Hot to Touch (Kimani Romance) (13 page)

Emma allowed the tears free rein to fall as she watched him go.

S
hane scowled down at the photo in his hand, his mood dark.

The picture had been taken by one of the others when Emma, carrying the forty-pound sack, crossed the finish line during one of the training exercises.

He ran a thumb back and forth over the image. Strands of hair had escaped the ponytail at the back of her head, but despite her exhaustion, a tired, pleased smile graced her full lips as she looked up into the camera.

“Damn,” he murmured.

Although she’d only been at the station a month, her absence was noticeable when he returned three days later to learn she was no longer there.

He’d caught the sidelong glances from some of the
others, questions in their eyes he had no intention on answering.

Questions he had no answers to himself.

Being back at the station had served to remind him that he’d had a slice of heaven for few short weeks with Emma. And more importantly, that he no longer had that.

“Please be gone before I come back to base.”

The last words he said to her rang in his mind.

“Just like you wanted, right?” he asked aloud to the empty room.

“What did you do to her?” another voice replied.

Shane paused, stiffening, his fingers clutching the picture in one hand, the other holding a T-shirt he’d been about to place in his duffel bag. Slowly, he placed the photo in his bag along with the shirt and zipped the bag shut, keeping his back to his commander.

In the current state he was in, he was liable to say something to Roebuck he was sure to regret, so he decided to talk around the issue.

“I’m assuming you mean Emma?” he finally replied, trying damn hard to keep his tone moderate.

“Hell yeah, I mean Emma. You leave her in that goddamn mine shaft—”

“She was perfectly okay. A flight crew was approaching. They brought her down before I even made it down the hill,” Shane shot back. Yet, even as he said it, he felt a moment of shame for leaving her there, for refusing to allow her to return with him. But at the time, he’d been so furious with her that all rational thought had flown out the window, anger and fear driving his actions.

“That’s not the point!”

“What exactly is the point? Was the point that she pulled a crazy stunt like that where she could have gotten herself killed? Or that she endangered the lives of others trying to rescue her from the ridiculous, self-serving act in question?”

He spun around angrily to face Roebuck. “Color me confused, because I sure as hell don’t know, sir. What exactly
is
the point?”

The two men stared each other down, neither one giving an inch, until finally Roebuck sighed, shook his head and walked farther into the room.

“No, the point is that she risked her own life to try and warn us that the column was about to collapse when no one else could have. She quite possibly saved the lives of a few civilians and a hell of a lot of manpower by risking her life and making the jump.”

“What? I, I didn’t know that.” Shane stumbled back, the impact from Roebuck’s admission stunning him into silence.

Roebuck fully explained what Emma had done and the reasons why. The more he talked, the lower Shane felt, realization at the magnitude of her gesture hitting him, hard. He felt lower than he ever had, anger at his own self-righteousness making him nauseous, thinking of how badly he’d hurt her.

After he’d made it back, the worst of the fire had been contained and it was at the cleanup stage. He hadn’t stuck around, had simply wanted to get away from the site before he went back up and grabbed Emma
again to demand she tell him what had possessed her to commit the foolhardy act.

His shoulders slumped as he sank down on his bunk. He had completely screwed everything up. She probably hated him, and she had every right to.

When he’d seen her parachuting down, every imaginable terror had entered his mind, everything from her getting caught in a tree, to her landing in the middle of the fire, and he’d felt…helpless.

Again.

“Oh God, what have I done?”

He felt the dip in the mattress when Roebuck joined him and raised his eyes to meet his commander’s dark ones, filled with empathy.

“Look, I don’t want to interfere with this, but—”

“No, please, go ahead. It seems like I’ve made a complete mess of things on my own.”

“I know that a lot of your feelings about women being smoke jumpers—hell, women in general—have a lot to do with what happened to you growing up and what happened to Kyle.” When Shane remained quiet, not asking how Roebuck knew of his background, he continued.

“I’ve watched you grow, become the man in front of me. I’ll admit I wasn’t exactly your champion, didn’t know what the hell Kyle was thinking when he brought you to the station. But he saw something in you, something a lot of other people didn’t see. Something that told him you had a future. That you weren’t just another statistic waiting to happen.”

