The Firefighter’s Secret Baby

by Anna DeStefano

  “I have no idea who she is,” he finally said. “But…I have to know she and her baby are okay.”

  Kate nodded slowly.

  “Martin said APD alerts have gone out, trying to find hits for her ID and description.” Kate’s hulking brother taught at the police academy, which gave him a lot of contacts in the Atlanta Police Department. “I suppose it’s possible no one knows she’s missing yet.”

  “It’s also possible the ID we found in her purse is a dead end, and we’re not meant to find out where she and her baby belong.”

  “Is that why you’re calling her Sam when her license says her name is Robyn?”

  “Something like that.” Don’t tell anyone you know….

  “You don’t think this was just another accident, do you?”

  “Witnesses at the scene said someone hit a minivan, sending it skidding into her car. It sounds like the truck that caused the pileup had been dogging Sam for miles.”

  “And how, exactly, do you know this Sam? Why don’t you want me using any other name but Robyn Nobles with the staff?”

  Kate’s perfectly logical questions hung in the air, waiting for perfectly logical answers.

  “Got a dollar?” Randy asked.

  Kate fished into the pocket of her scrubs and handed a bill over. Randy headed for the hall and the dilapidated vending machine that had already denied him Yoo-hoo twice. Ignoring his friend, who walked at his side, Randy inserted the money into the machine.

  Wrrr.

  Grind.

  It spat the bill back out at him.

  “Damn it!” He pounded the side of the contraption with a clenched fist and inserted the dollar again.

  “So, your plan is to make Herbie pay, “Kate said, “because you can’t smack around anyone else?”

  “Herbie?” The bill flew back out of the slot and drifted to Randy’s feet. He growled and bent over to pick it up.

  “This old wreck picks and chooses who it wants to bestow its bounty on. It’s not mercenary. Herbie always refunds your money if he’s not feeling the love. But he’s fickle. Reacts badly to stress. And from the looks of you, I kind of feel bad for whatever soda you get your hands on. You’ll crush it to oblivion when you’re done. You can understand why Herbie would feel protective.”

  Randy stared at her. Never-ending overtime on the pediatric ward and dressing daily in cartoon scrubs had finally shredded her sanity. He wadded her dollar into a ball. Kate chuckled. He threw the money to the floor and stomped away.

  He was furious. Deadly furious—at himself, not a tyrannical drink machine. He didn’t know anything about the woman his team had extracted. Not her mind. Her fears. Her secrets. All he knew was the instinct to keep her, now that he had her back. The memory of Sam’s contented sighs in that hotel room in Savannah had been messing with his head for months. Was that really all this was—him still being hung up on a one-night stand?

  He might be a shallow sonovabitch when it came to relationships, but him losing it was about more than not being with another woman since St. Patrick’s Day. Seeing Sam again had stirred up more than a physical itch he needed to scratch. He was terrified for her and her unborn baby. It had been a lifetime since any emotion had gotten this close.

  The elevator by the soda machine dinged. Randy’s sister emerged.

  “Hey, Em,” Kate said.

  Emma stepped onto the floor, stalled beside Herbie and pulled a wrinkled bill from her purse. She fed the machine, scooped up the can that was agreeably provided, collected her change and marched down the hall toward them. Her expression was worried, but her determined stride said I’ve got this covered.

  Classic Emma.

  She’d had everything covered for as far back as Randy would let his memory go. She reached his side and held out the can.

  “You must be needing a chocolate fix something awful by now,” she said.

  Kate hugged her, then she and her pink scrubs with yellow ducks floating all over them were heading down the hall.

  “I’ll let you know when there’s an update on our patients,” she said over her shoulder.

  “Patients?” Emma asked while Randy sat in one of the lounge’s chairs and snapped open his drink. She joined him. “You said you knew a woman in the accident. That you might need Rick’s help with information about her. Was there someone else in her car?”

  Randy downed half the Yoo-hoo and let its coolness take the edge off the drive to go hand-to-hand with Herbie.

