Out Of The Ashes

Hope can rise from the smallest ember

After a devastating fire rages through Rob Monroe’s rural Georgia community, the prime suspect is the pretty local baker. The blaze started in Kari Hendrix’s shop—and she just confessed to being convicted of arson as a teenager.

Rob knows in his heart that Kari’s innocent. So what is she running from? Who’s she protecting? As he digs deeper, he uncovers the truth about an unresolved crime in his own family. Now he has to make a choice. Is he going to let the past destroy his chance for a future with Kari?

Kari roared with laughter.

Rob swung her wide, lifting her off the floor and twirling her. “Got another cake that needs decorating?”

“That’s the sugar high talking—I think you may have licked one too many bowls of buttercream,” Kari said. But her eyes were sparkling, and Rob knew it wasn’t the buttercream that made his heart do a triple beat.

“There’s sugar, and then...well...there’s sugar,” he whispered. He bent down to kiss her.

She tasted of sugar...vanilla buttercream, to be exact. She smelled of the stuff, which suited him just fine, because for that moment all he wanted to do was take in the scent of her, the taste and the feel of her. If he’d had to decorate a thousand more cakes, give him a kiss like this, and he was game.

Because it was plain and simple. He was addicted to the sugar high that was Kari Hendrix...regardless of whatever secret she might be keeping.

Dear Reader,

Until I had the privilege of working for the US House of Representatives, I had always thought a juvenile offense was no big deal. Wasn’t it sealed away, never to haunt the grown-up, much wiser version of that foolish teenage self?

The answer, I found, was no. Even a misdemeanor arrest as a juvenile can come back to haunt a person in her adult years. Men and women in their twenties and thirties, in search of college loans, job opportunities, security clearances and other things that might improve their career prospects all told me the same thing: an arrest is still an arrest, a conviction still a conviction, no matter how old you were when it happened. Even an expunged record, I found, wasn’t truly a clean slate. On a job application, you still had to check yes on that box that asked, “Have you ever been arrested or convicted of a crime?”

That’s what my character Kari faces in Out of the Ashes: one bad decision so many years before comes back to haunt her. She’s older, wiser and a good deal sadder for her bad decision, but it still impacts her present in ways she had no idea it would when she made it. And it has the power to destroy any chance of her future with Rob.

I hope you enjoy Kari and Rob’s story as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Cynthia

CYNTHIA REESE lives with her husband and their daughter in south Georgia, along with their two dogs, three cats and however many strays show up for morning muster. She has been scribbling since she was knee-high to a grasshopper and reading even before that. A former journalist, teacher and college English instructor, she also enjoys cooking, traveling and photography when she gets the chance.

To my husband, my biggest fan.

This book, like the ones before it, owes a tremendous debt to the efforts of the best editors on the planet, Kathryn Lye and Victoria Curran. I am so thankful for their belief in my writing. Karen Rock has a huge part of this as well, as she helped me brainstorm the original story idea and the story arc for the Georgia Monroes.

Thanks, too, goes to Sgt. Tommy Windham and all the firefighters at the City of Dublin, Georgia’s, Fire Department, to John Lentini of Scientific Fire Analysis, to Judge Sherri McDonald, and to Blake Tillery for their patient answers to my dumb questions. All mistakes are mine.

No man is an island, and no woman can truly write a book on her own: thanks to my critique partner Tawna Fenske, my beta reader Jessica Brown, my cheering squad and inspiration for big happy families, Leslie and the gang, and, last but not least, to those who have had to talk me down from the ledges—my sister, my daughter and my husband. Thank you for all the times you didn’t strangle me when I replied to any request, “Not now, I’m writing.”

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Dear Reader

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

SMOKE.

Ashes.

Kari Hendrix wanted to see neither ever again.

All around her in the predawn light were the loud industrial sounds of ventilator fans, the slap of boots against concrete, the beep-beep-beep of a fire truck as it backed up, the calls from one firefighter to another, the thwack and clank of fire hoses being rolled up, the pulse of red and blue lights streaking across puddles of water on the street.

