Fire at Dusk: The Firefighters of Darling Bay (8 page)

“Bazooka?” Hank’s voice was heartbreaking, hopeful and desolate at the same time.

“Yeah.”

“His mom had huge bowls of that gum out at the funeral. I still can’t even smell bubblegum.”

“I’m so sorry.” Samantha wanted to touch him, to put her hand on his arm, but she suspected that if she moved even an inch, he’d snap. His body was rigid, as if he were holding himself together with rebar.

“No. I’m the one who’s sorry.” He looked steadily forward through the glass. “My behavior tonight was unforgivable.”

“Nothing’s unforgivable.”

Now he looked at her, and his eyes were dark with despair. “Didn’t you hear the story I just told you? Once you kill your buddy, there’s nothing you can do to get him back. That’s pretty much the very definition of the word.”

It wasn’t, but it didn’t do to tell him that right now.

Samantha twisted in her seat, drawing up her legs so that she was half-kneeling. A gust of wind pushed the car door closed behind her.

Without thinking about it, worried that if she did she would stop, Samantha leaned forward and put her lips on Hank’s. For one long second, their mouths rested against each other’s. Samantha didn’t hear him breathing. She certainly wasn’t. His lips were firm, warm. Just the right shape.

Then, with a jerk, he pulled back. “What the—”

Awesome. “Sorry.” Maybe if Samantha backed straight out as fast as she could, she could get out of the Mustang with one percent of her dignity left. She’d gladly leave the other ninety-nine percent hanging in shreds behind her, if it meant she could go upstairs and push her head under her pillow. “Okay, then…”

And then Hank came out of his seat. At her. In a split second, both his hands were wrapped around the back of her head, and he was pulling her to him, his mouth hot and demanding against hers. She pushed back against him—it was a war as to who could kiss the hardest, and Samantha would do anything to win. And she’d do anything to lose.

Wrapping her arms around his neck, she moved forward, bringing her knee over the middle console. His tongue tangled with hers, stroking her at first and then plundering her mouth. He tasted like mint and, faintly, of something sweet, something else that was all him. She wanted more,
more
. She wanted to kiss his neck, she wanted to nip the skin just under his chin, but she couldn’t tear her mouth from his for even a second. Every time she tried, he kissed her harder. Deeper.

She leaned her upper body against his, and his whole seat shot backward as he hit the release. She grinned against his lips and brought her other leg across so that she was straddling him on the front seat. His hands cupped her buttocks and she tilted so that her jeans pressed into his. She could feel his hardness under the material, hot against her thigh, and she pulled away for a split second to meet his eyes.

Hank’s gaze was so dark he looked like the devil. He looked like her salvation, too.

He pulled her head down to his again for another kiss. She was liquid inside, quaking with the need. What his tongue was doing to hers, the way it made her writhe against him, out here in the parking lot for all to see—she wanted that tongue to go other places.
All
her places.

“Come inside.”

“Honey,” he drawled, pulling her hips against his again, “I like to use protection.”

She laughed. “Inside the apartment. Please.”

He sobered suddenly, pushing his forehead against hers. “I can’t.”

“Why?” She ran her fingers up the line of his jaw, under his ear, reveling in the strength of the muscle she felt there. She put her thumb to his bottom lip and he groaned.

“You just fired me,” he managed, lifting his hand to hers. “For the second time.”

She slipped his finger into her own mouth and sucked for a second. She felt him get even harder. “You’re unfired.”

“That’s emotional whiplash. I should sue or something.”

“Then we’ll call it even,” she said. “You got mad at me, way too mad, but now I know why. Let’s split the difference and go inside where you can take off all my clothes.”

He laughed, but it sounded choked. “You are the hottest thing on two legs.”

It wasn’t the most romantic line she’d ever been handed, but she’d take it. He was a firefighter, not a poet. “Thanks. I like your legs, too. And I like this.” She tugged on his belt, drawing his hips to hers again. She leaned over and kissed him. When she came up for air, she said, “I like that, too. I know, we’ll do this a different way. Come upstairs, and I’ll take off all
your
clothes.”

