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But the great Senator Whitehead and Leah? Those hands on her body?

Running for a rock, Tricia grabbed her ponytail, bent over and vomited. Again and again. Until there was nothing left in her stomach. No energy—or feeling—left in her body. There was only her mind. The tortured visions playing themselves out.

And then, dropping her hair, she stumbled slowly down to the ocean to wash her face. An older couple asked if she was okay. She barely heard them, nodding without fully looking at them and began to walk.

She had to get home. Taylor would be waking from his nap. She and Scott had promised him a trip to Balboa Park that afternoon, which was why she'd made the quick run to the island to drop off Friday's order while the baby was asleep. She didn't want to be late. Scott already had too many questions.

Leah couldn't be dead. They hadn't found her body with the car. She'd run. Was safe someplace, finding a Scott to love her, to support her. She had to be. Anything else was unacceptable.

Calm, depleted, Tricia walked back up the beach, oblivious to the sand in her tennis shoes or the sun beating down on her.

Leah dead?

She passed an alcove, a little cave created by weather
and waves against some boulders on the beach. A haven. A hideaway.

Leah hadn't been nearly as emotionally strong as Tricia. Hadn't lived through the fights and beatings that had been such a large part of Tricia's childhood. She was strong, but she wasn't tough enough to run, could never leave the security of the elite society that loved and adored her, could never leave her sister or brother, her mother. Her security was the source of her strength.

Leah might be dead. With a hand to her mouth, barely catching the cry that escaped, Tricia fell inside the boulders and sobbed.

How many times in her life had the papers misquoted people? Twisted facts? Regardless of what she'd just read, her best friend
couldn't
be dead.

Please God, don't let her be dead.

“E
ngine Eleven respond. Building on fire, Juniper and 30th Street…”

Riding silently beside Cliff in full turnout gear Saturday afternoon, Scott eyed the dark black smoke already filling the sky a few blocks away. They were heading toward a two-story commercial building—a deli with an apartment above it. Everyone was safely out of the deli. So far, there'd been no report that anyone was home upstairs. No one trapped. Within spitting distance was an appliance place. And less than spitting distance behind it, a residential neighborhood with houses practically stacked on top of each other.

Ralen took the corner at forty. Scott barely noticed.

As far as he could determine, the biggest danger facing them was the exposures—the nearby buildings that could be in danger. He'd tend to that first, and let Joe and Cliff take care of ventilating the burning building. He hoped there'd be enough high windows to do the job. Cutting a hole in the roof was always a last resort. He'd
checked their ventilation fan himself that morning. He'd been bored. Too many thoughts.

“Engine Eleven, child trapped in second-floor bedroom…”

He didn't
feel
as the radio crackled with the bad news. But as his eyes briefly met Cliff's he communicated that he'd be the one to go in. There was no question.

“Child trapped!” he hollered to the two men in the back of the truck and then gave his mind over to the work at hand—and the part of him that would do the job without fail, without the kind of deliberation that would slow him down.

He was going to save a life.

 

“Damn, man, that was gutsy out there today.” Sliding his chipped mug of coffee along the scarred wooden table at one end of the station's kitchen, Cliff pulled out a chair and sat across from Scott. His wrinkled and stained blue uniform pants and T-shirt looked about as bad as Scott's.

He shrugged. It wasn't as if he'd made any conscious decisions. He'd just acted.

“You come down yet?” Cliff asked.

The adrenaline rush. It was, for some of the guys, the sole reason for doing the job. “I've come so far down, I'm at the feeling-beat-to-a-pulp stage.” It would pass soon enough, too.

Cliff nodded toward the nearly empty mug between Scott's hands. “You want me to refill that?”

“Nah.” Scott would've shaken his head if he'd had the energy. “I'm going to crash.”

Joe and Steven, his fourth, had already hit the bunks in the other room. They'd had three more calls since the fire that afternoon.

“For an hour, maybe,” Cliff scoffed. “It's Saturday night.”

Which meant drinking and driving. Smoking illegal substances. Numerous acts of supreme stupidity in the name of fun. And calls to 911.

“At least it's only a one on,” Scott said more to himself than his colleague. They usually had a couple of them a month. One twenty-four-hour shift on followed immediately by one off.

“The doc says Vera's ready for another go.” Cliff's low voice was soft.

Peering at his engineer's lowered head as Cliff stared at his coffee cup, Scott didn't know whether to congratulate the man or commiserate—give advice or shut up. He'd played it both ways in the past. And wasn't sure either one had helped.

