Three-Alarm Love

“Nothing Wrong With Independence In A Woman, Sugar...Up To A Point.” Letter to Reader Title Page CAROLE BUCK Prologue Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Copyright

“Nothing Wrong With Independence In A Woman, Sugar...Up To A Point.”

“And exactly what point might that be, Mr. Randall?” Keezia inquired, her voice like molten honey and her eyes shimmering with a uniquely feminine form of provocation.

“Well...” Fridge’s body thrummed with anticipation. “If you were to independently put your arms around my neck—”

“Like this?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And what if I were to move a little closer...? Are we beyond the point yet?”

“We’re nowhere close,” Fridge finally managed.

“So there wouldn’t be anything wrong with me sort of easing your head down....”

Their mouths met. Mated in an evocative dance that soon became blatantly sexual.

“I want to say that you are one fine kisser, Mr. Randall.”

“I can do much better, sugar.”

Dear Reader,

February, month of valentines, celebrates lovers—which is what Silhouette Desire does every month of the year. So this month, we have an extraspecial lineup of sensual and emotional page-turners. But how do you choose which exciting book to read first when all six stones are asking Be Mine?

Bestselling author Barbara Boswell delivers February’s MAN OF THE MONTH, a gorgeous doctor who insists on being a full-time father to his newly discovered child, in The Brennan Baby. Bride of the Bad Boy is the wonderful first book in Elizabeth Bevarly’s brand-new BLAME IT ON BOB trilogy. Don’t miss this fun story about a marriage of inconvenience!

Cupid slings an arrow at neighboring ranchers in Her Torrid Temporary Marriage by Sara Orwig. Next, a woman’s thirtieth-birthday wish brings her a supersexy cowboy—and an unexpected pregnancy—in The Texan, by Catherine Lanigan. Carole Buck brings red-hot chemistry to the pages of Three-Alarm Love. And Barbara McCauley’s Courtship in Granite Ridge reunites a single mother with the man she’d always loved.

Have a romantic holiday this month—and every month—with Silhouette Desire Enjoy!

Melissa Senate

Senior Editor

Please address questions and book requests to:

Silhouette Reader Service

U.S 3010 Walden Ave., PO. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

Canadian P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3

Three-Alarm Love

Carole Buck

CAROLE BUCK

is a television news writer and movie reviewer who lives in Atlanta. She is single and her hobbies include cake decorating, ballet and traveling. She collects frogs, but does not kiss them. Carole says she’s in love with life; she hopes the books she writes reflect this. Carole loves to hear from her readers. You can write to her at P.O. Box 78845 Atlanta, GA 30357-2845.

Prologue

Ralph “Fridge” Randall was a man who accepted the existence of Heaven as a matter of faith. Hell—at least an earthly version of it—he was acquainted with, firsthand.

Fridge was a firefighter. A veteran of fourteen years of dedicated, frequently dangerous service with the Atlanta Fire Department And while he’d readily concede that the vast majority of the blazes he’d battled during this period could be attributed to either accident or arson, there’d been a few that he privately suspected of being, well, essentially diabolical in origin.

This was not to say that the only child of Helen Rose and the late Willie Leroy Randall believed the devil was going around striking sparks and igniting multiple-alarm infernos in Georgia’s Fulton County. He didn’t. Given his awareness that human carelessness, callousness and cruelty often had incendiary consequences, he didn’t figure the devil had much need to step in and personally play pyromaniac.

Still. Nearly a decade and a half on the department’s front line had taught Fridge that there were fires that seemed to be more malignant—more deliberate in their destructiveness—than others. Bizarre as it might sound to folks who’d never gone after a fully involved blaze wielding a ventilating ax or a charged-up hose, there were some fires that just plain exuded evil.

It was such fires that made Helen Rose Randall’s son think back to an illustration he’d happened upon in a Sunday-school reader many years before. He couldn’t recall the text of the caption, although he was pretty certain that it had had something to do with sin, brimstone and eternal damnation. But the picture...

That he remembered in full-color detail!