This time it was a real laugh. But he twisted, putting her away from him with a smooth lift and turn. “I’m not going to take advantage of you like that.”

She flopped back into her seat with a groan. “
I want you to.
” That was the whole point.

“Samantha.” He scooted his seat forward again and looked her straight in the eye. “I want you. Honestly, I’d love to try to get you out of my system.”

Samantha smiled. She felt the same way and liked his honesty.

Hank went on, “I reckon you felt just how much I want you. But I can’t.”

“Why?” No, she didn’t get this. “Yeah, you got angry, but—”

“That.” He gripped the steering wheel. “That’s the problem. I’ve been trying to make it up to Jimmy since the day it happened by being the guy he wanted to be—we both, we were so into being firemen. Protecting. Saving. Instead, I scared a woman. I scared you. You were right to fire me.” He reached forward and touched her cheek. His hand was warm.

It made her feel safe while doing absolutely nothing to relieve the feeling of need deep inside her.

“I have to go.”

She growled in the back of her throat. Then she jammed open the car door again, kicking at it with her foot like she would an assailant. “Fine. But I need you at the community center at nine a.m., day after tomorrow. You said you were off, right?”

Hank nodded, his eyes narrowing. “But…”

“Look. I need your help, Hank.”

As she slammed the Mustang’s heavy door behind her, she felt a grim satisfaction. At least, putting it that way, he might show up.

But it was going to do nothing for the fire she still felt inside her body, low and deep. The firefighter had started that flame—that was the problem. No one but him could help her put it out.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

OF
COURSE
HANK’S grandmother would come by at eight in the morning. Hank hadn’t been able to sleep, not even after he got up and went for a run in the middle of the night, battling his way through the freezing night-time air, his lungs heaving with something he hoped would turn to tiredness. He’d come back and gotten into bed, and instead of dropping into sleep, his head had spun with thoughts of her.

The taste of her.

The feel of the nape of her neck in his hand. The way her body molded to his, the way when he kissed her she responded with the perfect heat before she took it even higher.

No fire he’d ever fought, not even the one at the magnesium plant seven years before, had ever burned hotter than she did against him.

After a cold shower followed by a hundred push-ups, he’d finally started getting tired. He dropped off to sleep sometime after five a.m., so when the doorbell shrilled, Hank shoved his head under the pillow and cursed.

The doorbell rang again. Gramma Maureen had a signature way of doing it—she pushed the button once, quickly, and then, always unsure it had rung inside since her hearing was going, she’d lean on it for a long minute. Before his old dog Samson had died, that particular method of ringing the doorbell had driven his dog right over the edge. He’d howl for a good ten minutes after Maureen left, scared that she’d come back and do it again.

Get up.

The doorbell rang again. There was no ignoring Maureen.

“Dear boy.” Maureen, wearing a red knitted sweater with the image of a large banana embroidered into the front, a black skirt that looked frayed at the edges, and big clompy black men’s shoes, lifted herself to her very tiptoes to kiss Hank’s cheek. Hank still had to bend down to receive it. “Look at you. You look like you just rolled out of bed.”

“I did.”

As if she hadn’t heard him—and perhaps she hadn’t—Maureen went on. “But it’s past eight in the morning—”

“Two past.”

“And a boy like you doesn’t oversleep.”

Sometimes Hank wondered how old Maureen thought he was. She’d treated him the exact same way since she’d taken over raising him when his parents had died. She treated him like a child who needed to be coddled, while at the same time, maintaining an implicit faith in him to do everything the way a good man would.

It was always good to see her, of course. If it didn’t happen to be eight-oh-two in the dang morning.

She bustled through the living room, tut-tutting at yesterday’s paper he’d left strewn on the couch cushions. Somehow she managed to balance her red basket and cup of coffee while still gathering the sections of newspaper under her arm.

“You look like Little Red Riding Hood, with your sweater and your basket.”

His grandmother humphed. “She didn’t have such a gorgeous sweater.” She touched the embroidered banana proudly. “Did I show you this one?”

“You did. I hadn’t noticed that you’d used glitter yarn for the banana, though.”

“Best invention of the nineties.”

