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  Can't Take the Heat

  A Working It Novella

  Jackie Barbosa

  Copyright © 2013 by Jackie Barbosa.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means.

  Digital Edition

  ISBN-13: 978-09849650-4-5

  Publisher's Note:

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  The author acknowledges the copyrighted or trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction: Coach, Flight of the Navigator, Jimmy Choo, Lexus, Mythbusters, Rolex, Star Trek, The Princess Bride, The Wall Street Journal, The Wizard of Oz.

  Prologue

  Thursday

  Smoke billows in the cavernous warehouse like thick gray curtains caught by a sudden draft from an open window. There’s so much smoke filling the enormous space, it’s hard to make out the flames, but they’re there—clawing their way along stacked rows of wooden and cardboard crates, curling up the wooden posts that support the wooden beams overhead. This is an old warehouse by Las Vegas standards, probably built in the ’20s, and thanks to its lumber-heavy construction, it’s burning hot and fast. The owner will be lucky if there’s any old-growth wood to salvage after the fire is put out. There’s probably no chance at all the structure can be saved. Everything crackles and creaks. Collapse is imminent.

  Ryan tugs at my arm, shouts near my ear so I can hear him over the din of our respirators and the symphony of the fire. “It’s two a.m. and the security guard called in the alarm. There’s no one in here.” He points overhead to the rafters. “It’s coming down any minute.”

  I shake my head. “Not until we’re sure.”

  The thing is, he’s wrong. Someone is in here, and that someone is still alive, still needs our help. I know it the way I always know—the hair on the back of my neck bristles, goose bumps pepper my skin. Don’t ask me to explain how it happens. It just does. Whenever I enter a burning building, I know if there’s anyone inside, even when I can’t see them or hear them. It’s not a psychic thing, though. Not really. Afterward, I always realize that I saw some bit of evidence, something that didn’t quite make sense, that tipped me off. It was my first experience with this ability that made me realize I had to become a firefighter.

  And I feel that now. No matter what the security guard says, no matter what he believes, he wasn’t alone when the fire broke out in this warehouse.

  “Damn it, Del. You’re going to get us both killed.”

  I grin, even though I know he can’t see it behind the respirator. “Next time, don’t draw the short stick.”

  I’m always on the team that clears a building. Thurb, our lieutenant, knows if there’s anyone in a building who can be saved, I’ll find them. The other three guys on the crew, Ryan, Miguel, and Hoss—that’s not his real name, but it’s what everyone calls him because he’s as big as one—draw lots on the way to the scene to go in with me. Ryan drew short tonight.

  He eyes the ceiling again. “Two minutes, Del. If you don’t find someone in two minutes, I’ll carry you out of here myself.”

  I’d stick my tongue out if I wouldn’t just lick my respirator. “Like to see you try.”

  Ryan’s bigger than me, but not by much. Small, delicate women don’t get to be firefighters, even if they have a weird gift for finding people in burning buildings.

  But he’s right. I have to hurry.

  Between the smoke and respirator mask, it’s hard to make out much of anything, even with our headlamps shining at full brightness. I have to assume, though, that my victim isn’t hiding between the stacks of crates that are going up in flames. He or she would be dead by now, and my skin wouldn’t be prickling like I’m being poked by a thousand sewing needles.

  I scan the few parts of the huge space that aren’t completely engulfed in smoke and flame. To survive in here, a person would have to be where there’s still some air to be had, and there aren’t a lot of possibilities. My gaze fixes on the far corner of the building to my left, where the smoke is wispier than elsewhere, especially near the floor.

  “There,” I say, pointing in the direction I’m already heading.

  The crates in this last row aren’t ablaze yet, but they will be in a matter of minutes, if not seconds. Ryan’s hot on my heels, his lamp shining just over my head into the sharp gray blackness. The smoke gets denser and heavier with every step I take.

  Where are you, damn it?

  I don’t give up, but the further we get with no signs of life, the more I doubt myself. Maybe I’m imagining it this time. That’s never happened before, but this could be the first.

  We’ve almost reached the end of the row, and I’m just about ready to call it, to admit I’m wrong.

  Then I see them: a pair of shoes sticking out from between last crate and the wall. Filthy canvas sneakers. Small ones.

  I break into a trot—a run is impossible in all this gear.

  The shock hits me. It’s a kid, maybe eleven or twelve. Curled up, unmoving. I can’t make out boy or girl or if he or she is breathing, but it doesn’t matter. Ryan’s right behind me. He bends over and scoops the kid up off the ground.

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” he shouts.

  “Right behind you,” I agree, but I hang back just a second. Listening, feeling, looking. Anybody else here?

  No.

  I head toward the door we came in, maybe ten feet behind Ryan and the kid. The crackle and pop of the fire is deafening, and the rafters are fully engulfed in flame. Just as Ryan makes the door, there’s a sound like thunder overhead. I look up, which is stupid, because I know what I’ll see.

  The roof is coming down.

  Ryan’s heard it, too. He slows, turns.

  I shake my head. “Go!”

  He hesitates.

