Someone behind him told a joke, and those listening erupted in laughter. One jig ended and another began. There were more dancers now, crowding him closer to the end of the room. Turning his head slowly, he scanned the sea of heads for a small woman with hair the color of maple leaves shimmering in the sun.
As soon as he saw her, his mouth went ash dry and his heart pumped adrenaline full force. She was standing by the fireplace with three men and three women, all dressed in black, listening but not contributing to the conversation going on around her.
Judd's mind went slate blank for a split second before memories rushed him like the first jolt from a two-inch hose.
As though sensing his gaze all but eating her alive, she turned her head in his direction. Stiffening, he waited for the warm blue eyes to ice over and the grin to freeze, but as Darcy's gaze rested for an instant on his face, he thought he saw a definite hint of feminine interest soften that grin before she politely returned her attention to her other guests.
Slowly, he brought his hand to his cheek and felt the wiry beard that he'd grown in the hospital and been too lazy to shave off since he'd gotten home again. No wonder she hadn't recognized him. Even he was sometimes startled to see the haggard, shaggy-headed man in the mirror.
Across the room where she'd been tending to her guests like a mother hen with her chicks, Darcy Kerrigan-Fisher noticed the tall stranger.
Another fireman. At least he moved like one. Had the look of one, too. Lean, impressively fit, with alert, assessing eyes.
Not particularly good-looking, though, and ill at ease, as if he were shy in a group this big. Nicely dressed in gray slacks and a blue blazer, no tie, and immense shoulders.
Instinct had her looking behind him for his wife or girlfriend, but he appeared to be alone. An eligible man in Grantley? Impossible!
Not that she was on the prowl for husband number two like her best friend, Jen, or on the rebound and hating all men like Jen's sister, Freda.
She'd adored her husband for every single day of the ten years they'd had together, and there were times when she missed his quick smile and rumbling laughter so much she ached. After nearly three years of widowhood, however, her grieving had ended, and she even accepted a date on occasion—with nice, safe, unexciting men.
Not like this one. This one had an attitude about him that had her muscles tightening and her heart beating faster. Just looking at him unsettled her, as though some primal instinct were warning her to run for her life.
Whoa, girl, you've been celibate too long when you start reacting to a guy just because he has sad eyes and a logger's build.
Next week for sure, she'd take a whole day off and go fishing, she promised herself as she fine-tuned her hostess smile and headed his way.
Judd had learned patience the same way he'd learned to like himself again—one day at a time—so he waited, one shoulder angled against the wall, one hand in his pocket, watching her make her way through the crowd toward him.
No one watching would suspect that his gut burned from a terrible tension and his spine was rigid—like a prisoner awaiting sentencing.
Only Darcy was judge, jury and prosecuting attorney all rolled into one small, slight, silk-clad package.
He allowed himself a long look as she made her way across the room. "Hello. I'm Darcy Kerrigan-Fisher, Mike's niece." Her cheeks were pale, and the touch of mascara she'd applied failed to hide the redness in her eyes, but her smile was flavored with the same old energy as she held out a slim hand. Her face was even paler than it had been in church, and her lips were pressed tightly together, even though they were curved in a polite smile. She was curious, he noted, and just the tiniest bit annoyed that she couldn't place him.
"Hello, Darcy," he said as he took her hand in his.
Darcy stared at the thin gold chain around his wrist. It looked like the one Judd had given her for Christmas the year she'd turned sixteen, the one she'd sent back to him in an envelope, along with the three letters he'd written to her.
It couldn't be him, she thought, her hand still enveloped in his. Not even Judd would have the nerve to show his face here again. Not tonight, of all nights. But those eyes, the dramatic slant of his thick eyebrows, the slow rasp of a familiar voice…
"Judd?"
Too uptight to smile, he settled for a nod. "I think this is where I say something like, 'It's been a long time.'"
She took back her hand, her gaze locked with his. "What are you doing here?"
Her calm surprised him. It wasn't like Darcy to keep her emotions locked inside.
