by Harper Allen
“Of course I don’t!” she cried, her nerves lending a rawness to her tone. “Don’t you think I know how hard it’s going to be to build a relationship with Petra even without a complication like this? She’s just lost her mom and I’m the stranger who’s suddenly appeared to take her place—she’d resent me under the best of circumstances. But Claudia left the responsibility for raising her child to me, despite the rift that kept us apart until it was too late—despite the fact that when she could have used my help, I wasn’t there for her!” Her vision shimmered. “I won’t let her down, dammit! Not this time, and not if I have to fight you every inch of the way!”
She bridged the distance between them with one swift step, her fists going to his chest to grab handfuls of the olive-drab T-shirt. “I know what she’s going through, Stone,” she said, her voice low. “Believe me, I know. Children want the world to make sense so badly they’ll seize on anything that might provide an explanation. If they don’t learn to accept that some things aren’t anyone’s fault, are just tragic, terrible accidents, they can end up blaming themselves. Petra’s not going to go through that.” She jerked sharply on the T-shirt. “I’m going to make sure she doesn’t, understand?”
She stared up at him, her face white and set. He reached for her wrists, his own gaze shadowed.
“Maybe I do. Your parents and your brother—they died in a fire just like Claudia did, didn’t they? Were you Petra’s age when you lost them?”
“I was five.” Her answer was automatic. She tightened her grip on his shirt. “How—how did you know? Did Chandra say something?”
He shook his head. “The photo in your helmet.” A ghost of a smile touched his features. “I figured the little sweetheart with the carrot-red hair had to be you. It followed that the boy on the bike was your brother and the man and woman standing by the car were your parents. But it had obviously been taken a couple of decades ago, and I guessed if your family was still alive you’d have something more recent. Was it a fire, Tam?”
She nodded, her eyes wide. “In a motel. Mikey was in an out-of-town hockey tournament that weekend. When did you see what was in my helmet?”
He shrugged. “The medal and the cloverleaf and the photo? In that hallway. It got blown off during the flash-over, remember?”
Slowly Tamara unclenched her fists. Her brows drew together in a frown.
The beast had been fast—so fast that everything had seemed to happen at once. Stone had been moving even faster, pulling her along with him, shielding her from the worst of the blast with his own body. At some point she’d lost her helmet.
In the smoke and confusion he’d caught a glimpse of it, lying overturned in the hall. Moments later Joey had appeared out of the flames and Stone had gone in after the child.
Stone McQueen had the reputation of being a jerk, and she wasn’t going to argue with that. He was abrasive and overbearing.
He also had the reputation of being a legend. Now she knew why.
“You saw all that in a glance, McQueen?” she asked quietly. “Not only the photo, but who was in it? How is that possible?”
He looked nonplussed. “For God’s sake, fire burns up a lot of evidence and once it’s gone, it’s gone forever. If you’re lucky enough to get on scene before everything’s destroyed you keep your eyes open. I do, anyway,” he added with a snort. “I can’t vouch for those clowns Knopf and Trainor.”
He shoved his hands in his pockets, his manner suddenly diffident. “But you’re right. I’ve got no official standing anymore. Probably the best thing I can do for the kid is walk away from this.” He raised his eyes to Tamara’s. “She’s a little scrapper, isn’t she? Funny how she took to me like that.”
He fell silent, his smile uncertain. Then he took a deep breath and looked restlessly around the room.
“Listen, honey, this whole setup’s a little too domestic for me—the cat, the friggin’ tea, the togetherness. I think I’ll be shoving off.” He cleared his throat. “Tomorrow I’ll drop in at the hospital to see the kid and tell her I was way off base about it being arson.”
Tamara turned to the counter and began gathering up the eggshells he’d left lying on the cutting board. She set a couple aside and bent to retrieve a saucepan from the cupboard. Behind her she heard him inhale.
“That’s that, then,” he said huskily. “I’ll let myself out, honey.”
