FIREBRAND

by Paula Detmer Riggs

  "Actually I like both exactly the same," he fudged. At the same time he caught a flash of lilac to his right and found himself looking into Darcy's guarded blue eyes.

  She was dressed in an old-fashioned riding costume with a bustle that reduced her waist to nothing and a long flowing skirt. Judd decided that it gave her an air of sophistication and mystery.

  "You have to choose," Angel declared vehemently. "It's a rule."

  "A rule, huh?" Expression solemn, he shifted his gaze to the ridiculous scrap of velvet, ostrich plume and flowers perched on top of Darcy's surprisingly controlled, old-fashioned hairdo.

  "Then I'd have to say that I like Mommy's best."

  While the girls shared a disappointed look, he and Darcy exchanged a long, tense one. "Good morning," he said with a belated smile.

  "Good morning." Her lips curved briefly, and Judd caught a hint of a tightly controlled tension in the corners. "Looks like it's going to be a nice day for a parade."

  "Yes. Too nice. I was hoping for rain."

  "But then the parade would have been canceled."

  "Yeah, that's the idea."

  Darcy couldn't help noticing how tired Judd looked. And his eyes had taken on the same hollow, haunted look they'd had the night of Mike's wake. But then, she'd seen a few shadows in her own eyes over the past two weeks.

  "I hear you've been taking some flak over your decision to cancel the fireworks on Thursday."

  "I can handle it."

  Anyone watching would see two old friends chatting easily in the middle of the milling crowd in a party mood. Anyone would be wrong, Darcy thought as she brushed a piece of lint from her sleeve and smiled.

  "Yes, I'm sure you can."

  Judd noticed that the girls were now over by the racing trap with Sean-O, arguing about who got to sit next to Rosie in the back.

  Prudy, already seated in the front, returned Judd's wave, then pointed to her belly and pantomimed, "Soon."

  Grinning, he turned back to find Darcy watching him.

  "I saw Ann Billings this morning. She said that you were no longer interested in buying a house."

  "That's right."

  This time they both found other things to look at. "Well, good luck in San Francisco if I don't see you before you go," Darcy murmured a moment later.

  "You will."

  Her smile slipped only a fraction before she rescued it. "No, I'd rather not. Let's just consider this our formal goodbye."

  Judd's stomach convulsed the way it always did right after a fire. He took a moment to settle it, then said gruffly, "If that's what you want."

  She nodded, her smile still bright and her eyes a pale shimmering blue. "It's better that way."

  "All right. On one condition."

  Her smile disappeared. "What condition?"

  "That you cancel your contract with Grant Koch to do the work on your place and hire someone else."

  She stared at him as though he'd suddenly stripped naked in the street. "Judd, I know you don't like Grant, but he really is the best around and he's being very generous in what he's giving me for the money."

  "Forget the money. I'll pay the difference. Just promise me, okay?"

  "Not unless you give me one good, sound, logical reason."

  Judd's limited reservoir of patience let go. "Okay, you want a reason. How does murder strike you?"

  Her head whipped up and her eyes locked on his. "You're joking. Aren't you?"

  "What the hell, everyone's asking me that these days? Do I look like a comedian or something?"

  "No, you look like a man who needs a good night's sleep and a long vacation."

  Judd muttered a word that once would have sent him to the woodshed and his old man speeding for the hickory stick.

  "Look, Red, I don't have time to explain, but trust me. I'm only thinking of you and the girls."

  Darcy shook her head slowly and the wildfire that was usually in her eyes seemed sadly lacking. "If you were really thinking of me and the girls, you wouldn't be running away again. You'd be hanging tough like Papa used to say, trying to work things out, facing up to the bad as well as the good like the rest of us." She hesitated, then shook her head. "And I'm just wasting my breath."

  She walked away, her spine straight, her head held high, and then, suddenly, she picked up her skirts and was speeding toward the gig, where Prudy was doubled over in the seat, her arms wrapped protectively around the "guys."

  Judd reached her a split second after Darcy. Sean-O had the little girls corraled near the horse trailer, his blue eyes sharp with worry.

