Battered as it was, his body gave the first faint signs of arousal. Maybe he hadn't been in love with that sweet, adoring sixteen-year-old, but he sure as Hades hadn't forgotten her, either.
Banishing the thought to the bottom of a long list of things he'd denied himself, he started to sit up, then gasped as his knees protested.
Nausea clawed his belly, and sweat popped out on his forehead. He drew a ragged breath, fighting the urge to heave his guts all over the bed.
He muttered the first word that came to his mind. A very obscene word that had her eyes popping open so fast her cheek nearly slipped from its support.
"Hello to you, too," she murmured as she straightened her legs, then winced. "What time is it?"
"Time for you to be tucked into your own bed."
She sat up slowly. "Ouch! My hand's asleep."
Judd scowled, sending a hot wash of pain across his forehead. "No wonder, the way you were twisted into that chair."
"I swear, I just closed my eyes for a minute." Her pale lips curved into a self-conscious smile that had him remembering the silky slide of those soft lips under his. "How are you feeling?"
"Sore. What the hell happened, anyway?"
"You passed out."
"That part I got. The question is why?"
Satisfied that her legs would support her now, she eased out of the chair and moved closer. The smell of smoke clung to her clothing the way it had the night her father died, conjuring up memories he would just as soon forget.
"The doctor mentioned something about exhaustion and smoke inhalation, and two very badly strained knees."
So much for the expected. "Go on."
"You have second-degree burns on your face and neck and your hair is singed in spots."
"Mostly the gray, I hope."
"Sorry. The gray's intact, just a little ragged in s-spots." The unexpected wobble in her voice had his eyebrows lifting and his eyes turning dark.
"You've had yourself a day, haven't you?"
The rough burr of tenderness in his voice was nearly her undoing. "Better than yours, I imagine."
"Mine wasn't so bad. Not the part where I woke up to find a very lovely, very sleepy lady next to my bed."
"The sleepy part's right, anyway." She glanced ruefully at her best blouse and slacks, which had looked so spring fresh at seven in the morning. Now they were rumpled and covered with soot. Probably ruined, she thought, clinging to the mundane, the ordinary, to keep the events of the day at a tolerable distance.
Judd watched the sadness return to her face. "How's your friend Carmen? Did she make it?"
The life seemed to whoosh out of her, and her eyes turned sad. "No, she died in the ambulance, never regained consciousness they tell me. Dr. Armadi said that she would have died anyway. She'd been shot."
"Shot?" Was this some kind of half-assed dream? he wondered. Or was he caught in another morphine-induced hallucination.
"Yes, in the back of the head. The doctor couldn't believe she lived as long as she did. He said she was a very strong lady." Tears spilled from her eyes and ran down her face before she scrubbed them away with her palms.
"I'm sorry, Red. Truly sorry."
"Yes, so am I."
He and tragedies like this were far too intimately acquainted. Sometimes, in spite of everything a fireman tried to do, people died in terrible, obscene ways.
"She didn't have any family to speak of." Darcy was trying to pull herself together, but her skin was pale and deep smudges swamped her eyes.
"I'm… I think she would like being buried next to Uncle Mike." A slip of a smile curved her pale lips briefly. "It's not much, but it's all I know to do for her now."
Touched by the sadness in her voice, Judd found himself reaching for her hand. She stiffened momentarily, then curled her fingers around his palm.
"Why does this keep happening, Judd? People I love…" She broke off, her mouth compressed against a sob.
"I don't know why, Red. I just know that you of all people don't deserve it."
"Does anyone?"
"No, I don't think they do."
He thought about the long string of fatalities he'd witnessed—babies in their cribs, toddlers found huddled under their beds, mothers or fathers burned alive while trying desperately to save someone they loved.
His old man would have called it God's will, and maybe it was. But too many times it was bad wiring or a blocked chimney or a curious kid playing with matches.
No one's fault, really. Just damn bad luck. Frustrating, inexplicable, yes, but a man who did his best learned to expect things like that.
