Rescued by Her Rival Read online

  Outside the windows, other cars passed in a blur of color and faces against a backdrop of gray concrete. It wasn’t anything to look at, but she let him look for a long time.

  “My adversary,” he said finally. “I see the fire like a cop chasing the serial killer that killed his family.”

  He spoke quietly, and what came out was much bigger than she knew how to deal with. Adversary wasn’t even accurate. Too civilized-sounding by comparison. Even hearing him say those words made her chest burn like she’d been inhaling cinders for days.

  It was a lot. But it wasn’t everything, it couldn’t be. His mother had died terribly when he was ten, and two years ago he’d been the star quarterback. Something had specifically changed last year.

  She leaned in closer so she could speak softly, as that kind of question should be asked with reverence. “Did your brush with the fire bring all that back? With your mom?”

  He looked pained, and then shook his head, repeating, “I don’t know.”

  He didn’t know because he wasn’t ready to go there.

  She couldn’t force him to do it either.

  “How can I help you on the job? I know the job is important to you. How can I help you?”

  “I don’t know.” He said the words again.

  “Does Treadwell know about her?”

  He didn’t repeat himself, just shrugged, making clear they hadn’t spoken of it. There were services that would’ve been offered to help him if he’d ever asked for help.

  “You have to figure this out, Beck. Don’t expect me to let up either. I know it sucks to talk about it, to relive it or to have someone trying to make you look at what you lived from some other point of view, but there’s something to this and you have to figure it out.”

  “What other point of view is there?” he bit out. Aggression. An emotional dodge from the man-speak playbook to redirect the conversation. He needed to focus.

  “Like how terrible it would’ve been for your mom had you been the one to die and she to live.”

  She shouldn’t have said that, she knew it the instant the words flew out of her mouth and the meager color he’d regained since Treadwell’s collapse drained away.

  He looked back out the window, once again returning to his usual broody silence. She wanted to touch him, and probably would have—even there on the packed bus, where anyone could’ve seen.

  In fact, she actually did rise up a little to look around, and saw fourteen other sweaty men sleeping in their seats, and that one jerk who’d laughed at her smirking at them.

  Copeland.

  He had one brow up, arching in challenge, eyes full of judgment, and mouthed, “Are you going to make out now?”

  Beck turned just then, and caught her staring back at the man, and picked up the sudden shift in tension even though he’d missed the silent gibe. Still, he placed his hands on the seat to rise and confront the man for her.

  Having Beck defend her again would only embolden Copeland to continue, get worse. Escalation was the male confrontational hallmark. Besides, she couldn’t have Beck taking on another emotional landmine while he was tiptoeing around his own.

  Not going to happen.

  She sprang up, reared back, and with the half-empty water bottle as her only weapon hurled it at Copeland’s head with as much speed and force as she could put into a wobbling, off-center, water-filled plastic missile.

  It tumbled end over end, and the heavier, water-filled base of the soft plastic bottle smashed into his cheek. Because she had three brothers, Lauren hit whatever she aimed at.

  Instantly, his face went red and he surged to his feet.

  She’d learned that look from her brothers too. Confrontation face. She couldn’t back down now.

  Taking one deep breath, she hopped onto the padded seat she’d just vacated and launched herself at the man, but Beck was faster. He slung one arm across her hips as she jumped and pulled her back into the seat as other, more sensible men near Copeland got in his way too.

  “Are you seriously going to fight that ass?” Beck shouted at her, dropping her in the seat. “He’s twice as big as you are.”

  “I don’t need anyone fighting my battles, Ellison. And I’m through taking crap from him.” She slid to the side, got back on her feet, but didn’t launch back in again, just stood her ground.

  “No one’s fighting.” Kolinski seemed to have awakened in the shouting and kerfuffle, and pushed back through to the middle of them. “Did I just see Ellison keep his partner from doing something stupid?”

  “Not stupid,” she argued, ignoring the small amount of praise slipped in there for Beck, who’d apparently finally exhibited some team spirit by stopping her from stomping on Copeland’s dangly bits. “I’m not putting up with sexist crap from that jerk. He’s always running his mouth. If you want to nail me for not working and playing nicely with my teammate, look to him as well.”

  Kolinski turned to look back at Copeland. “What sexist crap?”

  Copeland mustered the decency to look chagrined, and went for the traditional sexist cop-out. “I was just kidding. Not my fault she can’t take a joke.”

  When Kolinski looked back at her, she snorted but gave up on the nonsense. It was over. He had been caught out. He probably wouldn’t make the same mistake again, and if she hadn’t let Beck get in his grill about it last time, he wouldn’t have done it this time. “The idea of making out with your partner is hilarious. I’m sure you’d have said it to any of the dudes here chatting with their partners.”

  Point made, Copeland sat and glared out the window, and everyone returned to their seats.

