Controlled Burn (Scarred Hearts) Read Free Page B

burns on over forty-five percent of his body. They’ll be keeping him in a chemically induced coma for a while. He has a long road ahead of him, but he’ll survive.”
    The news could have been worse, but Delancey couldn’t see it as good. Nothing good came from being burned.
    “Media’s going to jump all over this one,” Married Man Mike said. Soot turned his normally brown mustache black and obliterated the gray hairs making their appearance more known all the time.
    “Delancey’s going to be a city hero.” Jarrett’s smile held more mockery than pride. It didn’t surprise her; he’d been one of the men against having a woman on their crew.
    “I don’t want the attention.” She’d witnessed the excitement of reporters covering fatal fires. The questions made it impossible to continue moving on and healing, but more importantly they would get in the way of the job. “I’d be okay if the word of me being a woman never got out.”
    “Gidge,” Charlie said with the charming smile that earned him his nickname and the reputation with women to go with it, “not even that turnout gear can hide the fact you’re a woman. It’s going to get out.”
    “It doesn’t have to get out that I carried anyone from the fire.” She wouldn’t have to work at convincing them, but she’d gladly swap chores with any one of the men for a month if it meant they’d keep her secret. Of course, she wasn’t going to tell them that unless it became absolutely necessary.
    The only necessity for her, aside from doing her job and earning her crew’s respect, was escaping the weight of the man’s destitution-filled gaze and the memories it awakened. Experience-honed instinct told her there was only one way she’d get past it. That was to face it and that meant facing the man. Facing him meant she’d crossed a line of professional entanglement she’d never crossed before.
    In over ten years as a physical therapist she’d only been tempted by one patient. She’d empathized with them, but keeping a professional distance hadn’t been a problem. Except the one temptation. Even then nothing had happened while he’d been a patient.
    This man was different, from the way he handled the pain, to the piercing intensity that came from the anguish and desperation in his gaze as he again reached for the woman near him.
    The look lasted only a moment, little more than the span of a breath, but in that moment a curious connection was born. Having distance between herself and the man and the scene should minimize the connection, but it didn’t. Nothing would.
    They pulled into the station. The men jumped out of the truck and began stripping off their turnout gear. Delancey couldn’t move.
    She couldn’t think of anything other than the man she’d saved, the look in his eyes, the idea of the look he’d have when he woke up to face the harsh realities of his burns and the woman’s death.
    Delancey’s heart, when she thought of him, pumped harder and faster. The pressure of loss became a fresh wound filling her with the need to weep. It grew until her breaths came in ragged gasps and she had to lean forward, resting her elbows on her knees.
    “Gidge.” Andy rested his hand on hers. “You okay?”
    She shook her head. “Sure.”
    “Liar.”
    She could be honest with Andy. She could be honest with all the men, it was just easier with Andy because he knew her story. “Seeing how that man tried to get to that woman… I’ve felt what he felt.” What he will feel.
    Jarrett, in a rare moment of sincerity, leaned into the truck from the other open door and said, “It’s never good when we fail to save someone, but it’s easier if we focus on the ones we get out alive.”
    “Thanks, Jarrett.” It was sound advice, similar to advice she sometimes gave her patients working through physical therapy after a loss. It didn’t help, because memories had a way of wrecking best-laid intentions.
    “You held it together at the scene.