but to be honest, I’m not sure it’s completely safe for guests to stay here tonight. No matter how careful we are, sometimes embers can flare up again hours later.”
“We have a dozen guests right now.” Laura looked at him directly and he was almost sure he saw a hint of hostility there. Annoyance crawled under his skin. She dumped him, a week before their wedding. If anybody here had the right to be hostile, he ought to be the first one in line. “What are we supposed to do with them?”
Their past didn’t matter right now, not when people in his town needed his help. “We can talk to the Red Cross about setting up a shelter, or we can check with some of the other lodgings in town, maybe the Cavazos’ guest cabins, and see if they might have room to take a few.”
Mrs. Pendleton closed her eyes. “This is a disaster.”
“But a fixable one, Mom. We’ll figure something out.” She squeezed her mother’s arm.
“Any idea what might have started the fire?” He had to ask.
Laura frowned and something that looked oddly like guilt shifted across her lovely features. “Not the what exactly, but most likely the who.”
“Oh?”
“Alexandro Santiago. Come here, young man.”
He followed her gaze and for the first time, he noticed a young dark-haired boy of about six or seven sitting on the curb, watching the activity at the scene with a sort of avid fascination in his huge dark brown eyes. The boy didn’t have her blond, blue-eyed coloring, but he shared her wide, mobile mouth, slender nose and high cheekbones, and was undoubtedly her child.
The kid didn’t budge from the curb for a long, drawn-out moment, but he finally rose slowly to his feet and headed toward them as if he were on his way to bury his dog in the backyard.
“Alex, tell the fireman what started the fire.”
The boy shifted his stance, avoiding the gazes of both his mother and Taft. “Do I have to?”
“Yes,” Laura said sternly.
The kid fidgeted a little more and finally sighed. “Okay. I found a lighter in one of the empty rooms. The ones being fixed up.” He spoke with a very slight, barely discernible accent. “I never saw one before and I only wanted to see how it worked. I didn’t mean to start a fire, es la verdad. But the curtains caught fire and I yelled and then mi madre came in with the fire extinguisher.”
Under other circumstances he might have been amused at the no-nonsense way the kid told the story and how he manipulated events to make it seem as if everything had just sort of happened without any direct involvement on his part.
But this could have been a potentially serious situation, a crumbling old fire hazard like the inn.
He hated to come off hard-nosed and mean, but he had to make the kid understand the gravity. Education was a huge part of his job and a responsibility he took very seriously. “That was a very dangerous thing to do. People could have been seriously hurt. If your mother hadn’t been able to get to the room fast enough with the fire extinguisher, the flames could have spread from room to room and burned down the whole hotel and everything in it.”
To his credit, the boy met his gaze. Embarrassment and shame warred on his features. “I know. It was stupid. I’m really, really sorry.”
“The worst part of it is, I have told you again and again not to play with matches or lighters or anything else that can cause a fire. We’ve talked about the dangers.” Laura glowered at her son, who squirmed.
“I just wanted to see how it worked,” he said, his voice small.
“You won’t do it again, will you?” Taft said.
“Never. Never, ever.”
“Good, because we’re pretty strict about this kind of thing around here. Next time you’ll have to go to jail.”
The boy gave him a wide-eyed look, but then sighed with relief when he noticed Taft’s half grin. “I won’t do it again, I swear. Pinky promise.”
“Excellent.”
“Hey, Chief,” Lee Randall called from the engine. “We’re having a little trouble with the hose retractor again. Can you give us a hand?”
“Yeah. Be there in a sec,” he called back, grateful for any excuse to escape the awkwardness of seeing her again.
“Excuse me, won’t you?” he said to the Pendleton women and the children.
“Of course.” Jan Pendleton gave him an earnest look. “Please tell your firefighters how very much we appreciate them, don’t we, Laura?”
“Absolutely,” she answered with a dutiful tone, but he noticed she pointedly avoided meeting his gaze.
“Bye, Chief.” The darling little girl in Jan’s arm gave him a generous smile. Oh, she was a charmer, he thought.
“See you later.”
The girl beamed at him and waved as he headed away, feeling as if somebody had wrapped a fire hose around his neck for the past ten minutes.
She was here. Really here. Blue eyes, cute kids and all.
Laura Pendleton, Santiago now. He had loved her with every bit of his young heart and she had walked away from him without a second glance.
Now she was here and he had no way to avoid her, not living in a small town like Pine Gulch that had only one grocery store, a couple of gas stations and a fire station only a few blocks from her family’s hotel.
He was swamped with memories suddenly, memories he didn’t want and didn’t know what to do with.
She was back. And here he had been thinking lately how lucky he was to be fire chief of a small town with only six thousand people that rarely saw any disasters.
Taft Bowman.
Laura watched him head back into the action—which, really, wasn’t much action at all, given that the fire had been extinguished before any of them arrived. He paused here and there in the parking lot to talk to his crew, snap out orders, adjust some kind of mechanical thing on the sleek red fire truck.
Seeing him in action was nothing new. When they had been dating, she sometimes went on ride-alongs, mostly because she couldn’t bear to be separated from him. She remembered now how Taft had always seemed comfortable and in control of any situation, whether responding to a medical emergency or dealing with a grass fire.
Apparently that hadn’t changed in the decade since she had seen him. He also still had that very sexy, lean-hipped walk, even under the layers of turnout gear. She watched him for just a moment, then forced herself to look away. This little tingle of remembered desire inside her was wrong on so many levels, completely twisted and messed up.
After all these years and all the pain, all those shards of crushed dreams she finally had to sweep up and throw away, how could he still have the power to affect her at all? She should be cool and impervious to him, completely untouched.
