Flashpoint

Chapter 11

Zach watched Brooke’s expression register surprise on top of the pain already there. She’d really believed that he’d walked away. Tears or no tears, he wouldn’t have left a perfect stranger, but she’d actually expected him to abandon her. He knew that wasn’t a reflection on him, but on her own experiences. People didn’t stick in her life.

Odd how he wanted to. “Phyllis wouldn’t want you to lose it over her.”

“I told her everything would be okay. I promised her. But everything isn’t going to be okay.”

He knew that, too. Heart heavy, calling himself every kind of fool, he sank into the chair next to her and leaned his tired head back to the wall and studied the ceiling.

It didn’t matter that he wasn’t looking at her. He could still see her; she’d been imprinted on his brain. A body made for his. A mouth that fueled his fantasies. Eyes that destroyed him with every glance. “Promises are a bad idea all the way around.”

Especially the one he’d made to her. Not to fall for her. Man, that one was going to haunt him.

“I know.”

Brooke still sounded way too close to tears for his comfort. Turning his head, he found her watching him, eyes still thankfully dry. “Don’t be too hard on yourself. We all break promises.”

“Some of us do it more spectacularly than others.”

“I don’t know about that.”

She stared at him for a long moment. “Zach…I’ve not handled any of this well.”

“This.”

“The new job. Making friends at the new job.” She lowered her voice. “You.”

“What about me?”

“Sleeping with you and thinking I could just walk away. It was supposed to be letting loose, but you should know I’m having some trouble with that whole walking-away portion of the plan. I have no idea how people do the one-night thing, I really don’t.”

“There was no sleeping involved.”

“What?”

“Our night. We didn’t sleep. It’s an important clarification, because sleeping implies intimacy.”

“What we did felt pretty damn intimate,” she said.

“Temporarily intimate. There’s a difference. Now, if we’d been getting naked every night since…that would be true intimacy.” He looked at her, wanting a reaction, but hell if he knew what kind of reaction he wanted, or why he was even going there.

“You agreed readily enough,” she reminded him. “And it’s what you do, anyway. Light stuff only.”

She was watching him carefully, and sitting there in the hospital chair, surrounded by strangers, the scent of antiseptic and people’s suffering all around them, she was clearly waiting for him to deny it. And given how he kept baiting her about it, it made sense that she was confused.

But what he wanted didn’t really matter. Not when she was out of here in less than two weeks. But apparently his mouth didn’t get the message from his brain because it opened and said, “Whatever this is, clearly we’re going to drive each other nuts for the next two weeks, so we might as well take it as far as we can.”

She blinked. “You mean…”

“Yeah.”

At his hip, his pager beeped. Hell. Rising to his feet, he looked down into her still surprised face. “Think about it.”

“I…will.”

Zach’s call was to an all-too-familiar address for a house fire.

Phyllis’s.

When they pulled down her street, his stomach hit his toes. The house was lit up like a Fourth of July fireworks display. The flames were hot, fast and, as it turned out, unbeatable. Even with Sam and Eddie’s engine already there, and two others from neighboring firehouses, in less than twenty minutes they’d lost the entire structure.

Afterward, with the crew all cleaning up, Zach slipped inside the burned-out shell. He moved through the clingy, choking smoke, down the blackened hallway where Phyllis’s pictures were nothing but a memory. Inside her bedroom, he took in the soot, water and ashes.

And a wire-mesh trash can, tipped on its side.

On the wall above it, black markings flared out, indicating a flash burn. Probably aided by an accelerant.

Just like the Hill Street fire.

And the two before that.

Jaw tight, Zach stared at the evidence, pulling his cell phone out of his pocket to take a picture, which he e-mailed to both Tommy and himself. This time, whatever happened, he was going to have his own damn evidence, because no way had Phyllis had a wire-mesh trash can in here, not in the lacy, frilly, girly room.

His cell phone rang, and when he saw Brooke’s name on the I.D., he experienced a little jolt. I’ve thought about it, he imagined her saying. Do me, Zach…

“I just heard about the fire,” she said instead, sounding tight and grim. “Zach, when we were taking Phyllis out of the house, she tried to tell us that someone was standing on the edge of her property, watching us. A man with a blowtorch.”

His fantasy abruptly vanished. “What?”

