Tasting Fire

by Kelsey Browning

  “They were waiting here for Emmy.”

  “Yeah,” she sighed. “I figured that out. Dr. McBitch made that pretty clear.”

  “Fuck,” Cash said, scanning the parking lot for all the cars pulling out. But there were too many for him to make out all the drivers. “I should’ve taken a picture of the group.”

  Maggie pointed at the security camera in the portico. “Maybe that’ll make up for it.”

  21

  Inside, Emmy hadn’t taken ten steps when the ER director intercepted her in the hallway. “Dr. McKay, we need to talk.”

  Shit, shit, shit. He’d found out about Emmy’s unethical use of the lab. Not optimal, but as long as she got her hands on the results, she’d take whatever consequences she deserved. “Okay.”

  He waved her into the break room and stood with his arms crossed. “We’ve had people sneaking into the ER all day.”

  Uh… not what Emmy had expected to hear, so she remained silent.

  “They were looking for you and not because they had coughs or any other ailments. Whatever you’re doing in your time outside the ER, you’re upsetting people.”

  “I’m sorry about that. It’s just—”

  “It’s disrupting our work here.”

  She could imagine, based on the mob outside. “Did you realize they’d formed a protest outside the hospital?”

  “No,” he said. “But that makes what I’m about to say even more crucial. I’m requesting that you take a leave of absence from the ER.”

  “Wha… What?”

  “Not permanently. At least not yet. But if you aren’t here, then word will get around and the staff can get back to our real work instead of serving as revolving doormen for the people who’re upset about Jesse Giddings.”

  Since she and Cash had driven up to discover the debacle outside, Emmy’s stomach had already been engaged in never-ending cartwheels, but now it hit the mat with a thud.

  She was being suspended. Possibly fired.

  As in completely jobless.

  An ache crawled up the back of her neck and squatted at the base of her skull.

  “Add that to the lawsuit that’s cropped up in Baltimore.” The director held out his hands in a helpless shrug. “And it’s just for the best all around.”

  Total bullshit. It wasn’t the best for her. Which meant she had to find out how all these pieces fit together as soon as possible.

  Although she was boiling inside, it wasn’t wise to buck his decision this soon after she’d been hired. “Should I clear out my locker?”

  “Not yet. Consider this your notice of a temporary suspension with a review in seven days.”

  “Thanks.” Thanks? Thanks?? Why had she said that? It was like showing your undying appreciation to the highway patrol when they issued you a speeding ticket. This suspension, temporary or not, was nothing to be thankful for.

  “I’ll e-mail you with the date and time of your review. Until then, please steer clear of not only the ER but the entire hospital.”

  “I understand.” Yeah, she might comprendo, but that didn’t mean she planned to comply. Not until she’d gotten those lab results. “I’ll… I need to pick up a couple of items from my locker.”

  “Get what you need.”

  Emmy heard the unspoken remainder of that sentence. And then get out.

  The director left and Emmy sleepwalked over to the locker that was empty except for an extra lab coat and a hair tie. She didn’t need either of them, but she stood there staring at the embroidery on the coat. Emerson McKay, MD.

  What would she be if someone took those initials from behind her name?

  It felt as if someone had been screwing with her ever since she returned to Steele Ridge. Her initial shock at the angry crowd outside and her subsequent suspension began to transform into something edgier. Sharper.

  She would not let anyone undermine the career she’d been building her entire adult life. She slammed the locker door, the metal vibrating against her hand. Then she strode out of the break room and toward the stairs that would take her down to the lab. When she entered the basement, Cash was standing in the hallway waiting.

  How long and how many times had this man waited for her?

  He was another thing she wouldn’t allow anyone to take from her without a fight.

  “Thanks for running interference outside.” She didn’t reach for his hand, but she brushed her arm against his as they walked down the corridor toward the lab.

  “Maggie showed up and persuaded them that breaking that shit up was in their best interest.”

