How to Tame a Wild Fireman

by Jennifer Bernard

  “No mountain. But we could do a dune race.”

  “You have dune buggies around here?”

  “No. A foot race. Running up and down the sand dunes is good exercise.”

  Since Liam didn’t even look winded, Patrick supposed it made sense that he wanted more exercise. Then again, he hadn’t been wrestling with a vengeful fiberglass murder weapon.

  He started to beg off, but the determined look on Liam’s face stopped him. Liam wanted to race. The hell if he’d deny his brother. “Sure. Foot race. I’m in.”

  They ran across sand that was beginning to radiate the sun’s heat directly into the soles of their feet. Liam practically danced over the dunes, zipping right and left to avoid scratchy beach grass, a few sharp pebbles, and even a stray crab claw. Patrick, meanwhile, managed to trip over a beer can, stumble into someone’s abandoned fire ring, and nearly sprain his ankle trying to avoid a dead jellyfish.

  Worst of all, he didn’t actually avoid the jellyfish.

  “I give up,” he signed to Liam, who leaned over him as he lay flat on his back, his right foot covered in disgusting jellyfish goo. “You win. I preemptively admit defeat in any competition that takes place in Mexico.”

  The laughter dropped from Liam’s face, leaving something that looked very much like hurt. “What else?” he signed.

  “What else?” Patrick stared up at him. The hot sand grated against his sunburned shoulders. His knee throbbed. “Okay. What else. The accident. My fault.”

  Liam slowly shook his head. “No. My accident,” he said out loud, emphatically thumping his fist against his chest. “Mine.”

  “You’re right. Sorry.”

  But Liam was still waiting, implacable, his head and upper body blocking the sun.

  Patrick drew in a deep breath. “I shouldn’t have left you. I should have stayed after it happened, no matter what Big Dog said. That was wrong.”

  Liam tilted his head just a bit, so a sliver of sun flared at the edge of Patrick’s vision. He shaded his eyes with one hand while continuing to sign with the other.

  “You want more? All right, more.” He thought hard, thought of everything that had happened since he’d last seen Liam, and everything he’d missed. “Here it is. I’m an arrogant prick and you did just fine without me, brother. I’m proud of you.”

  At that, Liam reached out his hand and grasped Patrick’s. He scrambled to his feet and for a long moment the two brothers looked each other in the eye. Hugging had never been their thing; Liam didn’t really like it. Instead, Patrick crossed his wrists and hugged them to his chest. The sign for love.

  Liam took it in with a slight frown, as if he didn’t know why “love” needed stating. He pinched his thumb and middle finger together and drew a string outward from his chest, then made Lara’s name sign. Did he like Lara?

  Patrick nodded. Even to Liam, who tended to shy away from emotional conversations, it must be obvious.

  Liam looked thoughtful as he picked up his surfboard and led the way back to the hut. “There’s an outdoor shower at my house. Let’s race.”

  “It’s all yours. Enjoy your shower. I’ll see you in a few.” Patrick gingerly pulled on his lizard T-shirt, wincing as it clung to his newly scorched skin.

  Liam gave him the good-bye sign and ambled away. Patrick watched him go. His little brother had totally, absolutely schooled him. Put him through his paces, humiliated him in the realms of surfing and sand-dune-racing, and forced him to issue the right apology.

  All this time, what had he been picturing? To be honest, he’d imagined his mother tending Liam, Big Dog calling in the best therapists. He’d pictured his brother as nearly helpless, the way he’d been right after the accident. Logically, he’d known that Liam must have recovered, at least to some extent. He’d figured their parents would spare no expense, that his brother would be coddled and treated like a prince as he worked his way back to health.

  The idea that Liam would have seized his independence, made his own life for himself, taught himself how to surf, found a girlfriend?

  He stole a glance around the beach, but saw no one except a few surfers still floating out to sea. Closer, a sandpiper poked his long bill at the wet sand at the ocean’s edge. A little pink crab scuttled sideways into a clump of grass. A hummingbird swooped past, hovering like an animated jewel before whisking its wings and disappearing in a blurry flash of ruby red.