He didn’t bother filling her in that a couple of decades had come and gone since the nineties. She still lived alone, just four blocks away, and while she lived on his grandfather’s life insurance, she made her spending money by teaching knitting classes. She’d somehow gained fame through knitting; Hank didn’t know how she’d pulled that off, but she had tourists coming to town expressly to learn her yarn embroidery techniques. Maureen enjoyed nothing more than creating sweaters that most of the world would call ugly, and wearing them so proudly that he’d seen people in Mabel’s Cafe offer to buy her sweaters right off her back.

His grandmother had to take over being mother and father right at the point he’d been headed into his awful teen years, and she’d done a fine job with limited means. Hank loved her more than he loved anyone in the world. And she loved him even more fiercely. He knew that. He felt it in her grip when she hugged him.

And yet that didn’t ever,
ever
get him off the hook.

“Heard you were a butthead in Eureka yesterday,” Maureen said.

Hank groaned and reached for the coffee pot. “That’s it. I’m moving.”

Maureen set her knitting basket on the table with a clatter and pulled out her needles. The sweater-in-progress was a toxic green-yellow. “Don’t bother with coffee. I had mine hours and hours ago.”

“I’m sure you did. This is for me.”

“So, what made you so mad you canceled a whole date?”

Hank turned, the pot still in his hand, and stared. He could imagine that Maureen could glean info that included who he’d been on a date with, and perhaps what they’d done, but the fact that he’d canceled it? That he’d been a jerk of the first degree?

“Did you also know that we had sex in the Mustang?”

Maureen waved her hand. “Don’t you try to shock me, young man. I know you smooched and then she left in a huff.”

There were eyes in the trees, spies
everywhere
. Really, he had enough in savings that he could run off to Mexico and be pretty damn comfortable for at least a few years before he had to figure out a next step. He should just go. But damn, if he’d packed a bag, Maureen would have heard it through the grapevine and would probably show up within minutes of him zipping the suitcase.

“Do you happen to know where I left my spare key?” It was a smart-alec question. His spare hadn’t been on his hook for the last month, and he couldn’t figure out what he’d done with it. There was no reason for Maureen to know where it had gone, though.

She lifted a ring of keys out of her basket and jingled it. “I took it.”

Didn’t that just figure. “Why? You already had one, and you always ring the doorbell anyway.”

“So I could have Eva come in and clean. She needed a key.”

“That’s what I hire Rosamunde to do. Every two weeks.” Hank was terrible at house-cleaning and he knew it. Rosamunde was the daughter of Eva, Maureen's longtime best friend.

“She’s terrible at the baseboards. Eva’s better.”

“You’re too old for the baseboards. For that matter, so’s Eva.” Hank hated to think about someone his grandmother’s age hunched over, wiping the corners of his rooms.

“Ah, I’m just messing with you,” said Maureen. “Rosamunde’s great. I just wanted a key so we could watch your cable TV when you’re at work.”

“And again, what about your key?”

She suddenly became extra invested in something her fingers were doing.

“Gramma?”

“Oh, all right. I dropped it off the pier.”

“Excuse me?”

“I needed something to throw at a seagull that had taken one of my stitch markers.”

Hank shook his head. Sometimes he thought it would be easier talking to a three-year-old than Maureen, even though her faculties were still sharp as her pointy needles.

The pot had almost a full cup of coffee in it now, and he poured it into his mug. He couldn’t wait any longer for it. He
needed
it.

“So, Gramma, what’s up this morning? Besides knowing more about my life than I do, apparently.”

“I need to tell you not to see that girl anymore.”

Hank blinked. “Samantha?”

“Who else are you seeing, Madonna?”

Someday he’d introduce her to a current pop artist. “I appreciate your concern.”

“But I should butt out.” Maureen clicked her needles and her fingers were moving so fast he could barely tell what she was doing. “I hear you. But I’m not concerned with what you think about this one.”

“You never are.”

Maureen pressed the tip of a needle to her chest and took a breath that would inflate a blimp. “You wound my
heart
when you say that. Right here is where I feel it. In the middle of the night, all I can think about is my grandson and his happiness. What did I do to deserve—” She reminded Hank of an opera singer, her chest heaving with emotion.