The Perfect Match

“Susan’s characters deliver love and laughter and a solid story with every book.
The Perfect Match
is a great read!”

LORI COPELAND,

author of the Brides of the West series

“Vibrant characters and vivid language zoom this action-packed romance to the top of the charts. This is a one-sitting read—once you pick it up, you won’t want to put it down.”

ROMANTIC TIMES BOOKREVIEWS

“Susan May Warren hits a home run with
The Perfect Match. . . .
Heart-tugging romance, gut-twisting excitement, and a powerful faith message make the book an excellent read.”

DANCINGWORD.COM

“Susie writes a delightful story. . . . A few hours of reading doesn’t get better.”

DEE HENDERSON,

author of the O’Malley series

“This debut story glows with romantic ingeniuty.”

ROMANTIC TIMES BOOKREVIEWS

“Warren’s characters are well developed, and she knows how to create a first-rate contemporary romance.”

LIBRARY JOURNAL

“In
Tying the Knot
, author Susan May Warren makes rooting for Anne and Noah easy, but putting the book down difficult.”

ROMANTIC TIMES BOOKREVIEWS

Visit Tyndale’s exciting Web site at
www.tyndale.com

TYNDALE
and Tyndale's quill logo are registered trademarks of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

The Perfect Match

Copyright © 2004 by Susan May Warren. All rights reserved.

Cover photograph of firestation © by Michael Miller/iStockphoto. All rights reserved.

Cover photograph by Julie Chen © 2004 by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.

Cover designed by Beth Sparkman

Interior designed by Julie Chen

Edited by Lorie Popp

Scripture quotations are taken from the
Holy Bible
, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations are taken from the
Holy Bible
, New International Version
^®
. NIV
^®
. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

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

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Warren, Susan, date.

  The perfect match / Susan May Warren.

    p. cm.—(HeartQuest)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8423-8119-2 (sc)

  ISBN-10: 0-8423-8119-8 (sc)

  1. Volunteer fire fighters—Fiction.   2. Women fire fighters—Fiction.

3. Stalking victims—Fiction.   4. Fire chiefs—Fiction.   5. Clergy—Fiction.   6. Arson—Fiction.   I. Title.   II. Series.

PS3623.A865P47 2004

813′6—dc22 2003025754

New repackage first published in 2008 under ISBN-13: 978-1-4143-1385-6 / ISBN-10: 1-4143-1385-3

ISBN 978-1-4143-3270-3 (ePub); ISBN 978-1-4143-3271-0 (Kindle); ISBN 978-1-4143-7306-5 (Apple)

To my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Your unfailing love sends me to my knees in awe and gratefulness.

G
od never fails to surprise me with His abundant provision of encouragers, and no book is ever written without a team. I am overwhelmingly grateful for those who invested time and energy in helping me write, edit, and research
The Perfect Match.
You are all a reminder to me that we serve Him together, and He equips each of us with unique gifts that together produce something that (I hope!) brings Him glory and honor!

My deepest appreciation goes to the following people:

Olaf Growald—Texas firefighter and all-around hero. Wow, you made this book real. Your insights, gentle criticism, and time spent in figuring out how to think like an arsonist breathed life and authenticity into the fire scenes. Any errors in description are simply because I either didn’t ask enough questions or didn’t listen well enough! Thank you for your patience and your friendship. You are truly a gift to my writing ministry.

Melissa Anderson—amazing sister and proofer extraordinaire. What a treasure your friendship has
become to me. God knew how much I needed you, and I am so grateful for your candor, your diligence, and your encouragement. What a blessing to know that when I need it you’re there with a “Sis, you rock!” I love you.

David Lund—cool brother and incredible husband to Nettie-Poo. Your encouragement has blessed me more than you will ever know. Thank you for your enthusiasm, ideas, insights, and especially your spiritual depth that continues to challenge and inspire me. God has great plans for you!

Tracey Bateman and Susan Downs—best writing buddies and iron-on-iron pals. Your laughter and teasing keep it all in perspective. Thank you for helping me unravel my tightly knotted brain at the end of the day and for just loving me despite my quirks (and you know what they are!). You two are gifts of friendship beyond compare.

Steve and Paula Geertsen—best buddies who know how to make me relax! Thank you for all the times you called us up, pizza already ordered, and helped me push away from the computer. Your friendship is salt and light to us, and we are so blessed by your love and encouragement. Thank you for always being there, for believing in me, and for standing by us during this difficult, searching year. We love you!

