by Abigail Owen
He clenched his hands as he deliberately turned his back on the ambulance and followed Aidan over to the petite blonde who stared at what was left of her barn with a white face. At least the owner seemed to be composed, though that could just be shock.
“Ms. Morrison?”
She dragged her gaze to him with obvious effort. Finn waited until she focused on him, pupil’s constricting. Then he held out a hand. “I’m Finn Conleth. I run the crew that showed up first.”
“Thank you for your help.”
He gave a cursory nod. The people side of things was not his strength, mostly because he didn’t deal with it often. He never had to receive thanks directly from those whose livelihoods were impacted. More often than not, he dealt only with Deep, maybe a crew supervisor or captain. That was about it.
Humans were not his thing. Not since Phoebe.
“I assume the barn is insured?” he asked.
She pulled a face but nodded. “My rates will go sky-high after this, though.”
Finn kept to the business side of things, emotions having no place in this interaction. “The good news is it looks like the fire won’t jump to other buildings or the grounds.”
“Yeah,” she whispered.
“Consider it hazardous and warn your people not to enter, even after the fire department is done. They’ll tape it off.”
She bit her lip. “Okay.”
“Did you call in the fire?”
“Yes, but Delaney was first to see it. I was inside working the tasting room when she ran in and told me to call.”
“Delaney?”
Aidan cleared his throat. “Delaney Hamilton. The woman you pulled out of the building.”
“She helps me manage the winery,” Sera added.
Finn didn’t want to acknowledge the flare of suspicion that came with that information. He had no reason to suspect anything other than a dragon shifter so far, but was there a reason Delaney had both known first and risked her life to stop it?
He glanced over his shoulder and collided with those incredible eyes across the expanse of the drive. Wary eyes. She watched him with an expression he couldn’t quite pin down but kicked over an instinct he thought he’d buried with his dead mate.
This was a woman who needed protecting. He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew. And he shouldn’t give a damn.
But he did.
Finn kept his face devoid of emotion as he turned back to Sera. “They’ll have to call the local fire marshal to investigate.”
“Already done,” Aidan said. They exchanged a glance and Finn gave him a small nod of acknowledgment.
“Why?” Sera asked, voice faint.
Finn dredged up what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “Because of the insurance involvement for what appears to be a valuable structure. I’m guessing this is a critical business situation…”
That’s when the tears welled up. “Yes.”
He hardened his heart to her plight. Other than stopping the fire, Finn had no other role here. He glanced at Aidan, who got his message. “Aidan is going to ask you a few more questions and take your statement. Okay?”
The rookie was smart, one of Finn’s better investigators, and a go-getter out to prove himself. Aidan would know to wipe the conversation from her mind. A handy trick dragon shifters had. One that only worked on humans but had saved their asses more than once.
Sera nodded.
Finn left Aidan with her and his gaze zeroed in on the woman he’d rescued.
Delaney Hamilton.
The name suited her, though he had no clue what led him to that conclusion since he didn’t know her. Maybe a woman who’d try to put out a big fire on her own earned a strong name like Delaney.
She didn’t glance up as he made his way to her, giving him time to take inventory, unable to completely control his curiosity as his gaze skimmed over her form. Dressed simply in figure-hugging jeans and a red polo shirt with the winery logo, she was slender but with fantastic curves and long legs that gave him ideas that required squashing. Long light-brown hair shot through with gold was pulled back in a ponytail that draped over one shoulder. She was probably around five feet eight, tall for a human, though the top of her head didn’t reach his chin. He knew that from yelling in her ear earlier.
Even with her face streaked in soot, he couldn’t miss her high cheekbones or the pouty lips that had a natural curve to them. Like she smiled a lot. A woman who smiled a lot but needed protecting. Definitely a woman to avoid.
She had heart, he’d give her that, even if trying to douse the fire on her own did make her logically stunted. Survival instincts should’ve made her wait for the firemen she’d called. Even animals knew enough to run from fire.
So, the question was, why hadn’t she?
Chapter Three
Delaney perched on the back of the ambulance, her feet dangling, breathing in oxygen through the mask she’d been given and trying not to hyperventilate. Ash streaked her clothes and probably every other part of her. Even her tongue tasted of it. She reeked of smoke, a scent she could happily go the rest of her life without smelling ever again, but right now she wasn’t worried about that. Instead, she stared at the demolished building the firefighters hadn’t been able to salvage, despite her puny efforts to give them a head start.
Apparently, she hadn’t learned from her previous encounters with fire that nothing she did could help. The barn was destroyed.
She closed her eyes and battled back the panic that had bile stinging the back of her throat, adding a putrid edge to the smoke swirling around her.
Oh God. It’s happening again.
Maybe this was a freak accident?
Delaney snorted at herself. Inexplicable fires could only happen so many times around one person before the coincidence became too great to ignore.
She looked at Sera, who stood a distance away. The woman’s gaze hadn’t left the smoldering barn once since she’d come outside.
