Hearts on Fire (8 page)

In her peripheral vision, she saw him tuck his fingertips into the front pockets of his jeans. He’d removed his shoes, too, and there was something strangely intimate about seeing his bare feet.

“Last night was…incredible,” he said after they’d walked along in silence for a few minutes. “Even if it doesn’t mean a thing, I want you to know it wasn’t just another hook-up for me.”

“It wasn’t for me, either. I haven’t been with anyone in a very long time.”

“I know our lives are different, but I couldn’t let you leave without trying to see if there might be a way we could work it out. I’d like to see you again. I don’t know how or when, but I do know I wish you weren’t leaving.”

She stopped and turned to face the surf. The warm breeze threatened to carry her hat away. Holding it in place kept her from reaching for him. The time had come to tell him why he would never have the things he was asking for. “I had a life like yours many years ago. I lost it all. At first, I tried to go on. I kept my job, but it was the only thing I had left, and after a while, I realized it was the one thing in my life I would have gladly given up if I’d been given a choice.”

“What happened to you, to the life you had?”

It had been years, but the pain was still there as fresh as it had ever been. She had only to look below the surface. Wrapping her arms around her middle, she headed down the beach, hoping movement would make the telling easier, because she’d been standing still for so long. Steve fell in beside her.

“I had a high-powered job in Manhattan that I commuted to five days a week. My husband had a similar job, but he traveled a lot. We rarely saw each other except for an hour or two in the evening when he was home. We had a nanny for our two children.” She choked on the last two words. Tears she had long since given up trying to control streamed down her cheeks.

“Hey.” Steve grabbed her arm, halting her. He stepped in front of her, his big hands anchoring her where they curled around her upper arms. He felt so…solid. “Something happened to your children?”

“There was a fire. I rode the train into work every day, and delays were normal, expected. My husband was in Seattle. Marguerite was home with the kids. Michael was four, and Tessa was two. She’d put them to bed upstairs then put in some laundry. She must have fallen asleep in her room. The fire inspector said she died of smoke inhalation. She never knew there was a fire.”

Steve pulled her against him. His strong arms cocooned her tight against his muscled chest while she cried out the anguish she’d held in for so long.

His heart broke for the woman in his arms. He’d seen plenty of tragedy in his years with the department, but nothing like what she had been through. No wonder she’d been so pissed at him for leaving Meggie alone the other day. The fact that he did it in order to put out a fire must have made it all that much worse for Shannon, given what he knew about her now.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, resting his cheek on the top of her head. He rubbed circles on her back while her tears soaked his shirt.

He didn’t know how long they stood there, but it didn’t matter. He hated the reason he had her in his arms, but he couldn’t get past how right it felt to hold her. The more he knew about her, the more certain he was that he’d misjudged her. She wasn’t the flighty, hippy transient he had first thought. He could only imagine the kind of grief that had set her on her present path. If he’d been through something like she had described, he wasn’t at all certain he would have survived.

“Tell me what happened.” He loosened his hold but kept her close. Her eyes and nose were red and swollen, her lips puffy. His heart ached to take the pain away from her.

“I got a cab from the train station. All I remember are the lights. Lots and lots of red and blue lights flashing. More than I’d ever seen in one place. The driver let me out a few blocks from my house, and I walked the rest of the way. As I got closer, I could see the flames through the smoke.” She shuddered in his arms. “There was so much smoke. I tripped on a fire hose and someone helped me up. That’s when one of my neighbors saw me. I could tell by her expression that something was terribly wrong, but it still hadn’t registered that it was my house. She grabbed me in a big hug.”

“Thank goodness you’re all right.” Rosemary backed up, her gaze darting around. “The kids are with you, aren’t they?”

“No. Marguerite is at the house.”

She didn’t know Rosemary well. She and Mike had been too busy building their careers to get to know anyone in the neighborhood, but she did know the woman holding her hands had children about the same age as Michael and Tessa. Still, the expression on the woman’s face needed no interpretation.

