Zach watched Brooke’s expression register surprise on top of the pain already there. She’d really believed that he’d walked away. Tears or no tears, he wouldn’t have left a perfect stranger, but she’d actually expected him to abandon her. He knew that wasn’t a reflection on him, but on her own experiences. People didn’t stick in her life.
Odd how he wanted to. “Phyllis wouldn’t want you to lose it over her.”
“I told her everything would be okay. I promised her. But everything isn’t going to be okay.”
He knew that, too. Heart heavy, calling himself every kind of fool, he sank into the chair next to her and leaned his tired head back to the wall and studied the ceiling.
It didn’t matter that he wasn’t looking at her. He could still see her; she’d been imprinted on his brain. A body made for his. A mouth that fueled his fantasies. Eyes that destroyed him with every glance. “Promises are a bad idea all the way around.”
Especially the one he’d made to her. Not to fall for her. Man, that one was going to haunt him.
“I know.”
Brooke still sounded way too close to tears for his comfort. Turning his head, he found her watching him, eyes still thankfully dry. “Don’t be too hard on yourself. We all break promises.”
“Some of us do it more spectacularly than others.”
“I don’t know about that.”
She stared at him for a long moment. “Zach…I’ve not handled any of this well.”
“This.”
“The new job. Making friends at the new job.” She lowered her voice. “You.”
“What about me?”
“Sleeping with you and thinking I could just walk away. It was supposed to be letting loose, but you should know I’m having some trouble with that whole walking-away portion of the plan. I have no idea how people do the one-night thing, I really don’t.”
“There was no sleeping involved.”
“What?”
“Our night. We didn’t sleep. It’s an important clarification, because sleeping implies intimacy.”
“What we did felt pretty damn intimate,” she said.
“Temporarily intimate. There’s a difference. Now, if we’d been getting naked every night since…that would be true intimacy.” He looked at her, wanting a reaction, but hell if he knew what kind of reaction he wanted, or why he was even going there.
“You agreed readily enough,” she reminded him. “And it’s what you do, anyway. Light stuff only.”
She was watching him carefully, and sitting there in the hospital chair, surrounded by strangers, the scent of antiseptic and people’s suffering all around them, she was clearly waiting for him to deny it. And given how he kept baiting her about it, it made sense that she was confused.
But what he wanted didn’t really matter. Not when she was out of here in less than two weeks. But apparently his mouth didn’t get the message from his brain because it opened and said, “Whatever this is, clearly we’re going to drive each other nuts for the next two weeks, so we might as well take it as far as we can.”
She blinked. “You mean…”
“Yeah.”
At his hip, his pager beeped. Hell. Rising to his feet, he looked down into her still surprised face. “Think about it.”
“I…will.”
Zach’s call was to an all-too-familiar address for a house fire.
Phyllis’s.
When they pulled down her street, his stomach hit his toes. The house was lit up like a Fourth of July fireworks display. The flames were hot, fast and, as it turned out, unbeatable. Even with Sam and Eddie’s engine already there, and two others from neighboring firehouses, in less than twenty minutes they’d lost the entire structure.
Afterward, with the crew all cleaning up, Zach slipped inside the burned-out shell. He moved through the clingy, choking smoke, down the blackened hallway where Phyllis’s pictures were nothing but a memory. Inside her bedroom, he took in the soot, water and ashes.
And a wire-mesh trash can, tipped on its side.
On the wall above it, black markings flared out, indicating a flash burn. Probably aided by an accelerant.
Just like the Hill Street fire.
And the two before that.
Jaw tight, Zach stared at the evidence, pulling his cell phone out of his pocket to take a picture, which he e- mailed to both Tommy and himself. This time, whatever happened, he was going to have his own damn evidence, because no way had Phyllis had a wire-mesh trash can in here, not in the lacy, frilly, girly room.
His cell phone rang, and when he saw Brooke’s name on the I.D., he experienced a little jolt. I’ve thought about it, he imagined her saying. Do me, Zach…
“I just heard about the fire,” she said instead, sounding tight and grim. “Zach, when we were taking Phyllis out of the house, she tried to tell us that someone was standing on the edge of her property, watching us. A man with a blowtorch.”
His fantasy abruptly vanished. “What?”
“She was fighting us, trying to stall, saying whatever she could to get us to let her go back into the house. We didn’t listen to her. And now…”
“And now you just might have helped catch a serial arsonist,” he said firmly. “If you were here, I’d kiss you again.”
She let out a breath. “But what if-”
“Don’t kill yourself with the what-ifs,” he said. “I’ve been there. They don’t help.”
“Old heating element,” Tommy told him the next morning when he found Zach waiting at his office. “Shoddy, unreliable, and as we saw firsthand, dangerous. Thank God Phyllis was still in the hospital and not at home.”
Zach just shook his head. “This was no more accidental than the Hill Street fire. The trash can-”
“Zach-”
“Look, Phyllis said she saw a guy standing on the edge of her property with a blowtorch.”
Tommy sighed and retrieved two Red Bulls from a small refrigerator on his credenza. “I can’t discuss the investigation.”
Zach declined the caffeine-rich drink. “Thought you were off caffeine.”
“Sue me.” Tommy drank deep and sighed again. “Just don’t tell my wife.”
“Tommy-”
“Look, I talked to Phyllis myself this morning. She’s incoherent and in and out of consciousness. She doesn’t remember a damn thing about yesterday. Not a guy with a blowtorch, or if she had a wire-mesh trash can or not.”
“That’s the drugs talking.”
“That’s all we have. The fire was put out, Zach. It was a job well done on our part. No injuries, no fatalities.”
And that was the bottom line. Zach got that. He just didn’t happen to agree. “It was also arson.”
“Goddamn it.”
“I suppose your next line is for me to leave this one alone, too.”
“Yes,” Tommy said very quietly. “It is.”
“You got the picture I sent.”
“I got the picture.”