  Darcy had already climbed into the trap's seat and had one arm around the terrified girl's shoulder. Prudy's face was ashen, but her eyes were filled with wonder as they found Judd's.

  "Those two little guys kicking and tumbling inside there, they were never real, not until this moment." She smiled, then let out a sharp little cry before aiming another grin Judd's way. "See, I told you."

  "You sure did, honey." He was suddenly gut-tight scared, the way a probie tech on his first emergency run was.

  "We'd better get her to the hospital," Darcy said, glancing around. "You never can tell with twins. Sometimes they're in a hurry."

  Judd bit off a groan. "Were yours?"

  "Yes."

  "Oh hell!" His hands were sweating and he wiped them nervously on his flanks. "What else can go wrong today?"

  Prudy giggled. "Stay with me, okay? Both of you," she said, looking from Judd to Darcy and then back to Judd again, where her gaze clung beseechingly to his. "Just until the doctor gets there?"

  Darcy hid her worry behind a teasing grin. "First, we'd better get you to the hospital or you'll be having the babies on the street."

  Prudy giggled again, then doubled over, groaning. "Bummer," she gasped when the pain finally eased.

  Judd cast a fast look around. The streets were blocked with pedestrians. "We'd better take her in my truck. From the size of that crowd, we'll need the siren."

  "Okay."

  "Stay here. I'll go get it." Judd took Prudy's hand and kissed it. "Hang in there, Mama. I'm not about to let anything happen to my namesake and his little brother."

  "Who says Judd's going to be born first?"

  "Wait and see." He gave Prudy as big a smile as he could manage before hurrying away.

  "What can I do to help?" Sean-O said, stepping forward.

  "Take care of the girls," Darcy said quietly. "In fact, you might as well drive the trap in the parade. That way the girls won't miss anything."

  "If you're sure."

  "Yes, I—" The rest of her words were drowned out in a huge shudder of sound, like a dozen claps of thunder booming in unison. At virtually the same moment, the sky over the warehouse was suddenly filled with bright orange flame shooting as high as the nearby maples.

  Passersby and parade participants in costume, who a moment before had been in a party mood, ran for cover, screaming, bumping into one another, falling, getting up again, desperate to escape the flaming debris raining down.

  Judd had just reached his truck when the warehouse roof blew. Icy calm now, he started the engine, slammed the gearshift into first and drove directly through the plate glass doors into the lobby.

  He wasted precious seconds retrieving his coat and mask from the back of the truck. Putting them on took another second, and then he was running. Suite 100

  was already filling with smoke, making it hard to see and harder to breathe, even with the breathing apparatus. Calling on his memory, Judd made it to Koch's private office without taking a wrong turn.

  At the door, however, he stopped, confronted with a solid wall of flame. He glanced around, spotted the fire extinguisher recessed behind glass a few yards farther along the hall and punched the release lever.

  Two seconds later, he had made a path through the flames. He found Grant slumped near the coffee table, a semiautomatic pistol still in his hand, his eyes closed. Leon was lying faceup on the floor, a neat hole right in t
he middle of his forehead.

  Judd figured he was dead or soon would be. Koch was still breathing and showed no obvious wounds.

  Adrenaline was working in Judd's favor and he didn't waste time. He grabbed Grant's gun, shoved it in the waistband of his trousers, then hoisted the unconscious man over his shoulder and headed for the lobby.

  The smoke was denser, a roiling, steaming cloud that stuck to his faceplate and seared his exposed skin as he staggered blindly in what he hoped was the right direction.

  Behind him a ceiling joist snapped, the sound echoing like a pistol shot before the two-by-six gave way, crashing into the once plush office.

  Through the smoke, Judd saw the red of the truck and veered that way. Just as he was beginning to think he would make it, the building shuddered under the force of yet another explosion.

  The concussion loosened his hold on the unconscious Koch and sent them both sprawling. Stunned and dizzy, Judd rolled to his hands and knees and was crawling toward Koch, intending to share his oxygen. Thirty feet above, a beam tore loose and plummeted toward them.

