Can't Take the Heat (13 page)

“
You’re wrong. That baby’s still in there somewhere.”

Two other firefighters stomp out of the door in the middle of our argument. One of them says, “We just cleared the place. There’s no one else in there.”

I close my eyes, fists clenched. They’re wrong, but how can I prove it?

“
Did you look everywhere?”

“
It’s a small apartment. Kitchen, living area, one tiny bedroom. We looked everywhere.”

“
In the closets?”

I get another glare for this question. “We’re not stupid. Of course we did.”

Brody tugs at my sleeve. “Come on, Del, we need to get her to the hospital.”

He’s right, but there’s a certainty crawling under my skin that I just can’t shake. It’s a tiny apartment. How did a young, healthy woman wind up unconscious on the floor, just a few feet from the door? She should easily have gotten out within a few seconds of discovering the fire. There’s only one answer that makes sense, and that is that she was looking for something. Or, more accurately, someone.

Her child.

Now I have to finish what she started. Taking a lungful of fresh air, I dash past the two firefighters who’ve just exited the apartment and into the smoky center of hell.

“
Hey, you can’t go in there!” someone shouts after me, but in all their gear, they’re too slow to stop me.

I take less than a second to look around, trying to figure out the likeliest place for a toddler to be hiding. Not in the living room, for sure. I glance into the small, U-shaped kitchen, where I’m guessing the fire started.

Two firemen are on my heels as I dash into the kitchen and begin pulling open the cabinet doors. I find her—the toddler is a girl with a mop of dark, curly hair and huge, frightened brown eyes—in the third one I open, just as my pursuers grab me with the intent of hauling me back out.

“
Well, I’ll be fucked.”

I don’t know which one of the firefighters says this, but they both release me instantly. Thanks to the fact that’s she's been huddled in this low cabinet with the door mostly shut, she hasn’t inhaled much smoke. She’s still conscious, but plainly frightened, and the big men in their big, scary suits aren’t helping.

Holding out my arms, I kneel down so our faces are nearly level with one another. “It’s all right, honey. I’ll take you to your mama.”

She hesitates a second, her gaze flitting between me and the scary firemen, before she stretches her arms out toward me. I pick her up. The firefighters part to make a path for me and I make a run for the door.

When we burst out into the fresh air, Brody takes one look at me and the little girl clinging to my neck and says, “Jesus Christ, Delaney, that’s the stupidest, bravest thing I’ve ever seen anyone do.”

It
was
stupid. But I’d
had
to do it. And over the next few days, as I replayed the incident in my head, I came to two conclusions.

The first was that I never wanted to be in a burning building without protective gear again. There’s a reason for respirators and all that fire retardant gear. Only after I got my own personal ride to the hospital—in my own ambulance, ironically enough—did I discover that I’d suffered lung damage due to smoke inhalation and several second-degree burns on my arms and the back of my neck. At the time it was happening, I felt neither.

The second was that I had to do it again.

I’m not claiming I have some kind of psychic ability, exactly. The reason I knew Bailey—that was the little girl’s name—was in the apartment was the evidence: the rundown state of the building, the toys on the floor, and the fact that her mother hadn’t gotten out of the apartment when she’d noticed the fire. But I saw things while the firefighters on the scene didn’t and I couldn’t ignore the implications of that.

I know I can’t save everyone. I can’t be at the scene of every fire where someone gets left behind, but I can be at some of them. I have to be, because I can and do make a difference. Like I did at the warehouse Ryan and I pulled that kid from last week right before everything went black.

Right before I put Wes through the very thing he never wanted to experience.

God, I’m a selfish bitch. For all these years, I left Wes on my forms as my emergency contact. Long after I could have chosen someone else, like Jett or Chelsea or even Brody. Why didn’t I? But I already know the answer. It was my passive-aggressive way of punishing him for not seeing things my way.

Only now I can see what my way would cost him in the long run. It’s more than is fair for me to ask of him. Of anyone. Sure, there are people who marry firefighters and police officers and military personnel, but no one should be expected to sign on to that kind of life. That kind of uncertainty.

Blinking back tears, I turn to look at him. To my surprise, he’s been looking back at me instead of at whatever’s happening on the stage. Our eyes meet and we mouth in unison, “I’m sorry.”

Wes drove Delaney home. To her house, not the apartment.

There were a thousand things he wanted to say, but in the end, none of them would change the outcome. She wasn’t going to give up her job. He wasn’t willing to live with the risks she had to take to do it. Despite the idyll of the last few days, they were at the same impasse they’d crashed into three years ago. The only difference now was that he was neither stupid enough nor selfish enough to ask her to change her mind.

“You can come by the apartment tomorrow to get your things while I’m in the office,” he said as he parked the Lexus at the curb. “You still have your key card, right?”

Pressing her lips together, she nodded. Was she holding back tears? In the yellow glow of the nearby streetlamp, it was hard to tell whether her eyes were glassy with emotion or just over-dilated to compensate for the low light.

“I’ll get your name removed from my personnel forms before I go back to work. It was shitty of me to do that to you.”