Filling the pan with water, she set it on the stove. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him bend quickly to rub Pangor behind one ear. When he straightened his posture was rigid. He was almost at the door of the kitchen when she spoke.
“How much damn coffee, McQueen?”
He halted at the doorway and she looked up from the stove. “I’ve never made it this way. How much coffee do I use?”
He took a step back into the room, his expression unreadable. “I thought you liked tea.”
“Tea doesn’t keep me awake,” Tamara said shortly. “You’re a crappy cook. For all I know you’re a lousy lay. But you were a hell of an arson investigator once, and I think you probably still are. I believe you saw what you say you did in that room, and that means you’re right—someone murdered my best friend.”
Her lips tightened. “Of course, after years of pissing off just about anyone who might be able to do something about this, no one’s going to listen to your theory. Which leaves just you and me.” She sighed. “So make us some coffee, McQueen. I’ve got a feeling we’re going to be up for a while.”
He stared at her for a moment. Then he nodded, and brushed past her to the stove. “Three big scoops of coffee. Hell, go crazy and make it four.” He took the canister she handed him. “You can tell you’re a tea drinker, honey. You don’t know jack about what kind of coffee to buy. There’s a couple other things you’re all wrong on, too.”
“And what might they be, McQueen?” Tamara folded her arms.
“I didn’t piss everyone off. Chandra stuck by me.” He shook out what looked to be a good half pound of coffee. She handed him the eggshells.
“You said I was wrong on two things. What was the other?”
She owed him, she thought. That crack about his sexual prowess had been over the line, and if she were honest with herself, she’d only said it to salve her own piqued pride.
Going to bed with him would have been a bad idea. But where did he get off being the first one to come to that conclusion?
“What was the second one, McQueen?” she repeated, mentally tapping her toe. The coffee came to a rolling boil, and with the air of a maestro, he tossed the eggshells in.
“The other one?” His brow cleared. “The crappy cook remark, of course. I’m one hell of a cook. Now get out of the way, this is the crucial part.” He gave her a bland look and turned back to the stove, but as she walked out of earshot he added one last remark under his breath.
“I can cook all night and still be up to give you breakfast in bed, honey. And one of these days I intend to do just that.”
Chapter Six
“Thanks, Lieut, I appreciate it.”
Tamara cradled the kitchen phone on her shoulder and drew her stockinged feet onto the chair she was sitting on. On the other end of the line Chandra’s voice rose questioningly.
“What? Oh, McQueen. I don’t know, probably still sleeping. We kept each other up pretty late last night.” She stifled a yawn. “No, I would have called you anyway. It’s good to hear that Joey’s out of danger.”
She should have asked for the number of the room he’d been moved to, she thought a few minutes later, padding to the refrigerator and taking out a carton of orange juice. Although it probably didn’t make much difference, if he still wasn’t being allowed visit—
Dear God, had she really said Stone and she had kept each other up all night? No wonder Chandra had ended the call so briskly. Tamara stared at the container of juice in her hand, and then tilted it recklessly to her mouth. One of the perks of being a single woman living alone, she told herself, closing he
r eyes and chugging back a much-needed dose of vitamin C. You could walk around in mismatched socks, drink from the carton and scarf down a whole tub of ice cream at a sitting if you felt like it. Not that she ever—
“That brings back memories. Make it a bottle of ripple wine and you could be me a year or so ago.”
She choked and hastily set the carton down. Beside her Stone began unpacking a bag of groceries and went on talking.
“I found your spare set of keys on the hall table, so I made my first stop the stationhouse and got your car. I looked in on you to tell you, but you were out like a light.” He glanced at the clock on the wall. “I’ve been up since five, honey, and it’s nine-thirty now. You planning to stay in those godawful pajamas all day?”
Ground rules, Tamara thought tightly. They needed to lay down some ground rules here. No—she needed to lay down some ground rules.
