burning theater where I’m rehearsing for an amateur production. He strides into my life and throws me over his shoulder, but little do I guess that the heat is just about to begin.

  This older possessive silver fox has no problem claiming what’s his. He knows what he wants and how to take it. And, more and more, I’m starting to wonder if he wants to take me.

  But this masculine millionaire fireman has been best friends with my dad since they were kids. Even though I’m eighteen, my family still treats me like a freaking baby. I just know Dad will freak if he discovers the truth.

  But I can’t stop dreaming about how primal and savage this ripped fireman is, remembering how he carried me out of that blaze and right into the fire of our risky romance.

  I have dreams of progressing my acting career, but that doesn’t mean I want my life coated in drama and pain. But I can’t keep away, not from this dominating fiery alpha who knows how to leave me breathless and gasping for more.

  But, even if Dad approved, I’m a virgin and nowhere near as experienced as the women this dreamy savage must be used to. How the heck is that supposed so work?

  As if things weren’t complicated enough, somebody’s following me, and I think I know who. I thought my stalker had finally called it quits. But apparently not.

  With about a million reasons why this can’t work, will I ever get to be claimed by the possessive fireman?

  *Claimed by the Possessive Fireman is an insta-everything standalone instalove romance with a HEA, no cheating, and no cliffhanger.

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  CHAPTER ONE

  Dominic

  I lie down on the bench and reach up for the bar, the metal creaking under the strain of the weights secured onto the ends. My body is coated in a cool layer of sweat as my brothers workout or play cards or watch the game in different areas of the room, but nothing exists for me except for the bar, the strain of my body.

  I grab it and slowly lower it down to my chest, gritting my teeth as I feel all the muscles inside of me twitching and priming, and then I hold it close, breathing slowly. I don’t let it touch my chest, because that’d be cheating.

  I just hold it there.

  And keep holding it.

  Finally, after thirty seconds, I push it in a controlled motion back to the brackets and then continue with my sets, pumping it faster now, feeling everything in me go taut and powerful and ready to do serious work.

  “Hey, Dom,” Max calls over, his Boston-Irish voice out of place in the sweltering confines of this Miami station. “What’d you prefer, redheads or blondes?”

  “You’ll never get that out of him,” Sonny says, his voice a deep guttural grumble from where he sustained some smoke damage a few years ago. “He’s real secretive when it comes to his business with the ladies.”

  I sit up and smirk good-naturedly at the two men, sitting around a small table playing cards. Sonny is tall and dark skinned with brown eyes and a cheeky, almost boyish smile. Max is tall as well, but as thin as a beanpole and with a shock of red hair contrasting sharply with his snow-pale skin. But his thinness is a lie, because he’s got a wiry strength to him.

  “What’re you playing?” I ask.

  “See,” Sonny grins. “Always changing the subject. I bet you got enough down under to last a lifetime, eh? See, Max, that’s what happens when you take off to Australia for three years.”

  I chuckle deeply and wander over to the table, feigning like I’m about to smack Sonny across the jaw. He lifts his hands in mock horror and everybody laughs, and then I drop into the seat and play cards with them, but my mind drifts to what they said, about women.

  I could tell them the truth, could let that unusual fire spew like a geyser from my mouth, that I’ve been waiting all my life for the woman I’m going to claim when she enters my life.

  I’ll know her when I see her, I could tell them, but until then, I don’t see the point in just moving from woman to woman.

  I’m sure they’d laugh and shake their heads like I was joking if I told them that, because we’ve been out to bars and clubs together – retirements and birthdays and things like that – and they’ve seen the women that throw themselves at me.

  I feel a note of distaste rise in the back of my throat when the memories carve into my mind.

  The way they prostrated themselves, leaning forward, battering their eyes lashes, telling me in all but words – and sometimes in plain words – that if I wanted I could whisk them home and do whatever I wanted to their bodies, it doesn’t excite me.

  I want a woman who’s mine, just mine, all mine.

  I want a woman who I can shoot my hot seed into, watching as it sprouts into a child in her belly, a woman I can support and be with forever.

  But that has never happened to me and, at forty-two years old, the idea that it might never happen has settled like an uncomfortable truth over the surface of my life.

  I’m jolted from my thoughts when the alarm blares through the station, immediately leaping to my feet and letting the cards drop on the table. We move in the well-orchestrated chaos of the fire department, grabbing coats and gear and heading for the truck, not even having to talk, just gliding into position and waiting for another slice of hell to become our world.

