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All of a sudden, her firehouse nickname sounded belittling.
“Hannah,” she said.
Irish smiled. “Hannah.” Then he shook his head. “We can do better than that.”
“What do you have in mind?”
Crap. It sounded like she was flirting.
Was she flirting?
She had no idea. Her brain was too tired, and the conversation had gone in too many directions in the last three minutes.
“I’ll work on it,” he said.
She turned away. “Close the door next time, okay? I don’t need to see what else you guys have to offer.”
Then she was through the door and into the parking lot before anyone could mistake the blush on her cheeks for anything more than a reaction to the early-morning chill.
CHAPTER 7
Michael sat on the edge of the concrete patio and put his bare feet in the grass. Sunlight beat along his neck and shoulders, fighting a losing battle against the lingering chill in the air. His breath made quick clouds that drifted away. He didn’t have a sweatshirt, but Marshal Faulkner had allowed him to check his laundry room to see if any clothes had survived the smoke damage. Luckily, there’d been three pairs of jeans and a ton of T-shirts in the dryer.
Unluckily, those were all the spare clothes he had for five people.
Adam had some old sweatpants that made up the difference for now. Michael added clothes to the mental list in his head. He’d drive to Target right now if he weren’t deathly afraid to separate from his brothers.
Every time he blinked, he saw the destruction of his neighborhood. Adam didn’t have a television, but he did have a laptop. He’d pulled up the local news coverage of the damage, but Michael had walked out here to get away from the conversation. He didn’t want to hear names and details. He didn’t want to know who was battling for life—or who hadn’t even gotten a chance to fight.
Now he’d been out here for an hour, and he could barely feel his fingers. At least his brothers had taken the opportunity to find a space to sleep for a while.
Michael unlocked his phone, tapped his text message icon, and then sat there, his thumb hovering over the keys.
He’d done this four times now. He had no idea what to say to Hannah. Was he okay?
No. He wasn’t. She’d seen him near breaking, and if he let go, just a little, he’d completely fall apart with no hope of gathering up the pieces.
She’d known, though. She’d grabbed his hand at the right moment. You’re shaking. She’d whispered it, leaving him a shred of dignity in front of her father.
He thought of those bookcases, charred almost beyond recognition. His whole house was unstable, but those damned bookcases were what his brain wanted to latch on to. His mother was long dead. Bookcases didn’t matter. Nothing in that house mattered.
He locked the phone and set it on the concrete.
Dirt shifted under his heels, feeding him strength, but not much else. His element wasn’t one for lightening a mood. He hunched over and rubbed his arms. Damn, it was cold.
He couldn’t stop fidgeting.
He picked his phone back up. Put it down, then picked it up again and woke the screen to check the time. He couldn’t call his insurance agent for another fifteen minutes. He could hold it together that long.
You can do anything for fifteen minutes.
His father’s words, often repeated. Michael first remembered hearing them when he was nine and didn’t want to do assigned reading for school. His father had set a timer on the stove and shoved the book in his hands.
His father had been right. He could read for fifteen minutes. He could do a lot of things for fifteen minutes.
Those words had haunted him after his parents’ deaths. He’d broken time into chunks to get through every day. Fifteen minutes for breakfast. Fifteen minutes to get his brothers to school. Fifteen minutes to travel between landscaping jobs. He could cook a frozen dinner in fifteen minutes.
Lights out in fifteen minutes.
