The grin on both faces was particularly broad this time. Briana knew that not all Shannon’s rescues turned out this well, yet she risked her life day after day, as her brother had done in his previous career.
In full uniform, Shannon seemed tough, and she was, but Briana knew she had a soft heart under all the protective gear.
The elevator had come to a stop about three feet above the main floor, so they had to bend down and jump to get out. Patrick naturally gestured for Briana to go first. She did, pulling off her high-heeled shoes and clutching the hands of Shannon and another firefighter. She managed to land on her feet without any injury, other than to her pride.
“I think you lost a button in there,” Shannon said in an undertone just after Briana landed.
A quick glance down showed her blouse gaping open to display a good bit of cleavage and the ice-blue silk of her bra. Briana grabbed the front of her blouse to cover the gap, forcing back the blush that threatened. It didn’t help that she caught one of the male firefighters checking her out with an interested expression on his face. She gave him the ice-queen don’t-even-think-about-it look she’d perfected in high school and turned back to Patrick’s sister.
“It must have come off when the elevator lurched and threw us to the ground,” she said.
“Must have,” Shannon replied in a dry tone, giving Briana a look that suggested more than her button was missing.
Briana knew she must appear mussed and hastily put back together. She detected the same telltale pewter color in Shannon’s eyes that were a dead giveaway in Patrick’s that he was angry about something. In this case, Briana realized that Shannon had made an educated guess at what had happened in that dark elevator and she didn’t like it one bit.
Patrick landed beside Briana a moment later and she couldn’t stop herself from looking up at him, seeing him in the light for the first time since they’d made love.
The blush she’d managed to suppress a minute ago swept over her cheeks now as she read the passion, intimacy and some other emotion she didn’t want to name deep in Patrick’s eyes. His weren’t pewter now, but the deepest Irish-Sea-on-a-sunny-day blue she’d ever seen them.
Her heart seemed to stutter as the full impact of what she’d done hit.
“Patrick, I—”
“You forgot your purse,” Shannon said, reaching up into the elevator to haul Briana’s bag off the floor and hand it to her.
“Thanks,” Briana said shortly, grabbing the thing. Her bag hid so much. The evidence of their passion, tucked neatly away, and that tape recorder, which she’d managed to switch off before their second bout of lovemaking.
“Well, I guess you missed your meeting with the police chief,” she said to Patrick.
“Yes.” He grimaced. “I doubt he even noticed. I bet he’s had a busier night than I did.”
She stared at him, and he must have realized what he’d said, for it was his turn to display ruddy cheeks. She and Patrick had not been idle in that elevator.
They were saved from awkwardness by the second firefighter, who said, “It’s been a busy night for EMS all right. Another one.”
It was no longer night but morning now, Briana realized. Almost 3:00 a.m. If she weren’t torn between elation and guilt over what had transpired in that elevator, she’d probably be pretty tired.
“What’s happening out there?” Patrick asked his sister, reverting from the tender loving man of the past few hours to the mayor of a town once again facing disaster.
“Not good,” Shannon told him, her voice neutral. It was a tone Briana had come to associate with emergency personnel who were sometimes forced to give the worst news possible. “One woman was killed in the convenience store collapse. She’d been pinned under a beam, and by the time we got there…” She shook her head. “There was a second woman, a fire victim. We pulled her out of the basement suite still alive, but I wouldn’t put her chances of recovery past fair.”
Shannon’s emotionless delivery almost fooled Briana into thinking Shannon was taking the violent deaths in her stride, but not her brother.
“Hey, kid. I’m sorry,” he said, pulling his sister in for a hug, regardless of her bulky uniform and helmet.
Amazingly, the tough, strong woman of a second ago let herself lean on her older brother. “Yeah,” she said, and in that one word Briana heard fatigue, despair and anger. “If we weren’t so stretched, and all of us running on too little sleep, maybe we could have got there sooner. Maybe—”
“You can’t beat yourself up over this. You know that. Sometimes there are fatalities.” Patrick spoke with the authority of a former firefighter who’d been there and seen it all, but he still held his sister in his arms.
Shannon couldn’t see his face, but Briana could, and almost as though she’d read his mind, she knew he was doing exactly what he’d told Shannon not to do. Blaming himself for the stretched resources, the exhausted emergency crews—the deaths of two more Courage Bay’s citizens.
Their brief romantic idyll, Briana realized, was over.
“I’m going to go home and get some sleep,” she announced. “I’ll see you at the office tomorrow.”
“Wait,” Patrick said. “Let me drive you home.”
She smiled at him, wishing it were that easy. Wishing she could just say yes. “No. My car’s in the lot. You get home and check on your kids. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Are you sure?” The words were urgent, the meaning behind them obvious to Briana, but, she hoped, not to the other ears listening in. He was asking if she really wanted to keep working for him. Since her other choice was sleeping with him, it was one of the hardest things she’d ever done when she said, “Yes. I’m sure.”
He nodded reluctantly. “Sleep in tomorrow morning.” He shook his head. “I guess I mean this morning. Come in to work when you can. I’d give you the whole day off, but frankly, I’m going to need all the help I can get.”
Briana knew that the phone was going to be ringing like crazy tomorrow as city residents phoned in to complain about the latest disaster and the city’s response.
The media would hound Patrick; councilors would be calling, as would the fire chief and the police chief. On top of that, she had a pretty good notion that once the story spread that he’d been trapped in the elevator, his family and friends would be on the hotline making sure he was okay. It was going to be a busy day. As kind as it was of her boss to offer her the morning off, Briana knew she wouldn’t take him up on it.
He needed her.
As soon as she’d given her car a quick check, Briana drove carefully through the quiet streets. She went more slowly than usual, since a couple of the traffic lights were out, probably due to the aftershock. Maybe it was a result of being cooped up in that dark elevator so long, but the first thing she’d done when she started the engine was to roll down all the windows. She decided to take the route that hugged the coastline on the outskirts of the city, and as she drove, she could hear the quiet shush of the ocean, smell the clean air coming off the bay. She tried not to think too much about what had happened to her personally tonight.
She’d vowed not to sleep with the man she was trying to topple, so how had she come to do it?
It was easy to blame circumstances. The euphoria following their escape from serious injury or death. The intimacy of being together for all those hours. Briana knew she could have managed to get through a hurtling fall in an elevator and a few hours in the dark with any other man and not jump his bones. But Patrick O’Shea was not most men. And the plain truth was, their attraction had been immediate and intense