  Beck’s steely glare leveled at her brought the frustration out that she’d been trying to contain. “I’m just going to add this and then I’ll let it go for now. Whether or not we were tied together, it would be wrong of me to let you plod forward like everything was fine without at least pointing out that you’re letting your emotions get the better of you in fires. I’m not saying you’re imagining danger, or that your actions are increasing the danger to yourself and your team, but, like it or not, if you get stuck, someone is going to come for you. The safety record the service holds is as much about making smart decisions as having the best people.”

  “This from the woman whose emotions just made her have a Chihuahua-bulldog confrontation?” His voice rose enough that she saw heads turning out of the corner of her eye, and knew that the conversation was done.

  “There you go again, thinking I can’t handle what I say I can handle. Sort it out, Beck. I like you, I really do, but if you think I’m going to let up, you haven’t experienced how tenacious a Chihuahua can be.”

  She stepped around the next seat forward and sat again. Not with Beck. She wasn’t mad at him, she was just tired, and the knowledge they hadn’t come to any kind of understanding was the cherry on top of a long, emotion-laden day. All she wanted to do was shower, eat, sleep and survive tomorrow.

  One more day of Hell Week.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  AFTER THE FIELD, after Treadwell’s ranting collapse, Beck spent the kind of night where he wasn’t sure whether he’d slept or not. Even after hiking directly into the woods upon arriving back at camp, and staying immersed in night song and the cool dampness of the forest. Even in the wooded embrace of his favorite tan oak.

  If he’d stayed back there in the woods, he might’ve been able to sleep. But he hadn’t. He’d thought about Lauren’s words, and those malachite green eyes that pressed into him, and he’d returned to the cabin to thrash around in his bed until morning. Even if they weren’t technically speaking, being under the same roof felt necessary. Probably some residual notion of partnership he’d only just grasped because it was ingrained in the genetic makeup of humans. It certainly wasn’t something he’d done out of inspiration.

  He’d dragged through the day, exhausted
in a way that snowballed, mentally and physically. There had been news about Treadwell, a mixed bag: he’d definitely had a heart attack and they’d performed an emergency procedure to open those vessels up, but no word had come on lasting damage to the heart. For all Beck knew, this was the end of Treadwell’s career. Which would mean a new chief, and one who wouldn’t have this positive memory of the things Beck was capable of if he could get his head straight.

  And that’s what was keeping him from sleep. That and the lingering frustration he had with Lauren after a day of purposeful avoidance, because opening his mouth would prove she’d hit on a sore subject with him, and not talking now probably proved her point. He was too emotional and let it impair his judgment.

  He rolled over again and the clock’s glaring, judgmental red numbers launched him from the bed.

  Just tell her. Tell her what had happened last year, and let her chew on it, not him. Get the words out of his own head so he could sleep.

  In the dark, he stormed out of his own room and knocked once, hard, on her door before opening it.

  She bolted upright, but in the dark he couldn’t see her expression. That was good. Then he wouldn’t have to read it, or hide from it.

  “I’m tired and I just want to go to sleep, but I can’t stop thinking. I don’t want to think about it. I just want it to go away. I just want to be busy and not think about it and have it go away...”

  “Okay,” she said groggily, then fumbled with the bedside lamp.

  He launched forward, grabbing her hand before she could close around the key to turn it on, and pushing it back to her lap.

  “Beck?”

  “I just want to say it and go to sleep. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she said again. In the dark, he could hear her confused, sleepy breathing, but she didn’t sound scared. She would. This wasn’t going to make things better.

  “There was a local fireman last summer in Oregon when we were called in. He got separated from the group and no one would let me go in for him,” Beck said, stepping back from the bed, wanting distance from that too. “They wouldn’t let me go, and he died. And I can’t... I can’t leave anyone behind. I can’t do it. It’s not in me to do that. If there’s a chance, and there’s always a chance.”

  “What do you mean, they wouldn’t let you go? You listened to orders?”

  “No. I mean...three of them wrestled me into the back of a parked police cruiser and locked me in.” He really hadn’t had a choice then. There was no opening those doors from the inside.

  “Oh.” She lifted her hand, almost turned on the light, but then remembered and rubbed her face instead. “There’s not always a chance.”

  “There is.”

  “Okay.” She tried again. “There’s always a chance for a while, but there comes a time when the chance is so small that it becomes a bad call.”

  “If someone’s willing to risk it...”

  “That’s not your call.”

  “The smokejumpers who saved me? They bucked orders. They bucked orders and came in anyway.”

  “Treadwell didn’t send them?”

  Right. He hadn’t told her that.

  “Not then. When I was a kid. When the fire came, they bucked orders. There was a chopper, they came after us. That’s why I survived. I survived after someone decided it was too dangerous to risk.” He tried to explain, but it was hard to put feelings into words. “Last year, there was a place where the fire seemed thinner. And there was a clear pocket in the middle where the man was. I could’ve gone through the fire. Or maybe gone up in a chopper and dropped to him.”

  “The people who saved you risked themselves to save a family. They risked for a family. For a child...” she said softly, picking up the thread of conversation as slowly as she climbed from the bed, the creaking of the mattress and the rustle of sheets distracting. The sound of rustling cotton had never sounded so nice, so enticing. That’s what he wanted, to be distracted. “But you can’t think it’s smart to exchange one life for another, if there was even a chance that your death could’ve saved him.”

