“Thanks,” she murmured.
He studied her for a minute longer and she knew she must be a mess—bedraggled and sooty and smelling of smoke and fire extinguisher chemicals.
“Welcome back. I guess.”
* * *
SOMETHING WAS UP.
Brendan frowned as he watched Lucy Drake slide back behind the wheel of her fancy BMW. She sat for a moment gazing out the front windshield into the darkness as if she couldn’t quite remember how to put the car in gear.
He was aware of a tiny, wriggling concern, like a slippery earthworm in the garden he couldn’t quite grasp.
Usually, she was brash and confident, striding through the world with her designer suits and leather briefcases.
On her rare visits to Hope’s Crossing before Jess had died, Lucy would blow in with a backseat full of expensive gifts for the kids and for Jess and story after story about her exciting life in Seattle as the marketing director at a hugely successful and rapidly expanding software company.
Yeah, the circumstances were rough tonight. It had to be a rude welcome for her to come back to Iris House and end up with a chimney fire five minutes later.
That didn’t completely explain the way she had been acting. The woman who had just headed away looking lost and alone didn’t seem at all like the fiercely driven go-getter who usually made no secret of her disdain for him.
Don’t you think you can do better than a washed-up jock with more muscles than brains?
He pushed away the bitter memory he hadn’t realized still haunted him somewhere deep inside to find he wasn’t alone in his contemplation of Lucy’s little red BMW.
Pete Valentine, one of his volunteer firefighters who ran a successful plumbing business the rest of the time, stood at his elbow. The other man licked his bottom lip with a greedy sort of look as his gaze followed her taillights. “Lucy Drake. She’s still as hot as ever. Man, she used to make my balls ache in high school.”
He glowered at the locker room talk which, unfortunately, wasn’t all that uncommon among his crew at times.
Pete was married to a nurse at the hospital. If she heard him talking like this, Janet would probably give him a whole new definition of aching balls.
Pete seemed to take his silence as tacit permission. “Something about that whole badass-Goth-girl thing just did it for me, you know? Especially because she was so smart on top of all that attitude. Honor roll, the whole thing. I sat behind her in Mrs. McKnight’s English class senior year, and I spent the whole semester trying to get a peek beneath all that black leather, if you know what I mean.”
He had always thought he liked Pete, but right now he wanted to take one of the attack fire hoses to him, for reasons he didn’t quite understand.
“Yeah, well, how about we don’t take any more visits down your horny teenage memory lane while we have a job to finish?” he growled.
Pete blinked at his tone and his glare. “Uh, sure, Chief. Sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it. I was just surprised to see her, that’s all.”
Yeah. Join the club, Brendan thought as Pete hurried away.
He never would have guessed when he tucked the kids in at home with Mrs. Madison and drove past this very house on his way to his shift that evening that he would be back here—and facing Lucy in the process.
Though her car was long gone, he still couldn’t help gazing down the road where she had traveled.
He hadn’t missed how evasive she had been when he’d asked how long she was staying. He had to hope it was only a day or two.
Some people just tended to shake things up wherever they went, to spawn chaos and tumult without even trying. Lucy had that particular gift in spades—as tonight clearly indicated.
He and Carter and Faith were finally digging their way out of the deep, inky chasm Jess’s death had tossed them all into. They were finally settling back into a routine, moving forward with one steady foot in front of the other. His kids didn’t need Lucy to aim all that chaos in their direction and shake up the world that was finally feeling calm for the first time in two years.
No sense in worrying about it, he thought as he turned back to the fire and all the details he needed to do in order to clear the scene and send his engines back to the house.
One thing about Lucy. She never stayed long in Hope’s Crossing. In a few days, no doubt she would be packing up her little red car and heading back into the fray, to Seattle and her high-powered career and the world where she belonged.
CHAPTER TWO
A MAN WHO had reached the ripe old age of thirty-six ought to have picked up a little sense along the way.
The next morning, Brendan sipped at his coffee at the counter of his father’s café, The Center of Hope, waiting for some of Pop’s delectable French toast. Though his cup was still half-full, Pop topped him off without asking the minute he set it back down.
“Lucy Drake! That darling girl.” Dermot’s weathered features creased into a concerned frown. “You’re certain, are you, that she came to no harm, then? Did you give her an examination?”
“I had a couple of the EMTs check her out. They reported all her vital statistics were normal. She was only exposed to the smoke for a few moments.”
“You didn’t check her out yourself?”
“No, Pop. I relied on the word of a couple guys who have a combined twenty years as emergency medical technicians. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so trusting.”
“She’s a family friend. Godmother to your children. You can’t be too careful with people who are that important.”
Did Pop mean it was okay for Brendan to provide subpar care to the various strangers he encountered in the course of his job every day? “You can put your mind at ease. She was fine when she left Iris House last night, I promise.”
“That’s a relief. And you’re sure she had no burns?”
“Positive.”
He should have expected this interrogation. By his very nature, Dermot was concerned about everybody in Hope’s Crossing, but he especially fretted over those he had taken under his wing. For reasons known only to him, Dermot had developed a soft spot for Lucy from the moment she showed up in town to live with her great-aunt, all black clothes and pale makeup and a truckload full of attitude.
Brendan sighed and sipped his coffee. When he’d decided on the spur of the moment to grab a quick bite of breakfast at the Center of Hope Café before he headed home, he had hoped he could avoid thinking about Lucy for five minutes—something he had found impossible throughout the night as he worked the rest of his shift.
Dermot wasn’t making that task particularly easy by bringing the woman up the moment Brendan walked into the café. He should have known his father would have heard about the fire the night before,