But arson, that was a different kind of obscenity, the kind that drove firemen to drink or to a grave, or at the very least, to an early retirement. He didn't know one fireman who didn't hate cold-blooded murder by fire.
"It's never easy to make sense out of something like this, Darcy. I know. I've been trying for twenty years."
"Don't you get tired of it? Seeing people hurting, burned?"
"Yes, I get tired of it."
"But you keep doing it, fighting fires."
"It's all I know. And sometimes, in spite of everything, we win one. It keeps us trying for more."
He raised his gaze to Darcy's face again and their eyes met. She tried for a smile, but it was a miserable failure.
"Maybe, if I'd gotten there sooner, I could have stopped whoever it was that shot her."
"If you'd gotten there sooner, you just might have taken a bullet, too." Anger bunched somewhere under the throbbing knot in his head, drawing his eyebrows tight again. "As it is, you're lucky you didn't end up fried by that power line."
Darcy shuddered. "You're right. I didn't think."
She liked the solid feel of hard muscle and warm flesh beneath her fingertips. She liked the feeling of security and safety he was tacitly offering.
"You saved my life."
"If it hadn't been me, it would have been one of the other guys."
"I was heading for Monk, to tell him, but things just went whoosh all of a sudden."
"Yeah, well, that's the way it is in a fire, Darcy. Things go whoosh and boom and all kinds of nasty things. That's why people like you pay people like me to handle things like that."
"You could have been killed."
"Part of the job."
"A fire fighter's job, not the chief's."
"It is in a small department like Grantley's."
"It shouldn't be! Uncle Mike had no business going into the opera house and you…" Glowering, she waved one hand in a gesture of resignation. "Forget it. I've seen that stubborn, don't-lecture-me look in your eyes before."
"Hey, don't look so fierce, Red. Anyone would think you really cared what happened to me."
"I do care. I just can't act like that night by the river never happened." Her smile curved. "You were my first lover … and my first love."
"Your first crush, you mean."
"No, Arnie Chadwick was my first crush. We were on the same softball team at summer camp. You were the real thing."
Seeing the strain of red on her cheeks, Judd cursed the lapse of his usual control that had led them onto this treacherous ground.
"You were curious." He shrugged, trying to repair the obvious damage. "I was around all the time, handy. You just satisfied that curiosity, that's all."
"Ah, I see," she said, forming a smile that seemed to curve her lips in very slow motion. "And you were eager to oblige, is that it?"
"No that wasn't it. But I should have known better. You were so young…"
"So were you, only you wouldn't admit it."
His mouth slanted. "We both grew up in a hurry, though, didn't we?"
She nodded. "Sometimes I wonder what would have happened between us if Papa hadn't died."
"I would have asked you to marry me."
"And I would have said yes." She smiled. "Do you think it would have worked out?"
He glanced down at their hands where they lay on the bl
anket next to his thigh. "No. You wanted someone to love you the way Pat loved your mother. I don't have that kind of love in me to give."
"Is that a warning, Chief Calhoun?" Her tone was teasing, even as her gaze searched his face intently.
"Yes, it's a warning." He raised her hand to his mouth and kissed it. "It's also an apology."
"For what, not being able to fall in love?"
"Something like that, yes."
"Thank you for telling me."
His mouth quirked. "Don't go pinning any medals on my hospital gown, Red. I still want you like the very devil, but something tells me that's not enough for you these days."
"You're right. It isn't."
"What the hell, you can't have everything in life, right?"
There was an odd note in his voice. It took Darcy a moment to place it, and when she did, it shook her. It was yearning, the deep, hungry kind that she hadn't been able to resist when she was sixteen and so sure that she could have anything she wanted, if only she wanted it badly enough.
Leaning across his big chest, she gently kissed the singed hair above his temple. "Get some sleep."
She tugged against the hold he still had on her hand and he let her go without a fight. As she walked out of the room, she realized that she was crying.
