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“I hope it’s not too bad.”
“This time of day?” He shrugged. “Probably a grease fire in the kitchen.” It was nights when things could get hairy, where fires burned undetected and were already out of control when the trucks arrived.
“Why did you decide to become a firefighter?” Kim asked.
“You mean besides wanting to rescue damsels in distress?”
“I suspect there’s more to it than that.”
He paused in the hallway to give her the easy answer, the one they used for school kids touring the station. “For the cheap thrills. Every time that tone sounds, you’ve got a chance for a trip to Six Flags.”
“You’re an adrenaline junkie?”
He couldn’t leave it at that, letting Kim think he was that shallow. “I grew up in the house where I’m living now. As a kid, every time I’d hear the fire trucks roll, I wanted to be there with them putting out fires, rescuing people, wearing that cool helmet. But the real question is why any sane person would stay on the job and risk his neck every day for strangers after you get past the adrenaline high and the excitement.”
“And?”
He turned to her, picturing her blue-violet eyes looking at him, wishing he could touch her. Run his fingers through her hair. Weigh the silken blond strands in his palm.
“It’s the brotherhood on the job. We may fight like brothers here at the station and give each other a hard time every chance we get, but we’re there for each other when it counts.” He rubbed his hand over his face, forgetting for the moment about the glasses and knocking them askew. He hadn’t done a very good job of shaving that morning and there were patches of stubble on his jaw. He couldn’t do anything about the press of tears at the back of his eyes, caught there behind those damn patches that kept him from being a whole man. “That’s what I miss the most about being off the job. They need me and I can’t be there for them.”
“You will be, Jay. A few weeks, and then you’ll be back on the job.”
“Yeah.” God, he hoped so. Otherwise he’d go crazy. He hated pretending everything was okay; hated swallowing the fear that rose up in the night to grab him. The dreams he was unable to halt, the explosion happening again and again.
Shaking off the feeling, he continued down the hallway, Kim at his side, her heels making those feminine clicking noises on the hardwood floor. Her scent faint. Seductive. Something that good dreams were made of.
“I’ve lost track of how many steps I’ve taken,” he admitted, distracted by her nearness and his own fantasies. “The dispatch office—”
“Is right here. You want us to go in?”
“Yeah. No tour of the station is complete without meeting Emma Jean Witkowsky, our dispatcher and resident psychic.”
“Psychic?” Kim frowned at the comment. “You mean she predicts fires before she gets a 911 call?”
“That’s what she says…about two minutes after a call comes in. Says it’s her gypsy blood.”
Kim nodded, chuckling, though she wasn’t sure she quite understood.
Jay shoved open the door marked Dispatch and Kim entered. Certainly the woman sitting in front of a U-shaped console of computer keyboards and screens could be a gypsy. Her dark hair was in wild disarray as though she had just finished a fiery dance to the music of violins and a concertina, and large silver hoops dangled from her ears.
“Hey, Jay, I knew you’d be coming in today. How are you, hon?”
Jay nudged Kim with his elbow. “Now she knows I was going to show up, but a half hour ago? Not likely.” To the dispatcher he said, “Doing fine, Emma Jean. I’d like you to meet Kim Lydell. I’m giving her a tour.”
“Hey, hon, I know you.” Her dark eyes flashed with recognition. “You’re that TV person. Haven’t seen you on the air for a while.”
Kim tensed, feeling the now-familiar self-consciousness wash over her when she met someone new. Automatically, she tugged her scarf more tightly around her face.
“I’m on a sabbatical.” There wasn’t much call for news anchors who look like macabre clowns.
The dispatcher gave her a closer look, her gaze uncomfortably penetrating. “Don’t worry about a thing, hon. I’m getting good vibes about your future.”
Although Kim wasn’t a great believer in psychics, she said, “Thanks. I’ll hold that thought.”
“You do that, hon.”
Kim noticed a plate of what looked to be homemade oatmeal cookies covered with plastic wrap on the counter that separated the computer area from the rest of the room. “Those look good. Are you the cookie maker?” she asked Emma Jean.
“No, not me, but help yourself. Mrs. Anderson brought them over for the guys and they’re going a little slow.”
“Thank you.” Tempted, she reached for—
Blindly, Jay grabbed for her wrist just as her hand closed around a cookie. “Don’t touch those. They’ll kill you.”
