by Lisa Ladew
Edge of the Heat 5
By Lisa Ladew
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons or organizations, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 Lisa Ladew
***
You do NOT need to have read any of the prior Heat books in order to enjoy Edge of the Heat 5.
Table of Contents
Copyright Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
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About the Author
Dedication/Acknowledgements
Also By Lisa Ladew
Chapter 1
As Jerry drove away from the joyful double wedding of his best friend and Paramedic partner, Emma, and her twin sister, Vivian, his mood swiftly turned south. His date, Sara had taken off. Left without saying goodbye. Ditched him. What in the hell was wrong with her? Who does that?
The clock ticked to two minutes after midnight. The time seemed to taunt him, to haunt him. As if Sara were Cinderella come to life. And now he had to search the kingdom. He looked around at the dark street flashing by as he drove. Some kingdom.
Jerry forced his thoughts back to the wedding reception, back to just before he had noticed she was gone. The toasts were given, the food was eaten, and the important dances were danced. The dance floor was flooded with couples, young and old, dancing and laughing in their best outfits. Jerry had asked Sara to dance and she has said sure, swaying rigidly with him on the dance floor for one song. He hadn’t thought about her tension at the time, but now it sat huge in his brain, teasing him with its significance.
After the dance she had headed back to the table and he followed, stopping on the way to talk to Emma. Sara had said “I’m going to get a drink,” and walked to the bar. He hadn’t seen her again. After a few minutes he’d scanned the large room, but she wasn’t in it. He assumed she’d gone to the bathroom and so he waited for her at their table. After 15 or 20 minutes he’d sent Beth, one of his and Emma’s coworkers, in to the bathroom to look for her, but she wasn’t there. Not wanting to bother Emma or Vivian, he’d asked Beth to help him search the room and ask a few people if they’d seen her.
Uneasily, he’d made his way outside, ignoring people who tried to talk to him. There was no one outside of the reception hall. He’d listened to the wind dance in the trees, looked up at the almost-full moon, and wondered where she had gone. And why. And how. He’d driven her to the reception, picking her up at her office. So you wouldn’t see where she lived, a voice inside of him had whispered.
As the moon watched impassively, he called her phone. It went straight to voice mail. He texted her. Sara, where are you? No response.
A horn blared, pulling him fully back to the present. The road flashed past, streetlights illuminating the interior of his car. Jerry looked down at his lap where his phone sat, willing it to ring, willing Sara to call with a story, any story, to explain why she’d disappeared.
His head chattered on about how she was rude, wrong, and probably crazy. His heart whispered that something bad must have happened to her. But what? This was a nice neighborhood. No thugs roamed the streets. There was no crime to speak of here. Jerry knew the city as well as anyone, and he knew some people didn’t even lock their doors at night.
Jerry’s heart whispers increased in intensity. Something happened. You should check on her. You should do something. But what? He knew where she lived, but he also was quite sure she didn’t know he knew, and the last thing she wanted was for him to know where she lived. How would she react if he just showed up at her apartment? He could imagine her brown eyes flashing while she ordered him to never call or talk to her again Ordered him out of her life, basically. But hadn’t she already done that? Who ditches someone that they care about staying in a relationship with?
Jerry sighed and tried to push back the thoughts. He hadn’t had a drink all night, but now he just wanted to drink until he passed out and the voices in his head passed out too. His mind ticked off his options: go to a bar and call a taxi to take him home, or buy something hard and take it home, drink alone, pass out alone, and try to convince himself he didn’t have a problem in the morning.
He’d never had a drinking problem before in his life, until the incident with Emma’s ex, Norman Foster, where Norman shot him in the shoulder and tried to turn him into a pancake between a reversing car and a stationary ambulance. Emma had saved most of him by cranking the wheel. Only one of his legs was partially sacrificed.
After that incident, Jerry had spent a few months feeling sorry for himself. That’s one thing you never hear about in those brief stories of triumph where you see a picture of someone standing tall and strong or walking again for the first time after rehabilitation from a horrifying injury. You don’t hear about the months and months of struggle, plus hard, painful work that always seems to net 2 or 3 steps back for every one step forward. You don’t glimpse the early moments when the brain is willing but the body is unable. Those moments make a person weak. They strip will and way from you, like you never had any to begin with. And even when you manage to claw your way back and have your triumphant moment, finally, the memory of the weak moments never goes away. Never disappears fully. And now I know weakness intimately, Jerry thought, his mouth pressed into a grim line. I can turn weakness away again and again, but I’ll never go back to the person who only knew how to be strong.
