Tall, Strong & Cool Under Fire

It was time to change the subject. Bryce indicated the rooms upstairs. “No, but I can see the dinner bell going off and ten hungry firefighters deciding to string you up because you didn’t make dinner when it was your turn to cook.” He flicked his thumb and forefinger at the date on the calendar that graced the side wall. Riley’s name was written in in the appropriate space.

Riley dragged his hand through his wayward chestnut-colored hair. “Hell, I forgot about that.” He caught his lower lip between his teeth as he looked up at his friend. “The refrigerator still empty?”

Bryce looked at him innocently, as if he didn’t know what was coming. As if they hadn’t danced this dance before a number of times. “Last I looked.”

Riley raised his eyes hopefully to Bryce’s face. The latter’s expression was deadpan. “You wouldn’t want to take my turn, would you?”

“I took your turn,” Bryce reminded him. “Last time, remember? And the time before that,” he added before Riley could protest. “The men are beginning to think you can’t cook.”

Riley sighed. He knew his limitations. “The men are right.”

Riley’s mother ran a restaurant and her cooking attracted people in droves. How this talent hadn’t been passed on was beyond Bryce. Even he had picked up a considerable number of pointers during the years he and his brother had lived with the Rileys. Riley, however, was just slightly beyond the boiling-water-without-burning-it-stage with no progress in sight. “No time like the present to learn,” Bryce commented.

Riley gave him a dark look. “That’s not what you’ll say when you’re at the hospital, having your stomach pumped.”

Bryce glanced over his shoulder toward the doorway, impulse pushing forward an idea. “Tell you what, I’ve got a few things to pick up at the grocery store myself. I’ll do the shopping for tonight. But then you’ve got to do the rest.”

It was only fair, he knew, the men each taking turns. But Riley really wished they’d give the assignment to someone who was better at it than he was. “Get something simple.”

“You read my mind.”

Riley watched his friend leave and thought of the expression he’d seen on Bryce’s face when the woman had turned down his offer.

“Only part of it, Walker,” he murmured to himself. “Only part of it.”

Bryce tucked the coloring book that was beginning to slip back more securely under his arm.

It wasn’t like him to go where he wasn’t wanted so he wasn’t altogether certain just exactly what he was doing here, standing on Lisa Billings’s doorstep, ringing her doorbell, flowers in one hand, a bag with a loaf of bread in the other and a coloring book tucked under his arm. There was also a broom leaning against the wall where he’d rested it.

He had a number of excuses ready to offer her when she asked, but explaining it to himself was a whole different matter. He wasn’t sure if he could.

It wasn’t as if he lacked female companionship. Now or ever. As Riley enjoyed ribbing him, he had more than his fair share of women ready to make themselves available to him.

There was no conceit involved. Bryce figured that women were attracted to the uniform and to resistance, both of which he possessed. He’d been a firefighter for eight years and as for the other, that had been an ongoing thing from the very first time he ever kissed a woman. He wasn’t interested in commitments and forever. He was already committed to his work and because of that, it precluded any other long-term relationships that might be headed to the altar. Any woman he ever went out with knew he was not the marrying kind. Not from any desire to remain free or to sample as many women as he could, but from a very humane standpoint. He’d been thirteen years old when his father died in the line of duty, sacrificing his life while trying to save two children from being burned to death. And then Bryce had watched, day in, day out, what that sacrifice had done to his mother. It took away the laughter from her eyes and for a while, had sent her into a depression so deep, nothing and no one could reach her.

Even when she recovered, she was never the same after his father died.

To him, marriage was a pledge in which two people promised to live the rest of their lives together. It was only natural to assume that life would be for as long a time as could possibly be managed. That didn’t mean taking on burning buildings on a regular basis, which was what he did for a living. A firefighter risked his life every day, risked the happiness of those he loved every day, pitting his life against a force of nature. And sometimes, he lost. The way his father had.

The tears Bryce saw in his mother’s eyes for a full year following his father’s death at the age of thirty-four made him silently vow never to put anyone through what his mother had suffered.

Since his heart had been set on being a firefighter from the very first time his father had brought him down to the station, Bryce thought it only right to make a choice. A home and family, or a career, but not both. So he followed one dream and gave up the other. Most of the time, it seemed like a fair tradeoff.

