Finally she rubbed her cheek against him and straightened again to look gravely into his eyes. “I came to find out whether you want to...to try to make this work, like you said. I mean, I have to go back. So, we wouldn’t see that much of each other until I graduate—”
The ability to breathe restored, he squeezed her hard. “Did you think I’d say no? Bailey, whatever hit me the minute I saw you turned into the real thing damn near as fast. I’ve been hanging on by my fingernails since you left. You have no idea how much I wanted to fly to LA and knock on your door. If I hadn’t been sure that would backfire, I’d have been there. But I really thought you needed to come to me, not the other way around.”
“Like a bird whose broken wing you healed, after which you held out your hands and let her fly free.”
An odd note in her voice made him cautious. “Something like that,” he said, “except I didn’t heal you. In fact, I’m still not sure if I did you any favor. Your parents, yes.” His mouth quirked. “I still get home-baked cookies once a week, but now they’re offered with a radiant smile instead of grief and hope.”
Bailey was silent for longer than he liked. “That’s...part of what I didn’t know.” Her eyes briefly focused on his. “I mean, when I left. There were good moments. The first time Kirk hugged me, and I knew he was my dad. When I actually remembered. That was one.” She gave a funny little shrug. “But a whole lot of the time I wished I’d never come. These strangers who claimed to love me. The press.” Another grimace. “Eve. Without you, I think I’d have turned tail. But you see, that freaked me out, too, because after he dumped me, I never let myself really, truly depend on anyone else again. I knew, bone deep, that allowing someone else power over you is not safe.”
Her face held pain that he sensed went just as deep. Her voice almost shook at the end with the force of her conviction. He’d known how she felt, as much as someone could who’d never experienced the horror she had—someone who hadn’t been held captive for years, molested and hurt and brainwashed and then abandoned when she was at her most vulnerable.
When he could make himself speak, he said, “That’s why you ran away. Because you didn’t feel safe.”
“No,” she corrected him, “because I did. And...how could I trust that?”
Seth nodded. Crap. Was he close to crying?
“At first I wondered why you didn’t call, why you waited until I did. But then I realized you really did understand. You weren’t...tricking me into thinking I was free to make my own decision, when actually you intended to keep the pressure on.”
“You took so long to call—” He cleared his throat. “I was so damn afraid you’d put me out of your mind. Why would you want me? Cop in a backward county with nothing to offer someone as smart and beautiful and determined as you.”
She gaped at him. “You’re kidding, right? I’m the one with the history. I mean, little girl forced to have sex with her ‘daddy’? Later, slutty because that’s all I knew?”
Suddenly angry, he gave her a shake. “What you had with that scumbag wasn’t sex. You were assaulted. How many times do I have to say that? And don’t use the word slutty. What you did was come out fighting. You took control. It was your choice. You were proving you held the power, something you didn’t have for all those years with Hamby. Given your horrific experience, what you did was brave. There is nothing about you that I’d change for my sake. It’s only for your own—” His voice cracked.
Eyes shimmering, she blinked hard a couple of times. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Oh, Seth.” She lifted herself to press a clumsy kiss on his mouth, one he returned with fervor, trying to tell her without words everything he felt.
But then he had to say it, too. “I love you, Bailey. Maybe you don’t want to hear that yet, but—”
“I do.” She sounded choked up. “I do. I never thought—”
“Anyone would love you?”
“That anyone could. And now...now I have to readjust everything I used to believe.”
He cupped her jaw, stroking his thumb over her lips. “Can you?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” she said simply.
“For four days.”
“And at Thanksgiving. And Christmas. I have a long break then. And...and you could come and visit me, you know.”
“I can. If you want me to, I’ll start applying for jobs down there.”
Now her gaze held astonishment, even wonder. “You really meant that.”
“Damn straight.” Since she’d left, he had tried river rafting, hiking, a scramble up one of the smaller peaks in the Cascades. Bailey had filled his thoughts whatever he was doing.
“Oh, my God.” The second “Oh, my God” was so soft he hardly heard it. “I can’t believe it.” Then, despite the fresh tears clinging to her lashes, a smile appeared, gathered force, until he saw on her face what he’d already seen on her mother’s: radiance. “No, that’s not true,” she said more strongly. “Because I do believe it.”
He laughed in joy even as the most profound relief he’d ever felt weakened him to the point he wasn’t sure he could have stood up. “Shall I give my notice tomorrow?”
“No.” The glow was gentle now, loving. “This feels like home, you know. I don’t want to stay in LA. We don’t even have seven months to go. I’ll apply to UW for graduate school. I can commute from here. If I don’t get in and have to go somewhere else...” Here she hesitated.
“That’s when I’ll give my notice,” he said huskily. “I can get a job anywhere.”
“Oh, Seth.” Her smile wobbled. “The day I came to find you was the best day of my life.”
“Sort of like jumping out of an airplane without knowing whether your chute would open?”
Happiness rang in her laugh. “Exactly.” With a suddenness that took him by surprise, she swiveled to straddle him. Now her lips were temptingly close. She slid both hands up his chest and to the back of his neck. “If I tell you that now I know the difference, can we make love?”
