Three-Alarm Love

Three-Alarm Love
Carole Buck

VERY LOUD WEDDING BELLS… Keezia Carew never imagined that her best friend's kiss would send shivers up her spine, set her head spinning and sound off alarms. Or that sexy Fridge Randall would suddenly be hearing wedding bells! With one bad marriage behind her, Keezia said "no thanks." Three times!But this determined man was deaf to everything but those darned bells! Until something happened that made Keezia suddenly think twice about Fridge's proposals. She said "yes." Once . But this time, he was the one saying "no thanks" and backing away. Yet this feisty female wasn't going anywhere - except down the aisle!

“Nothing Wrong With Independence In A Woman, Sugar...Up To A Point.” (#u80c9ff58-e5b7-5fc2-a7bc-aa969d854ef3)Letter to Reader (#ub6e283c4-9d2f-5ed1-a64f-020cb7a2a8ae)Title Page (#u8217d7b9-98d5-569e-b471-ee6d6a235343)CAROLE BUCK (#u1c19e887-a0a4-5c23-9232-66229940c1da)Prologue (#u11b9543e-5972-5436-98a0-253416061e07)Chapter One (#u544f8d30-e72e-56e5-8e13-d163013ce242)Chapter Two (#u5ce2b6a0-5e0a-5d4f-9486-5d8e1dac9643)Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

“Nothing Wrong With Independence In A Woman, Sugar...Up To A Point.”

“And exactly what point might that be, Mr. Randall?” Keezia inquired, her voice like molten honey and her eyes shimmering with a uniquely feminine form of provocation.

“Well...” Fridge’s body thrummed with anticipation. “If you were to independently put your arms around my neck—”

“Like this?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And what if I were to move a little closer...? Are we beyond the point yet?”

“We’re nowhere close,” Fridge finally managed.

“So there wouldn’t be anything wrong with me sort of easing your head down....”

Their mouths met. Mated in an evocative dance that soon became blatantly sexual.

“I want to say that you are one fine kisser, Mr. Randall.”

“I can do much better, sugar.”

Dear Reader,

February, month of valentines, celebrates lovers—which is what Silhouette Desire does every month of the year. So this month, we have an extraspecial lineup of sensual and emotional page-turners. But how do you choose which exciting book to read first when all six stones are asking Be Mine?

Bestselling author Barbara Boswell delivers February’s MAN OF THE MONTH, a gorgeous doctor who insists on being a full-time father to his newly discovered child, in The Brennan Baby. Bride of the Bad Boy is the wonderful first book in Elizabeth Bevarly’s brand-new BLAME IT ON BOB trilogy. Don’t miss this fun story about a marriage of inconvenience!

Cupid slings an arrow at neighboring ranchers in Her Torrid Temporary Marriage by Sara Orwig. Next, a woman’s thirtieth-birthday wish brings her a supersexy cowboy—and an unexpected pregnancy—in The Texan, by Catherine Lanigan. Carole Buck brings red-hot chemistry to the pages of Three-Alarm Love. And Barbara McCauley’s Courtship in Granite Ridge reunites a single mother with the man she’d always loved.

Have a romantic holiday this month—and every month—with Silhouette Desire Enjoy!

Melissa Senate

Senior Editor

Please address questions and book requests to:

Silhouette Reader Service

U.S 3010 Walden Ave., PO. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

Canadian P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3

Three-Alarm Love

Carole Buck

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

CAROLE BUCK

is a television news writer and movie reviewer who lives in Atlanta. She is single and her hobbies include cake decorating, ballet and traveling. She collects frogs, but does not kiss them. Carole says she’s in love with life; she hopes the books she writes reflect this. Carole loves to hear from her readers. You can write to her at P.O. Box 78845 Atlanta, GA 30357-2845.

Prologue

Ralph “Fridge” Randall was a man who accepted the existence of Heaven as a matter of faith. Hell—at least an earthly version of it—he was acquainted with, firsthand.

