Dangerous Conditions (Protectors At Heart Book 4)

by Jenna Kernan

  In the morning the oxygen was removed, and their breathing checked. A short time later they had a visit from volunteers from the American Red Cross. They had bathroom kits for both her and Lori, and a pink stuffed rabbit for her daughter. Lori clung to the bunny with a fierceness that worried Paige. Her child was growing past the age where such toys held her interest, but if anyone deserved the plush comfort of a stuffed animal, it was Lori.

  They were also given bags of clean, new clothing and underwear. Lori was furnished with brown corduroy pants, bright purple fuzzy socks, new snow boots, a turtleneck, fleece jacket and snow coat, all in shades of pink and purple. Seeing the unfamiliar clothing laid out on her daughter’s hospital bed only brought home to Paige that they had likely lost every personal possession in the upstairs area. The grief was lightened only by the realization that they were both alive.

  Paige took the contact information from a volunteer who, before departing, assured her that they had plenty of donated clothing and household items and could help with temporary housing.

  “Where will we live now, Mama?” asked Lori.

  Where indeed.

  “Let’s check with Grandma on that one. All right?”

  Lori’s eyes held worry and her neck was still streaked with soot.

  “Would you like a shower?”

  Lori’s face brightened as she nodded.

  Rabbit stayed behind on the hospital bed as Paige helped her daughter get her shower going, handing in the tiny shampoo, body wash and conditioner bottles. As Lori washed, Paige cleaned up in the sink, using the hand soap, comb, toothbrush and lotion.

  She left Lori in the bathroom to towel off and brush up, while Paige found a nurse, borrowed a pair of scissors, then snipped away the singed hair. Then she explored her bag of clothing. Paige found she had blue jeans, a tailored white blouse and a soft, fuzzy forest green sweater with a crew neck. The boots were tight but new. She loosened the laces and tried on the tan-colored leather jacket. She’d never owned a leather coat before, especially one that was so stylish and fitted. The loose buttons and general wear told her this was a donated item. As a result, the jacket was well broken in and she was grateful.

  Lori appeared from the bathroom with her hand on the waistband of her pants.

  “They’re too big,” she said, holding them up with one hand.

  The problem was fixed shortly after breakfast, which they both devoured. Their nurse supplied them with several safety pins and Paige made the adjustment to her daughter’s waistband.

  It was nearly lunchtime when they were finally released. When they reached the lobby it was to find Logan waiting just past the reception area. His attire, unlaced boots, charred sweatshirt and mud-streaked trousers, indicated that he had spent the night on the waiting room couch. There was a white gauze bandage on his left forearm.

  “What happened?” asked Paige.

  “In all the excitement, I didn’t realize I cut myself somehow. Needed staples to keep me from leaking.”

  “Oh, no. How many?”

  “Thirty or so.”

  She blinked at that. “And you’re all right?”

  “Never better,” he said. “New clothing?”

  She glanced down at the unfamiliar attire. “Hmm. Yes.”

  “I like the leather jacket.”

  “I don’t suppose there is anything left of our...”

  He shook his head, his smile now tight. “I’m so glad that you and Lori are all right.”

  There was a long and weighty pause as Paige considered what might have happened and how blessed she was to have Logan there for her. He’d risked everything to reach them.

  “Thank you, Logan, for saving our lives.”

  Logan gave her that dear, hopeful smile. She stroked his cheek and leaned in, kissing him tenderly on the lips. The contact was meant as an expression of thanks, but the instant her mouth touched his, the internal fireworks exploded, and her circuitry went haywire.

  When she drew back, he was blushing and her daughter was staring up at her, slack-jawed.

  Paige glanced from Logan to Lori and discovered her daughter’s lip trembling, though whether from what she had just witnessed or at the magnitude of their escape, Paige did not know. Lori lunged toward Logan, wrapping her arms about his waist, trapping Rabbit between them as she buried her face in his side and wept. Logan cradled her in one arm, giving her narrow shoulders first a squeeze and then a pat.

  Paige felt a lump, as spiny as the coat of a hedgehog, now lodged in her throat. Breathing past the obstruction, she took several small gasps as she reined in her emotions at seeing Logan hug his daughter. It was impossible. The fire and their escape and Logan being there every single time she needed him all crashed down on her. She stepped to his opposite side and draped her arms about his neck. His free arm drew her closer, and she let the tears fall.

  She’d meant to tell him the truth about Lori the afternoon of the Harvest Festival. But then she’d been drugged and framed and sent to jail for a night. She had to tell him, but not here in this impersonal waiting room.

  He didn’t hurry them or draw back in embarrassment at this public display. He let them shatter and then slowly draw the broken bits back together again, knitting them into a new whole.

  Paige drew away first and then Lori lifted her tear-smudged face and stepped beside her mother.

  “Ready to go home?” asked Logan.

  Only they had no home. Paige would have wept again if she had any tears left. Instead, she gave a nod. Logan swept a hand toward the exit and then followed them out through the sleet to his old truck. All three squeezed into the front seat, with Lori between them. Logan set them in motion.

  “Where’s Grandma?” she asked, now buckled in and peering out at the slush that slapped against the windshield like wet mud.

