Edge of the Heat 7 (3 page)

Hawk relaxed onto the bed next to his spent wife, being careful not to let any of his weight down on her. Her eyes were closed, her body limp and sated, her hair spread everywhere like a great, dark flame. He thought he'd never seen anything so beautiful in his life. He lowered his head onto the pillow next to her and ran his hands along her body, reaching forward to cup her belly.

"Mmm," Vivian murmured. "That was amazing."

Hawk smiled, feeling pleased with himself. She would sleep well tonight. He kissed her cheek and spent a few more minutes in her afterglow before covering her with a blanket and getting up.

Hawk cleaned up in the adjoining bathroom, pulled on a pair of boxers and a t-shirt, and then prowled into the kitchen to get something to eat. The prepared dinner at Vivian's parent's anniversary party had been good, but not very filling. As he raided the fridge and set about eating a snack, his mind ticked over the day's events as it always did before he went to sleep. But something kept distracting him. Several times he put his thoughts on hold and lifted his head to the quiet room, like there was something to hear. There wasn't.

When Hawk finished his snack he left the kitchen, padding noiselessly into the living room and looking around. Why did he feel something was off? Randomly, he picked up items and looked at them, occasionally cocking his head again like a dog scenting the air. At the end table next to the couch he stopped and stared for a long time. A picture in a silver frame had been moved.

Hawk picked up the picture gingerly and looked hard at it. It showed Vivian, Emma, and JT, their arms slung around each other, still at Camp Patriot. The picture had been taken only a few days after JT had been rescued from the dessert. Hawk ran a hand over his ribs on the right side, remembering the pain of his injury from the helicopter crash during that rescue.

He put the picture back down and arranged it exactly perpendicular to the corner of the table, the way he'd placed the picture when he had first put it in the ornate frame. Someone had moved it. The housekeeper? Vivian?

It shouldn't have been a big deal. People look at pictures all the time, that's what they were for. But it felt like a big deal. Everything in the house felt off to him for some unknown reason. He had been distracted by Vivian's arousal when he first came in, so he'd missed it then, but now he felt it loud and clear, pinging at him, stirring unease in him.

Hawk looked around, then almost ran to the bedroom to check on his wife. She lay in the bed exactly how he had left her. Hawk crossed to the closet and opened it, then pressed his hand against his fingerprint-entry gun safe. The door swung open and he took the larger of the two guns that were inside. He shut the door again then walked farther into their walk-in closet, peering under clothing and behind shoe boxes. The closet was empty.

Hawk felt slightly foolish. His house was empty, he knew that. There were no intruders lurking anywhere. He could tell that he and Vivian were alone. But
something
was wrong, and he intended to find out what.

Hawk retreated from the closet, back out into the master bedroom. His eye lingered on his wife just long enough to be sure she was sleeping peacefully. He stared hard at the dust ruffle around the bed then dismissed it. Their bed sat low to the ground, very low. Nothing dangerous could fit under there.

Hawk prowled through their house, checking closets, crawlspaces, cabinets, and the space under the stairs. He examined every room and found nothing. In spite of that, his nerves kept ratcheting up their message. Wrong. Something was wrong. Danger.

In exasperation, Hawk headed to his front door. He examined the lock and door jamb. No sign of forced entry. Nothing wrong there. The only place he hadn't searched was the cellar, but it was old and only had access from the outside—a remnant from when their restored farmhouse had first been built. They'd only been down there once, when they first bought the house. There couldn't be anything down there causing this current bout of the jitters.

Hawk returned to the bedroom, torn. He put his gun down on a table within easy reach of the bed, and eyed the spot next to Vivian, thinking that he should just lay down and try to sleep. Work this out in the morning.

But another part of him looked to his pants on the floor. His cell phone would be in the pocket. He could call Craig. Have him come over and help search. The clock on the nightstand said 2:02 in the morning. Craig was probably still at the fire with Emma. Awake, certainly. Even if he wasn't, Craig would not argue. If Hawk said he thought something was wrong, he knew Craig would be there in a heartbeat. Something was certainly wrong.
If only he knew what!
Hawk had learned the hard way to never ignore his intuition, and he wasn't going to start now.