And the wet smell of a building burned to a crisp.

Make that buildings. She shivered and wrapped her arms around herself to ward off a chill despite the late summer temperatures still not dropping below seventy-five at night. Almost the whole section of the downtown on one side of the street was gutted and blackened. Her little bakery stood smack in the middle, an even darker smudge against the rest.

Gone. Up in smoke.

She’d checked everything twice the night before when she’d closed up: the oven, the stove, the lights. She always did.

If there was one thing Kari knew, it was the destructive power of fire.

The scrape of boots on the sidewalk came nearer—next to her. She pulled her attention away from her ruined bakery and switched it to the man who’d walked up to join her by the fluttering yellow tape that blocked off the scene from civilians.

The first thing that struck her about him was how tall he was—a good foot taller than her 5­4"—okay, 5­3½"—frame. Beside him, Kari felt even more like a munchkin than usual.

Unlike the rest of the men on the far side of the tape, the tall man wasn’t dressed in turnout gear. He wore no fire helmet or rubber boots, but he was in a uniform of sorts: khakis and a knit golf shirt with a shield of some sort embroidered on it.

She couldn’t make out the logo because of the third thing she noticed about him: in his hands he carried two paper cups of coffee and had a blanket slung over one arm.

“You’re Kari Hendrix.” It wasn’t a question, just a confident restating of a known fact. “Here. I figured you could use a cup of coffee.”

Kari’s hand reflexively took the coffee before she could get out, “What?”

But he wasn’t done. With his free hand, he awkwardly propped the blanket, marked PROPERTY OF LEVI COUNTY FIRE DEPT, around her. Kari grabbed at it before it slipped onto the sodden sidewalk and pulled it gratefully around her shoulders.

The man made a quick save of her fumbling coffee cup. “Whoops. So much for my being a gentleman. You nearly lost the coffee and the blanket,” he told her.

“Thank you,” she replied. She peered at the stitching on the shirt, which stretched over a well-constructed chest that looked more like a triathlete’s than a firefighter’s. This guy was built like a tree. In the dim light, though, she couldn’t really decipher the dark threads that made up the design.

“Oh, I’m Rob Monroe.” He offered a hand, realized she had both hands occupied—one with the cup and the other anchoring the blanket. He grinned.

It was a good grin—the smile of a guy who didn’t take himself too seriously and realized when he was being a goofball, Kari decided. It tugged at dimples and a cleft in his chin, and it showed off white teeth and the barest hint of stubble to devastatingly good advantage.

“Kari—well, you, hmm, you already know my name, don’t you?” she asked. She felt her face heat up. Suddenly she could picture how she looked to this guy: she could feel her blond hair slipping out of its hastily-rigged ponytail, imagine her face bare of makeup and still streaked with the tears she’d shed earlier as she’d stood watching the fire in all its gut-wrenching destruction. “You have me at a disadvantage.”

“The coffee and the blanket don’t make up for that?” His eyes were dark—not brown or black, but she couldn’t quite make out the color in the dawn light. But they were kind eyes. Intelligent ones.

Now they shifted beyond her, not apparently expecting an answer to his question, and they locked on the smoldering remains of the downtown section that had burned.

She followed his gaze. It was hard to watch it now that she’d looked away. She’d almost hoped that it had been a nightmare that she could wake up from and it would be gone.

But of course it wasn’t. No, the fire was out now and the firefighters were gathering up their equipment, tromping around the half-burned walls of the buildings, over rubble.

“Want to take a closer look?” Rob Monroe offered suddenly.

Kari opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Did she? Yes...and no. Even from here, she could tell nothing would be salvaged from her shop.

Still, she wanted to know what she’d done—or hadn’t done—that had turned her dreams into ashes.

“Okay,” she got out. “But can we? The chief told me to wait back here.”

Rob lifted the tape and jerked his head for her to go on. “I happen to have a little pull with the chief,” he said. “He’s my brother.”

