The crew would get the fire knocked down, but he had no desire simply to hope they got to this back room in time. As far as he knew, no one was aware that he and Shannon were there.
The smoke was getting thicker, choking him, stinging his eyes. He pulled her down to the floor and fumbled for the bedside phone. No dial tone. The fire must have already burned through the lines.
Cell. She had a cell phone. Where was it? Had she put it back in her purse? Where was the purse? Where the hell was the damn purse?
“Shannon! Wake up. Come on, wake up.”
No response.
Nick swore again and finally found her purse, but the phone wasn’t in it. The table. Maybe she’d left it…there. He had it.
He called 911, wondering if he would get the local service or something else.
It was the county 911 dispatcher, thank God. He told her their situation and asked that someone contact the fire chief at the scene and have him direct his spray toward the back corner. The woman tried to keep him on the phone, but he had to make preparations in case the fire decided to come in through that broken window before the crew could knock it down. He would have to make a stand in the bathroom.
He tried to carry Shannon that far, but she was too limp and his leg was too weak. He ended up half dragging her to the tub, thanking God for slow renovations. The tub was an old cast-iron job that, if nothing else, wouldn’t melt and fuse with their skin. Of course, there was every possibility that they could end up beyond caring, but not as long as Nick had so much as one breath left in his body.
He left Shannon on the floor next to the tub, then crawled back and pulled the sheets and blanket from the bed. They would make good wet wraps and help filter the air for breathing. He was about to close the bathroom door and seal them in with a wet towel along the bottom to help keep any more smoke from getting in when he remembered her computer. If they lived through this and she realized he had let her computer burn, she would kill him.
He made one last foray through the room, grabbing only what he thought she would consider essential. Purse, cell phone, notepad, computer. Shoes beside the bed. He stuffed the cell phone in her purse, and everything else in the bag for her laptop. By then his bad leg was worse than useless, making crawling on all fours impossible, so he belly-crawled. There was more air at the floor level, anyway.
Any minute now, he kept thinking, the pipe would be trained on their door and the fire would retreat. Any minute.
But now the fire was at their door. He could hear it, feel the increased heat. In another couple of seconds—yes. There. The drapes on the broken window. He should have pulled them down, but now they were on fire. Time was running out.
He made it back into the bathroom and, in what was probably a useless gesture, considering the amount of smoke already there and the nearness of the fire, he closed them in and put a soaking wet towel over the crack beneath the door. Then he turned on the water in the tub and quickly soaked the bed linens. He got Shannon and her belongings into the tub, climbed in after them, and wrapped them all in sopping wet sheets with the blanket beneath them to protect them as much as possible in case the tub got hot.
“Shannon?” He was too out of breath to be able to find a pulse on her. He was too busy praying to slow his breathing. It was one thing to walk into a burning building and rescue strangers, while wearing full turnout gear, breathing air through a tank and knowing your brothers-in-arms, as it were, had your back. That was his calling. He had been good at it.
But to be on the other end, to be the one needing rescue, knowing he could not get Shannon out to safety, left a bitter taste in his mouth.
God, he could feel the tub getting hot. The flames must be licking at it from below because if the door was on fire he would hear the sound. He could raise the sheet and look, but he didn’t. He held Shannon close in his arms, turning so that he practically lay on top of her to shield her as much as possible with his own body.
And he prayed. He had already done all he could. He wasn’t interested in letting Fate take him just yet. He prayed for a big, hard stream of water. He prayed for Lon to guide his men well. He prayed that the 911 operator got through to Lon.
Then he heard the roar of the fire. The door was burning. The wall, too, probably. Not good. Not good at all.
Suddenly—boom!
His heart jumped. Explosion? Fire? Water? What?
An instant later he heard a shout. He couldn’t make out any words, but it was a voice.
They were coming.
The parking lot and three full blocks of Main Street were awash in people and vehicles and fire hoses. The fire was out now, but no one seemed anxious to leave.
Nick stood beside Shannon and held her hand, grateful to feel her squeeze his. The paramedics determined that she’d been rendered unconscious by smoke inhalation and had her on oxygen. When she’d started coughing earlier, it had seemed to Nick as if she might never stop. The paramedics would have insisted she go to the hospital and have a doctor look her over, but the doctor had come to them.
“You’re going to be fine,” Nick reminded her now. “The doctor will check you again in an hour, and then I can take you home.”
Shannon felt as if she were emerging from a deep sleep. She guessed she was, essentially, since she’d been unconscious. But she was catching up fast. Fire. Smoke. Nick. Home?
She pulled off the oxygen mask so she could talk easier. “How…you came. How did you know?” God, her throat ached.
He put the mask back on her and told her about being unable to sleep, about walking, smelling smoke.
“Thank God you did,” she said with feeling.
“You’re right about that, Ms. Malloy,” Lon Wallace said, standing on the other side of her gurney. “If he hadn’t got you into the tub and covered you with wet sheets, then called to let us know where you were, we wouldn’t have gotten to you in time.”