"I came to say goodbye to an old friend."
"You and Mike weren't friends. You couldn't have been. Not after what you did."
"Maybe Mike wasn't as unforgiving as you are."
Darcy's chin stayed up, but her eyes clouded briefly. "I think I have that right, don't you? After all, you killed my father."
Something changed in his eyes, something that sent little prickles of warning down her spine like a distant crack of thunder.
"I was hoping we could get past that and talk about Mike. I'm going to miss him."
Darcy drew in a swift, angry breath, one so violent it rustled the silk of her dress. "So am I, Judd. Just the way I've missed Papa all these years."
From the corner of his eye, Judd noticed that they were beginning to attract curious stares, and he lowered his voice.
"What do you want me to say, Darcy? That I'm sorry? I've already said that in as many ways as I know how."
"'Sorry' can't give my girls a grandfather to hug, though, can it?"
A person who didn't know him well probably wouldn't have noticed the slight narrowing of his eyes or the way the small golden flecks in the rich brown irises slowly dimmed.
"It's been twenty years, Darcy. Things change, people change. Sometimes they even develop something called compassion. Mike had it. So did Pat. But then they knew what it was like to make mistakes, and that's what it was, Darcy. A mistake. A stupid, thoughtless, tragic mistake. Come to think of it, I guess you wouldn't understand that. I wonder now why I thought you might."
He nodded once, turned away and walked out of her house without looking back.
Darcy stood in the open doorway, watching the last of her departing guests drive down the lane. The red glow of the car's taillights disappeared into the fog and she slowly closed the big door, then leaned against it, trying to summon the energy to move again. Lord, I'm tired, she thought. Exhausted, in fact.
"Everyone get off all right, dear?"
She started at the sound of her aunt's voice and realized that she was nearly asleep on her feet.
"Yes, everyone's gone," she called as she headed down the hall toward the square of light marking the kitchen door.
Bridget O'Halloran Clancy was a spinster, too preoccupied in her youth looking after her seven brothers and one sister, Darcy's mother, to notice the young men eager to pay her court. At sixty-seven, after forty years as a teacher, she looked after Darcy and the "girls."
Turning from the counter she was wiping, she took one look at her niece's face and reached for the bottle of pear brandy she kept hidden behind the coffee on the top shelf of the kitchen cabinet.
"It was a grand wake, Darcy. Mike would have been pleased."
"I hope so." Darcy sank into a chair and slipped off her pumps. "Tired?"
"Mmm." Darcy stifled a yawn, then tried to shake the sleepiness from her brain. Instead, she merely succeeded in making her nagging headache into a true temple-pounder.
"Are you all right, dear? You look a little gray around the edges."
"I'm fine. Just … a half day shy of enough time, as Papa used to say."
Darcy dropped her head and massaged the ache in her neck. The more she pushed herself, the more her muscles complained.
Her aunt threw her an exasperated glance, then snorted, "Problem is, you've got time for the kids and the orchard and anyone with a problem who comes along and no time for yourself. My advic
e is to take the day off. Curl up with one of those books you have piled on your nightstand."
Darcy groaned. "That sounds heavenly, Auntie, but you know as well as I do that the pruning crew will be here at dawn. After I get them started on the north section, I have to run Prudy in to see her obstetrician and then we both have an appointment with her caseworker."
"God's truth, Darcy, sometimes I wish you hadn't started this takin' in of stray kittens. Anyone listenin' to you would think Prudy and Rosie Lee were your own instead of two street kids you're fostering."
"They are my own, Auntie. While they're here, anyway."
Her aunt splashed brandy into two snifters, hesitated, then added more to each glass before carrying them to the table.
"I've told you before and I'm telling you again," she said as she pulled out a chair and settled her rail-thin body onto the gingham cushions. "You're taking on too much."
Darcy started to answer, but another yawn overtook her. "Once the harvest is over, I'll have more time."
"I've heard that before."
"Don't fuss, Auntie. I know what I'm doing."