“Yeah.” He covered her breasts with his hands, gently rubbing. “Now we can.”
And, just before he kissed her, she said those three words for the first time since she was six years old.
I love you.
* * * * *
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IN HOPE’S SHADOW,
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Sweet Southern Nights
by Liz Talley
CHAPTER ONE
EVA MONROE ADJUSTED her helmet as Engine One roared up to the Magnolia Breeze residential complex.
“You ready?” Jake Beauchamp asked her, his blue eyes intense.
“I’m always ready,” she said, fitting the Nomex hood over her braided hair and securing the Velcro on her bunker coat. Her heart galloped in her throat. Didn’t matter that she’d done this hundreds of times. Preparing to battle a fire always felt the same. Like sex. Didn’t know how good or bad it was going to be, but you were going to get hot and sweaty either way.
Captain Sorrento crossed himself as he shifted the engine into Park alongside a curb grown wooly with overgrown crabgrass. A string of tired duplexes s
quatted next to the one smudging a sky the color of Cozumel Bay with dark smoke. “Check your radios. Everyone safe.”
“Everyone safe,” she and Jake repeated the department mantra.
Eva fitted her SCBA, strapping the air tank securely before pulling her mask over her mouth. She glanced at Jake, who’d done the same, his eyes crackling with intensity and focus.
Jake was always focused.
“FD2, go to C and give a status. FD5, start initial attack at A.” Captain Hank Sorrento already stood at the helm, flipping levers and barking directives at the engines pulling in behind. “Catch me a hydrant, Engine Four.”
Eva bailed out after Jake, just the way she liked it. When she first joined the squad, one of the older guys tried to let her out ahead of him saying “Ladies first.”
It had pissed Eva off...and Jake must have noticed because he said, “You kidding? She ain’t no lady. She’s a goddamn fire swallower, ready to put this bitch out.”
His words had made Eva laugh...and Dutch Rinaudo frown. Dutch was a home-grown Louisiana boy who still struggled with the fact Eva was his equal on the squad. Jake had grinned at Dutch and then pushed Eva back, bailing out before she could.
Later when she rolled the scene around in her mind, she wondered if his charging in first was because he couldn’t wait to face death or because he wanted to protect her.
Probably the first one.
Though she’d been friends with Jake for years, she didn’t doubt that embedded deep within his modern brain was the masculine desire to protect the weaker sex.
She snorted at the thought of her being weaker.
Weaker, her ass.
Jake hooked his accountability tag on the large cone designed to help keep track of who had tanks and was active on the scene before jerking back around to face her. “Want me to get the beast so you can break the window?”
Eva gave him the look, and Jake grinned. Ever since she’d nearly broken her hand trying to break a thick plexiglass window with the Halligan tool, Jake had given her grief.
Her heavy gloves prevented her from giving him the finger.
Smoke poured from the upper right corner of the freestanding, single-story apartment building. When Eva reached the backside as the captain instructed her to do, she called in her position and assessment. The captain barked commands, and Eva noted Moon Avery attaching the LDH to feed the pump.
“FD5, get the front door. Start initial through A. Let’s push this back. FD2, report to front.” Jake would go through and attack, while Eva headed back to the front to assist...or whatever the captain wanted her to do.
Moon set a ladder against the front side of the building and started securing the hose straps. Moon drove Engine Four and had worked for the department for almost twenty-three years. Martin drove the snorkel truck, which idled behind the two pumpers, the aerial bucket dangling like a forgotten toy.
Moon looked at her and jerked his head to an older woman huddled with a young girl, both crying.
Eva’s stomach flared aggravation. She shook her head.
Her radio crackled and Captain Sorrento said, “FD2, interview residents.”
“Shit.” Eva gritted her teeth, pissed that once again she wouldn’t be part of the attack and that she’d been relegated to deal with the teary-eyed while Jake and Martin smashed in the front door and knocked down the fire.
But then Eva looked at the older woman standing in a striped housecoat, dampness streaking her cheeks, anguish in her eyes, and softened as she headed toward where the pair held each other. Chief Blume met her there.
Eva pulled off her mask. “Anyone else in the building, ma’am?”
“Just me and Kiki. The people next door are at work. Ollie puts Zeke and Zara on the bus at ten to seven before she leaves for the day,” the woman said.
With sad eyes, the woman watched the hoses begin to pump. “They gonna ruin my mama’s quilt.” The girl she held to her looked about ten or eleven years old, and she watched stoically as the other firefighters scrambled to get into position.
Eva slid off her gloves, hooking them on her bunker coat. “We have tarps, and once we access the apartment we’ll do our best to cover your furnishings.”
The chief leveled bushy eyebrows at Eva. “I’m not assuming command, but I’ll send Martin next door to clear the apartment.”
“I can go,” Eva said.
“No, you stay here with Ms....”
“Glory Mitchell,” the woman managed, wiping her eyes with one hand.
“Ms. Mitchell,” the chief repeated, glancing back at Eva. “Take care of things here, Eva. Thanks.” The chief walked away before Eva could protest. She snapped her mouth shut, tamping down the sour taste of disappointment.