“Don’t oversell it,” Nick said with a crooked smile.
“I’m not. I guess you didn’t notice the bed when you came out.”
She pulled the mask away. “What about the bed?”
Nick put the mask back in place. They tussled a moment and she resorted to merely lifting it away from her mouth to speak rather than pulling it all the way off her face.
Lon gave a nod of approval. “The bed is where he found you when he got here, right?”
“I was asleep.”
Lon patted her arm. “I don’t mean to scare you any more than you already are, but that bed is toast now.”
Shannon’s mouth went dry. “Toast?” she croaked.
Nick frowned at the chief. “We get the picture.”
Lon winked at Shannon. “But then, we already knew he was a hero, didn’t we?”
She looked from Lon to Nick, who looked away and stared at the skeletal remains of the motel. The entire end where her room had been was destroyed, including the office. She would have been gone, too, were it not for Nick, but he didn’t like hearing it and wouldn’t want the credit. “Some of us did.”
Nick had to figure that the only reason Shannon agreed to go home with him instead of checking into another motel was that she was too exhausted to make the effort. And maybe still too shaken to want to be alone.
They drove her car, which was only dinged slightly by the effort to put out the fire. Bev greeted them at the front door, pulling her nephew into her arms. It seemed that someone she knew had seen Nick at the fire and had heard about how he had rushed into a wall of flame and had called Bev to tell her about it.
“What can I do for you? Oh, you poor things, look at you. Do you want a shower first, or food? Or do you want to just go straight to bed? I’ve got a spare nightgown you’re welcome to, and in the morning we can see about getting you some clothes.”
A tear leaked from Shannon’s eye, and it nearly killed Nick.
“Thank you,” she croaked. “I would hug you, but you don’t want me to touch you like this.”
For the f
irst time, Nick realized that the two of them were covered in black soot—as Bev was, thanks to his embrace—and they reeked of smoke.
“Don’t you worry about that. Come into the kitchen for a minute, both of you.” She poured them each a glass of orange juice with orders to drink every drop.
“Then you can shower. I’ll go set out some things you might need,” she said to Shannon. “If I miss anything, just let me know.”
“Thank you, Bev. You’re a godsend.”
“You’re more than welcome. Nick, my boy, I won’t scold you for leaping through a wall of flames—”
Shannon shuddered at the words.
“—because you saved Shannon. Bless you both. Now, I’ll get out of your way. The house is yours, dear,” she said, patting Shannon’s shoulder.
When she left them there in the kitchen, Shannon turned to Nick. “You saved my life, and you saved my work, my computer. You even saved my purse with my wallet, ID and cash. Am I allowed to say thank you?”
He ducked his head. “If you want, but it’s not necessary.”
“I want, and it is necessary. You weren’t just doing your job, because it’s not your job anymore. But you did it anyway.” She kissed his sooty lips. “I’m alive right now because of you. Don’t you ever call yourself a useless has-been again.”
Shannon showered first, then Nick. She slept in his bed, curled up in his arms, and neither spoke.
Nick had gone for a walk because he couldn’t sleep. Now here he was, back in bed, with sleep not even a remote possibility. He would not relinquish a single second of his time with Shannon by sleeping. She would leave him soon enough.
Maybe she felt the same desperation that was threatening to choke him because she turned to him and kissed his lips. Without a word, they kissed, they touched, they stroked. They made love so slowly, so sweetly, it almost didn’t seem real.
When they slipped off the edge together, it was warm and sweet and gentle. And afterward, he fell asleep, forever grateful to feel her alive and safe in his arms one more time.
Chapter Twelve
When Nick woke the next morning, Shannon was gone.
No note, no message. Just…gone.
He knew without checking that she hadn’t gone to another motel. She was on her way home. It was time; she had no more reason to stay.
He wanted to pull the covers over his head and tell the world to go away, but he had promised to talk to Lon about the fire, let the man ask his questions.
He crawled out of bed, stepped into a pair of jeans that didn’t smell like smoke, and followed the aroma of coffee to the kitchen.
Bev stood there, leaning against the counter, arms folded over her chest, waiting for him. She didn’t look particularly welcoming. “So you let her go, did you?”
He grunted and headed for the nearest empty coffee mug so he could fill it. “Good morning to you, too.”
“Go ahead, get yourself a cup. You look like you need it.”
“Th—” His voice croaked. Damn smoke. He swallowed and tried again. “Thanks.”
When he filled his mug and took a seat at the breakfast table, she joined him.
“Nick, I’ve never been one to pry, you know that.”
“I sense a but coming.”
“Nobody ever said you were stupid. Until now. And that’s exactly what I’m saying. You are the dumbest creature on God’s green earth to let that woman go home without you.”
Nick hung his head and let her words batter him.
“Well? What do you have to say for yourself?”
Slowly he raised his head to look at her. “Not a thing. You’ll get no argument out of me.”
“So? Don’t get me wrong, I love you and love sharing a home with you. But what are you doing here if she’s on her way back to New York? Nick, talk to me. I don’t understand this at all. You are so obviously in love with her, and she with you. You do know that, don’t you?”