  “Your sister is a badass.”

  Cash stopped and turned her toward him. “So are you. Don’t let what happened out there shake your confidence.”

  She smiled in what she knew was a determined teeth-baring expression. “Oh, I won’t. In fact, they just added fuel to the Emmy McKay fire.”

  Male appreciation washed over Cash’s expression. “Have I mentioned how damn sexy confidence is?”

  She couldn’t force herself to respond to his teasing tone.

  “Hey,” he said, touching her arm. “Did something else happen between the ambulance bay and here? I expected you to come straight to the lab.”

  “I got waylaid down in the ER.”

  “Patient?”

  “No.” She hated to tell him this, but it did her no good to hide it. In fact, the ER director had just inadvertently given Emmy the time she needed to dig into Jesse’s death. She gestured down the hallway to urge him toward the lab. “My boss. He’s decided I’m too much of a distraction in the ER right now. He suspended me.”

  “What?” Cash tried to pull her to a stop, but they didn’t have time for that.

  Emmy plowed on and joked, “Hey, I’m piling up vacation time all over the place.”

  “This has gone too far. You need to take back your position on the tac team and—”

  “I’m doing exactly what I need to be doing right now.” She made direct eye contact with him. Wondering. Deciding. Accepting. “And as long as you are on my side, everything else will work out.”

  She pushed open the lab door and looked back to see Cash frozen with his mouth open. She hadn’t given him a confession of love, but he mattered. Hadn’t he realized that before now?

  He snapped out of his surprise and followed her. “Are you saying—”

  “I’m here to pick up a lab report for Dr. McKay.” At the counter, Emmy pulled out her hospital ID and showed it to the lab tech.

  “You should be able to access it through the computer system.” The tech clicked his keyboard and scanned his computer monitor.

  “Max said he’d leave a printout for me.” Luckily for Emmy, she’d gone to undergrad with the lab director.

  “Max?” Cash asked.

  “Dr. Maximilian Causewell. The lab director.”

  “Whoa. He has a first name. Who knew?” the lab tech said. “Oookay. Lemme check with him.”

  The tech disappeared into the back and when he returned, Max Causewell, a pathologist who had the hair of a mad scientist and the mind of a genius, walked out with him. He eyeballed Cash suspiciously, but Emmy reassured him. “It’s fine. Promise.”

  “Then come back to my office.”

  They wound their way through lab equipment and squeezed into Max’s office. He plucked a file folder off his desk and handed it to Emmy.

  She flipped it open and quickly scanned the report. Jesse’d had painkillers and surgery drugs in his system, but nothing immediately shouted He was murdered!

  Still, she needed to go through the results line by line.

  “What’s so important about this patient?” Max asked, kicking back in his desk chair while Emmy and Cash remained standing.

  She trusted Max. After all, he was the reason she’d aced her organ systems path course in med school. But something stopped her from sharing her concerns. “I’d like a hard copy of this report.”

  “That one is yours.” Tap. Tap. Max drummed his thu
mbs on his desktop. “But you didn’t answer my question.”

  “I can’t tell you because I don’t know for certain.”

  “No illegals in his tox report,” Max said. “Died from a PPC. He was young and healthy, which makes cause of death a bit of a surprise. But any surgery is risky.”

  Max wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t know. And he knew that, too.

  “You’re absolutely right,” she agreed. “Has anyone else asked for a postmortem?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “Will you call me if anyone else comes sniffing around this?”

  “I don’t even know what stinks—”

  “I’m not sure anything does,” she said. “I just want to go over this report closely.”

  “I heard what happened, Emmy. I’m sorry about the kid, but it wasn’t your fault.”

  “So you can understand why I need a little while with this information. Can you bury it in the system just to make certain no one else stumbles across it? Just for a little while.”

  Max focused on Cash. “She’s hard to say no to, isn’t she?”