Judd was finishing the last of his watery eggs and reading the morning paper he'd cadged from one of the nurses when a knock on the open door to his room drew his attention.
Tom Billings was standing in the doorway with a huge florist's arrangement and an extremely self-conscious grin.
"I hear you gave the rookies a demonstration they won't forget yesterday," he said as he came toward the bed.
"Yeah, on how not to conduct a rescue."
"That's not what I heard."
Billings's expression sobered as he set the flowers next to the clutter on the bedside table and rubbed his hands together nervously.
"From Annie and me. She says hi and told me to tell you that she hasn't given up on that house you wanted."
Judd nodded. "I don't know that much about real estate, but from what I've seen of your wife, Tom, she's a real tiger. If anyone can get the church elders to sell that old place, she can."
Billings's eyes gleamed behind the lenses of his glasses. "Yeah, she's something, all right. Prettiest gal in Grantley, too."
Judd considered Tom's wife slick and superficial next to Darcy's sass and ginger, but a man didn't knock another man's woman—not if he wanted to maintain a good working relationship.
"You're a lucky guy."
"Yeah. She makes the money and I squander it on fixing up old buildings."
"What's the story on the hotel, anyway? Did the insurance company pay off?"
"Finally, although we had to do some dickering."
Billings pulled up the same chair Darcy had used and sank into it. Judd found himself wishing that she was still there instead of Tom and then banished the thought.
"I'm sorry about Mrs. Rodriquez. She was a good woman, very devoted to Mike. And Darcy, too."
Billings took off his glasses, polished them with a handkerchief he took from his back pocket and then carefully replaced them on his nose.
"Yeah, Darcy's pretty broken up about it." Judd shoved his breakfast tray out of the way and folded the paper into a neat oblong before tossing it on the foot of the bed.
"Tom, that fire was deliberately set."
"Yes, I know. To cover up a bungled robbery attempt." Billings looked stricken. "Say, you don't think that fire at my place was set to cover a robbery, too?"
"It's possible, although you said that you'd just taken most of your cash to the bank."
"True, but we lost most of Annie's jewelry and some very good paintings that she'd inherited from her mother. That's one of the things we were haggling with the insurance company about."
A phone rang down the hall at the nurses' station. Outside, another storm was building over the mountains, and the new leaves on the trees twisted and turned in the freshening wind.
Using his elbows, Judd held his breath and eased higher on the pillow. His chest was still one big ache, and the burn on his head throbbed. Most of the discomfort that had kept him awake much of the night, however, had come from his knees. Worse, because he hadn't been able to sleep, he'd spent most of the night thinking about Darcy.
"Tom, how well do you know Grant Koch?"
Judd reached for his coffee, then winced as pain shafted through his sore shoulder. He saw sympathy flash in Billings's eyes and frowned.
"Not well. We play poker together one night a month, and now and then we play a round or two of golf at the country club. Mostly I know him through the work he did for me on the hotel. Why do you ask?"
"Curiosity mainly. He's going to do some work for Darcy at her place."
"Excuse me, gentlemen," called a voice from the door. "It's time for the patient's bath."
Judd recognized the hatchet-faced nurse in the door. She was the same one who woke him from the only sleep he'd gotten to take his temperature, and then scolded him for the language he'd used to protest.
"The patient can take his own damn bath."
"I'm afraid not, Mr. Calhoun. The doctor has ordered complete bed rest, and that means no getting out of bed."
Judd tried different words this time, the worse he could dredge from his wildest nights on shore leave, but the obstinate woman simply set her jaw and waited in cold silence for Tom Billings to take his leave.
"Looks like you're in good hands." Billings grinned as he stood.
"The hell I am!"
If anyone put hands on him, he wanted it to be Darcy. Which, the way things were settling out, was turning out to be damned unlikely.
"Call me when you're feeling up to it," Billings said as he marched quickly past the woman like a chastened schoolboy.