  “There’s a baby.” He tunneled his free hand through his hair. “The victim is pregnant. Very pregnant. It’s only a matter of hours pregnant. No one’s saying anything about either of their conditions yet.”

  “And?” Emma had on her lawyer’s face. The one that revealed nothing about what she was feeling, while she listened to absolutely everything that was being said.

  “And it sounds like Sam and the baby were in trouble a long time before the MVA,” he added. The kind of trouble that Emma’s APD detective husband could look into.

  “And?” Emma asked again.

  “And I owe it to her to—”

  “Owe it to her?” Emma slipped her hand into his, like she had when he was a little boy and their world had fallen apart. “Randy, this woman. How do you—”

  “We…met, on my trip down to Savannah in March.”

  Emma watched him drain the last of his drink. When he still didn’t say anything else, she headed back to the vending machine and beguiled another can out of the beast. She returned to Randy’s side, her eyes narrowing.

  Her mind had always been able to sift through facts faster than should be legal.

  “So, you met this woman the weekend you and Chris and Charlie and some of the guys headed south to blow off steam,” she said. “Only you came back more uptight than ever. You’ve been impossible to deal with since, the few times any of us have seen you off the job. All because of some hook-up you haven’t wanted to talk about. And now she’s here…and she’s very pregnant?”

  “Yeah.” Randy took the fresh Yoo-hoo. He handed over his empty can, which he didn’t remember crushing. The thing was little more than a ball of aluminum now. “That weekend…It was strange. We were both looking for something easy and fun. It shouldn’t have meant anything more. Except it did, somehow. Being with her was…different. There was a connection. At least, I thought there was. But when I woke up the next morning, Sam had bolted. I figured I’d never see her again and tried to tell myself it was a good thing.”

  “And now that you have seen her again?”

  Randy curled both hands around his drink.

  “She’s in trouble, Em. I’m sure of it. Nothing she was saying at the scene made any sense. I think she may have been in trouble when I met her in March, too. Maybe that’s what stuck with me all this time—what I couldn’t let go of.”

  “You do have a weakness for saving people.” Emma nudged his shoulder with hers, only half kidding. “My little brother, the hero.”

  Her biggest worry for him—for Randy and both his brothers—was how much of themselves they buried in their jobs. For Randy and Charlie and Chris, navigating relationships was the impossible thing—not walking into blazing infernos for a living. So far, Em had been the only one who’d been able to carve out a life with someone.

  “If Sam wanted my help,” Randy reasoned out loud, “she wouldn’t have run that morning.”

  “I don’t know about that. I almost torched what I had with Rick, before I learned how to stop shoving him away.”

  “That was different.”

  Emma had always been different.

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “I wasn’t pregnant with Rick’s baby when he gave me the space to realize I couldn’t live without him. If I’d been carrying his child, he wouldn’t have let me out of his sight, whether I wanted to be saved or not.”

  “I don’t know what this woman wants. I don’t have the first clue what’s going on.”

  It wasn’t an admission anyone who knew R
andy was used to hearing. His sister’s eyebrows disappeared beneath her honey-colored bangs. But she didn’t push. Her silence was an open invitation to trust her with more, whenever he was ready.

  And Randy did trust her. There was nothing his family wouldn’t do for him. Whatever secret Sam was keeping, even if the danger she’d been rambling about was real, Randy’s brothers and sister would be his safety net.

  “She said someone was after her,” he admitted. “That whoever it was would be back, and she and the baby were in danger. I don’t know how much of it is true, or even if the child is mine. But she was terrified. Then a federal marshal showed up on the scene….”

  Emma nodded. Her lawyer’s face was back, but she was holding Randy’s hand again.

  “And you need to know what about Sam’s situation is real,” she said. “So you’ll know where you stand once she’s stable enough for you to ask about the rest.”

  The rest.