The picture had scared the living daylights out of him. He’d taken one look at it and persuaded himself that the flames it so vividly portrayed were intent on his personal incineration. “Intent” as in consciously determined, with malice aforethought.

There’d been no doubt m his young mind about the implications of what he’d seen Those flames had been out to get him—Ralph Booker Randall—no ifs, ands, buts or possibilities of divine salvation about it.

Fridge had been about six when he’d come across that Sunday-school illustration. He’d spoken about it to only two people in the nearly thirty years that had followed.

The first person had been his mama. Keeping secrets from her wasn’t something he’d done as a little boy. It wasn’t something he did much as a grown man, either.

The second person had been a fellow firefighter who, despite the difference in their skin color, Fridge had come to trust like a brother. The firefighter’s name was Jackson Miller.

Jackson had understood without needing an explanation why certain fires reminded him of the hellish image he’d seen as a kid. Fridge had been sure that he would.

Why had he been so certain Well, chalk it up to his awareness of Jackson’s family history. He knew that there’d been Miller men battling blazes in and around Atlanta ever since Jackson’s great-great-granddaddy had volunteered for the force back in 1870. The notion that there were flames capable of transcending the laws of science and taking on a seemingly sentient existence of their own was something Jackson had absorbed at his father’s knee.

“Fire’s always the enemy in our line of work,” he’d observed after listening to Fridge’s tale of the Sunday-school illustration and its lingering impact “But I hear what you’re saying, man With some calls, it feels...personal. Like you’re going up against a living, breathing, thinking thing that’s aiming to get you any way it can. And with those kind of fires, it’s not enough to knock ‘em down and put ’em out. You need to kill ’em.”

The warehouse blaze that Ralph Booker Randall faced on the fourth Sunday of the eighth month of his fourteenth year as an Atlanta firefighter didn’t feel personal to him. At least...not at first.

There could have been a lot of explanations for his lack of attune ment to the situation. Probably the most accurate was that he’d arrived on the scene with a small but significant piece of his mind still caught up with the conversation he and Jackson had been having when the wake-the-dead sound of an alarm had sent them running for their truck.

They’d been discussing the women in their lives. In Jackson’s case, a beautiful and brainy Yankee psychiatrist named Phoebe Donovan. In his, a firefighter named Keezia Carew who was as independent as she was exotically attractive.

Different ladies in a great many ways, to be sure. But soul sisters when it came to their capacity for confusing the men who loved them.

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again,” Fridge had declared at one point, gazing up at the star-spangled sky as though seeking guidance. Things had been remarkably quiet in the nearly fifteen hours since they’d come on duty. While many of the other members of the station’s A shift were sacked out in their bunks, he and Jackson had elected to sit outside and shoot the breeze for a bit. “If the good Lord had meant for men to understand women, He would have put the explanation in writing.”

His friend and colleague had chuckled briefly then observed, “You seem to understand Keezia pretty well.”

“Oh, I understand her just fine when she’s on the job, actin’ like a firefighter,” Fridge had acknowledged with a touch of pride. “But the rest of the time?” He’d grimaced, his memory fast-forwarding through a dozen particularly perplexing incidents. What does Keezia really want from me? he’d demanded of himself for the umpteenth time. Does she even know? “Give me a break. I feel like I’m stumblin’ around in a minefield at midnight.”

Stumblin’ around in a minefield at midnight...

Strange how that ominous turn of phrase popped back into Fridge’s head about fifteen seconds before the first drum of industrial solvent that wasn’t supposed to be on the scene blew up, killing a probationary firefighter named Dwight Daniels.

He and Jackson were inside the burning warehouse searching for the twenty-two-year-old “probie” when the blast occurred. They’d just come down from ventilating the structure’s roof when Daniels had been reported missing. They weren’t the only ones who volunteered to attempt to find him; just the quickest to step forward.

They basically went in blind. The warehouse was filled with smoke. Thick. Dark. Dirty. Fridge knew he’d stink of it for days, no matter how many times he showered.