"Coward."
Billings laughed as he left the room.
"Lady, I'm warning you," Judd said as the woman closed the door and advanced on him with clean towel and washcloth in hand. "If you even think of using that washcloth on me, you'll end up eating it."
"No more tests. All I want is my pants." Judd swung his legs over the side of the bed, then sucked in and waited for his head to stop swimming.
"I can't stop you from leaving, Mr. Calhoun, but I strongly advise against it."
In the last fifteen years or so Judd had had a bellyful of doctors and hospitals. The last thing he needed was another two or three days stuck in a bed in a room where a man had even less privacy than he had bunking in with twelve other guys.
"I spoke with Dr. Garcia at San Francisco General. He said that you were on medical leave when you resigned."
Judd ground his teeth as pain flared deeper into his knees. "I was. Now I'm not."
"He faxed me the salient portions of your chart. You're lucky you can walk on those knees, let alone carry on the duties of an active job."
Luck had nothing to do with it, Judd thought grimly. He'd busted his tail and sweated bullets to prove to those gloomy Guses in orthopedics that he wasn't quite the physical wreck they kept telling him he was.
"All I need is a cane for a few days."
"I've already ordered crutches from the physical therapy department for you, and we're talking weeks."
"Bull."
Shaking his head at an obvious idiocy, the doctor collected Judd's jeans and the blue fire department T-shirt from one of the two lockers and tossed them gingerly onto the bed. Because they'd been covered by his coat and turnout boots, they were halfway clean, but the fabric reeked of smoke.
"At least stay in bed a day or two before going back to work."
"I'll think about it."
"Only don't hold my breath, right?"
Judd grinned. "Right."
"I'll have them send up those crutches and someone to teach you how to use them."
"Forget the lessons. I'm already an expert."
"Yes, considering those knees, I imagine you are."
Still shaking his head, the doctor turned to leave. At the same time, Darcy came into the room wearing a harried expression that turned to alarm when she saw the doctor there.
"Oops, sorry. I can come back if—"
"I was just leaving," the doctor said with another quick disapproving look at Judd's ashen face. He bent to sniff the bedraggled bundle of wildflowers wrapped in a sheet of yellow notebook paper before giving Darcy an amused look.
"I owe you an apology, Mrs. Fisher. I'm afraid I didn't quite believe you when you told me that Calhoun here would be the worst patient I'd ever had, but you were right."
Darcy's gaze darted from the doctor's face to Judd's and then back to the doctor's. "Gave you problems, did he?"
"Oh no, not unless you consider an invaluable nurse threatening to boycott this wing until Calhoun is released a problem."
"Uh-oh."
Dr. Armadi flashed her a grin, then glanced over his shoulder. "If you have any influence over that man, get him to stay off his feet for a couple of days until those strained ligaments heal."
With a nod for Judd and another grin for Darcy, Dr. Armadi left, mumbling to himself about macho firemen and false pride.
Darcy approached warily, like a zoo visitor close to the lion's den. "How do you feel this morning, tough guy?"
"Like a wimp, that's how I feel."
"You look like you've been on a three-week bender."
"Don't start!" he warned as he grabbed his pants and managed to get his legs into them without fainting. "I've had enough tongue clucking from your friend Armadi."
His voice was clipped, bringing a flush to her cheeks as she walked toward him.
"Here," she said, shoving the flowers into his belly. "These are from the twins. They heard Aunt Bridget telling Prudy that I was visiting you in the hospital and they got up early to pick them. Someone as grumpy as you are this morning doesn't deserve them, but take them anyway."
Judd grabbed the flowers and her hand at the same time and held them both tight against him. Before he could talk himself out of it, he hooked his free arm around her waist, angled her backward with his chest against her breasts and kissed her.
It was a kiss that had started without thought, but the moment his mouth felt hers, something wild came to life inside him, like a nearly dead ember shocked into life by a burst of pure rich oxygen.
FIREBRAND Page 12