But every so often, he caught himself wondering what it would have been like if he had followed the other path. If he’d gone into engineering homes instead of saving them, or harnessing nature instead of battling it.

Talking to CeCe had made him wonder again. But he told himself that it was only a passing thing and that coming here this evening, after he’d gone off duty, was merely motivated out of a sense of neighborliness.

He rang the doorbell and waited. There was no response on the other side of the door, no music coming through an open window, no sound of shuffling. Maybe they’d gone out to get something to eat, he speculated. The moving van and its four men was gone.

Deciding to give it one last try, Bryce reached for the bell again when the door abruptly opened. Instead of Lisa, he found himself looking down at a woman who could have been mistaken for a slightly older version of the woman. Rather than shorts, she had on a sundress and her short, stylishly cut dark blond hair had a ribbon of gray running through it.

But she looked up at him with Lisa and CeCe’s blue eyes. “Yes?”

“I’m not sure if I have the right house, but do Lisa Billings and her daughter, CeCe, live here?” Even if he hadn’t been certain that he had the right house, one look at the woman would have assured him that he did. Still, it seemed a good enough way to begin.

Cecilia took swift measure of the handsome young man at the front door. She made decisions quickly. In her life, there hadn’t always been much time for debating.

She liked his mouth. The lines around it indicated that he was given to smiling frequently. It was a good trait. And his eyes were kind. You could tell a great deal about a man by his eyes. Her husband had had kind eyes. CeCe’s father hadn’t, but she’d found it a difficult thing to convey to Lisa at the time. You had to let your children make their own mistakes, no matter how much it pained you to watch.

“Yes.” Cecilia saw the broom leaning against the wall. The young man seemed to come with an odd assortment of things. He was holding flowers in his hand and there was some sort of thin book held flat against his side by his arm. She couldn’t begin to guess what he had in the bag. “You are selling brooms, perhaps?”

Bryce shifted his weight. It wasn’t often he felt self-conscious. “No, I—”

Curious who her mother was talking to, Lisa hurried over to the open door. “Who is it, Mother?” Peering around the door, she stopped short. “Oh God, it’s you.”

Intrigued, Cecilia stepped back from the doorway, allowing the visitor better access. “You know him?”

She hadn’t expected him to actually come over, Lisa thought. He must have watched her leave with CeCe. “It’s the fireman I told you about, the one who I found with CeCe.”

Interest transformed into something akin to pleasure. A smile bloomed on Cecilia’s face as she took hold of his wrist, drawing him into the house. “Ah, please come in, yes?”

Lisa’s immediate response was, “No,” but it was already too late. Her mother was shutting the door, after pulling the firefighter inside.

Chapter Three

There’d only been just enough time for him to grab the broom before Bryce had found himself being pulled into the house by the diminutive woman who had clamped her hands around his wrist. She was surprisingly strong, given her size.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said obediently, trying not to laugh. Obviously her mother and her daughter were a lot freer spirits than Lisa Billings was.

Out of the corner of his eye, Bryce saw CeCe come running into the room. The moment she saw him, she clapped her hands together in pure delight. Her grin was wide and welcoming.

Unlike, he noted, her mother’s expression. Nobody had to tell him that Lisa wasn’t happy about this turn of events, or the lack of immediate support she had.

CeCe fairly bounced in front of him, her eyes shining. “Hi, Bryce.”

Lisa didn’t want CeCe getting too friendly with the intrusive firefighter, even if this was just a onetime visit.

“Mr. Walker,” she corrected.

A little of the sunlight in CeCe’s eyes abated. Bryce was quick to wave Lisa’s admonishment aside. Too many children called him by his first name for CeCe to be singled out this way.

“That’s too much of a mouthful for someone her size, Lisa. Bryce is fine.”

Lisa didn’t like him calling her by her first name. It made this conversation entirely too personal. Besides, she had the feeling that he was conveying more to her than just a name preference when he said that Bryce was fine, but there was no way she was about to allow herself to be drawn into any sort of wordplay over that.

In the larger scheme of things, it was all a moot point. It wasn’t as if the man was going to be someone they interacted with on a regular basis. As soon as she managed to usher him on his way, she didn’t expect to ever see Bryce Walker again, barring a fire somewhere in the immediate area.

But before she could say anything, her mother was taking charge of the situation.