"I've heard that before, too," Bridget muttered before taking a sip. It was so good she treated herself to another.
Smiling wearily, Darcy swirled the brandy slowly and thought about the night she'd been allowed her first taste of Kerrigan Orchards' Premium Pear Brandy. She'd been ten and feeling insecure because Judd had just come to live with them. Everyone made a fuss over the skinny fourteen-year-old with the terrible reputation who thought she was a whiny little kid.
The brandy had burned her throat, sending her into a coughing spell. Judd had slapped her on the back, sending her sprawling. With tears in her eyes, she'd glared up at him, daring him to laugh. Instead, he'd helped her up, then fetched her a glass of milk—and one for himself. She'd fallen in love on the spot.
"Judd was here," she said as she studied the jewellike clarity of the brandy. "I didn't recognize him at first. He has a beard now, and his hair is mostly gray around his temples."
"Well, he has to be near forty by now."
If Bridget was shocked, she hid it well. And why not? Darcy thought, closing her eyes. During her forty years in the classroom, Bridget had dealt with darn near everything. She wasn't the one whose tidy, comfortable world had just been tossed upside down.
"Forty-one, in August." She'd been planning a surprise party for his twenty-first birthday that last awful summer. By August her father was dead and Judd was gone. She never did know where he finally celebrated it. Or if he did.
"What did he say?"
Darcy sniffed the brandy, then pushed it away. One sip and she would be out on her feet. "That he was sorry."
Her aunt sighed. "I can still see him at Pat's wake … so shut off inside, taking every scrap of blame anyone wanted to throw at him. After he left, I used to wonder if he ever learned to forgive himself."
"Apparently. He seems to be doing just fine now."
"Pat always claimed he was too sensitive for his own good."
Darcy leaned forward to rest her head on the table. The cold wood felt good against her throbbing temple. She closed her eyes, but she kept seeing Judd at fourteen, a big, brash, cocky male with a surprisingly shy smile and brown eyes that sometimes held a heartbreaking loneliness.
"I hate him," she'd complained to anyone who would listen. "He's always in the way and now he's calling me names."
Patrick had listened to her irate complaints with his usual patience. "Make him stop, Papa. He keeps calling me Red even though I've told him my hair isn't red, it's auburn, like Katharine Hepburn's before she got old."
Instead of ordering Judd to cease and desist the way she had so smugly expected, Pat Kerrigan had simply smiled and said, "Don't let him know it bothers you, and he'll stop."
"But, Papa," she had protested with a ten-year-old's indignation, "he's getting nastier and nastier the longer he stays here. Why, he even acts like he belongs here!"
Lord help her, she still remembered the rare flash of anger in Patrick's kindly blue eyes.
"He does belong here, Darcy. When I offered him a home, I didn't just offer him a bed to sleep in and chores to do. I've told him to consider himself my son and your brother."
Brother? Judd Calhoun?
The very idea had been preposterous to her. Everyone knew he was one of those "bad" boys that mothers and maidenly teachers warned young girls to avoid at all costs. Hadn't she overheard Miss Freeman he tell another teacher that the look in Judd Calhoun's eyes was enough to send shivers down the spine of every God-fearing female in the county?
Darcy had known exactly the kind of feeling her teacher was talking about. When he'd turned those eyes on her for the first time, she'd felt giddy all the way to her toes, the way she'd always felt on the fast downward swoop of the giant swing in the park.
It wasn't only his eyes, either. It was the way he walked, shoulders back and hips oiled with a man's confidence, even when he'd been too young to shave.
And it was the way he stood, the dominant male of the dominant pack, his body language daring only the biggest and bravest to challenge him.
During those first months, when Patrick had had him pruning the trees in the yard before trusting him with the money-making crop in the orchards, she had sat for hours at a time in the window seat of her room, watching him work and spinning fantasies in which he was hopelessly and forever in her power.