Her head snapped around. “What?”
“Evie Anderson is the world’s worst cook.”
“The city councilwoman?”
“The same,” Emma Jean said. “She’s also got a mad crush on the chief. Thinks the way to his heart is through his stomach.”
“A stomach pump is what you need when you eat any of her cooking.”
“Oh, they can’t be that bad.” Gingerly, Kim bit off a tiny bite of the cookie she’d snatched, chewed and choked, desperately wishing she could spit it out. “Eeew, yuk.”
“Told you so,” Jay chided.
“She must have dumped a whole box of salt in there. They’re terrible.”
“She fell a couple of years ago and suffered a concussion,” Jay explained. “I think she lost her sense of taste.”
“But she’s a very nice lady,” Emma Jean said, defending the councilwoman. “And I predict—”
“Don’t!” Jay held up his hand. “If the chief and that woman get together, there’ll be mass resignations from the department. That’s my prediction.”
Kim couldn’t help but laugh. Councilwoman Anderson was an attractive woman in her early sixties, practically an institution in Paseo del Real, if a little conservative for Kim’s taste. She and the widowed fire chief would make a good-looking couple—assuming he had an iron stomach, she thought as she dropped the remains of the cookie in a nearby waste-basket.
“Say,” Emma Jean said. “I bet you’d like to come to the station’s pancake breakfast this weekend.” She whipped out a pre-printed pad of tickets. “Only five bucks a crack. It’s for a good cause.”
Kim glanced at Jay in the hope of an explanation.
“We’re restoring a vintage fire truck to ride in the Founder’s Day parade next September,” he offered. “Whoever sells the most tickets gets to drive. I figure I’m a shoo-in.”
“In that case, maybe I ought to buy my ticket from Emma Jean.”
“What kind of loyalty is that?” he complained. “Wasn’t I the one who brought you to the dance?”
The dispatcher grinned at her. “A girl after my own heart. Don’t let these guys and their egos get ahead of you. How many, hon?” She started tearing off tickets. “You got a boyfriend you could bring? A good-lookin’ brother about my age?”
Kim shook her head. “Maybe my parents would come,” she said impulsively. Both professors at the local university, they did try to support the community in a variety of ways. And even if they didn’t want to come, Kim’s investment wouldn’t be large, only ten extra dollars….and it was for a good cause, as Emma Jean had said. That amount of money wasn’t about to break her, particularly since KPRX was still paying her salary. Her boss, Alex Woodward, had told her to “take all the time she needed” for her recovery, although his generosity wasn’t likely to last indefinitely.
She dug into the small purse she carried and passed over the money in exchange for three tickets.
A moment later, Emma Jean had to answer a call, so Kim and Jay excused themselves.
“Some friend you are,” he grumbled, but she knew he was kidding.
Surreptitiously using his hand on the wall to guide him, he took her upstairs to the living quarters. Instead of a dormitory as she had expected, each firefighter had a separate bedroom that he shared with the men on alternate shifts, although each man had his own private locker. Then Jay demonstrated how to change the men’s room into a women’s restroom with the simple flip of the sign on the door.
“I think my preference would be for a lock,” Kim said, a little suspiciously. “On the inside.”
“We firefighters are the last true gentlemen in America,” Jay assured her piously. “We’d never violate that sign. Unless we were invited to, of course. Or, in my case, if I didn’t see the sign, which would be a darn good excuse.”
She laughed. How he could joke about his blindness and at the same time be so stubborn about accepting help was beyond her.
They were in the third-floor TV room with its rows of recliners lined up in front of the big screen when the fire trucks returned. A loudspeaker announced, “Engine 61 in quarters.”
“Let’s go see how the guys did.”
She followed Jay across the room where he opened what looked like a closet door. Her eyes widened. She screamed and snared him by his T-shirt, pulling him back. “That’s not the way out.”
“Sure it is.”
“No, Jay! It’s a big hole! You’ll kill yourself.” And this was a man who didn’t think he needed help? She’d been right when she’d called him a lunatic.
“Not hole, sweetheart.” He laughed. “It’s our pole. Quickest way to get downstairs.”