Absently, Jerry’s hand massaged his right leg that had been almost crushed. He felt the scar tissue underneath his pants. The gunshot wound to his left shoulder had been simpler, a clean shot through only muscle. But he’d almost lost the leg. Learning to walk on it again had taken 9 months, and he still limped badly if he’d been on his feet for too long.
Jerry drove on, absentmindedly, still undecided on where to go. His mind cast back to those months when all he could do was sit around and wait for his body to heal enough that he could start physical therapy. He sat on his couch and watched TV. He didn’t know what else to do. He’d always been an active guy, playing sports, exercising, working with his hands. Firefighter/Paramedic was the perfect job for him because he was always moving, always on his feet, always doing something new and interesting, and he got to help people. What could be better than that? So when he was stuck on his butt in his apartment for days and weeks on end he didn’t know what to do.
He had nothing to fall back on. He’d never enjoyed reading. If he tried to force himself he usually fell asleep. And he didn’t own a computer. His sister called him grandpa and a dinosaur for that. She’d bought him an iPad after he got out of the hospital, but looking at it was almost like looking at
a book to him. It put him to sleep. He watched a few movies on it and liked that aspect of it, but he didn’t do much else on it.
Everyone visited him often. Emma, Vivian, Beth, Craig, Hawk. Craig especially. Craig came over three times a day for months, cleaning out the empty liquor bottles so no one else would see them, bringing him food, even helping him to the bathroom. Craig was convinced that Jerry had saved Emma’s life. Jerry knew he’d barely slowed Norman down.
And then he’d finally healed enough to start physical therapy. He’d hauled himself through the door to the physical therapy gym on crutches, excited to get back on his feet. And then he saw her. Sara Acosta, his physical therapist and the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. It’s not that she was perfect, but she sure was stunning. Her long brown hair was pulled back in a simple ponytail, but it looked thick enough to tie a man up with. She wore no makeup, and no jewelry; she didn’t need any. Her smooth skin looked tanned, although he thought it was probably her natural skin tone. Her high cheekbones and full lips suggested an exotic cultural background, but she spoke without any trace of an accent. She was perfectly pleasant and professional, but she held him at arm’s length from day one.
Meeting her, he’d almost forgotten his purpose there. Almost forgotten that his leg was so mangled that he couldn’t put any weight on it. Almost forgotten the shame that started to come with the bottle. One look at her and he was captivated. But she never forgot the reason he was there. She was all business, all the time.
He didn’t care, he had just been happy to be there with her, looking at her, talking to her, feeling her hands on his leg. He remembered how her touch had seemed to melt away the pain from the scar tissue and how a smile from her had seemed to burn away the haze of self-pity.
And he’d seen her before.
He’d had a sense that he’d seen her before at that first meeting, but he hadn’t been able to remember where or when. During his fifth appointment with her, it came back to him. He’d opened his mouth to tell her that he’d seen her at her apartment building almost a year before, and then promptly closed it. Something whispered in his head that she would be upset to hear about it, upset that he knew something personal about her.
His doctor had prescribed him two hours of physical therapy, 5 days a week. He’d progressed from using crutches, to using a cane, to finally being able to walk short distances without any help at all. He fondly remembered Sara’s feminine but strong hands tirelessly working the knots out of his legs and hips and massaging the ring of scar tissue around his leg.
During the week, when he had an appointment with her to look forward to, he’d found it easy not to drink in the evenings. Besides, he would drop into bed exhausted by the work of recovery. On the weekends, his mind would unbiddingly explore the possibility that he’d never be back to his old self. What if I can’t go back to work? What if I have to get a desk job? He couldn’t think of much worse than that.
At each appointment, with increasing intensity as the months wore on, he remembered longing for more than their business relationship. He’d watch her hair drop into her face while she worked on him and burn to reach out and push it back behind her ear. But something told him he’d better not overstep her obvious boundaries. She was wound tight. Always looking over her shoulder at everyone who entered the gym, never seeming to relax or let down her guard.
Right before he gave up the cane forever, he worked up the courage to ask her out to coffee that afternoon. Her eyes had widened. In surprise? No, the look in them was warmer than surprise. In happiness. He swore she was about to say yes. And then she’d dropped a cold mask over her face and said “I don’t date clients.” Next thing he knew she had him on the leg press machine with the heaviest weight he’d used since the accident. Punishing me, or shutting me up, he thought as his breath tore at his throat and his leg shook.
But he didn’t give up. She was pushing him back to health, and he couldn’t bear the thought that the day he walked out of there without a limp was the last day he would see her.
