Authors: Jennifer Bernard
He’d encountered dumber reasons for starting fires. People got stupid about fire.
If Doug was setting the fires, Ryan would have to beat some sense into him. That part, he looked forward to. Doug rubbed him the wrong way, always hanging around the bar with that annoying mopey look, as if the world owed him something. As if Katie owed him something.
When Doug showed up at the bar, Katie changed. She got quieter, and no matter how much Ryan teased her, her usual snappy spirit didn’t return until Doug left. Then she’d get back in the swing of things, answering his jabs with zingers of her own.
Working with Katie was even more fun than a game of beach volleyball. With girls in bikinis. And a cooler of Corona waiting at the sidelines.
His eyes drifted shut as he floated into a lovely dream in which Katie dove for the sand and landed in his lap, where she snuggled and tried to tickle him. Every time she touched his ribs, she made a tapping sound. Or maybe it was a glugging sound.
Tap-tap-glug-glug.
Suddenly he came wide awake. Someone knelt by the back door. He couldn’t make out details, all he saw was a black shape. The sharp, chemical scent of lighter fluid filled his nostrils. The
glug-glug
sound came from a bottle being emptied along the base of the wall.
Sheer insanity. What did this guy intend to do? Step back and toss a match? Then again, with this level of cluelessness, who knew what he’d try to do. Or when. Any minute now the idiot arsonist would light a match and get a face full of flames.
Even if the jerk deserved it, Ryan couldn’t let it happen.
He scrambled to his feet, untangling himself from the blanket that had apparently been doubling as Katie in his dream. He launched himself at the black shape crouching outside the door. He heard an alarmed squeak as he hit the body and rolled with it over and over, pulling them both away from the trail of lighter fluid. In the back of his mind, he realized the body belonged to a small person, not a tall one like Doug.
“Are you insane? Are you trying to kill yourself? There’s a lot better ways than that,” he growled as they kept rolling.
When they stopped a safe distance from the bar, Ryan had the fire starter squashed under him like a bug. That’s when he noticed that the person was really quite small. Was it a boy playing a prank? Did Doug have a younger brother he’d roped into this crime?
“Who are you?”
Another squeak made him realize he was probably cutting off the kid’s air supply. He eased off a few inches.
The boy spoke in a strangled voice that didn’t sound like a boy’s at all. “You’re smothering me, you big jerk! Get off me!”
Only one person talked to him like that.
R
yan rolled Katie over so he could see her face. The dim light from the corner streetlight revealed an indignant scowl. What right did she have to be angry?
“Would you stop crushing me?”
Oh. Right. He sat back, releasing her shoulders but keeping her legs in lockdown.
“What the hell were you doing, Katie?”
She stuck out her chin. “I forgot something in the bar. So I came back to get it.”
He had to admire her bravado.
“Well, that explains everything. Especially the lighter fluid.”
She blinked, looking disconcerted. “How’d you . . . Hey.” She sat up and tried to free her legs. Nothing doing. He wasn’t letting her go until he got some answers. “What are you doing here so late at night?”
“Security guard duty. Don’t worry, I’ll only charge you half my going rate. No overtime.”
“Half . . . charge . . .” she spluttered. With a sudden twist of her tiny body, she managed to slide one leg out from under him. A foot, wearing a black Converse, planted itself in the center of his chest. “Let me go.”
“Okay.” He lifted his weight off her other leg. She sprang to her feet. At which point he picked her up by the back of her black sweatshirt and began hauling her toward the Hair of the Dog.
She kicked and squirmed the whole way. But Ryan didn’t care how many bruises he got. He’d given up a perfectly good night’s sleep, hung out next to a Dumpster, and he hadn’t even gotten to beat up Doug. Explanations were required.
K
atie didn’t know why she bothered to struggle. Ryan was much stronger than she was, plus he had right on his side. But she didn’t like feeling like a naughty child being hauled into the principal’s office, so she fought him. When they reached the back door, Ryan finally let her feet touch the ground. He kicked dirt over the trail of lighter fluid.
“Help me,” he ordered her.
Gritting her teeth, she followed his lead. Neither of them spoke until they were done.
“Key,” he said, putting out his hand.
“Ryan, what is the point of this? You caught me. You can go home now. Let’s all go to bed and forget about this.”
Unfortunate phrasing. The darkness of the night, the presence of Ryan next to her, and the word “bed” combined to send a shiver up her spine.
“We can go to bed, but we’re not going to forget about this. Key, please. Unless you want me to kick the door in.”
Not another repair bill. She dug in her pocket and came up with her key ring, which she childishly slammed into the palm of his hand.
“Ow,” he said, very deliberately. “You really don’t want to make me lose my temper here. I guarantee, it ain’t a pretty sight.”
“Fine. I apologize. Let’s go inside, shall we, kind sir?”
She knew she was being ridiculous, but she couldn’t seem to stop. A toxic mixture of relief and mortification made her want to pummel someone.
