The Firefighter's Appeal (Harlequin Superromance) (21 page)

“And I see you.
Every day.
And it reminds me that Katja’s never coming back.”

You’ll never be good enough.
It wasn’t what he said, not exactly, but it was what she heard behind his words. So was that what this was? He’d lost his favorite daughter and was forced to put up with the second best? Shame filled her along with a sense of loss that was all too familiar. Her entire life had been spent wishing for her father’s love when, really, he’d reserved it all for only one daughter.

Lily edged to the door, too broken to say anything. What was there to say? As angry and hurt as she was just then, she had a profound sense of pity for her dad, too. At least she’d started to let go of some of the gunk inside her soul. Doug hadn’t been so lucky. The emotional turmoil he was in couldn’t be soothed until he was ready, but she was done being his punching bag until then.

Lily wiped her eyes before crossing the threshold with an ungraceful wobble. The short distance she’d put between them gave her strength. She straightened her spine and held down the clog of sorrow in her chest. Lily walked straight out the Ashden building, not knowing—not caring—if she’d ever set foot back inside it again.

Lily didn’t allow herself time to cry as she slipped into her vehicle. Half expecting Doug to come after her, and feeling more foolish than ever for even considering that he would, Lily pulled out of the lot and drove. Once she was around a corner, she parked on a side street. In the distance, the sound of an emergency siren blared. Garrett out on a call? She slumped in her seat as his name came to mind.

He’d helped her so much. She’d be a fool not to recognize that. Their connection went so much deeper than two people being present at the same tragedy. His fears were her fears; his reservations matched her own. How could they ever move past that shared fear?

Lily grabbed her cell and called Lincoln, relieved when he answered on the second ring. He’d been on her mind all day and she’d intended to call him, knowing he’d also be grieving. But she’d foolishly waited to speak to Doug first.

“I’m coming tomorrow,” Lily rushed before he even said hello. “I’m leaving at daybreak and I’ll call you when I get close.”

Lincoln made an indecisive sound. “Wait, I thought Dad said you were staying in Danbury?”

“No.” She looked at her lap. “I can’t...I can’t stay with him anymore, Linc. I need space.”

Lincoln didn’t even pause.

“Okay, good. Come, please. You can stay at my place since Dad and I will be gone anyway. It’ll be a minivacation for you until I get back.”

She tried to respond, but the tears came, fast and hot and relentless. Lincoln’s voice dropped. “What’s the first thing you’re going to do in Nashville, sis?”

She leaned back against the seat. “I’m going to Killer Dan’s and getting Katja’s name tattooed on my left arm.”

Lincoln gave an appreciative chuckle, but the sound got lower...deeper still until the next breath he took came out in a shudder. Six-four and built like a linebacker, yet Lincoln Ashden had never been one to hide from his emotions.

“Goddamn good plan, Lil.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“You have time to talk a bit?” She found a tissue in the glove box and dabbed her eyes.

“Time for my best girl? Always, Lily. Always.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

W
HAT
THE
HELL
was that noise? Garrett’s arms came out to steady himself. He was falling... Wasn’t he? A steady, loud beeping cut through his mind. He groaned and rolled onto his side, the tug of sleep slow to leave. Maybe it was Lily.

Lily.
He groaned again and ran a hand over his face. He’d called her last night, just because. Mostly because he knew she was leaving this morning and it was killing him. The way they’d left things the other night—no commitment, but the promise of trying to figure this out, whatever this was—was driving him crazy. Because he wanted her, and Garrett was pretty sure Lily felt the same way about him. But they were both too scared to do anything more about it.

She’d said she was packed and ready to go, would be heading out at dawn for the long drive. And she’d sounded happy, almost, and he was glad for her. Or tried to be. What time was it anyway? Maybe something had happened—

He shot up and realized he was on his couch. He looked down. His cell phone was lying in his lap and ringing like mad. He grabbed it and looked around as the groggy sleep confusion began to fade away.