Delaney’s heart sank. Sera had to be quietly dying inside. The single mother had already dealt with enough, losing her husband to cancer and inheriting the winery shortly after, when her father died. Her mother had been gone for years due to a bad heart. The California inheritance taxes had nearly wiped her out. Now her barn. She didn’t need more stress.
She was barely making ends meet with the winery as it stood. Having to rebuild the barn where all the work to convert grapes to wine and age it happened was not in the budget. Not to mention all that lost product. At least not all of the wine was stored in there, thank God. Still, this was the most damage one of the fires that plagued Delaney had caused.
What have I done, bringing this down on her?
Delaney curled her fingers into the scraggly fur of the massive cat that sat passively on her lap. She’d gone back to the office to get the thing before it could wreak too much havoc. To her shock, the creature had acted like a lamb, coming with her meekly. Now she was grateful for something to hold on to.
She’d only just settled in California, and she liked her new home and new job at Hestia Family Vineyards. Was she going to have to move again?
No. Dammit. I’m done running. Obviously running didn’t do any good anyway.
If she held back her history—those fires that seemed to follow her, though evidence supported her claim to be the victim—and the investigator found out, she’d leapfrog straight to the top of the suspect list. The problem was, who could she tell who wouldn’t immediately jump to a guilty verdict?
Who can I trust to listen to me?
One of the firemen prowled around the side the building toward her. Her fireman. The one who’d pulled her out of the barn.
She tried to pretend she wasn’t aware of his approach, though his probing stare reached her like a physical touch. You’d think, with those heavy boots and tall frame, he’d move in a clunky manner, but no. He moved with a grace she’d describe as beautiful if he wasn’t so…well…male.
A small part of her—okay,
maybe more than a small part—registered a strong jaw shadowed with dark scruff, dark hair worn short on the sides and longer on top, mussed from his helmet, and definitely the bluest eyes she’d ever encountered. Those dark blue depths were trained on her now, and that air of total control, as if he’d tightly leashed his emotions and had zero intention of letting them loose, snared her attention.
And irked the hell out of her.
Maybe that was her fear talking, but being attracted to this man was wrong, wrong, wrong.
Delaney swallowed as her body stirred with interest, tingling in inconvenient places. She sat up straighter, determined to ignore her wayward hormones. Attraction had no business up in this mess.
He stopped in front of her and seemed to consider her. Given the way he’d snapped out orders, she expected him to immediately jump into an interrogation. To her shock, the boss crouched down, bringing their eyes level. He opened his mouth like he was going to speak, then closed it as he studied her face intently for a long moment.
Did he already suspect?
Delaney tried not to shift uncomfortably under his intense gaze, not to mention getting her lungs to keep functioning normally. They already didn’t want to take in any air thanks to smoke inhalation, but now they constricted, her chest tight. What was the point of this oxygen mask if the dang thing wasn’t going to help?
“What were you thinking? Going in there on your own?” he finally demanded.
And there it was, the interrogation she expected. His voice was deep, his words measured. A shiver shimmied over her skin. He might sound sexy as hell, but the edge to his voice also indicated that he was blaming her for a dumb decision. She buried her unwanted awareness under a rising tide of aggravation and lowered the oxygen mask. “Doing the same thing as you, I’d imagine.”
Damn, talking hurt. But she knew from experience with other fires that her throat would heal soon enough.
He rocked back on his heels. Eyebrows raised. “Same as me?”
“Yeah. Slow it down until someone who could stop it got here.” She didn’t say the word duh, but it lingered between them just the same. “So, I guess that makes us both crazy.”
Immediately, the words were out of her mouth and she wanted to smack herself in the head. Antagonizing the guy in charge was definitely not the way to avoid suspicion. Apparently, her unwanted reaction to him had crossed some wires between brain and mouth.
“I do this for a living,” he pointed out with annoying calm.
Delaney wanted to cross her arms, but the dang cat was in the way, so instead she rolled her eyes. “Then I guess mine is only temporary insanity and yours is a condition.”
Oh my God, stop insulting the man. Except her mouth wasn’t listening. She had to be in shock.
Surprisingly, he not only didn’t call her on the sarcasm, he settled his hands on her knees, gaze steady.
Delaney stiffened, though the warmth of his touch and a moment of human contact made her want to relax into him. No other firefighters had touched her like that before. Maybe he’d taken her snappy comeback as a sign that she was flustered by the fire? He wasn’t wrong—she was flustered. Scared shitless more like.
Just not for the reasons he no doubt assumed.
“You could’ve been trapped in there.”
Was that real concern in his voice? It had been a long time since anyone had truly shown concern for her. Sera came the closest, having become a fast friend as well as her boss. But she couldn’t tell Sera all the dirty details about her past, forcing her to keep Sera at a distance, just like she’d pulled away from friends in Vermont. She’d been dealing with this on her own since the first fire flared up, determined to protect the few people close to her.
A hysterical laugh tried to bubble up out of her, but she managed to swallow it back down. “I wasn’t thinking about me,” she admitted on a croak. “When I tried to help, that is.”
He stared again, like he was trying to get into her mind. After a second, he shook his head. Giving up on her? A pang of regret shot through her. Something about this guy, despite her defensiveness, made her feel…weirdly safe.
