Up in Flames [The Heroes of Silver Springs 10] (Siren Publishing Everlasting Classic) (13 page)

“I hope so ’cause my CPR skills are a bit rusty.” He shot a glance at the now closed apartment door. “Cory lives across the hall, though, if EMT assistance becomes necessary.”

“Seeing you half-naked is not
that
distracting, Max.”

Well, damn.
He wondered if it would be
that
distracting to see him completely naked.

“I would’ve called first, but I didn’t have your number.”

“I slid it under your front door when I dropped off your car the other night.” Fuck. He hadn’t meant to bring up the other night. She’d unleashed her pit bull on him at the mere mention of it yesterday morning.

To his immense surprise, she didn’t let her pit bull out of its cage this time. She didn’t even bristle. Her gaze did drop from his, though, and the foot that had frozen a minute ago slid back and forth on the carpet a couple of times.

“Yeah, I, uh, I found it, but…”

“You threw it away,” Max finished for her. If he’d known that before she had showed up at his apartment door, his ego might have taken one hell of a hit. The fact that she was here now, though, saved his pride from total devastation.

She winced as she met his gaze again. “Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about. Do you want something to drink? I can make some coffee.”

“Do you have any cream for that coffee?”

Max chuckled. “French-vanilla Coffee-mate and two-percent milk.”

One eyebrow winged up. “You drink French-vanilla coffee?”

Max wrinkled his nose. “Yuck! No way. It’s Rayne’s. She has a habit of invading my apartment from time to time and making herself at home, so I keep it around for her.”

“I’ll remember to tell her thanks the next time I see her.”

“The kitchen is this way.” Max pointed toward the short hallway and the doorway beyond that led to his kitchen. “C’mon. I’ll make the coffee, and you can tell me why you showed up at my apartment this morning and gave me instant visions of a mad doctoress wanting to surgically remove my brain from my skull.”

Her laughter, along with her spectacular body, preceded him to the kitchen. “You’re not serious,” she said, stopping at the counter by the sink and turning to lean against it.

His kitchen was long and narrow with just enough space for two people to pass one another, but not enough to keep them from touching. His shoulder grazed her breasts as he moved by her, sending electric sparks of lust through his system.

“As a heart attack.” He pulled the coffee from the cabinet, spooned a few scoops into the filter in the basket, and took the pot from the burner. “You said you were mental. Believe me, that only made the image more concrete.”

“I meant…” Her tone sounded more serious when she finally finished, “Well, you know what I meant by it.”

“What I know is you were right.” Max moved to the sink, his forearm brushing hers as he filled the pot to the appropriate line with water. “For the pit bull to show up at Lieutenant
Insufferable Nuisance Ass’s apartment must mean you fell at some point in the night and bumped your head.”

“You’re really not an insufferable nuisance ass, you know?”

Max froze in the act of turning from the sink, his gaze slamming into hers. He hid his shock well. At least he hoped he did. Damn, if she didn’t just surprise him to the bottom of his feet, though. “And you’re really not a pit bull…sometimes.”

Her lips twitched, and he finished setting the coffee maker to brew.

“Remember that MVA you were telling me about the other night? The one Kyle Shannon said was so similar to the one B-shift was toned out for last week?”

“Yeah, the Buick Regal.” Max turned and leaned against the opposite counter. “What about it?”

“The cause of both of those fires was determined to be improperly connected fuel lines. Do you know what actually caused both of the MVAs?”

Max thought about it for a second and shook his head. “Come to think of it, no.”

“The steering cable snapped.”

“On both cars?”

Regina nodded. “There’s more. The week between the two MVAs, an automotive shop in Station 4’s district caught fire. Another investigator was called to that one and determined it was an electrical snafu. That’s, of course, not the political terminology, but you get the gist of it.”

“Yeah, I get it.” What he was getting was a connection, apparently just like she had. “You’re thinking the cars were tapered with so they would cause an accident and catch fire. Then, the same guy torches the two automotive shops.” He drew his brows together. “But why?”