  Sam and the baby and what the hell they meant to Randy…

  “I need Rick’s help, Em. Your husband’s a bulldog. He knows exactly how to bend the rules without breaking anything important. He’s served as APD liaison on task forces with God knows how many federal agencies. He has to have a few favors to call in. I need to know everything he can dig up on this woman, her federal handler and whoever she’s running from.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “EXCUSES ARE USELESS TO ME.”

  Luca Gianfranco smoothed a hand down the tie that, along with his private Gulfstream jet, was ruinously expensive but worth every dime he’d spent. In his world, money was power. It intimidated the people he needed kept in place, and wooed the ones he wanted closer.

  Know who you can trust, and deal firmly with the ones you can’t.

  It had been the wisest advice Luca’s father had ever given him.

  “I guarantee she couldn’t have survived that accident,” the head of Luca’s southeastern operations insisted over their cell link.

  “Really? Because it occurs to me that a guarantee would have been you watching her take her last breath.”

  “Fire and rescue was there in under ten minutes. We couldn’t have—”

  “You chose to make a public spectacle out of your responsibility, then you didn’t finish the job. Almost as if you didn’t want the same outcome I do, and you didn’t want me to have another chance once you failed.”

  “I did what you asked,” said the voice of a man Luca had been sure could be trusted. It wasn’t the first time he’d been wrong about family. “You wanted the world to know you aren’t weak. No matter what you have to do. No one who hears about how you took Sam out will doubt—”

  “But I haven’t taken her out. She was rushed to the hospital. She’s been in emergency surgery for hours.” Luca took a deep breath, resisting the wave of familiarity that came with thinking of her as Sam. She was a loose end. A challenge to his control that would be his death warrant if he didn’t eliminate her.

  There was a long pause.

  Something crashed on the other side of the line.

  “She’s alive?” the gruff voice said.

  “I’m assured she’s in bad shape, but alive. That’s all the details I can get. My source won’t risk attracting suspicion by asking too many questions. But that’s a risk I’m confident you’d be happy to take, to make up for your failure.”

  “But even if I can get someone to—”

  “Get your ass over there. I want a detailed report before morning. Then I’ll tell you exactly what I want done to end this. The trial’s less than a month away. My Vancouver associates are nervous. I’m on my way to reassure them that I’ve isolated the leak, that there’s no way I’ll be indicted, and that their investment is secure. You either take care of this for me, or you become part of the collateral damage you caused.”

  Luca slapped his phone shut. The flight attendant bringing him cappuccino flinched as she set the cup down. He caught her hand before she could draw away.

  “Share some of this with me?” It wasn’t a request.

  She sat. Her smile was beautiful, if not completely genuine. She didn’t resist as Luca’s fingers threaded through hers. He lifted the cup of steaming coffee with his free hand, offering it to her as if it were a precious jewel. Hesitating, she took a sip and licked foam from her upper lip.

  Sam had once craved private time with him. She’d needed companionship and a sense of belonging so badly. She’d been his shadow, until she betrayed him.

  Luca’s hand tightened around the attendant’s, becoming a crushing vise. A squeak of pain escaped as he leaned forward, staring into her blue eyes. The same color as Sam’s.

  “No one leaves my family,” he whispered to the attendant.

  His mind raced with his plans to expand his West Coast operations into Vancouver. Everything was riding on him neutralizing this ridiculous grand jury mess. His fist clenched tighter. A bone snapped in the petite blonde’s hand. She cried out. The thrill of it swamped the rush of unfamiliar anxiety that had momentarily taken hold.

  “No one challenges me,” he explained, his voice gentle. “Understand?”

  The flight attendant nodded frantically, her eyes glazing. Pain. Fear. It was the same broken expression that had been on Sam’s face the night she’d run from him and their world. He wanted to see fear in her eyes again, just once more before she died. Fear of him, while he took away the life she had no right to live without his permission.

  “You’d never betray me.” He yanked the attendant closer, until their lips brushed. “Would you?”