God, what time was it? He grappled to flip his cell open.

“What?” he roared into the phone. His fire pager was screeching from the kitchen table. That must have been what had woken him in the first place. Scrambling to his feet, Garrett stumbled to reach it.

“Garrett?” An unfamiliar male voice burst through the line.

“Yeah.” He grabbed the pager, pressed the silence button. But there was another noise that refused to die, revolving in crescendo and decrescendo through the house. It was the sound of storm sirens coming from the city watchtower. They gave off a loud, insistent wail anytime a severe storm or tornado was approaching Danbury. He ran to his kitchen window and looked out. The morning was hazy but filled with sunlight. The insta-dread he always felt when the sirens went off melted away. Probably just heavy rain headed their way or something.

“Where the hell is my daughter?”

“Ah, who is this?” Garrett hit a button on his fire pager to see what the call had been. He wasn’t on duty today, but if it was bad enough, he’d go help. Nothing but static replayed back.

The voice barked at him. “What do you mean, who is this? It’s Doug Ashden.”

Garrett slid the pager into his pocket. “Mr. Ashden. Why are you asking me where Lily is?” An irritated grunt came over the line.

“I’ve been calling her since six and she won’t answer. I figured she might be with you.”

Garrett glanced at his cell. Nine o’clock. Exhaustion took him down a few IQ levels. He sighed and ran his knuckles over his forehead to try to wake up.

“She was heading out early this morning for Nashville.... Why don’t you just drive over and see if she’s home?”

“Because I’m in jail.”

Garrett looked at the ceiling as that little nugget sunk in. “Why the hell are you in jail? And how’d you get my number?”

“You’re still talking when you should be getting down here and posting bail, seeing as how I can’t get hold of my daughter.”

Now Garrett knew were Lily’s abrasive streak came from. He made a dismissive sound and waited.

Doug scoffed. “Lily added your cell number to your contract. I put it in my cell in case I needed to talk business with you.”

The contract. The thing that had brought him and Lily together in the first place. No sense in thinking about that right now, because it just made him queasy inside.

No, right now he needed some jeans and extrablack coffee with a little whiskey thrown in to help him deal with Doug Ashden. He found jeans, his chest squeezing every time he thought of last night...and the fact that Lily was gone. He’d finally allowed himself to fall for a woman and he didn’t know if she was going to stick around. Irony, that.

Hopefully, Doug hadn’t done anything that would jeopardize the construction project. God, these Ashdens were going to be the death of him.

“Okay, okay, I’ll be right there.”

Garrett was met with the blare of the storm sirens after he cleaned up and stepped outside. The sky was bright, though a greenish haze was working its way like a toxic fog over the sunshine. The air was sticky and heavy, making him glad to slide into his air-conditioned truck. Flipping to the local radio station, he listened as a severe-storm warning came through. Hail, rain and high winds were headed this way, although the weatherman said it might blow to the north and bypass them all together. Wind, like fire, was an unpredictable beast and could either save them from the storm or bring it clear down on top of them.

It took fifteen minutes to get downtown and another forty to get Doug’s bail posted at the jail. Disorderly conduct.
Huh.
Garrett didn’t have much time to ponder exactly what that might mean when Doug was brought up front, looking ornery enough for a repeat performance.

The drab gray of the older man’s T-shirt and his more-salt-than-pepper buzz cut made him fit right in with the severe gray-blue of the jail walls. He was built like a WWE wrestler who was slow to leave his prime, and if the glower was any indication, he was used to intimidating people into a puddle on the floor.

Garrett half waved as the warden brought Doug up to the counter and uncuffed him so he could fill out paperwork served by a woman behind a barred cubical. The warden handed Doug a cell phone, prompting Doug to give him a nod of appreciation. “Thanks for the extra phone time.”

“Want to tell me what happened?” Garrett rested an elbow on the counter. Doug didn’t look up from the paperwork.