Hawk bent and picked up his pants, his eyes falling again on the dust ruffle as he did so. His phone forgotten, he reached his hand out, the little voice in his head suddenly screaming in alarm. Adrenaline dumped into his blood stream as he ripped the piece of cloth away. A wadded up blanket greeted him in the four inches of space between the floor and the bed. Hawk knew there was never anything under this bed. The blanket was hiding something. Something that was making his hair stand on edge.

Gingerly, he eased the blanket aside and saw a shoe box, plus a mass of items he couldn't identify behind it. Sweat formed on his brow and his breath whistled between his teeth. "Vivian," he said as he eased the shoe box out from under the bed. "Vivian, get up and get dressed. Hurry," he said, his voice coiled and tight. Vivian murmured on the bed. He lifted the lid gingerly off of the shoe box as he heard Vivian murmur something on the bed.

A mass of wires wound through the box over two round cylinders. A pungent smell wafted up from the container. Terror laced through Hawk's heart as he realized he was holding a bomb. A bomb intended to blow he and his wife to Hell as they slept.

"Vivian!" he shouted as his eyes fell on the simple countdown timer in the very center of the box.

It read 00:34.

Hawk shot to his feet as Vivian rolled over and sat up groggily in bed, awakened by his shout.

No time for explanations!

Hawk snatched up his naked wife and threw her over his shoulder, then sprinted down the hallway.

"Hawk!" Vivian squawked in confusion as she held on to his back.

Hawk saved his breath for running. He made it to the front door, pulled it open, and took five large, running steps onto the grassy lawn before he felt the concussion wave behind him.

Craig held the door open for Emma, watching as she pulled off her helmet and tucked it under her arm, then climbed up into the cab of his truck. He ran around to the driver's side and got in, started the vehicle, then looked at her. The light from the clock glowed just enough for him to see how exhausted she was. The clock showed almost two in the morning and she had just been relieved by another lieutenant so she could go off shift, something she'd been scheduled to do almost twelve hours ago. The fire had been a bad one—a fertilizer warehouse with a faulty boiler had gone up. The flames had been so intense the chiefs had finally made the call to let the building burn itself out while the firefighters just tried to protect the surrounding businesses. But three more buildings had caught fire, stretching the department thin and taking all day and much of the night to contain.

Craig threw the truck into drive and pulled out on the empty street. He'd parked well away from the scene and walked in to find Emma, not wanting to get in anyone's way.

"Thanks for coming to get me," Emma told him, giving him a sweet but exhausted smile.

"Of course," Craig fired back. "It's not like I was sleeping anyway."

Emma pulled her head off the headrest and looked at him strangely. "You didn't sleep at all? You went home around ten."

"I can't sleep while you're at a fire. Especially not a big one. What if something happened to you? What if you needed me? Like tonight. Your work truck got commandeered and you needed a ride to your car."

Emma scoffed. "I could have gotten a ride back to the station from someone else. I never would have asked you if you hadn't texted me."

"I wouldn't have texted you if I'd been asleep," Craig responded, like that answered everything.

Emma laughed, then her eyes grew serious again. "I sleep when you're off gallivanting around doing dangerous stuff."

Craig raised an eyebrow, making Emma laugh again. "I never gallivant. Besides, that's different. You're a woman. I'm supposed to take care of you."

Emma sucked in a breath between her teeth and Craig winced and smiled inwardly at the same time. He knew he'd said something wrong, and if only she wasn't so tired he'd take full advantage of it, teasing her right up to the edge of blowing up at him, then telling her how right she was about everything and plying her with kisses until she channeled her unspent anger into mind-blowing sex. But she had to be back at the fire department in six hours and he thought she'd want to spend all of those hours asleep.

"Craig Masterson, I didn't know you were a closet sexist!" Emma cried.

Craig chuckled. "What did I say that was sexist?"

"Because I'm a woman, you can't go about your business when I'm doing my job! You have to wait around in case I need you? Because I'm not capable of taking care of myself?"

