If he hadn’t already.
She desperately wanted to look around his house, and, more important, to look around his garage. If she were part of the police force, the way Ethan was, her hands would be tied until that search warrant materialized—and that might never happen.
But she wasn’t part of the police force, she thought, becoming steadily more motivated to take action. She was part of the fire department—a situation she had more than a sneaking suspicion might not be the case very soon. But right now she was still a fire investigator. And as such, she could very easily look around, turning things over to the police if she found anything the least bit incriminating. It was her job to prevent fires from starting.
Granted, entering Bonner’s garage was technically, as she’d said to Ethan, breaking and entering, but if she found what she thought she would find, she sincerely doubted that she’d be charged with anything.
Even if she was, it would be worth it if she could stop this man from setting even one more fire.
Very slowly, moving an inch at a time so as not to wake Ethan, she slipped out of bed. Once her feet were finally on the floor, she quickly gathered up her scattered clothes and snuck out of the room.
Entering the living room, she left the light off and hurried into her clothing. With her purse in one hand and her shoes in another, she quietly opened the front door and eased herself out. Closing the door behind her took an equally long amount of time. The last thing she wanted to do was wake Ethan up. She knew that he would immediately ask where she was going.
She couldn’t tell him the truth because he would stop her, and she didn’t want to lie to him. Sneaking out like this allowed her to avoid either scenario.
Kansas quickly put together a course of action in her head while driving to the house of the man she now regarded as the firebug. She couldn’t very well knock on his door and ask to see his garage. He was within his rights to refuse.
Her only option was not to give him that opportunity.
She’d noticed, as she and Ethan had left the man’s house, that the garage had a side entrance as well as the standard garage doors that opened and closed by remote control.
Her way in was the side door.
More than likely, the door was locked, but that didn’t pose a deterrent. Picking a lock was exceedingly simple if you knew what you were doing. And she, thanks to one of the foster kids whose path had crossed hers, did.
Because there was no traffic in the middle of the night, she arrived at her destination fairly quickly. Parking her vehicle more than half a block away from Bonner’s house, Kansas made her way over to the one-story stucco building, keeping well to the shadows whenever possible.
Bonner, she noted, wasn’t one of those people who left his front porch lights on all night. The lights were off. That worked in her favor, she thought, relieved.
Within a minute and a half of accessing the garage’s side door, she’d picked the padlock and was inside the structure.
Taking out a pencil-thin, high-powered flashlight, Kansas illuminated the area directly in front of her. She was extra careful not to trip over anything or send something clattering to the finished stone floor.
There was no car inside the garage, no car outside in the driveway, either. Maybe he was gone, or on call, she thought. Either way, she still wasn’t going to take any chances and turn on the lights.
That, however, did slow down any kind of progress to a crawl. It wasn’t easy restraining herself this way, considering the impatience drumming through her veins and the fact that the garage was easily a packrat’s idea of heaven. There were boxes and things haphazardly piled up everywhere. Looking around, she sincerely doubted that any vehicle larger than a Smartcar could actually fit in the garage.
Rather than go through the preponderance of boxes, she decided to start with the shelves that lined opposite sides of the structure, methodically going from one floor-to-ceiling array to another.
Twenty minutes in, she got lucky.
Hidden beneath a tarp and tucked away on a bottom shelf situated all the way in the rear of the garage, conveniently behind a tower of boxes, she discovered some very sophisticated incendiary devices.
Several of them.
“Oh my God,” she whispered, feeling her insides begin to shake. He wasn’t planning on stopping. There were enough devices here for him to go on indefinitely, she realized.
Setting down her flashlight, she angled it for maximum illumination on her find and took out her camera. Holding her breath, Kansas took one photograph after another. This was definitely the proof she needed to convince the captain that he had a rogue firefighter on his hands.
“I’m really sorry you found those, Kansas.”
Surprised, she bit down on her lower lip to keep from screaming. She shoved the camera quickly into her pocket before she turned around. When she did, she found herself looking up at Nathan Bonner. His genial expression was gone and he looked far from happy to discover her here.
“You can’t do this,” she told him. “You can’t use these devices. You’re liable to kill someone.”
He waved away her protest. “No, I won’t. I’m an expert on handling these things. Nobody’s going to get hurt.”
He couldn’t believe that, she thought. But, looking into his eyes, she realized that all the dots were not connecting. He had no idea of the kind of havoc that he could bring down on a neighborhood if things went awry. He was too focused on what these fires would accomplish for him.
“Like no one was supposed to get hurt at the nursing home?” she challenged.
The firefighter looked genuinely stricken that she should think that he had somehow failed the deceased man. “That was his heart, not the fire.”
Was the man that obtuse? “But the fire brought on the heart attack,” Kansas cried.
The firefighter didn’t seem to hear her. Instead, he grabbed her in what amounted to a bear hug, pinning her arms against her sides. Caught off guard, she desperately tried to get free, doing her best to kick him as hard as she could. But, although she made contact several times, he gave no indication that any of her blows hurt.
