by Julie Miller
Mark’s cheeks turned a pale shade of pink that matched the embarrassment Matt felt at her compliment. “Could we stop saying hot? Unless you’re referring to me?”
“Oh, you know how I like to refer to you, Fire Man.”
Although he was grinning, Gideon shook his head as the subtext between the newly engaged couple’s banter. “Hello, you two—you have an audience—and children in the next room. Save it for after the wedding.”
“Did I miss something? Who’s hot?” Meghan reentered the room to stand beside her husband. “Matthew’s girlfriend?”
“Mom, no. I don’t have a girl... Corie is a friend. I’m just watching Evan while she’s at work tonight.”
“And investigating some mysterious circumstances surrounding her,” Gideon added, his tone laced with concern. “Sounds like you’re pretty involved to me, son.”
“I like to know what I’m dealing with,” Matt insisted. “And if Evan has anything to do with those fires, if he’s trying to emulate his father or he’s crying out for attention because the creep chose a life of crime over him, then—”
“You’re the best man to help him.” Probably better than anyone here, his mother understood just how far he had come since he’d been the troubled little boy who’d set the fire that had killed his birth parents. “Other than being a little skittish around all of us—and who wouldn’t be?—I’m not seeing any indication that he’s withdrawn or hiding something.”
“Evan seems like a pretty cool kid to me,” Pike added as he rejoined them. “He’s making sure Junior and Dorie stay safe and share their cookies, even though Mom and Dad and Hope have been in there with them most of the evening. And that castle they’re building is pretty sweet. The kid’s going to be an architect one day.”
Or was there something so frightening in his real life that he felt he had to keep building imaginary fortresses to feel safe?
Pike crossed the room to join them in picking up the mess they’d made. “So, we’re talking about Evan’s mom? Is she the one who finally woke up Matt here?”
Alex helped him move the bank of old cabinets they’d taken apart to the side of the kitchen. “She has hair like a ‘ripe wheat field.’ Quote, unquote.”
“When did you become a poet?” Pike echoed Alex’s earlier question. Apparently, Matt’s factual description of Corie’s hair had revealed something he hadn’t intended to. “This sounds serious.”
Matt realized he was surrounded on all sides and commanding way too much attention. “Don’t any of you have work to do?”
Martha Taylor had an answer for him. “I don’t. Certainly, nothing as interesting as this conversation.”
“Grandma!”
Fortunately, his mother had always been his strongest ally. “Give it a rest, boys.” From the time they’d first met in the foster home where they’d all been living, Matt, Mark, Alex and Pike had been Meghan Taylor’s boys. Becoming adults hadn’t changed the nickname or the bond. She reached up to cup Matt’s cheek and smiled. “I know you’ve just been waiting for the right one to come along. I’d like to meet Corie sometime. I hope she knows what a treasure you are.” Then she added, in a soft whisper for his ears alone, “I hope you know, too.” As she pulled away, she added, “And remember, firefighters work as a team. If there is something dangerous around Evan and his mother, you don’t take it on alone.” Her look encompassed the entire room. “You have allies.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Despite the dramatic sigh of disappointment from Grandma Martha, the spotlight on Matt finally faded. The younger women returned to their painting as Gideon walked his wife and mother down the hall to watch the children. Matt and his brothers got to work on the last of the cleanup and prepping the expanded kitchen for the work they were going to do this weekend.
However, Mark, in all his newly engaged happiness, wouldn’t let it go. He knocked loose the remaining dangling bits of drywall and tossed the biggest piece at Matt. “They say when the big ones fall, they fall hard.”
Matt caught the piece squarely against his chest and shoved it into the trash. “Give it a rest, Mark.”
Evan popped in again, his mouth wrinkled with concern as he eyed the dusty residue clinging to Matt’s dark flannel shirt. The kid must have some kind of danger radar. Or he was more of a worrywart than anyone his age should be. “Matt, did you fall? Are you hurt?”
