“Saving your kids’ mother,” Ethan snapped back. He threw the obstinate woman over his shoulder, appropriately enough emulating fireman style.
She was saying something, no doubt protesting or cursing him, but he couldn’t hear her voice above the sounds of the fire. As far as he was concerned, it was better that way.
His eyes burned and his lungs felt as if they were coming apart. The way out of the building felt as if it were twice as far as the way in had been.
Finally making it across the threshold, he stumbled out, passing several firefighters as they raced into the building.
One of the firefighters stopped long enough to address him and point out the paramedic truck that was just pulling up.
“You can get medical attention for her over there,” were the words that the man tossed in his direction as he hurried off.
“Let go of me!” the woman yelled angrily. When he didn’t respond fast enough, she began to pound on his back with her fists.
For a woman supposedly almost overcome with smoke, Ethan thought, she packed quite a wallop. He was having trouble hanging on to her. When he finally set her down near the ambulance, Ethan instinctively stepped back to avoid contact with her swinging fists.
She all but fell over from the momentum of the last missed swing. Her eyes blazed as she demanded, “What the hell do you think you were doing?”
He hadn’t expected a profusion of gratitude, but neither had he expected a display of anger. “Off the top of my head, I’d have to say saving your life.”
“Saving my life?” she echoed incredulously, staring at him as if he’d just declared that he thought she were a zebra.
“You’re welcome,” Ethan fired back. He gestured toward the curb where two of the three children were sitting. The third was in another woman’s arms. The woman was crying. “Now go see to your kids.”
She stared at him as if he’d lost his mind. What the hell was he babbling about? “What kids?” she cried, her temper flaring.
“Your kids.” Annoyed when she continued staring at him, Ethan pointed to the three children she’d had hanging off her as if she were some mother possum. “Those.”
She glanced in the direction he was pointing. “You think—” Stunned and fighting off a cough that threatened to completely overwhelm her, Kansas Beckett found that she just couldn’t finish her thought for a moment. “Those aren’t my kids,” she finally managed to tell him.
“They’re not?” They’d certainly seemed as if they were hers when she’d ushered them out. He looked back at the children. They were crying again, this time clinging to a woman who was equally as teary. “Whose are they?”
Kansas shrugged. “I don’t know. Hers, I imagine.” She nodded toward the woman holding the baby and gathering the other two to her as best she could. “I was just driving by when I smelled the smoke and heard the screams.” Why was she even bothering to explain her actions to this take-charge Neanderthal? “I called it in and then tried to do what I could.”
Kansas felt gritty and dirty, not to mention that she was probably going to have to throw out what had been, until tonight, her favorite suit because she sincerely doubted that even the world’s best dry cleaner could get the smell of smoke out of it.
Ethan gaped at what amounted to a little bit of a woman. “You just ran in.”
She looked at him as if she didn’t understand what his problem was. “Yeah.”
Didn’t this woman have a working brain? “What are you, crazy?” he demanded.
“No, are you?” Kansas shot back in the same tone. She gestured toward the building that was now a hive of activity with firemen fighting to gain the upper hand over the blazing enemy. “From the looks of it, you did the same thing.”
Was she trying to put them on the same footing? He was a trained professional and she was a woman with streaks of soot across her face and clothes. Albeit a beautiful woman, but beauty in this case had nothing to do with what mattered.
“It’s different,” he retorted.
Kansas fisted her hands on her hips, going toe-to-toe with her so-called rescuer. She absolutely hated chauvinists, and this man was shaping up to be a card-carrying member of the club.
“Why?” she wanted to know. “Were you planning on using a secret weapon to put the fire out? Maybe huff and puff until you blew it all out? Or did you have something else in mind?” she asked, her eyes dipping down so that they took in the lower half of his frame. Her meaning was clear.
He didn’t have time for this, Ethan thought in exasperation. He didn’t have time to argue with a bull-headed woman who was obviously braver than she was smart. His guess was that she probably had a firefighter in the family. Maybe her father or a brother she was attempting to emulate for some unknown reason.
Ethan frowned. Why was it always the pretty ones who were insane? he wondered. Maybe it was just nature’s way of leveling the playing field.
In any case, he needed to start asking questions, to start interviewing the survivors to find out if they’d seen or heard anything suspicious just before the fire broke out.
And he needed, he thought, to have the rest of his team out here. While his captain applauded initiative, he frowned on lone-ranger behavior.
Moving away from the woman who was giving him the evil eye, Ethan reached into his pocket to take out his cell phone—only to find that his pocket was empty.
“Damn,” he muttered under his breath.
He remembered shoving the phone into his pocket and feeling it against his thigh as he started to run into the burning shelter. He slanted a look back at the woman. He must have dropped it when she knocked him down at the building’s entrance.
Kansas frowned. “What?”
Ethan saw that she’d bitten off the word as if it had been yanked out of her throat against her will. For a second, he thought about just ignoring her, but he needed to get his team out here, which meant that he needed a cell phone.
“I lost my cell phone,” he told her, then added, “I think I must have lost it when you ran into me and knocked me down.”
Ethan looked over in the general direction of the entrance, but the area was now covered with firefighters running hoses, weaving in and out of the building, conferring with other firemen. Two were trying to get the swelling crowd to stay behind the designated lines that had been put up to control the area. If his phone had been lost there, it was most likely long gone, another casualty of the flames.
“You ran into me,” she corrected him tersely.
Was it his imagination, or was the woman looking at him suspiciously?
“Why do you want your cell phone?” Kansas asked him. “Do you want to take pictures of the fire?”
He stared at her. Why the hell would he want to do that? The woman really was a nut job. “What would anyone want their phone for?” he responded in annoyance. “I want to make a call.”
Her frown deepened. She made a small, disparaging noise, then began to dig through her pockets. Finding her own phone, she grudgingly held it out to him.
“Here, you can borrow mine,” she offered. “Just don’t forget to give it back.”
“Oh damn, there go my plans for selling it on eBay,” he retorted. “Thanks,” he said as he took the cell phone from her.
Ethan started to press a single key, then stopped himself. He was operating on automatic pilot and had just gone for the key that would have immediately hooked him up to the precinct.