Regina heaved a heavy breath and let it out slow. “To get my attention.”

* * * *

“This is Owen Banks. You know what to do.”

Did she? Terri grazed her finger over the “end call” icon on her iPhone and tossed the phone on the coffee table as she stomped to her bedroom. She stopped in the doorway, stared at the bed she’d failed to make before leaving to start her rotation yesterday morning, and pivoted, stomping back down the hallway to the living room.

It had been an uneventful night at the firehouse, one of the few where she’d managed to get plenty of sleep before C-shift had taken over the rotation. If she tried to go back to bed now, she’d spend hours tossing and turning. Her stomach growled, alerting her for the umpteenth time that she hadn’t yet eaten breakfast.

“Which is why I just called you,” she said, narrowing her eyes on her discarded iPhone. “But you didn’t answer.”

She could try Owen’s other number, the cell he kept for hospital purposes, but what would be the point? She knew his schedule at the hospital as well as she knew her own at the firehouse. She knew the days he volunteered at the clinic, too. Today was an off day for him. At barely eight in the morning, he should’ve been groggily crawling out of bed and heading to his kitchen for a cup of wake-up juice.

“Not ignoring my phone calls,” she said through gritted teeth.

In all fairness, she doubted he was really ignoring her. He’d probably come up with something else to occupy his time this morning. But, damn it, she’d wanted to go out for breakfast. She’d wanted to see him. It had been more than a week since they’d done anything together. How the hell was a woman supposed to convince a man he wanted more from her than friendship if they spent so little time together?

“And why the hell are you wasting your time trying to
convince
a man of anything in the first place?”

Her gaze shifted to the end table closest to the front door of her apartment where she’d emptied her pockets as soon as she’d stepped inside. The business card lying amongst the pile of her keys, coins, and a tube of lip balm brought Gage Britt’s do-me eyes to the forefront of her mind. The way she saw it, she had two choices. She could sit around her apartment sulking and bitching about a man who obviously didn’t have time for her, which was decidedly
not
a Terri Vega thing to do, or she could give Gage Britt a jingle.

“Which
is
the Terri Vega thing to do,” she told herself as she scooped up her iPhone on her way to the end table to fetch his card.

She didn’t give herself time to think about it. Ever since she’d come up with this cockamamie notion that she might be ready to settle down, find a man, and keep him for a while, she’d had plenty of damn time to think, and it had gotten her nowhere.

Gage’s thick, Southern drawl answered on the second ring, and, for the first time in months, Terri felt like herself again.

* * * *

Regina watched Max. His jaw dropped, and he blinked several times in succession before he closed his mouth again. She’d taken a risk coming to him. She’d known it when she’d made the decision. If B-shift had been on duty, she wouldn’t have even considered it. Being alone with him, especially in his apartment, was more of a recipe for disaster than she needed for breakfast.

But no way would she disturb Dean Wolcott at home. She knew the captain wouldn’t have cared. He and Veronica would’ve opened the door to their home to her with open arms. Still, she hadn’t wanted to bother him and his pregnant wife on one of the few days they got to spend together this week.

So, she’d come to Max. She’d needed someone with a quick mind and a smart brain. She’d needed someone who knew fire the way she did, understood and loved it. There were other investigators in her office, others who worked below her, and there was her superior. She’d considered going to one of them, but it simply hadn’t felt right.

Going with her gut, she made the decision to come to Max. She knew she’d made the right choice when he didn’t freak out or tell her she was off her rocker or laugh at her for being so silly. After he finally recovered from his shock, he got straight to the point.

“What makes you think this arsonist is doing it to get your attention?”

“A lot of hours spent this afternoon interviewing, investigating, and talking on the phone. To give you the whole story, Gage is the one that started the ball in motion.”

“The arson prosecutor from the firehouse today?”

Regina nodded. “We had a late lunch after we left the station. I was telling him about the MVAs and yesterday morning’s fire. I didn’t know about the other auto-shop fire at the time. Anyway, something about everything I was telling him hit a spot, but he couldn’t tell me why. All he could say was that I needed to call my father.”