  “YOU HAVE TO DO THIS,” Charlie Montgomery insisted, begging for help from a man he’d once threatened to kill with his bare hands.

  His family’s relationship with their sister’s husband had come a long way since he and Chris and Randy had tried to beat the crap out of Rick Downing on Emma’s front lawn.

  “I’ve never seen Randy this way,” he pressed when Rick didn’t respond. “Not even when we were kids. Not even when…”

  “I understand.” Emma’s APD hero husband sounded both sympathetic and annoyingly professional. “But there’s no way—”

  “There is, too, a goddamned way!” Charlie thundered.

  This was Charlie’s baby brother they were talking about. Helping Randy through the first crisis any of them had seen get to him since they were kids—that was the only way. Except Rick didn’t know Randy like the rest of them. He couldn’t know how out of character Randy asking for Emma’s help had been—then asking Charlie to wade into the situation when Emma had come up empty.

  “When it was your best friend’s ass on the line,” Charlie said, “you pushed and shoved until you were right in the middle of an FBI sting Alexa Vegas got herself in. When my sister told you to butt out of her life and turned my brothers and me loose on you, you took us all on to stay by her side. You put your job on the line to help her and get her to believe in you. But my brother’s problems aren’t important enough to risk your neck for, is that it?”

  Rick was the big gun Charlie and his family needed. He’d married their sister last year, and they’d all accepted him, regardless of the bad blood between their families. It was time for the man to prove he knew what family meant.

  Rick folded his arms across his chest. The guy was talking himself out of letting those meaty fists of his fly—a diversion Charlie would have welcomed at the moment.

  Damn, he hated being back at Atlanta Memorial. Even though he didn’t personally know the patient they were all waiting around to hear news about, the place gave him the creeps. It hadn’t been that long ago that Emma had been the one clinging to life, after a courthouse shooting left her bleeding in Rick’s arms.

  “Say whatever you got to say,” Charlie challenged. “I have got no feelings for you to hurt. And I got no problem taking you on right here and now, if you don’t care how much it’s hurting Emma to watch Randy fall apart over a stranger while there’s something you can do to help him.”

 
“There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for my wife, as long as my actions don’t make the situation worse. And from what I’ve heard, that’s exactly what would happen if I started throwing my weight around digging for answers. Martin Rhodes already got nowhere trying to find information on this Robyn Nobles woman.”

  “Making things worse for your cushy career, you mean.”

  “No, you asshole.” Downing slid his hands into his filthy jeans pockets. The guy had come to the hospital straight from work. Being a detective meant he wore whatever earned him the street cred he needed. “Worse for Emma, when my questions put someone her brother cares about at even more risk.”

  Rick had clearly done a bit of digging already.

  “What have you heard?” Charlie asked.

  “Not much.” Rick scanned the empty waiting area. Chris had dragged Emma downstairs for coffee. Lord knew where Randy was prowling while he waited like a caged lion for an update about this woman and her baby. “Except that the guys’ weekend you took down the coast may have landed Randy in the middle of a whole lot of shit he was never supposed to be involved in.”

  “Well, he’s involved now. At least enough to ask his own questions if I can’t get them for him through safer channels. Think about what that will do, if things are as dicey as you say. He’s attached to this woman, whether the rest of us understand it or not. I’ve never seen him like this. Chris or Emma neither. Randy’s all about logic and reason and keeping things simple. But he’s neck deep in whatever this is and not looking for a way out. All for a woman he hasn’t spent more than a few hours with. I don’t see him stopping until he has some answers, do you?”

  A wave of understanding passed between them. Randy might work nonstop and party hard and all the other things that guaranteed his personal life stayed superficial and uncomplicated. But nothing stopped him when it came to keeping the people he really cared about safe. And this accident victim had Randy caring like she was family—in the midst of a situation that sounded more unstable by the second.

  “Get my brother whatever information you can,” Charlie insisted. “Whatever it’s going to take to keep him and this woman safe.”