by Jill Shalvis
Socks hissed.
Joe sighed. “Yeah. I know just how you feel.”
Chapter 2
Life was short, so grab it by the balls and run.
This was Summer Abrams’s motto. As a result, she’d scaled mountains, traversed canyons, and kayaked down rapids not meant for humans.
She’d survived it all, and more.
But standing right here in the spot where her world had once fallen apart just might kill her. At the sight of the charred building, the confusing circle of fire vehicles, firefighters and cops milling around, her breathing quickened. Number one warning sign of a pending panic attack. She couldn’t control it, being here brought her back.
She could only imagine how her mother must have felt standing in this very spot. Once upon a time, Camille and Tim Abrams had been everything to each other, sharing an all-inclusive love that had begun when they’d been still in school. Their bond hadn’t required a child, but Summer had come along anyway, when Camille had been only eighteen. She and Tim had accepted their fate, arranged a quickie marriage on a beach in Mexico, and for the next sixteen years, life had been bliss for them, pure bliss.
Until the first warehouse fire.
Summer knew her mother still missed her father, so much so that she’d never really invested herself emotionally again. There’d been men, but nothing deep, nothing emotional, a phenomenon that included the relationship she had with her own daughter.
Summer knew she couldn’t have prevented what had happened that long ago day, no one could have, but she still felt responsible. If only she and Joe had gone inside the warehouse sooner, if they’d only smelled the smoke earlier, if only…
So many if onlys.
Her chest tightened with anxiety. Second warning sign. She breathed through it because she would absolutely not have a panic attack now. She hadn’t had one in years. Of course she hadn’t come back to this very spot either, but she could do this.
To prove it, she smiled with remarkable calm at the firefighter approaching her. He was covered in a fine layer of dust so that she couldn’t tell if his hair was blond or gray, but oddly enough his face was perfectly clean. He wore black-rimmed glasses that magnified his light blue eyes and friendly smile. She let go of the lucky crystal in her pocket and held out her hand. “I’m Summer Abrams, the daughter of one of the owners of this property.”
“Kenny Simmons, fire marshal, from the Metro Arson Strike Team.” He pushed up his glasses. “I’m sorry for the loss.”
“It’s a total goner then?”
“Most likely. We’ll know in a little bit.”
Her stomach sank to join her heart at her toes. She felt sick for her mother and her aunt. Unable to tear her gaze from where the roof had collapsed, she kept seeing the original warehouse as it had stood twelve years before. Hearing her own screams, inhaling the smoke—
That was all she had, all she could pull out of her memory. The rest was blank, like an unpainted canvas. She’d lost it all when she’d been hit by the falling debris, then trapped there. She didn’t remember getting out, she remembered nothing beyond that first lick of fear at the top of the stairs.
She put a hand to her chest, as if she could pump her own air into her deflated lungs, but she couldn’t. Damn it, this always happened when she thought about the fire, or was enclosed in a crowded space. There were too many people around here, standing too close—
The fire marshal’s brow furrowed in concern as he moved in closer. “Do you need to sit down?”
“No, really. I’m good.” She straightened her shoulders and sent him the I’m-in-charge smile, the same one that allowed her to run crews on some of the fastest rivers and steepest mountains in the world with unquestionable authority.
What she wouldn’t give to be on a trip right now, out in the wilderness, with only a handful of people around. In her element. In control. Where life was lived in the moment, with no time for thoughts of the past, and no need for thoughts of the future.
Life was too short for either. “My mother said you found her cat.”
“We did. Feisty thing too. She’s over there, in that truck. I’ll go get her—”
“Oh, no, that’s okay, I can do it.” Needing to keep moving, needing to get away from here, she waved her thanks over her shoulder and walked toward the truck to which he’d pointed. The driver’s door was open, so she came around and peeked in, and hello, found another fire official. This one sat behind the wheel, shirtless, his coveralls shoved low on his hips, holes torn in each knee, a tube of antiseptic in one hand and a fistful of Band-Aids in the other, eyeing Socks with a healthy mistrust.