“I don’t answer to you, son.”

Garrett tapped his wallet in his palm. It was a hell of a lot lighter than it had been earlier. “You do when I just posted eight hundred and fifty for your bail.”

Intimidation had never been Garrett’s thing. He wasn’t moved by the aggression of other men and didn’t back down without good cause. When Doug made a slow turn toward him, Garrett held his ground, relaxed, giving nothing away. He’d faced walls of fire and car accidents slicked with so much blood and body fluid it took months to get the stains off the road. It was going to take a hell of a lot more than a sour look and some biceps bulging to throw him off balance.

“You hear from Lily yet?” The concern in the older man’s voice rubbed Garrett raw.

“Don’t avoid the question.”

Deflection was Garrett’s card, and he knew how to play it. Doug signed the paper in front of him with more flourish than was probably necessary. The woman behind the box handed Doug a paper bag and wished him well.

Doug gathered up his things. “I hit the bastard, that’s what happened. And I put five years of frustration and dislike into that punch, and I’d do it again in an instant.”

A scratchy dispatch came through the base scanner unit somewhere inside the closed-off cubicle, followed by a series of high and low tones. Storm tones. Garrett put a hand to his hip, expecting to feel his fire pager there, then remembered he’d left it in the truck.

“Who pissed you off for five years?” He decided to press his luck. Doug’s eyes narrowed.

“Lily’s ex.” He fished his wallet out of the paper bag, along with some keys and change. “I always hated that little shit. What she saw in him, I’ll never know. I stayed out of it. Let her live her life. The day she came home and found all his stuff gone...I almost lost it. He’d moved out without a word.” Doug shoved his wallet into his back pocket. “Bastard left a note, though. How nice of him.”

Garrett rubbed his brow with a thumb and forefinger. Doug crumpled the bag and tossed it in a trash can as they headed out of the jail.

“Rob was Lily’s first...everything. I didn’t want to interfere with all that first-love bullshit. She and I, God, we butt heads, but I couldn’t let him get away with hurting her like that. When Lily dropped the ring off with me yesterday, it gave me something to look forward to—having Rob come in and ask for it. He called this morning. I met him at the coffeehouse, and, dammit, couldn’t help myself. I nailed him.”

“Ring?” He thought back to the day she’d run into Rob at the bar. Rob had asked her for something, but Garrett had never pressed for information.

Garrett held the door for Doug, who surprised him by actually providing details. “Lily still had the engagement ring Rob had given her. He came to ask for it back so he can marry someone else. The father in me didn’t take too kindly to that.”

They crossed the parking lot to the tune of the sirens. Humidity laid an immediate blanket over their skin. “Which leads me to this question. How long have you been sleeping with my daughter?”

Garrett was pretty sure a giant red X had just formed on his forehead as the perfect mark for Doug to aim for. He knew Lily’s relationship with her father was tense, and, truth be told, he was surprised Doug had shared so much with him just now. He was a client of Doug’s after all, not just the guy who was involved with his daughter. It added a complicated layer.

If he wasn’t already in love with her, he was damn close. But that wasn’t something he wanted to think about right now.

“Lily’s a big girl.”

Doug stopped on the passenger side of Garrett’s truck and glared. “That wasn’t an answer to my question, son.”

Pushing his luck but protective of Lily’s privacy, Garrett shrugged and tossed the older man’s words back at him. “I don’t answer to you, Doug. You want a ride or not?”

Doug wasn’t looking at him any longer; instead, he was staring up at the sky, his expression concerned. “Look at that.”

Doug pointed up. Before Garrett’s gaze could follow suit, the storm siren started a new kind of wail, the ear-bending one that said this storm was now something else.

It was the tone for a tornado.

