by Cathie Linz
Some more good-natured ribbing took place before Darnell stopped passing around the latest photos of his baby girl to put in his two cents worth.
“I don’t know. I think marriage has a lot in common with fighting fire,” Darnell quietly maintained. “You have to trust each other not to run when the going gets bad. You have to depend on them being there.”
With Darnell’s words, an imaginary lightbulb suddenly snapped on in Jack’s head as he recalled something—Kayla’s comment about Jack being committed to his friends at the firehouse and did he think he’d ever be able to depend on someone outside of that closed circle. And he’d told her then that that kind of emotional commitment to a woman could eat a man alive.
But marriage hadn’t eaten him alive. In fact, he’d been happier than he’d ever been this past month. He’d come to depend on Kayla being there for him, with him. Did that mean he loved her? For the first time ever, the possibility didn’t scare him spitless.
“Jack is still a newlywed,” Sam stated. “Look at that stunned, kinda stupid look on his face. He’s thinking about his wife.”
“If I was married to Kayla, I’d think about her, too.” Boomer noted with a lecherous grin. “You ever get unhappy, Jack, you just send her my way.”
Jack had grabbed a handful of Boomer’s shirt and yanked him out of his chair before he knew what happened.
“Hey, buddy, calm down,” Boomer protested. “I was just kidding!”
Swearing under his breath, Jack released his best friend with a muttered, “Sorry.” Running a hand through his hair, Jack shot a warning look in Boomer’s direction as he added, “But don’t even think about chasing after Kayla.”
“I won’t.”
“Good,” Jack growled, trying to come to terms with the powerful emotions raging inside. The fury he’d felt at the thought of Boomer touching Kayla had been more than mere jealousy. Even though he knew his friend would never betray him, he’d been stunned by the intensity of his feelings. Apparently he wasn’t the only one—his coworkers were warily eyeing him as if he’d suddenly grown two heads. “What are you guys staring at?”
“Nothing,” they all answered as one.
As Jack left the break room, he heard someone mutter, “What was his problem?” and then Boomer’s laughing reply, “If I didn’t know better, I’d say there’s a man who just discovered he’s in love with his wife.”
“I came home and found Jack ripping out the ceiling,” Kayla told Diane over the phone Saturday night. She’d called to share the good news about Bruce dropping the custody suit, but the conversation had soon centered on Jack.
“So you told me. That’s what happens when you leave a man home alone with tools.”
“And he didn’t tell me how he really broke his leg.”
“Kind of a minor complaint, don’t you think? Come on, Kayla, what’s really going on here?”
The kindness in her best friend’s voice brought the threat of tears as she unsteadily confessed, “Jack said he was hooked up with a woman afraid to light plain matches... and...and he said it as if he regretted it.”
“Your marriage is in trouble because you won’t light matches?” Diane was clearly puzzled.
“He says I’m afraid. And he’s right. How did a girl who is afraid of matches end up marrying a firefighter?”
“As I recall, it was supposed to be a marriage of convenience, having nothing to do with love but rather with practical matters.”
“That’s what was supposed to happen,” Kayla muttered. “But I screwed up and fell in love with him.”
“Hmm, I can see that loving your husband might be a terrible problem,” Diane teased.
“It is if he doesn’t love you back.”
“What makes you think he doesn’t?”
“We had this big fight last night. I flat-out asked him if being a firefighter was more important to him than being a husband, and he said yes.”
“People say things they don’t mean when they’re fighting.”
“That’s what Corky said, but...”
“How about looking at what the man has actually done, by his actions instead of his words? According to what you’ve told me, he went through a great deal of trouble to stage an incredibly romantic marriage proposal complete with music and flowers. He helped you out when Ashley had the stomach flu and didn’t complain or freak out when she threw up on him. He practically eats you with those sexy eyes of his whenever he looks at you. He built a skylight for you and a cathedral ceiling, just because you once mentioned in passing that it might be neat Gee, Kayla, it sounds to me like he’s doing all the things a man in love would do.”
“Why would a man in love say that firefighting was more important than being a husband?”
“Because he was scared of his feelings. When you found out that you loved him, you socked him in the stomach. Not exactly the actions of a totally in-control woman.”
“I barely touched him. And I did that because he hadn’t been up-front with me, because there was so much of himself that he was holding back.”
“Socking him doesn’t seem to have been the answer,” Diane noted wryly.
“I know. I plan on taking another course of action. Corky calls it fighting fire with fire.”
“What do you call it?”
“Jack’s Waterloo.”
Boomer’s words stayed with Jack through the night. “A man who just discovered he loved his wife.” Was that an accurate description of Jack? A man in love with his wife? It sure as hell was starting to feel that way.
“You have to trust each other not to run,” Darnell had said earlier. What if Kayla had decided to run? What if she was tired of living with a firefighter who told her his job was more important than she was? He hadn’t really meant that, but once the words were out it was hard to take them back.
His shift over, Jack was getting ready to leave the station the next morning when Boomer yelled out, “Hey, buddy, wait up!”