  Blurry because now that he was alone, Patrick did nothing to stop the tears that seemed to well from the very deepest part of his being—a place that hadn’t seen the sun in a very long time.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Lara woke to an unexpected sight: two sculpted, sun-tousled men. They smiled down at her, one from eyes of fierce cobalt, the other’s sunny blue. Both looked grubby and salt-streaked and ready for a long soak in a hot tub, or at least a shower. The smell of sun, ocean, and sweat permeated the air.

  She promptly leaned over the edge of the couch and threw up.

  Liam backed away in horror. He’d never been comfortable with bodily functions. Patrick crouched next to her, swiping her hair away from her face as she retched miserably. “Don’t worry about it, sweetheart,” he murmured. “Get it all out.”

  Her stomach clenched, over and over again, as the contents spilled to the floor. When she was done, she kept her head where it was, hanging over the edge, so she didn’t have to meet anyone’s eyes.

  “Don’t move. I’ll be right back.”

  Patrick disappeared, and a second later a damp cloth was pressed against her face. Shaking, she moved it across her mouth. “I’m so sorry,” she croaked.

  Patrick used the towel to dab a spot that she’d missed. “Don’t worry about it, honey. Just lie back and take it easy.”

  She did as he said, a little startled by his use of the word “honey.” Opening her eyes a crack, she raised an eyebrow at Patrick.

  “He asked me and I told him,” he said in a husky voice, wiping her hair off her damp forehead.

  She groaned. “What a mess.”

  “Actually, he’s fine with it.”

  “No, I mean the floor. Just let me catch my breath and I’ll clean it up.”

  “No way. Stay where you are. I got this.”

  Lara finally dared to lift her head. “Where’s Liam?”

  Liam was nowhere to be seen. “I guess you scared him off,” said Patrick with a wink. “Don’t take it personally.”

  As he rose to his feet, she noticed a trickle of dried blood on his shin. “What happened?”

  “Manly stuff. Brotherly bond stuff. You wouldn’t understand.”

  She struggled to sit up. “Did you fight? I should have known you guys would get into trouble if I wasn’t there. I should never have left you alone.”

  He gently pushed her back down, then went into the kitchenette to rummage for rags. “No fights, at least not with blows. Or words,” he explained over his shoulder. “You have to speak man language to get it. He told me what he thought of me abandoning him to the tender loving care of Big Dog Callahan. I apologized and told him I was proud of him.”

  “So you had a conversation?”

  “Hell no. Well, a little bit, at the end.”

  “At the end of what?”

  Patrick reappeared with a stainless steel mixing bowl and a pile of torn T-shirts. “At the end of the Callahan Brothers Truth and Reconciliation Olympics. I guess you had to be there.”

  He knelt down and began mopping up the mess. Lara covered her face with one arm; even the sight of it was making her nauseous again. “I’m supposed to be back at work on Monday. I hope this is done by then.”

  “If you’re not better by tomorrow we’re not going anywhere. But these things usually pass quickly, as you know, Doc.”

  She groaned. “I don’t think this is food poisoning. There’s a stomach flu going around in San Diego. I think I picked it up at the hospital.”

  “How long does it last?”

  “A few days, us
ually. I’ll need fluids. Liam better have some bottled water. I’m not taking any chances.”

  “I have a case of water in the Hulk.” Patrick finished cleaning the floor and went to the sink to wring out the rags. “Keep that bowl close in case it hits you again. I’m going to go hang these up and check on Liam. My brother might be able to beat me on a surfboard, but when it comes to cleaning up after my girl, I’m undefeated.”

  “Yay for you,” she said weakly. The words “my girl” made her insides go warm and squishy, or maybe that was . . . She steeled herself, fighting a new wave of nausea. This one passed over without any new disaster. “I think I’m just going to lie here perfectly still until further notice.”

  “Good plan. If you feel like napping, that works too. Sleep’s a cure for everything, right? At least that’s what they’re always telling me whenever I break a bone. Which happens a lot.” He came to her side and passed a light hand over her forehead. “No fever.”

  “You’re playing doctor?”