She peered past him. There was a pole in the center of the closet, all right, about six inches in diameter, but it looked like a hole to her—a deep one all the way from the third floor to the ground level.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll slide down first, you follow me and I’ll catch you.”
She bristled. “I’m not going to do any such thing.”
“What’s the matter? Are you chicken?”
“Certainly not.” Although she did have a certain fear of heights.
“You’re not afraid I’ll look up your skirt, are you? I promise I’ll keep my eyes closed, if that’s the problem.”
She whacked him on the arm with the back of her hand. “It’s just that I’ve…I’ve got heels on.”
“I know. I’ve been listening to them when you walk.” He waggled his eyebrows above his dark glasses. “Very sexy.”
The heat of a blush rose up her neck. She hadn’t been aware he was paying that much attention to the details about her, fully scrutinizing her in the same way she was noticing his attributes, all of them thoroughly masculine. And sexy. Like his full lips, especially when he was holding back a smile. Kissable lips.
“You get downstairs any way you like,” she told him, whirling away from both Jay and her reckless thoughts. “I’m going to use the stairs.”
His teasing laughter followed her out of the room as did his footsteps. She was intensely aware that he was “seeing” her in ways only a blind man could and very likely with more clarity than most sighted men would. She could only be grateful her disfigurement wasn’t as apparent to him as the style of shoes she was wearing. Any man with reasonable vision would turn away from her, repelled by the scars that had healed so poorly.
At least any man she’d consider having an intimate relationship with—and that errant thought rocked her back on her mental heels.
THEY’D BROUGHT back the acrid smell of smoke to the firehouse and it hung in the air amid the sounds of his buddies checking out the equipment, readying everything for the next run they’d get.
Jay had never felt quite so left out, not even in high school when he hadn’t had time to be a part of any clique. Or had the money to ask out the girl he wanted, he recalled, aware that Kim was standing beside him. What irony that she would be here now when he was in no position to do anything except enjoy the smoky sound of her voice and remember the face that had been a frequent visitor to his adolescent dreams.
The thing he hated the most—feared the most—his blindness, had brought her to him. Temporarily.
But it didn’t change the fact that under other circumstances she’d be far out of his reach. Unattainable. And he’d still be one of the guys sitting in the stands, Kim his favorite fantasy.
He silently cursed the fact that though years had passed, their relative positions had remained pretty much the same—she was still the beauty queen, a local celebrity, and he was just a working stiff with ambitions above himself. A blind man who was only too likely to bash into a wall or trip over a crack in the sidewalk.
Buttons licked his hand in greeting, pulling Jay back to the action in the station house. In gratitude, he petted the dog and scratched him between the ears.
“How’d it go?” he called out to the men he couldn’t see.
“Looked like the lady of the house was playing a little hanky-panky in the bedroom with her boyfriend,” Gables replied. “She forgot about the lamb chops in the broiler and they turned into crispy critters with flames shooting up the vent.”
“I figured it for a stove fire this time of day.”
“Yep. Fun part was the lady’s husband came home to check on what was happening. The boyfriend was hard-pressed to explain where he’d left his clothes.”
“Oh, my,” Kim gasped, a quick giggle escaping.
“Not a pretty sight,” Gables added and the rest of the crew joined in with their laughter.
“Sometimes we need a degree in social work in addition to fire-suppression courses,” Jay told Kim, still petting Buttons.
“Yes, I can see that.” She touched his arm lightly, sending an arc of desire through him. “Look, I think I’d better be going. Would you walk me back to my car?”
For a panicky moment, he searched for an excuse to keep her around—a few minutes longer. An hour. He’d settle for whatever he could get. He didn’t want her to leave. And he didn’t have any right to ask her to stay.
“Hey, I’ve got a great idea,” he said, knowing he was being a fool.
“Why does that make me feel like I ought to be running for cover?” Skepticism laced her voice as though she’d just announced some heavy-handed politician had promised never to take a campaign contribution from his favorite lobbying group.
“Kim, sweetheart, you’ve got to learn to be more trusting of men.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I just figured—since you were so worried about me—that you’d like to help me train Buttons to be my Seeing Eye dog.”
“Your what?” she gasped.
“You were the one who suggested I get a dog. Buttons will be great, won’t you fella?” With exaggerated affection, he scratched the dalmatian’s coat.
“I thought you were going to harness your cat.”