As worried about Evan’s paranoia as he was glad for the reprieve from Let’s Pick Apart Matt’s Love Life Night, Matt scooped him up in his arms and rested the boy on his hip. “I’m fine, bud. You know, in many ways, you’re lucky you’re an only child.”
“Huh?”
Matt was already striding from the room. He’d done most of the heavy lifting tonight. Let his annoying brothers handle the rest of the cleanup. “Show me this castle you and Gid are building.”
Evan’s arm rested lightly on Matt’s shoulder, seeming to like being able to look him straight in the eye. “Can I hammer something again?”
Matt paused at the entrance to the hallway and looked back at his brothers. “Sure. I’ve got a trio of numbskulls you can start with...” Matt veed two fingers toward his eyes, then pointed to Mark, Pike and Alex, indicating he’d be watching them for any more teasing...and would put a stop to it when they didn’t have an audience that included an impressionable child or their delicate grandmother. Alex laughed. Pike nodded, conceding that Matt was leaving with the upper hand. Mark threw his hands up in protest, as if affronted. So much love and support. So much a pain in the—
“What’s a numbskull?” Evan asked.
Matt shook his head as his brothers laughed behind him. He needed to think about how he was going to explain that one to an eight-year-old.
By the end of another hour, the kitchen was prepped for new cabinets and tile. Paint cans had been sealed, dust had been swept up, his family had given the state of his love life a temporary rest, and Matt was walking Evan down the steps to the sidewalk in front of his grandmother’s condo. “This way, bud.” Evan kicked up puffs of snow as he shuffled along beside Matt. “I promised your mom I’d have you in bed by nine o’clock, so we’d better hustle.”
“I’m not sleepy,” he protested through his wide yawn.
Matt bit back his grin. “I know. If you want to close your eyes and rest for a few minutes on the drive home, that’d be okay.”
“Can I come help again? Grandma Martha said she’d bake chocolate chip cookies next time. They’re my favorite. She said to call her Grandma Martha because I was a nice boy, and I was helping her, even though she’s not my real grandma.” Since Matt’s hands were full with his ax and toolbox, Evan tugged on the sleeve of his coat to stop him. “I don’t have a real grandma. Is it okay if I share yours?”
This kid worried way too much about other people’s feelings and safety for someone his age. Not for the first time this evening, Matt wondered what events had shaped his young life. Corie had confessed that her ex had hurt a lot of people. Anger burned through Matt’s blood at the idea that any of that violence might have touched Evan.
“If she said it’s okay, then it’s fine by me.” He set his tools down on the sidewalk beside his truck and lifted Evan into the bed of the pickup so the boy could help him stow his ax and toolbox in the metal cargo box behind the cab.
Matt thought he heard the scrape of footsteps on the sidewalk. But with Evan’s boots raising a muffled metallic sound in the bed of his truck, he couldn’t isolate the noise. He glanced behind him to see if one of his brothers had followed them out. But the circle of illumination from the streetlamp in front of the old butcher shop was empty. A glance up the block revealed no pedestrians, either. Sometimes these tall brick and limestone buildings lining either side of the street in the City Market district captured sound and reflected it back off the hard surfaces, especially on a clear, cold night like this with little wind t
o dampen the echoing sounds.
Of course, there were shadows at the fringes of every streetlight and in the alleyways between buildings. And with vehicles parked along the curbs, someone hunched against the cold might not be readily visible. Matt pushed up the edges of his knit cap and trained his ears to try and pinpoint the company he couldn’t see. But with Evan rattling Matt’s toolbox as the boy insisted on lifting it himself, as well as his ongoing commentary about all things construction and cookie related, it was pretty impossible to hear anything else.
Probably his overtaxed sense of alertness, anyway. If he had heard the last steps of someone scurrying inside a warm building, there wasn’t any real need to be concerned. This might once have been a decaying working-class neighborhood, but it had enjoyed a rebirth of tourism and an influx of professionals and young families who both lived and worked closer to the heart of the city. This wasn’t a particularly dangerous neighborhood. Getting Evan out of this single-degree weather was probably a more pressing concern.