He opened the door and pulled her through into the kitchen. He threw the switch, flooding the kitchen with bright light that made them both blink.
“You know how in the movies they interrogate suspects with those floodlights in their faces?” Katie nodded warily. “Pretend we’re in one of those.”
“Okay.” She squared off with him, legs apart, hands on fists. “What the hell are you doing skulking outside my bar without my permission after midnight?”
He laughed, but it wasn’t his usual playful, teasing chuckle. It sounded more like the unamused bark of an army colonel.
“Cute. But get it straight, missy. I’m the cop in this movie. You’re the suspect who’s one joke away from getting reported to the police.”
Katie paled. Would he do that? One look at his set, serious face told her he would. She’d never seen Ryan like this before.
“I don’t want to call them in, but I will. When it comes to fire, I don’t mess around. Are you the one who’s been setting all the fires around here?”
Katie considered her options. Pretty simple, they came down to the truth or a lie. Or something in between. “Yes. I’ve been setting the fires.”
“You’re lying,” he said instantly. “We were both here for that first one. Don’t bother to lie. You’re not good at it, Katie. Your neck is turning pink”—touching the side of her neck—“and you can’t meet my eyes.”
She tried to prove him wrong, but damn it, he was right. Her eyes kept sliding away from his and settling on the scorch marks on the yellowed plaster wall.
“I’m going to need the truth, here, Katie.”
“Fine.” Truthfully, getting caught was a relief. “This is the first fire I’ve tried to set. Doug did the others. But you kept putting them out. So I told him I’d take over. Is that it?”
She turned toward the back door. She really wanted a bath to get the smell of lighter fluid off her body. Disgusting stuff.
His strong hand clamped onto her shoulder and spun her around. A kind of savage glee shone in his eyes. “I knew it was Doug! Damn, I wish I’d caught him in the act instead of you.”
“Why?”
“I’ve been wanting to kick his ass for a while.”
“Don’t you dare. He’s very . . . um . . .”
“Whiny?”
“Fragile.”
“
Fragile?
”
She had to laugh at the look on his face, as if he’d never heard that word applied to a man before.
“Don’t distract me. Why are you and Doug trying to burn down the Hair of the Dog?”
His blue eyes, which didn’t look summery anymore, but implacable as stone, drilled into hers. She hated how disapproving he looked. As if she’d suddenly forfeited every bit of good opinion he had about her.
“I have to,” she said fiercely. “I can’t pay the bills, the business is going under, and no one cares. Not even my dad. My father took out an insurance policy that says we get a million dollars if the place burns down.”
“A million
dollars
?” He drew back in shock.
“Can you believe it? The Hair of the Dog is worth far more as a pile of ashes. So I decided that was the only thing that made sense.”
“Made sense? So far I’m not hearing anything that makes sense. You’re supposed to be afraid of fire. Does Smokey the Bear mean nothing to you?”
“It was scary at first. That time in the kitchen . . .” She shuddered. “After that, Doug promised to make sure no one was here. Except you kept showing up and putting out the fires. Why do you keep doing that?” Her voice rose. “You’re messing everything up!”
“You know the phrase ‘playing with fire,’ right?” Ryan’s eyes were now steel-blue.
“I’m not playing—”
“Fire is a dangerous motherfucker. You don’t mess with fire.” He punctuated each word with a poke at her chest.
“I wasn’t messing—”
“That lighter fluid could have blown up in your face if it caught a spark from a cigarette butt. You know people go back there to smoke. If there’s a leak in the gas line, the building could have exploded. You could easily be dead right now. Along with any homeless people who might be sacked out in the front doorway. And what about someone who happened to be walking their dog at that moment? Or teenagers making out in a car out front? What about them? What about the neighborhood? Does Milt and Myrna’s deserve to burn down because you can’t pay your bills?”
Katie flinched away from him. “That wouldn’t happen. The fire station’s really close. I was going to call 911 right away.”
“Not if you’re dead, you can’t. And even if you did make the call, what if they’re already working a fire somewhere else? They only have one engine and one truck. If they’re both on the other side of town, it could take up to seven minutes to get a crew here from Camino Ranch. And those guys, believe me, you don’t want them at your fire.”
He snapped his mouth shut. She gaped at him in utter astonishment.
“How do you know all that stuff?”
“That’s not the point.”
“Oh my God. Are you a”—she dropped her voice in horror—“
fireman
?”
He snatched his hands off her shoulders, a deeply uneasy look darkening his handsome face. “I’m a bartender now.”
“What about before you started here? Come on, I told you the truth.”
“All right. I
was
a fireman.”
She let out a spurt of giggles, then couldn’t make it stop. They kept spewing out, giggle after hysterical giggle. “This could only happen at the Hair of the Dog. Try to burn the place down and it turns out the bartender has a secret identity as some super-dedicated fireman. I swear, this place has like nine hundred lives. My luck is incredible.”