  “She’s at our house calling the insurance company. Said to tell you she’ll be there or at your place seeing what to salvage.”

  “How bad is it?” asked Paige.

  “Took the second floor and attic before they got the fire out. I expect the bottom floor will have heavy water damage.”

  Temperatures were dropping. The sleet was turning to snow. Soon all that water would freeze solid.

  On the drive back, Paige began to wonder if she had underestimated Logan. Was he so different from the boy to whom she had given her heart?

  Yes. He was. But in some ways, he was better. Kinder and more responsible. This Logan would not leave her or Lori to go off to reenlist. This Logan would stay and raise his child instead of sending money back from overseas.

  “You all right, Paige?” asked Logan. “You’re awful quiet.”

  “A difficult time, Logan.”

  “I’m here to help you. My pa, too.”

  “All my stuff is gone,” said Lori, gripping Rabbit. “My trophies and my horse models. Everything.”

  “Things aren’t important, Lori.”

  “I know. People are,” she said, repeating the words she had heard many times. “But I still like my things, my bed and the bedroom curtains.”

  “We have our lives. It’s a blessing,” said Paige, wrapping an arm around Lori’s shoulders.

  “But where are we going to live?”

  That stopped Paige. She drew a breath, held it and then pursed her lips and blew.

  “You and your mom and grandmother are staying at our place. Your grandmother will have my mom’s sewing room. You and Valerie will have my brother’s old room and your mother will take my room.”

  Paige was shocked at the tingle that went through her at this revelation.

  “Where will you sleep?” she asked, innocent of the possibility that she and Logan might share a bed, the bed they had shared nine years ago, in fact.

  She glanced to Logan, expecting him to turn and give her a knowing look or wink. Bu
t instead he held his grin and kept both hands on the wheel. He never even looked at her as he spoke.

  “I’ll bunk with Steven and my dad in his room.”

  It hit her again. He didn’t remember. This time the anger at his decision to reenlist, which had led to his brain injury and loss of memory, didn’t surface. In its place, there was a deep, yawning sorrow.

  “I can’t put you out of your room,” said Paige.

  Now he turned, brows raised in speculation. “No?”

  “I’ll sleep on the sofa downstairs,” she said and watched the speculation turn to disappointment as his gaze flicked back to the road. The snow was falling in earnest now, coating the grassy surfaces and sticking to the branches of the trees. Only the oaks held their leaves now. The rest of the trees stood bare and skeletal in the torrent.

  “You can sleep with me and Valerie,” said Lori, her voice holding a coaxing, hopeful tone.

  “Sounds good, sweetheart.” Then a thought struck her. “That’s a lot of people, Logan. A lot of beds.”

  “Red Cross is helping with that.”

  “You know, I still have lots of toys and board games and books. So many books,” said Logan to Lori. “I guess I used to be a big reader.”

  “Not anymore?” asked Lori.

  “Letters jump around a bit. I can read, but it’s not yet a pleasure. Getting better, though.”

  “That’s because of the bomb that went off?” she asked.

  “There wasn’t a bomb. They tell me that I got hit right here.” He pointed to the scar that threaded along his hairline to the side of his temple. The scar was still raised but it was no longer pink. “Part of the ceiling fell on me.”

  “But you saved everyone?”

  “You know they never told me that. Just that I...” His voice changed as if he were reading from a report. “Engaged insurgents while simultaneously evacuating three wounded marines under fire.”

  “Engaged?” asked Lori.

  “That means they shot at us and I shot back.”

  “Did you kill anyone?” asked Lori.

  “That’s not the sort of question you ask, Lori,” said Paige.

  “It’s all right,” he said to her and then glanced to Lori. “Answer is, I have no idea. I was a soldier, so probably.”

  They reached Hornbeck and drove through the village and finally reached their house. Past the bare branches of the three maple trees stood what had been their home.

  The entire top floor was charred black. The front windows were all gone and the exterior was burned down through the clapboard siding. The first-floor paint had peeled and the smoke discoloration made the paint seem brown in places. Pink insulation disgorged from between blackened two-by-fours spilled out onto the charred porch roof. Through the empty space where the windows had been, exposed electrical wires hung from what remained of the interior ceiling.

  Logan pulled to a stop and the three went quiet. Paige stared at the yawning black hole that had been her window.

  “How did you get us out?”

  “That,” he said, pointing at the sooty aluminum ladder that had twisted in the heat.

  Thousands of tiny icicles glittered from the charred sides of the second floor.

  Lori nestled close to her mother as she stared.

  They had been so fixed on the house or what remained of it that they did not at first see her mother standing on the porch of the Lynch home motioning to them.

  Logan pointed. “Your mom wants us.”

  He continued past her home and into his driveway.

  Paige was not even out of the truck when her mother hurried down the stairs wrapped in an unfamiliar woman’s coat that Paige suspected had once belonged to Logan’s mother.

  “The fire inspector wants you to call him.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Paige had come home from the hospital, wanting only to stretch out on her bed and sleep. But she didn’t have a bed. The scorched and blackened box spring she had spotted on arrival in the yard beneath her vacant window told her that much.