How she would torment him when he came wooing her! she had vowed with a delicious sense of anticipation. Like a princess bestowing favors, she would grant him the honor of winning her hand. In combat, perhaps, with all the other hopeful suitors longing to sit at her side, or by defeating some terrible fire-breathing monster with his bare hands. Just for the honor of receiving her favors.
In those days her imagination hadn't taken her beyond thoughts of impassioned kisses, the kind she'd adored in the old black-and-white movies on late-night TV.
Now…
Darcy sat up slowly, running her hand up one bare arm, trying unsuccessfully to rub away the erotic thoughts turning her skin hot from the inside out.
"I think I will head on up to bed after all," she said, forcing a smile.
"You do that, dear," Bridget replied, patting her arm. "I'll turn out the lights and be right up."
Darcy picked up her shoes, stumbled to her feet and headed down the hall for the stairs.
It was too easy to remember, too easy to see him stripped to the waist, his bulging arm muscles oiled by sweat as he attacked the gnarled branches.
After work, he had often sluiced off the grime in the clear green water of the South Umpqua, returning a few minutes later with his thick sandy hair slicked back and his wet jeans molded to his thighs.
She hadn't understood why she had lain awake night after night in the sticky heat, thinking about the bulge behind the fly of those jeans. But when she did, her breathing would quicken and she would experience a disturbing tingling deep inside her virginal body.
To this day she had never quite relieved the rush of emotion she had felt on that unnaturally hot night in early summer when she had foolishly decided that he would be the first to make love to her.
Yes, Judd had been many things in her fantasies, she thought as she started slowly up the stairs. But never, never, her brother.
* * *
Chapter 2
« ^ »
The noise was deafening, a thousand steam locomotives barreling down on him at once. And the heat, oh God, the heat—like the lash of a dozen whips against his skin.
Sweat dripped into his eyes, obscuring even the limited visibility he had in the smoke-clogged corridor. His right hand stung where the hot metal bars blocking the nursery window had burned through his glove and his left was beginning to cramp around the sodden bundle he was gripping tightly against his chest.
The kid was little more than a baby, couldn't weigh more than thirty pounds. His coat, now wrapped around the squirming little
boy like a flameproof cocoon, weighed almost that much by itself. Together, the two made a hell of a football to carry one-handed.
Only a few more yards, he told himself as he crawled under the poisonous cloud of smoke. The oxygen in his tank was nearly gone, and he struggled against the need to drag air into his burning lungs.
Four more yards to the fire escape window and the ladder he prayed was waiting there. Three… Two…
Through the dense haze he saw a man's silhouette, a raised ax. Glass exploded, showering him with razorlike shards. Fresh air roared through the opening, sucked inward by the fire's vacuum to tear his helmet loose from the chin strap. Bits of glass shrapnel hit his faceplate with enough force to become embedded in the thick plastic.
"Hurry, Judd!" The voice was muffled but recognizable. Shandy from the Fourteenth Ladder Company. Another alarm must have gone out.
"C'mon, Judd! The roof's gonna blow any second now."
With the last of his strength he got to his knees and passed the bundle into Shandy's waiting arms.
"Got him," Shandy shouted, before turning quickly to pass the swaddled baby to the man waiting a few rungs down.
Judd's legs were watery and his lungs were screaming as he tore off his mask and gulped a mouthful of the hot night air. He had one foot on the windowsill and was reaching for the ladder when he heard the rumble above him.
"Pull away!" he shouted, but the ladder was already swinging wide. At the same moment, he catapulted his body into the air. One hand hooked the fourth rung, stopping his fall but at the same time jerking his arm free of the socket. Pain seared his shoulder, but he managed to hang on, two hundred pounds of hard muscle and bone dangling by one arm until he was less than two stories above the pavement.
The ladder was still coming down when he fell, plummeting feetfirst to Mission Street
. He felt his knees give, and then a terrible grinding pain. Flames licked at his face and singed his hair.
Run! his mind shouted, but something was holding him down. Something wet and cloying, girdling his hips. Liquid flame, hot oil.
FIREBRAND Page 2