“When?”

“Next Friday—our first day off rotation.”

“And this is what she wants?” he asked, meeting Cliff's eyes before the other man looked away again. “What
you
want?”

“Yeah.” Cliff nodded, turned his mug a full three-sixty on the table. He'd yet to take his first sip of coffee. “We want a kid, you know?”

A year and a half ago, he wouldn't have understood how that desire could drive people to do whatever it took. It still wasn't for him.

“You could always adopt.”

“That's what I keep telling her.” Cliff pushed his cup aside, slouched back in the hard wooden chair, his arms crossed over his chest. “She says she wants
my
baby and as long as they tell her there's a chance, she has to try.”

He frowned. A kid was a kid. Taylor wasn't his, but he still—

No, Taylor wasn't his. Period.

“She almost died losing the last one.” Scott wasn't sure how involved he should get, but felt he had to tell his friend what he was thinking.

Cliff's blond hair, usually brushed back, hung down over his brow. “I know.”

“Couldn't that happen again?” He'd assisted with a fair number of births during his career. Seemed reasonable to expect that Vera, who was fibrocystic, was more at risk than normal.

“It could,” Cliff said, his eyes narrowed as he finally looked at Scott head-on. “I'm telling you, man, I'm half tempted to call and have the lab destroy my goods. Having a kid isn't worth losing Vera.”

“She'd just talk you into donating more.”

“I know.”

“So tell her what you just told me. That you can't risk losing her.”

Cliff watched him silently for a moment. Then, nodding, he sat up, grabbed his mug and took a couple of healthy swallows.

Scott had a feeling his engineer was going to be spending a lot of hours on the phone that next week. Not that he hadn't done a fair amount of standing out back himself lately…

“So what gives with you?”

“Nothing.” Scott considered heading in to bed but couldn't manage the effort. He slid down in his chair, resting his head against the top rail. A bit harder than a pillow, but for someone who'd learned to sleep almost anywhere, it would suffice.

“Yeah, tell that to the ants out by the trash. You've been so distracted lately even Steve noticed.”

Steve was a great firefighter, one of the best, but about as lacking in personality as anyone Scott had ever met.

“I'm giving top performance on each and every call,” Scott said, not quite as relaxed as he lay there with the chair digging into his head. “If any of you have complaints, take them up with—”

“I wasn't talking about the job, man,” Cliff interrupted. “You single-handedly performed another miracle today, going into that wall of fire, running out with a burning kid, rolling with her until the flames were out—and all without so much as bruising her,” he reiterated, as though Scott hadn't been present at the scene.

Cliff's account was so exaggerated, he felt he
hadn't
been there.

“She wasn't burning,” he corrected. “Just her clothes were.”

“Yeah, that's why she has first-and second-degree burns on three quarters of her body,” Cliff responded dryly.

“Not her face, though,” Scott said. Thank God.

“Because you'd buried it in your chest.”

He'd done his job. As he'd been trained to do. Nothing else. And was relieved when Cliff finally let it drop. He concentrated on drifting off.

“So, you having problems with Tricia?” Cliff's deep voice, as soft as it had been when he'd first mentioned Vera, interrupted his counting of sheep.

Why the hell had he thought this chair would be comfortable enough to let him doze off? He kept his eyes closed anyway. “What makes you ask that?” he asked as though half asleep. Willing himself to be half asleep. On his way to fully zonked. Maybe it was the sheep. He'd been working with ordinary white ones but maybe the color was too bright. Maybe if he used a dark breed, something in black…

“The length of time you were on the phone with her the other night,” Cliff was saying. “The expression on your face before you noticed I'd come outside.”

Shit. He thought he'd seen Cliff right away. Had the guy gone back inside and come out a second time, more loudly, to get his attention?

“Joe and Steve were wondering about her, too.”

And Cliff, being the one Scott confided in the most, had been elected to find out?

He opened his eyes to glare at his friend. “You guys think because you were with me the night I met her, that somehow gives you squatter's rights on the relationship?”

“I can't speak for them, but my throat still hurts I was cheering so loud when you left with her,” Cliff said gruffly. “Even if she
was
pregnant. Hell, man, we been together, what ten years or more and she's the first woman I'd even seen you speak to twice.”

“Your point is?”

“I encouraged you to get friendly with her. I feel responsible.”

