Now, suddenly, there was fire everywhere. The smoke, too, impeded his progress, blinding him at times. Without wasting a moment, he motioned Thompson toward one side of the room, and Boone moved to the other, looking for a couch against the opposite wall, finding it exactly where she had said it would be.
But there was no child sleeping on it.
Terrific, he thought morosely. Who knew where the kid could have taken off to?
“Check across the hall,” he told his partner. “But don’t go far.”
As Boone moved quickly forward to search the room, he caught a quick movement from the corner of his eye, and, spinning quickly back around, saw that there was someone on the couch, after all. But it wasn’t a child. Instead, a huge, black, malevolent-looking beast reared back on its hind legs, clearly terrified and slashing at the air with its claws.
Helplessly, Boone groaned aloud. A cat. He’d come back into a raging inferno to save a child, only to be obstructed now with the rescue of a cat. He hated cats. He really did. For good reason, too. And this one looked to be a real bruiser. Or flesh-eater, as the case may be.
An ominous creak sang out above him, a sound with which Boone was all too familiar. The upper floor was about to come down on top of him. He had maybe thirty seconds to get out before it did. Without even thinking about what he was doing, he completed his rushed search of the room and, satisfied the boy was elsewhere in the house, crossed to snag the cat, collect Thompson, and head for the front door. They’d have to come back for the boy through another entrance. They had no other choice.
When he was within inches of grabbing the big animal, it backed against the sofa cushion, flattened its ears angrily, and batted wildly at him with claws roughly the size of scimitars. Even with his hands well protected with heavy gloves, Boone halted before seizing the cat.
“You gonna give me a hard time, big guy?” he asked the growling beast, wondering why he was bothering, since he already pretty much knew the answer, and time was slipping by fast.
The cat hissed, spit, growled some more, flailed at the air, reared up on its hind legs as if to strike... then keeled over, quickly losing consciousness. Boone’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. Okay, so maybe not the exact answer he was expecting, but it would make his job infinitely easier.
“A fighter to the end, huh?” he muttered as he scooped the animal up as effortlessly as he had its owner only moments ago. “I admire your spirit.”
He tucked the cat into his coat and called out to Thompson, and the two men turned to flee, barely making it out of the house before the floor above the living room crashed down in an explosion of pyrotechnics. The reverberation of the noise and the flash of heat at his back told Boone how close he’d come to being trapped. Wouldn’t have been the first time, he reminded himself. Then again, did he really want to go through an experience like that again?
As he raced from the house into the chaos outside, he saw the woman he had carried to safety earlier being restrained—barely—by one of the other firefighters. Behind her, an ambulance with red lights tumbling through the haze of smoke stood ready to carry her to the hospital. But she’d obviously refused to make the trip until she knew the fate of her child, and Boone wasn’t exactly surprised.
He could see that she had been watching for him to emerge from the house, and when she saw him, she catapulted forward. Her face was still streaked with black from the smoke, her short hair was matted to her forehead with perspiration and the water from the firehoses, her clothes were wet and filthy and clung to her like a second skin. But those eyes...
He had to force himself to look away. He’d never seen anyone with eyes that blue. And the soot on her face only made them appear that much more vivid. Her gaze penetrated him to his soul when he approached her. This was a woman who would never be able to hide her feelings, he thought. Her eyes, huge and round and thickly lashed, were the kind of eyes that a man would lose sleep over. Some men, anyway, he amended. Not him. He never lost sleep over anyone. Not anymore, anyway.
He was overcome with a sense of guilt and failure at having come from the house without her son, and could only watch helplessly as she kept moving forward, her gaze never leaving his, her pace never slowing. Her lips parted, but no words emerged. Which was just as well. He could already hear her accusing, panicked voice demanding to know why he’d come out of the house without her child. As she drew near enough to reach out and touch him, Boone withdrew the still-unconscious cat from his coat, to hand the animal off to one of his colleagues before returning for the boy.
But at the sight of the motionless animal, the woman halted in her tracks and fell to her knees. Then she buried her head in her hands and began to weep as if her heart were broken.
“Mack,” she sobbed without looking up, as if she couldn’t bear the sight of the unconscious beast. “Oh, Mack. You were too late to save him.”
Boone gazed at her for a moment, completely dumfounded. Then, finally, he realized what he had done. He held up the caL “This is Mack?” he asked incredulously.
The woman nodded and finally looked up at him, her eyes filled with tears. Her gaze dropped briefly to the motionless animal in his arms before returning to fix it on Boone’s face. Then she began to cry freely again.
Boone could only stare back at her for a moment, so entranced was he by the piercing intensity of her gaze. Finally, he shook the hypnotic sensation off and managed to ask, “Mack is your cat? I went back into that inferno to save your cat?”
She nodded mutely as she lifted a hand to gingerly stroke one of the cat’s dangling paws. “Oh, God, he’s dead. You couldn’t get him out. Oh, it’s all my fault.” She buried her face in her hands again, and began to cry even more helplessly.
She was terrified that she had lost her cat, Boone realized, the same way a mother feared the loss of her child. Her whole body shuddered with every sob that erupted from inside her, and her dark head moved helplessly back and forth. Before he could stop himself, he threaded his fingers through her short hair, stroking the damp tresses until she looked up at him again. Gently he urged her head backward and pushed her bangs back from her forehead.
“No, lady, don’t cry,” he said softly, swiping at a fat tear that tumbled down her cheek. The cat twitched in his arms when he did so. “It’s okay. Your cat’s still alive. He’s even starting to come around. He just needs oxygen.”
She gazed at him levelly, those blue, blue eyes incredulous. “He’s alive?” she cried. “You got him out okay? He’s not dead?”
Boone shook his head and turned to make his way quickly to the oxygen he had used earlier, with the woman following only inches behind him, scrambling three steps for every one of his. “He was unconscious, but he’s starting to rouse,” he called over his shoulder as he went. “And he does need oxygen.”
He settled the animal gently on the grass beside the teddy bear the woman had left there, picked up the same plastic mask she had worn, and dropped it over the animal’s muzzle. Then he shed his gloves and began to slowly stroke his hand over the cat’s thick, wet fur, rubbing it lightly under the chin and cupping a hand over its rib cage to feel for its heartbeat.
Okay, he conceded as he watched the helpless creature lay still and half-conscious. Maybe cats weren’t so awful after all. This one, at least, had shown some spirit and had a strong will to survive. Boone had to respect that. It was something he identified with greatly. Survival was his reason for living, after all.
“His pulse
