find this woman’s daughter, he can.”
Ethan nodded, taking the information in. “You seem to know a lot about this Conway guy. You worked with him before?”
“For five years.”
He was tempted to ask if she’d done more than just work with the man. The fact that the question even occurred to him caught him off guard. The woman was a barracuda. A gorgeous barracuda, but still a barracuda, and he knew better than to swim in the water near one. So it shouldn’t matter whether their relationship went any deeper than just work.
But it did.
“How does someone get into that line of work?” he wanted to know.
He was prejudiced. It figured. “You mean how does a woman get into that line of work?”
Ethan knew what the sexy force of nature was doing, and he refused to get embroiled in a discussion that revolved around stereotypes. He had a more basic question than that. “How do you make yourself rush into burning buildings when everyone else is running in the opposite direction?”
It was something she’d never thought twice about. She’d just done it. It was the right thing to do. “Because you want to help, to save people. You did the very same thing,” she pointed out, “and no one’s even paying you to do it. It’s not your job.” She looked back toward Conway and the woman she’d entrusted to him. He was on the phone, most likely calling the hospital to find out if her daughter was there. Mentally, Kansas crossed her fingers for the woman.
“It’s all part of ‘protect and serve,’” she heard O’Brien telling her.
Kansas turned her attention back to the irritating detective with the sexy mouth. “If you understand that, then you have your answer.”
Greer blustered through life, but Ethan’s mother had been meek. He’d always thought that more women were like his mother than his sister. “Aren’t you afraid of getting hurt? Of getting permanently scarred?”
Those thoughts had crossed her mind, but only fleetingly. She shook her head. “I’m more afraid of spending night after night with a nagging conscience that won’t let me forget that I didn’t do all I could to save someone. That because I hesitated or wasn’t there to save them, someone died. There are enough things to feel guilty about in this world without adding to the sum total.”
She didn’t want to continue focusing on herself or her reaction to things. There was a more important topic to pursue. “So, did you find out anything useful?” she pressed.
What did she think she missed? “You were only gone a few minutes,” he reminded her. The rest of the time, she’d been with him every step of the way—not that he really minded it. Even with soot on her face, the woman was extremely easy on the eyes.
“Crucial things can be said in less than a minute,” she observed. Was he deliberately being evasive? Had he learned something?
“Sorry to disappoint you,” Ethan said. “But nothing noteworthy was ascertained.” He looked back at the building. The firemen had contained the blaze and only a section of the building had been destroyed. But it was still going to have to be evacuated for a good chunk of time while reconstruction was undertaken. “We’ll know more when the ashes cool off and we can conduct a thorough search.”
“That’s my department,” Kansas reminded him, taking pleasure in the fact that—as a fire investigator—her work took priority over his.
“Not tonight.” He saw her eyes narrow, like someone getting ready for a fight. “Look, I don’t want to have to go over your head,” he warned her. He and the task force had dibs and that was that.
“And I don’t want to have to take yours off,” she fired back with feeling. “So back off. This is my investigation, O’Brien. Someone is burning down buildings in Aurora.”
“And running the risk of killing people while he’s doing it,” Ethan concluded. “Dead people fall under my jurisdiction.” And that, he felt, terminated the argument.
“And investigating man-made fires comes under mine,” she insisted.
She didn’t give an inch. Why didn’t that surprise him?
“So you work together.”
They turned in unison to see who had made the simple declaration. It had come from Brian Cavanaugh, the chief of police. When Dax had called him, Brian had lost no time getting to the site of the latest unexplained fire.
Brian looked from his new nephew to the woman Ethan was having a difference of opinion with. He saw not just a clash of temperaments as they fought over jurisdiction, but something more.
Something that, of late, he’d found himself privy to more than a few times. There had to be something in the air lately.
These two mixed like oil and water, he thought. And they’d be together for quite a while, he was willing to bet a month’s salary on it.
His intense blue eyes, eyes that were identical in hue to those of the young man his late brother had sired, swept over Ethan and the investigator whose name he’d been told was Kansas. He perceived resistance to his instruction in both of them.
“Have I made myself clear?” Brian asked evenly.
“Perfectly,” Ethan responded, coming to attention and standing soldier-straight.
Rather than mumble an agreement the way he’d expected her to, the young woman looked at him skeptically. “Did you clear this with the chief and my captain?”
“It was cleared the minute I suggested it,” Brian said with no conceit attached to his words. “The bottom line is that we all want to find whoever’s responsible for all this.”
The expression was kind, the tone firm. This was a man, she sensed, people didn’t argue with. And neither would she.
Unless it was for a good cause.
Kansas stayed long after the police task force had recorded and photographed their data, folded their tents and disappeared into what was left of the night. She liked conducting her investigation without having to trip over people, well intentioned or not. Gregarious and outgoing, Kansas still felt there was a time for silence and she processed things much better when there as a minimum of noise to distract her.
She’d found that obnoxious Detective O’Brien and his annoying smile most distracting of all.
Contrary to the fledgling opinion that had been formed—most likely to soothe the nerves of the shelter’s residents—the fire hadn’t been an accident. It had been started intentionally. She’d discovered an incendiary device hidden right off the kitchen, set for a time when the area was presumably empty. So whoever had done this hadn’t wanted to isolate anyone or cut them off from making an escape. A fire in the kitchen when there was no one in the kitchen meant that the goal was destruction of property, not lives.
Too bad things didn’t always go according to plan, she silently mourned. One of the shelter volunteers had gotten cut off from the others and hadn’t made it out of the building. She’d been found on the floor, unconscious.
