A Beautiful Fire (Love at Lincolnfield Book 4)

by Colette Dixon

  “Word travels fast.” She checked the time on her computer. Miles must have been watching the clock. It had been almost exactly ten minutes since she’d left to get coffee. She was impressed he remembered her proposal deadline and thought to follow up on the outcome.

  “Offer’s still good for the Epidemic Intelligence Service training. We had the first orientation session, but you can catch up if you come now. Don’t let them squander your talents over there. We need good docs like you. And you need…more than they’re giving you.”

  For a moment, she thought he might say that she needed him. But no, he was being professional and kind, offering her a way to make an impact.

  And he had a point.

  Now that she’d been passed up for the grant, she couldn’t bear the thought of wasting away in this basement dungeon of an office while her department continued to be treated like an afterthought. Like some poorly placed ant trap that served as lip service to a nasty problem and was easily forgotten.

  “That’s kind of you to offer, Miles. Let me think about it.”

  “Don’t take too long. If you miss too many more days, I may not be able to swing your admission.”

  “If I accept, I need you to know this is about my career.”

  “Of course.”

  “What I mean is I’m in a relationship with someone.”

  There was a pause. “I understand.”

  “I’m sorry to be so blunt.”

  “I won’t deny I’m sorry to hear that, but I hope you believe me when I say I have your best interests at heart.”

  She let out a sigh of relief. “Thank you.”

  That evening, once she was across the threshold of her townhouse, she dropped her purse and collapsed on the couch.

  Her cell phone vibrated with the pulse of a call. She snatched the device from the coffee table.

  Jakub.

  A warm sensation churned in her belly as she watched the screen lit with his name until voicemail kicked in and the buzzing quieted.

  She couldn’t talk to him yet. Not until she made a decision. Experience told her he’d have a strong opinion.

  She wouldn’t give up on her goals, not for any man.

  She needed time to re-strategize.

  After minutes of letting her thoughts chase their own tails, she went to the kitchen, opened a can of tuna, and plopped it on a bed of lettuce.

  She couldn’t wallow. She had to come up with a plan. She couldn’t wait the length of another grant cycle to start to make an impact.

  What she needed was a shining example, a successful case, the same way San Diego had made a splash and got their funding for their phage center.

  Perhaps the EIS was a means to more than one end, more than just a way for her to make an impact in infectious disease. If she could identify a case and convince Miles to allow her to use phages as treatment, she’d get so much media attention that she’d bet the Chancellor would find those funds in the bowels of the hospital just so he could share the prestige.

  She brought her bowl to the dining room table. While she ate, she listened to Jakub’s voicemail on speaker.

  Hey. Give me a call when you get a chance. Just wanted to know what happened with the grant. And I miss you. I want to see you. Call me soon or I’ll think my family scared you off.

  Her mouth quirked in an attempt at a smile. But her throat was swollen too thick to speak. She didn’t want to be so far away from him for so long, but she had to think of her career. If she spoke to him now, it would be too easy to let emotion cloud her judgement.

  She typed out a text. The grant is a no go. Change of plans.

  The ellipses bubble popped up on the screen. Before she could see his reply, she turned the phone face down on the table and went upstairs to pack for Atlanta.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Jakub’s wait for Harper’s reply to his text was interrupted by an emergency call to an El station where a man had caught his foot outside the door of the train and had been dragged far too long before the operator stopped the car. The man was going to lose his leg. That much was certain after one glance at the injury.

  Jakub hardly slept all night.

  When he woke, he passed up breakfast, whiling away the remaining minutes of his shift on his cot, thinking about the man. About Harper’s broken knee. About the capricious nature of health and survival. Harper’s lack of response to his text had unsettled him. Perhaps she planned to run by the station this morning.

  He dragged himself to lean on the glass window in the stairwell so he could keep a watch on the street. But the more time passed without a sighting of her, the more an uneasy feeling pervaded him. He knew how much that grant had meant to her.

  Nothing could have kept him from going to check on her. They were together now. Hell, she’d tolerated an afternoon with his family and still spent the night in his arms.

  The sheer white curtains of her living room glowed with lamplight when he pulled the pickup to the curb in front of her townhouse.

  He paused a moment on her stoop, oddly feeling like some strange guy who meant nothing to her, like he’d been when she broke her knee and there was nothing yet between them.

  She came to the door looking flustered, barely meeting his eyes. “Hi.” Her mouth flickered with a hint of a smile but then quickly fell along with her gaze. She backed up to let him in.

  He stepped over the threshold. “I’m sorry about the grant. That truly sucks. Clearly, those yahoos have no idea what they’re doing.”

  She hugged her arms around a red wool jacket and nodded, a little smile trying to work its way over her lips but dying out. He should be the one hugging her, but something in her manner kept him from moving closer to embrace her.

  “It’s okay.” Her voice was cold. Detached. He knew well that defensive reaction, like she’d slammed down a steel wall between her and the disappointment of the grant.

  Obviously, she was not okay.

