Emily Forbes - The Playboy Firefighter's Proposal

‘Come here and I’ll show you again just how perfect you are.’

He pulled her into his arms, sliding his hands under her T-shirt as he kissed her, leaving her head spinning. He hadn’t rejected her. He’d called her perfect. In wonder, she kissed him back while her body melted beneath his touch. Thoughts twirled in her mind until, out of the kaleidoscope of images and words, one truth emerged and flashed behind her closed lids: she was in love with Ned. She was in love with this gorgeous, thoughtful daredevil of a sweet-talking firefighter.

And although she was still scared, although it had been years since a man—or anyone except her sister—had seen her naked, the shock of her realisation was enough to jolt her into action as the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. He hadn’t rejected her—and from the way he was talking would it be so very foolish to start hoping this might be more than a one-night stand?

Emily Forbesis the pseudonym of two sisters who share both a passion for writing and a life-long love of reading. Beyond books and their families, their interests include cooking (food is a recurring theme in their books!), learning languages, playing the piano and netball, as well as an addiction to travel—armchair is fine, but anything involving a plane ticket is better. Home for both is South Australia, where they live three minutes apart with their husbands and four young children. With backgrounds in business administration, law, arts, clinical psychology and physiotherapy, they have worked in many areas. This past professional experience adds to their writing in many ways: legal dilemmas, psychological ordeals and business scandals are all intermeshed with the medical settings of their stories. And, since nothing could ever be as delicious as spending their days telling the stories of gorgeous heroes and spirited heroines, they are eternally grateful their mutual dream of writing for a living came true.

They would love you to visit and keep up to date with current news and future releases at the Medical™ Romance authors’ website: http://www.medicalromance.com/

Recent titles by the same author:

WEDDING AT PELICAN BEACH

THE SURGEON’S LONGED-FOR BRIDE

A MOTHER IN THE MAKING

EMERGENCY AT PELICAN BEACH

Dear Reader

Life is full of competing wants, needs and desires: having designs on that chocolate versus knowing we’ve vowed to resist temptation; wanting to stay home on the couch in our slippers when we’ve already accepted an invitation.

So it’s vital that sometimes life makes things easy, with no debate about what we should do. No internal struggle. No guilt. Just pleasure.

It’s in whole-hearted support of this Pleasure Principle that I give you Ned Kellaway, the charismatic firefighting hero of THE PLAYBOY FIREFIGHTER’S PROPOSAL.

If you’ve read my last book, EMERGENCY: WIFE NEEDED, you’ve already made Ned’s acquaintance. Ned is a shameless playboy with a life-is-for-the-living attitude, and—I admit it—I was his from the first. I just had to spend more time with him.

Ned was born with a thirst for all things action. He’s the team leader for the Fire Service’s Emergency Response team. Built to make any girl feel protected, he’s also scorching in the looks department. And, although no woman has been able to get inside his head, none are complaining about getting inside his bed. It’s going to take a pretty special woman to make him question his playboy lifestyle and get him to face his own past. Is Sarah Richardson, emergency consultant, the woman to do it?

So grab some chocolate, find somewhere cosy, turn the page and meet Ned Kellaway. And when you’re interrupted, as you surely will be, ignore all demands and put your nose back in the book! Trust me, the right to indulge in a book is definitely enshrined as a Pleasure Principle.

Love

Emily Forbes

BY

EMILY FORBES

www.millsandboon.co.uk

My darling littlest daughter, you came into our lives just as this book was being finished, so it’s only right this one is for you. We waited a long time for you, and the moment we saw you it all made sense: we were meant to be together. You have enriched our world in so many ways already, daily bringing us joy and sunshine and laughter. May the future shower you with every blessing and may you always know how very dear you are to all of us and how greatly you are loved.

From my heart to yours and back again,

Your loving Mummy

CHAPTER ONE

NED KELLAWAY scanned the racecourse from his vantage point in the grandstand, absorbing the impact as the disarray grew before his eyes. It was chaos, utter chaos, and far worse than he’d anticipated.

He was loving every minute of it.

He’d love it even more if he could get down there into the thick of things. Instead, when the emergency services and medical response teams arrived on site, he’d have to sit back and watch as they responded to the crisis. ‘Sit back and watch’were not words in his vocabulary.

His gaze swept the area again as he marvelled at how all his planning had successfully brought this to fruition. Littering the ground in front of him were dozens and dozens of prostrate bodies, some immobile, many struggling to their feet, most bloodied. Voices carried up to him on the breeze as people called out in pain. Just as many were lying silently.

