The Heat Is On (Boston Five Book 1)

by Anderson, Poppy J.

  The promise, however, seemed to further fuel her wrath, because now she started hammering against the window with her fists. “Heath, that isn’t funny!”

  “If she wrecks the car, you’ll have to explain that to my captain,” Ryan said dryly.

  Heath smiled when he looked into her reddened face and noticed the strands of her blond hair that slid free from her braids. She had never seemed more beautiful than right at that moment, and he told her that—through the loudspeaker, so the entire school could hear it.

  “Heath!” she yelled at him. “Shut up right now! You’re embarrassing me!”

  But he went right on. “If you take me back, I’ll explain why I said all those awful things after we had sex.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him and pressed her face against the window. “Ryan! Take that mic from him! Our sex life is nobody’s business—least of all my pupils’!”

  “What am I supposed to do?” Ryan shouted indignantly. “He’s blackmailing me!”

  She glared at Heath again. “You keep making it worse!”

  “I love you,” he yelled into the mic. The loudspeakers boomed his words all over the school grounds, and probably all the way to Canada. “After your dad and my dad, I didn’t want you to bury a third fireman! That’s the reason I broke up with you!”

  He was watching her closely, so he saw the exact moment when she realized what he’d said and what that meant. Her face fell, her eyes widened, and he wanted to pull her close and never let her go again.

  “What?” She shook her head, absolutely stunned. “What did you just say?”

  Heath nodded, and his face showed his torment. “You were so unhappy when my dad died. All I could think of was that you shouldn’t have to go through this a third time, if anything were to happen to me. God, Hayden …”

  She put a hand over her mouth and uttered a strangled cry.

  “You’re everything to me. Everything. I couldn’t bear the thought of you being unhappy because of me.”

  “Heath,” she said, trembling all over now. “Open the door.”

  Without argument, he complied. He wanted to get out, but she slipped inside and onto his lap, wrapping her arms around his neck and kissing him on the mouth without so much as a comment.

  Heath didn’t know whether the salty tears he tasted were hers or his own, but he didn’t care. He pulled her close and hugged her tightly, feeling only relief. He hardly even noticed how he shook and trembled.

  Hayden broke the kiss, sobbed, and then whispered, “I love you, too. But if you ever put on a show like this again, then may God help you.”

  He stroked her tearstained face with cautious fingers, not caring that his brother saw him crying like a baby. “Can I come home?” His voice trembled uncontrollably. “I’m going to make up for all the crap I put you through, Hayden. I promise.”

  She nodded silently, the tears still streaming down her face.

  Of course Ryan, the knucklehead, had to destroy the moment. He grabbed the microphone, which Heath had dropped when Hayden had slipped into his lap. Clearing his throat, he said, “This is Officer Ryan Fitzpatrick. On behalf of the Boston police force, I want to wish all students and their parents a happy summer vacation. In case you’re curious, I was forced to come here by my own brother, who shamelessly blackmailed me into playing chauffeur. So if anyone wants to file a complaint regarding the adult content of the preceding announcements, I’d be much obliged if you could keep me out of it.”

  Hayden chuckled and patted Ryan on the head. “What did he blackmail you with?”

  “That’s a secret.” Ryan jerked his head away and glared at her. Then he put his hair back in order and shot his brother a meaningful glance. “If you tell Mom anything about … you know, then I’ll tell her all the words you just used in front of an entire school of small children. Words like ‘sex’ and ‘fuck.’”

  Heath rubbed his smiling face against Hayden’s shoulder and murmured, “That’s what I call a good deal, Officer.”

  Epilogue

  “Let me at least sneak a glance of my niece!” Shane peeked over his brother’s shoulder and saw the tiny face of his four-hour-old niece, Josephine. The newborn baby slept undisturbed, even though her mother’s hospital room was filled to capacity, and the volume was accordingly high.

  None of that seemed to faze the little girl, who was lying in her dad’s arms, snuggled in a blanket, face completely relaxed, smacking in her sleep. She was resting from the ordeal of her birth and didn’t seem to notice the excited chatter around her, nor the fact that the proud dad did not want to yield her to any of her eager relatives.

  Heath was sitting in a chair with a silly grin on his face, staring at his daughter as if mesmerized by her. And he refused to put her into the arms of anyone but Hayden or his mom. Shane had already complained several times, because he wanted to hold her for a while, too, but Heath remained unyielding.

  Nobody mentioned anymore that this tiny girl had kept the entire clan on their toes for more than two weeks. Now they were all happy the baby was finally there and that there would be no more false alarms, which had led the whole family to the hospital every other day, waiting for the birth yet again. They should have pitied poor Hayden, who had been examined daily, tortured with needles, tormented by contractions over and over for two weeks. But it was Heath, inexplicably, that Shane felt the most sympathy for. The man had been such a wretched spectacle, blanching every time Hayden headed to the hospital again with a new bout of preliminary contractions. Shane had quickly ceased making fun of him.

  Now he frowned, because his brother had turned his back to him as if on purpose, as if he wanted to prevent him from catching a glimpse of the new, youngest family member.

  “Heath,” Hayden chided her husband with a chuckle. “Take it easy. He’s not going to drop her.” She lay on her hospital bed, dark circles around her eyes, but a beatific smile on her face. She rolled her eyes at her husband in amusement. She looked surprisingly fit for a woman who had gone through eighteen hours of labor—quite contrary to Heath, who looked like a wreck. A wreck that was keeping Shane from his niece!

  “She’s sleeping,” Heath protested.