From her perch on the passenger seat, Socks eyed him back.
Then the man craned his neck toward Summer and said the oddest thing. “Are you okay?” he asked in an intimately low voice, suggesting such intimacy and familiarity that she blinked. “Sure,” she said, and shrugged.
He just watched her. She couldn’t help but watch him back. He was filthy, but he had an extremely nice chest. Sinewy, tanned, with a spattering of hair from pec to pec that wasn’t too light, wasn’t too thick, but juuuust right. The Goldilocks in her wanted to smile. After all, she loved men, all shapes and sizes, but this man…yum.
Unfortunately, all that extremely decent male flesh also sported a series of deep, nasty-looking scratches that appeared to be Socks’s doing. “Ouch,” she said in sympathy.
His light, light brown eyes, with the impossibly long, dark lashes met hers with…amused cynicism?
She went still. Wait. Wait. She knew that slashing scar above his eyebrow. She knew that dimple on the right side of his mouth. She knew that wry, slow smile, it had always made her day. “Oh my God. No.”
He just kept looking at her.
She took closer stock. Shaggy sun-kissed brown hair, still apparently untamable in thick waves framing his face. Light stubble over his lean jaw—lean jaw. That’s what was so different, besides the years that had turned him from boy to man.
He’d lost his softness, every single bit of it, coming out with a rangy, leanly muscled build that spoke of long days in physical labor. He looked liked he’d lived each of the twelve years that had passed, every single one of them, well and hard. There were fine laugh lines fanning out from his eyes, and laugh lines around his mouth too. The thought made her heart leap. He’d smiled, laughed, and often. Oh I’m so glad, she thought, and felt the grin split her face. “Joe Walker.”
“So you do remember.”
“Of course I do.” She laughed, because just looking at him made her feel young and carefree, but the smile faded away when he didn’t do the same. “I can’t believe it’s you.”
“In the flesh.” Twisting around, he reached for a dark blue T-shirt hanging over the back of the passenger seat.
“Don’t you want to treat the scratches first?” she asked.
“Later.”
“But—” She thought of the herbal cream she always carried for blisters, cuts, and any other nasty surprises she encountered on a regular basis out on a trek, and reached for the little purse hanging off her shoulder. “I have—”
“I’m good.” He pulled the shirt over his head, the muscles in his biceps flexing, his hard, ridged belly revealing a nice six-pack as he sat up straighter to pull the material down to cover his torso. A firefighter patch now covered his pec, making him look official. Grown up. And then it hit her. He looked right at home here. He’d lost the haunted, hollow look that had plagued him all his childhood, and had found something for himself, a place he belonged.
So had she. Far away from here. Unfortunately, her basis for that distance had been a single tragic event, not a strong enough foundation, she’d discovered. She’d lived free as a bird, yes, and had loved it, but a very small part of her knew she’d missed something by walking away from everyone and anyone who’d ever cared about her.
She just didn’t know what exactly.
And yet standing here, looking at the warehouse, s
eeing Joe, it was like a high-speed internet connection to the single most traumatic event of her life, and without warning, her vision wavered. Oh, damn. The third and final warning.
“Summer?”
She blinked into Joe’s eyes. He had her wrist in a firm grip.
“Here.” He stood, then pressed her to the driver’s seat. “Sit.”
“I’m okay.” She went for a smile but couldn’t quite stick the landing as she continued to suck air into her lungs too fast. “It’s just…hard to be here.” She waved a hand in front of her face to fan it and gulped air like water.
“Yeah,” he said, watching her carefully. “And it’s going to get worse. You probably shouldn’t hang around for longer than necessary.”
“No.” Keep breathing, Summer. It took a few minutes to even it out, to gain control. Humiliating.
His mouth was grim as he waited, his eyes blazing with emotion. This was hard on him too, incredibly so, and yet she could still hardly believe it was him standing here. “You look good, Joe.”
He laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
It was a shock that she couldn’t read him, not at all. “You used to wear your emotions on your sleeve.”
“Yeah, well, that never really worked out for me.”
She nodded and stood on legs she told herself were steady now. “Look, I’m sorry. I know I left things badly. I never said good-bye. I—”
“It doesn’t matter.”
He sounded as weary as she felt. Just yesterday she’d been in San Francisco, planning and organizing a hiking trip through the Sierras for a large group of businesswomen. Then her mother had called at two in the morning. An oddity in itself because in all these years Camille had been extremely cognizant of the fact that Summer didn’t like to come back to Ocean Beach and had never asked her to.
As a result, Summer’d had an amazing freedom to do as she pleased. And what had pleased her was to roam, far and wide.
But her mother needed her now, an event shocking enough that Summer had hopped in her car and driven seven straight hours to get here. She’d had no sleep and it was catching up with her. But looking into Joe’s eyes she could see that he’d had a long night too. And probably an even longer morning. “I’m sorry,” she said again. After a hesitation, she reached past him for Socks. “Here, kitty, kitty.”
“Watch out, she’s still skittish.”
“I’ll be careful.” Her shoulder brushed his. Beneath his shirt, he was warm and hard with strength, but that wasn’t what struck her with an almost unbearable familiarity as she found herself in such close proximity to him. No, his scent did that because he smelled the same, and it took everything she had not to throw herself at him for a desperately needed hug.
But he sucked in a breath and stepped back.
To avoid her touch.
She stared at him, the hurt sneaking in and squeezing her heart. She wrapped her hands around the fat, scared cat, who came compliantly, even happily, pressing her furry face into the crook of Summer’s neck affectionately. “Mew.”
She hugged Socks close, feeling unusually awkward and out of her element. He didn’t want her here. Didn’t want to see her. “Did you fight the fire?” she asked.
“No, I’m a fire marshal.”
“So…you’re investigating?”
“Yes.”
That was somehow both unsettling and comforting. “It was an accident last time. A terrible accident.”
His face softened. “I know.”
“Is it this time?”
“I’ll find out.”
He sounded so sure, so confident. So unlike the Joe she remembered. His radio squawked, and he reached for it, talking into it with a shocking, easy authority.
He bewildered her, this man who felt both familiar and so much like a stranger. There was a lot to say to him, and yet nothing to say at all. Cuddling Socks, she turned away, giving him privacy, and taking a moment for herself as well.
The knowledge that the warehouse was probably a total loss dragged at her, fatiguing her all the more. She wondered if her mother and Aunt Tina would rebuild for a second time, and glanced back at Joe.
He was still talking into his radio, and didn’t appear to notice she’d left.
So she kept walking, surrounded by people and still somehow more alone than she’d felt in years. Utterly, completely alone.
Chapter 3
Fifteen minutes until the staff meeting, Walker.”
Buried in paperwork at his desk inside the San Diego Fire Department’s central headquarters downtown, Joe looked up at his micromanaging, anal chief. “I’ll be there.”
With a curt nod, Chief Michaels moved on, stern frown still in place, ready to terrorize the next underling.
Joe let out a breath, not intimidated—no one intimidated him anymore—but frustrated. It’d been a hell of a week, and not just because of the blast from his past a few days ago, though that certainly hadn’t helped, especially in the thick of the night when the dark dreams sometimes came back, when he dreamed he was still hopeless, helpless, when the only bright spot in his life had been Summer.
But even that he could shove aside in the light of day. He’d been doing so for years.
It’d been seeing her again.
Facing who he’d once been.
The chief poked his head back into Joe’s office. “Don’t forget, you’re presenting on prevention.”
Joe didn’t jump, didn’t do anything but cut his eyes to the clock. He had thirteen and a half minutes left. “I’ll be there,” he repeated, and when he was alone, got up and flipped over the WELCOME sign to STAY OUT! before shutting the door firmly.