“Well, don't.” Scott thought of black sheep. And then just had black thoughts. “You absolved yourself of all responsibility when I let her move in with me right after I met her. At the time, you shared your opinion, just as loudly. And you were sober that time around,” he mumbled when Cliff didn't get the hint and leave. His eyes drifted shut.

Scott couldn't even remember all the derogatory things his men had called him—and when that didn't work, Tricia—once they found out she'd not only left with him, but, seven months pregnant with another man's child, moved herself in.

“So what's the problem?”

Scott opened one eye, then the other. Eventually,
reading the concerned and determined expression on his colleague's face, he gave up on immediate sleep.

“I'm not sure.” He sighed, sitting up to rest his elbows on the table and give the back of his head a rest. “She's hiding something—big—and I don't know what.”

“Big as in how? Like Christmas or a birthday? A drug deal? Another man?”

The words twisted his stomach a little tighter. “I don't know. Just big.”

“Bad big?”

“Not good.”

“You think she's got someone on the side?” It wasn't an illogical question. In their profession, they were gone from home for days on end, and affairs happened pretty often.

“No. At least, not as in being in love with someone else.”

“But you think there's someone.”

“I think she's involved in something.” He was saying more than he wanted to. And wouldn't have said anything at all if he hadn't been so damned tired. Or trusted Cliff with his life.

“Like what?”

Getting up to pour himself fresh coffee, he brought the pot to top up Cliff's mug. “Anybody's guess,” he said. He'd spent far too much time concocting possible scenarios with no results to show for his effort. “But whatever it is, it's not making her happy.”

“Maybe it's financial.”

“Maybe.” He'd considered that more than a few times. She could be in big to someone who was suddenly putting on the heat. “I don't think so, though. She's making decent money and while I don't pry, I know she's got a little nest egg saved.” Only because it was rolled up in a gravy tureen at the back of his kitchen cupboard. He'd happened upon it one day when he was looking for something to put the flowers in that he'd bought her on the way home from work shortly after Taylor was born. He'd been surprised when he'd found the nearly four hundred dollars tucked away.

That was when he'd known for sure that she had no bank account. She'd been saving for another trip to the used baby-furniture store. He'd offered to open a bank account for her, but she'd declined—politely, sweetly and without explanation.

He'd noticed the tureen several times since then, and it had never been empty.

“What about drugs?”

Scott shook his head. “There's not enough money to suspect she's into anything like that and no sign at all that she's a user. No pupil variations, erratic behaviors, appetite fluctuations, mood swings, excessive energy, lethargy or needle marks. Hell, she hardly drinks.”

“Okay, I can see you've thought that one through.” Cliff's grin didn't make light of the situation, but lightened the moment.

“So it's not drugs, money or a man. What's left?”

Scott shook his head, taking a slow sip of coffee. If they got another call tonight, which the odds said was about one-hundred percent likely, he was going to need the caffeine. “I have no idea,” he admitted. “Take yesterday, for instance. She comes home with red eyes like she's been crying, you know? Claims it was allergies—that the wind was blowing on Coronado.”

“Could be true. It's allergy season.”

“Yeah, and in the two years I've known her, she's never been allergic to anything.”

The station reverberated with the eerie silence that fell in the absence of normal sounds and activity. A silence made that much more noticeable by the awareness that bells and sirens could erupt at any moment.

“She could be pregnant.”

Cliff's words knocked the wind out of Scott as tangibly as if he'd punched him.

“She's on the pill.”

“Women forget.”

Especially women who spent a lot of nights in bed alone.

“Could be she's afraid to tell you. Afraid you'll think she did it on purpose, to trap you.”

Scott
felt
trapped. And constricted and tied up. Handcuffed. In jail, behind bars, unable to escape. She couldn't be pregnant. He couldn't be a husband and father. He wouldn't be able to empty his mind of all worldly concerns to walk into burning buildings, to rescue burning little girls. He couldn't do that if he had
anything in the world he cared about more than the person inside the fire.

And if he had a wife…a child of his own…

Still, a hidden pregnancy would certainly explain Tricia's inexplicable behavior on Coronado the Sunday before. The sudden onset of a stomach ailment. It might not explain walking all the way to the Hotel Del, but pregnant women were known to have odd cravings. Why not odd requirements regarding toilet standards?

It could also explain the unusual evidence of tears the day before. Even women who didn't cry much or easily were prone to unexpected tears while pregnant. Especially during the first few months of hormonal adjustments.

Oh, my God. She could be pregnant.
He should be angry. There was no room for even a hint of anticipation.