Shane’s hand, resting on the top of his thigh, clenched the minute Roebuck mentioned Kyle.

“But he proved me wrong. He proved a lot of us wrong. And when Kyle died, you were angry, hurt and you blamed someone you shouldn’t have.”

Shane didn’t want to talk about his friend’s death. He didn’t want to admit what he knew was the truth, that Ciara hadn’t been the reason for his death.

“Ciara was the only one you could blame. The only one you struck out at. You needed someone to blame, and she was the most convenient. Women became the scapegoat for you. Your mother abandoning you after your father left, and then in your mind Ciara taking Kyle away, a man who had become a substitute father for you.”

The truth of his words pierced with arrowlike precision directly to Shane’s heart.

“But it’s time you did some thinking, Shane. Lay to rest a few ghosts and stop allowing the past to dictate your present, your future. A future you could have with Emma.”

After Roebuck stopped speaking, the two men sat in silence. Shane became lost in thought, his mind turning over the chain of events that led him to force away the one who’d come to mean more to him than anyone in his life had, including Kyle.

“It’s not too late. She hasn’t left.”

Shane glanced at Roebuck, his brow furrowed. “I thought she was already gone. I checked her room—”

“As soon as she got back to base, she wrapped up
and was packed, ready to go, in less than a few hours. I tried to ask her what happened after everything calmed down. She barely said a word. Just that she had what she needed for the article. She wouldn’t even stay at the station, decided to stay at one of the hotels in town.”

“And she’s still there?” Shane asked, already rising and grabbing his jacket.

“I’m not sure about that. She just gave me her card, told me she’d be leaving as soon as she could book her flight.”

Before Roebuck had completed his last sentence, Shane had his keys in hand and was running out the door.

Roebuck sat back, a satisfied smile crossing his face.

T
he soft melody and stirring lyrics of love and loss played on the radio while Emma sat on the floor in her office, sorting through the mountain of mail that had accumulated in her absence.

She picked up an ad for a new lingerie shop opening and snorted. “Yeah, right. Doesn’t look like I’ll be needing any of
that
in the foreseeable future.”

Balling the ad up in her fist, she tossed it into the compact trash can nearby. “She shoots, she scores!” When the wadded up piece of paper spun on the rim before tipping to the floor, she finished, “Scratch that, folks. She misses.”

With a sigh, she stretched her legs out in front of her, glancing up at the clock on her desk, stretching her back.

“The story of my life,” she groused.

She’d been in her office for the last three hours, reading emails, going through mail and old files badly in need of her attention…anything and everything to help keep her mind off of Shane.

Not that any of it had worked.

She glanced at the pile of mail. She had hardly made a dent. Damn.

She’d returned home two days ago, and in that time she’d cleaned every inch of her small apartment, gone through her emails and responded, spoken with her editor, and had sat down more times than she wanted to remember in an attempt to start writing the article.

But each time she sat in front of the computer, she found herself at a loss for words, her fingers lying still over the keyboard.

Something that usually came so easy to her, telling a story in article form, had painfully become the hardest task in the world. Words failed her when she needed them, her inability to write making her fear that she had nothing to say. That her gift had been taken from her. That he’d taken it from her.

Though really, she couldn’t blame him.

She’d known from the first minute how he felt about her being on his turf. He had made no attempt to hide his feelings. Maybe a part of her had thought, foolishly, that she could change him. That she
had
changed him.

And for a while she thought she had succeeded. That he believed she could be trusted. She felt anger at him, as well as at herself. Why did she have to prove herself
in the first place? She’d learned, often the hard way, that you could never really change anyone.

She stood up and left her small office and wandered over to stand near the balcony. Sightlessly, she stared out, her mind in turmoil.

Between his mother’s desertion and eventual death and then what happened between him and Kyle, there was little room for forgiveness in Shane’s life, it seemed.

And no matter how noble her intentions, he’d found her guilty of selfishness, believing she cared so little for anyone else’s safety that for her article she would do just about anything. She hadn’t even been allowed to explain what happened.