Tim and Nancy Ramey—inspiration and role models. I wanna be just like you when I grow up! Thank you for this new chapter in our lives and for promoting my books wherever you go. God loves the Warren family a whole lot to let us hook up with you.

Anne Goldsmith—dear friend, and, oh yeah, great editor. You’re always right. Really! Thank you for the
gentle way you guide me, for your wise insights, and for your incredible smile. Your friendship is a great gift to me. (And I gotta learn that karate chop!)

Lorie Popp—my appreciation for you deepens with each book. I’m so glad that God chose you for my editor. I’m so grateful for your wise touch, for the way you can take a sentence and polish it, and for your sweet friendship. You make the editing process rich!

Julie Chen—I have the best covers in history. Without a doubt. Your talents blow me away, and I’m so indebted to you for your creativity. Thank you for all you invest to make the Deep Haven books works of art. Wow.

To David, Sarah, Peter, and Noah. What joy fills my heart when you plop yourselves into my chair and say, “What’cha working on now, Mom?” Thank you for believing in my dreams, for encouraging me, and for every time you say, “No, Mom, don’t get up from the computer. I can get my own snack.” I am so blessed to be your mother and so delighted with how God is growing you. I pray you will see His great love for you and that it will mold you into people thrilled to be His children.

And, finally, to Andrew. My Perfect Match. Thank you for loving both the Spitfire Susie and the “please-hold-me-now” gal. You will always be enough for me.

My salvation and my honor come from God alone. He is my refuge, a rock where no enemy can reach me.

P
SALM
62:7

L
eo Simmons had made good on his mumbled threats.

Pastor Dan Matthews stared at the pager address, and the taste of condemnation swept through him like poison—down his throat, through his blood, into his bones—and pooled in his soul.

Diving into his turnout gear, Dan tossed his fire helmet onto the front seat and gunned his VW Bug toward Leo Simmons’s old log house.

Leo might have set the fire, but just as surely as if Dan had struck the match, he had ignited the explosion that brought Leo to this desperate moment.

Dan should have recognized the gathering heat, the greed, the grief, and not a little small-town shame that had fueled this inferno.

Leo’s pastor had failed him.

Dan wrestled his guilt as well as the steering wheel while he floored it around Tenth Street East and screeched to a halt behind firefighter Joe Michaels’s green pickup. Deathly images ravaged the night as Dan
got out, buckling his helmet. He hesitated, transfixed at the flames raging through the bottom floor of the Simmonses’ two-story log home. They licked out of the broken windows like the tongues of death; black smoke curled around the porch beams and spewed toxic fumes into the fall night. Despite its status as a historical site, the house sat bordered by newer homes—ramblers and bungalows—on the piece of cleared forest that had once been the old Miller homestead.

A clump of onlookers—some in bathrobes, all wearing expressions of horror—pressed against the envelope of danger, aching for a closer look.

Dan’s breath came in short gulps.
Please, Lord, let the family be out!

An explosion shook the ground as another window blew out. Flames and sparks tore the fabric of the night sky. The howl of the fire as it consumed wood and oxygen set Dan’s fine neck hairs on end, reviving the analogy of fire being a living entity, needing oxygen and food to survive. It rattled Dan free and sent him running toward the Deep Haven pumper engine. “Mitch!”

“Get back!” Mitch Davis yelled to the gathering gawkers. Attired in his turnout coat, bunker pants, and helmet, the captain wielded his axe like a billy club. “I said get back!”

His gaze settled on Dan before he turned back to the house and shouted commands at the other volunteers. Although Davis hadn’t yet been named fire chief to replace the sudden vacancy left by Kermit Halstrom when he suffered a heart attack, the forest ranger had already moved into the position with some arrogance.

Dan raced to old engine two. Two hose lines snaked
out from the truck, and Craig Boberg bent over the hydrant at the end of the block, struggling with the coupling.

The heat blasted from the house like a furnace. As Dan ran to help Joe Michaels, who battled to unhook the fifty-five-foot house ladder from the truck, his eyes began to water. “Is everyone out?”

Despite the fact that Leo had set a fire two years ago that had nearly succeeded in killing Joe’s wife, Mona, Joe wore a gut-wrenching, grim look at the tragedy before him. “The first story was engulfed by the time we got here. We can’t get in.”

Dan’s thoughts closed around Leo’s family—Cindy, the baby, the boys—and he fought the grip of terror. Through the darkness, the haze of smoke and tears, he saw that the fire hadn’t yet consumed the second floor, although the toxic fumes rising through the house may have already asphyxiated Leo’s sleeping family.

