Fire at Dusk: The Firefighters of Darling Bay (2 page)

Damn it. He’d pretty much planned on never seeing her again, and now that she was in town, and he knew he was going to have to, he’d planned on just trying to stay away from her.

Instead? He’d stepped right into the friend zone. She’d grabbed him one morning at Mabel’s Cafe and bought him a cruller. Bought
him
a cruller. Wouldn’t even let him buy her a coffee.

If he could just get her out of his system, once, for good…

What would that be like?

How would it feel to go on a date with a nice woman he didn’t compare to Samantha? Maybe he could finally make a go of it with someone, someone he could introduce to his Gramma Maureen, the woman who’d raised him. Someone he could settle down and fall in love with, someone he could have those babies everyone else was having. Hank dreamed of kids, a passel of them, running around the house, filling it with noise and dirt and rambunctiousness.

He’d just never been able to picture anyone to have them with. Anyone that didn’t look like Samantha, that was. Every girl of his dreams that he imagined had that same thick brown hair hanging to her mid-back, each one had those sparkling green eyes and that nose that slanted upward, right at the very tip. Every dream girl had her figure, too: just right, not too slim, with—let’s face it—a rack that just wouldn’t quit.

Three women exited the Darling Bay Community Center chattering excitedly about the drama of Jim Hinds hitting the dirt. One smiled up at him, and he smiled back, his teeth clenched. Hopefully Samantha had a lot to do inside and wouldn’t come out till they’d left. She probably needed to put whatever they worked with away, and probably had to close windows and doors and set the alarm…

No such luck.

Samantha waved at him cheerfully as she came out of the building.

“Hank! I’m so glad you were on the engine that came to help Jim!” She stood at the foot of the open door and looked up at him. “Where are the other guys? Can I come up?” She started climbing the steps before he answered, leaving him to scramble backward in surprise.

“Whoa,” was the only thing he could think of to say.

CHAPTER THREE

“WHAT?” SHE PULLED back. The way Samantha barreled forward, Hank knew she was probably used to having to self-correct. “I’m not supposed to be up here?

Not technically, no. She wasn’t. The only people allowed on board were either paid by the Darling Bay Fire Department or specially cleared for ride-alongs. If Chief Barger rolled by and looked up to see a citizen in one of his rigs? Heads would roll, and the first head spinning would be Hank’s.

But instead of telling Samantha Rowe that she couldn’t climb up, Hank reached a hand down to help pull her up. He felt that stupid grin cross his face, the one he always got when she was anywhere around.
Dummy.
“Come on. Watch your head there.” He pointed her to the spare jumpseat. “Are you okay?”

“That was terrible! So scary!” she said, leaning forward so she could rest her elbows on her knees. For a moment, he forgot she was talking about Jim Hinds and thought she was talking about the climb up. She’d always done that to him—confused him until he didn’t know what was up or down. Her hair, that wonderful brown waterfall, fell forward and, for a moment, hid her eyes. Was she crying? Hank felt two simultaneous urges: to leap forward and wrap his arms around her and to throw himself out of the rig. No
way
was he worrying about her again. No way.

Samantha looked up at him, but instead of tears, her bright green eyes were sparkling with excitement. “That was
amazing
, what you did.”

They really hadn’t done much. They’d assessed Jim and strapped him to a gurney. His pulse on the 12-lead was strong enough that they didn’t even go code three. “Nah.”

She laughed, that sound as pretty and sweet as whatever light scent she was wearing, the scent that Coin with his dog’s nose would be able to pick up as soon as he climbed back on board. “You saved a man’s life.”

Saving lives was what they did. And Jim hadn’t been a save so much as a push to the hospital where he definitely needed to be seen. Something was wrong with the guy, but nothing immediate. “He’ll be fine. He’ll be home tonight, nursing those bruises that got put on him by your group of aggressive women. What were you doing to him in there?”

Samantha flapped her hand. “Ah, you know. Beatin’ the tar out of him. Every girl’s gotta learn how sometime.”

“It looked like you were killing him.”

“No, it didn’t! Did you see how well he was suited up?”

“It wasn’t easy to get through all that padding to get the leads on, so yeah. But did you see that bruise on his right arm?”