  Cash’s smile was grim. “I’ve never been successful at it.”

  “Don’t get me fired, Emmy.”

  Easier said than done when her own head was on the chopping block.

  * * *

  “I moved my truck to the back lot,” Cash said, leading her out the set of glass double doors to the area where hospital staff parked. “Figured we’d be less likely to run into any return protesters.”

  “Good thinking.”

  They were three steps away from Cash’s truck when his phone let out his incoming text tone. He checked the message. Talk about bad timing. “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “Callahan’s kid is sick and his wife is out of town for work. He wants me to cover the rest of his shift for him. I’ll try to get out of it.”

  Cash thumbed in a quick message: In middle of something. Can u tag someone else?

  Callahan: Middle of something? Lucky u. But ur it, dude.

  “Damn, I can’t say no to him,” Cash told Emmy as he opened the passenger side door for her. Before everything had gone off the rails here at the hospital, he’d planned to take her back to his house and show her what he’d hoped would make a difference in their relationship. “I still owe him from the last time he covered for me.”

  “I need some time to go through this report anyway,” Emmy told him.

  “You were pretty close-lipped in the lab. Did anything pop for you?”

  “Nothing blatant.” Inside the truck, she leaned an elbow against the door and stared out the window. Deep thought pose.

  “I’ll be off shift at seven in the morning, but I feel uneasy about leaving you alone right now.”

  Emmy turned to him. “Go in for Callahan. I need a few hours to sort through everything we know. And Jonah still owes us some information. I’ll go back to my place and lay all the pieces out, see if anything looks off.”

  “Research and thinking only. No action,” he said. “After that crazy protester stuff, I’d feel better if you were at my house.”

  “I wouldn’t,” she said. “I want my space to think in.”

  If Cash had his way, he’d stow her in an extra bunk at the station and lock her inside. Yeah, that would go over like a charm. But the thought of someone coming after her made his blood feel as if someone had shoved popsicles in his veins. “Keep your phone nearby, don’t leave your apartment for any reason, and don’t open the door for anyone but me.”

  “Seriously?” She stared him down.

  “Just hang out here. No public appearances or deliveries.”

  “I’m reminding myself that you’re doing this out of concern and not some macho manly egomania.”

  They pulled up in front of her building, and Emmy reached for the door handle, but Cash clicked the locks before she could pull it. “You’re not going up alone.”

  She pointed toward the newly replaced glass, reminding him of how scared and pissed he felt the night the brick had almost hit them. Had almost hit Emmy. “Grif and his staff are in there.”

  “Which means there’s all the more reason for you to keep your door locked and stay inside your apartment.”

  “He’s your cousin!”

  “Yeah. But the rest of those people aren’t.”

  He popped the locks and Emmy shot out of the truck. He was right on her heels as she flew through the Murchison building’s front door, not giving anyone on the first floor a passing glance.

  “Don’t go inside your apartment without me,” Cash called out to her.

  Grif glanced up at Cash, giving him a what-the-fucking-fuck look as Emmy stomped up the stairs.

  “Long story,” Cash told him.

  “When it involves a woman, it usually is,” Grif returned. “Whatever you did to piss her off, just apologize for it. Your life will be much better.”

  “What if I’m not wrong?”

  “Even if you’re not wrong about this, you are about something. Just suck it up and say you’re sorry. Take this advice from a man who lives with three women.”

  “Can you keep an eye on her?”

  Grif’s smug expression went sharp. “Why? What’s going on?”

  Yeah, he should’ve known that his Steele Shark cousin would home in on something Cash didn’t want to talk about right now. “Some folks aren’t too happy with Emmy currently. Someone wrote a crappy op-ed article about her in the Steele Ridge News and there was some kind of protest outside St. E’s emergency room today. If I hadn’t been there, I think someone might’ve gone so far as to hurt her.”

  “Steele Ridge people?”