“The second story!” He seized the end of the ladder. Joe read his mind. He hustled to the far end of the house and propped the ladder against the porch roof. Dan jumped on it nearly before Joe had a chance to secure it.

Dan heard screams as the crowd reacted to his courage.

Or stupidity. He’d left his SCBA gear beside the engine, totally abandoning every scrap of training. Firefighting 101: Don’t go into a burning house without equipment, namely, a mask, breathing apparatus, and an axe. Safety first. But Dan’s well-thought-out actions hadn’t netted any outstanding successes over the past fifteen years, and now wasn’t the time to ponder the choices.

It would be so much easier if he didn’t have to go
through life with hindsight flogging his every step. A preacher who spent less time conjuring up past scenarios might have spotted the psychotic signs in Leo’s demeanor, taken seriously Leo’s morbid self-depreciation and moans of “Cindy would be better off if . . .” Instead of following Leo down to the local pub to listen to his problems, gently hoping to befriend the man, a true man of the cloth would have hauled Leo out, forced coffee down his gullet, and shaken him clear of his downward spiral.

Then again, with the way Dan’s words rolled off his congregation of late, he could have beat the man over the head with a hefty King James Bible and still not made an impact. The thought sent a shudder through him when he dived into the burning house to rescue Leo’s family.

Jumping onto the roof, he felt profoundly grateful for the steel-toed, insulated boots that let him walk over what seemed like live coals. He had an uneasy sense that little time remained until the place exploded into a torch that would light up half the North Shore. He hoped someone had already dispatched the St. Francis Township fire crew.

But by the time they arrived, the Simmons place would be a carbonized smudge on the landscape. Dan prayed the scars wouldn’t include the two boys and their little sister. His eyes burning, he staggered toward the window. Black pressed against the window . . . smoke or simply the fragments of night? He couldn’t remember who slept in this room, but he hoped he’d find someone alive.

A second before he cracked his elbow into the glass pane, his firefighting science kicked in. If toxic fumes
had gathered in the ceiling, raising the temperature in the room to a combustion point, the sudden inflow of oxygen would ignite a back draft that would blow him clear off the roof.

And kill whoever was inside.

He yanked his arm back. “Mitch!”

Mitch had already climbed halfway up the ladder.

“Your axe!”

Mitch barreled past him and sent the axe in hard—over his head, near the soffits of the house, next to the ceiling. Dan felt the house tremble with the blow. Three more quick blows and the room purged smoke, a stream of black, toxic fumes.

“Now!” Dan yelled.

Mitch sent the end of his axe handle into the top half of the window and cleared it in less than five seconds.

Dan gulped clean air and dived in. The smoke invaded his nose, burned his eyes, suffocating with its grip. He hadn’t even worn a handkerchief, and air evaporated in his lungs. Dropping to his knees, he scrabbled around the room, feeling a rocking chair, a dresser, then—oh no, a crib? Crawling up it like a prisoner begging for escape, he climbed over the edge and made his way around the bed.

A soft form. He dug his fingers into the clothing and hauled the baby over the edge, not gently, into his arms. Baby Angelica. He wanted to howl.

“C’mon!” Mitch’s voice turned him around as he fell back to his knees, clutched the baby to his chest, and scrambled out. His lungs burned, now begging for air. He passed her over into Mitch’s arms as black swam through his brain.

And then hands grabbed his jacket, dragged him over the window frame into the night. Joe called out to him, yanking him to semiconsciousness as someone dangled him over the roof. His hands slapped at air, and he managed to find three ladder rungs before landing on the ground, curling over and coughing out the poison in his body.

“She needs oxygen!” A woman’s voice broke through the haze—he couldn’t place it. It didn’t sound like Anne, their volunteer EMT.

Joe crouched next to him. “Dan, you okay?”

“The . . . boys . . .” He coughed hard, feeling as if his lungs might expel from his chest.

Joe clamped him on the shoulder, squeezed.

Dan turned back to the house. Flames shot from the window of baby Angelica’s room. “They’re . . . in the back!” Struggling to his feet, he sprinted around the house, pinpointed the room. Black windows, no flames. “Joe, get the ladder!”

Dan rushed back to the front of the house, desperation filling him. Jordan and Jeffrey were only eight and six. The memory of their round eyes on him Sundays as he taught the children’s sermon, their smiles in the face of personal sorrow had nurtured his own hope. He gripped the ladder, began to muscle it from the porch.