Samantha looked a little guilty. “It’s possible that Myra Tenbottom got a little carried away with her kicking. But that just means she was
really
into it.”

Hank straightened his legs. The hardest thing about being the firefighter in the back of the rig was that it wasn’t big enough to fully stretch out. Right now while the door was still open was the ideal time to do it. “So, what is it that you do in there, anyway?”

“I teach women how to defend themselves against would-be attackers.”

“That’s great.”

Samantha looked surprised. “Really?”

“Of course.”

“The reaction I’ve gotten in this town doesn’t always go that way.”

Darling Bay could be a little provincial, but… “What do you mean?”

Samantha looked out the small window as if looking for someone. “Men usually wonder out loud who it is we’re going to beat up.” She made air quotes around the last two words. “I always tell them that if they’re that worried about it, maybe they shouldn’t be around the women that train at Daring Darling.”

Hank nodded. It was a good answer. “I like it. What about women?”

“I get one of two responses. Either they say how cool it sounds and how much they want their niece, sister, mother, and aunt to take it, or I get silence.”

He filled in the blank in his mind. “That’s what you don’t want to get.”

“Yeah. That means it’s too late, and they should have already known what to do in the past.”

“In Darling Bay?”

“Everywhere. In every town. One in five women will survive rape or attempted rape, and ninety-seven percent of rapists won’t ever stay a night in jail.”

“Well, heck.” Hank stretched out his hands, looking at the knuckles. “I hate that so much I can’t even stand it.”

“Well, yeah.”

“What can I do to help?”

“What?” She sounded startled.

“People have to ask you that.”

“Strangely enough, no.”

“How long have you been doing it?” Hank had been seeing the flyers up around town for at least the last four months—Daring Darling Defense, a silhouette of a woman standing proudly upright in front of a darkened door.

“Seventeen weeks.” Samantha sounded proud. “But it’s going really well.”

“Until you knocked out your attacker.”

Samantha barked a short laugh. “Yeah.
Crap
. He’ll be back. Right?” Her eyes were worried. “Right?”

“Maybe?” Hank hated to lie, even when he should.

“But you don’t think so?”

“A guy with that coloring?”

“You mean pink and white?”

“He left out of here gray. That’s not a good sign for either his heart or his lungs. He might be out a while.”

Samantha pulled up her legs and wrapped her arms around them. “No. I need him.”

“He’s your only guy?”

“I have another one, Wally, but he’s so skinny that the women just toss him around like a teacup.”

“Wally Atkins? Isn’t he over sixty?”

She looked chagrined. “Well, it’s pretty easy for the more advanced to block him.”

“Block him? They’ll kill him.”

“I know.” She sighed, blowing a breath out. A brown curl swung next to her face and Hank tried not to notice how her chest rose in her T-shirt with each breath. That rack of hers had only gotten better with time. “I need to come up with a better plan.”

“I’ll do it.” Hank knew as soon as he said it that he wanted it. He wanted to help. To save her. Okay, to save her business. But wasn’t that kind of similar? Even while his inner voice told him he was just falling into the same old pattern, he said, “I’ll help. If you want me to.”

“You’d train to be an attacker?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you have any idea what that entails?”

“Beyond being beaten up by a bunch of angry women? No.”

“First of all,” she raised one finger, “you’ll have to realize that it’s not a bunch of angry women. It’s a bunch of women appropriating their much-deserved autonomy, realizing that they don’t have to rely on a man to take care of them. It’s a bunch of women figuring out they’re as strong as or stronger than many men, and that they can learn how to use their bodies to their fullest potential in terms of protection.”

“That sounds a lot better.”

“And two, you’ll have to learn how to wear the suit and come at a woman.” She made a stabbing motion at the bridge of her nose as if she was pushing invisible glasses back up.

“I can do that.”

“Can you?”

Hank rubbed his face. He wanted to. He shouldn’t want to. He should just stay out of Samantha Rowe’s way. For his own sake. “Yes.”

“What if I came at you right now?”

“Huh?”

“What if I tried to hit you? Would you even be able to fend me off, let alone push me to the floor or against a wall?”

The unbidden image of him pushing her against the door of the engine, his lips on hers, filled his mind.