  Acting on instinct, Judd leaped forward, covering Koch's body with his. The pain blistering across his back was like a throbbing scream. And then, blissfully, it was gone, lost in the soft white vapor beckoning him.

  As soon as the OB nurse had Prudy settled in one of the hospital's labor rooms and had assured Darcy that she would stay with the white-faced, worried, soon-to-be mama, Darcy was off, racing through the sterile corridors now teeming with victims of the fire toward the even more crowded emergency wing.

  Half-crazy with terror, she stopped the first man in uniform she saw. It was the shy young fireman she'd encountered not too long ago at the firehouse. His face was black and his right hand sported a stark white bandage.

  "Chief Calhoun? Where is he?"

  The fireman took one look at her white face and desperate eyes and grabbed her by the elbow. "C'mon, I'll take you there."

  "There" turned out to be a bustling nurses' station. Here, at least, the noise level was somewhat diminished, if not the activity.

  "The lady with the bow in her hair," the fireman said, pointing. "She's in charge. Maybe she'll tell you more than she told Monk and me."

  Darcy started forward through the organized confusion, then muttered a silent prayer of thanks at whatever benevolent spirit had assigned Jen Frick to duty that morning.

  "Jen, over here."

  The harried nurse's preoccupied scowl turned to a surprised grin as Darcy caught her eye.

  "Darcy!" she cried, hurrying forward to meet Darcy halfway. "Who is it? One of the twins? Sean-O?"

  "No, they're fine. On their way home, I hope—if they can get through, that is." Darcy clutched her friend's arm and dragged her out of the traffic lane.

  "Jen, those two men the paramedics brought in a few minutes ago, the ones they hauled out of the warehouse before the roof came down, where are they?"

  Jen glanced toward a pair of double doors at the end of the corridor. "One's in surgery right now."

  Darcy's fingers bit into her friend's arm's. "And the other?"

  "In the morgue."

  Some crazy bastard had turned on the emergency medical technician's heart monitor, and the way too rapid beeps were as loud as ax blows against steel in his head.

  Judd tried to turn his head toward the sound, but the quick jolt of pain in his neck stopped him cold. He tried to open his eyes but managed only the tiniest of slits. Even then, the piercing needles of light hitting his retinas had him closing them again. He struggled to move his arm, but it seemed tied down.

  "Don't try to move, Mr. Calhoun," a soft voice ordered. "Tell me what you want and I'll get it for you."

  "Darcy," he managed to croak. "I want … Darcy."

  * * *

  Epilogue

  « ^

  "Stop peeking!" Judd ordered before dropping a kiss on the top of his wife's new wash-and-wear hairdo. "You're as bad as the twins."

  Grinning, her eyes still squeezed tight, Darcy challenged, "Which ones? Prudy's or ours?"

  "All of them."

  Judd and Jason were a robust six months and teething. For three nights straight, they'd been taking turns screaming so that no one in the house had gotten more than a few hours of sleep at a time.

  Judd senior had taken the longest stint at walking first one and then the other, claiming that the "guys," being outnumbered the way they were, had to stick together.

  "I'm thinking of buying those earmuffs like workers at airports wear," Darcy informed him archly as Judd's big hands guided her across the attic floor.

  The smell of paint and plasterboard and new wood was particularly strong here. As part of his recuperation, Judd had insisted on doing most of the remodeling work on the house himself.

  "Therapy," he'd called it, for his broken back, but Darcy suspected it had something to do with his need to put a part of himself into the old house, a part of the man he was now instead of the angry, rebellious boy who had spurned the very love he'd secretly craved for so many long, lonely years.

  "Okay, you can open your eyes now."

  "About time." Darcy tried to sound peeved, but she was laughing as she did as she was told. "Oh, Judd! A window seat! I thought you said we couldn't afford it."

  He tried hard to look nonchalant, but his eyes were gleaming like a little boy springing a cherished surprise. "So I fudged a little. Like it?"

  Darcy threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. "I love it, love it, love it! And I love you."