“She was fighting us, trying to stall, saying whatever she could to get us to let her go back into the house. We didn’t listen to her. And now…”

“And now you just might have helped catch a serial arsonist,” he said firmly. “If you were here, I’d kiss you again.”

She let out a breath. “But what if-”

“Don’t kill yourself with the what-ifs,” he said. “I’ve been there. They don’t help.”

“Old heating element,” Tommy told him the next morning when he found Zach waiting at his office. “Shoddy, unreliable, and as we saw firsthand, dangerous. Thank God Phyllis was still in the hospital and not at home.”

Zach just shook his head. “This was no more accidental than the Hill Street fire. The trash can-”

“Zach-”

“Look, Phyllis said she saw a guy standing on the edge of her property with a blowtorch.”

Tommy sighed and retrieved two Red Bulls from a small refrigerator on his credenza. “I can’t discuss the investigation.”

Zach declined the caffeine-rich drink. “Thought you were off caffeine.”

“Sue me.” Tommy drank deep and sighed again. “Just don’t tell my wife.”

“Tommy-”

“Look, I talked to Phyllis myself this morning. She’s incoherent and in and out of consciousness. She doesn’t remember a damn thing about yesterday. Not a guy with a blowtorch, or if she had a wire-mesh trash can or not.”

“That’s the drugs talking.”

“That’s all we have. The fire was put out, Zach. It was a job well done on our part. No injuries, no fatalities.”

And that was the bottom line. Zach got that. He just didn’t happen to agree. “It was also arson.”

“Goddamn it.”

“I suppose your next line is for me to leave this one alone, too.”

“Yes,” Tommy said very quietly. “It is.”

“You got the picture I sent.”

“I got the picture.”

“You’d better be on this, Tommy.”

“You need to go now, Zach.”

Yeah. Yeah, he did, before he did something he might deeply regret. Like lose his job.

When he finally got to the fire station and went to the kitchen for something to put in his empty, gnawing gut, Brooke was there. He’d hoped to see her last night at his place. In his bed. But clearly she’d thought a little too much. He tried to move past her, but she grabbed his arm.

“Brooke, don’t.” He felt raw. Exposed. If he let her touch him right now, it might make him all the more vulnerable. Pulling free, he backed up a step and came up against the damn refrigerator.

She merely stepped in against him, trapping him there. He could have shoved past her, but he didn’t. Her warm, curvy body pressed to his, her eyes wide and open, reflecting her sorrow, her sympathy.

“The house is completely gone?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Was she right about the guy she saw? Was it arson?”

“I believe so.”

“Tommy-”

“Told me again to stay out of this.”

“Oh, damn. Zach, I’m sorry.” She slid her hands up his chest to cup his jaw. “I’m so sorry.”

But not sorry enough to have come to him last night. Knowing that, he might have been able to resist what she did next, except he didn’t. She pressed her mouth to his cheek, and then to the corner of his mouth, and then, because he’d apparently lost his mind, he turned his head and hungrily met her lips with his.

Reason went out the window. Everything went out the window as he did his best to inhale her whole. She had her arms wound around his neck, her hands fisted in his hair. He had a hand up the front of her shirt cupping her breast over her bra, the other down the back of her pants, when he vaguely heard someone clear his throat behind them.

Shit.

Lifting his head, he locked eyes with Blake over Brooke’s head.

“Bad time?” Blake asked drolly.

Brooke squeaked and hid her head against Zach’s chest.

“Very bad,” Zach said.

Blake gestured to the refrigerator at Zach’s back. “But I’m hungry.”

With a choked sound, Brooke stepped away from Zach. Without a word, she walked out of the kitchen.

Blake just arched a brow, gesturing to the fridge.

“Jesus.” Zach pushed away from the refrigerator and let Blake at it.

The next night, off duty and at home, Zach sat at his own kitchen table with all the evidence he had on the arson fires so far spread out on a board laid in front of him. He was trying to connect the dots instead of thinking about Brooke when the doorbell rang.

It was pizza delivery by Aidan. His partner handed off the extra-large, loaded pie and pushed past him to get inside.

“Well, gee,” Zach said dryly. “Come on in.”

“We’ve got to talk.” Aidan moved into the kitchen and helped himself to a beer in the refrigerator. He twisted off the top, drank deeply, then gave Zach a long look.

“It’s not good,” Zach guessed.

“It’s you. And what you’re doing.”

