Fire at Dusk: The Firefighters of Darling Bay (13 page)

Which was exactly why she had to get out of here, before she broke her own heart, and so much worse, his. “Seriously, you couldn’t have helped me back then. I wasn’t very helpable.”

Hank made a frustrated noise and reached over the edge of the bed to the floor. He jerked a blue fire department T-shirt over his head. “You don’t know that. I want you to feel safe, the way Linda said she did when her husband was alive.”

That was the whole problem. Linda needed to feel safe by
herself
. “Linda lost the one person she could rely on. That was a bet she lost. We all lose. You should understand risk better than anyone. You’re a firefighter. You can’t promise to come home to me.” Not that she meant… “To anyone,” she corrected herself.

Hank tilted his head. “There’s risk, yeah. But I’m the safest one on the crew. I never leap before I look. Protocol is there for a reason, and I follow it—”

“Rules aren’t all they’re cracked up to be,” Samantha said as gently as she could. “You’re
too
safe. Remember, way back then, when you made me promise you that at least when I was with Vicente that I would always wear a helmet?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Then you rode off into the sunset without one. I watched you go. I was so
mad
at you for that, Samantha.”

“But I didn’t die.” She tugged on the sheet he’d pulled from her when he’d reached for his shirt.

“You could have.”

“Gah! That’s the point, Hank. I
didn’t
die. It sounds obvious, but it’s pretty simple: we don’t die from the things that don’t kill us. And the exhilaration we feel from doing the wrong thing can be amazing.” Riding across the Mohave at a hundred miles an hour, the hot wind tearing at her hair—it had been one of the most stupid things she’d ever done, probably. She’d also never forget—or regret—that ride.

Hank shoved a hand through his messy hair. She’d given him that bedhead, she suddenly realized. Her fingers had done that to his hair last night. And again early that morning.

“No, we don’t,” he said, “but people die from the stupid, preventable things. An epileptic man forgot to take his medicine and fell into his fireplace last year.”

Samantha gasped.

He went on. “What were the odds of that happening? A billion to one? But he could have just chosen to wait to light the fire until his wife got home. That would have saved his life. A woman just last week died of asthma because she’d forgotten her inhaler while she was at the gym. Instead of asking them to call 911, she went to the locker room to catch her breath, and instead, died by herself. Stupid, preventable things.”

Samantha flexed her fingers in the air as if trying to grasp what she needed. The right words were there, the ones that would make him understand this—she just had to find them. “Then
why
do you try to prevent things? You’re just proving my point. You might as well do whatever you want. You’re going to die anyway.”

“Kids die, too. The ones whose parents didn’t put them in the carseat, because they were only going around the block to grandma’s house. A mother of ten-year-old twin girls was killed on her bicycle last year because she fell and hit her head. She wasn’t wearing a helmet. She also wasn’t carrying any ID, so for about eight hours, no one knew who she was. She was a Jane Doe at the hospital morgue.”

Samantha shook her head, not wanting to hear any more, but he kept talking.

“I just kept thinking about her daughters and her husband, how long they waited for her to come home before calling the cops to report her missing. The sergeant on the call said they gave up waiting for her for dinner and went to get burgers, but none of them ate anything because they were so scared about her not coming home for the first time ever. How do you plan for that? You don’t. But you know how you prevent it from happening? You take all the precautions you can. Like wearing your damn helmet which would have saved that woman’s twins from growing up without a mother.”

“Have you ever jumped out of a plane?”

He shook his head firmly. “No. I never would.”

“Tempting fate?”

“Damn straight.”

“So you’ll never get to know that rush you feel as you fall and fall and then suddenly you’ve fallen past the place where you would normally stop and your body tells you you’re going to die, and then you pull the ripcord, and you’re safe, hanging under the parachute, and the next few minutes of drifting toward mother earth are the sweetest moments of your life.”
Except for the moments after making love with the man with the eyes to match his last name.

“You’re not as daring as you think you are, you know.”

