Wild Heat (Hot Shots: Men of Fire #1)(27)
Author: Bella Andre

No one should go through that kind of helpless pain alone.

“We’ll find out who did this to him. I promise.” Logan fishtailed into the hospital parking lot, then leapt out of the truck. She ran through the glass sliding doors a beat behind him.

For the hundredth time, Maya seriously questioned Logan’s guilt. There was no way he could have poured gasoline over dry grass in the middle of the night, knowing one of his men might go up in flames. This explosion smacked of a psychotic arsonist who didn’t care whom he hurt.

In five years of involved investigations, Maya had never heard the clock ticking so loudly, or so quickly. She was up against a serious threat. They all were.

Logan pushed through a glass-fronted door, and when she saw what had happened to Robbie, her spinning thoughts ground to a halt.

My God.

Tears filled her eyes and it took every ounce of will for her to remain standing. Memories flooded into her system, rising up from the linoleum floor tiles through her feet, gunning for her heart, trying to break her again, just as they’d broken her before.

Robbie lay on the hospital bed, hooked up to a life support system, wrapped head to toe in white gauze. When he woke up—if he woke up—he would be in more pain than anyone should ever have to live through.

A pretty blonde girl who’d been weeping beside Robbie ran into Logan’s arms, and he held her tight as she sobbed against him. When the girl finally stepped out of his comforting embrace a few minutes later, Maya could have sworn she’d taken some of Logan’s strength with her.

The girl left the room in a daze, wiping her tears away with the back of her hand. Maya watched Logan kneel on the floor beside Robbie, his head tucked down along the side of a bandaged hand. She didn’t know if he was praying or simply hiding his tears.

She’d been through hell with her brother, and still she didn’t know a damn thing about dealing with it.

She blinked and wiped away the tears leaking out from beneath her lashes. When the apartment building had collapsed around Tony and his body had been pinned beneath a thick ceiling beam, the other firefighters hadn’t been able to drag him out. The heat of the flames had destroyed everything. Even his bones had been reduced to ashes. She’d been so angry for so long at not even being given the chance to say good-bye to him in a hospital.

But now that she saw Robbie surrounded by machines, she wondered if Tony had been the lucky one. In all likelihood, her brother had died on impact. Whereas pain would be Robbie’s constant companion for the next several years … if he survived.

She pushed away from the window and wiped her eyes dry. She couldn’t allow long-buried grief, or its fresh counterpart, to muddy her thinking. She had to stay focused on the investigation. But it took a long moment to remember where she’d been when Logan heard the news about Robbie. She’d been standing in the airport office questioning Logan and wondering about Dennis’s motives.

Intent on finding out more about Dennis, she headed to a nurses’ station.

“This is going to sound like an odd request, but I really have to get online to look something up. Could I use one of your computers for thirty seconds?”

The two nurses sitting behind the counter frowned. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” one of them said, “but I’m afraid we can’t permit you to do that.”

Maya swallowed a frustrated snarl. She wasn’t simply wanting to check her e-mail to see if her nonexistent boyfriend had sent her a note. But they didn’t know the severity of the situation. Somehow, she needed to walk the fine line between confidentiality and disclosure.

“I’m an arson investigator,” she said quietly. “And I desperately need to print out a document regarding the hotshot who just came in. It’s a vital clue in my search for the person that did this to him.”

One of the nurses leaned forward and looked both ways down the empty hall. “You can use my computer. But hurry, honey. I don’t want anyone to see.”

Maya slipped through the swinging door and took the woman’s office chair.

“Ellen, you could get fired for doing this,” the other nurse hissed.

Maya quickly pulled up a government background check on Dennis Kellerman as Ellen responded to her coworker with a snort.

“You heard her. She needs to catch an arsonist. I don’t want to see another kid with third-degree burns over eighty percent of his body come in here.”

Maya cringed. Eighty percent. My God, she’d known people who’d recovered from third-degree burns on one arm, and their pain had been excruciating. Her heart broke again at the thought of what Robbie would go through if he managed to pull through the initial physical shock.

With shaking hands, she printed the document and logged out. “Thank you,” she said to Ellen as she retrieved the pages from the printer.

“No, honey, thank you.” She patted Maya on the shoulder. “Now go find the bad people and lock them up. We’re counting on you.”

Feeling the weight of expectations on her shoulders— her own the biggest of all—Maya quickly read through Dennis’s short file. She sensed Logan before she saw him, and when she looked up he was looming tall and dangerous over her shoulder before she could hide the document.

“Dennis? Why are you doing a background search on him?”

Confidentiality was crucial. She shouldn’t tell Logan anything, should never have let one of her suspects see a copy of another suspect’s background check, even if she’d suggested they share information. She felt like her own back was against the wall.

“I have to be suspicious of everyone, Logan. It’s the only way I’m going to find out who started these fires.”

“There’s nothing on Dennis. He’s as innocent as they come. Jesus, Maya, the longer it takes us to find the real arsonist, the more people are going to get hurt.” She read the grief, the anger on his face and felt them as her own. “One kid is already lying half dead in a hospital bed. We can’t wait for another one of my men to end up covered in bandages.”

She put her hand on his arm, then yanked it away at the surge of heat between them. “Neither of us wants that, Logan. And if I’m wrong about your foster brother, I’ll back off. But if I find something there, I have to do my job and look into it.”

He stood in the hospital hallway watching her, his shoulders so broad they almost looked like they were going to bump against the pale green walls.

“Tell me why Dennis is suddenly on your list.”

An hour ago, she wouldn’t have even considered letting Logan in on her investigation, but after having seen him with Robbie, she was absolutely certain he hadn’t set off this explosion. Watching him at Robbie’s bedside as much as made her decision for her: They would work together to investigate this new fire, and along the way she hoped to get some answers regarding the initial wildfire.