“No. No. No!” Shannon shook her head. Tearing her gaze away from her neighbor, she looked in horror at the fire blazing down the block. She counted houses until she got to where their slate-gray Cape Cod should be.

“As I said, I don’t remember much. The inspector told us the fire started in the laundry room—a clogged dryer vent or something. It spread fast. The kids’ bedrooms were right above the utility room.”

He brought her close again, her next words muffled by his shirt. “They never had a chance.”

Jesus.
He didn’t know what to say. There were no words to make something like that right, so he did the only thing he could. He held her.

After a while, he steered her toward an outcropping of rocks that shielded them from the wind. With his back to a boulder, he made a cradle for her with his legs. When she sat, he wrapped his arms around her once again. He wasn’t sure she needed the connection, but he did. He wanted to be there for her.

The need to comfort was new to him. Yeah, Meggie had her moments when she needed a hug, but for the most part, he didn’t do the touchy feely thing. However, the last thing he wanted to do was let go of Shannon.

CHAPTER EIGHT

More people were arriving to take advantage of the warm day and calm surf. Families with children, teenagers with body boards and footballs, and the occasional sun worshiper began to dot the landscape. Steve was content to remain right there for as long as Shannon wanted to stay. Meggie was probably having the time of her life, being spoiled rotten by his mother and aunt. He had all the time in the world.

“I went back to work the next week. Mike, my husband, went to the local bar. I don’t know which one of us handled it worse. He tried to find absolution in a bottle, and I…I don’t know what I was doing. I’d lost everything, and there I was, going through the motions as if getting another promotion would make a difference.”

“But you quit?”

She nodded. “I did. It took me about six months to realize I’d lost all interest in my job. If I’d been at home where I belonged instead of trying to impress people I’d never met into giving me a promotion…. But I wasn’t at home. I blamed myself. I blamed Mike for not being handyman enough to know the dryer vent needed to be cleaned out. I blamed poor Marguerite, who had never done anything but love my children like they were her own.”

“Understandable.”

“Perhaps, but unproductive. We had a few things in a storage locker—mostly stuff I’d inherited from my grandmother. Antiques and things. I’d lost everything but the clothes on my back, so I went there one day to see if I could use some of the furniture for my new apartment. By then, Mike had filed for divorce. The loom you saw in my tent and another, bigger, one were in the locker. I spent the next six months learning to use them.”

She sighed. “They saved me. Once I came up from the pit I’d been in, I looked around. The only thing in my apartment was a mattress, no frame, and the looms. I’d lost all my friends, what few I had, and my family could hardly look at me. I had to get out of there, so I bought the motor coach and started traveling. I stopped at the Renaissance faire one day and met Nadya—the fortune-teller whose booth you tried to save. The next thing I knew, I had my own booth, and I was making a living, sort of, selling garments made from the cloth I weave.”

“You could sell your cloth from anywhere, so why travel?”

“If I stop in one place for too long, the memories come back. Then I remember all the reasons I can’t go back to my old life.”

“Who says you have to go back to your old life? What’s wrong with starting a new one?” He knew the minute the words left his mouth that he’d said the wrong thing. Her body stiffened in his embrace.

“I had my chance, and I blew it. I won’t do that again to anyone, let alone to myself.” She tried to get up, but he held her tight.

“No, don’t go. I wasn’t suggesting you try to replace what you had. God knows, if I lost Megan, nothing would make up for the loss.” He took a deep breath. “What I’m trying to say is you’re a young woman. And if there’s one thing I’m certain of, children want their parents to be happy. You didn’t do anything wrong, Shannon. You provided your children with the best home you could. You worked hard to provide them with the things they needed, and I’m sure they loved you and your husband.”

He hated the words forming in his head, but he had to say them, no matter how much they were going to hurt her. “I’ve seen a lot of house fires, and I can tell you this—you probably couldn’t have done anything if you’d been there. Everyone thinks they can, but they can’t. Even wearing full turnout gear, it’s almost impossible to save people trapped inside a burning house.”

