Savannah tugged at the hem of her light blue T-shirt, testing the limits of the cotton before sitting down in the chair across from him. Stay tough. “I just need to review the procedures,” she said, although the look on Everett’s face said they both knew it was a lie.
“You’re afraid of blood, Nelson.”
Her pulse stuttered, her defenses kicking her default response right off her tongue. “I’m not afraid of anything.”
“I am.”
The answer was so far outside the realm of anything she’d been expecting that Savannah bit without thinking. “Really? And what are you afraid of?”
He paused, as if his own admission had just caught up with him. “Heights. I can’t stand ’em.”
“You’re acrophobic?” Bombshell, meet lap. Of all the things he could be afraid of, heights seemed so . . . normal.
One light brown brow arched up. “What, you were expecting the boogeyman? Armageddon, maybe? Or killer bees?”
Savannah’s laugh knocked the tension right out of her chest. “No, I just . . . I’m surprised.”
“That I have a fear of heights?”
“That you have a fear of anything.”
“Everyone’s afraid of something,” he said. “It’s how you manage the fear that makes or breaks you.”
Everett looked at her from across the table, his green eyes flashing nearly hazel in the soft gold light spilling down from overhead. She knew she should feel vulnerable—he’d pegged her one debilitating fear from forty paces away, and that fear had made her weak. But something about his unvarnished honesty over being vulnerable, too, made Savannah open her mouth to let her words tumble right out.
“When I was a senior in high school, I was a passenger in a car accident. The guy I was dating was driving too fast and acting like an idiot. Typical teenage boy stuff.” God, she could still feel the drop of her stomach, the way her adrenaline had sent a hard shot of foreboding under her skin at every backroad turn. She’d told him to knock it off, but of course, that had only made him go faster. “We crashed into another car on the way to a football game. Hard enough for the impact to send it into a hundred-year-old oak tree.”
The smooth line of Everett’s jaw ticked. “Were you hurt?”
“No,” she said, then qualified with, “Not really, I guess. The air bag left me a little banged up, and I had some cuts from the glass. My boyfriend was okay, too, other than a really nasty bruise from his seat belt.”
Everett nodded, and even though there was clearly more to the memory, he simply waited for her to share it.
“The other car was a . . . different story. There were three girls inside. We went to school with them. The two on the driver’s side had only minor injuries like me and Justin, but the girl in the passenger seat was hurt really badly.”
Savannah pressed her palms into the desk in front of her, the wood cool against her damp skin. Mary Anne Marbury. She’d been a year behind Savannah at the time. They’d barely known each other. Which made the fact that Savannah had seen the girl’s humerus and more than half the blood in her body up close and personal seem all the more terrible.
Sweet Jesus, there had been so much blood.
“Her arm had gotten crushed in the impact, and she had a pretty bad head injury, too. She wasn’t conscious at first. Everyone else was freaking out, thinking she was dead.” In truth, for one gut-clenching minute, Savannah had thought so, too. Not that it had stopped her from trying to help. “I tried to get her out of the car, but her arm was pinned in, her brachial artery completely severed along with more than half of the limb. You could smell the blood from a couple feet away. It was . . .” Gruesome. Nightmarish. Terrifying. “Pretty awful.”
“Sounds like it,” Everett said. His hands lay calmly in front of him on his side of the desk, separated from Savannah’s shaking fingers by only a few inches. He had nice hands—long fingers, callused and capable, strong yet not terribly work-scarred. It was a strange thing to notice, considering the gravity of the topic.
But not nearly as strange as how badly she wanted him to reach out and wrap those fingers around hers.
“When she—Mary Anne”—Savannah corrected herself, because not saying the girl’s name felt somehow disrespectful—“came to, she panicked and started thrashing around, but of course that only made things worse. I swear to God, I’ll never forget the sound of her screams. I did my best to help her, but she was bleeding so much, and I couldn’t make it stop. The blood just kept coming, until finally, she passed out again, and after that, she didn’t . . .”
Savannah broke off, forcing herself to inhale. The climate-controlled air smelled faintly of wood polish and old books, not the sharp, dark scent that clogged her memory, and she ran both hands over her hair, pressing her fingers to her scalp to ground herself. “Anyway, I guess all of that came back into my mind yesterday when we were at the scene of that wreck, and I froze. But I really meant it when I said it won’t happen again.”
“You should’ve told me.”
The words arrived without accusation, but still, she huffed out a humorless laugh. “Come on, Everett. I—”
“Cole,” he interrupted, prompting her brows into a one-way climb.
“What?”
“I get that we work together, but we’re not at Eight right now. We’re sitting here, having a conversation, just me and you.” He paused, gesturing to the center of his gray T-shirt with one index finger. “You can call me Cole if you want.”
“Cole,” she repeated, the tension in her rib cage loosening by a fraction. “Maybe I should’ve realized calls like yesterday’s were going to shake me up. But I couldn’t just come out and say I’m scared of blood. I don’t need another reason for everyone in the house to think I’m weak.”
He leaned forward, his chair scraping softly against the floor. “I know you want to stay tough and prove yourself, but every last one of those guys has a trigger and gets scared on calls.”