“Oh. Are you—you’re a firefighter, too?” She glanced back over her shoulder.

Rob reached over and righted her coffee cup again—as she had again been on the verge of dumping it.

“Sorry. I seem to be a bit of a klutz today. I’m not usually,” Kari told him.

“It’s like that at four in the morning.” Now he walked beside her, matching her step for step, even though he could have easily crossed the distance in a fraction of the time it was taking her.

Especially when Kari’s feet felt nailed to the ground the closer she drew to the burned-out storefront.

“Do you know?” she blurted out. “How it started? What did I do? What did I leave on?”

Rob cast an appraising look her way, one eyebrow hiked in question. “You think you left something on?”

“I checked. Everything. I always check. But I must have, right?”

It was the only thing that made sense to her. More than one firefighter had said enough in passing to let her know that the fire had started in her bakery. So she must have done something wrong. She’d left something on in the oven, or maybe her old coffeepot had shorted out, or...something.

The acrid smell of drenched ashes and soot assailed her even more strongly now that they were just outside the front door of her shop. Rob drew up short, staying put. Kari was grateful for his consideration, because without a moment to collect herself, she would have surely burst into tears or succumbed to the roiling nausea in her stomach.

The plate glass window with the stenciled name of Lovin’ Oven was no more—splintered into pieces. Inside, the shop was inky-black, lit only by a few klieg lights and the sweeping beams of a firefighter’s flashlight.

Even so, Kari could see only the barest scraps of the gingham tablecloths she’d had covering the window’s deeply bayed display shelf. The window display with the four-tiered mock cake—nothing but a form made of hatboxes and decorated with frosting to showcase her skills—was no more.

A man almost as tall as Rob appeared out of the shadows. Even in his turnout gear and soot-covered face, Kari recognized him as the man who’d warned her to stay back what felt like hours earlier...the chief. Rob’s brother.

“I told him you’d said I should wait—” Kari rushed.

But the chief—Daniel Monroe, she remembered now, waved her words away. “Rob said he was going to take you through it.”

Kari gulped. Usually she was stronger than this, braver. She’d had to be braver for years now, so there was no point going all weepy over a fire. Nobody had gotten killed in it, thank goodness. And at least she’d been able to pay the insurance.

Rob cocked his head. “See? I told you I had pull.” He clicked on a huge and battered flashlight that rivaled a small baseball bat in size. “But we do need to be careful. Here—why don’t you leave your blanket and the coffee with Daniel?” He winked at his brother. “You won’t mind holding it for us while we’re in there, will you, bro?”

“Why not? You’ve left me holding far worse bags over the years, now, haven’t you?” But Daniel’s retort was devoid of malice... Kari found herself wishing she and her own brother could joke around like that. She handed him her coffee and slid off the blanket, shivering at the cool air.

Kari stepped through the door to an interior she would have never recognized as her very own shop. Black water was everywhere, walls were gone, tables reduced to ash and rubble.

The precious glass display cases she’d found online and got her brother to help her haul them home—gone. The kitschy fruit prints she’d framed on the walls—gone.

And the farther she went into the bowels of the beast, the worse it got.

The kitchen area in the back, smelling of burned sugar and flour and plastic, had taken on an apocalyptic appearance, all scorched earth and none of the cheerful, neat work space she’d left just a few hours earlier. Kari stood beside her Hobart floor mixer and slid a hand over its fire-blistered paint.

Gone. All gone.

She hadn’t even realized she was crying until Rob squeezed her shoulder. “Hey. If you want to do this later...”

He was so kind. As if he didn’t mind in the slightest standing by a squawling baker as she wept over her floor mixer. Kari swiped at her eyes and choked back her tears. “No, I’m—it’s okay.” She whirled around to escape his intense look of compassion, only to stumble and nearly fall on something in her path.

“Whoa, there!” Rob saved her from a nasty spill in the soot. He shined his light onto what had caused her to stumble: her bookshelf of cookbooks, now charred almost beyond recognition.