“I would have heard the smoke alarms. I could have saved them.” Her body heaved with the force of her tears.

“I know you want to think you could have, but chances are you would have died, too.”

“I wanted to die. God knows I wish I had.” She pushed out of his arms, and this time, he let her go. She stood, wiping her tear-streaked face on her sleeve. “You see why I can’t do this.” Her finger waggled between the two of them. “It’s not just losing my family. It’s what you do, too. I can’t be with a man who runs into burning buildings for a living. The fear, the constant worry, would be more than I could take.”

Steve got to his feet. Never once had he wished to be something other than a fireman. He’d wanted to be one since he was nine years old, and the guys from the local firehouse had come out to rescue his sister’s kitten from the big oak tree in their front yard. The men had been in full turnout gear, having just left a fire when they’d gotten the call. Their gear had been covered in soot and smelled of smoke. He’d been in awe of their quiet efficiency and the way they treated a stranded alley cat situation as if lives were at stake.

“You’re mad at the firemen, too, because they couldn’t save your family.” He got it. He really did, but placing blame where it didn’t belong didn’t sit right with him.

“Maybe. If they’d gotten there sooner…or made an effort to go in…. But they didn’t. They knew there might be people in the house, and they didn’t go in!”

He knew someone had explained it to her back when the incident happened, but clearly, she still hadn’t processed the information. “If they didn’t go in, then it had to be too late, Shannon. I wasn’t there, but I can tell you if I had been, and there had been
any
chance whatsoever of getting people out of the structure, alive or otherwise, I would have gone in. Every firefighter I know would have.”

Her grief had turned to anger. She placed her fists on her hips and glared up at him from beneath the wide brim of her hat. “I don’t believe you. Besides, you left your own daughter alone in the middle of a traveling faire so you could play macho firefighter. What kind of father does that?”

She was talking in circles, and all of it was nonsense. She had no idea what she was saying, but he got the gist of it. Grief and guilt had stolen her life just as surely as the fire had stolen her family. She couldn’t change the past, but she could change the future—if she wanted.

“You aren’t making any sense.” He held out his hands to her, willing her to step back into his arms. She took a step back instead. “Listen to yourself. You’re making excuses for not living and blaming yourself for breathing at the same time. You hate firemen, but you sure didn’t hate me last night. What happened to your family wasn’t your fault, or mine, or your husband’s. It just happened. And, yeah, that sucks. It’s unfair, and it’s cruel, and it’s downright shitty, but you can’t change it. Hating yourself, or me, or the world won’t erase history.”

A woman with a couple of kids in tow walked by. When she gave him a look then hurried away, he realized his voice had been steadily rising.

Chastising himself for being an idiot, he lowered his voice. “Punishing yourself for being alive won’t bring your children back.”

He stood there, waiting for her to slap him, or at the very least, throw sand in his face, but she did neither. She looked at him for the span of two heartbeats then turned and walked away. He watched her until she was nothing more than a speck on the horizon before returning to his truck.

Should he go hunt her up? She was a grown woman. She had her bag with her, so she had resources. If he did find her, would she let him give her a ride home?

Shit.

You fucked that up, mister.

All the way home, he cursed himself for losing his temper with her. He was a fireman, for God’s sake, not a counselor. What right did he have to tell her how to grieve or how to live her life? He tried to imagine what he would feel like if he lost Megan and couldn’t. All he knew was it would destroy him.

Just like losing her children destroyed Shannon.

But she’d come back from the tragedy, coping with it, and, in her own way, making a life for herself. It wasn’t the kind of life he wanted or could understand, but it had been working for her until he came along and…what?

Reminded her of a life she once had?

You’re an asshole, Steve. A grade-A asshole.

He swung the truck around and went back to the beach. After driving along the road several times looking for her, he finally gave up and headed toward the fairgrounds. She’d probably called someone to come get her or hopped the old-fashioned trolley-style busses that shuttled tourists around town during the summer months.