How to Tame a Wild Fireman

by Jennifer Bernard

  He squinted up at the sun, which was quickly dropping behind the scrubby pinyons at the edge of the fairgrounds. Okay, so Deitch had a point. No heli-rappelling would be happening tonight. And he had to admit his muscles ached, not to mention his feet. “Psycho” didn’t mean superhuman. He’d be a liability out there. He’d hold his nose and grab a long, hot shower, ignoring the reek of a thousand stinky firefighters who’d showered before him. Then he’d sack out in his tent, get a good rest so he could kick the Waller Canyon Fire’s ass in the morning. And whatever they were cooking up in the food trailers smelled pretty darn good to him. He’d make a stop there after he cleaned up.

  Heading across the dusty fairgrounds, he glanced over at the medical tent. A small throng of people clustered around something on the floor—Goldie, he saw, as two firemen shifted places. Poor Goldie would be terrified when she woke up and found herself surrounded.

  Not his problem. He’d done his part. Dragged her away from the path of the fire. She’d be fine now. Nonetheless, his steps slowed as he passed the tent. Lara’s blond head was bent over the llama’s leg. It looked like she was sewing.

  Fuck. She was stitching up Goldie. Drawing a needle and thread through the llama’s flesh. A wave of dizziness passed over him. Damn, why’d he have to picture that? A tattoo needle was one thing. It just jabbed at you, over and over, like a drill. But a freaking needle punctured the skin and the thread passed right through the hole.

  Oh hell, he was going down. All the tension and exhaustion of the day, the strain of the hike, plus the nauseating thought of those stitches, combined into one whirlwind knockout. It was either go down willingly or fall on his face.

  Surrendering, he bent over, hands on knees. Staring at the gravel under his feet, he drew in one deep breath, then exhaled. Then he drew in another, held it, and exhaled. Finally his head started to clear.

  Thank the sweet Lord. If he lost consciousness anywhere near Lara Nelson—especially after she’d gotten knocked out by a llama—he’d never hear the end of it.

  He was just about to straighten up when a soft voice, a familiar, wistful voice he hadn’t heard in ten years, spoke next him. “Patrick? Is that really you? Are you okay?”

  The ground came up and swallowed him.

  Chapter Six

  Patrick awoke to the sight of Lara looking unbearably smug. She was leaning over him, waving something under his nose. It smelled horrible and made his eyes water. Even so, part of him—a completely inappropriate part—responded to her nearness. From this angle, he could see right down her top to the soft shadow between her full breasts.

  He’d always suspected she was stacked underneath those funeral outfits she used to wear.

  Then his gaze drifted to the girl hovering anxiously behind Lara.

  “Meggie,” he said weakly, struggling to sit up. Lara pushed him firmly back down. She had some strong muscles in those nicely rounded arms.

  “I didn’t mean to make you pass out,” his little sister said, her freckled face twisted with remorse. Little sister—after ten years, she wasn’t so little anymore. She must be twenty-four or so by now. Wire-rimmed glasses perched on her nose, hiding worried blue eyes.

  “That’s okay,” he croaked. “Not your fault.”

  “Of course it’s not your fault, Megan,” said Lara. “He’s exhausted and probably dehydrated. Do you know what happens when you get dehydrated in this kind of heat? Your kidneys can shut down. Deitch was telling me about a girl in Alaska who had to get both legs amputated because she didn’t drink enough water.”

  In his opinion, she related that story a little too gleefully. “I’ve been drinking like a fish,” he protested.

  “You have to keep your glucose intake up too. If you don’t have enough fuel, all the water in the world won’t help.” She held up a brownie as if it were a club she wanted to brain him with. “Your sister made these. Open wide.”

  He grabbed her wrist before she could stuff it in his mouth. “I can feed myself, Dr. Bossypants.”

  Her pulse sped up, fluttering against his palm. So she reacted to him. Good. Not that it put a dent in her sass.

  “Pretend it’s a peeled grape and I’m one of your groupies,” she said with a sweet smile.