She had been tried and convicted without Shane even giving her the benefit of the doubt, much less an opportunity to defend herself. It was as though he had been waiting for her to screw up and prove that she couldn’t be trusted. That he had wanted a reason to end their relationship.

The more she thought about it, the angrier she became. Beyond the anger, she was hurt. She’d come to care about him in ways she never thought she would—or could—for anyone.

“Who am I trying to kid? I fell ‘head over heels, pick out the white dress, picket fence and two and a half kids’ kind of love for the dumb jerk,” she said out loud, swallowing down the lump in her throat.

It was too painful to think about.

She took a deep breath and left her balcony and headed back to her office. Pulling out her chair, she
sat down and rolled herself to the desk. Her monitor flared to life as she clicked on the mouse, activating the system.

Clicking on the photo icon, seconds later a slideshow presentation began, one she’d been toying with earlier in the day. She sat back, watching the display of images cross her screen depicting her time with the smoke jumpers.

“Be gone…”

Again, the painful words he’d slung came back to haunt her.

At the time, she’d been too hurt to do much more than just sit there and take it, dumbfounded when he flung the words at her before turning and walking away.

Leaving her alone to wait for someone to bring her down had only been the second part of the insult. He’d left her alone as though he were throwing her away. As though she meant nothing to him.

Had there been a part of her that made the jump for reasons beyond helping the men? The thought entered her mind, but she shut it back out immediately. For so long she’d had to prove herself. Had to prove she was as good as everyone else for her entire life, it had felt. Had there been somewhere, buried deep in her subconscious, that her intentions, although for the right reasons, had been for the story? Had she been so desperate to prove she could write the best article that she’d go to such extreme measures to do so?

Angrily, she wiped at the tears on her face with the back of her arm. She paused, mid-sniff, looking down
at her sleeve. She was wearing his T-shirt. She brought her sleeve to her nose, closed her eyes and inhaled. The shirt still carried his scent… She remembered when she’d taken the shirt. They’d just made love during the weekend they spent away from the station.

She sat up, realizing that she’d worn the T-shirt at night, every night, since the day he told her to leave.

“How pitiful am I?” She threw her hands up in disgust, shaking her head.

“Sitting here crying over someone…someone who doesn’t even want me! Doesn’t give a damn about me. Someone who thinks I’m so stupid…so, so…whatever the hell he thought, that I’d jump into a damn burning forest for a story!” She flung the angry words into the room before she pushed her chair away from her desk, stood, and tore his shirt from her body.

“Enough! I’m through…through, mooning over him like some teenage girl crushing over a boy.”

Once removed, she balled the T-shirt up much the same way she had the newspaper ad and threw it with all her might across the room.

“He doesn’t want me? Fine! Whatever! I don’t need him.” She continued her one-sided diatribe, her breathing heavy.

When she tore the shirt from her body, it had snagged on the necklace, the one he’d given her before he’d jumped, that she still wore around her neck.

Before she’d left, she’d stopped by his room to return it. But she hadn’t been able to do it. Yes, he had been a royal ass to her, had treated her like he couldn’t stand the sight of her after making love to her… Emma blew
out a long breath. But in the end, she hadn’t been able to give up that last link to him.

She grabbed the necklace, fumbling for the catch. Frustrated when her trembling hands wouldn’t coordinate with her intent, she fisted the chain with the goal of breaking the damn thing from her neck and stopped, glancing down at it.

Opening her palm, she stared down at the old, nicked cross before bringing her arms back down to her sides. She couldn’t do it, couldn’t destroy something that had belonged to him. Something she knew had a lot of meaning for him, no matter how badly he’d hurt her.

She walked over and picked up his T-shirt from the floor where it had missed the trash can and carefully refolded it, her fingers caressing the soft material.

Turning, she walked into her bedroom and opened the top drawer of her dresser. Her glance raked over the items inside, a drawer in which she’d placed the few items that held meaning for her.

An old fading picture of her and her parents when she was young, her first medal for track and field, her first photojournalist award, a few keepsakes she’d gathered from her many travels…they were all things she kept and occasionally removed when she was feeling sad, lost.

With a deep sigh, she moved a few things out of the way before placing the T-shirt on top and closing the drawer.

Before closing another chapter in her life.