  In the truck, I sit with the new kid, Craig. He must be only twenty and he looks even younger, like a small insect almost being stifled in the fire jacket, his helmet askew, his eyes with that wild, panicked look some of the new guys get.

  How the fuck did he
get through training?

  But training and the real thing are two very different realities, and perhaps the notion of actually facing the real thing will be too much for him.

  I sit down beside him as the truck rumbles to life and the sirens wail like mythical creatures. He’s got big green eyes and, despite his muscular build – a necessity in our business – he still seems tiny next to my six foot seven frame.

  “Craig,” I growl over the sound of the truck. “You won’t have to get out today. You’re here to learn. But you also need to remember that people’s lives rely on us having our shit together. Can you do that, kid? Can you get your shit together for me?”

  He blinks up at me and his eyes are watery, and, goddamn, he looks like a scared lost little lamb.

  Something like regret punches me in the chest when the realization that he won’t make it hits. Some people simply aren’t made of the right stuff.

  I clap him on the shoulder.

  “You’ll be alright,” I say.

  “Do you think so?” he whispers, sharp weakness infusing his words. “I’m trying, Dominic, I’m really trying.”

  I grit my teeth and suppress a groan of annoyance, because trying doesn’t mean much when there’s a family who needs you to brave smoke inhalation and searing heat and burns and all the rest of it to make sure they’re safe. In that situation, trying is the same as failing.

  But there’s no use in making this poor bastard feel worse than he already does, so I just clap him on the back again and sit with my head resting on the surface of the truck behind me, feeling the thrum of the road in my body.

  Strangely, an image comes to me, a vignette biting into my mind.

  It’s her, the woman I’ve been waiting for all my life, and even if I can’t make out any physical features, I can feel her essence, whatever the fuck that means. It’s like there’s this force calling out to me, perhaps her womb telling me it’s ready for everything I have to give, to start a life together.

  But then it’s gone.

  And it’s time to go to work.

  The fire has already spread over a large portion of the theater, a squat detached building with a rustic look about it that looks out of place against the Miami skyline. The flames lick and hiss and before I know it – after the hoses and the taming – it’s time for me to don my gear like a soldier in post-apocalyptic wayfarer and brave the remaining heat and smoke.

  I’m practiced at switching off my emotions as I hack away at the charred door, smashing an opening and striding into what was once the lobby, but is now a wasteland of burnt-out nothings and the detritus of destruction.

  I head toward the back, the place where we were told the dressing rooms would be. Max and Sonny move silently beside me, communicating via nods and gestures, ignoring our radios because it’s just too damn loud.

  Like a thousand hailstones falling at the same time.

  That’s how one of the men described the sound of flames crackling all around you once, and it’s true, it just never stops.

  Quiet screaming reaches my ears through my helmet the closer we get, and I pick up my pace, having to stop to throw aside smoldering beams more than once, the heat pressing through my gloves, or trying to.

  I unsheathe my axe, feeling for a moment like I’m on a beach a thousand years ago and I’m about to charge into battle, and then head for the door to the dressing room.

  “Stand back,” I roar. “Do you understand me? All of you. Back.”

  “Yes,” a small voice answers. “We’re safe.”

  With one mighty swing, I split the door right down the middle, the wood splintering and coughing like something alive, and then I stride into the room.

  And there she is.

  Am I hallucinating?

  There’s the woman I’ve been waiting forty-two long, long years for.

  She’s wreathed in smoke but I can see that her hair is sun-blonde, and her face is open and kind and her eyes are a startling, vivid green that remind me of long walks in luscious landscapes, and her body is the very definition of curvy, her hips child bearing and making me want to grab them, to feel the subtle gradations on her plus size perfect form.

  Of course, I don’t just stand there gaping. I’ve got work to do.

  But as me and my men move across the room I find myself having to tug my attention back to the task at hand, because it wants to gallop away and dream up a million different scenarios with this woman.

  As Max and Sonny approach the other person in the dressing room, I approach her, her beauty tugging at me, roaring at me to do something, and it takes every honed instinct I have to do my job instead of just ravishing her amidst the flames.

  I grab her and lift her up, feeling her body through my gloves, how thick and full and sexy it is.

  Then I carry her out, like a robot, focusing on my footsteps and nothing else, focusing on the path through the mayhem.

  When we break out onto the street, I immediately take her to the waiting ambulances, putting her down and turning away so that I don’t have to gaze into her face one more time.