  “Go!”

  He bursts out into the night. Into fresh air. With the kid, who might make it.

  The thunder roars again. I run.

  I won’t make it.

  Oh, Wes, I’m sorry. I never should have left. I love you.

  Chapter One

  Saturday

  Delaney Monroe lay on her back in the hospital bed, her thick lashes fanning out above her cheeks in what could easily be mistaken for peaceful sleep. Easily, that is, if one ignored the IV lines poking into her veins, the EEG patches and wires pasted all around her head, and the bevy of monitors registering everything from blood pressure to oxygen levels to brain function.

  But Wesley Barrows couldn’t ignore them, because they were exactly what he’d feared from the moment she had announced a little less than three years ago that she was going to become a firefighter, and nothing he could say or do would stop her.

  She’d been right. None of his arguments swayed her. Not his very reasonable concern for her safety. Not the fact that, as an EMT, she was already saving plenty of lives. And certainly not his observation that, when it came to it, she didn’t need to work at all because the income from the two Barrows casinos was more than enough to support them both. In the end, he’d forced her to make a choice between him and her vocation. She’d made it. He hadn’t won.

  But he’d been right in his way, hadn’t he? Because now she was lying unconscious in a hospital bed thanks to a head injury she’d sustained on the job, and there was no guarantee she would recover. Had achieving her goals been worth the cost? He sure as hell didn’t think so.

  One of the nurses stuck his head into the room. “Any change?”

  Wes shook his head. He’d been sitting here for two hours, waiting for her to emerge from the medically induced com
a she’d been in for the past couple of days, and so far, she hadn’t so much as moved an eyelash.

  “Hey, give her time.” The nurse must have read Wes’s concern and impatience. “Those are some heavy drugs they use. Some folks are out by now, but others take a lot longer. I’ve seen as much as eight hours.”

  Wes pasted on a smile. “Sure,” he said.

  The neurologist had already assured him on multiple occasions that there was every reason to believe Delaney was going to come out of this just fine. Her CT scans showed no significant damage, and she’d experienced so little brain swelling that surgery hadn’t been necessary as it sometimes was in such cases. All the signs pointed to a full recovery. And if the signs were correct, she’d just go back to her dangerous job and run the risk of getting killed all over again. If they were wrong…well, he didn’t want to think about that.

  But either way, he wasn’t getting her back. He was just here because, despite their years-old breakup, she had designated him as her next of kin on all her personnel and medical forms. And although that had only given him the obligation to make medical decisions for her while she was unable to, he couldn’t very well leave her to wake up in a hospital room all alone.

  His father, of course, didn’t see things that way, which was why Wes’s cell phone vibrated in his pocket with what was almost certainly another text from dear old Dad. Wes had stopped bothering to check his messages after the fifth one ordering him to get his ass back to the office and do his fucking job instead of hovering over the hospital bed of his ex-girlfriend. Of all the sixty-something parents to master text messaging, why did his persistently malcontent father have to be one of them?

  Sam Barrows had never liked Delaney—he thought the daughter of an unmarried showgirl who’d probably made as much of her living on her back as on her feet was beneath his son—but then, he didn’t really seem to like anyone. Not even his wife of thirty-five years or either of the two children they’d begotten together; he just hated his family slightly less than everyone else.

  And Wes had to admit it was hard to argue with his father’s methods when it came to running a casino. Sam was a ruthless son of a bitch, but none of his employees dared to cross him. When a business handled millions of dollars on a daily basis, that kind of loyalty was priceless, no matter how it was earned. His father griped endlessly that Wes had learned too damn much touchy-feely crap in business school and was going to torpedo the company with his nice-guy management style. Problem was, it wasn’t business school that had taught Wes to be a nice guy. He just was one.

  Mostly.

  His phone vibrated again. God damn it, now his father couldn’t even go ten minutes between messages.

  Standing up, he dug his cell out of his jeans’ pocket and clicked the icon to see his messages. He’d been right about the most of the messages—all from Sam, all bitching about Wes not being in the office—but the last one was from his sister, Chelsea, asking after Delaney. Chelsea had been seventeen when he and Delaney first hooked up, and the two of them had hit it off right away. He suspected his sister had been almost as upset by the abrupt dissolution of their relationship as he had.

  He turned away from the bed to shield the phone screen from the light so he could see to type out a response to Chelsea. His dad he was ignoring.

  No change yet. Nurse said it might take a few more hours for drugs to wear off. I’ll let you know if—

  He hit the backspace key twice, changed the “if” to “when”.

  —when she wakes u—

  “Hey, Crush. Nice ass you got there.”

  Wes nearly dropped the phone, not just because hearing Delaney’s voice—raspy but recognizably hers—surprised the hell out of him, but because she’d used her old pet name for him. When he first told her his name, she’d said, “Westley, like the Dread Pirate Roberts from Princess Bride, or Wesley, like the Star Trek character, Wesley Crusher?” After he’d confirmed the latter rather than the former, she nearly always called him Crush. Or she had until their breakup. The few times they’d spoken since then, she had never once called him Crush.