“No, Dan!” Joe grabbed him, dug his fingers into his turnout coat. “No!”

“Yes, Joe.” Dan growled and wrenched free. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he heard common sense shouting as he ran with the ladder and bumped it up next to the back. Still, no flames.

He flew up the rungs. This time he didn’t stop to vent
the soffits. Adrenaline pumped into his veins, and he swung his elbow high and hard. Pain splintered through his arm while smoke roared out the opening.

He sensed the flashover two seconds before it ignited. The hiccup of time, a sudden gulp of air, as if the flame took a breath, then—

The window exploded out with the force of a land mine. Dan fell off the ladder and landed on the ground in a blinding flash of agony. His breath whooshed out, and blackness crashed over him.
So this is death.

Somewhere on the back side of consciousness, he heard screams.

“Breathe!” A female voice, this time harsh and angry. He tried to obey, but the pain clamping his left shoulder fought him. “Breathe!” Forcing himself to inhale, he moaned in anguish.

“There you go.”

He felt hands on him, feminine and strong, cupping the back of his neck, unbuckling his helmet, easing his head to the ground. “Stay still.” The voice gentled, as if tempered by relief. A cool touch on his forehead brushed back his hair. “You’re lucky you didn’t land clear in Canada.”

He wanted to smile but couldn’t push past the grief that squeezed his chest. He’d killed those boys. Not only had he failed Leo, he’d failed the man’s family.

His throat burned, probably from the smoke he’d inhaled. Somehow he screwed his eyes open. Through a watery haze, he watched the inferno engulf the house, flames four stories high climbing into the night, frothing black smoke. Shingles exploded off the roof; red-hot cinders and ash fell like snow around him. He
tried to raise himself on his elbows and earned a fresh burst of torture. His left arm felt like a noodle at his side, and the pain nearly turned him cross-eyed.

Then he saw her, the woman who had dragged him from the house. She had turned to watch the fire, a frown on her fine-boned face. She wore two short, stubby braids and had flipped up the collar on her jean jacket, like he had on his fire coat. Almost absentmindedly, she had her hand curled around his lapel, the other pointing to some unknown sight in the flames.

A short and spunky angel. He had to wonder from where she’d materialized. She seemed to be transfixed by the fire, and something about her profile, her clenched jaw, the way she stared at the blaze with a defined sorrow nearly broke his heart. She shouldn’t be here to see this. He had the sudden, overwhelming urge to cover her eyes and shield her from the horror.

She looked at him. Eyes as blue as a northern Minnesota sky speared through him with the power to pin him to the ground. “I gotta get you away from the flames. Brace yourself. This is going to hurt.” She stood, clutched his coat around the collar, and tugged.

Okay, she hid serious muscles somewhere inside that lean body. He nearly roared with pain as she propelled him back, away from the shower of ash, the mist of water and smoke. She didn’t even grunt.

“Who are you?” he asked in a voice that sounded like he gargled with gravel.

She knelt beside him again, pressed two fingers to his neck, feeling his pulse. “I’ll go get you a stretcher,” she said, not looking in his eyes.

He reached up and grabbed her wrist. “Wait . . . are you a dream?”

Ellie Karlson had seen men fly out of the sky before, but never had it wrenched her heart out from between her ribs. The way this fireman had looked at her left her feeling raw and way too tender, as if he’d hit a line drive straight to the soft tissue of her heart.

She attributed it to the fact that she’d nearly lost her first firefighter—before her watch even began. At least she’d found out his name—Dan. She’d have to look up his file and figure out how many years he’d been fighting fire. He’d shown the courage of a veteran but the panic of a probie—a first-year rookie.

Ellie stopped her pacing, leaned into the hospital wall, and touched her head to the cool paint. The quiet in the ER ward pressed against her, tinder to every cell in her body that wanted to howl in frustration. Fire she could face. The somber tones of sorrow . . . she could not. The smells of antiseptic and new carpet added to the simmer of the postfire adrenaline that never left her veins without a fight. She should go back to her hotel, do about a hundred sit-ups, or even hop on her bike for a very early morning ride.

Or maybe she could find a piano and pound out a few rounds of Chopin’s Fifth. Something other than this mindless, useless pacing. She noticed a man and a woman sitting huddled against the wall across from the firefighter’s room. Maybe praying. Ellie was a woman of action, and praying only seemed to slow her down. Besides, God knew her thoughts, didn’t He?