He tried not to think about what might happen if something went wrong with his self-contained breathing apparatus and he was forced to inhale the rotten stuff. He also prayed that Damels hadn’t succumbed to panic and hyperventilated through an entire bottle of air as probies were wont to do in dicey situations. He’d seen rookies finish bottles that were supposed to last twenty minutes or more in less than half that time. The “huff ‘n’ puff” syndrome, some veterans called it.

Fridge moved forward cautiously, gripping the steel cable he’d hooked to the outside of the building before he’d started in. Jackson—who was a couple feet to his left—was similarly equipped. As long as they kept hold of their flexible metal guidelines, they’d be able to go out the way they’d come in.

Or so the manual maintained. If the way they’d come in had gone up in flames, they’d have to try an alternate route

The heat in the warehouse was increasing. Fridge was sweating profusely beneath his heavy turnout gear. His hands were slick inside his gloves. His short-cropped hair and mustache felt sodden. Running his tongue over his lips, he tasted salt.

He suddenly flashed back on something he’d been told early in his training: The intensity of a fire doubles with every seventeen-degree rise in—

Ka-boom!

The explosion seemed to come from the back of the warehouse. The unexpectedness of it more than its percussive force knocked Fridge to his knees. Fortunately, the drop wasn’t very far. Since heat and smoke rise, the importance of keeping close to the floor was something that had been drummed into him at the academy from day one.

Stay low, you go, went the blunt counsel. Stay high, you die.

“Fridge!” It was Jackson’s voice. It sounded muffled, but close to normal.

“Okay, man!” Fridge responded, getting to his feet He did a quick mental inventory of his condition and deemed himself to be shaken but intact. “You?”

“Okay. But I lost hold of my—”

Ka-boom!

This second blast jarred the fillings in Fridge’s molars and knocked him flat. His helmet came off. A metallic-tasting liquid flooded his tongue. It was blood. Somewhere in the back of his mind he realized that he’d bitten a chunk out of the inside of his right cheek.

He levered himself up on all fours, scrabbling to locate his headgear. He could feel the outer rims of his ears starting to blister. The back of his neck would begin to barbecue any second. He couldn’t see anything. Not a single... solitary... thing.

He hollered Jackson’s name.

No answer.

And then the building seemed to groan.

Somethin’s comin’ down, Fridge thought grimly. He shouted Jackson’s name again. He knew that being trapped in a collapse was his friend’s personal nightmare. His daddy had died that way. Captain Nathan Miller had been working the nozzle on a water-charged one-and-a-half-inch hose inside a burning frame building when the structure had kicked out and come crashing down. He’d never had a chance.

Fridge found his helmet. He clapped it on and started crawling in what he fervently hoped was Jackson’s direction.

A moment later, the something he’d feared was coming down actually did. Whatever it was, it struck Fridge across the back and slammed him to the concrete floor of the warehouse like a pile driver. He opened his mouth to cry out but the pain was so great he couldn’t muster the lung power to force the sound up his throat.

He tried to move. Shafts of agony spiraled down his legs, slicing along his nerves like knives. His stomach roiled He was afraid he was going to vomit. Swallowing convulsively, he once again tried to move. Whatever was on top of him shifted. He thought he heard something snap. Pain stabbed viciously at the small of his back.

A moment later, Fridge saw red. At first he assumed it was blood—his own blood—on the inside of his face mask. Then he realized that what he was seeing was the glow of encroaching flames.

He was caught. God in Heaven have mercy, he was caught and he was going to roast like a pig on a spit.

“Fridge?”

It was Jackson. The shout came across a great distance. Or maybe it just seemed far away because Helen Rose Randall’s son was losing his grip on consciousness.

“Fridge?” It was a bellow. Angry. And anxious. “Talk to me, dammit! Where are the hell are you?”

“Here...”

Perhaps he said it aloud. Perhaps he only uttered the syllable inside his head. Fridge didn’t know. He wasn’t certain it made much of a difference.

Another spasm of pain racked him. He closed his eyes, shutting out the sanguineous light from the flames. This fire was starting to feel personal, he decided, with a touch of gallows’ humor. Real, real personal.

He didn’t want to die. But if his tune had come, he was prepared to meet his Maker. He’d done his best to be a good man, to lead a good hfe. And while it had taken him a long time to do so, he’d been fortunate enough to find a good woman to love.