She couldn’t help it. She snorted. “Are you seriously trying to tell me there’s something out there that scares Oz?”
“Okay, he might not be the best example,” Cole admitted, but still, he didn’t let up. “Being scared is part of the job, though. I don’t expect you to be fearless, Savannah. But I do expect you to be straight with me so I can help you deal with what scares you and get you trained.”
“I just . . .” Savannah’s defenses made her trip over the words, but Cole was right. Hiding her feelings wasn’t going to teach her how to get past her fear so she could help people, and she sure as hell wouldn’t prove her worth as a firefighter if she couldn’t carry her weight. “I don’t know how to lose that bad head space when it comes to car wrecks.”
“Will it help you to know that both Melody and Rebecca are okay?”
Her shoulders hit the back of her chair with a graceless bump. “They are?”
Cole nodded, the small smile on his lips turning his trademark seriousness into simple honesty. “Rebecca had to have surgery to repair the damage to her chest, but as it turns out, she’s a fighter. Prognosis for both girls is a full recovery.”
Savannah blinked in an effort to keep all the no way in her brain from taking over her expression. “And how exactly did you come across that information?”
“Well, it took a little doing, but let’s just say my list of contacts isn’t limited to nice old ladies at the library.”
Cole lifted his brows up and down just enough to make her laugh inevitable. The corners of his eyes crinkled as his laughter blended in with hers, sending a shot of sweet surprise all the way up her spine.
“Hey. You know how to smile.” Without thinking, she nudged his hand with the back of her knuckles, the warmth of the contact multiplying tenfold as he nudged her in return.
“Yeah. So do you.”
A minute passed before Savannah said, “Thanks. I mean, not for the smiling thing.” Her blush heated a path to her temples, and God, could she be any worse at this expressing-your-s
ofter-side stuff? “But, you know, for, um, letting me know about Melody and Rebecca. And for helping me study.”
“Thanks for being straight with me about why you had trouble yesterday.” For a long second, Cole looked at her, no pretenses, no pressure, just the two of them sitting there. Savannah’s heart sped up, but the feeling pulsing through her was different from the unease she’d felt before.
She trusted him. And it felt frighteningly good.
Cole cleared his throat, scooping a textbook from the top of the stack and parting the pages with a creak. “So, ah, why don’t we start with some of these protocols since that’s where you seem most comfortable? Once you’ve got the responses down, then we can figure out the best way for you to handle the rest. Sound like a plan?”
Between Cole’s low-pressure suggestion and the calm composure returning to his eyes, Savannah’s answer sprang right out. “Okay, yeah. What’ve you got?”
She leaned over the desk, listening intently as he outlined scenario after scenario. Some of them were easy enough, and even the tricky ones became more manageable as Cole peppered in suggestions based on his experience and expertise. He seemed to have seen just about everything, from near drownings to electrocutions to one really gruesome call involving a man getting his arm caught in a residential wood chipper. But every incident had a string of responses, ordered steps to bring things closer to right side up, and the more they went over each one, the more intuitive the possible solutions became in Savannah’s head. Their study session got a little dicey when Cole used his phone to pull up a few YouTube videos of actual accident footage, but the way he paused each one to matter-of-factly explain each scenario and the best ways to fix it kept her anchored and focused.
“Jeez,” she said, finally pushing back in her chair. “You really weren’t kidding when you said this job will show you all sorts of things that should never be seen.” Putting out fires kind of seemed the least of it.
“Unfortunately, I wasn’t. Lucky for us, the upside gets you through the bad days.” Cole gestured to the books in front of them, and wow, they really had covered a lot of ground. “Anyway. I know this was just a start, and we’ll keep working on trauma responses at the house. Finding your comfort zone will mostly be a matter of practice. But I hope tonight helped a little.”
“Actually, it helped a lot. Thanks.”
“No problem.” He unfolded his arms into a stretch, and Savannah turned toward the door leading out to the rest of the library. They hadn’t seen or heard a single person since they’d made their way upstairs—although on a Friday night, that couldn’t be terribly unusual. Still, the snapshot of hallway visible beyond the glass set in their study room door looked awfully shadowed. And wait . . . were those the emergency lights illuminating the exit signs?
“Cole,” Savannah said, her heart picking up its pace in her chest. “What time is it?”
“It’s . . .” He palmed his phone, his brows snapping together. “Wait. This can’t be right. It’s ten forty-five.”
“I thought the library closes at nine.” She’d seen the hours printed in thick gold lettering right on the massive front doors when they’d arrived.
The same front doors that looked as sturdy and impenetrable as Fort freaking Knox.
“It does,” Cole said, helping her shove her books into her messenger bag. They double-timed it to the stairwell, which was as sparsely lit as the rest of the stacks. Their footsteps cut through the otherwise eerie silence, coming to a screeching halt at the bottom of the stairs on the ground floor.
The entire library was as dark as it was empty.
Chapter Eleven
“It looks like we’re locked in.”
Cole shook his head, as if the movement would somehow alter the reality of the words Savannah had just said.