  “At least some of them.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Grif muttered and ran a hand over what was probably a two-hundred-dollar haircut. “This town is a nice place. At least it’s supposed to be.”

  “It is,” Cash assured him. “But sometimes people act out when they’re scared.”

  Grif shot a look toward the stairs. “Why can’t you look after her?”

  “Caught half a shift at the station. I’ll be back here in the morning.”

  “Consider me on duty, then.”

  22

  As much as Emmy liked Grif Steele, she was considering doing him bodily harm by the time he finished two beers from her fridge and had paced the perimeter of her apartment like a guard tiger so many times that she was dizzy.

  He checked the front windows for the tenth time, and she said, “I don’t care what you claimed. This isn’t a friendly visit. Cash put you on Emmy duty.”

  “Can’t a guy—”

  “You are not a guy. You are Cash’s married cousin who has a wife and two beautiful daughters waiting on you at home. Go be with them.”

  Grif sighed and chucked his bottle into her recycling bin. “He’s worried about you, but I have a feeling he didn’t tell me the whole story. Which means he’s even more worried than he let on. I like you, Emmy. But family is family, and Steeles don’t desert family.”

  She pointed to the apartment door. “See those locks? You already turned this place into a fortress. And yes, I know that you replaced all the windows with ballistic glass.”

  He avoided her stare. “Just good business. I do own this building and I don’t like paying for repairs.”

  My God, was there a single man in Cash’s extended family who didn’t have a protective streak ten miles wide? “You should be milked, the whole lot of you.”

  That brought him around to stare at her. “What?”

  “The Steele men, the Kingston men, probably every other cousin related to y’all in whatever far-reaching way. There should be a way to skim off the extra testosterone. You could package it in manly bullet-proof bottles and sell it for a hefty profit.”

  Grif huffed a laugh. “Don’t let Maggie, Riley, Micki, or Evie hear you say that. They’re not exactly wallflowers themselves.”

  “But they do have the tendency toward rationali
ty that sometimes seems to be missing in you XY chromosome types.”

  Grif’s phone rang, and he answered it with a smile. “Hey, babe. What’s—” His eyebrows pinched together and his mouth tightened. “When? How long has she been running a fever?”

  More frowning. “I don’t like the sounds of that. Hang on, I’m with Emmy McKay right now. Let me ask her.” He covered the phone and turned to Emmy. “Stella Grace has a temperature of 101, the sniffles, and a cough. The fever came on within the past hour or two. Should we be concerned?”

  Hm. She could be totally honest and tell him the fever would probably go down on its own. Or she could get this man—a wonderful husband and dad—out of her apartment so she could think. She usually hated it when people used the ER for situations that could be handled by an urgent care clinic or a primary care physician the next day, but Emmy said, “Remind me how old she is.”

  “About eight months.”

  Stella Grace’s fever wasn’t that high, but that could be a tricky age. Better safe than sorry, even though it was probably nothing to worry about. “I can call Dr. Patton and let her know you and Carlie Beth are coming in and that Stella Grace needs to be seen right away.”

  “Fuck,” he said, worry clouding his eyes. “I mean thank you.”

  “No problem.” She reached for her phone.

  “Hey,” Grif turned back to his own phone. “Emmy says we need to get her in right now. I don’t want to waste time by coming to the house. Can you and Aubrey get her loaded up in the van and meet me at St. Elizabeth’s? Okay. Fine. Good. See you there in less than fifteen. I love you. Kiss my girls for me.”

  Tears glazed Emmy’s eyes. Grif Steele was an all-around good guy. She probably shouldn’t have given him such grief for playing guard dog for Cash.

  It was in these good ol’ boys’ DNA. Protect the womenfolk and babies, regardless of their ability to protect themselves. The beauty was that these strong men hadn’t gone for weak life partners. They’d each fallen for smart, tough women who pushed them to be even stronger.

  Cash included. And Emmy couldn’t stay pissed off at him for that.