She gazed narrowly at him—at his back rather, since, typically oblivious to her outrage, he was hunkered down on the floor beside Pangor’s food bowl. The cat was going into ecstasies as McQueen scraped something that looked and smelled unpleasantly like kidneys out of a can and into the bowl. Giving Pangor’s tail a roughly affectionate tug, he sat back on his heels to watch the animal eat.
She’d been about to ream him out. The words died in her throat.
He’d shown that same awkward affection to Petra, she reflected slowly, and the child had reacted with the same adoration that the normally aloof Pangor was bestowing on Stone. In fact, though he nearly always followed it up with some remark that had her gritting her teeth, he’d occasionally shown his tenderer side to her, she admitted. He’d tried to make her dinner last night. He’d retrieved her vehicle. He’d picked up extra groceries.
Stone McQueen was a diamond in the rough. Too bad most of the time rough was the operative word.
And too bad she’d been left with no alternative but to take a stand right here and now, she thought in resignation. She looked down at the badly pilled sleepshirt she was wearing and saw with embarrassment that she’d obviously put it on backward last night before crashing like a fallen log into bed. The shirt hung down past her knees, and from there to her socks a pair of flannel pajama pants covered her legs.
The drinking from the carton thing had weakened her position, too. But she couldn’t let this go on any longer.
“Number one.” She was gratified to hear a trace of his own growl in her voice. “You don’t barge into my bedroom and watch me while I’m sleeping. While I’m doing anything, for that matter,” she added. “Number two—”
She paused. What exactly was number two? she thought helplessly. Stop being such a jerk all the time? Try to lose the junkyard dog attitude? Slowly she shook her head at him.
“What’s with you, McQueen?” She really wanted to know, she thought suddenly. “Why are you so…abrasive most of the time?” Her gaze searched his face. “You couldn’t always have been this hard to get along with, even if we have to go back to when you were just a kid. I’ll bet your mom and dad didn’t let you snap their heads off everytime you talked to them.”
“That would have been tough to do.” His voice was expressionless. “Especially since I never knew who my old man was, and the day after she gave birth to me my mother walked out of the hospital without remembering to take me with her. I’d say sassing off to the folks would have been quite a trick under the circumstances.”
Tamara stared at him, stricken. He shot her a sharp glance. “Quit it, honey. I’m thirty-four years old. I wasn’t mothered when I was in diapers, and I’m damn well not looking for that kind of response from a woman now. I wasn’t cute so I got fostered out, and to more families than I can remember. I grew up fast and I grew up tough—and since this is a good world to be tough in I’m glad I learned the lesson early.” He shrugged. “But so did you. We’re not that different, you and me.”
“I wasn’t bounced around from home to home,” she said softly. “My parents’ best friends adopted me, and Uncle Jack and Aunt Kate made sure I grew up knowing I was loved. There’s a world of difference between our backgrounds, Stone.”
“If you say so.” He sounded unconvinced. “But if losing your family wasn’t it, what did happen to make you the way you are?”
“The way I am?” She smiled at him, her tone a little less soft than it had been a moment earlier. “I don’t get what you mean.”
“You live alone, except for a cat that can’t stand you,” he said flatly. “You were hurt on the job yesterday, and from what I can tell, you don’t have anyone close enough to you that you felt you had to phone them to say you were okay.”
“My uncle called the hospital and talked to Chandra,” she interrupted. “She told him it was no big deal.”
“Okay, but he’s family. Your only family, right?”
“Since Aunt Kate died last year, yes.” She pressed her lips together. “I still don’t get your point.”
“You can’t have a boyfriend, or I wouldn’t have spent the night ten feet down the hall from you, honey. My point is that you keep the world at arm’s length. I think you might even be worse than me in that respect, except you just hide it better. So what took away your trust?”
“Unbelievable.” She lifted her eyebrows at him. “If I were a man you wouldn’t think twice about my lifestyle, but because I’m a woman you assume there must be some deep, dark reason for me not having a boyfriend or a husband. For starters, I was engaged to be married, remember? Maybe having my fiancé take off with my best friend shook my faith in humanity for a time, but the simple truth is that when I got over it I realized I liked being single.”