“Yes, it is.” He speared her with more blue-eyed fire. “Take it from a firefighter, burning down your bar is the worst possible idea. You should thank your guardian fairy angel godmother I happened to walk in here that day.”
She gnawed at her lip. Easy for him to say, when he didn’t have ten million bills to pay and a father to save from another heart attack. She let out a long breath and looked around the dingy, slightly charred kitchen. So the Hair of the Dog would live another day. “You want a drink?”
“Hell, yeah.”
T
hey sat together at the bar, with one candlelit red globe lantern between them. Katie opened a bottle of Glenfiddich and poured each of them a small glass.
“So when did you stop being a fireman?”
He sipped the scorching, golden liquid, which inspired images of rolling green hills and the Loch Ness monster. The scent of aged liquor blended with leftover eau de lighter fluid. “A year and a half ago. I took a leave of absence. Well, Brody told me to take it. And he was right to.”
“Why? I bet you were pretty good.”
“I was a wunderkind.”
She looked at him with wide eyes.
“You surprised I know that word?”
One straight eyebrow lifted. “Why would I be surprised?”
“People don’t usually give me credit for much of a vocabulary.”
“I’m just surprised to hear it applied to fighting fires. You were some kind of precocious boy genius?”
“Yeah. I became a firefighter at the age of nineteen. Youngest ever in our department. I’m what they call a natural.” He let out a deep breath. Confessing his true nature took a load off his mind—a load he hadn’t even known he carried. He liked telling Katie who he really was. And hopefully impressing her.
“So then why’d you leave?” She examined him over the edge of her glass. Her eyes gleamed in the candlelight. He noticed a smudge of dirt on her jaw, which made him remember the feel of her small body fighting him like a wildcat.
He took a slug of the Scotch. “I made a stupid mistake. I used to be a jump-in-with-both-feet, figure-out-if-it-was-a-good-idea-later kind of guy. Turned out it wasn’t a good idea.”
“Where was that?”
“Here. San Gabriel. I’ve been a San Gabriel firefighter since the beginning.” He couldn’t keep the pride out of his voice.
“Seems like I would have seen you around. The firehouse is right nearby. Oh my God!”
He braced himself for the inevitable.
“You’re one of the Bachelor Firemen! The ones they did all the stories about. I remember the camera crews coming and all the girls.”
“We’re not all bachelors. Captain Brody got married. Double D was married all along. And girls always like firemen. We’re heroes.” He winked at her, hoping to divert the conversation. “Especially when we put out fires all by ourselves, with our bare hands and no gear.”
“Right. My hero.” But the upturned corner of her lip counteracted her sarcasm.
“You know what they say. Firefighting—one of the few professions left that still makes house calls. Or bar calls, in your case.” He tipped his glass at her and took a long swallow.
She laughed, her face glowing in a way that made him twice as tingly as the Scotch. “Okay, so you took a leave of absence a year and a half ago, now you’re back, and you only wanted a job here for a few weeks, so that means . . . you’re going back to being a fireman?”
“Trying to. Have to jump through some hoops first. Captain Brody’s a tough bastard.”
“Should be no trouble for a wunderkind.”
“Yeah.”
Maybe it was the Scotch, and the rolling green hills, but it felt so good to sit here and talk to Katie about his life. She listened to him with her whole self, in that Katie way of hers, her black-clad body turned toward him, her eyes fastened on his face. He finished his Scotch and poured himself another finger.
“I don’t get it,” he mused.
“Get what?”
“You’ve got all this energy, all those brains packed into that adorable head of yours. Why do a bonehead thing like commit arson? Insurance companies have experts who know about things like lighter fluid.”
Her face turned as red as the lantern and she shoved her hands in the pockets of her hoodie. “But unless they figure out I did it, we’d still be covered. At least, the way I read the policy.”
“Those policies always have loopholes. And a million dollars is a lot of motivation to find one.”
She worried at her bottom lip with her teeth, the way he’d seen her do in moments of stress. He put his hand to her mouth. She froze.
“Why do you want to chew those lips up, pretty as they are?”
She frowned. “Pretty?” He felt the soft movement of her mouth against his hand.
“Yes.” He took his hand away so he could trace the line of her upper lip with his finger. “I like this curve right here, like a ski slope. I like how the bottom lip swells out. Like a cherry. Your lips are very, very pretty. Even when you’re frowning at me.” He let his hand drop.
She put her hand to her forehead as if to wipe away the frown. “You should see my sister.”
“I’ve seen your sister. What about her?”
“Bridget came here?”
“Sure. Said she had to make sure you hadn’t hired a psycho killer.”
The frown came back, two little lines between her eyebrows. “And?”
“She was with another girl and they kept talking about a wedding.”
“She’s Meredith’s maid of honor. It’s basically the only thing she talks about anymore.”
“They were discussing the bachelorette party, I believe.” He felt quite proud of himself that he remembered so much detail. But Katie didn’t seem satisfied.
“So what did you think? She’s gorgeous, isn’t she?”