The adrenalin coursing through his body made it an almost impossible feat to simply stand and observe. The mass casualties would require medical attention and there were fatalities, too, requiring a response of a different sort. He mentally checked off the list of things that needed to happen, including the task of overseeing the rollout of all the emergency response teams, a role that would normally be his since his skills in this area were second to none. Today, his expertise was exactly the reason why he wasn’t down there, taking control. He was needed for another task. But that didn’t mean he was finding it easy, sitting here, excluded from the action, prevented from taking control and restoring order, watching someone else do his job.

In the midst of the chaos was a fifty-seater bus, now containing considerably fewer than fifty seats, and this drew his focus. The bus’s left-hand side had been ripped open by the force of the explosion, the metal casing peeled back like a tin can, its interior exposed. Above the back wheels, where there should have been a row of seats, was a gaping hole. Luggage was strewn on the ground around the bus and lying amongst the bags were the injured passengers.

In the time Ned had taken to process the scene a few passengers had gathered their wits and were now moving between the prone figures. It wasn’t clear if they were trying to offer assistance, staggering about in shock or simply searching for people lost in the confusion.

To his right, a second bomb had detonated inside the bus terminal and more people were pouring out of the building, further congesting the space around the damaged bus. Visibility was compromised by smoke, a fact that would create another set of problems for the emergency teams.

The noise was increasing now as people realised what had happened. Voices rang out, yelling over the top of one another in an effort to be heard, growing louder and more desperate as the seconds ticked on.

Ned took a deep breath, anticipation of the imminent arrival of the emergency service vehicles sending more adrenalin through his system. He rubbed his hands over his head, leaving his short hair sticking up at all angles, as he cast his gaze across the scene once more.

And then he heard sirens. The bomb victims heard them too and ceased their yelling momentarily as they listened to confirm the sound.

The emergency personnel were on their way.

The first crews to arrive would be from the fire department. He glanced at the stopwatch in his hand, timing the response. Getting here quickly was the easy part—the real tests were all in front of the men and women hurtling towards the racecourse, with scant knowledge as to what they’d be facing on arrival.

But from where he was standing, having to watch was a hundred times harder than dealing with disaster hands on.

Sarah stood a couple of rows behind the others. She needed the extra height and it was the only way to get it since stiletto heels weren’t an option in her line of work. If ever she was keen for a view, it was today, to watch the planned event unfold. With her clipboard in one hand and a pen in the other, she stood rocking on her heels on the top step, clicking the pen on and off as she watched the scene below. Most of the bomb victims were milling around in a dazed manner. It wasn’t easy for her as a trained emergency doctor to sit back and observe but today that’s what her job was. As part of the team who’d put this training exercise together, it was her role to instruct the medical members of the first responder unit, those men and women who were the first emergency personnel on the scene at any disasters classed as CBR—chemical, biological or radiological—incidents.

And there was no use pretending she wasn’t just as aware of Ned Kellaway. It didn’t escape her notice that he, like her, had tilted his head a touch to the side as the sirens became audible. It didn’t escape her notice that he was as focused, professional and in control as she’d have expected from the man she’d come to know a little over these last weeks as they’d worked together to bring today to fruition. And it didn’t escape her notice that, despite all this, he was as breathtakingly charismatic as ever. If anything, these surroundings only added to his many attractions. It must be the whole men-in-uniform thing, she told herself, so as not to be too badly distracted from the training simulation.

It was what they were here for, after all. The moment of truth. After weeks of planning, they were about to see how the teams performed. The sense of excitement was mixed with tense anxiety in case any of them fell below standard, a guaranteed result of the day. Which team would prove to be the weakest link? Glancing along the rows below her at the people she’d worked with intensively she saw Lucas, from the police force, and Neill, from the State Emergency Services, were deep in discussion. Angie, the liaison officer for the ambulance service, was standing slightly apart, seemingly focused on scanning the arena below. They all had to be taut with expectation but she could see no outward signs. Hopefully her own tumult of feelings was similarly veiled.

A few policemen were already on site but larger numbers of police and paramedics would follow the fire department. If the disaster was on a large enough scale doctors would be called to the scene from the city hospitals’ emergency departments. That would happen here. Soon.

Today’s disaster was large-scale. It had been planned that way.

The fire department would be responsible for controlling the situation and her team would be under their command.

Thinking of the fire department inevitably bought her attention back to the man who, in a real-life situation, would most likely be the incident controller.

Ned Kellaway. A station officer with the Metropolitan Fire Service, he was currently the man in charge of the first responder unit, which included all the emergency service departments as well as the medicos.