If only his love for that good woman had been enough to erase the fear he’d seen lurking like a wounded animal in the topaz depths of her remarkable eyes, more times than he wanted to remember.

If only it had been enough to allow her to fully trust him.

Enough to allow her to trust herself.

“Keezia,” Fridge gasped, invoking the name like a prayer. “Oh...Keezia.”

One

Four months earlier

On top of all his other talents, the man could dance

The realization surprised Keezia Lorraine Carew, although she knew it shouldn’t have. It wasn’t as though she’d never seen Fridge move. She’d watched him on the job—running drills for rookies at the academy, tending to business at the fire station, responding to calls in the field—more times than she could count. Although he stood a strapping six-four and tipped the scales at a solidly muscular 230 pounds, the man was light on his feet Potently graceful, like a big, black jungle cat. He could be weighed down by turnout gear and breathing apparatus, but he still seemed to.. gli-i-i-ide...when he walked. And he had a knack for maintaining a rock-solid rhythm, even when everything around him was falling apart.

She’d watched how Fridge moved when he was off the job, too. It wasn’t a sexual thing. She wasn’t checking him out or sizing him up. He was a friend, for heaven’s sake! More than that, he was a fellow firefighter. If she were looking for a man—which she most emphatically was not now and had no intention of doing anytime soon—she’d have more sense than to go hunting for one in the department.

Still. Keezia knew that she’d be lying if she denied she found Fridge attractive. The source of his appeal was something she’d shied from examining except to acknowledge that he was very different from the brothers she’d been drawn to in the past. He didn’t strut his stuff. He didn’t represent himself as some streetwise stud He was, in fact, the kind of mama-loving, churchgoing black man she’d once disdained as hopelessly dull. But now...

What could she say? Ralph Randall compelled her interest. Her attention. And the unsettling thing was, he seemed to compel them against her will.

Keezia took a sip of the beer that had been thrust upon her by a colleague when she’d walked into the garishly decorated hall where several dozen members of the Atlanta Fire Department and their families were celebrating the retirement of one of their own. She wasn’t much of a drinker, but she knew the drill. If she’d turned aside the brew and asked for something soft, she would have been labelled a wuss—or worse.

Swaying to the irresistibly down-and-dirty beat of the golden Motown oldie that was wailing out of the hall’s speaker system, she glanced around at the gathered throng. The mood in the hall was rocking, verging on rowdy. The esprit de corps—the camaraderie—was palpable Keezia gave herself over to the all-for-one, one-for-all feeling, wrapping it around her like a security blanket.

She shifted her gaze back toward Fridge. He was dressed in dark jeans and a white T-shirt. The dark, loose-fitting jacket he’d been wearing when she’d walked in—late, thanks to yet another problem with the hunk of junk she drove—had been discarded shortly after he started dancing. The T-shirt clung to the powerful muscles of his upper body as though it had been sprayed on. As for the jeans...

Keezia swallowed and shifted her weight, trying to ignore the sudden fluttering in the pit of her stomach.

All right, she thought with a touch of self-directed anger. Okay. So she’d noticed. She’d have to be bind not to. Fridge’s jeans seemed to be clinging to some pretty well-developed anatomy, too. The man was just plain big all over.

Too big, something inside her warned. Bigger than—

Keezia clamped down on the comparison before it was completed. She took another drink of beer. A gulp this time, not a sip. She didn’t even grimace at the lukewarm temperature.

Motown gave way to a classic cut from the Rolling Stones. All of a sudden Fridge was dancing with a flashy young thing who, in Keezia’s considered opinion, should have taken a few of the dollars she’d paid to have her hair braided and beaded and spent them on a brassiere. A pair of super-control, jiggle-reducing panties would have been a good investment, too.

And what were those nails she was scratching against Fridge every time she wiggled near enough to touch him? Keezia wondered with a sardonic snort. A fancy manicure was one thing. Men liked a woman who made an effort to appear her best. But bloodred talons that looked as though a girl had been ripping at somebody’s jugular vein? Puh-leeze. Those things were worse than tacky. They were flat-out ugly.