“Yeah, but not because you don’t need someone in your life,” he rasped. “You’re too afraid to trust anyone enough to fall in love with them. Go ahead and tell yourself that jerk dumped you, but you were never in love with him in the first place. You know why you and I came so close to ripping each other’s clothes off last night, honey? Because I’m the perfect guy for you—I’m a stranger, I’m no one you could ever imagine yourself falling in love with and I’m so damned bad tempered you’re pretty sure I’d never soften up enough to fall in love with you. Hell, I was made for you.”
A couple of minutes ago she’d been thinking of him as a diamond in the rough, Tamara thought, icy anger flooding through her. This was the real Stone McQueen—coarse, offensive, surly to the point of rudeness and beyond. And he felt he had the right to examine her life?
“This is over now,” she said in a splintered tone. “You and I aren’t alike at all, McQueen. Hell, we’re so different we can’t even work together. But that should be nothing new to you. Tell me, did you quit investigating fires because you’d run out of people to piss off or did everyone just get so tired of you that they finally voted you off the island?”
Her eyes were on his as she spat the words out, and even before she finished speaking she saw the shuttered look that slammed down over his gaze. His features seemed to lock into immobility, and the heavy muscles under his T-shirt tensed.
She’d crossed over some invisible boundary, she realized, immediately wishing she could take back whatever it was she’d said. All of a sudden she didn’t want to be the latest in the long line of people who’d wounded Stone McQueen.
But it was too late.
“You’ve been dying to know.” The touch of velvet she’d always heard beneath the gravelled tone was completely gone. “I guess there’s no reason not to tell you. If you’d asked around, sooner or later someone would have been only too happy to fill you in, honey.”
“I don’t want to know.” Her voice shook, and she steadied it. “Whatever it is, it’s something you don’t want to talk about, so I don’t want to know. I don’t even know why I lashed out at you like that.”
“Because I got too close.” Like lightning briefly illuminating a blasted landscape, just for a second the dead look in his eyes seemed lit by a flash of pain. “Because you wanted to push me away. I let five firefighters die.
That’s why I walked away from the job.”
“Five firefighters—” She stopped, her eyes widening in partial comprehension. “Four men and Donna Burke,” she said hollowly. “The old Mitchell Towers office complex. They went in to fight the blaze and they never came out.”
“They never came out.” His tone was barren. “I saw the building collapse on them myself. I went to the funerals, one after another, and then I quit.”
The tragedy had still been fresh when she’d been in training, Tamara recalled, and the fact that one of the five lost had been a woman had brought home to her the potential dangers of the profession she’d decided to enter. She’d gone to the library and looked up copies of the Boston Globe from the time of the deaths, and found the newspaper had honored the jakeys by profiling each one.
She’d learned that Donna Burke had saved a toddler from a day-care fire less than a week before she’d been killed. She’d left the library knowing that earning the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of a woman like Burke would be a privilege.
Stone’s name was unusual enough that she would have remembered seeing it in the articles, she thought. He hadn’t been mentioned.
“I don’t understand.” It was important he didn’t glimpse even the slightest sheen in her eyes. He would mistake any sign of compassion for pity. “How do you see their deaths as your fault? You were an investigator, so you wouldn’t have had anything to do with fighting the blaze—in fact, why were you on the scene at all? Your job would have begun after the fire was put out.”
“That’s right. And I screwed up on my job.” He looked away from her. “Listen, the sharing’s been swell, honey, but what say we drop the subject now, okay?”
His tone held a hard note of finality. He’d said all he was going to say, Tamara thought in frustration. He’d closed down, shut off, retreated behind the barrier of abrasiveness that was his way of keeping the demons at bay, and there was nothing she could do about it. Maybe in a month or two, his demons would become once again intolerable to him, and he would find himself standing in an empty room, looking sightlessly out of a window and wondering whether it was worth it to go on.