  “Hey, I do more than dangle out of helicopters. I’m a trained paramedic, you know. Most of us are.”

  “Right. Forgot.” Her eyes drifted shut. “Thanks, Patrick. I owe you. I don’t know what, but something.”

  “I’ll mark it down. We’ll think of something good.”

  The next couple of days passed in a blur of dry heaves and vertiginously spinning rooms. She clung to the couch as if it were a lifeboat, only leaving when she had to stagger to the bathroom. On Sunday she borrowed Liam’s phone—neither hers nor Patrick’s had reception—to call the hospital. As soon as they heard she’d contracted the dreaded stomach flu making the rounds, they told her to take the whole week off. She also had to call the clinic and reschedule her interview.

  If not for Patrick she would have lost her mind along with every trace of food in her system. He was . . . well, perfect. He tended to her with a sort of brisk practicality that was exactly what she needed. He brought her bottled water, Gatorade, crackers, and miso soup, which he claimed worked better than chicken soup. The sound of his voice always made her perk up, no matter how deeply queasy she was feeling. The rest of life went on without her. Liam kept his distance, only speaking to her from the other side of the room. Liam and Patrick seemed to spend a lot of time surfing. She was vaguely aware when Liam’s girlfriend came home, and some sort of uproar ensued.

  But mostly she slept and sipped her fluids. And lived for the moments when Patrick would come rub her neck or give her a discreet sponge bath. Or drop a kiss on her head. Those were the only moments she felt like an actual human with a future that didn’t involve mixing bowls. The thought crossed her mind that she might be pregnant, except she quickly realized it wasn’t possible. Pregnant by Patrick . . . the idea ought to have alarmed her. But it didn’t. It made something spark to life, like a beacon on some distant horizon.

  The thought capsized under a wave of nausea. When she surfaced, when Patrick had rinsed out the bowl and brought it back, skimming a tender hand across her forehead, another stunning truth occurred to her.

  I love you.

  The words arose from the depths of her queasiness, quite naturally, as if they had been there all along.

  But they couldn’t have been. Love Patrick? Impossible. She would have known something like that. Stomach bugs did funny things to your brain, that was all.

  “You ran away with the housekeeper?” Patrick couldn’t get over it. Soledad Ramirez had worked for the Callahans for years. She had to be fifteen years older than Liam. She was pretty enough, he supposed, but his general impression had always been one of a dark-haired whirlwind of hard work. She used to tear through the ranch house like a hurricane of Ajax. They’d all been surprised when she learned sign language faster than any of them, and used it to insist that Liam put his dirty socks in the hamper and stop making careful piles of midnight snack plates in his room.

  “Soledad is a wonderful person, for a hearie,” he signed. “I trust her. She’s very capable and she doesn’t let anyone push her around. And she’s not a housekeeper anymore. She cleans houses for vacation rentals now. I do the cleaning here so she doesn’t have to. Except for vomit. I don’t clean up vomit.”

  “No, clearly that’s my job around here.”

  “Dad fired her. He shouldn’t have done that,” Liam signed.

  They were floating on their surfboards, taking advantage of a relatively calm day to give him a chance to practice surfing without nearly drowning. So far, so good. “He fired her because of you?”

  “No, he fired her because he started firing everyone. That’s not right. And he shouldn’t have made you leave.”

  Of course that would have upset Liam. Liam lived by rules and one of the Callahan family rules was that you stuck together. “No, he shouldn’t have. Is that why you left, because he fired Soledad?”

  “Yes. It wasn’t right. He was changing things around. Why can’t I go in the barn? That doesn’t make sense.”

  Patrick could imagine how upsetting Big Dog’s unpredictable behavior must have been for Liam. He’d always relied on his routines.

  “Are you ever going to back to Loveless?”

  Liam shielded his eyes from the sun as he watched the oncoming swells. “Soledad and I will discuss it after we get married.”

  “Married?”

  “Of course. You’re supposed to be married if you live together. Here comes a good one.”

  He leaped onto his board and skimmed toward the shore. Patrick was so shocked that the wave caught him with one foot on the board, the other sticking out behind him as if he were attempting some kind of oceangoing pirouette.