The coffeepot finished brewing, and Max pushed himself away from the counter. The step he took across the narrow kitchen put the front of his body pressing to the side of hers. Heat, lust, and a myriad of other sexual sensations zinged through her system. She hadn’t lied to him when she told him his appearance this morning was distracting. When he’d opened the door wearing nothing but a towel and a thoroughly shocked expression, she’d damn near melted at his feet. His replacing the towel with the jogging pants that rode low on his lean hips hadn’t helped a bit. She still felt like her insides were on the verge of a total meltdown. Feeling his rock-solid body pressed to hers again only accelerated the process.

“Your father is an investigator for the Kingsford office, right?” Max asked as he pulled two coffee mugs from the upper cabinet next to her head.

“Was,” Regina corrected, unable to keep her eyes off him as he turned to the coffeepot on the opposite countertop.

She’d never seen him with his shirt off. Dear God in heaven, it was definitely a sight to appreciate. The muscles in his back and shoulders flexed deliciously as he pulled the coffeepot from the burner and poured the java into the mugs. She curled her hands around the edge of the counter behind her, fighting off the desire to flatten her palms on his back, to drag them down his bronzed flesh, and then snake her arms around his trim waist and pull him against her body.

He turned, extended one of the cups for her to take, and she snapped out of her trance.

“He’s retired now. Severe arthritis. Very severe.”

Max lifted his cup to his mouth and blew a cooling breath into it, gazing at her over the rim. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

Regina stared into the brown liquid in her mug. “It’s been hard for him, but he’s handling it okay.” At least Gage said it was. She still didn’t believe it herself. “Anyway, that’s not the point.” She shook it off and got back to the conversation. “I called him as Gage suggested, told him about the MVAs and the auto-shop fires, and he filled in what Gage couldn’t.”

“There’s a bigger connection?” Max guessed correctly.

“Much bigger. Huge, even. Four years ago, there was a string of fires in Kingsford. My father was the investigator on the case. It started with a MVA. An early-eighties-model Buick Regal was involved in a head-on collision.”

Max held up a hand, palm out. “Let me guess. The fuel line was improperly connected and the steering cable snapped.”

Regina nodded. “Just like the two recent accidents. A week later, an automotive shop was torched. There was no connection between the two made at the time, and it was later determined the only connection was the arsonist himself.”

“In other words, the Buick from the accident had never been to that particular automotive shop.”

“Exactly. It didn’t end there.” Regina pushed off the counter, sidestepped, and opened the fridge. The French vanilla Coffee-mate sat on the top shelf. She poured a little in her cup and shot a glance over her shoulder at Max. “Spoon?”

“The drawer to your left.”

She pulled open the drawer, snagged a spoon, and continued. “A week after the auto shop catches fire, a private physical therapist’s office goes up in flames. A week after that, it was a daycare.” She turned back around and leaned against the counter again in time to see Max’s full posture stiffen.

“A daycare?”

“It happened at night when the place was closed, thank God, but evidence found at both scenes linked those fires to the one at the automotive shop.”

Max turned slightly and set his coffee mug on the counter behind him. “A car, an automotive shop, a doctor’s office, and a daycare…” He ticked them off on his fingers.

Regina sipped her coffee, watching him over the rim of her cup. “Sounds like random fires, doesn’t it?” she asked as she lowered her hand. “Except that at each scene after the car, the same accelerant was found.”

“A mixture of gasoline and whatever that napalm-smelling shit was?” Again, Max was right on the money.

“The sample I took from the auto shop this morning is at the lab being tested even as we speak.” Regina cradled her coffee mug in both her hands. “If I’m right and today’s fire was started by the same guy who did all those in Kingsford, the scent you picked up on will turn out to be citronella gel.”

Max’s brows winged up. “Citronella gel?”

“Highly flammable, easily mixable, and found at your local department store.”