Fade the Heat by Colleen Thompson Page A

The man who’d helped her find the strength to say good-bye.
    Part of her understood that Captain Rozinski had consoled her in order to help himself get through the guilt and trauma of losing one of his men. But it didn’t matter why he’d done it, only that the kindness planted that day had taken root…and sustained her through those nightmare years in her mother and stepfather’s house.
    Though Jack was still talking, saying somethingabout one of her headlights being out, the strains of bagpipes overrode his words. The bagpipes that had played at her father’s memorial service.
    Her throat closed around what felt like a pinecone wedged inside it, and approaching headlights turned kaleidoscopic in the prism of her tears. Rozinski couldn’t die; he couldn’t. She couldn’t stand to join the parade of dark blue uniforms that marched in silent homage, couldn’t bear the memories of watching from the front row while hundreds, perhaps thousands, of firefighters filed into the space in a hush so profound it made her want to scream to shatter it.
    Only this time, instead of holding her hand and reassuring her, he would lie inside the casket while she joined the surreally silent cortege. And the specter of their final conversation would forever poison decades of fonder memories.
    As Jack turned into the parking garage, Reagan’s sense of urgency evaporated into terror. He pulled into a second-level space and shut off the engine, but icy fingers clamped around her throat. She couldn’t move—could barely breathe—for fear of whatever news awaited them inside the hospital.
    Jack laid a hand on her arm. “Are you all right, Reag?”
    The shortening of her name jerked her back to the days when she had tried to tag along with him, an eight-year-old shadow to a thirteen-year-old boy. Most often, he’d yelled at her, “Get on home, Reag. I got things to do with the vatos. Us guys can’t have no bebés followin’.”
    Especially, his tone had said, the white daughter of the couple who owned the bungalow his family rented. Though the house Reagan’s family lived in wasbarely any bigger, his behavior hammered home the unbridgeable expanse between owner and tenant, white girl and Hispanic boy.
    But when no others were around, he would sometimes allow her to help him as he fixed a bike chain, or join in her efforts to rescue a stunned fledgling from a neighbor’s tomcat and nurse the little mockingbird to health. On one memorable occasion, he had even helped her with her homework.
    But never, ever, would he have touched her, the way he touched her now. And never had he looked at her as he was looking at her this evening, his dark gaze so serious and earnest that it made her fidget. And God knew, she had never been so aware of the masculine squareness of his jaw, the way his throat worked as he swallowed…or her own desire to touch the hollow just beneath it, to feel the way it moved.
    Jerking her arm away, she told herself she’d been wrong about him earlier. He must be a damned good doctor if he could shunt aside his own horrendous problems to feign interest in hers. That was all it was, she told herself, no matter what else it might feel like.
    She sucked in a breath. “I’m fine,” she said. “I’ll be okay.”
    Because whatever happened, she’d be damned if she would let him see her fall apart. Once he saw how strong she was, how well steeped in the stoicism of her mostly male department, he’d forget his reservations about signing off on her return to work.
    Her mouth dried instantly as guilt knifed through her. Had she sunk so low that she would use her captain’s injury to try to thwart the man’s own wishes?
    Jack climbed out of the car and came around to her side, meaning, she could tell, to open the door as if shewere an old lady or an invalid. Or as if, in the twenty years since she had seen him, he’d acquired a polish he hadn’t had before.
    She beat him to the punch, emerging on her own and