  Her mother wanted them to go over to the house to see what they could salvage. The walk between the houses showed Paige again how ferocious the fire had been. There was a pile of charred debris that might have been dragged out by the volunteer firefighter. She wasn’t sure how else it might have landed in a heap below her window.

  “What’s that?” asked her mother, pointing.

  Paige glanced from the rubble to the strands of yellow caution tape wrapped around the porch rails and across the side steps like a dubious garland. Upon reaching the bottom step they paused to read the notice affixed to both the closest porch beam and the front door. On the bright yellow post was printed in black:

  DO NOT ENTER

  CRIME SCENE

  Below that was a white post with red lettering:

  DO NOT ENTER

  UNSAFE TO OCCUPY

  * * *

  THEY RETREATED TO the Lynch home. Her mother had been on the phone all afternoon, trying to reach the fire inspector and get answers as to who exactly had forbidden her to enter her own home.

  Paige checked in at work and was informed she had an employment hearing scheduled for Friday at 9:00 a.m. sharp. She was advised to bring her attorney.

  She barely remembered eating supper and was so dead on her feet that both she and Lori went up to bed at just after seven.

  The next day she gave Lori the choice of school or a day off and her daughter, the social butterfly, chose school. In the Lynch’s kitchen she found her mother, still in her robe, chatting with Mr. Lynch over their mugs of coffee at the breakfast table as Steven sat between them, shoveling breakfast cereal into his mouth.

  Her mother glanced at Paige, who was now dressed in a borrowed pair of men’s flannel pajama pants and an overly large US Marine Corps T-shirt.

  “You look like you’re off to boot camp,” she said and took her coffee and the paper past Paige to the dining room. Paige watched her mother go, wondering if she was expected to follow. The smell of freshly brewing coffee convinced her to stay.

  “Help yourself?” said Mr. Lynch, seeing the object of her desires.

  “Thanks. Smells wonderful.” Then to the boy she said, “Good morning, Steven.”

  His reply was garbled. She headed to the appropriate cabinet and retrieved a mug. Paige had been in the house often enough to know where everything was kept.

  Mr. Lynch poured and motioned to the sugar and carton of milk on the table. From above, she heard the not-so-tiny feet charging up and down the upstairs hallway.

  “Uh-oh. The girls are up,” said Mr. Lynch and retrieved a six-pack of blueberry muffins from the refrigerator with the butter dish. He set the butter on the kitchen table with the breakfast cereal and milk. Steven took his bowl to the sink and headed upstairs.

  “Where’s Logan?” asked Paige.

  “Went in to work early. The fire, I think,” said Mr. Lynch.

  Paige looked toward the back door. A melancholy too great to name turned bitter in her mouth.

  “He’s getting better, I think. Speech is improved. Not stuttering or groping around for words,” he said.

  “He can’t process loud sounds.”

  “That’s true. And the memory, well, it’s gone, Paige.”

  She met his steady, sympathetic gaze.

  “I know that, Mr. Lynch.”

  “Do you? Because it seems you are still waiting for him to show up.”

  She glanced away. “Don’t be silly.”

  “It’s not silly. I felt that way for a time. But now, instead of mourning the man he was, I’m celebrating the man that he is.”

  Paige frowned at that, thinking how wise and impossible that advice really was. How could she not want what they had shared? If only she remembered, did that make it less real? She felt
her throat going tight with the pain of loss. It was so hard to grieve someone who was right here with you. Didn’t any of them understand?

  “Paige, honey. His heart remembers even if his mind forgets.”

  That broke the last of her control. Tears streamed down her cheeks.

  “He just needs a little push, Paige. He knows he’s not the man who was engaged to you. He’s told me he doesn’t think he’s good enough now.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Truth and belief are different things. So, I’m afraid if you are waiting for him to do it, it will just not happen. It’s got to be you.”

  “Do you think he’ll remember this time if we tell him?”

  “He’s been retaining things perfectly. I think his doctors would be shocked.”

  “I think so, too.”

  “Time to tell him again, Paige.”

  There was a yip and shout from the girls upstairs.

  He glanced toward the ceiling. “And past time for Lori to know I’m her grandfather.”

  The sound of pounding feet on the stairs preceded the girls’ appearance. Paige snatched up her napkin and dabbed at her eyes.

  Lori flounced into the room, joyful as a butterfly. She was dressed in her only outfit and holding her new rabbit in a headlock as she entered the kitchen.

  “Good morning, sunshine!” Mr. Lynch said with exuberance that seemed as natural as breathing.

  Paige swallowed hard and then crushed her napkin under the table in her lap. She turned to her daughter and Lori gave her an assessing look that lasted just longer than normal. Paige forced a tentative smile.

  “Good morning, honey.”

  Lori’s smile returned.

  “Cereal or blueberry muffin?” asked Mr. Lynch.

  Lori chose the muffin. Valerie appeared, making that two blueberry muffins. Mr. Lynch went to work as Paige sipped her coffee, forcing the hot liquid past the stubborn lump. It felt normal eating in the Lynch home. She couldn’t remember how many meals she’d had here over the years but this house, she realized, was as close to a second home as one could hope for.