“Oh, no...” Kari hadn’t even thought of them—all these cookbooks, collected over the years from the first time she’d ever baked a cake, destroyed in seconds. “My recipes...all my recipes! Gone!”

“Wait—see? Not all gone.” Rob bent over and scooped up a thick book and flipped it open. Sure enough, though the edges of the pages were scalloped with an ugly carbon-black from the heat and flames, many pages were readable. “You’ll need to let them dry out, of course, because they got an extra good soaking.”

She couldn’t help it. She grabbed that cookbook and pressed it to her, giving up on holding back her tears.

“Your favorite cookbook?” he asked.

Kari managed a laugh, then sniffled. “Cookbooks are like children or dogs. You can’t have a favorite. They’re all my favorites.”

“Hmm. I had no idea.” His smile was sweet and patient. Kari realized that daylight was filtering through the front windows. “Come on.” He waved her toward the delivery door. “I want to show you something out back.”

Carefully she made her way there. Outside, a hulk of scorched metal lay in a heap near the remains of what had been a wooden door that Kari had daily battled with.

“What?” she asked as she joined Rob, who was staring at it intently.

“You don’t recognize it?”

She frowned. It had been white, maybe, or the lightest of blue, a tank of some sort...

A chill went down her spine.

A propane tank.

“Is that what I think it is?” she asked.

“What do you think it is?” Rob evaded answering her question.

She knelt down for a closer look.

Yes. A small propane tank, like the ones you’d see at a convenience store, ready to be taken home and hooked up to a grill.

But she had no grill. Her bakery ran on natural gas and electricity, not propane. She’d not had any need for a propane tank.

Jammed into the tank’s collar, next to the valve, was a scrap of metal and a heap of ashes.

She straightened up, her heart sinking to her toes. “It looks like a propane tank. For a grill.”

“Yep,” Rob agreed.

“It’s not mine.”

“That a fact?” he asked.

Now she met his eyes, and she could tell in the gray light of dawn that they were blue, a very dark blue that she hadn’t seen ever before—but she’d seen the speculation that filled them in others’ eyes—plenty of times.

“Is that what started the fire?” she asked. “This tank?”

“I couldn’t tell you yet. I’ve only just started to investigate.”

“Investigate? You?” Now it was Kari’s turn to look speculatively at her companion.

“Didn’t I tell you? I’m the fire marshal and arson investigator for Levi County.”

A renewed wave of nausea flooded through her. “Arson?” she asked and sagged against the scorched cement of the exterior wall. But she hadn’t needed to ask him to repeat it. She’d heard it the first time.

“It looks that way. That tank’s valve is open, and it appears to be the remains of a road flare stuck in there.”

Kari’s knees wouldn’t hold her up any longer. She found herself sliding to the wet ground, the masonry wall digging into her back as she descended. “Not again,” she whispered. “Oh, please, not again.”

“Again?” Rob knelt down beside her.

“You might as well know...” She stared down at the cookbook in her arms, the one thing she’d been able to salvage from the ashes of her fresh new start.

“Know what?” Rob prompted.

“You’ll find out soon enough. I was convicted of arson when I was fourteen years old.”

CHAPTER TWO

ROB SAT BACK on his heels, stunned. Had she really said what he thought she’d said?

Yes.

But she’d said it in a curious, distancing way. Not “I started a fire,” or “I burned down a building.”

No. “I was convicted.” That was how Kari Hendrix had put it.

He took in her eyes. They were gray and flat and dull, devoid of the hope he’d seen sputter in them when she’d found the cookbook.

So the question wasn’t if this was arson. Rob switched his gaze away from Kari and back to the propane tank.

Revenge. That was the first thought that popped in his mind when he’d made his initial sweep after the firefighters had put the blaze out. He’d seen the way-too-obvious point of origin—an open valve on a propane tank, the remains of a safety flare jabbed into the tank’s collar—and it was impossible to miss the “take that!” message the arsonist had sent loud and clear.