“Come on, bud.” Once Evan had closed the lid and locked it, Matt helped him jump down and climb up into the back seat of his crew cab. Matt buckled him in, then ruffled the bangs that stuck out from beneath Evan’s stocking cap. “Did you have fun tonight?”
“I like hammering, but can I use your ax next time?”
“Probably not the ax. It’s heavy and it’s dangerous. But we’ll see about putting a paintbrush in your hands.” There was still plenty of work to do on the condo above his late grandfather’s butcher shop. Once they finished the remodel, they could sell it for a nice enough price that Grandma Martha could pay off the single-story ranch home she’d moved into that summer. The question was, would Corie be willing to trust Evan with him again? Once he mentioned axes and the fact he’d asked his brother to run a check on Evan’s father, she might reconsider. “It’ll be up to your mom.”
“Cool.” The smile Evan flashed was missing two full teeth, but it hit Matt with the same intensity that Corie’s smile had.
Good grief. Maybe his family was seeing something in him that Matt hadn’t fully admitted yet—he was falling for the family next door—not just the pretty mom whose smile and touch could set him off-kilter, but the little boy who seemed haunted by some of the same shadows Matt remembered from his own early childhood. The McGuires needed him. Or maybe they just needed someone—and he wanted to volunteer for the job.
Matt closed the rear door and stepped out into the street to walk around to the driver’s side. But a subtle alarm tickled the back of his neck, and his fingers clutched the door handle without opening it.
He hadn’t imagined footsteps. They were in a hurry now, moving away from his location. Punctuated by the slam of a vehicle door, he had to wonder if someone had been watching them. But a quick 360 didn’t reveal any spies. Maybe his family’s conversation about arson, and Corie’s suspicion that someone had been inside her apartment while she’d been at school, were feeding his wary senses.
This wasn’t a place where muggings and street crime happened much anymore—and anyone with a lick of sense would think twice about coming after him. Matt could walk the walk when it came to holding his own in a physical confrontation. His firefighter training and lifting weights weren’t the only skills he’d honed over the years.
Still, the tickle at his nape was never wrong when it came to fighting fires and the safety of the men and women on his Firehouse 13 team. Something wasn’t right. But what he saw as intrusive might just be a curious neighbor, wondering what was going on over the old Taylor Butcher Shop, or why the loner of the Taylor clan, who’d never even brought a date to a family gathering, now had a kid in tow.
With no obvious threat in sight, Matt climbed in and locked the doors. After he started the engine, he cranked the heat and found Evan’s curious green eyes watching him in the rearview mirror. “I’m going to let the truck warm up for a few minutes before we go.”
Evan pushed up against his seat belt. “Can I use your watch to count how many minutes again?”
“Sure.” Matt took his utility watch off his wrist and reached over the seat to show Evan the timer feature. “Now you set it for four minutes. When the alarm goes off, I’ll hear it and we’ll go.”
“Sweet.” Evan leaned back in his seat to play with the watch that fascinated him so. “We have twenty-four minutes before I have to be in bed,” he announced. “After the truck warms up, we’ll have twenty minutes to drive home.”
Good math skills. He’d run through his multiplication problems in a matter of minutes, and gotten every answer right, before Matt gave him the okay to go in and play with Gideon Jr. “I’ll get you home in eighteen.”
“We’ll have to run up the stairs if we only have two minutes.”
“I’ll race you.” As soon as the watch beeped, Matt pulled out of his parking space. There was little traffic at this hour, and he quickly passed two blocks before stopping at the red light. Matt found Evan watching him in the mirror again. “Will there be someone at the diner to walk your mom to her car when she gets off work?”
“We don’t have a car.”
His guileless pronouncement rekindled Matt’s suspicions. “Then how does she get to school and work and then come home?”
“The way we always do. We walk. Or when it’s cold like this, we’ll walk to the bus stop. It’s not that far.”