  He crashed into the churning foam for the hundredth time since coming to Baja.

  Married? His younger, developmentally challenged, deaf brother was getting married before him?

  He surfaced and discovered his ankle tether had come undone and his surfboard was bouncing on the waves a short distance away. Liam was shouting and pointing at it. He gave his brother a wave of acknowledgment and paddled over to the board. Resting his arms on it, he kicked his way toward shore. He was thirty years old, which meant Liam was twenty-eight. Plenty old enough for marriage. And it made sense that he’d see marriage as a requirement of living together as a couple. Liam might be his little brother, but he was a grown man perfectly capable of deciding what he wanted, and going after it.

  In some ways, Liam had things more together than he did. The realization was just as humbling as this whole surfing fiasco.

  By midweek Lara was feeling well enough to sit down for dinner at the outdoor table behind the bungalow. A red and white striped beach umbrella sheltered them from the late day sun. Soledad brought out brightly colored bowls filled with a fish stew she swore would strengthen Lara’s digestion. Some tortillas, a few bottles of cerveza, and they had themselves a feast. Liam wore his hearing aid headset for the occasion, though he could only use it for a short time until his head began to ache.

  A paler, thinner Lara took a careful sip of broth, then set down her spoon. “I want to thank all of you and apologize for being the worst houseguest ever. It’s not every day someone shows up uninvited, throws up all over your living room floor, then refuses to leave the couch for the next week.”

  “It hasn’t been a week,” pointed out the always literal Liam.

  “It hasn’t? It sure feels like it.” She inhaled the steam rising from her spoonful of soup, as if trying to acclimate her stomach to it in advance. “Anyway, I’m really sorry. If any of you is ever feeling sick, there’s a couch waiting for you up in San Diego. Open invitation.”

  Patrick raised his bottle of Corona and clicked it against Soledad’s. “Same goes for San Gabriel, although my couch isn’t much to speak of.” In fact, he could barely summon an image of his lonely apartment. It felt like a million years since he’d been there.

  “San Gabriel?” Soledad brightened. “You’re one of the bachelors, no? The ones on TV? The sexy, single firefighters that all
the girls go crazy for? But there’s a maledicto, what is it . . . a curse?” She crossed herself.

  “That’s a huge exaggeration.” Patrick stuffed a chunk of whitefish in his mouth to avoid further comment. He felt Lara’s teasing gaze on him.

  “There is no curse?”

  Congratulating himself on his forethought, Patrick pointed to his mouth and chewed earnestly at his fish.

  “I don’t know,” said Lara. “If Patrick Callahan IV, the handsome, dynamic, heroic, partially college-educated fireman can’t find anyone to marry him, I think this curse might need looking into.”

  “You won’t marry him?” Liam asked, looking seriously from one to the other of them. “Why not? He’s not a bad guy, overall.”

  Lara choked on her spoonful of soup. Patrick, fighting to keep a straight face, pounded her on the back. She gagged, and Liam scrambled away from the table. Patrick swung her chair around so if she threw up she’d be pointed away from the table.

  “How is it possible for one person to produce so much vomit?” Liam murmured to Soledad with complete seriousness. He had no concept of sarcasm.

  Lara’s shoulders quaked—from laughter, Patrick hoped. Was she laughing at Liam’s comment or at the thought of marrying him? Was the idea really so ludicrous? Not that he was thinking about marriage. But surely once a guy had taken care of a girl while she was sick, that girl ought to put him in the category of potential life partner.

  Really, she shouldn’t be laughing quite so hard.

  He put an arm around her while her ribs quaked. Finally she straightened up. “I’m okay. I’m okay. False alarm,” she told the other two with a bright smile. “That’ll teach you to surprise me with crazy talk. So. Soledad and Liam. When exactly did the sparks begin to fly between you two?”

  The rest of the meal was devoted to getting to know Soledad—the more Patrick saw, the more he liked her down-to-earth, devoted style—and sharing stories from the firehouse.

  Crazy talk. The phrase stuck in his mind and mocked him the rest of the night.