“My name is Finn Conleth.”
Strong name for a strong man. An undeniably hot firefighter—every pun totally intended—with a voice that could make women part their legs on a single uttered sentence.
Not my legs, though. Because that would be dangerous given her situation. “Delaney Hamilton.”
He nodded as if he already knew. “How are you doing?”
Delaney bit her lip. “Okay, I guess. It’s nothing that won’t fix itself in a day or two,” she answered. A lie she’d been telling herself for way too long now.
He squeezed her knees with those large hands…nice hands. Capable hands. Attraction, hot and unwelcome, flashed through her. A response she smothered with determination as she jerked her gaze from his hands back to his face. That didn’t help any either.
He glanced at the massive orange tabby she still held in her lap. At his look, the animal, docile until now, struggled to be set free.
“Yours?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Just a stray cat that hangs out around here. I pulled it out of the fire.”
He raised his eyebrows. “You went into a burning building to rescue a cat?”
His expression remained vaguely surprised, but his tone indicated he was back to lumping her in the stupidity-of-the-month club.
“Are we back to that? Not just for the cat, and I couldn’t let him die in there. That’s a horrible way to go.”
Her voice broke on the word horrible. She’d seen her family die that way. They’d been unconscious, thank God, unmoving, dead from the car crash before they knew it. But at night, she still heard screams that never happened in real life.
“I see,” Finn said quietly.
And she got the feeling he actually did. Ghosts haunted those eyes.
The cat chose that moment to force his release by scratching the back of her hand. With a hiss of pain, she jerked away, and the fickle animal jumped down, then proceeded to wrap around Finn’s legs, giving a loud, rumbling purr.
“Hey. I saved your life,” Delaney pointed out to the ungrateful beast.
The animal ignored her, not that she could blame the cat. She wouldn’t mind wrapping around Finn Conleth either.
For his part, Finn curled his lip at the animal in disdain.
“Not a cat person?” she found herself asking.
“They’re the one animal I would’ve left off the ark,” he muttered.
He ignored the cat and turned back to her, lips quirked. She almost smiled back, but he sobered too quickly, the twinkle disappearing from his eyes. Almost as if he realized he shouldn’t be smiling at her or something. He glanced down and frowned. With a surprisingly gentle touch, he picked up her hand and examined the scratch the cat had left which was beading with tiny drops of blood.
He has a tattoo. An intricate design the likes of which she’d never seen before, inked into the skin on the back of his hand, on the fleshy part between this thumb and forefinger. The symbol reminded her of something between Celtic and African and Chinese and Egyptian, or maybe all those cultures in one.
She held her breath as warmth seeped into her from his skin, making her want to relax, trust. A treacherous reaction she couldn’t afford. Except…maybe this was the man she should tell. She had to tell someone after all. Could she confess everything and leave it to fate and Finn Conleth to figure out what happened next?
“I’ll have the medic take care of this,” he said, eyes still on her hand.
“That’s not—”
He glanced up and for a second, she swore his eyes were glowing as if lit from within by a blue-tinted fire. Lord, his touch was scrambling her brain. Her terror that someone would link this fire to all the others she’d been involved in didn’t help. Either way, she was starting to see flames everywhere now.
They should lock me up. What if I’m dangerous?
She cleared her throat. “That’s not necessary. I’ll clean it up when I get home.” The EMT had already treated the other cat bites and scratches. This one was nothing compared to those. A love nip.
“Where’s home?” he asked.
She canted her head in the direction of the rustic farmhouse close by that had been renovated while keeping its original charm. “There. I live in the apartment on the second floor.”
Sera and her son Blake lived in the larger apartment on the first floor, but he didn’t need that info.
He released her hand, expression and voice going all business. “Did you see how the fire started?” he asked.
Delaney took care with her answer. “I didn’t see anything.”
“Where were you?”
“I was walking from my apartment to the main winery building.” She gestured in the direction of the modern stucco building behind them. “Then I saw smoke coming from the barn and checked to make sure no one was in there.”
All true things, just leaving out the in-between, confusing bits. Last she remembered, she was outside walking from her apartment to the tasting room to start her afternoon shift as a server to winery guests. Weekdays were usually slow, especially during the day, but they still needed at least one server there for the trickle of guests who still showed.
Next thing she knew, she woke up on the barn floor with smoke swirling around her.
Finn narrowed his eyes, seemingly back to assessing her. Delaney refused to look away. Guilty people looked away.
Only she got tangled up in those eyes. A few darker specs floated in a sea of sapphire blue—the irises were rimmed in a navy shade, while fading to a color around the pupils that was more slate. She found herself leaning toward him to get a better look. Thankfully, she caught herself and managed to sit back before she fell off the edge of the ambulance and made a complete fool of herself.
He didn’t seem to notice. Instead, his gaze shifted to her neck, and she resisted the urge to lift a hand to cover the scar there. A constant, visible reminder of how her life wasn’t quite as perfect as she wished.
Make that as normal as she wished. Forget perfect.