A few weeks later, he tried again. “I know you don’t date clients, but would you consider dating me after I’m not your client anymore?” Again, he’d seen something indefinable in her eyes for a split second. This time he thought it was longing. But why? In a flash he saw her force her eyes to narrow and her face to pull into a cold grimace. Quickly, he said “Don’t answer right now, just consider it, OK? I think you’re really beautiful and smart and sweet and I really want to get to know you better.” Then he’d slipped off the table where she was working on him and limped to the drinking fountain, taking a long drink to cool his burning cheeks and let the moment pass. He normally never worked so hard on getting a woman to say yes. If they said no he shrugged and moved on. He didn’t know why this woman seemed so different, so special, so worth working hard for.
And he did work. He started staying after his appointments to work on the therapy equipment by himself. He didn’t overtly watch her with her next patients, but instead tried to absorb her likes and dislikes. He saw her drinking watermelon sparkling water a few times and then began buying them and bringing them to her. He noticed she always got her lunch from the same deli on the corner so one time he stopped in beforehand and asked them to give her a pink rose with her lunch, from a secret admirer. The next day he saw it on her desk in a vase. He tried to do something sweet for her at least twice a week, and made sure to never cross the line into creepy territory.
Then the day came. “Jerry, you don’t need to come 5 days a week anymore. In fact, I think you are almost well enough to go back to work early, if you want to do that.”
Jerry’s heart leapt when she said back to work. And she was right. He’d recovered 85% function in his leg. Certainly good enough to go back to work as a paramedic, but not a firefighter. Cautiously he’d asked. “How many times a week do you recommend now?”
“I think once a week will be plenty. You can continue your exercises at a regular gym and I’ll check your progress for the next 6 months. After that, you probably will only need to come once a month for a few months. After that …” She trailed off. After that, not at all, he read in the silence.
Jerry sat quietly, a tens unit stimulating his thigh muscles. Once a week? Once a month? Not at all? He felt almost physically sick at the prospect. He’d gotten to know her well enough to know that she was upset too. Or at least he thought she was. Her movements at her desk were erratic and seemed to have no purpose other than to keep her from looking at him. When she did speak she didn’t look directly at him, but instead at his leg. Her mouth was tight and drawn. He could see stress in her cheeks. She’s conflicted, he thought. She knows I’m going to ask her out again and she doesn’t know what she’s going to say.
Well let’s get it over with.
“So I am going to be the Maid of Honor at my best friend’s wedding next week -” he said. She snorted laughter, cutting him off.
“Don’t you mean you are going to be the Best Man?” she asked, still laughing, but looking in his eyes again.
“Oh no, my best friend is the bride, and she specifically said Maid of Honor,” he said, smiling, thinking that this was a good sign that she found it so funny.
“Your best friend is a woman?” Sara asked, her eyebrows raised and new warmth in her eyes.
“Yes, Emma, I’ve told you about her. In fact she drove me here a few times. The strawberry blond?”
“Oh yes, your partner. She’s your best friend?”
“Yep. Well, maybe she doesn’t think of me as her best friend anymore, now that she is getting married, but she’s certainly the best friend I’ve ever had. She’s no nonsense, no bullshit, you know?”
Sara just looked at him, and he thought maybe she didn’t know.
“I don’t have a date,” he said, dropping his eyes. “And honestly, I can’t think of anyone I want to take except for one person. And if she won’t go with me I’m afraid everyone there will think I’m a total loser because I’
m a male Maid of Honor and I can’t even get a date.”
He’d peeked at her, weighing her reaction. She had stopped laughing. Not good. He pressed on, knowing if this didn’t work, nothing would and too soon she would be completely out of his life for good. His stomach flip-flopped once and lay still. “I know you don’t date clients, but I’d really love to take you. I won’t be your client anymore soon, and if you want, I’ll find someone else to assess me for the rest of the time I need physical therapy.”
He’d stopped talking. The question sat between them like a lead weight, dulling the air in the room. Finally she smiled and said “Sure, I’ll go, but can you pick me up here? I have to work that day.”
Later, he’d thought that she hadn’t even known what day it was when she said that. But he’d shrugged his shoulders and thought that he didn’t care, because she had said yes. Yes!
Jerry drove on autopilot and thought hard about that. She could have told him she’d meet him at the wedding, rather than having him pick her up at work. And why was she so closed off, so hard to get to know? She’d never shared anything personal with him, and they’d worked together 5 days a week for almost a year. Better yet, if she was just going to ditch him, why did she agree to go with him in the first place? Why not just turn him down cold? Because she wasn’t planning on ditching you. Something happened at the wedding that made her think she had to, his mind whispered coldly at him, in a voice that implied he was a complete idiot if he couldn’t see that.