But it was late at night, she was a woman and she was alone. “Does she ever let you walk that far by yourself?”
“Un-uh.”
“Then she shouldn’t, either.” Movement in the street behind him shifted his attention from Evan. A nondescript van pulled out of a parking space and drove up behind Matt’s truck. The van wasn’t speeding. But with its headlights blinding him in every mirror, he couldn’t get a look at the driver, either. “Hey, bud. Why don’t you set the timer for fifteen minutes. You time me to see if we get home before it beeps.”
Matt was glad to see Evan concentrating on the watch, telling him the boy wasn’t alarmed by the vehicle behind them. But he was an eight-year-old boy—he shouldn’t have to be worried about strange coincidences and sixth senses warning him of danger. That was Matt’s job. On impulse, he turned right before the light changed. When the van turned the corner behind him, Matt pulled his phone from his coat pocket and punched in a familiar number.
His brother Mark picked up on the second ring. “Did you miss me?”
“Do you mind stopping by my place on your way home?”
“No.” Every bit of humor left Mark’s tone. “What’s up?”
Matt took another random corner, and the van followed. The warning at the nape of his neck couldn’t be ignored. “I’m not sure. But I’d feel better if I had some backup.”
Chapter Seven
“Hey, blondie.”
“Come on, sugar—you know you miss us.”
Great. Now the two men at the back of the bus were blowing kisses at her.
After that “courtesy” message her attorney’s office in St. Louis had left on her phone tonight, she sure as hell didn’t need this.
“As a courtesy, we are notifying all our clients that Owenson, Marsden & Heath may have had a breach in security subsequent to an electrical fire in our offices, in which several computers and most of our files were destroyed. While we are making every effort to ensure confidentiality while we sort through the remains of both paper and digital records, we are still in the process of accounting for all our data. Rest assured, backup systems were in place, and we are able to continue working on all of your current or upcoming needs. We are happy to report that Mr. Heath is at home now, recovering from injuries sustained in the fire. Our temporary offices will be housed at...”
She hadn’t listened to the rest of the voice mail. Current and upcoming needs had nothing to do with her. Her only legal concerns were in the past. But a breach in security? Missing records? Her
attorney injured in a fire?
To Corie, that meant only one thing. Kenny.
Was he responsible for that fire? Had he gotten access to her new identity and other personal records Mr. Heath had arranged for her? Had he burned the place down to cover up evidence that he had been in St. Louis? If he could track down her attorney, could he also find her here in Kansas City?
“Whatchya thinkin’ about, sugar? Which one of us you’d like to get to know better first?”
Corie hugged her backpack tightly to her chest and stared at her hunkered reflection in the bus window and at the city lights that seemed to float past as she made her way home after closing the diner. Normally she found the ride home relaxing, and she enjoyed seeing parts of the city still decorated for Christmas or New Year’s, especially when the lights reflected off the snow. But tonight, the world outside was a blur. Her pulse thundered in her ears, drowning out any fun or peaceful thoughts. And she was shivering, despite her coat and gloves and the bus’s heater blowing across her feet.
She fought to keep Kenny’s verbal abuse from playing in her head. “What the hell’s a study group? You’re not going anywhere. You’re good for only two things. If you weren’t so damn frigid, it’d be three. You make me look good and you take care of my baby. Understand?” The words might be different, but the tone was the same. Her reaction was, too.
This is not Kenny, Corie told herself, forcing herself to take deep, calming breaths. There is no proof that he set that fire in St. Louis and found out about your new life. Your world isn’t burning down around you. The two men hassling her tonight weren’t Kenny. Even at his worst, Kenny had been all about appearances—the right look, the right woman, associating with people of money and power. Those two losers are just a couple of drunks who happened to get on your bus. You have value, Corie. You are strong. Think of the positives. Evan is safe. You are safe.
She repeated the mantra again and again, just like her therapist had advised her. Evan is safe. You are safe.