Oh, if he was looking for a fight? This was the way to have it. Samantha dropped the sheet and slid off the edge of the bed. She glared at him, hands on her hips, too angry to be embarrassed to be naked in front of him. “Where are my jeans?”

“You’re scared to lose your heart.”

“I’m serious, Hank.” She pulled her shirt over her head, not bothering with her bra. She’d shove that in her bag. “My jeans?”

“You’re terrified to love. You’re reckless—sometimes idiotically so—but you won’t take a chance on love. Why is that?”

Her teeth started to chatter though she wasn’t cold. “I. Need. My. Jeans.”

“It’s not the rape—rape is about power. It has to have been before that. Your dad?”

“Are you seriously going to analyze me? Can I put my pants on?”

He shrugged. “Check under the bed. Were your parents happy?”

Samantha scowled. “Very.”

“Is this about your mom?”

“My mother never got a chance to
live
.” She wanted to take back the words as soon as she uttered them. But it was too late.

Hank leaned against the headboard, his posture open, his eyes clear and sweet and strong. What would it feel like to crawl back into bed? To lean on him?

“And…” he prompted.

She found her underwear next to the bedside table and pulled them on. “She died of cancer so young—she’d never done anything but get married and have us. Not one other thing.”

“So you think you have to live for her. I can see that. But is it fair? Is that what she would want?”

“Of course she would. She regretted everything she’d never done. Her last words…”
See it all. Do it all.
Samantha had tried to follow her mother’s directive. It was even why she’d initially learned how to fight. Her mother had always wanted to do judo or taekwondo, but her body had never been strong enough. Samantha had studied the moves—even when she wasn’t doing well in her own life, even when she was training through a vodka haze—so she could make her dead mother proud.

“Would she want you to take a chance on love?”

If Samantha loved, if she stayed in place, her roots would grow, and maybe she wouldn’t do all the things she needed to do for her mother. Her head felt fuzzy. That was true, right? That’s what she’d believed for so long…

Hank stayed still as he said, “I’m taking a chance here. With you. I think we could do this, Samantha. I really do.”

“But you can’t take a chance on anything else.”

“I don’t need to.”

“No one
lives
if they don’t risk.”

“Samantha.” Hank’s voice was scratchy and low. “There’s this quote that says you should jump of the cliff and build your wings on the way down. I’m risking everything. Right now. Can’t you see that? You’ve changed me. I’m jumping off the cliff. Hoping I have wings.”

Samantha pulled on the jeans she’d finally dragged out from under the bed and dug an elastic out of the pocket. She pulled back her hair viciously and twisted it into a ponytail. “Prove it.”

“What?”

“Do something dangerous.”

He frowned, and crossed his arms. “I don’t get it.”

“Show me you’ve changed. That you can live on the edge.”
That you can fly with those wings.

“Telling you I love you isn’t enough?”

She wanted it to be. “They’re just words. Do something scary and risky.”

“You understand that my job, my whole way of life, is about mitigating danger.”

That was what she was worried about. Samantha tossed her ponytail over her shoulder and raised her chin, wishing for her glasses to hide behind. “
I’m
danger. How would you mitigate me?”

“I won’t. I promise.”

“You’ll try to. They all do.” She pulled on her jacket and picked up her bag from where she’d flung it in the corner. “
Damn
, I want a drink.”

Hank’s eyes went wide. “You don’t.”

She gave him one final look, aching with how she would miss what this could have been. What it should have been. “I always do. That’s the thing. But not having a drink is something I have to accomplish myself. Alone. You can’t help. I wish you could. You can’t save me, Hank, and you can’t make me safe.”
I love you anyway.

She couldn’t say the words.

It wouldn’t be fair to him. And in her leaving, she needed to be fair. If she could, she would choose him. If she could have what she wanted, she would curl up in his arms and let him take care of her, let him make her safe.