Now Craig knew she was past the point of tired and well on her way to exhaustion. He could hear the subtle whining note in her voice that said she didn't even want to be arguing, she didn't know why she was saying what she was saying, but she couldn't help herself. He tried the easy way out.

"Of course not Emma, that's not what I meant at all."

Emma didn't say anything for a few moments and he drove in silence, hoping she was done. She'd feel differently when she got at least a few hours of sleep.

"Good. Because you're not always going to be able to rush out and try to take care of me. When we have kids you'll have to stay home and take care of them, no matter how dangerous of a call I'm at."

Craig pulled over to the side of the road quickly and threw his truck in park. Emma had avoided this subject for a year now, even after Vivian got pregnant. Especially after Vivian got pregnant.

He turned to face her head-on. "We're having kids?"

Emma smiled and blushed at the same time, then looked at him through her lashes, almost shyly. "Well, you're almost done right? You said you were going to quit the FBI once the Oberlin investigation was over, and that's in two weeks. Then I thought maybe we could try."

"Even if I go back to work? I still want to join the fire department."

"You'll only work ten twenty-four hour shifts a month. I'm on day shift now. Why not? After my maternity leave we would only need a sitter for eight hours, five or six times a month. My sister might even be willing to do it."

Craig unclasped his seatbelt and slid across the seat to his wife, his brain boiling with excitement. With his right hand he unclasped her seatbelt, and with his left he pulled the hair tie out of her hair, then plunged his hand into her tresses, pulling her mouth to him. He kissed her long and hard, maneuvering her into his lap as he did so.

He pulled back, leaving her breathless. "Call in sick tomorrow. We'll start trying tonight," he whispered, then he kissed her again to still the protests he knew were on her lips.

Finally, he had to stop kissing her.

"Craig, I can't. You know Jack is going to be exhausted tomorrow, just like I am now. We're short a Lieutenant and Vince is on day off. I have to go in. Besides, I don't want to start trying till you are officially out of the FBI. Until there is no possible way they can send you somewhere else."

Craig sighed and scooted himself back to his spot. The radio on Emma's belt crackled, asking for any available rank to respond. Emma sighed and waited a beat, hoping someone else would answer. When no one did she unclipped the radio and held it to her lips. "Lieutenant 6-4," she said.

"Lieutenant 6-4, we've got a residence explosion at 1281 Azalea Lane. No medic units available to respond, please advise."

Craig saw fear lance across Emma's face. He replayed what the dispatcher had said over in his mind and felt his own bowels turn to water.
Hawk and Vivian's place!

He threw his truck into drive, grabbed the police bubble from under his seat and slapped it on the roof, then stepped on the gas. "Get your seatbelt on," he said in a low voice as he took a hard right without slowing.

Emma did it with one hand while she spoke into the radio. "I'll be there in five - ah four minutes, Central, to let you know what we need. Scramble someone from the hospital or another call. If no one will be free in under five, get a unit heading from Tetam County. I'll cancel if they aren't needed."

"10-4," came the reply and Emma dropped the radio, holding on tight to the seat and the handle above her head. Craig was on a straightaway and about to hit close to one hundred miles per hour, but a left turn was coming up. Luckily the streets were empty, since it was the middle of the night.

Craig made the turn with no problem, although Emma swore she felt the tires lift off the pavement. She didn't dare breathe a word to him to break his concentration. Besides, nothing needed to be said. Hawk and Vivian had to be OK. Had to! Her sister was pregnant. The baby ... Emma bit back her terror, and tried not to think about the fact that Hawk and Vivian were almost certainly asleep in their bed when their house exploded.

As they drew close, Emma saw exactly what she was praying she wouldn't. A glow in the sky ahead of her. Something was definitely on fire. Emma squeezed her eyes shut, determined not to condemn her sister and Craig's best friend to death in her mind. They were OK. They had to be.

Craig rounded another corner and advanced up the street fast. Emma could see Hawk and Vivian's house, fully ablaze, barely any part of the structure left. A fire truck in front had just arrived and was putting out its hoses. Four or five people thronged on the sidewalk. Emma leaned forward and strained her eyes, trying to pick out Hawk and Vivian.