  In the same moment, the significance of her wearing a red wool coat hit him. She was dressed to leave her townhouse. “It’s a little early for work, isn’t it?”

  A black suitcase stood against the wall in the entryway.

  “Harper, what’s going on?” He nodded toward the suitcase. “Where are you going?”

  She hugged her still-folded arms closer and wouldn’t meet his gaze. “I’m going to Atlanta for a while.”

  “What?” Indignation raced up his spine, making him rigid. She was leaving—on a long trip, and she hadn’t even thought to tell him. “What’s a while?”

  “A month, at least.” She studied the baseboards, still refusing to look at him.

  “A month?” Bitterness stole into his voice. He felt his control slipping away. “When were you going to tell me? Because it doesn’t seem like you just decided this morning.” Bold contempt laced his words now. This was how much she cared for him? “Were you even planning on telling me at all?”

  “I’m sorry, Jakub. It was a quick decision. I decided last night. I was planning to call you in a little while.” Finally, she met his gaze. Her brown eyes were large and pleading. Pleading for what, he wasn’t sure.

  “I thought,” he said, stepping closer, taking her hand until she dropped the defensive hugging of her chest. Softening his voice, he continued, “You’d tell me something important like this. Maybe even in person. So we could say goodbye. I thought we were…”

  “We were what?” She blinked her big brown eyes at him, seemingly oblivious to the effects on him of her secret departure.

  “Oh, I don’t know.” He couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of his voice. “I thought maybe we were a couple.” He didn’t like that he’d used the past tense to describe their relationship. “Couples talk about changes in their lives.” Talk. That was present tense. What they should be doing now. “What’s in Atlanta anyway?”

  Her phone dinged. She pulled the device out of her pocket. “I’m sorry, Jakub. I have to go,” she said to the screen. “My car is here
.”

  “You’re leaving this minute?” He was growing wild at the thought of her leaving him without saying goodbye. At the thought of losing her for a whole month. It felt like he was losing her entirely. He grabbed the phone out of her hand and opened the ride share app.

  “What are you doing?” She nearly shrieked.

  The fact that she could show this much emotion over losing her phone and nothing in response to being away from him for a month—it pissed him off. “I’m cancelling your damn ride.”

  “You can’t stop me from going.”

  “I don’t even know where the hell you are going.” He held the phone high, out of her reach. “Tell me where you’re going.” He regretted the viciousness of his voice the minute he formed the words, but he couldn’t stop the rage that had a power of its own.

  She stretched up on tiptoe and jumped for the phone. “Give me that. How dare you!” There was a desperation in her voice he’d never heard before. Like a vulnerable, cowering child.

  He forced himself to take a long breath. “Harper, calm down and listen. I’ll give you a ride to the airport myself.”

  This quieted her but she averted her gaze, grabbing her suitcase handle.

  He laid a hand over hers on the handle and gave her a pointed look. “Let me.”

  The comforting scent of his truck cab, that heady mix of citrus, worn upholstery and him tempted her to let down her guard. But the way he’d acted since he stormed into her townhouse, all angry demands and unbridled testosterone…. It was as if a switch had been flipped and he was a different man, someone she didn’t know.

  Her father could switch like that. She cringed at the visceral memory that tightened her gut. He had his charming moments, yes, but at any given moment, he could explode.

  Acutely aware of the large pulsing masculine energy next to her, she kept herself a safe distance from his body, her knees pressed together.

  “What’s in Atlanta?” Jakub flicked his gaze to her as he checked his blind spot before merging to the right lane. “If it’s more Ebola, I need to know now. I won’t allow it.” His voice was wild and infused with an anger she’d never heard from him before.

  She bristled. How dare he attempt to control her? “You can’t tell me what to do, Jakub.”

  “Damn if I can’t. You’re mine and my job is to keep you safe.”

  His words pricked at her heart. Part of her liked the idea of belonging to him, but she didn’t like the greedy force with which he said the words, and to keep her safe wasn’t exactly his job. This was the second millennium, not Paleolithic times when men protected women from predators with their bodies. She needed a man who would support and respect her career and decisions, not one who got angry and ordered her around.

  But to be fair, she hadn’t shared her decision with him. And yes, Jakub deserved that much. She could understand his frustration at the surprise. “What’s in Atlanta is training for the EIS, the Epidemic Intelligence Service.”

  Last night when she’d made the decision, she hadn’t known how she was going to say goodbye to him for so long. She’d been so exhausted from the events of the day, the choice, then from packing that she’d decided to call him once she was on her way.

  No. More than that. She’d known he wouldn’t react well to the news.

  She’d been right.

  The muscle at the angle of Jakub’s jaw rippled. “So you’re switching jobs? Just like that?”

  “No. This is something I’ve thought about doing for a while.”

  “But not something you cared to share with me.” His knuckles tightened around the steering wheel, blanching white.

  “I had a feeling it would be hard on you, so I decided to wait to tell you.”

  “Oh, only hard on me? Not hard on you at all.” He coughed out a hollow laugh.