Over her shoulder, she heard Jake burst into Glory’s apartment using the battering ram. The older woman sucked in an injured breath before moaning and turned away. Her threadbare cotton robe swished against the tall hitchhiker grass peppering the yard.
“Oh, Jesus, they broke the door,” Glory said, her shoulders shaking. “I can’t believe this. I just can’t believe this.”
“It’ll be okay, Ms. Mitchell. You’re safe, and that’s most important. Doors can be fixed.”
The older woman nodded, trying to staunch the emotion shaking her.
“So, can you tell me what happened?” Eva asked.
“When I saw those curtains on fire, I grabbed Kiki and we ran out the back door. She had her phone so I called 911.”
“Very smart, Ms. Mitchell,” Eva said, taking the older woman’s elbow and moving her back toward the sprawling mimosa tree on the edge of the yard. Seemed like the only thing that grew on the hardscrabble lot. Glory shuffled back, but her eyes remained fixed on the apartment building.
Captain Sorrento released the valves, and water started pumping out of the blue hose strapped to the ladder and the red hose Jake had dragged in through the front door.
“Ms. Mitchell, do you have any idea what may have sparked this fire?” Eva asked, placing a gentle hand on Glory’s shoulder.
“I don’t rightly know. I was cooking breakfast, and Kiki was in the bathroom. You do somethin’, Kiki?”
The girl shook her head but her gaze slid away.
“Then I heard Kiki start screaming.”
“So you don’t know where the fire started?”
Glory shook her head.
“Uh, the bedroom. I think,” Kiki said. “I mean, there was this, uh, lighter sittin’ on the dresser.”
Glory stiffened. “What’s a lighter doin’ in you and your mama’s room?”
“Ms. Quita gave Mama a candle that smells like peaches. She been lighting it at night so our room don’t smell like feet,” Kiki said, her voice almost a whisper.
Glory grabbed Kiki’s shoulder, pulling her toward her. “Girl, did you start this? Did you?”
“No, Ma Glory,” Kiki said, whipping her head back and forth. “I didn’t do nothin’. Mama lit the candle last night but she blew it out. I think. I don’t know. I just saw that lighter. That’s all.”
“Don’t make no sense,” Glory said, anger crackling in her voice even as she released the girl. “A lighter don’t suddenly light itself.”
“I opened the window,” the girl said.
“Why you do that?”
Kiki swiped an arm across her nose and stuck out her chin. “I was hot. We ain’t had no air-conditioning in a long time and I don’t wanna go to school sweaty. That’s all I did. I only told this lady the lighter was there ’cause there’s fluid in it that catches fire, right?” The girl looked at Eva.
“That’s right,” Eva said, scanning the area. A few residents of Spring Street had gathered, all in various state of morning dress, some holding coffee cups. Nothing like a fire to bring out lookyloos.
Eva flinched when she saw a Magnolia Bend Police cruiser lurch to a stop behind the snorkel truck. Funny how every time she saw one of the town’s finest stepping from a police car, she tensed for a confrontat
ion. Her break up with Officer Chase Grider was recent enough to still make her uncomfortable.
Thankfully, it wasn’t Chase but his brother Cole.
Eva excused herself, radioed the point of origin to the captain and went to Engine One to get the prefire plan binder so she could start the on-scene report. Hank was still busy running the fire, which looked to be knocked down, while Moon was at the back of the engine, pulling out the positive pressure fan to clear the smoke and blow some good air inside the still-smoking apartment.
Bobby John Crow, the department’s fire investigator, pulled in behind the police cruiser, meeting Cole, who held a coffee from the Short Stop. Bobby John’s motto was that every fire was potential arson. Eva had argued with him about it once, to which Bobby John had flipped a beer bottle cap and declared it was his job to prove it wasn’t.
Whatever. Wasn’t her job.
Jake came trudging out, still on his tank, tugging the red hose. Moon had already cut off the blue one. Acrid smoke hung in the air like a persistent salesman, and the apartment building looked forlorn and lost.
“Morning, fellas,” Bobby John said as he approached the engine. Eva grabbed the binder and stood, nearly bumping her head on the top of the engine. Bobby John made a face. “Oh, sorry. Didn’t see it was you.”
But he had known damn well it was Eva bent over in Engine One.
He was the only guy who took pleasure in needling Eva about being a female firefighter. Yeah, Jake teased, but he respected her. And Dutch was just old-school and found it hard to step outside the social mores he’d been raised with. But Bobby John outright didn’t like the fact Eva had been hired— period. She’d overheard him once tell Dutch she was a token, that women didn’t belong in the department. He also hadn’t let go of the fact that when he’d hit on her the first night she was in town, she’d shot him down.
Eva turned, shapeless beneath her gear, her dark wavy hair concealed under her helmet. “Easy mistake, since you don’t get to see the female form that often.”
“Ouch,” he said, the smile not quite reaching his cold blue eyes. “What’ve we got here?”
Yesterday's Gone (Two Daughters Book 1) Page 27