  “Give her to him,” Hayden demanded cheerfully. “He’s her uncle, after all.”

  Shane was also the only one who had known they were expecting a baby when they’d got married seven months before. Neither Heath nor Hayden had said as much, but he fully expected to be the godfather of his first niece. If Heath didn’t want that, he’d just beat him up, he swore to himself.

  When he looked down into his brother’s face again, Heath was studying him with a critical expression. “Did you wash your hands?”

  “No,” he shot back sarcastically. “After cleaning the toilet with my bare hands and taking out the trash, I petted a rabid cat on the way here. And then I came straight to this room to hold my niece.”

  Heath scowled at him. “Shane.”

  “Jesus! Of course I washed my hands!” He leaned down and took the baby carefully from Heath’s arms into his own, even though his older brother still wasn’t happy about it.

  The little girl was heavier than he’d expected, smelled absolutely delightful, and caused him to press a spontaneous kiss onto her tiny forehead. “Hello, princess,” he murmured.

  He ignored both the amused chuckle of his sister-in-law and the scowl of his older brother, and started to wander around the room, almost oblivious to the happy sigh of his mother.

  “I think she looks a lot like me,” he stated proudly, as if he were responsible for the warm bundle that nestled in the crook of his arm, and not his brother.

  “She looks like me,” Heath corrected sharply. “I’m her father. You’re only her uncle.”

  “But she has my hair, and also my mouth,” Shane replied with a smile, pressing the baby against his chest.

  Heath snorted. “You and I have the same hair and mouth, so she still inherited them from me. Not you.”

  “Pea
ce, boys,” Kayleigh cut in, slightly irritated. She was sitting in a chair, munching an apple. She looked every bit as exhausted as the new mother, because she’d been on duty for over twenty hours when she’d slipped upstairs to pay mother and baby a visit.

  “The main thing is that she didn’t inherit your receding hairline,” Ryan added from the other end of the room, where he was flipping through the channels of the wall-mounted TV.

  “We don’t have receding hairlines!” Heath protested, running a hand through his thick hair.

  Shane nodded his agreement, but didn’t fall into his younger brother’s trap. He kept rocking the baby softly.

  “You’ve held her long enough now.” Heath stood abruptly and took his daughter from Shane’s arms.

  Shane patted his older brother’s shoulder generously and grinned at his brother’s doting. “Luckily you had the last word in that whole argument about whether to find out if you’d have a boy or a girl. Imagine—we almost painted her room with little fire trucks! The ponies and pink walls are much more fitting.”

  “Hey,” Kayleigh complained. “Girls don’t have to like ponies and pink. My room was filled with fire trucks!”

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” Shane said with a meaningful look. “We all know the result of that.”

  His sister seemed to ponder the apple, probably wondering whether to hurl it at his head. “God, you’re such a jerk.”

  “Don’t swear in front of our daughter,” Heath chimed in. He sat down on the edge of his wife’s bed and pressed a kiss to her forehead.

  Shane took a deep breath as he took in the image—the two of them sitting there, next to each other and obviously very happy. And after they bent over their sleeping daughter, they exchanged a private smile. Shane was happy for his brother and Hayden, whom he loved like a sister, but that didn’t quell his sudden envy at their bliss. He remembered a time when this vision of a happy family had been within his grasp, too.

  And then everything had changed.

  “That reminds me, Shane, I saw one of your exes in the ER earlier.” Kayleigh sounded both pleased and a little catty. An unholy combination. She was probably still miffed about his comment.

  “And?”

  “If I were you, I’d get a test for chlamydia soon. That’s all I’m saying.”

  Their mother gasped, and Kayleigh leaned back in her chair triumphantly.

  He ground his teeth. “Have you ever heard the term ‘medical confidentiality,’ you little brat?”

  “I didn’t tell you which of your many exploits I saw, did I?”

  “For God’s sake,” their mom murmured.

  He felt like a teenage boy who’d been caught staring at a woman’s breasts. “Mom, I don’t have chlamydia,” he said, trying to soothe his mother’s nerves.

  “You never know.” Kayleigh giggled. “Does it hurt when you pass water, Shane?”

  “No!” he snapped. “And it’s none of your business, Kayleigh, but I never sleep with a woman without using protection.”

  “My daughter is four hours old,” Heath complained. “She should not have to listen to your swearing or hear about venereal diseases and the details of her uncle’s sex life!”

  Kayleigh was unimpressed and laughed loudly. Then she stood and kissed her mom, before patting Hayden’s knee with a cheerful expression. “I gotta get back to work.”

  “Thank God,” Shane blurted, but his annoying sister merely winked at him and tousled his hair in passing.

  “If I see your ex again, Shane, should I say hi?”

  “Absolutely,” he sarcastically shot back, snaking an arm around her waist and stopping her from leaving the room. “Speaking of exes, my love,” he added sweetly, “I recently saw Robbie Callahan at the gas station—I’m sure you remember the boy you deflowered in high school? Do you want me to give him your number the next time I see him? Because I really think you should go out once in a while.”

  “Shane!” His sister’s reaction was too funny. She paled in anger but then reddened with embarrassment when she saw the horrified look on her mother’s face.

  “I sincerely hope you’re going to confession on a regular basis,” their mom said, shaking her head, looking slightly stunned. “And I don’t even want to know what Father Brady thinks of our family!”

  Hayden gave a cheerful laugh and turned to her mother-in-law. “We’re the Fitzpatricks, Ellen. Father Brady’s already heard it all. I don’t think we can shock him anymore.”