Then he went back to brooding over the stacks on his desk, held in place by three of his cameras. He moved his favorite carefully aside, the new and so-expensive-it-still-made-him-queasy digital, and pulled out one of the fourteen sets of blueprints he had to approve for the building department. Behind them was another stack of new building sites to inspect. Everyone in the entire county seemed to be building or rebuilding this year, and as a result, his scheduled workload had tripled.
This did not a happy Cindy make.
She’d been hot under the collar for days, which had meant no sleepovers for him. And now she’d given him an ultimatum. Cut back the hours or stick a fork in her, she was done.
He had to admit, she wasn’t asking for anything unreasonable, but cutting back just wasn’t going to happen, not at this time of year.
Adding to his troubles, it’d been three days since the warehouse fire, and he hadn’t yet satisfied himself that they were done with the scene. The suspected accelerant had turned out to be gasoline, which both Camille and Tina had told him in separate phone interviews they didn’t keep around. The mysterious vagrant hadn’t materialized, though they’d found evidence that someone had been there as recently as a week ago in the way of a boot print—size eleven and a half with diagonal tread. Interestingly enough, the print had held a trace of gasoline. Maybe the vagrant had attempted to light himself a campfire. No one knew.
Kenny thought they should rule undisclosed accidental fire caused by neglectful drifter, but Joe didn’t want to let it go. Only he wasn’t sure if that was because he felt tied up with the past, or if his instincts were truly screaming.
Kenny’s theory—which he’d been happy to share just this morning on a downtown high-rise fire inspection, where they’d been meticulously going through plans and checking fire escape routes—was that it was both. That because of the way Joe had grown up, he tended to keep people at bay, never sharing the real Joe Walker.
Joe had retaliated by pointing out that he’d shared plenty, using Kenny as an example, at which his partner had rolled his eyes. “Like I’m going to keep you warm at night. You need a woman, a good one, for the long haul.”
“This from the guy who changes women like shirts.”
“That’s only because I haven’t found
the right one yet, but I plan to.” Kenny smiled at the challenge. “Can you say the same?”
“Yes.” He scowled at Kenny’s scoff. “And it’s not my fault I keep getting dumped.”
“Yes, it is. You don’t open up enough. How many times have I told you spill your beans, open the floodgates. Women get off on that stuff.”
“I’ve been dating Cindy for two months.”
“Because she thinks you’re hot and you’re pathetic enough to be bowled over by that. But sooner or later she’ll realize you’re not talking enough and you’ll get dumped again. Come on, Joe, you’re not the fat kid anymore. You can let someone inside. Have a real emotional attachment.”
Joe had grumbled then and he grumbled now. So he didn’t let people in, so what? It wasn’t just how he’d grown up. He knew that a person took their experiences and made their own path. He didn’t have to be an alcoholic asshole who beat on kids to feel like a man.
But if he knew that, he also knew he didn’t have it in him to really connect on a heart and soul level. Doing so would make him feel too open, too vulnerable.
Besides, he was perfectly happy this way.
He was, damn it.
His door opened, which meant someone was blatantly ignoring his STAY OUT! warning. He lifted his head, prepared to growl.
And Summer flashed him a smile. “Friendly sign you have there.”
“If it was any friendlier it wouldn’t work.”
“It didn’t work this time.” She leaned back against his office door as it clicked shut.
He tossed his pen aside and struggled to get it together in the face of this beautiful, smiling, warm woman who ridiculously reminded him of a time he’d rather not think about. “What do you want?”
“Hmmm,” she said, and stepped forward. She wore a colorful flowery skirt low on her hips that didn’t quite meet the hem of the layered tank tops, one white, one red. The strip of abdomen exposed was smooth, flat, and tanned. A gold hoop flashed at her belly button, which for some idiotic reason, made his mouth water.
For the second time this week he felt eighteen, horny, and pathetic.
