by Nancy Warren
“I was mad as hell,” he said. “The former mayor made a joke out of our town. I got on my high horse and told anyone who wanted to listen my ideas for how to improve Courage Bay.”
He laughed softly. “Some of my friends got together and raised a few bucks for a campaign and put my name forward. I was already a declared candidate before I’d even made up my mind.”
“Do you miss being a firefighter?” she asked.
“I miss the action. I miss being able to do something right now that’s going to save a life. I’d rather face a twenty-foot wall of fire than some of the council meetings I’ve been stuck in lately. But I’ve got kids and…”
He didn’t finish the sentence, but she immediately guessed the real reason behind the switch. Once his wife had died, he didn’t want to continue in a dangerous job and risk orphaning his kids. Good for him.
“How about you?” he asked her. “You know as well as I do that you’re overqualified for this job. In fact, you almost didn’t get it because of that fact.”
“Really? Who wanted to pass on me, you or Archie?” Archie Weld, the communications manager for the city, had interviewed her first. Only the final candidates had gone on to interviews with Patrick.
“Don’t hit me, but I was the one with concerns.”
Smart guy.
“Archie talked me into hiring you. He said the way things were going in our city this past year with the mudslides, the fires, the earthquakes and murders that I’d be crazy not to jump on you.” He cleared his throat and said, with a touch of humor, “Figuratively speaking of course.”
“Of course.”
“I assumed you were taking the job to get a foot in the door, and then you’d start applying for more challenging positions. But I was wrong, wasn’t I? I still can’t figure out why you took the job.”
She was on shaky ground, but she wanted to be as honest as she could with the man she’d just made love with. “I wanted a change from the Midwest. I’ve always loved California. So, you’re right in one way. But I won’t start looking for another job right away. That wouldn’t be fair to you.”
“I don’t want to argue with you, but based on what-”
“Then don’t argue,” she said, cutting him off with a kiss. It took her a few times to find his mouth. First she kissed his cheek, the bump of his nose and finally his lips. When she finally pulled back, she said, “Looks like we’re stuck here for a while longer.” Her voice dropped to a sexy whisper. “Just the two of us, in the dark.” She ran her index finger up his arm. “I can think of one way to help pass the time.”
Even as she tipped her head toward him, his hand was cradling the back of her head and his lips covered hers. Give the man credit, he wasn’t slow on the uptake.
“PATRICK? BRIANA? You okay?” The strong clear female voice jerked Briana awake. She heard the welcome whirr of the generator and then the sound of thumping and banging.
As she lifted her head from Patrick’s shoulder, which she’d used as a pillow, a sharp crick in her neck had her stifling a howl of pain. She rubbed her neck while Patrick squeezed her shoulder, then rose to his feet and moved toward the front of the elevator.
“Hey, Shannon!” he yelled. “Hope we didn’t haul you out of bed for this.”
“For that crack, you get to buy the coffee.”
“Get us out of here and I’ll buy you breakfast. Anything you want.” He turned to Briana. “My sister, Shannon,” he said, overly cheerful. “She’s a truckie on Engine One. She’s the best.”
“Great,” Briana said, equally hearty as she struggled to her feet.
Already the real world was close and awkwardness crowded in as they stood together listening to the noises indicating imminent rescue.
Suddenly Patrick pulled her to him and kissed her hot and hard.
He took her hands and held them loosely. She wished she could see his face, but even though the generator was thrumming, the elevator was still in darkness. “I’m going to have to give you your job back now. Are you sure you want it?”
Silence pressed against her chest. She understood what he was saying. The minute she accepted her job back, the affair ended.
She could leave the mayor’s staff now that she had the tape, of course. But after tonight, she knew she’d never use it. No. What had happened between them had been as unexpected and bizarre as the aftershock that had trapped them in the elevator.
There’d been a lot of time in the night to think. She’d intended to tape Patrick making an inappropriate pass. She would say no, loud and clear, then record him trying to talk her into having sex. The reality was pretty much the opposite. Patrick had tried to say no and Briana had thrown herself at him. She knew her uncle believed Patrick had faked the evidence that destroyed Cecil’s chances of ever becoming mayor. She’d believed it, too. Who else had anything to gain by publishing a doctored picture and leaking a bogus story? Now, however, she was beginning to wonder if Patrick actually had anything to do with leaking false evidence against his rival Maybe someone on his campaign team had done the deed. Possibly, they hadn’t even told him.
Okay, it was a slim chance, but she’d just made love with the man. She wanted him to be as decent as he’d seemed in the two months she’d worked for him.
One way or another, she’d find out who had blackened her uncle’s name. If that person was Patrick, then she’d do what she had to do.
She owed her uncle her loyalty.
But after tonight, she felt she owed Patrick some, too.
“I can’t stay fired,” she told him with real regret. “You need me.”
He touched her face, and she felt tenderness in his fingertips. “You have no idea how much,” he said.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE SOUNDS OF their approaching rescuers had Briana and Patrick pulling reluctantly apart.