“Look, if it’s about last night, I’m not in the mood for any more kidding around.” Jack’s emotions felt too new for him to even examine too closely, let alone his buddy.
“This isn’t a joke. I wish it was. Jack, the dispatch just told me that there was a fire reported... at your house.”
The pallor on Jack’s face made Boomer reach out to grab his arm. “Steady there, buddy.”
“How bad?”
“I don’t know. The call just came in. Your house isn’t in our district but the appropriate units are on their way.”
Jack dashed to his car and made the twenty-minute drive home in nearly half that time. And all the while his mind was speeding as fast as his car. What if something happened to her? What if he’d discovered he loved her only to lose her?
Jack was too afraid to pray. The last time he’d prayed he’d been a terrified nine-year-old trapped in the twisted ruins of his parents’ car. He’d prayed that his parents would live...and they hadn’t.
So he didn’t pray. He just raced home as fast as he could. Because home was where Kayla was. She was like a bowline, always there, something you could bet your life on. How could he have been so blind? Why hadn’t he realized he loved her earlier? Hell, he’d probably loved her the first time he’d seen her, when she’d yelled at him for swinging his crutch at her. Those funny tugs he’d felt on his heart when she’d fussed over him hadn’t been irritation as he’d impatiently dismissed. She’d broken down his defenses one by one.
Jack was used to being the one who walked in and rescued people. He wasn’t used to someone else doing it to him. But Kayla had. She’d rescued him from a life devoid of a special woman’s warmth.
He’d discovered be loved her last night, but only now was he realizing how deeply rooted that love was.
Giving in, Jack finally whispered a broken prayer before turning the corner to his house on two wheels. A fire engine was out front, red lights flashing, when he came to a screeching halt in front of his house.
Jack frant
ically searched for signs of flames even as he leaped over the pink impatiens Kayla had planted along the walkway.
Recognizing him, one of the firefighters called out. “Hey, Ace, how’s it going? What are you doing here? A little out of your jurisdiction, isn’t it?”
“I live here.” He came to a skidding halt as he saw Kayla standing on the front step. She was wearing a trench coat and her feet were bare, showing off the bright red nail polish on her toenails.
“Well, you can relax,” the firefighter said. “It was a false alarm.”
“What happened?” Jack demanded of Kayla, even as he took her in his arms and practically hugged the breath out of her. “Where’s Ashley?”
He had to bend his head to hear her reply, partially because she was speaking against his collarbone. But he wasn’t about to let her go. Not now. Not ever. “Ashley is with Bruce for the weekend.”
“Right. What happened?”
“I lit lots of candles, those votive kind. I lit too many, I guess, and I didn’t realize I’d set a bunch of the candles right under the smoke alarm until the dam thing went off. I didn’t know it was hooked up directly to the fire department. I feel like an idiot.”
“You’re not an idiot,” he murmured huskily, resting his chin on the top of her head as he rocked her in his arms an extra moment before reluctantly turning to the firefighters taking their leave. “Thanks, guys.”
“Anytime,” the firefighter who’d recognized him replied. “Nice skylight you got in the living room. You do good work. Want to come over to my place and finish my basement?”
“I’ve got plenty right here to keep me busy,” Jack retorted, keeping his arm around Kayla.
Guiding her back inside, Kayla was still muttering about feeling foolish.
“No harm done,” Jack said, his voice rusty. “False alarms happen.”
“When Corky told me to fight fire with fire, this wasn’t what I had in mind,” Kayla noted.
“What did you have in mind?”
“This.” She unbelted her nondescript trenchcoat to reveal the fire engine red teddy she was wearing, an incredibly sexy piece of nothing that revealed more than it covered. The plunging neckline went almost to her navel, while the high-cut lace showed off her thighs.
Jack just stared at her, slack-jawed, before blurting out, “I love you.” The statement came tumbling from his lips in one continuous word.
Frowning at him, she wrapped the coat around herself again. “Are you making fun of me?” she demanded with a primness that made him long to kiss her.
“No. No way! Believe me, I didn’t want to love you. I fought it as hard and as long as I could,” he muttered. “And I was doing a pretty good job of it, too, until Boomer told me that a fire had been reported here. Then...then I knew. If anything had happened to you...”
He tugged her back into his arms again.
Kayla drew his head down so she could look into his smoky eyes, searching for the truth and finding it there. “You mean you really do love me?” she whispered.
“Yeah.” He ran his work-roughened fingertips across her forehead, down her cheek, over the stubborn tilt of her jaw and back up her other cheek—as if drawing an invisible frame around her face. “What about you?”
Her smile was both radiant and shaky. “I knew I loved you when I socked you in the stomach.”
“That was your way of showing me that you loved me?”
“No.” She turned her head to kiss his palm. “No. I shouldn’t have done that.”
“And I shouldn’t have said some of the things that I did. Fighting fire is my life, Kayla. But so are you. One isn’t more important than the other. I was angry when I said that. I was fighting my feelings for you.”
“Why did you fight it?” she asked in a small voice. “Did you think it would be so bad to love me?”
“Loving anyone scared the bejesus out of me.”