  It was hard to imagine being away from him for a month. Harder now that he was sitting here next to her. His emotions were flaring, and she had to keep a cool head for both their sakes. Never mind the uncomfortable buzzing of her nerves at the rawness of his reaction. “It’s only for a month. I’ll still be based here after the training, but I’ll be on call to areas of disease epidemics to gather evidence and identify patterns and containment strategies.”

  “You’re going to traipse around to the front lines of disease outbreaks? Fuck that!” He pounded the steering wheel in a series of increasingly violent whacks with the heel of his hand. The last one sent the car swerving.

  “Jesus, Jakub!” The memory of an out-of-control car ride assaulted her, her father spewing angrily about her mother, his alcohol tainted spit hitting her face like cinders from a fire. That feeling of trying to disappear deep inside herself so that if the car crashed maybe, just maybe, she wouldn’t feel the pain. But in the end, another child had endured the pain. That boy had taken the brunt of her father’s anger.

  Jakub regained control of the car, eyes hard on the traffic before him, nostrils flaring.

  How well did she even know this man? She’d been lulled by his arms into complacency, rested when she should have been working to secure her grant. She’d ditched all her own rules, and now she was very possibly in a precarious situation she promised never to let herself get into again. Yesterday she’d never thought Jakub capable of such an outburst, but now she wasn’t sure what he was capable of.

  He didn’t speak for the remaining fifteen-minute drive to the airport. He just sat there, nostrils flaring, fingers squeezing the steering wheel in a death-grip.

  When they arrived at the airport’s Departures curb, he threw his gearshift into park and turned stormy eyes on her.

  “I protect what’s mine, Harper.” He growled out the words.

  Her throat suddenly parched, she swallowed roughly. “I’m no one’s possession.”

  For a flash, his blue eyes were crystal calm like the lake on a perfect sunny day. But the blue tumbled quickly into a dark, churning chaos. “Then have a nice fucking life.”

  His words sliced her open. “I don’t need protection, Jakub. I need a partner.” Where had that come from? She wasn’t so sure in this moment she needed him or any man at all. Now that they were discussing the finer points of relational equality, she was compelled to define what was acceptable to her.

  Hands shaking, she stepped out of the truck onto the sidewalk.

  He retrieved her suitcase from his pick-up bed and met her on the curb. “You’re not the only one who has important shit to do,” he said as though he’d just come to a decision.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m going to go where I’m wanted and needed too.”

  “I’m sorry it came to this, Jakub.” She meant it. He wasn’t her father. He’d shown her tenderness—perhaps more than any other man in her life had. But her nerves still thrummed with the shock of his anger. Her heart seemed to have lost half its strength at the way he let go of her so quickly when he couldn’t get his way.

  “Me too,” he said, backing up a step. “You may not like a man having opinions on your life but how do you expect to find a partner when you won’t even let a guy in? Good luck finding someone else. You’re going to need it.”

  Without another glance at her, he got into his truck and pulled away, leaving her alone on the curb.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Jakub stood in the natural light pouring in through the enormous bay windows of the warehouse-turned-tasting room, listening to the server’s description of the wine to the rag tag team of volunteer firefighters who had assembled here from all over the country. He looked at the rolling hills beyond the windows planted in acres of vines.

  When the server offered the glass, he took it and sipped. But irony had spoiled his palate. If he’d had a woman with him, this place would be romantic as fuck.

  He didn’t have a woman. He no longer had a wife. He no longer had Harper, who had barely even been his girlfriend. Whatever the hell had been between them was over. He’d thought on the drive to O’Hare, they
’d both calm down and clear everything up then he’d send her off with a long hug and a longer kiss. But everything had spiraled out of control so fast. He’d lost his temper. Said things he shouldn’t have.

  He had to stop thinking about her. He was here to put his skills to good use, just like she was doing in Atlanta.

  Jakub, no matter how he felt for Harper, didn’t need to get involved with a woman he couldn’t protect. Who didn’t even want his protection. She hadn’t even wanted him to know where she was going, it seemed, since he’d caught her fleeing to the airport.

  Now he owned a decaying house he’d bought because of her.

  Idiot.

  It was about time he moved out of the condo he and Samara had bought together, where memories of her surrounded him at every turn. Whether Harper was in his life or not, he needed to pour himself into a project. This volunteer stint in California would only last so long. That old house would keep him busy for years.

  The group moved to the long tables by the windows lined with benches. The trainer broke the group up into those who would help on the ground in search and rescue and those who would help the forest service by helicopter. He explained the path of destruction the Chico fire had already taken. The wildfire was threatening a small town in the foothills on the outskirts of the city. Already the blazes had encroached on a residential area and damaged several houses, some burnt entirely to the ground.

  Two firefighters and fifty-one people were missing. Twenty-three were confirmed dead.

  The town was their destination.

  He’d worked on countless fires, navigated untold numbers of perilous situations, and he’d always managed to shove fear down that deep dark well and cap the lid. But at the prospect of the fire they were about to face, he couldn’t stuff the feeling that he was walking into some kind of hell on earth.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine