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Chapter Three

Roark’s breath caught in his throat the way it did every time he saw Priscilla. Even in the loose-fitting department uniform of dark pants and a golf shirt, her caramel-brown hair pulled back in a braid, she looked touchable. He stepped around Eric Campeon’s desk and sat in the captain’s chair, putting a large amount of polished oak between them.

“Is that the kind of crap you have to put up with all the time?” He’d been surprised by the protective instincts that had arisen when he realized she’d been the victim of a mean joke. And then he’d been impressed by the cool, controlled way she’d handled the situation.

“It used to be worse.” She took the chair opposite. “I wasn’t very popular when I was first assigned here. None of us were, because we were taking over for the three men who died. And, let’s face it, it’s pretty hard to fill the shoes of a martyr.”

“I can imagine.”

“But we all just kept our mouths shut and did our jobs, and gradually the others began to accept us. Except maybe for Bing Tate.”

“The guy’s an ass.” Roark had seen how hard Priscilla was trying, how much she was hoping the guys would like her lasagna. When he’d realized what Tate had done, he’d wanted to wring the scrawny jerk’s neck.

Priscilla shrugged. “I’ll get him back in some passive-aggressive way. Maybe I’ll short-sheet his bed.”

Roark didn’t think she would. She wouldn’t stoop to Bing’s level. He liked that about her. She wasn’t vengeful or petty. He’d seen her take a lot of crap during training, and she’d always been a good sport.

He suspected sometimes the taunting had hurt more than she let on. She wouldn’t show any weakness, though. Not Priscilla.

“So what’s going on?” she asked. “Why do you want to talk to me?”

Truthfully, he would have invented any excuse to get her alone for a few minutes. Unfortunately he did have a legitimate reason. “I think the serial arsonist is someone connected to the fire service.”

Priscilla’s eyes widened. “Oh, no. I really hope you’re wrong.”

It was a sad fact that many arsonists turned out to be firefighters or former firefighters. A person might be drawn to the fire service because he wanted to serve his community or save property or because the lifestyle appealed to him or his father and grandfather were firefighters. But it might just as easily be an unhealthy fascination with fire.

Clearly this particular perpetrator wasn’t your average firebug—a teenage mischief maker or someone out to collect on insurance. This guy knew a lot about fires—and how not to get caught setting them.

“We don’t know for sure, but the evidence is leaning that way,” Roark said. “The fires aren’t set just to watch something burn. The guy is deliberately trying to injure or kill firefighters, which indicates he has some emotional connection. I’ve been investigating every firefighter who’s left the department under less-than-favorable circumstances in the past ten years, but so far none of them look good as a suspect. I’m wondering now if it’s someone still currently employed, maybe someone who got passed over for promotion.”

“But surely no one from this shift. I mean, they were all here when the warehouse fire started. They couldn’t have started it.”

Roark lowered his voice. “This isn’t common knowledge, but there was a timer on the ignition device. The whole thing could have been set up several hours before.”

“I don’t want to believe this. It can’t be any of the guys here.”

“What about Tate?”

“Not even him. Every one of those guys out there has grieved for the men who died. I’ve watched them.”

“It’s only a possibility at this point. It could be anybody, from any shift, any station.”

“So why are you talking to me about this? How could I possibly help?”

“Maybe you weren’t here for the warehouse fire, but you’ve been around for several months now. You could see or hear something as easily as anyone. For instance, if there’s anyone with an ax to grind with the department—any scuttlebutt going around—that’s the kind of information I need.”

“You want me to rat on my brothers?”

“To stop this guy from killing more firefighters? Yeah. And he will kill again. If he goes unchecked, it’s only a matter of time.” The arsonist often left a little surprise for the firefighters. Once, it was a vicious dog that had bitten Murph McCrae when he’d tried to rescue it. Another time, the serial arsonist had left a homemade bomb, though fortunately the thing hadn’t detonated.

Priscilla sagged a little in her chair. “I know he’s got to be stopped.”

“Anything you tell me is confidential,” Roark continued. “I’m asking everyone the same thing. If there’s anyone I should look at more closely…”

“I wish I could help. But I’m the last person anyone would trust or confide in,” she said a little testily.

“Just keep your eyes and ears open.”

“I don’t like this. I don’t like it at all.”

“Believe me, I don’t like it either. And I hope I’m wrong. But it’s my responsibility to catch this guy, and I’ll do whatever it takes. Even if it ticks people off.” He would not allow another person to die on his watch.

“Is that all?” She stood, preparing to make her escape.

He stood, too, and stepped around the desk. He didn’t want to end their meeting on such a negative note. “Have you told your mother all about me?”

She nodded, inching away from him, putting more distance between them. “Mother is thrilled. She got on the Internet so she could read all the newspaper articles you’ve been quoted in. She printed them off to show my aunt Clara.”

“Aunt Clara being…the mother of the bride?”

“Good guess. She and my mom are sisters and they’re intensely competitive. It’s killing Mother that Clara’s daughter is getting married before hers, especially since…”

“Since what?”

“Well, since last year Mother thought she heard wedding bells. Turned out to be a funeral dirge.”

“The guy you were rebounding from?”

She nodded. “When we broke up, Mother was more disappointed than I was, I think.”

“And now she has something to pin her hopes on again.”

Priscilla nodded, wincing. “I hadn’t realized it was going to get this complicated. I thought this plan would buy me some peace, at least for a few months. Maybe I should claim we broke up at the last minute.”

Roark smiled. “I wouldn’t do that to your mother. But I do have one question for you.”

“Yes?”

“How is anyone going to believe I’m your boyfriend when you look like a scared rabbit every time I get within two feet of you?”

“I’ll do better,” she promised hastily.

“Maybe we should rehearse. You know, practice looking fondly at each other. Hold hands.” With every suggestion, her eyes got a little wider.

“That’s not necessary,” she said. “We’ll do fine.” Then she did escape. But Roark wasn’t too discouraged—if anything, her skittishness raised the bar. Would he even want a woman if she was a pushover? He enjoyed the challenge.

ROARK HAD BEEN LOOKING forward to this day like a kid counting the days to Christmas. The wedding of two people he’d never met. He could devote the whole evening to Priscilla. She would be his captive, stuck at the wedding and unable to flee. And he intended to see how far that could take him.

He pulled up to the curb in front of her two-story frame house in Oak Cliff’s historic district and cut the engine. He was late by five minutes, which was probably good. He didn’t want to appear too eager. He checked his hair in the mirror and then laughed at himself for being vain. His brothers and sisters had always teased him about that, about the fact that he liked to dress well and look his best even if he was just running to the grocery store for milk.

When he rang the bell, Tony Veracruz promptly opened the front door. He held a crying baby in one arm and a cat in the other and he was wearing a big smile.

Roark had been to this house before. Tony had invited him over a couple of times to play shuffleboard. He knew that Priscilla owned the house and lived in the upper apartment, renting the main floor to Tony. But he’d never been up the stairs.

“Priscilla will be down in a minute,” Tony said.

They were standing in a small vestibule. A set of steps to the immediate left of the door led upstairs. Roark wanted to see what kind of apartment a woman like Priscilla called home. But she apparently didn’t want him up there.

“Come on in,” Tony was saying. “Sorry about the racket. Josephina is teething.”

Last he’d heard, Tony didn’t have a baby. A nine-year-old daughter, yes. And there was Jasmine, perched on a chair in the living room, holding a baby bottle.

“Jasmine and I are babysitting,” Tony explained. “The baby belongs to Julie’s chef. Her regular sitter is sick.” Julie was Tony’s wife and also the owner of Brady’s Tavern and Tearoom, across the street from Fire Station 59.

Roark could see that Tony and his daughter had been exerting considerable effort to distract the baby from her teething pain. Toys of every description were spread out over the coffee table and a large area rug in the living room.

“Jasmine,” Tony said, “run upstairs and tell Pris her boyfriend is here.”

Startled, Jasmine stared at Roark. “Priscilla has a boyfriend?” She sounded almost scandalized.

“Go,” Tony said.

When she’d gone, Roark asked, “You aren’t giving Priscilla trouble over this fake boyfriend thing, are you?”

“Are you kidding? After all the grief she gave me when Julie and I got engaged, I couldn’t let a golden opportunity like this pass by.” He paused, put the cat down and shifted the baby to his other shoulder. “I shouldn’t do that, huh?”

“It’s a bit of a sore spot with her, I think,” Roark said carefully. “She’d probably never admit that.”

“Yeah, heaven forbid she show any weakness.” Tony jiggled the baby and offered her a teething ring, which she promptly rejected. “Aw, come on, little one.”

“Here, let me try,” Roark said.

“You? You don’t have kids, do you?”

“Just an endless stream of nieces and nephews. But I spend as much time with them as I can. Whenever I go home to visit, someone is always teething.” He took the baby, who wore a ruffled pink dress and matching booties, and held her up, looking her in the face. “Hi, Josephina. Can you look at me?” And he proceeded to make faces at her while Tony tried not to laugh.

The baby was so startled by the faces that she did stop crying, at least for the moment. Roark gently swung her back and forth. She stared wide-eyed at him.

“How’d you do that?” Tony asked.

“It’s probably just the novelty of a new face,” Roark admitted. “She might start crying again any minute.”

“Let me try it,” Tony said, holding out his hands. Before he could take the baby, though, Jasmine came running down the steps.

“Dad, wait till you see this. You won’t believe it!”

Moments later, a cloud of florid pink chiffon barely contained in a clear plastic bag descended the stairs, and somewhere behind it was Priscilla—in curlers.

The men froze, and even Josephina, who’d been cooing softly, went silent. She seemed to be staring at the spectacle, too.

“I don’t want to hear anything about cotton candy or Glinda the Good Witch or…or Martians,” Priscilla said as she descended. Carefully—probably because she couldn’t see her feet. “Not one word.”

Tony whistled. “Do you have to get permission from Pepto-Bismol to wear that color?”

Roark bit his lip. He had to admit, the bridesmaid’s gown was a ghastly hue.

He hadn’t expected Priscilla to show up for their first—and possibly only—date in curlers, either. Pink plastic rollers like his mother used to wear. He didn’t see why she had to resort to such extreme measures. Her natural hair, straight and thick and the most gorgeous dark honey color, didn’t need any improvement.

Priscilla finally looked at Roark, and what she saw almost made her miss a step. Roark, holding a baby as if it were the most natural thing in the world. She felt an unexpected contraction in the vicinity of her womb. And the way Roark was looking at her, as if she were a mountain of strawberry ice cream and he was hot fudge, didn’t help matters. She had thought the curlers would put him off.

She pulled herself together. “Hi, Roark. There’s still time to change your mind.”

Roark shook his head. “Not a chance. I want to see you actually wearing that dress. It’s bigger than you.”

“And it weighs more than my turnout gear.”

“I think it makes you look like Cinderella,” said Jasmine, who loved all things pink and girlie. She had begged Priscilla to model the dress when she’d brought it home a few days earlier.

Priscilla spared a smile for the girl. “Thank you, Jasmine. But, remember, it’s not the dress that makes the princess.”

“I know, it’s the inner princess,” Samantha said with a giggle.

Priscilla ruffled the girl’s dark mop of hair, then grabbed a couple of bulging shopping bags sitting near the bottom of the stairs. She looked at Roark. “Are we taking Josephina with us?”

“Oh, um, no.” He handed the baby to Tony, then focused his attention back on Priscilla. “You ready?” He had to raise his voice to be heard over Josephina’s renewed screams.

“I know I don’t look ready. But Marisa has a legion of makeup artists and hair torturers waiting for me at the church.”

Priscilla was momentarily taken aback once again when she saw Roark’s car—a red Porsche. “Quite a step up from the black Suburban.”

“That’s my work car. This is my play car.”

Pretty nice toy, Priscilla thought as she stuffed her shopping bags, containing shoes and other accessories, in the tiny trunk. Where was she going to put the dress? The car didn’t have a backseat to speak of. “We need a sidecar for the dress.”

“I think all three of us will fit.” He gallantly opened the passenger door, then held the dress while Priscilla got herself situated. He gently draped the dress over her, though he had to try three times before he was able to stuff the mountain of pink chiffon inside.

And then they were off, Roark deftly maneuvering his macho machine through the twilight of an early fall evening. The weather was magnificent, with just a touch of chill in the air. Priscilla wished she could enjoy it. But she was too tense. The next few hours were going to be tedious. Marisa and her mother would be walking, talking high-anxiety machines while eight bridesmaids—eight!—tried to do makeup and hair and change their clothes in that tiny bride’s room.

Priscilla didn’t like pandemonium, especially when she had no chance of controlling or organizing things. She would be at the mercy of her family. And Roark would get to see it all.

He would probably run for the hills.

“Okay,” she said when the silence had stretched too long. “I’ve been thinking about this, and here’s the story. In case someone asks how we met, how long we’ve been dating, that sort of thing.”

“Okay.”

“Let’s keep it simple. We met a couple weeks ago, when you were called to a fire that I worked. You asked me some questions about the fire, then you asked me out to dinner the next night and we’ve been seeing each other ever since.”

“Where did we go on our first date?” he asked. “Everyone always asks that.”

“Um…We went out for pizza.”

“I could do better than that. How about we went to Newport’s?” Newport’s was one of Dallas’s best seafood restaurants.

“Too dressy for a first date. How about Havana Nights?” Havana Nights was a hot new Cuban restaurant in Bishop Arts.

“Done. Are we serious?”

“Our relationship, you mean? It has potential to be serious,” she said carefully.

“Do we hear wedding bells?”

Priscilla’s heart skipped a beat. “You don’t have to take it that far. Do you know where you’re going, by the way?”

“To that humongous church in Highland Park? The one that looks like a medieval cathedral, complete with gargoyles?”

“That’s the one. You’ve been there?”

“Actually, I got married there.”

“You’ve been married?” she blurted out. She wasn’t sure why that surprised her. A man as good-looking as he was seldom reached his midthirties without at least one trip to the altar.

“Only for a couple of years, when I was younger.”

“Were there children?” The image of Roark holding Josephina flashed through her mind.

“No.”

She gathered by his clipped answer that she might have touched on a sensitive issue.

“Libby and I wanted different things. We married pretty young and we had some idealistic notions about what marriage would be all about. But we were still growing and changing and figuring out who we were. And in the end…our goals in life were polar opposites. Maybe if we’d gotten counseling or something…” He shrugged. “But we were just dumb kids.”

“It’s still sad.” She processed this new information about Roark, trying to fit it to the man as she knew him. “You don’t seem jaded, like a lot of divorced people are.”

“Cautious would be more accurate. But not without hope.” He smiled enigmatically at her. Instantly her chest tightened in a not-unpleasant way.

“I hope this won’t bring back sad memories for you,” she said.

He shrugged. “I got over all that a long time ago.”

She wondered. Did anybody truly get completely over a divorce? She and Cory hadn’t even gotten to the wedding-plan stage before their relationship had ended, but she wasn’t sure she would ever be able to talk about it as casually as Roark talked about his previous marriage.

She shivered.

“You cold?” Roark asked.

“Maybe a little.”

He inched the thermostat up a bit.

They took advantage of the valet parking that had been arranged—Priscilla didn’t want to drag the dress any farther than she had to. Roark courteously carried the rest of her things, so she could hold the dress well off the ground.

The church did look like a medieval cathedral. Since she’d been attending services here her whole life, she’d never thought about it much. But it was grand to the point of ostentation. Everything was white and gray marble, punctuated by intricate stained glass and pseudoancient tapestries.

The wedding consultant, whose name was Elisha, greeted Priscilla like a long-lost best friend. “The others are all here. Hurry, now, hurry!” Then she gave Roark a quick once-over, gasped daintily and directed them toward the dressing room.

“You want me to go to the dressing room with you?” Roark asked, looking doubtful. “I can just go sit in the church.”

“Oh, no,” Priscilla said, “you have to come with me. My mother is already half-inclined to believe I made you up.” She grabbed his hand and dragged him with her. A few seconds later she realized she had voluntarily touched him. As soon as he appeared to be following willingly, she dropped his hand like a hot coal.

She knocked on the dressing room door, which opened instantly. Her mother stood blocking the entry and looking worried. “Priscilla. Where have you been? I was starting to get concerned.”

Priscilla checked her watch. She was only five minutes late. “Sorry, traffic was bad.” Which was true. Traffic in Dallas was always bad.

“Hang your dress up over there, but don’t get it mixed up with the others. Christina will do your makeup as soon as she gets done with Judith’s. And then Rebecca will do your…” Her tirade halted abruptly when she saw Roark. “Oh. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you weren’t alone. This must be your young man.”

Gawd, where did her mother come up with these archaic expressions? She’d grown up in the sixties. Surely she hadn’t referred to her boyfriends as “young men.”

“Mother, this is Roark Epperson,” Priscilla said dutifully. “Roark, my mother, Lorraine Garner.”

Roark took her mother’s hand and squeezed it. “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Garner.”

Lorraine’s attention was so fixed on Roark she forgot she was in the middle of giving Priscilla her instructions. Priscilla couldn’t help but smile. Roark had that effect on women, no matter what their age.

She was sure Roark could hold his own, so she skulked past her mother and into the room where she could properly greet the bride with a dainty hug.

“You look beautiful, Marisa,” Priscilla said, meaning it. Although her cousin was still in a dressing gown, her lush, curly black hair had been piled on top of her head in a style worthy of a Greek goddess. “You’re just…radiant.”

“Thank you,” Marisa said regally. Then she whispered, “The guy is gorgeous. And you let him see you in curlers!”

“Couldn’t be avoided. You know my hair doesn’t hold a curl for more than five minutes.”

“And mine frizzes in the humidity. Remember when we used to want to trade hair?”

Priscilla nodded and swallowed hard. She hadn’t thought she would get mushy—especially because Marisa and she hadn’t been as close in recent years. They’d gone to different colleges, cultivated different friends. But they’d shared a lot when they’d been younger, including their attempts to thwart their pushy mamas.

“Come and meet everyone, Roark,” Lorraine was saying. And she performed introductions. To his credit, Roark didn’t even flinch when seven women, some of them wearing identical hideous pink dresses, all tried to introduce themselves at once. Three of them were already married, yet to a woman they eyed Roark with predatory interest.

Even the prospective bride, who should have had thoughts only for her groom, sparkled a bit as Roark was introduced.

“Thank you so much for coming,” Marisa simpered. “It’s such a pleasure to have you at my wedding. I’ve seen you on TV.”

“The pleasure’s mine.” His voice was low and sexy as he shot Priscilla a look that could melt cold steel.

Again Priscilla was sure everyone in the room read between the lines and knew they’d slept together. This was not what she’d asked him to do.

“Well,” Roark said briskly, “I’ll let you ladies get back to…whatever it is women do before a wedding.” Every female in the room but Priscilla giggled—even her aunt Clara, who was normally about as giggly as a Star Wars storm trooper.

Priscilla walked him to the door. “You’re supposed to be devoted and besotted,” she whispered, “not hot to trot. Try to remember the difference!”

Roark tried not to grin at her fierce reprimand. He deserved it. But hiding his growing attraction to Priscilla was getting more difficult with each passing minute he spent with her.