But that didn’t work. She’d seen firsthand what it looked like when a woman loved a man so much she was willing to give everything else in the world up. Samantha's mother had given her whole life to their father, and then, when she’d gotten sick, she had nothing to draw from. No memories of dancing on beaches, no recollections of long Sunday mornings in bed with various lovers. Her mother didn’t know what language they spoke in Brazil, or what coffee tasted like in Italy. Of course, her mother also hadn’t had any idea what it was like to be detoxing in a tiny motel just outside Phoenix with five dollars in nickels stashed an old Altoids tin, with no cell phone, no one within a thousand miles that knew her middle name.

Hank’s dark, bruised-looking eyes made her want to cry. “Don’t go,” he said one last time. “Stay with me.”

So he could put her in box and keep her safe. Keep her from
burning
, from living her life with fire and flame and verve and lust and excitement. No, she was too much her mother’s daughter to let that ever happen. She would never be her mother, coddled and protected by a man who, in the end, could save her from nothing.

And more than that, she was enough her mother’s daughter to not allow herself to hurt this man again. She’d done it once to him. Once was enough, and if she stayed a little longer, she’d hurt him deeper by not staying, by not choosing the safe road. For the first time, she realized that if she’d stepped off the back of that motorcycle years ago, choosing Hank back then, she wouldn’t be the person she was today.

And he wouldn’t be the Hank she loved.

Samantha could only think of one thing to say that would make it better, and they were the words she couldn’t give him. So she dropped her gaze to the floor and left, closing the door softly behind her as she went.

CHAPTER TWENTY

HANK TOOK ANOTHER body-blow. The women were getting better with throwing punches, and they were all excited to get their turn on him instead of the bag Samantha had hung from a rafter. Kelly, especially, was really getting into it. He was sorry Wally wasn’t here today to take some of the jabs for him, but he’d had something to do with his daughter.

“That’s it, Kelly! Harder! Don’t let him push you like that by the shoulders! Remember what we worked on with the twist and elbow.” Samantha's voice was professional and just the right tone and pitch. Just as it had been for the last two weeks.

Two weeks of this awful, broken silence. Samantha was cordial when they worked with the class together. Afterward, she always ushered him to the community center door along with the last couple of students, thanking him kindly for coming, for doing such a great job.

He was nothing to her, that was what her carefully upright body telegraphed. Her voice told him that he was a valued part of her teaching sessions, nothing more.

But her eyes said something different to him, and at least twice a class, Hank was tempted to hurl himself at her in his padded suit and let her whale on him until that bleak, haunted look in the back of that green gaze abated.

He didn’t do it, though. He just did his job in the class. He was the attacker. The women, his victims, were becoming friends while his helmet was off.

Samantha, though, smiled at him like they were only slightly acquainted. Hank had kissed her, loved her with his fingers and mouth and body and mind until she’d wept in his arms with release, and just this afternoon, when she’d held the community center’s door open for him, she’d looked as if she was considering whether or not to put him on her Christmas card list.

“Harder!” yelled Samantha. “Come on, Kelly, you can hit him harder than that.”

“
Oof
.” Yeah, he was definitely off her list. He held his arms up, his signal for defeat. He’d pushed Kelly into a corner and pinned her down, using everything Samantha had taught him, and she’d gotten away from him and then kicked his butt. There were still two classes to go in this course, and Kelly was going to be the star pupil, he could tell. She loved fighting and winning. And her sisters, while doing well themselves,
loved
watching her, cheering her loudly.

It would have been uplifting if he hadn’t been getting so pummeled by fists and shoulders and knees and feet. The suit was good, and he’d learned a little bit about how to block, but he’d be bruised tomorrow. The pain almost felt like some kind of relief.

He’d blown it.

Hank had lost her.

As Linda got into place on the mat, he looked through the mesh of the helmet at Samantha. She stood tall at the edge of the fighting area, her shoulders drawn back. Her cheeks were pale, and for a second, he saw something in her face waver. Then she bit her lip quickly and the look was gone. She was all business again.

“Linda, you have this.”

Linda did
not
have this. Hank could tell she was on the verge of tears. He made a time-out sign with his hands and lifted off his helmet, tucking it under his arm. “Hey,” he said, stepping toward her. “You want to take a minute?”

“No,” she muttered, looking at the plastic blue mat beneath her bare feet.