“You’re going to tire yourself out,” he warned. And then he shrugged as he carried her over to an old, dilapidated office chair. It had rusted wheels and its green upholstery was ripped in several places. Each rip bled discolored stuffing. “Maybe it’ll be better that way for you.”
A cold chill ran down her back. “Why?” Kansas demanded.
“If the fight goes out of you—” he slammed her down onto the chair, and the impact vibrated all the way up through the top of her skull “—you’ll go that much quicker.”
She thought she picked up a note of regret in his voice, as if he didn’t want to do what he was about to do. “You’re not talking about letting me go, are you?”
“No, I’m not.”
She struggled, straining against the rope that he was wrapping around her as tightly as if it were a cocoon. Using the rope, he secured her to the chair. “I thought you said you planned these things so that no one would get hurt.”
“I do. But all those fires have to do with my coming to the rescue. I can’t come to your rescue. You made it so I can’t come,” he told her with a flash of anger just before he applied duct tape over her mouth. “This isn’t my fault, you know. It’s yours. If you hadn’t come around the firehouse, snooping like that—if you hadn’t accused me—” his voice grew in volume “—you could have gone on living. And I could have gone on fighting fires. Rescuing people. It’s what I’m good at, what I need to do.” His eyes glinted dangerously. “But you want to spoil everything. I can’t let you go now.”
For a moment, he stood over her, a towering hulk shaking his head. “You women, you always spoil everything. My mother was like that, always telling me I’d never amount to anything. That I was just some invisible guy that people looked right through. She said no one would ever notice me.”
The angry look changed inst
antly and he beamed. “Well, she was wrong. They notice me, the camera people, they notice me.” His hand fisted, he hit the center of his chest proudly. “People are grateful to me. To me.” And then he sighed, looking down at her. “But I really am sorry it has to be like this.”
And then, as she stared, wide-eyed, he was gone, using the side door. She heard him put the padlock back on the door.
He was locking her in.
She’d deal with getting out later, Kansas told herself. Right now, she needed to get untied from this chair. Somewhere along the line, the unbalanced firefighter had learned how to execute some pretty sophisticated knots.
Maybe there was something she could use to cut the ropes on the workbench.
But when she tried to move her chair over, she discovered that the wheels didn’t roll. The rust had frozen them in place. She wasn’t going anywhere.
Desperate, Kansas began to rock back and forth, increasing the momentum with each pass until she finally got the chair to tip over. The crash jolted through her entire body right down into her teeth. But it also did what she’d hoped. It loosened the ties around her just the slightest bit, giving her enough slack to try to work herself free.
But as she struggled and strained against the ropes, she realized that she smelled something very familiar. Smoke.
It registered at the same time as the crackling sound of fire eating its way through wood. The entire garage was unfinished, with exposed wood on all four sides. A feast for the fire.
Panic slashed through her.
Kansas forced herself to remain calm. Panic would only have her using up her supply of oxygen faster. Filling her lungs with smoke faster.
The ropes are loosening, she told herself. Stick with the program, Kansas.
Straining against the ropes, she kept at them relentlessly. The rope cut into her wrists, making them bleed. She couldn’t stop, even though she was getting very light-headed and dizzy. Even though her lungs felt as if they were about to burst.
Finally, her eyes stinging, she managed to get one hand partially free. Hunching forward, she bent her head as far as she could. At the same time, she stretched her fingers to the breaking point until she managed to get a little of the duct tape between two of her fingertips. The awkward angle didn’t let her pull as hard as she wanted to. But she did what she could.
It seemed as if it was taking forever, but she finally got the tape off her mouth.
She could have cried. Instead, she screamed for help, hoping that someone would hear her. She screamed again, then stopped, afraid that she would wind up swallowing too much smoke if she continued. Using her teeth, she pulled and yanked at the ropes until she got them loose enough to pull her wrist free.
But all this struggling was getting to be too much of an effort for her, all but stealing the oxygen out of her lungs. She was losing ground and she knew it.
Damn it, she wasn’t ready to die. Not now, not when it looked as if things might really be going right for her for the first time.
Why had she sneaked out? Why hadn’t she told Ethan where she was going? Left him a note, woken him up, something? Anything.
She was going to die and he was never going to know how she felt about him. How she…
Kansas was winking in and out of her head. In and out of consciousness.
The smoke was winning.
She was hallucinating. She thought a car had just come crashing through the garage doors. But that was only wishful thinking. Just like thinking that she heard Ethan’s voice, calling her name. If only…
Her eyes drifted shut.
“Goddamn it, woman, you are a hard person to love,” Ethan cried, trying to keep his fears banked down as he raced to her from his beloved Thunderbird, which he’d just embedded in the garage door in an effort to create an opening. He got to her chair-bound body on the floor. There wasn’t time to undo her ropes so he lifted her, chair and all, and carried her and it out onto the front lawn.
Just in time.