  I turn to find Mark walking toward me, and have to blink away sunlight and smoke to convince my mind that my eyes aren’t lying.

  Mark Thompson, wearing a plaid shirt rolled up at the sleeves, big chunky steel toe capped boots telling me he just came from a construction site, his face so tan he’s almost orange and my best friend since I was just a kid.

  “Mark?” I mutter.

  “Thank you, thank you,” he blusters, gripping me by the arms. “Jesus, man, Jesus Christ, thank you so much.”

  “What’re you talking about?” I ask.

  He tilts his head at me as though wondering if the fire has damaged my senses.

  “You saved her.”

  “Who?”

  “You saved Lilah,” he breathes, gesturing to the woman behind me, the woman I’ve already mentally claimed as mine. “You saved my daughter.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Lilah

  I lie in the hospital bed with the sun blazing through the closed blinds, casting a glow across the room, my head on the pillow and my eyes closed. My eyelids are red with sun.

  I can feel Mom and Dad in the room, Dads boots shuffling around, the crisp sound when Mom turns the pages of her book.

  But I keep my eyes closed as my mind drifts back to the theater, to running lines, to rehearsing for the play – the play where, somehow, I’m the lead – and then everybody is screaming and a fire is blazing with stunning speed through the building.

  It's been a sweltering day and the building is old, Cassie shouldn’t have been burning candles backstage, and of course we all should’ve been way, way calmer.

  But the fire and its aftermath isn’t what continuously stabs at my mind.

  It’s the way Dominic Dallison looked as he stood in the doorframe, overfilling it, his body like something out of a fever dream as he stood six foot seven in his fireman’s uniform.

  His piercing brown eyes were barely visible with the smoke and the helmet, but I remember him from my childhood, before he went off to fight wildfires in Australia for three years.

  I know he’s tall and has salt and pepper hair, his jawline strong, his body bulging at the seams like his skin can barely contain his tight, well-practiced muscles, but not the muscles of a bodybuilder, inflated just for the sake of it.

  These are the muscles of a man who knows what he’s doing.

  I flinch when the door creaks open, the idea that it could be my stalker, Craig, lurching through me so that I’m forced to throw my eyes open just to be sure.

  Craig has been quiet lately and I try to convince myself that this is it, that he’s done playing his twisted games with me.

  It’s not Craig, though. It’s my brother.

  Finn strides across the room, a wiry twenty-one year old with a shock of ash blonde hair and a skinny face, his long arms covered in tattoos as he sinks down next to me.

  He looks at me with big brother
eyes even though I turned eighteen a few months ago.

  “You good, sis?” he asks.

  “Yes,” Mom says, with a sly smile. She wears about a bajillion bracelets and her hair is tied back with a Bohemian bandana. “Are you done pretending to be asleep?”

  “She wasn’t pretending,” Dad says, still in all his construction gear.

  “No,” Mom says, winking at me. “Of course she wasn’t.”

  I repress a giggle as my family settles around me, Finn with a severe grimace plastered across his thin lips.

  “Was it him?” he says. “Was it that stalker psycho?”

  “Jeez, Finn,” I snap, surprised by the fire in my voice. Fire. Ha ha. “Not everything is related to that. He hasn’t followed me in months now.”

  “What was it, then?”

  “One of the girls was burning a candle,” Dad says with a major eye roll. “She’s lucky I don’t sue her for almost killing your sister. What the hell was she thinking, burning candles in this weather?”

  “You’re not suing Cassie, Dad,” I groan with an eye roll of my own.

  “Why are you in bed?” Finn asks. “Are you sick?”

  “Can you please all stop fussing over me?” I say, laughing and sighing at the same time. “I’m fine, really. They’re just keeping me for observation to make sure there’s no smoke inhalation damage, which they’re ninety-nine percent sure is the case, but they had a case last year where they let somebody go early and it didn’t turn out well. So, you know, they’re legally obligated to keep me here. It’s no biggie.”

  “No biggie,” Finn repeats, shaking his head. “Can you believe this girl? No biggie. You almost died.”

  Another eye roll. And this one is nuclear. “I thought I was meant to be the drama queen, Finn?” I say.

  “Why are you so happy?” Finn asks suspiciously.

  “What?” I hiss. “I’m not allowed to put a brave face on?”

  Mom places a hand on Finn’s tattooed forearm. “She’s allowed to process things in her own way,” she says, ever the hippy. “The main thing right now is not to upset her.”