  “There’s always a chance,” he repeated. Without thinking, he stepped closer, hands restless, body restless, mind restless. “They came for a family, and left with a child. They had to leave her. I had to leave her. Do you...? You can’t expect that to be something someone can do again. And I couldn’t get to him. And now I don’t ask permission. I just do what I need to do.”

  He hadn’t actually touched her yet, though he’d reached out and retreated several times during his blathering, but when she took the next step and reached for his shoulders, he backtracked across the room.

  “Why couldn’t they get to your mother?” She focused in on that.

  “Fire moved too fast. It was too late. They couldn’t find her, they said.” The burnt, scarred trees flashed into his mind, the remains of their cottage, and a lingering bitterness with himself that he still didn’t want to believe them. “I guess it makes sense, the fire got all the way to the river.”

  “You saw it?”

  “A couple of years later.” Long past the time when anything could’ve still been smoldering, but that was how he remembered it: with smoke rising from everything. Their little cottage by the river. The trees surrounding it, the forest beyond. Even the grass smoldered in his memory.

  Anyone would’ve picked the river over the flames, but the prospect of her dying in the water didn’t make it better.

  He’d lied to himself for years about that day, because the images he played in his mind of his mother were of her having survived the water. Maybe with a head injury, something that made her forget. No body meant no true ending to her. That was the only thought that actually soothed.

  The smokejumpers who’d rescued him couldn’t have known their story, true or not, wouldn’t be the kinder alternative. Which was its own kind of twisted and sick to think he’d be in a better place mentally, feel less guilty, if she’d died in the flames.

  His mother had worn the malachite pendant and crystals had littered their home because she needed their help for something. Something had happened and she’d drawn away from the world, using money left to her by her father to buy land and build the cabin away, where it was safe. He didn’t know what had made her retreat, had only ever gotten vague cautions from her about the world being dangerous, and had known her to meditate with the malachite when her emotions got out of control. When he couldn’t talk her through another panic attack.

  Which was why the idea of her drowning wasn’t better. He couldn’t have helped her survive the fire, but if he’d gone into the water with her... There was a chance. If he hadn’t let them take him. If he hadn’t left her behind. It was torturous to think of her burning alive with him helpless to stop it, but thinking of her drowning because he abandoned her put her death on his hands.

  He’d told himself a lie of hope, and during the first years, it helped him get through. Maybe never having found her was kinder than knowing it was one or the other, it left room for the denial that had let him survive. A little boy’s dream he could no longer believe, the reason he could never leave anyone behind again.

  Lauren stopped following when he reached the doorway, and the next step would mean leaving. In that moment, he wanted to see her eyes. With one hand, he found the switch for the overhead and flipped it on so they were both squinting and blinking against the sudden brightness. When she opened her eyes fully again, there it was. The malachite green, pale in the center, and impossibly dark at the edge of the iris.

  Malachite was for healing, he’d looked it up. Healing and bringing hidden pain to the surface. Probably why he was subconsciously drawn to her. Maybe even why he felt compelled to tell her things he didn’t even like to admit to himself. Because not doing so felt somehow like lying to family.

  “Are you angry with Treadwell for not letting you go in after the f
irefighter?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head again, and this time he really didn’t have that answer, and he didn’t want to think about that right now, open up new avenues to keep him from sleep. He’d said what he’d needed to say, the things that had been running around in his head, and now he just wanted to sleep.

  “You need to talk to someone about this, Beck. Everything about it. I’m more than willing to listen if you want to tell me everything, talk through it...”

  “That’s it. I don’t have anything else.”

  “That’s not it,” she said, and there was no slow, gentle approach this time, she just was suddenly right there, her hands holding his face, making him look at her. “If it’s not me, then it needs to be someone. Yesterday, on the bus, you said the fire was your adversary. I see it as a thing that’s being held out of my grasp, you see it as something living and sentient—a monster hiding behind corners, waiting to take people from you. And I get it. I don’t think there’s any reason you wouldn’t feel that way, with what you’ve experienced. But you can’t outsmart fire. It’s not a chess match with a serial killer.”

  “I know that.”

  “Do you?” Her hands gave one sharp, small shake, just enough to jostle him and command his focus. “Treadwell was right not to send you in. It was down to deciding if he lost one firefighter or two. And even if the man survived and you died getting him out, that’s still bad math. His life wasn’t more valuable than yours. The dog you went after later on wasn’t more valuable than you are, even if it would’ve been tragic for him to burn up in that fire.”

  She still held his cheeks, her touch a spark of temptation that made him want to stay. Climb into the bed with her, take the peace that flowed from her touch.

  “I know they called you the Smoke Charmer, but you were wrong about that fire with the dog. You were wrong yesterday when you thought the fire was coming and we should reformulate the digging plan. It didn’t show up while we worked. If all that’s happened has thrown soot on your crystal ball, then you have to rely on the judgment of others until you get it cleared off. And you need to talk to someone about it.”