“Okay, guys, stand back now,” Shannon ’s voice came through the metal door, and before Briana could take a step backward, Patrick was reaching for her hand. Not that she was scared anymore, but it was nice to have the comfort of his warm hand in hers. A loud bang sounded, then a creak, followed by the screech of metal pulling against metal.
As light flooded the elevator, Briana freed her hand from Patrick’s and shaded her eyes.
“Good to see you, kid,” Patrick said to his sister. Anyone could tell they were related, Briana thought every time she saw the siblings together. Both were tall, athletic, black-haired and blue-eyed. They shared the trademark O’Shea grin she’d also seen in his children.
The grin on both faces was particularly broad this time. Briana knew that not all Shannon ’s rescues turned out this well, yet she risked her life day after day, as her brother had done in his previous career.
In full uniform, Shannon seemed tough, and she was, but Briana knew she had a soft heart under all the protective gear.
The elevator had come to a stop about three feet above the main floor, so they had to bend down and jump to get out. Patrick naturally gestured for Briana to go first. She did, pulling off her high-heeled shoes and clutching the hands of Shannon and another firefighter. She managed to land on her feet without any injury, other than to her pride.
“I think you lost a button in there,” Shannon said in an undertone just after Briana landed.
A quick glance down showed her blouse gaping open to display a good bit of cleavage and the ice-blue silk of her bra. Briana grabbed the front of her blouse to cover the gap, forcing back the blush that threatened. It didn’t help that she caught one of the male firefighters checking her out with an interested expression on his face. She gave him the ice-queen don’t-even-think-about-it look she’d perfected in high school and turned back to Patrick’s sister.
“It must have come off when the elevator lurched and threw us to the ground,” she said.
“Must have,” Shannon replied in a dry tone, giving Briana a look that suggested more than her button was missing.
Briana knew she must appear mussed and has
tily put back together. She detected the same telltale pewter color in Shannon ’s eyes that were a dead giveaway in Patrick’s that he was angry about something. In this case, Briana realized that Shannon had made an educated guess at what had happened in that dark elevator and she didn’t like it one bit.
Patrick landed beside Briana a moment later and she couldn’t stop herself from looking up at him, seeing him in the light for the first time since they’d made love.
The blush she’d managed to suppress a minute ago swept over her cheeks now as she read the passion, intimacy and some other emotion she didn’t want to name deep in Patrick’s eyes. His weren’t pewter now, but the deepest Irish-Sea-on-a-sunny-day blue she’d ever seen them.
Her heart seemed to stutter as the full impact of what she’d done hit.
“Patrick, I-”
“You forgot your purse,” Shannon said, reaching up into the elevator to haul Briana’s bag off the floor and hand it to her.
“Thanks,” Briana said shortly, grabbing the thing. Her bag hid so much. The evidence of their passion, tucked neatly away, and that tape recorder, which she’d managed to switch off before their second bout of lovemaking.
“Well, I guess you missed your meeting with the police chief,” she said to Patrick.
“Yes.” He grimaced. “I doubt he even noticed. I bet he’s had a busier night than I did.”
She stared at him, and he must have realized what he’d said, for it was his turn to display ruddy cheeks. She and Patrick had not been idle in that elevator.
They were saved from awkwardness by the second firefighter, who said, “It’s been a busy night for EMS all right. Another one.”
It was no longer night but morning now, Briana realized. Almost 3:00 a.m. If she weren’t torn between elation and guilt over what had transpired in that elevator, she’d probably be pretty tired.
“What’s happening out there?” Patrick asked his sister, reverting from the tender loving man of the past few hours to the mayor of a town once again facing disaster.
“Not good,” Shannon told him, her voice neutral. It was a tone Briana had come to associate with emergency personnel who were sometimes forced to give the worst news possible. “One woman was killed in the convenience store collapse. She’d been pinned under a beam, and by the time we got there…” She shook her head. “There was a second woman, a fire victim. We pulled her out of the basement suite still alive, but I wouldn’t put her chances of recovery past fair.”
Shannon’s emotionless delivery almost fooled Briana into thinking Shannon was taking the violent deaths in her stride, but not her brother.
“Hey, kid. I’m sorry,” he said, pulling his sister in for a hug, regardless of her bulky uniform and helmet.
Amazingly, the tough, strong woman of a second ago let herself lean on her older brother. “Yeah,” she said, and in that one word Briana heard fatigue, despair and anger. “If we weren’t so stretched, and all of us running on too little sleep, maybe we could have got there sooner. Maybe-”
“You can’t beat yourself up over this. You know that. Sometimes there are fatalities.” Patrick spoke with the authority of a former firefighter who’d been there and seen it all, but he still held his sister in his arms.
Shannon couldn’t see his face, but Briana could, and almost as though she’d read his mind, she knew he was doing exactly what he’d told Shannon not to do. Blaming himself for the stretched resources, the exhausted emergency crews-the deaths of two more Courage Bay ’s citizens.
Their brief romantic idyll, Briana realized, was over.
“I’m going to go home and get some sleep,” she announced. “I’ll see you at the office tomorrow.”
“Wait,” Patrick said. “Let me drive you home.”