“Look, we’re both adults. If we decide to go at this until she leaves, it’s our business.”

Aidan looked confused. “Huh?”

“You’re not talking about Brooke?”

“No.” Aidan cocked his head. “Although, I did hear some interesting rumors today, which I ignored. Erroneously so, apparently.”

“It’s no big deal.”

“Okay.”

“It’s just casual.”

“Okay.”

“But Jesus, the way everyone’s going on about it, I might as well marry her.”

Aidan’s eyes nearly bugged out of his head. “Whoa. The M word? Out of your mouth?”

“It’s just a word.”

Aidan was still eyeing him like a bug on a slide. “Why are you harping on this?”

“Because you are.”

“I said okay about twenty minutes ago, dude. It’s all you.”

Zach opened the pizza box, pulled out the biggest piece and stuffed a bite in his mouth. “Jenny brought me pizza a while back. Hers was better.”

“That’s because hers came with a hot bod. You boinking her, too?”

“No.”

“Then can I boink her?”

Zach sighed. “Why are you here again?”

“To yell at you. But not for the women. I only wish I had half your woman problems.”

“Hey, you’ve had your problems.”

“Name one.”

“Okay, how about you doing Blake’s soap-star-diva sister and not telling him about it.”

Aidan winced. “Hey, she wasn’t a soap-star diva at the time. And besides, I was really young and really stupid back then.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You’re unusually testy. You’re either PMSing, or those new rumors are definitely true.”

“Which are what exactly?”

“That you and Brooke nearly did it up against the refrigerator. Which, by the way, if it’s true? Nice.”

“Do you ever think of anything besides sex?”

“Alas, rarely.” Aidan grabbed his own huge piece of pizza.

“Fine. But I don’t want to talk about Brooke.”

Aidan shot him an amused look. That rankled. “Okay.”

“I don’t.”

“Fine. Let’s talk about a little thing called arson. You told Tommy you thought Phyllis’s house fire was deliberately set.”

“Yes.”

“Are you crazy?”

“It was arson.”

“Okay, but Tommy is the best investigator this town has ever had and you know it, which means he’s on it.”

Zach opened his mouth to speak, but Aidan stopped him. “And you also know he has the biggest mouth this town has ever seen. Everyone is talking about you.”

“So what?”

“So what? You love this fucking job, that’s what. You work your ass off. You’re one of the best in the whole damn city, and there’s a lieutenant position coming up that you’re going to take yourself right out of the running for because you won’t leave this alone.”

“I can’t leave it alone.”

Aidan sighed. “You’re that damn sure?”

Zach pointed to the material he’d been working on.

Twisting one of the kitchen chairs around, Aidan straddled it, steepling his hands over the back and setting his chin on them as he studied the board on the table. After a long moment, he let out a breath. “Mysterious points of origin. Metal trash cans. And now, maybe a blowtorch.” He shook his head. “So what now?”

Zach sat heavily and for the first time put words to the terrible thoughts in his head. “I’m not sure. But look at this.” He tossed down the photos he’d taken of the razed properties.

Aidan shifted through the pictures. “Who ordered the demolitions?”

“I’m working on that.”

Aidan finished his beer, silent.

“I know. I’m crazy.” Zach shoved his fingers through his hair. “I feel crazy.”

“No.” Aidan shook his head. “Someone is systematically destroying evidence. Tommy either knows this, or…”

They stared at each other at the unspoken implication that Tommy could be behind any of it.

“You’re not crazy,” Aidan said. “And you need to get to Phyllis before someone convinces her to destroy any more evidence we can use.”

“We?”

“Partners,” Aidan said. “For better or worse.”

Long after Aidan had left, Zach stood on his back deck, staring out at the night, his mind whirling.

Arson.

Brooke.

Restlessness…

He was surrounded by the life he’d chosen, a life both exhilarating and challenging. He loved it. And yet there was no denying he’d shut himself off from the very thing that people would say mattered most.

Love.

Had he really done that because of losing his family so long ago? Or had it just been an excuse, a handy reason not to let himself get hurt? If so, that had backfired, because he’d gotten hurt, anyway. Whether he was ever with Brooke again almost didn’t matter-his emotions were involved.

She hadn’t come to him tonight, either. That left him two choices: be alone, or go to her.

Easy enough choice. He went inside and grabbed his keys, and then whipped open the door-to find Brooke standing there, hand raised to knock.