Fridge was a firefighter. A veteran of fourteen years of dedicated, frequently dangerous service with the Atlanta Fire Department And while he’d readily concede that the vast majority of the blazes he’d battled during this period could be attributed to either accident or arson, there’d been a few that he privately suspected of being, well, essentially diabolical in origin.

This was not to say that the only child of Helen Rose and the late Willie Leroy Randall believed the devil was going around striking sparks and igniting multiple-alarm infernos in Georgia’s Fulton County. He didn’t. Given his awareness that human carelessness, callousness and cruelty often had incendiary consequences, he didn’t figure the devil had much need to step in and personally play pyromaniac.

Still. Nearly a decade and a half on the department’s front line had taught Fridge that there were fires that seemed to be more malignant—more deliberate in their destructiveness—than others. Bizarre as it might sound to folks who’d never gone after a fully involved blaze wielding a ventilating ax or a charged-up hose, there were some fires that just plain exuded evil.

It was such fires that made Helen Rose Randall’s son think back to an illustration he’d happened upon in a Sunday-school reader many years before. He couldn’t recall the text of the caption, although he was pretty certain that it had had something to do with sin, brimstone and eternal damnation. But the picture...

That he remembered in full-color detail!

The picture had scared the living daylights out of him. He’d taken one look at it and persuaded himself that the flames it so vividly portrayed were intent on his personal incineration. “Intent” as in consciously determined, with malice aforethought.

There’d been no doubt m his young mind about the implications of what he’d seen Those flames had been out to get him—Ralph Booker Randall—no ifs, ands, buts or possibilities of divine salvation about it.

Fridge had been about six when he’d come across that Sunday-school illustration. He’d spoken about it to only two people in the nearly thirty years that had followed.

The first person had been his mama. Keeping secrets from her wasn’t something he’d done as a little boy. It wasn’t something he did much as a grown man, either.

The second person had been a fellow firefighter who, despite the difference in their skin color, Fridge had come to trust like a brother. The firefighter’s name was Jackson Miller.

Jackson had understood without needing an explanation why certain fires reminded him of the hellish image he’d seen as a kid. Fridge had been sure that he would.

Why had he been so certain Well, chalk it up to his awareness of Jackson’s family history. He knew that there’d been Miller men battling blazes in and around Atlanta ever since Jackson’s great-great-granddaddy had volunteered for the force back in 1870. The notion that there were flames capable of transcending the laws of science and taking on a seemingly sentient existence of their own was something Jackson had absorbed at his father’s knee.

“Fire’s always the enemy in our line of work,” he’d observed after listening to Fridge’s tale of the Sunday-school illustration and its lingering impact “But I hear what you’re saying, man With some calls, it feels...personal. Like you’re going up against a living, breathing, thinking thing that’s aiming to get you any way it can. And with those kind of fires, it’s not enough to knock ‘em down and put ’em out. You need to kill ’em.”

The warehouse blaze that Ralph Booker Randall faced on the fourth Sunday of the eighth month of his fourteenth year as an Atlanta firefighter didn’t feel personal to him. At least...not at first.

There could have been a lot of explanations for his lack of attune ment to the situation. Probably the most accurate was that he’d arrived on the scene with a small but significant piece of his mind still caught up with the conversation he and Jackson had been having when the wake-the-dead sound of an alarm had sent them running for their truck.

They’d been discussing the women in their lives. In Jackson’s case, a beautiful and brainy Yankee psychiatrist named Phoebe Donovan. In his, a firefighter named Keezia Carew who was as independent as she was exotically attractive.

Different ladies in a great many ways, to be sure. But soul sisters when it came to their capacity for confusing the men who loved them.

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again,” Fridge had declared at one point, gazing up at the star-spangled sky as though seeking guidance. Things had been remarkably quiet in the nearly fifteen hours since they’d come on duty. While many of the other members of the station’s A shift were sacked out in their bunks, he and Jackson had elected to sit outside and shoot the breeze for a bit. “If the good Lord had meant for men to understand women, He would have put the explanation in writing.”