  “What makes you think I have groupies?”

  “I said this was pretend, didn’t I?”

  He laughed, and before he knew it the brownie was lodged in his mouth. Nice move, he had to admit. He took a huge bite, nearly scraping her fingers with his teeth.

  “Cute,” she said, snatching her hand away and leaving him in sole possession of the dessert. “You must be feeling better. Of course, anything’s better than unconscious.”

  He chewed thoughtfully. “I’d have to say that depends.”

  Meggie cleared her throat. Despite the ten years that had gone by, she could still have passed for a teenager. Her wispy ginger-brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail, with a blue paisley bandanna keeping the flyaway strands off her face. He remembered her as a sweet, vivacious girl who loved to ride horses almost as much as she loved her family. When Liam had gone deaf at the age of eleven, she’d learned to sign faster than anyone except for Soledad, their housekeeper. Their impatient father had relied on her to translate for him. He remembered her as a giggly sort of girl, but now she didn’t look as though she smiled much.

  “Why didn’t you tell us you would be here?” she asked in a hurt tone of voice.

  He deflected the question. Megan was an innocent bystander in the war that constituted the Callahan family. “Were you out here by coincidence or were you looking for me?”

  She flushed a bright red. “Of course I wasn’t looking for you. I didn’t even know you were coming.”

  Ah. So she’d been looking for someone else. He wondered which of the lucky firefighters here had caught her attention.

  “But I knew you were a firefighter. I saw a picture of you in that People magazine article on the Bachelor Firemen.”

  “Wait a second. The what?” Gleeful laughter quivered at the corners of Lara’s luscious mouth. Fan-tastic. Patrick braced himself for an onslaught of mockery, but instead Megan looked curiously from one to the other of them.

  “So you both just got back to Loveless?”

  Lara lifted one shoulder. A smudge of soot on her cheek caught Patrick’s eye. How inappropriate would it be to wipe it off? He clenched his hands against the impulse. No need to stir up trouble.

  “I just got in today,” said Lara.

  “I was sorry to hear about your aunt,” Megan told her.

  Patrick gave Lara a curious look, but she turned her head away, busying herself with her medical kit. She probably wanted a change of subject; anything connected to the Haven had always made her uncomfortable.

  “I just got here too.” He sat up, strong enough now to push Lara’s hand away. “I bet you never thought you’d find me facedown in the dirt. No comment, Lara.” He threw up a hand to stop her inevitable jab.

  “While you were passed out, I heard some of the other firefighters talking.” Megan’s eyes lit up, so she finally looked like the excitable girl he remembered. “They said you drove here all the way from California, then went right onto a helicopter, rappelled into the fire, then hiked out with that llama on your shoulders. Is that true?”

  “Pretty much.”

  Lara snorted. “Pretty stupid.”

  “That’s why they call me Psycho.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Firehouse nickname. So . . .” He finished the brownie, dusting the last crumbs off his hands. “Any more commands from the doctor? And how’s my llama doing?”

  “Sleeping off the sedative. She’ll be fine. And yes, I do have orders. Take Megan to the dining tent. Let her fuss over you. Get out of my hair.”

  Her mention of hair made his eyes stray back to the thick, buttery gold strands stuck to her damp neck. What would it look like released from the clip that secured it on top of her head? What if that sweat was from a bo
ut of all-day lovemaking instead of a fire scene? What would she look like under him, flushed from his kisses, wearing nothing but her hair, like a sensual Rapunzel?

  His eyes dropped to her mouth. Even in her teenage angst years, she’d never been able to disguise the shape of her mouth, which managed to be both erotic and ironic, lush and mocking. Of all things, a dimple sometimes appeared on the lower curve of her cheek when she was especially amused by something. It was a very distracting mouth.

  His cock seemed to think so too. Annoyingly, it stirred to life. Time to get some distance from Dr. Lara Nelson. “Yeah, sure,” he said. “Let’s go, sis. You might have to carry me, though.”