  He spun around to look at her. She was awake, but clearly still drowsy; her eyelids drooped at the corners and her brown eyes were hazy. Maybe that explained her use of the nickname—she wasn’t quite fully alert yet.

  But she was conscious. And able to speak. And she recognized him.

  It was more than he’d been willing to hope for.

  Overcome with relief, his text message to Chelsea forgotten, he rushed to the head of the bed. “How do you feel?”

  Delaney’s beautiful features twisted with puzzlement. “My head hurts.” She struggled to sit up then, realizing she was tethered to something, lifted her arm and stared at the IV line. “What happened to me?”

  The neurologist had warned Wes that there was a good possibility Delaney wouldn’t remember the accident when she first woke up. The human brain had a way of protecting itself from traumatic events, particularly in the immediate aftermath of an injury. In some cases, people never regained their memory of the incident.

  “You had an accident,” he said. The doctor had told him to be truthful, but not specific, about what had happened. Too much information too early could freak out some patients. “On the job.”

  Her eyebrows bunched together. “In the ambulance?”

  Why would she ask him that? She’d been a firefighter for more than two years and rarely rode in ambulances anymore.

  Wes was trying to decide how to respond when the nurse entered the room. “Told you to give it a bit more time,” he said with a wink before turning his attention to his patient. “Welcome back, sleepy beauty.” He began turning knobs and pushing buttons on the equipment. The blood pressure monitor stirred to life.

  Delany looked at Wes, the expression on her face unfamiliar but instantly recognizable.

  Helplessness.

  That look shredded his heart, because if there was one thing Delaney Monroe had never been, it was helpless. He’d never known anyone more capable of taking care of herself. Being strapped to all these machines, unsure of how she’d come to be here or what was happening, had to be the worst kind of hell imaginable for someone so determinedly self-sufficient.

  Wes reached for her hand to offer some comfort as the nurse nodded, apparently satisfied with the readings. She squeezed his fingers so hard, it hurt.

  “So, can you tell me your name?” the nurse asked.

  She answered without missing a beat. “Delaney Monroe.”

  “Good. Very good. And I assume you know this young man?” He nodded in Wes’s direction.

  “Of course, I do.” She looked up at him, her features relaxing with obvious affection. “He’s Wesley Barrows. My fiancé.”

  From the concern-laden glances Wes exchanges with the nurse, I know I’ve just said something wrong, but I can’t imagine what. Confusion makes my already aching head throb. I’m familiar enough with brain injury to know that my answers to these questions are an important indicator of how serious the damage is. But apart from a crashing headache and a fogginess that must be the result of the drugs they’ve been pumping into my veins for however long I’ve been unconscious, I feel fine.

  And I know I’m not wrong about my name or his. So why does he look so pale, so uneasy?

  Unless...

  “Wes, are we still engaged?” I’m trying to keep my rising panic from creeping into my voice, but I’m doing a crappy job.

  Memory loss is completely normal after an accident or other traumatic event. It’s the brain’s way of protecting you from reliving the terror of the incident over and over. Most people lose anywhere from a few hours to a few days. I’ve even heard of people who couldn’t remember the past few weeks when they first regained consciousness, although they usually got most of those memories back fairly quickly.

  But if I’ve forgotten my wedding, then I’m not just short a few days or weeks. I’m short months. Maybe even years.

  And that’s
terrifying.

  He shakes his head. “No, we’re not.”

  Then we’re married. “How long?” I ask.

  “A little less than three years.”

  Trembling, I close my eyes. My pulse is racing. An alarm sounds on one of the machines, probably the one that reads my blood pressure. I’ll bet it’s going through the roof.

  Three years is bad. Three years means I haven’t just forgotten getting married, but a whole host of other things.

  “Do we have any kids?” The question rips from my throat in a whisper. It’s horrifying enough that I can’t remember the day Wes and I committed to spend the rest of our lives together. If I can’t recall giving birth to our child…

  “Kids?” Wes sounds puzzled. “No, of course not.”

  Of course not? Okay, it’s true we planned on waiting a while before having kids, mostly so we could figure out how to handle the day-to-day of raising a child between my weird hours and Sam’s incessant demands on Wes’s time. I guess we haven’t done that yet. Not that there’s any big rush—I’m only twenty-five.

  Shit, no. I must be twenty-eight by now. That would make Wes thirty-two or very close to it.

  “What month is it?” I ask.

  The machine beeps louder, more insistently.

  “You really need to calm down, Ms. Monroe,” the nurse says, an edge of despair in his voice.

  Wes brushes a tangled lock of hair away from my face. “Shh. It’s not that important.”

  “It is important.” I say it even more fiercely than I planned. My eyes sting, and my throat thickens. “I need to know if I missed your birthday.”

  “You shouldn’t be worrying about that right now.”

  I struggle to sit up, but all the tubes and wires make it impossible, which only frustrates me more. “Well, what should I worry about, then? I can’t remember how I got hurt, I don’t know how long I’ve been here, I can’t remember the day we got married. Hell, I don’t even know who’s the President of the United States.”