“I know that,” he told her. “Love isn’t our problem.”
“If you love each other, then you can work anything out.”
He was shaking his head before she finished speaking. “You know I can’t live in New York anymore.”
“You mean you chose not to.”
“All right.” Dammit, he didn’t need this right now. “I chose not to spend every single day staring into the face of the thing I was born to do, and not be able to do it.”
“That’s nothing but sheer pride talking, Nick. If you want to be around fires, be an instructor, or a dispatcher. Become an arson investigator.”
Those were the same things Shannon had told him. The same things he’d told himself a long time ago. The same suggestions his commander had given him when Nick had left the hospital five years ago. He told Bev the same thing he’d told them. “It’s not the same.”
“No, it isn’t. When did you get to be so special that you have to have everything exactly the way you want it?”
Nick felt a painful throbbing start behind his eyes. It had been a long, long time since he’d been scolded. At his age, it was a little hard to take, but he sat there and took it. It was starting to sink in that maybe, just maybe, he had it coming.
Shannon was beyond numb and approaching zombie status by the time she made it home. She hadn’t had a reservation, so she’d had to sit around the Dallas-Fort Worth airport all day and catch the 6:30 p.m. flight to LaGuardia. By the time she landed, taxied, caught a cab and got into her apartment, it was past midnight.
Just think how late it might have been if she’d had any luggage to check. Any luggage at all. Thank you, mister fire, for incinerating my clothes.
Thank you, Nick, for saving my purse and laptop.
And that was the last time she was going to think about Nick. Except, of course, for however many days it took to write and edit his chapter in her book.
How was she going to keep her feelings out of the writing?
She was going to be the professional journalist she hoped she’d always been, that’s how.
But first, she would sleep. Tomorrow she had to report back to the paper. And call her mother and Deedra. And somehow, through it all, manage to act like a normal person who had not recently met, and lost, the love of her life.
Shannon managed to make it through that first horrible day, and then the next one and the next. She worked at the paper during the day and found a hundred different things to keep her busy each evening. Busy, as in, no time to work on that certain chapter in her manuscript.
There was no hurry, really. She had two more months until her deadline. In a few more days, maybe a couple of weeks, she would get her act together and get it finished.
Then another day went by, and one more after that.
Enough, she told herself. This was stupid, moping around as if her dog had just died. It wasn’t a dog; it was only a man. The man, true, and with him was her heart, but what the heck. She didn’t need it to give to anyone else in the foreseeable future. Nick was gone.
There. She had thought his name and the world did not come to an end. She marched to the closet where she had stashed her laptop when she’d come home from Texas and hauled it out.
Oh, God, the bag and all its contents reeked of smoke.
She spent most of the evening cleaning everything carefully, doing everything she could think of to get rid of the smell. When she went to work the next morning, she would leave everything from her bag—laptop, notepad, tape recorder—sitting out in her living room, ready for use when she came home.
Everything seemed to still be in working order. Even the tape in her recorder still played, although she wouldn’t be listening to it anytime soon. Not the last part, she thought with a smile. It seemed that she had never turned it off that last night. She had inadvertently captured the sounds of their lovemaking.
It felt good to smile again. She was going to be all right. She was all right.
And then she went to bed and dreamed of Nick. The next morning, the ache of missing him
was so strong she almost convinced herself to stay home and wallow in her misery.
But she did go to work. Whatever had brought on the good mood of the night before had deserted her, but with grim determination, she kept her misery to herself. She would be fine, dammit. She would be terrific.
No more putting off that chapter in her manuscript. That night when she got home, she changed into her sweats and settled down on the sofa, with all her writing materials spread out around her. And she sat there and stared.
It was one thing to say she was going to write about Nick, but it was another actually to do it. Writing about him would be like bringing him into her home with her. Wouldn’t he then haunt her every day and night after that?
Someone knocked on her door. They must have played the keep pressing buttons until someone lets you in game because she hadn’t buzzed anyone up. Frowning, she went to the door, double checked that the dead bolt was engaged, and looked through her peephole.
Nick. “Nick?” She fumbled the lock three times before getting it open. “Nick! Where did you come from? What are you doing here? Is everything all right?”
He stood in her doorway, his hands buried in the pockets of his brown bomber jacket, an expression on his face that she could not read.
“I came from Texas,” he answered. “To see you. And no, everything’s not all right.”
Her heart skipped a beat. She grabbed his hand and pulled him through the door. She wanted to fling her arms around him and hold on until the next ice age and beyond. But he didn’t look all that approachable, and she did have her pride, after all. She released his hand and turned to close and lock her door before facing him again. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“We didn’t finish.”
Shannon swallowed and eyed him warily, afraid to hope, unable to do otherwise. “Didn’t finish what?”
He looked around her apartment and made for her tape recorder on the coffee table. “This. Is there a tape in here? Is it ready to use?”
Finding Nick Page 15