Keezia tapped her short, unvarnished nails against her nearly emptied beer bottle. She was disappointed in Fire Officer Ralph Randall, she told herself She really was. She’d thought he had more sense than to take up with such obvious trash. She could only imagine what would happen if he decided to take Whoever-She-Was home to meet his mama!

That Helen Rose Randall wanted her only child married was plain to anyone with eyes or ears. But she wasn’t willing to settle for any old Sally, Jane or LaToya as a daughter-in-law. No, indeed not. Miz Helen was a lady with very definite standards. She’d take one look at—

Little Miss I-Got-It-So-I’m-Gonna-Flaunt-It said something at this point. Keezia decided the comment must have been downright hilarious because Fridge grinned m response to it, his even teeth flashing white beneath his mustache. A few seconds later, he swept his partner into a Michael Jackson-style spin.

The physical dominance implicit in the maneuver made Keezia flinch. The reaction was visceral. Involuntary. She shuddered slightly, her vision blurring, her palms going clammy. A brackish taste invaded her mouth. A part of her started looking for a place to hide.

Bitch! a nightmarishly familiar male voice rasped inside her skull You do what I tell you, when I tell you. You think I’m gonna let some—

“Hey, Keez!”

Keezia started violently, nearly dropping her beer bottle. Blinking rapidly, she drew a shaky breath. She was appalled by what she’d just experienced While she understood that she could never fully escape her past, she’d thought she was free from the worst of it It had been months since she’d suffered such a flashback That it had been something Fridge had done that had revived the fear and shame and helplessness she’d sworn she would die before going through again tore at her heart.

“Keezia?”

“You okay?”

“Hey, maybe she needs to sit down ”

“Geez, Keez. You’re damned near white.”

Keezia got herself under control, steadying her breathing and stilling her trembling hands by sheer force of will. She turned to confront a quartet of her fellow firefighters. Two were African-American like herself. One of them was tall, lean and totally bald; the other was short and squat, with biceps the size of baked hams. The third man had buzz-cut blond hair, blue eyes and the beginnings of a tan. The fourth was a wiry redhead whose faintly glassy gaze suggested he was a couple of beers over his limit. All four were staring at her with a combination of uncertainty and concern.

“Sorry,” she said, manufacturing a smile. It must have looked less fake than it felt because there was a perceptible easing in her colleagues’ expressions “I was... uh ... zoning out.”

“You’re sure you’re okay?” This was from the taller black man. His name was Sam Fields. He’d been something of a mentor to Keezia during her probationary period.

“Positive, Sam. I’m fine.”

The four men exchanged glances, then apparently decided to take her at her word.

“Sorry about shakin’ you up,” the shorter black man said. “We moseyed over because we didn’t think it was right for the best-lookin’ firefighter in Atlanta to be standin’ all by herself.”

Keezia made a conscious shift into what she’d come to think of as her sassy-but-classy mode. It had taken her quite a while to find the courage to participate in the verbal give-and-take that was an integral part of fire fighting life. The habit of speaking up for herself had pretty much been beaten out of her during her marriage.

The first time she’d finally felt confident enough to crack back at somebody who was ragging on her, she’d been suffused by a heady rush of triumph It wasn’t that what she’d said had been so clever. Indeed, it had been pretty lame compared to the “snaps” some of the guys traded. Nonetheless. She’d said it.

“Funny, J.T.,” she drawled, arching an eyebrow. “I’ve heard you tell folks the best-looking firefighter in Atlanta is you. ”

This provoked a hoot of derision from the blond firefighter. “Oh, yeah,” he sarcastically concurred. “John Thomas thinks he’s a regular Denzel Washington.”

“Let’s not be talkin’ about who thinks what about their looks, Bobby,” J.T. retorted, jutting his jaw pugnaciously. “And it’s Wesley Snipes I resemble, man. Not Denzel.”

“What?” The man addressed as Bobby gave another hoot. “Give me a break! You resemble Wesley Snipes about as much as Mitch here resembles what’s-his-name—that guy from Backdraft.”