Samantha came off her seat and launched herself at him, her arm swinging. She stopped just before her fist made contact with his cheek. Hank scrambled sideways and almost fell out of the open door of the rig. Holding on with one hand, his foot twisted on the outer step, he took a quick look around to see if anyone had seen his more-than-ungraceful lurch from the seat.

“No,” said Samantha, folding herself back onto her seat.

“No, what?” Hank pretended he’d been making a move to check the radio in the front. He turned it off and back on, waiting for the power-up beeping to stop before he said, “Was that a test?”

“You failed.”

“What? Because of my lightning-fast reflexes?”

“Because you didn’t come at me.”

“Hey, now.”

“You have to be able to come at a woman. With no holds barred. You can’t be afraid to hurt her.”

“Um. I
would
be afraid to hurt her. I’m bigger and stronger than ninety percent of the women I saw coming out of the studio, and Greta Wagner doesn’t count—she’s a professional bodybuilder.”

Samantha looked startled. “I
knew
she was stronger than she was letting on. But that’s not what I’m talking about. What you’re training them to do is to feel a man’s strength, the force of someone coming at them with all their might, and then getting it done anyway. Fighting back. And winning.”

“What if they don’t win? How do you keep them safe so that your attacker doesn’t hurt them?”

She shot him a quick, amused look. “Oh, yeah. You’re going to be fun to train. Are you sure about this? You think you can handle it?”

Handle being around Samantha Rowe? For hours and hours? No way could he handle it. He didn’t
want
to handle it. But he found himself nodding anyway. And if he got to help one woman feel safer as a result, he could call that a well-spent day.

“Good,” she said. “Are you off-duty tomorrow?”

He nodded again, dumbly.

“Come by the center at nine?”

Hank said, “I’ll be there.”

Boy howdy, would he ever. And damn it, just like that, the fire was back in him when he thought of Samantha Rowe. The years he’d spent getting over her were gone up in a puff of smoke that smelled like flowery shampoo.

He didn’t even want those years back. When it came right down to it, he didn’t mind as much as he should. When Tox and Coin climbed back onboard, Coin flinging two pizzas onto the spare seat so recently vacated by Samantha Rowe’s delicious backside, he didn’t even care that they’d bought pepperoni again, instead of the sausage he preferred.

It was all good.

He was going to see Samantha Rowe tomorrow. And maybe, just maybe, get to tackle the heck out of her and not get in trouble for it.

CHAPTER FOUR

SAMANTHA BROUGHT INSIDE the bag of lemons she’d just picked from her sister Grace’s backyard tree.

“I got twenty. And man, do some of them look funny. You have some lemons out there that have screaming little sour faces, did you know that? Is that because it’s winter or something?”

Her sister smiled at her. “I forgot to rein you in. Sorry. I was just going to make a little lemonade. Five would have done.”

“Hand me the squeezer-thingie. We’ll just make a crap-ton.”

“Is that the technical measurement?”

“Yep,” said Samantha. “I know this from when I worked on the swamp boat in Louisiana.”

Grace bumped her hip, moving her from in front of the oven where an apple-cinnamon pie was about to come out. “I don’t get what a boat in a swamp has to do with lemons.”

Samantha plunked all the lemons from the bag into the sink and began to rinse them. “We were famous for it. Alligator sightings and the best spiked lemonade in the bayou.” She fell silent as she remembered the smell of the swamp, the green earthiness of it, rising from all around, the sharp scent of the lemons cutting through it, and the fogginess in her head when she woke up every morning in the little hanging bunk she and two other waitresses shared on the riverboat. The almost constant morning hangover, only alleviated by liberal application of the spiked lemonade the boat tour was so famous for.

She’d lost months on that boat. Nothing to show for them but a higher tolerance for vodka, and her tolerance had already been too high.

Grace said, “Well, I guess you can use the lemonade skills for the rest of your life, anyway.” Her voice was kind, and Samantha appreciated it. Her sister had been pretty judgmental when she’d first come back around, and why wouldn’t she be? Samantha had been a wreck for ten years of her life, for every year she spent in her twenties. When she’d finally gotten clean and sober, it had taken a while for Samantha to believe it of herself, let alone for anyone else to. Now it wasn’t so much a
hard
thing as it was a thing. Her thing. She didn’t drink today. That’s what she knew. Hopefully she wouldn’t drink tomorrow, either. But she didn’t think about it.