Burn (The Firefighters of Darling Bay Book 2)

by Rachael Herron

  And he knew for one moment—for those sixty seconds—what it would feel like to know his own daughter would never breathe again.

  They’d dropped the mother off at the hospital. They’d checked in with the rescue squad who were as shaken as the engine crew. They went to the grocery store and bought the steaks they’d forgotten to get in the morning shopping trip because that’s what firefighters did. They just kept moving and doing what had to be done. If someone died on you in the morning, it didn’t mean you automatically got to save the dead guy in the afternoon.

  When they’d gotten back to the station, he hadn’t told anyone what had happened to him. The way he’d seen his daughter instead of the patient—that was the kind of crap that got you kicked off the line if you weren’t careful.

  But Lexie had known in her usual Lexie way, and that night, when he’d gone down to take her a leftover brownie from a pan a citizen had dropped off, she’d said, “What happened?”

  He had shrugged. “She died. It happens.”

  “No,” she had said. “What happened to you?”

  He’d told her, and if he was perfectly honest with himself, he could admit that he’d cried that night. She’d pretended not to notice, but she’d shoved the Kleenex box closer to him and had made a pot of coffee so he could collect himself. Then she’d told him to call Serena before he went to bed, something he didn’t always do, and hadn’t even thought about doing that night. It was such an obvious answer. It had just taken Lexie listening to him to get the answer he needed.

  Now, as they drove toward the water, he said, “Sorry. I’m being awkward, huh?”

  “Yeah,” she said, keeping her gaze out her window. “But that’s okay. I’m used to you being awkward.”

  He laughed. I love you, he wanted to say. He couldn’t say it. But damn if he didn’t want to.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The cemetery. He’d taken her to the cemetery.

  Lexie couldn’t decide whether to be happy or to punch him in the arm. She settled on just saying, “I had no idea you were a vampire.”

  He reached into the bed of the truck and pulled out a black backpack. “Vampires don’t hang out at cemeteries. Only ghouls do. And goths. I suppose they do, too.”

  Feeling for a moment as if she should dig in her heels, Lexie said, “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

  Cheerfully, Coin said, “Nope.”

  “You’re not?”

  “Not even a little bit. But I’m hoping it’s a good idea. I’m hoping it’s a great one, actually.” He turned to face her, and Lexie realized that even with the early fall evening around them, he filled her vision in a way she’d never noticed before. He seemed taller than the clear blue sky above them. A vineyard skated the edge of the cemetery and the yellow leaves of the grape vines echoed the color of the sycamore leaves. Far in the distance, over the rooftops of Darling Bay, the ocean sparkled blue and deep green.

  And she couldn’t take her eyes off Coin.

  He smiled at her. “You can do this,” said Coin. “Besides, I have something I want to show you.”

  “Don’t take me there,” said Lexie. She couldn’t go to her father’s grave. She hadn’t been back since they’d buried him, not once.

  “I won’t. Not unless you want me to. I have something else to show you.”

  “This is officially the worst date I’ve ever been on in my life.”

  He smiled. “Just wait! It gets worse!”

  Lexie reached forward and took the hand he offered. There was no way she was going to walk down those paths alone.

  Night dropped slowly as they walked, turning the air a soft blue. The cemetery was enormous—something Lexie had forgotten. It was beautiful, she could admit that, especially in the golden fall sunset. Low rolling green hills were dotted with markers that went as far back as the early 1800s, something that wasn’t common on a stretch of land so far west. The settlers who were buried here were the ones who’d fought their way to the coast, battling their way across mountains and deserts with a desire to see the Pacific and make a new home.

  To the right, where Coin was leading them, were the crypts that resembled small, ornate houses made of marble. Some were from the turn of the last century, but Lexie could tell some were newer. Cleaner. People were still building homes for the afterlife, something that struck Lexie as both morbidly strange and eerily hopeful.

  “Over here.” Coin said. He gave her hand a squeeze, and for one moment Lexie imagined pulling on his hand, making him turn to hold her. She wanted Coins arms wrapped around her shoulders. If she could just bury her face in his jacket for a moment, maybe she wouldn’t be feeling so lightheaded … What if they accidentally walked past her father’s grave? That day had been such a blur—she couldn’t remember where on the grounds his stone was. What if she just glanced down and read the words Robert Tindall? She felt her hand go clammy in Coin’s. Her stomach muscles contracted, and her footsteps slowed.

  “Hey, now.” Coin stopped. “You okay?” He looked carefully at her face. “We can go back if you want.” He touched her shoulder.

  Lexie gritted her teeth, sucking air around them. Then she said, “Is this going to be worth it?”

  Coin touched her chin. “I’m taking you to see where my dad is, not yours.”

  His father? That was enough to shock her out of worrying about herself. He hated his father. It was the one thing Lexie had never been able to get him to tell her much about. “Why?”

  “I just want you to see what he was like.”

  It was a good enough answer, for now at least. Lexie straightened her spine. “I’ll follow you.”

  He hiked the backpack up his shoulder and nodded toward the green hillock on their right. “Almost there.”