Nope. Nada. She simply stood in front of him, her hands on the hips of her low-slung jeans and a bold, what-now expression covering her pretty face, and he had to admit it. Of all the scenarios he’d ever strategized, breaking out of one of Fairview’s oldest landmarks on a Friday night might just be the weirdest.
“The library staff usually does a sweep at closing time, but Mrs. Norcross must’ve missed us somehow.” Not too unfathomable, since he and Savannah had been in the very last study room, and the librarian had to be pushing octogenarian status. Still, Cole was never unaware of his surroundings, and definitely not for hours. How had he lost track of that much time?
Hell if the answer to that question wasn’t standing right in front of him in all her long-legged, leanly curved, everything-on-the-table glory.
Going straight up with Savannah at the beginning of their study session had been a gamble, he knew, but the best blueprint to get her to overcome her fear was for her to face it, and that meant earning her trust enough to get her to air it out.
He just hadn’t realized how much going one-on-one with her would sucker punch his emotions. Savannah’s hands had been right there on the desk as she’d unraveled the story of her accident, so close that Cole had been able to feel them trembling as she spoke. Her rare lack of toughness had arrowed through him with palpable force, hard enough that he’d wanted to lay waste to every logical reason not to pull her straight into his arms and kiss her until they both ran out of breath. It had taken every last ounce of his composure to focus on the task that had brought them here.
But then Savannah had balanced out her vulnerability with a double dose of determination and intelligence, making him want to do a hell of a lot more than kiss her.
And now they were stuck in the library. Together. In the dark. Alone.
This was the worst tactical plan ever.
Cole reached out to test the heavy double doors, but they gave the same unyielding rattle as when Savannah had tried them twenty seconds earlier. “Okay,” he said, raking a hand through his hair as he started formulating a Plan B that didn’t involve his dick. “There’s an emergency exit over by the periodicals, and there’s got to be access in the back for employees.”
“I saw the emergency exit when we came in,” Savannah said, her hair swishing over one shoulder as she turned toward the right-hand wall. “Why don’t I check it out while you look for an employee entrance and we can meet back here in five?”
Five minutes later, their options still amounted to Cole’s new best friend, Jack Shit.
“The emergency exit is a no-go,” Savannah said, her voice echoing through the hushed quiet of the library even though she spoke only one notch above a whisper. “It’s dead-bolted from the outside just like the front doors. This library might be as old as the hills, but it was built like a bomb shelter. Even money says that emergency exit door is four inches thick. Breaching it without a crowbar or a Halligan looks damn near impossible.”
“Yeah, the employees’ entrance in the back is the same.” Cole flipped his cell phone into his palm. “I guess we could call the police and get a squad car out here.”
Savannah reached out, her hand curling over his forearm to halt his finger over the emergency icon. “That still won’t help unless they have the key. Plus, we’re six blocks from the station, Cole. Do you really want to risk dispatch putting out a person in distress call and sending B-shift over here? We’d never hear the end of this.”
Fuck. Fuck, she was right. “Okay, but unless you’ve got a Halligan in your pocket or a thing for sleeping in the stacks, we still need a way out of here.”
“We have one. We just have to go outside the box to get it.” Savannah’s gaze drifted upward, a smile breaking over her face, but oh no. She couldn’t possibly mean . . .
“There’s a fire escape on the third floor outside the main window facing the gardens. Doesn’t that fall under the umbrella of our expertise?”
Cole’s gut bottomed out at his boots as he tried desperately to spin up a Plan C. Preferably one that had less risk of him hurtling thirty feet to a rather rude meet-and-greet with the library pavement. “Well, yeah, but we don’t have any gear.”
His pulse tapped out oh, is that all in rapid-fire Morse code, but he bit back the argument welling up from his chest. Letting his emotions dictate his actions, or worse yet, turn them into non-actions, wasn’t going to get him out of this mess. And just because he wasn’t wild about heights didn’t mean he hadn’t hauled his bacon up ladders twice as high as the library’s fire escape whenever the job dictated.
Never mind that he’d hated it with the fiery passion of a thousand white hot suns every damned time.
“Fine. Let’s go.” Cole made his way up the second staircase, following Savannah past the third-floor study carrels and through the shadow-lined stacks. Their feet came to a muffled halt in front of the window at the end of the middle row, and Cole had to hand it to her. At least she’d been paying attention to her exit paths.
“Okay,” she said, the thick fringe of her lashes sweeping downward as she squinted through the glass. “Fire escapes are pretty standard, right? This shouldn’t be too complicated.”
Before he could point out that dangling themselves three stories over the ground had the potential to get very complicated, Savannah had thrown open the window and shimmied onto the narrow platform of the fire escape.
“Jesus Christ, Nelson.” His heart jerked against his sternum, and he had one leg over the window ledge before his brain caught up with the rest of him. “Are you crazy?”
“Of course not. I’m doing exactly what we just planned.” Savannah took a step toward the dropdown ladder, but then she froze, mid-move. “Oh my God, Cole. Look. Have you ever seen so many stars?”
Fearless Page 13