She smiled at him, wishing it were that easy. Wishing she could just say yes. “No. My car’s in the lot. You get home and check on your kids. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Are you sure?” The words were urgent, the meaning behind them obvious to Briana, but, she hoped, not to the other ears listening in. He was asking if she really wanted to keep working for him. Since her other choice was sleeping with him, it was one of the hardest things she’d ever done when she said, “Yes. I’m sure.”
He nodded reluctantly. “Sleep in tomorrow morning.” He shook his head. “I guess I mean this morning. Come in to work when you can. I’d give you the whole day off, but frankly, I’m going to need all the help I can get.”
Briana knew that the phone was going to be ringing like crazy tomorrow as city residents phoned in to complain about the latest disaster and the city’s response.
The media would hound Patrick; councilors would be calling, as would the fire chief and the police chief. On top of that, she had a pretty good notion that once the story spread that he’d been trapped in the elevator, his family and friends would be on the hotline making sure he was okay. It was going to be a busy day. As kind as it was of her boss to offer her the morning off, Briana knew she wouldn’t take him up on it.
He needed her.
As soon as she’d given her car a quick check, Briana drove carefully through the quiet streets. She went more slowly than usual, since a couple of the traffic lights were out, probably due to the aftershock. Maybe it was a result of being cooped up in that dark elevator so long, but the first thing she’d done when she started the engine was to roll down all the windows. She decided to take the route that hugged the coastline on the outskirts of the city, and as she drove, she could hear the quiet shush of the ocean, smell the clean air coming off the bay. She tried not to think too much about what had happened to her personally tonight.
She’d vowed not to sleep with the man she was trying to topple, so how had she come to do it?
It was easy to blame circumstances. The euphoria following their escape from serious injury or death. The intimacy of being together for all those hours. Briana knew she could have managed to get through a hurtling fall in an elevator and a few hours in the dark with any other man and not jump his bones. But Patrick O’Shea was not most men. And the plain truth was, their attraction had been immediate and intense from the first moment they’d met.
As she drove home, she tried to convince herself that nothing monumental had happened. That it was only sex. And that everything would go back to the way it had been before the aftershock.
When she finally reached the apartment she rented on the main floor of a house, she was still keyed up. Her eyes were gritty with fatigue, but she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep for a while.
Besides, her stomach reminded her that she’d missed dinner. Unable to face cooking, she toasted whole-wheat bread, dished up a bowl of yogurt and sliced a banana into it. She poured a glass of apple cider to accompany “dinner.” While she ate, she flipped through the day’s mail. A couple of bills, a promotional flyer from a high-end fashion store and this month’s copy of Gourmet Magazine, which she subscribed to, even though she barely had time to cook for herself these days, never mind entertain.
Still, there was something about reading up on other people’s elegant dinner parties, checking out the international destinations featured, and imagining she was tasting all those wonderfully photographed dishes that made up in a small way for the fact that too many of her meals lately had been like this one.
She had dinner tidied away by 4:00 a.m. and was no more tired than she had been earlier. So she drew a hot bath, throwing a few handfuls of lavender milk crystals under the running faucet. While the tub was filling, she fetched a clean nightgown and her slippers.
When at last she eased herself into the warm, silky milk bath, magazine at hand, Briana breathed deeply of the lavender, in dire need of its soothing aromatherapy benefits.
She was in the middle of reading about a romantic springtime feast for two, when she caught herself changing places with the attractive couple in the magazine. She projected Patrick into the photo with her, fantasizing about him sitting across the cozy round table,
toasting her with the California sauvignon blanc, eating the food she’d cooked and staring warmly into her eyes.
Smiling slightly to herself, she went back over their evening. Her spine was a little sore in places, and there was definitely some incipient whisker burn on the slope of one breast. She touched the spot. Next time, they’d have to find a bed.
Next time…
She got out of the bath with more haste than grace, slopping water on her magazine in her agitation. What the hell was she doing? Patrick was a good man. She was sure of it.
Drying off and pulling on her robe, she reminded herself that Uncle Cecil was a good man, too. But Patrick couldn’t have deliberately damaged her uncle’s career and her aunt’s peace of mind. There had to be another explanation.
Someone had done it, though, and Briana was going to find out who.
She washed her face, brushed her teeth and crawled into bed, knowing she’d be crawling out again in three hours. She only hoped she could manage to sleep some of the time.
Tomorrow was going to be a very busy day.
PATRICK STAYED at city hall long enough to make sure the fire department had put up emergency tape over the elevator doors.
“Thanks for getting us out of there,” Patrick had said to the crew as they left. Since he knew them all, he hadn’t bothered with the formality of handshakes, but slapped them on the back and joked around a little. Shannon had hung back and made sure she had a minute alone with her brother.
“You okay?” she’d asked.
“Sure. I don’t think I even got bruised when the elevator jolted.”
“Don’t play dumb with me, big bro. You know what I’m talking about. You and your model-gorgeous secretary looked like you were rolling out of bed when you got out of the elevator.”
“So we fell asleep while we were waiting. Get your nose out of my business.”