  The crypt Coin led them to was one of the biggest crypts in the cemetery. It was in the shape of a pyramid, at least twenty feet high at its uppermost point. A path to the sealed door cut through the grass, and Coin went up the two steps to sit on the stoop in front of it. “I call this his front porch.”

  Lexie shaded her eyes against the last rays of the setting sun. To the west, the ocean sparkled a dark blue agate and a thin line of fog at the horizon stood at the ready. Overhead, two seagulls argued in an in-flight squabble.

  She sat next to him. “The concrete is cold.” It was, bone-chillingly so. Or was that just because she knew what was behind her? Her stomach was still so tight it almost hurt.

  “I’m sorry, I meant to bring a blanket, but I forgot to put one in the truck.”

  “You usually bring a blanket on your dates? Is this something you do? Seduce women in the graveyard?” She kept her voice light.

  He brushed his hair back as he opened the backpack. “This is a first.”

  Strangely, Lexie felt relieved. She was the only one he’d brought here. That was okay, then.

  From the backpack, Coin pulled a bottle of red wine. “It’s Forget Me Not’s red zin from two years ago.”

  “Oh! Valentine’s winery.” Truck One’s tillerman owned a small vineyard just up the coast that was his off-hours baby. “I liked that one. He gave me a bottle for Christmas.”

  Coin took out two plastic wine glasses and screwed on the stems. “Classy, right?”

  “Mmm.” Lexie looked again at the view. From here she thought she could just see the top of her house, if she was guessing the right color roof. For some reason, she couldn’t picture her roof at all right now. She could picture Coin’s dark eyes without looking his direction at all. But the color of the roof she’d lived under since she bought her house five years ago? She didn’t have a clue.

  “Here,” he said. “Let’s toast.”

  Lexie bit her bottom lip. “All right. On your father’s grave, literally. What should we toast to?”

  “Obviously, to health.”

  Lexie nodded. “L’chaim.” She clinked her glass against his—really more like a plastic tap—and sipped. She kept her eyes on his, as one should do when toastin
g, and ignored the fact that her stomach went from knots to flips.

  He really did have the sexiest bedroom eyes.

  Which was an inappropriate line of thought to have while sitting on a tomb.

  While Coin took food out of the backpack, she scooted backward so she could sit cross-legged. She touched the concrete at her knee with one finger. She cast her mind for something—anything—that she could say that might distract them from the awareness of where they were, but Coin didn’t seem at all weirded out. He seemed relaxed, as if he hung out here all the time. And, heck, maybe he did.

  “When was the last time you were here?”

  Coin looked into the air as if calculating. “He died when I was twenty. I came back once with my mom before she died. So I guess it’s been thirteen years or more.”

  She gaped. “You don’t come here, either?”

  “No reason to. I hated the guy.”

  It didn’t make sense. If they both avoided the cemetery … “Why are we here?”

  “He was important to me.”

  “I thought you said …”

  “I said I hated him. That’s true. But he’s the reason I am who I am, and specifically, he’s why I’m the father I am.” Coin tore a piece of bread off the baguette and looked at it, as if he’d forgotten why he’d brought it.

  Maybe this time he would tell her about it. “Talk to me.”

  Coin took a deep breath. “He was a horrible guy. Really, there was nothing good about him. Check this out,” he said, gesturing at the crypt, his arms wide open. “Doesn’t this look like somewhere you’d like to spend eternity?”

  “Maybe,” said Lexie, trying to be charitable. “If I were Egyptian, or wanted … to stand out in California.”

  He snapped his fingers and then tapped the tip of his nose. “Bingo. He wanted to stand out. He always wanted the biggest. The best. He’d read about some actor who had a tomb built like this, something about it holding the life force inside, so he had this built when he could afford it. Of course, then he went and crashed his car, having left no life insurance for my mother. He had, however, bought half of this before he died, so they buried him, and then my mother went on paying for it for two years after he died. Charming, no?”

  “Where is she?”

  Coin laughed, but the tone of it was off. He wasn’t amused. “He didn’t want her near him. She had to buy her own plot, so she chose a spot next to her mother’s grave in Birmingham. But just imagine that. A man who didn’t want his own wife with him. Too stingy to make a place for her inside this behemoth. Wanted it all to himself.”

  “You’re the opposite of him.”

  Coin took a taste of wine and then help up the plastic cup. “I hope so. Anyway, that reminds me.” He took a smaller bottle out of the backpack. “Whiskey for the old man.” He uncapped it and poured it at the base. “One for the homie. Oh, never mind, just have all of it, Dad. You always did.” He paused. “You know, one time I made a list, thinking that if I listed all his bad qualities I might be able to remember a good one. I just wanted one. Know what I came up with?”

  Lexie shook her head.

  “He liked bacon. That was his best quality. Not that he cooked it well, or liked to make BLTs for the family. That would have been a good thing, and I couldn’t find one of those. I just know that he liked bacon. To eat.”

  It clicked. “That’s why you hate bacon.”

  “Yep.”

  “I just thought you were a bad person.”

  At that, Coin gave an unexpected hoot of laughter. “No. That’s not why. Though by the way everyone talks about it, you’d think that was the case. It’s just salted pork, people. Why is it such a big deal? I even hate the smell of it.”