Rob had taken Kari through the building in hopes she could fill him in on who it was she’d so badly ticked off. A boyfriend? A customer?

But now...

Now he had to consider whether Kari was the culprit. The propane tank was easy enough to acquire, as well as the safety flare. She owned a bakery—and any food-based small shop hemorrhaged money like nobody’s business at first. And she certainly knew the lay of the land and when no one would be around.

Means, motive and opportunity...and a past criminal history, albeit self-confessed.

Her head was bent, and Kari appeared to peer deeply at her knees as though the secret to the universe were there. He could see the fabric of the denim stretched over those knees was thin and threadbare—not some high-dollar distressing of the jeans, but literally worn through.

Kari hadn’t done this.

Rob knew it. It was a bone-deep knowledge he couldn’t explain, but he was just as certain that Kari Hendrix had not set this fire as he was that his big brother Daniel would throw back his head and roar with laughter at his conclusion. Daniel was always telling Rob that Rob was the cynical, suspicious one.

Still...

“Ahem. I should read you your rights,” Rob said. Funny how his voice seemed to strain and crack. “You have the right to remain silent—”

Kari lifted her head. Her mouth twisted in a grimace. “Yeah. I know. And whatever I say, you’ll use against me in court, and I can have an attorney—you’ll even give me a really, really bad one since I can’t afford one. I know the drill.”

“So? Did you? Do this?”

“No.” There was no equivocation, no hesitation, no fancy I-swear-on-a-stack-of-Bibles, no how-dare-you outrage. Just a plain and simple, no-frills, direct, “No.”

“Do you know who might have?”

But now Kari lied.

Not at first. Her initial headshake was vigorous and heartfelt. But somewhere in mid-shake, a lightbulb must have gone off. She froze—just for a split second. He could see more pain flare up in her eyes, the deep anguish of betrayal. And for a moment he was sure she was going to spill out a name.

Instead, she pressed her lips together in a tight, thin line and clutched the cookbook to her chest. “How could I know who burned this place? Why would they want to?”

“That’s what I’m asking you. Do you have trouble with your landlord?”

She laughed. It was a dry, bitter sound that would have been more fitting for a jaded seventy-year-old than someone Kari’s age. Kari pushed herself up to a standing position, wobbly on her knees, but still pointedly ignoring Rob’s outstretched hand.

“I take that as a yes?” Rob pressed.

“My landlord, as you probably already know, is Charlie Kirkman, and everybody has trouble with Charlie Kirkman. And when you ask around, you’ll probably find the customers who heard me screaming at him the other day when he refused—again—to send somebody to look at the roof. Or the air conditioner. Or the vent fan. Or the water heater. But if everybody who got into a screaming match with Charlie Kirkman burned his buildings down, Charlie Kirkman would have no buildings left to burn.”

She was right about that, Rob knew. Charlie was as skinflinty a landlord as he’d ever come across. Rob had had dealings with Charlie—and not in a good way—when he’d followed up with Charlie’s residential tenants about fire safety complaints. And he knew that Charlie was famous for finally getting around to repairing the problem—and then upping the rent and gleefully evicting the poor tenants.

So it was par for the course that Charlie’s commercial ventures would play out the same way.

“Why’d you keep renting from him, then? Why not move somewhere else?” Rob asked.

Kari shrugged slim shoulders. “Location, location, location. I haven’t been in business long enough to have a reputation yet, or a real customer base that would follow me if I moved. The location was perfect. Plus, I’d signed a year’s lease. It won’t be up for...gosh, another six months.”

Rob couldn’t believe that the Lovin’ Oven had been in business for six months already and he hadn’t availed himself of its goodies. But he hadn’t. Maybe it was because he could get all the free dessert he wanted at Ma’s...or maybe he’d somehow looked down on a boutique bakery that sold things like four-buck cupcakes that couldn’t be any better than the boxed brownies he made for himself whenever he had a snack attack.