“It’s okay, buddy,” Danny murmured with his lids still down. “Take your time.”
Soot sniffed a hand first. Reared back. Sniffed the arm. Sniffed the chest. Sniffed the face.
Danny slowly opened his eyes. “I’m a friend of your mom’s. It’s good to meet you.”
Soot and Danny stared at each other for what felt like an hour. And then the dog curled into a sit, his skinny body leaning against Danny’s torso. It was only then that a hand lifted and gently stroked the animal’s flank.
“See? I told you he’d like me.”
Anne crossed her arms over her chest and glared at the pair of them. She’d had to offer bribes of Fiber One, FFS. But for Danny? Soot gave it up for free.
Men.
“So,” Danny said, “you got any dinner plans?”
Anne opened her mouth. Closed it. And somehow ended up muttering, “Just leftover pizza and a salad.”
“Perfect. I’m starved.”
There was a long moment of quiet, and then somehow, for reasons she didn’t want to look too closely at, she took him into her house, into her kitchen, over to her table. And after she had reheated the pizza, she sat down across from Danny with her salad.
“So what are you working on?” Danny said between bites of the pepperoni-and-onion.
She tried out the salad and decided it tasted like cardboard. “You know what a fire investigator does.”
“How’s it going?”
“Okay.”
“Your salad good?”
She put her fork down. “Danny, this is—”
He wiped his mouth with a paper towel. “Look . . . I just wanted to see you when I was sober. Last night, I was outta my mind, and not making any sense. And I would have called first, but you’d’ve told me not to come over.”
“So you just showed up. Have you ever waited for an invitation in your life, Danny?”
“Not any more often than you have, Anne.”
“I hate when you smile like that,” she muttered as she poked at her lettuce some more. “And can we just stipulate that you’re sorry about trying to kiss me—”
“I’m not sorry about that.” When she looked up at him, his lids lowered. “I’d be lying if I told you otherwise.”
Instantly, she was back in that dark, messy apartment of his, standing face-to-face with him, her name a hoarse sound leaving his lips. And then his mouth was dropping toward hers.
Arousal came hard and fast to her body, and she shifted in her chair. “So I’m working on a fire just like ours, actually. I mean, our last one. You know.”
Danny sat back and crossed his legs, ankle to knee. Then he peeled off a piece of crust and offered it to Soot, who had curled up on his new bed. After a moment, the dog hobbled over and took it as gently as an English nobleman, whispering back to his bed and chewing it down on a oner.
“He’s so quiet,” Anne said. “And mild-mannered.”
“That’s a good dog, right here. You lucked out. Both of you.” Danny’s shoulders eased up. “So what about this fire you’re on. Which one is it?”
“Warehouse downtown.”
“The one on Harbor Street? From two days ago?”
“Yes, that’s it. Same vintage structure as the one we were—well, you know. Anyway, there are some similarities between the two. And get this, there have been others. I’m wondering if there’s a connection.”
“Lot of crazies in that area. Sometimes they burn shit for fun.”
“True.” She put some lettuce in her mouth.
“Is it safe for you to be down there? Do you go in a pair or something?”
“I have a handgun. I’m licensed to carry concealed.”
“Good girl.”
“Woman.” She chewed. “Not girl.”
“Sorry.” He smiled a little. “So can we go back to the elephant in the room?”
“Did Moose come into my house and I somehow missed him?”
Danny frowned and then laughed. “I already talked to him. He’s not going to bother you anymore.”
“This mean you’re going to turn over a new leaf and stop acting like an idiot on the job? Great. I feel this is a really good decision on your part. And I’m so glad you’re cutting down on the drinking and putting Uber in your contacts—”
“Can you ever really forgive me?”
Anne lowered her fork. God, with Danny, she kept falling into these holes of emotion, the floor of her logical side giving way and leaving her at feelings’ mercy.
“No offense,” she said, “but I’m not the one who has to do that.”
“Did I cut some other person’s arm off?”
She lifted her prosthesis. “This is not that big a deal.”
“The hell it isn’t.”
Anne studied his face and resented the shit out of the guilt she saw there. Abruptly, she put her fork down. “How much time do you have?”
“When? Now? I have no plans.”
“I’ll be right back.”
• • •
Sitting at Anne’s kitchen table, Danny listened to her move around upstairs. She was walking right above him, her footsteps purposeful and quick. Then again, when was the last time she had meandered about anything?
“More pizza crust?” he asked the dog.
Soot got himself up and came over, accepting the final length of crust with the softest mouth this side of a Labrador.
“Listen up, my man.” The dog went back to his red-and-black bed and curled up, looking over as he chewed. “I need you to watch over her, okay? She’s tough and she’s smart, but she lives here alone.”
Well . . . at least from what he understood she lived alone. And he didn’t want to think of the alternative. Had she dated anyone? Shit, the idea any other man had been with her made him want to go get an elephant gun so he could eliminate the competition.
“Okay, let’s go.”
He looked up. Anne was in leggings and a fleece, with a duffel hanging off her shoulder—and he couldn’t help but eye her strong, muscular legs. He had had them around his hips only once, but that was all it had taken for him to never, ever forget what it felt like to be with her.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
Not that he gave a shit. She could have been taking him to get his eyebrows waxed off and his toenails painted and he’d be in.
“You’ll find out.”
She snagged a dog biscuit and led Soot into his crate—which she had refused to let Danny help set up. “You be a good boy. I’ll leave the TV on for you.”
“Music is better.” When she glanced over her shoulder, Danny shook his head. “If an ad or a show has a dog in it, it can be a trigger for him. Especially if he’s enclosed and can’t run.”
“Since when did you learn about dogs?”
“Just picked things up from Jack. They work with the canine unit a lot.”
On her way out of the kitchen, she turned the radio on to the local PBS station. And as the dulcet sounds of the BBC World Service murmured from the little speaker, he followed her lead through the front door and over to the car.
Fifteen minutes later, they were pulling into the parking lot of Mounteria, a wall-climbing place he knew well—and hell, he’d liked the trip so much, he wished it had taken longer. It felt good to sit so close to her, to have excuses, as they talked about nothing, to study her profile, to smell her laundry detergent, to listen to the cadence of her voice.
“Am I going on the wall with you?” he murmured.
“That’s up to you.”
“I think I’ll enjoy the view from below.”
As they got out, she glared across the hood of her Subaru at him. “That is not the purpose of this.”
“Can I mention it’s a side benefit?”
She swung her duffel back into place on her shoulder. “Then I’ll tell you to not look at my ass.”
Yeah, he kept quiet on that. ’Cuz he shouldn’t make promises he couldn’t keep, should he.
The sky was getting dark as they walked through the packed parking lot toward the lit entrance. Mounteria had walls for every skill and age, as well as a juice bar, babysitting, and instruction, so there tended to be two kinds of vehicles outside: minivans that carried kids and roof-racked SUVs that carried serious climbers.