Hot as Sin (Hot Shots: Men of Fire #2)(16)
Author: Bella Andre

“You mentioned Connor. How is he?”

Sam’s expression went from hot to cold so fast her head spun.

“None of us heard from you for ten years. You didn’t leave a telephone number. Or an address. You didn’t send Christmas cards to the station. You just disappeared.”

The force of his words pushed her back against the pillows. She opened her mouth to defend herself, but no words came.

“I gave you what you wanted, Dianna. I let you be gone. So what do you care what happened to Connor?” She was reeling from the anger—and hurt—behind his words. But she couldn’t ignore the red flag of danger that told her something had happened to Connor. Something bad.

“Something happened to him, didn’t it?”

His lips tightened and the muscle in his jaw jumped. She held her breath, desperate now to find out what had happened to Connor, even though she already knew she wasn’t going to like what she heard.

“He was burned. Last summer in a blowup in Desolation Wilderness.”

“Oh God,” she breathed, remembering the news reports from that wildfire. “Every time I heard about a bad fire in the Sierras, I thought about you,” she said softly.

His face registered surprise and she mirrored it back at him. Suddenly it seemed important that he know just how difficult it had been—both then and now—to stop worrying about him and the rest of the men she’d known on the Tahoe Pines crew.

“Just because I left Lake Tahoe didn’t mean I could pretend your job wasn’t dangerous. I thought about everyone on the crew. About Connor. And I prayed that all of you would make it through unscathed.”

When she stopped talking, she realized she’d broken her own vow to keep her distance. The beautiful man standing in front of her was too dangerous for such recklessness.

“We all came out of it fine,” he said. “Everyone except Connor.”

The thought of how much pain Connor must have been in sent a new wave of nausea through her.

“Where was he burned?”

“His hands and arms,” Sam said in a cool, almost clinical voice. “His chest and the back of his head a bit.”

She could only imagine how hard it must have been for Sam to watch his brother get hurt. To be so close and yet just far enough away that he couldn’t save him, couldn’t keep the fire from taking its spoils.

On the verge of saying this, she realized he was staring at her hands. Looking down, she realized she was cracking her knuckles and made herself pull her hands apart. The cracking was a sign of weakness. Dianna hated showing weakness to anyone.

Especially Sam.

“Tell me what happened, Sam. Please.”

He was silent for a long while and she thought she understood why. Firefighters weren’t big talkers, especially when one of them got hurt. Sam had explained it to her once, telling her that the most important thing was getting back out and doing their job, not stewing on what had gone wrong.

In truth, this trait had been one of the things about Sam that had driven her crazy: He’d always had her on a “need to know” basis. And as far as he’d been concerned, she simply didn’t need to know the gory, scary details of his day-to-day, which meant she’d known next to nothing about his job and had to get her information from the newspaper like everyone else.

Sensing that more questions would only put him more on guard, she gently observed, “I just can’t picture Connor getting hurt. He always seemed so invincible.”

Sam finally sat down on the chair beside her bed, so close that the hair on her arms stood on edge, and goose bumps covered her skin.

Late at night, when she was exhausted and her defenses were down, she’d dreamed a thousand times about being with him again, but she never thought she would experience this closeness live and in person. She wanted to reach out and touch him to see if he was real or if he’d disappear like he always did in her dreams right before she pressed her lips against his.

“Logan, Connor, and I were working on clearing a patch of brush a quarter mile from the blaze.”

He spoke quickly, as if he had to get the words out before it became too difficult to recount the event.

“Sparks must have jumped over us in the wind, and before we knew it, we were on top of the fire. Logan realized it first, even though Connor and I were closer to the fire. Logan should have made a break for it. He should have saved himself. Instead he came down the hill and saved our lives.”

Dianna wasn’t surprised by what Logan had done. Like the rest of the men on Sam’s crew, Logan had been gorgeous and fearless, and yet he’d stood out to her. Not because she was attracted to him, but because she knew a kindred spirit when she met one. He hadn’t needed to tell her that his life hadn’t always been easy. She’d seen it in his eyes, in the set of his jaw, in the way he carried himself.

“I always liked Logan.”

“He just got married.”

Again, she was surprised by Sam’s intensity. And the fact that there was no mistaking his meaning of, “Back off, he’s taken.”

Well, she wasn’t going to rise to the bait.

“I’ll make sure to send his new wife something pretty for the house.” Getting back to Connor, she asked, “So the three of you ran up the mountain? And then what?”

His eyes clouded over and she wondered if he was back there in Desolation Wilderness with Logan and Connor, breathing in hot, black smoke.

“Death was right there, right behind us. We were almost out, when the breeze kicked up and the flames sucked Connor down.”

She took a shaky breath. “It must have been horrible.”

She knew the Forest Service sent in psychiatrists whenever there was an accident. She also knew that hotshots rarely talked to the suits, that they weren’t willing to risk getting kicked off the crew later on because of a momentary weakness recorded in their official files.

“Have you talked about this with anyone?”

Sam shook his head once, firmly. The urge to take him in her arms and heal his bottled-up pain was so strong that she had her hand on his arm before she could corral her compulsion.

He stiffened and she immediately yanked her hand away. The skin on her palm and fingers felt like she’d grabbed on to a hot platter right out of the oven.

“I should have insisted on bringing up the rear,” Sam finally said in a hard voice.

Clearly, guilt still weighed him down. Even though he’d almost died saving his brother, he obviously wished he could have done more.