and just briefly, in the midst of the panic and fear, a spark of awareness more dangerous than the fire within the house flared between them. And then it was gone, doused by the blank indifference in his blue eyes. “Is there anyone else inside?” he asked.
She shook her head and held a hand to her painful throat. “No.”
“No pets or anything?”
How could she have forgotten her grandmother’s beloved, bad-tempered Robespierre? “There’s the cat—”
“He goes hunting,” Consuela wheezed, “every night. There is no one left inside.”
The other man, the stranger, spoke kindly. “Where’s your garden hose? The blaze seems confined to one room so perhaps I can put it out or at least contain it.”
“Don’t try going in there again,” Lucas said shortly. “Acting the hero isn’t going to help if you end up another casualty. That’s the last thing we need.”
“I’ll break the window and work from the outside.” The stranger’s manner was quietly confident, the hand he rested on Emily’s shoulder sympathetic. “We can’t stand by watching family treasures go up in smoke without doing something about it, now can we?”
“Suit yourself,” Lucas muttered, squatting beside Monique and checking her pulse.
After a moment, he sat back on his heels and blew out a breath. Without thinking, Emily reached out and touched his arm. If she’d grasped a live wire, the jolt could not have shocked her more. Snatching back her hand, she said, “How is she?”
“Better than either of you, it seems,” he replied, jerking a nod at Consuela who lay like a sack of flour, panting audibly.
His impersonal tone and the way he refused to look at her left Emily feeling like an interloper. Annoyed, she said as sharply as her beleaguered lungs would allow, “How can that be? She was passed out on the floor.”
“Exactly,” he replied loftily, as if only a complete fool would fail to figure it out for herself, “and smoke rises. She’s suffered almost no harmful inhalation.”
Monique chose that moment to assert herself. “I did not pass out,” she announced in distinct tones that left no one in any doubt about her umbrage at being treated as if she weren’t quite all there. “I slipped and fell.”
“Did you?” he said impassively. “And how are you feeling now?”
“Like hell, Lucas Flynn, and if you were any sort of doctor you’d know that without having to ask.”
Unperturbed, he began to examine her, probing gently along her neck and down her arms. “Want to tell me how you came to fall?”
“I was trying to alert my household to the fact that my home was on fire.”
“How do you think it started?”
“I have no idea,” she returned frostily.
“It was the same as before,” Consuela said. “Madame—”
“Be quiet!” Monique snapped. “How could you possibly know anything when you were upstairs snoring so loudly that I couldn’t sleep?”
Just then Beatrice Flynn, Lucas’s grandmother, came traipsing through the trees, clad in a brocade dressing gown and with her hair hanging down her back in a long gray braid. “Praise the Lord Lucas got you out alive!” she cried, the beam of the flashlight she carried swinging in a wide arc over them where they huddled on the lawn. “You could all have fried in your beds!”
“You must be terribly disappointed,” Monique retorted with a malevolent glare.
“That’s a wicked thing to say, Monique Lamartine. I wouldn’t wish anyone dead, not even you.”
Perhaps it was as well that the sound of sirens split the night just then, signaling the arrival of emergency vehicles and thus preventing another round in the yearsold feud between the two dowagers.
“Three casualties, none too serious,” Lucas informed the ambulance attendants, while the fire marshall organized his crew. “This one had a stroke recently, the other two suffered some smoke inhalation. A night in the hospital won’t hurt any of them.”
“I do not require hospitalization,” Monique declared, struggling to sit up, “but by all means take Consuela. She’s wheezing like a locomotive.”
“This hasn’t been easy on you either, Mrs. Lamartine,” he said as the paramedics loaded Consuela onto a stretcher. “You need rest and a thorough check-up, too.”
“You’re supposed to be a doctor and you’ve just given me a check-up. How many more do I need?”
“You’ll be better cared for in a properly equipped medical center.”
“No,” she said, waving aside his concern. “This is my home and here I intend to remain.”
“That’s impossible, as I’m sure you know,” Lucas replied, with thinly veiled impatience. “If you refuse to follow my advice then you’ll have to find some other place to stay because there’s no way you’ll be allowed back into your house tonight, nor, I suspect, for some time to come.”
“You’re quite right,” Emily said. “Grand-mère, we’ll phone for a taxi and take a room at the hotel, then in the morning I’ll contact the family and make temporary arrangements for you to stay with—”
“You will do no such thing, Emily Jane! Furthermore, if you attempt to use this unfortunate incident to convince me that my children are correct in thinking I’m unable to care for myself without their help, then not only are you a dreadful disappointment to me, are you also no longer welcome in my home.”
“Well, she’s welcome in mine,” Beatrice put in. “And so, come to that, are you, Monique Lamartine, though why I should put myself out for you I don’t know. It’s a miserable old woman you’ve become, and I pray I don’t turn out the same when I’m your age.”
“You’re already my age and then some!”
Beatrice did an about-turn and prepared to march back the way she’d come. “I’ll not waste breath arguing with you. If my house isn’t good enough, you can sleep under the stars for all I care. Emily Jane, if you decide to take me up on my offer, you know where I live.”
She was almost at the boundary of the two properties when Monique called out grudgingly, “I never said your house wasn’t good enough, you silly woman.”
Beatrice spun around in her tracks. “Are you saying you’d like me to prepare a room for you, then?” she inquired, exacting a full measure of revenge in the way she pointedly waited for a reply.
Emily could have sworn she saw her grandmother swallow the huge chunk of pride threatening to choke her before she managed, “Under these very unusual circumstances, I find that an acceptable alternative, yes.”
“In that case,” Beatrice said, “I’ll ask you, Lucas, to fetch the car round so that poor, feeble Mrs. Lamartine doesn’t have to trek through the woods at such an ungodly hour and her