  “I know.” It was why, when they were on Sunday shift, Coin usually spent the morning in dispatch if there wasn’t a call.

  Well. She’d thought it was because of the bacon …

  Shaking her head to clear it, she said, “So now tell me how he was bad.”

  “Oh, you know. The usual way. He wasn’t even an interesting kind of awful. He was a hitter. And a drinker. He liked to get loaded on cheap whiskey and knock my mom around.”

  Lexie winced.

  “When I got tall enough to be in his way, he knocked me around the same way. I thought he was normal, though. I thought that dads hit and moms cried, and that was why I was never going to fall in love and have children, because I never wanted anyone to feel as scared as I did, listening to him whale on my mother.”

  “Oh, Coin.”

  He shrugged. “It was what I knew. Then I met Janice, and we got pregnant on accident. I thought my life was over, and I could just see myself going down that road. I think that’s what pushed me and Janice apart—my fear that I would turn into him.”

  “That or the fact that she slept with the mailman.”

  He laughed again. “I still can’t believe that. That she actually left me for Tom the mailman. But at least that was after we had Serena. When I saw my baby girl for the first time, I knew. I just knew I wouldn’t be my father.”

  Lexie scooted an inch closer so that their knees were almost touching. More scarlet rays streaked across the darkening sky behind him. “How did you know?”

  “Because I knew that no matter what, when my mother gave birth to me, he would never have held me the same way I held my baby daughter.”

  “How did you know? Did your mother tell you that?”

  “I could feel it. If I’d ever been held by my dad like that, things would have been different. He wasn’t supposed to be a father. I’m glad he was, naturally, because that means I’m here, drinking wine next to his old dead bones with the prettiest girl in the state. And I was. Meant to be a father, I mean. I knew that as soon as I got my arms around her.”

  Lexie set down her wine. She took his wine glass away and set it down.

  “Hey, what—?”

  “Hush,” she said. “Just for a minute. I want to try something.”

  Then Lexie leaned forward and put her lips against his.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Lexie told herself was really only a test to see if he still tasted as good as he had in his kitchen. It was a test to see if they would feel the same heat.

  It wasn’t the same. It was even hotter.

  Coin initially seemed surprised, but it took him only a second to rev it up to super-heated, like she’d poured lighter fluid on a banked fire. He was with her, in the kiss, driving it. Twisting his body but not taking his mouth from hers, he pulled her into his lap so she lay across him. He smiled against her mouth and then nipped her bottom lip, eliciting a small gasp.

  Lexie pulled back, suddenly worried. “Am I hurting you?”

  “You? You’re perfect. Right where you are.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Your body is perfect, Lex.” He kissed her again, and for the first time in her adult life, Lexie didn’t worry about her weight during a kiss. She didn’t wonder if he could detect a roll at the top of her jeans, and she didn’t worry whether her thighs were too wide. He’d pulled her into his lap like she didn’t weigh an ounce, and she could feel the strength in his arms as they wrapped around her.

  His mouth was hot, his tongue slick. She panted against him, and he gasped as she deepened the kiss. When she moved against him, she could feel his hardness, and a fevered thrill shot through her.

  Lexie wanted more.

  “Coin,” she said against his mouth.

  “Mmm?” He licked her top lip, sending another shiver down her spine.

  “We’re making out on your father’s grave.”

  “Screw him.”

  “That’s gross. And he’s not the Keefe I want.”

  Coin pulled back. “I swear this wasn’t the plan. We were just going to have a picnic, with wine and cheese and those double-stuffed Oreos you love.”

  “I started this,” she said, trailing her fingers across his jawline, down his neck, tucking them under the neckline of his
shirt. She wanted to touch more of him. All of him. “I want more.”

  Coin’s dark eyes sparkled, even in the dark that was settling around them. “More of what?”

  “More of you. More kisses. More skin.” Lexie touched his belt buckle. “Less clothing.”

  “Where?”

  “My house.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Lexie considered for a moment. Did she want to take this man home? To her bed? It had been so long since she had a man stay the night that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d brewed more than one cup of coffee in the morning. She didn’t do this. She didn’t take random men home with her.

  But this wasn’t just some guy she’d met.

  It was Coin. Her best friend.

  A week ago, she would have thought that would make it weirder. But it didn’t.

  It made it better.

  “I’m sure. But before we go … Can we …?”

  “You never ask for anything. Name it.” His voice was rough. He meant it, she knew. He’d do anything for her.

  “Before we go can we look for my father’s grave?”

  “You bet.”

  It turned out her father wasn’t that far from Coin’s. He was just over a small rise in what must have been a cheaper section. There were no crypts there, just modest markers, none more than two feet high.

  “Here,” said Coin.

  Robert Tindall. It was clean, and well maintained. A bouquet of flowers stood at the foot of it, and a small American flag moved slowly in the autumn breeze.

  “Oh,” said Lexie. She had expected it would hurt to see it. That it would bring her to her knees. The reason she’d never gone to visit her father’s grave was because she didn’t want to cry again—ever—like she had when he died.

  She’d never expected it would make her happy.

  “Are you okay?”