He shrugged, trying to maintain a stoic front. Later, when he was alone, he could let the loss sink in, but for now, he didn’t want to burden her with any more guilt than she was already feeling. “You saved that boy.”

“So he was a boy,” Delaney breathed. “Ryan and I couldn’t tell when we found him. I’m glad to hear he made it.”

We nodded. “It was on the news the next morning, while you were still unconscious. They say he ran away from an abusive foster home and was squatting in the warehouse. The investigators think the fire was started by one of his discarded cigarette butts.”

“So 
that’s
 what I saw,” she murmured.

Wes knew she wasn’t really talking to him, but he asked anyway. “What do you mean?”

“Whenever I find someone in a building we’re told is clear, I always realize afterward that there’s some tangible reason I wasn’t convinced. The first time, with that little girl, it was the toys and the mother’s failure to get out of the apartment when she should have had plenty of time. At the warehouse, I remember now that I saw a couple of stray cigarette butts.”

“Couldn’t those have been left by the security guard or anyone else who entered the building?”

“Well, yeah, but the security guard was outside having a cigarette when the fire broke out, so it didn’t make sense that they were his. Plus, I’d like to think anyone who works in a warehouse would realize that dropping their butts around wood and cardboard boxes isn’t the brightest idea. A kid…not so much.”

Wes shook his head with amazement. “That seems like a hell of a lot to think through in the heat of the moment.”
Literally.
“I don’t know how you do it.”

“That’s the thing, though. I 
never
think through it at the time. I just 
feel
 it. It’s only afterward that I figure out 
why
. But it’s what makes me good at the job. For whatever reason, I process stuff other people don’t notice.”

“You’re not just good at your job. You’re incredible. And it was shitty of me to think you should give that up for me. I think we can call it even.”

Turning away, she stared out the window into her darkened front yard. “I was never angry with you, you know. Not really.”

He let out a snort of self-disgust. “You should have been. I acted like a chauvinist pig.”

Her laugh was low and sad. “Maybe a little. But you weren’t wrong about what it means to be married to a firefighter. It means always fearing the worst will happen. And I’ll admit, if our positions were reversed and you were the one putting yourself in danger, I’m not sure I could take it. I shouldn’t have expected of you what I couldn’t do myself.” She reached down into the foot well for her purse. “And, by the way, I hope you won’t hold what happened tonight against
Mystique.
It’s an awesome show, and if you don’t book it, I will come and lay some serious whoop-ass on you.”

He chuckled at that, because he was pretty sure she could follow through on the threat. “Don’t worry. I know it was pure coincidence. Aaron’s going to be very happy when I call him in the morning.” Which was more than he could say for himself.

“Good.” She started to open the car door but hesitated when it was cracked just far enough to bring on the dome light. “And as much as I know I shouldn’t be, I’m glad we had these three days together.”

His voice cracked under the weight of her absolution. “I’m glad, too.”

Leaning across the console, she brushed her lips across his. “I love you, Wesley Barrows. And I always will.”

Then she pushed the door open, slung her purse on her shoulder, and got out of the car. He watched her walk up the tile pathway that led to her front porch, the flared hem of her turquoise blue dress swirling above her knees in time with the sway of her hips. When she reached the front door, she slipped her key into the lock without a backward glance. Lights came on inside, and a second later the curtains closed.

He got it. No turning back. No last, longing looks. What was done was done.

And it hurt like fucking hell.

Sliding the Lexus into drive, he pulled a U-turn in the middle of the suburban street and headed back out the way he’d come in. Although he wasn’t as familiar with the neighborhood as Delaney, he knew it well enough to slip into autopilot for the drive back to the Grand. He’d have to pay more attention once he got closer to the Strip, of course, but here in the residential parts of town, there was very little traffic at this time on a weeknight.

The aftermath was going to be different this time. After all, he’d known from the beginning that this moment was inevitable. The only thing he hadn’t counted on was how suddenly and dramatically the moment had come. He grimaced at the thought of what Chelsea and his father were going to have to say to him when they heard the news. “I told you so” and “Are you an idiot?” seemed like pretty solid predictions of their respective responses. But what else could he do? Another phone call like the one he’d received a week ago would gut him. Especially because the next time it happened, Delaney could be more than hurt. She could be dead. And that was a thought he couldn’t bear. Imagining a world without Delaney in it was like imagining the planet without gravity—conceivable, but so bizarre as to be unrecognizable.

The blare of a horn startled the shit out of him. Glancing up, he realized he’d blown through a red light just a second before he saw the eighteen-wheeler barreling toward the intersection.

The same intersection he was entering.

He had no time to panic. Pressing his foot flat to the floor, he gunned the engine and swerved to the left, squirting past the braking big rig with mere inches to spare. He watched the truck pass behind him in his rearview mirror, unable to believe how close he’d come to obliteration.

Trembling, he pulled the Lexus to the side of the road and tried to get his breathing under control. He’d had near misses before, of course. Everyone had. But none had been nearer than that.

Everyone had.