The wind had shifted, all right, but in the wrong direction. A wall of deep gray clouds hovered in all directions like an ominous spaceship covering the sky. The wind was coming from the east, seemed to be picking up speed as they stood there. Garrett thought back to the structure fire last night and how the wind had seemed to change direction constantly, making the fire a hundred times more difficult to put out.

He wrenched open his truck door and grabbed his pager. The red light on top was blinking, indicating a page had gone through. Nothing but static came back at him when he pressed the repeat button.

Frustrated, he grabbed his handheld radio and shoved it in his back pocket. It was more reliable and allowed him to talk back and forth rather than just listen to what went out over the emergency frequencies.

“Shit.” Garrett pulled back from the truck and reached for his cell phone. Three missed calls. The air settled around his skin like a weight, his ears filling with a slight pressure.

“Double shit.”

Garrett looked up at the wavering tone of Doug’s voice. His eyes latched on to movement from the east, but his brain didn’t want to register what he was seeing. “Funnel cloud.”

“Yep.”

Garrett slowly looked around. A few pedestrians on the sidewalk were already racing inside the nearest buildings. A lone bicyclist pumped frantically down the street. Cars were turning around at or flying through the intersection, trying to get out of the way. The siren filled his head, the pressure increasing like a slowly expanding balloon. The lid of a trash can skidded through the parking lot, pulling his attention.

“Back inside the jail, Doug.”

The wall of clouds above them made a slow descent, moving horizontally as if to squish everything below. Garrett had experienced a lot of storms in his almost five years here, but he had never seen anything quite like this. All the hairs stood up on his arms and the back of his neck. In the distance, the squiggly dance of the barely visible funnel cloud came closer. By its position, the tornado looked as though it was ripping through the center of town, the way he’d come that morning.

“Doug, we have to get inside.” Garrett ran around the front of his truck and grabbed Doug’s arm, but Doug was fixed on the tornado. Wind whipped over them, flushing up papers and other debris that had been hiding on the ground. He gave the older man an impressive tug, but Doug braced his feet.

“Lily’s apartment is on that end of town.” And the Ashden building, too, though Doug didn’t seem concerned about that. The significance didn’t escape Garrett.

“I know, but, Doug, she’s long gone. She was leaving before sunup. Didn’t she tell you? She’s safe.”

Doug turned on Garrett, grabbed his arms with both hands. “I told her she couldn’t go to Nashville. We had a fight.... She’s always listened to me before. I won’t know that she’s safe until I see it with my own eyes.”

Garrett’s hair flew into his eyes, the force of the wind like desperate, clawing hands. The speed with which it accelerated left no doubt that the twister was heading their way. He’d hoped it would turn, that the wind would shift and carry it away from this half of town. The gray clouds above them were now nearly black, blocking out the light, yet giving an odd greenish hue to the sky.

“I spoke to her late last night. She was planning on leaving as soon as the sun was up.” Garrett took both of Doug’s big biceps in his hands. “She’s already out of town, Doug.”

A vice grip clamped on Garrett’s wrists as Doug grabbed him.

“I almost lost her once, goddamn you!”

Garrett felt for the man; he really did. And for a moment, he had a flicker of panic that maybe Lily had changed her mind and was curled up in her apartment right now, ignoring her phone because she was angry with her father.

Damn, he should have called her this morning just to be sure.

A heavy hum sounded through the air. They couldn’t wait any longer. Garrett looped his arm through Doug’s and pulled. They rushed inside the lobby of the jail. No one was at the security entrance. The concrete structure could withstand a whipping, but there were reinforced walls inside the jail center. That was where the employees had likely already hunkered down, and that was where he and Doug really needed to be.

He rang the buzzer once, twice, as the wind outside began to howl. A beat passed, and then another. No one responded to the buzzer. Doug caught sight of the security camera pointed at them from behind the security glass, moved as close to it as he could and waved his hands. The front door rattled with the force of the wind, drawing their attention and making Garrett’s heart fall to his feet. They were going to have to ride this out in the lobby.