The next moment, the shingled roof over the garage collapsed, burying the two-car garage in a shower of debris and flames.
Focused only on her, Ethan began cutting her free. Her eyelashes fluttered and then her eyes opened for just a second. His heart leaped into his throat. She was alive!
“Kansas, Kansas, talk to me. Say something. Anything. Please!”
He thought he heard her murmur, “Hi,” before she passed out.
When she came around again, she was no longer bound to a chair. Instead, she was strapped to gurney. The gurney was inside an ambulance.
Its back doors gaping open, she could see what was left of Bonner’s house. The fire was pretty much out, the embers winking and dying. The fire truck had arrived with its warriors in full regalia, ready to fight yet another fire. It wasn’t much of a fight. The fire won before finally retreating into embers. “Idiot.”
Kansas smiled. She could recognize Ethan’s voice anywhere.
Turning her head, she saw him sitting beside the gurney. She let the single word pass. “He did it, Ethan. He did it for the attention. He wanted to play the big hero and have everyone say how wonderful he was.”
“You were right.”
“I was right.” She let out a long sigh, exhausted. If Ethan hadn’t come when he had… “How did you know where to find me?”
“Because I know how you think,” he told her, torn between being angry at her and just holding her to him to reassure himself that he’d been in time, that she was alive and was going to remain that way. “Like some damn pit bull. Once you get an idea in your head, you don’t let go. When I woke up to find you gone, I just knew you were at Bonner’s house, trying to find something on him any way you could.” He looked over at the ashes that had once been a house. “Looks like if there was any evidence, it’s gone.”
It all came back to her. The fear, the fire and everything that had come before.
“Not necessarily,” Kansas told him. He looked at her quizzically. “I took pictures.” She touched her pocket to reassure herself that the camera she’d used was still there. It was. “You find him, Ethan, we can convict him. He won’t burn anything down anymore.” Her voice cracked as it swelled in intensity.
He began to nod his head in agreement, but then he shook it instead. “Never mind about Bonner. I don’t care about Bonner.” Everything she’d just put him through—the concern, the fear, the horror when he first heard her scream and realized that she was inside the burning garage and he couldn’t find a way to get in—came back to him in spades. He could have lost her.
“What the hell were you thinking, coming out here in the middle of the night, poking around an insane man’s garage?”
Her throat felt exceedingly dry, but she had to answer him, had to make him understand. “That he had to be stopped. That you couldn’t do this because the evidence wouldn’t be admissible, but I could because I wasn’t bound by the same rules as you were.” She stopped for breath. Each word was an effort to get out. Her lungs ached.
He looked at her incredulously, still wanting to shake her even as he wanted to kiss her. “And getting killed never entered you head?”
She smiled that smile of hers, the one that always made him feel as if his kneecaps were made of liquid gelatin. “You know me. I don’t think that far ahead.”
Meaning she gave no thought to her own safety. He thought of the first night he met her. She’d run into a burning building to rescue children.
Ethan shook his head. “What am I supposed to do with you?”
The kneecap-melting smile turned sexy. “That, Detective, is entirely up to you.”
He already had a solution. One he’d been contemplating for the last week. “I suppose I could always put you in protective custody—for the rest of your life.”
Had to be the smoke. He couldn’t be saying what she thought he was saying. “And just how long do you figure that’ll be?”
He took her hand in his, still reassuring himself that she was a
live, that he’d gotten to her in time. “Well, if I make sure to watch your every move, maybe the next fifty years.”
Okay, it wasn’t getting any clearer. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
“The way your mind works, I never know,” he admitted. “What is it you think I’m saying?” When she shook her head, unwilling or unable to elaborate, Ethan decided it was time to finally go the whole nine yards and put his feeling into words.
“Okay, maybe I’m not being very clear,” he admitted. Leaning in closer so that only she could hear, he said, “I’m asking you to marry me.”
A whole host of emotions charged through her like patrons in a theater where someone had just yelled “Fire!” Joy was prominently featured among the emotions, but joy was capped off by fear. Fear because she’d thought herself safe and happy once before, only to watch her world crumble to nothing right in front of her eyes.
She never wanted to be in that position again. “How about we move in together for a while and see how that goes?”
That wasn’t the answer he was hoping for. “You don’t want to marry me?”
Her first reaction was to shrug away his words, but she owed it to him to be honest more than she owed it to herself to protect herself. “I don’t want another broken heart.”
“That’s not going to happen,” he told her with feeling. “You have my word.” He held her hand between both of his. “Do you trust me?”
She thought of how he came riding to her rescue—literally. A weak smile curved her mouth. “I guess if I can’t trust the word of the man who just messed up the car he loves to save my life, who can I trust? You really sacrificed your car for me,” she marveled.
“It doesn’t kiss as well as you do,” he told her with a straight face.
“Lucky for me.”
“Hey, O’Brien.” Ortiz stuck his head in, then saw that Kansas was conscious. “How you feeling?” he asked her.
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