“Why? Is it because of your parents’ deaths?”
Sighing, he realized that she wasn’t going to be happy until she’d heard it all. “Yeah. I loved them and they left. It’s not rational, maybe, but that’s how I felt. You love someone, they end up getting taken away from you. I vowed then and there that I was going to be tough. I wasn’t ever going to be hurt like that again, never allow myself to get that dependent on someone else. It was a vow I kept, even when Corky and Sean adopted me.”
“Because admitting you loved them might mean having them leave you?”
“Yeah.”
“What about now? Do you believe in love now? Do you believe that I love you, despite the fact that you’re the most stubbornly mule-headed man I’ve ever met? I love you, anyway. You are worthy of being loved. You don’t have to keep proving yourself. You’re already a hero.”
“I’m not a hero. I’m just a man doing his job. It’s what I do. It’s what I am.”
“No one takes more risks than you do. Why is that?”
“Maybe I’m trying to make up for past mistakes.”
“What past mistakes?”
“The car accident. With my parents. It was my fault.” The harsh words were torn out of him.
“How could that be? You were just a kid, sleeping in the back seat.”
“I wasn’t asleep. I was acting up. I was tired of being cooped up in the car. The drive from Springfield had seemed to take forever. My father looked over his shoulder at me. That’s why he didn’t see the car coming at us. Later I was told it was a miracle I was spared. I figured I must have been saved for a reason and that reason was to make a difference, to help others. I wanted to be a firefighter to make up for what I’d done wrong.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“There’s more.” A muscle in his jaw throbbed, a visible sign of his emotions, emotions he was trying to keep in check. “My first year in the department, I made another mistake. There was this kid, no bigger than Ashley, hiding under his bed. I was wearing my breathing apparatus, the smoke was thick enough to cut in there. I saw the kid, reached for him. But he was frightened of me, he thought I was some kind of monster coming to get him. I heard him scream ‘Monster’ and then saw him crawl out from the other side of the bed, right into the flames. There was no saving him.”
“Oh, Jack. I’m so sorry.” She slid her arms around his back.
For a moment he tensed against her. The years of automatically rejecting comfort and love were tough to break, and she was fearful that he might push her away. Then, with a sudden groan, he pulled her close, dropping his forehead to her shoulder.
Kayla blinked away the tears as she tenderly stroked his dark hair with her fingers. At first she expressed her loving compassion simply with her touch.
After a few moments had passed, she spoke. “You just said it yourself, Jack. There was no saving that little boy. Just as there was no saving your parents in that car accident. Things happen, tragic things happen, but they aren’t your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong. You didn’t set the fire that killed that child.”
His voice was ragged as he said, “No, but I didn’t save him, either.”
“So you’ve been trying to make up for it ever since by risking your own life to save a child’s. Oh, Jack, don’t you see? You have to let go of the past. You’ve got to be willing to move ahead, to know that there are people who love you. To trust in that love.”
“What if I don’t deserve it?”
“Don’t say that!” She tugged on his hair in a gentle but firm reprimand.
Lifting his head, he stared into her eyes. They were as blue as the heart of a flame, he belatedly realized. He’d been searching since the day he’d first met her for a way to describe her eyes. Now he’d found it.
Her eyes flashed fire at him as her look turned into a glare. “You do deserve to be loved, dammit! You just have to be willing to reach out your hand and grab it, take that risk. That shouldn’t be so difficult for a man used to living on the edge.”
“Keep talking.” His voice was thic
k with emotion as he tucked a loose strand of her honey brown hair behind her ear.
“Remember what you told me about fire, that you had to learn about it, respect it and make it your friend, to do your job? Well, how about doing that with love? Learn about it, respect it and make it your friend instead of your enemy.”
“And how do I do that?”
“I can help you.”
“I’m sure you can. But I already learned a thing or two on my own.”
“Like what?”
“Like the fact that my life would be dark and empty without you. Like the fact that even though you’re bossy and you hog all the mushrooms on a pizza, I love you.”
Her smile was glorious as she said, “Tell me again.”
“You’re bossy and you hog—”
“I meant the last part.”
“You’re going to make me say it again?”
“You bet I am. A hundred times a day, until it comes as naturally to you as ripping out ceilings.”
“A hundred times a day?”
His exaggerated look of horror cracked her up. “Okay, ten times a day,” she said.
“Twice, maybe. A week.”
“Four times a day and that’s my final offer.”
“I accept.”
The words were spoken against her mouth as he kissed her. The wealth of emotion expressed brought tears to her eyes. There had always been passion before, always been hunger and need. There had even been tenderness and gentleness. But now there was love. Love that no longer had to be kept hidden, no longer had to be fought.
His arms cradled her, wrapping her in their protective warmth, surrounding, encircling her. She loved him so much, and the freedom to tell him, to show him, was powerful and heady.
“Remember when you told me you were an expert with knots?” Kayla huskily asked.
“Mmm,” he mumbled as he grappled with the knot on the belt of her trench coat while she backed down the hallway toward their bedroom, carefully avoiding the trail of unlit scented candles.