  “I think I can spare a shoulder,” she said with a smile.

  If you asked him, her smile looked a little rusty.

  Leaving Megan behind had been the hardest part of walking away from Loveless—other than the even worse part, leaving Liam in the hospital. But he hadn’t had a choice about that.

  Meggie had been his father’s pet, so he’d known she’d be fine. And she was fine—thinner and more anxious than he would like, but still cute as a daisy. As she walked beside him, holding tight to his arm, she drew interested glances from the various exhausted firefighters milling around.

  “So which is he?” he asked her as they approached the catering trailers.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The guy you came out here to see. You brought brownies to the command post. They weren’t for me, since you didn’t even know I was here. Great brownies, by the way. Were those walnuts?”

  “Pecans. He’s . . . some people might be allergic to walnuts.”

  “So your mystery man has an allergy. The plot thickens.” He slipped into the old teasing pattern as if it were a favorite bathrobe.

  “Maybe I was just being nice.”

  “I’m sure you were. You’re a sweetheart.”

  “How would you know?” she murmured, before clapping a hand over her mouth. “Forget I said that.”

  Good grief. Had she always been this tentative, this unsure of herself?

  “It’s okay. I deserve it. But I knew you for the first fourteen years of your life. I doubt you’ve changed that much.” They reached the catering trucks, two huge tractor trailers set up in an el-shaped pattern. “Do you want to wait for me in the tent? I don’t think they let family members eat here. It’s about twenty-five bucks a meal and is practically guaranteed to include some kind of pork product.” The fire service had a saying: when fires break out, pigs die.

  “That’s okay, I don’t want to eat. I’ll just tag along with you.”

  A line of firefighters was moving briskly past the hand-washing station. Patrick joined them, followed by Megan.

  “Maybe I have changed,” she said. “Maybe you have too.”

  Patrick pumped hand soap onto his blackened, filthy hands and scrubbed thoroughly.

  “Let’s not delve into any emotional stuff, okay? It’s too early.”

  “It’s dinnertime.”

  “Then it’s too late.”

  With his hands washed and dried, he stepped up to the window, where the server handed him a plate filled with pork chops and mashed potatoes.

  “Requiem for a dead pig,” he told the guy next to him, who laughed. With Megan tagging along, he stopped at the salad bar table and loaded up with greens and sliced cucumbers and carrots. The two attendants, one from the federal government, one from the catering company, clicked their counters.

  Long banquet tables and exhausted firefighters filled the big white dining tent.

  Megan took in the scene, scanning the firefighters seated at the tables, shoveling food into their mouths. “He’s not here.”

  “Sorry. What’s his name, in case I run into him?”

  “And what, tell him I like him, the way you told Jimmy Hong?”

  “That wasn’t me. That was Liam. He didn’t know any better.”

  And as soon as his brother’s name slipped out, everything changed. Her face went wary as a trapped rabbit’s. Crap. Already he’d upset her. He grabbed the nearest folding chair and sank into it, desperately wishing he could undo the last half minute.

  Megan stood over him, worrying at her lower lip. He noticed that her nails were bitten down to nubs. His little sister had grown into a worrier.

  “Liam’s gone,” she said abruptly, dropping into the seat next to him with a soft whoosh. “He left about six months ago.”

  “Left? What do you mean, left? Where is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What?” For a second Patrick thought he might pass out again. The thought of Liam out on his own, wandering by himself—his naïve, socially challenged self—made him want to rip something to shreds.

  Not his poor sister, however, who was looking at him with big, wary eyes. “So you don’t know either?”

  “How would I know where he is? I was banned from his presence. The hospital literally wouldn’t let me back in. Dad hired security guards to keep me away.” It occurred to him that she’d only been fourteen at the time of the accident. “You know all this, right?”

  “I know the gist. I was there.” She lifted her chin stubbornly. “Lara and I both told Dad it wasn’t right, but we probably just made things worse. Why would he listen to a kid and someone from the Haven?”