  His mouth curved crookedly under the mustache she adored. "Yeah, that's what you keep saying. One of these days I'm going to believe you, probably around the time you change your mind and boot me out of this circus you call a family."

  Even though he was grinning, his tone was gruff, and his eyes were still touched with the old shadows. For the past three months since he'd gotten out of the hospital—two weeks early to keep their date with the priest at Saint Stephen's—he'd been learning little by little to trust the happiness that sometimes seemed too precious and too rare to be real.

  "No way, tough guy! No matter what you do, I'm not letting you get away a second time. Not since I found out how handy you are with your hands."

  "Yeah?" His hands slid down her sides, found the dangling tail of her shirt and burrowed beneath to find lush warm skin.

  "Yeah." She rubbed her breasts against his wide chest and his reaction was immediate and blatant, his arousal restrained only by the zipper of his old jeans. Darcy's pulse leaped and she couldn't seem to stop smiling.

  "Sweetheart," she whispered close to his ear, "you have to stop being so reluctant about expressing your sexual impulses."

  "One of these days that smart mouth of yours is going to get you into big trouble, Mrs. Calhoun."

  "I sincerely hope so, Mr. Calhoun," she purred before taking a tiny nip of his ear.

  Groaning like a man in deep pain, he buried his face in the warm hollow of her shoulder and tightened his arms until she was as close to being a part of him as clothes and skin would permit.

  "How 'bout we christen that new window seat, er, creatively?" he whispered.

  "Now?" Darcy tugged his flannel shirt from his jeans and slipped her hands into the warmth generated by his skin.

  "Can't think of a better time, can you?" Judd's heart rate was rocketing higher than it had in the critical days after the doctor had pieced together the crushed vertebrae in his back.

  The beam that had hit him had also hit the roof of the truck, which took most of the impact. Or so Monk had told him the first time they'd allowed him to visit Judd in ICU.

  As for Grant Koch and Leon, no one knew more than the basics. That Grant had shot Leon, then set the fire as cover, but he hadn't figured on the fumes from the paint and other remodeling paraphernalia in an adjoining suite, and the building had gone up faster than he'd anticipated, trapping him.

  "Ann and Tom and the others will be here soon, and I still have
a few more ornaments to put on the tree." With gentle, loving fingers she deliberately stroked the long, straight suture lines framing his spinal column, where she knew the skin was still supersensitive.

  The doctors had called it a miracle that his spinal cord had survived intact. She had agreed, and every night gave thanks in her prayers.

  "Feel good?" she murmured as a small tremor ran down his spine.

  "Too good. I'm not as patient as I used to be, you know."

  Darcy arched backward so that he could see the utter disbelief in her eyes. "Uh-oh. Now that's what I call bull. You were never patient."

  "I was, too. Especially in the hospital. Several of the nurses, including our fussy friend Jen, in fact, mentioned how much they were going to miss me."

  Darcy shook her head, her mouth pursed in a pout of disbelief, which he promptly kissed. And then, when her lips softened and warmed, he kissed her a few more times for good measure.

  "That's not what I heard, Chief Calhoun," she murmured when he finally lifted his mouth from hers. "I heard that they were getting up a petition to have you evicted, but you talked Armadi into dismissing you before they could present it to the hospital administrators."

  She grinned, and her eyes glowed with the pure joy of knowing that her ring was on his finger just as surely as his was on hers. Till death do us part, which she fervently hoped was years and years from now.

  "There was also some talk of picketing," she added.

  Judd's eyes narrowed dangerously, but his hands were busy undoing the buttons of the old flannel shirt she'd taken from his drawer before he had a chance to miss it.

  "You try spending three months in that hellhole and see how you like it."

  Darcy burst out laughing. "Hellhole? I thought it was a blankety-blank prison cell."

  "It was, and if you don't stop teasing me, you're going to get a dose of your own punishment."

  "The cruel and unusual kind, you mean?" she sassed. "The kind you can't seem to get enough of?"

  "That does it," Judd muttered. Before she could get out more than a squeak of surprise, he had her in his arms and was aiming her toward the new window seat.