  He hadn’t known about any of that. “Well . . . thanks for standing up for me.” For a brief, humiliating moment his throat closed up. He hadn’t paid much attention to Megan during that terrible time.

  She shrugged one thin shoulder. “I’m not sure Dad even heard me. Like, literally heard me. I said it kind of softly. I wasn’t as brave as Lara.”

  “It’s the thought that counts. But Liam, when did he leave? How? Why?”

  “I don’t know. He left in the middle of the night with some money and all his favorite things packed into a suitcase. I know he was angry with Big Dog because he kept firing all the servants. You know how he is about doing things correctly.”

  Patrick remembered Liam’s obsession with rules all too well. He used to wonder if Liam became his shadow to make sure he followed them—which he rarely did.

  “But he’s deaf, not to mention mildly autistic. He needs help.”

  “Maybe not as much as we thought. You should have seen him during his rehab. He took it really seriously. The therapists were kind of slacking off, like hey, it’s just this deaf guy, what difference does it make? But he was totally dedicated. You know how he can get. He just blocks everything out and goes.”

  Patrick grimaced against the pain of hearing so many details about Liam. It was like hearing about a limb that had gone missing. Oh, I saw your leg crossing Main Street the other day. It looks pretty good.

  “He always could surprise you,” he muttered. “Shocked the hell out of me a bunch of times. Does anyone know where he is? Did they try to find him?”

  “Big Dog refuses to talk about him. But I think he might know something.” She dipped her head, drawing circles on the table with an abandoned paper cup of water.

  He eyed her, so pretty, so anxious. “You still live there? At the ranch?”

  She nodded. “I take care of the animals, collect eggs, that sort of thing. Most of the servants are gone now. Big Dog fired everyone, but he can’t fire his family.”

  A self-conscious look came over her face. The knowledge hung between them that Big Dog had, in effect, fired his eldest son.

  Energized by a sudden, fierce need to change the subject, Patrick jumped to his feet. “Come on, let’s see what they’ve got for dessert.”

  “Wait, Patrick.”

  Her pleading tone filled him with dread. She wanted something from him, something he wouldn’t want to give, and he’d have to disappoint her, had already disappointed her a million times over, so how could he possibly do it again . . .

  “Come to dinner.”

  And there it was.

  He groaned and grabbed his head. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

>   “I’m not. Really. Please come.”

  “Is this an authorized invitation? Did you get it approved by Big Dog, or did he ball it up and feed it to the chickens?”

  “Stop.”

  “Megan, you can’t invite me to Big Dog’s house without his permission. He threw me out and told me never to come back. You don’t mess with the former Governor Callahan. Remember the profile that called him a one-man mafia?”

  Megan was shaking her head like a scolding schoolteacher, as if he were in the wrong. “It’s different now. He won’t mind. Well, he might mind, but I’ll make sure it’s okay.”

  Patrick felt his eyebrows climb toward his forehead. “You’ll make it okay. Have you forgotten how much he hates me? Has he forgotten?”

  “He doesn’t hate . . . well, anyway, please, please come.”

  Stubbornly, he shook his head. “I’m not here for a family reunion. I’m here to fight a fire. I won’t have time for one of those cozy Callahan dinners in which I get verbally eviscerated. I need to keep my strength up.”

  “After the fire’s out. Before you go back to . . . California, is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, you’ll come?”

  “What are you, a politician’s daughter? Yes, I live in California.”

  He scowled, hoping to forestall more questions.

  “But will you come?”

  God, he wanted to say no. But there was that hopeful look in her eyes. He’d seen that same look in the eyes of a girl when he’d used the Jaws of Life to extract her from a wrecked Miata. You’ll save me, right? I’m not stuck here forever. My life isn’t destroyed because of someone else’s wrong turn.

  Besides, he’d come here, to Loveless, Nevada. In the back of his mind hadn’t he imagined seeing the ranch again? Maybe even his family?

  “I’ll think about it. But only after we get the fire contained. And anyone at my firehouse can tell you I take a lot of crazy risks, so don’t count on anything.”