FIREBRAND Read online

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  Contents:

  Prologue

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

  Epilogue

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  Prologue

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  Grantley, Oregon—1973

  "I got through … the ambulance is coming!"

  Sixteen-year-old Darcy Kerrigan sank to her knees and tried to catch her breath. Her skimpy summer pajamas were torn and covered with soot. Behind her the barn was still blazing, sending sparks and smoke high into the night sky.

  Judd Calhoun didn't acknowledge her words or even her presence. A strapping youth of twenty, he was cradling her father in his arms, rocking Patrick as he would a slumbering child.

  "I didn't know… Oh God, Pat, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

  "He'll be all right," Darcy cried stubbornly as she took her father's hand in hers. It was still as warm as softened wax and just as lifeless.

  "Open your eyes, Papa. Talk to me, please, Papa. It's me, Darcy."

  "It's no use," Judd said woodenly.

  "No, no, I don't believe it. He's just unconscious!"

  "No, Red. That damn beam hit him square when it fell. He's … he's gone. Dead."

  Light from the flames fired the tawny flecks in his dark eyes, giving his face a frightening intensity. His new shirt, so crisp and white when he had accepted his diploma from the high school principal that afternoon, was half torn away from his chest and sodden with blood from the terrible gash in Patrick's forehead.

  "But he's not even burned," Darcy cried. "It's just a cut, a few stitches … tell me he's not dead."

  "It was just a few drinks, I swear. You know, to celebrate. I was going to sleep it off in the barn. I woke up … the smoke was so thick I started coughing and then I heard him call my name." Judd's chest heaved, and his mouth twisted. His breath reeked of stale beer. "The beam … it's all my fault."

  The anguish in his face tore at her almost as much as the dawning grief. She had wakened to the sound of Patrick's shouting, ordering her to call Uncle Mike and the fire department. And then her father was gone, running toward the barn to save the horses. Instead, he must have found Judd dead drunk and asleep.

  "No, the wiring was old. Papa was going to replace it." Darcy's eyes burned, and her throat was raw.

  "I remember lighting a cigarette." Judd looked down at the blood on his hand, then shuddered and clenched his fingers. "I must have passed out with it still lit … the straw…"

  He shuddered again as he bent over Patrick's chest, shielding his limp body from the falling cinders.

  Darcy stared at his bent head through hot, angry tears. Patrick had one hard-and-fast rule—no smoking in the outbuildings. They were too far from town, too vulnerable to fire.

  But Judd hadn't listened. He'd never listened, not from the moment her father had taken him in. And now Papa, her funny, sweet, big-hearted papa, was dead.

  "You killed him," she whispered, staring, unseeing, into Judd's tortured face. "He took you in, loved you like a son, and you … killed … him."

  "Red, listen—"

  "Don't call me that again. Don't ever call me that again." Her voice broke on a sob as the sound of a siren wailed in the distance.

  "I hate you!" she screamed as she got to her feet. "You're no good, just like everyone said. I wish it was you lying there instead of Papa."

  The big fire truck came rocketing up the rutted lane, sirens screaming and lights flashing. But Judd didn't see and he didn't hear. He was too busy wishing the same thing.

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  Chapter 1

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  The funeral Mass was held at eleven on a cold rainy Monday. The church, the largest one in Grantley, was packed with fire fighters in dress blues, their small silver badges bisected with black tape in honor of their dead comrade.

  A goodly number had come from surrounding departments, as well, having braved the rain-clogged highways to pay last respects to Chief Michael Francis Kerrigan.

  Few noticed the tall, thin man standing at stiff attention in the back row, his haunted brown eyes rimmed with fatigue after a night of airplane travel, his craggy, weathered skin unnaturally pale above a thick blond beard now heavily threaded with gray.

  His uniform, that of the San Francisco Fire Department, was a slightly different shade of blue, and his badge was the gold of a battalion chief instead of silver, but it too was striped in black.

  Judd had deliberately entered Saint Stephen's at the last moment, careful to seem as anonymous as the other mourners. Like them, he had instinctively come to attention as soon as the casket had been wheeled in, his big hands fisted at his side, his athletic body rigid as he stared at the flag draped over the coffin in front of the altar.

  On top rested a fireman's helmet, charred nearly beyond recognition. Michael Kerrigan's men had found it near the gaping hole where the elaborately carved stairs of the century-old Grantley Opera House had stood. Mike had been in the middle of those stairs when they'd given way, carrying him to his death two stories below.

  It had been a routine run, a lightning-struck building in the center of Grantley's Main Street

  . Why fate had pointed a damning finger at the Grantley Opera House, the town's most prized relic of earlier glory, no one could fathom. But the old building had exploded into flame, as though it had been waiting impatiently for a long-overdue end.

  The first alarm had been turned in by a kid walking his dog. The second by the captain of North Company. By the time they'd called the chief out of bed, the old building had been already lost.

  None of his officers and men knew why the chief himself had felt the need to go into the building during the worst of the conflagration. In the midst of the noise and heat and routine, no one had paid him more than the usual attention, not until the fire was damped and he'd turned up missing.

  When the word had come, Judd had been on the beach in Kauai trying to make the most of the medical leave forced on him by department doctors. His name had been on Mike's list of "to-be-notifieds," almost as though he'd been family—only Judd didn't have any family. No wife, no children, no one to share his life but a bad-tempered parrot with a habit of chewing on his ear.

  Guys working on a second or even third divorce called him lucky. Women called him a loner without the inclination, or maybe it was the ability, to share himself beyond the bedroom door. A great guy to have next to you in a burning building but lousy husband material.

  Only he knew that he'd blown the chance to have the woman he'd wanted a long time ago. In twenty years of on-again, off-again relationships with a fair number of bright, attractive, genuinely nice women, he'd never found anyone to replace Darcy. At forty he doubted that he ever would.

  Let us pray.

  Head bowed stiffly, Judd let the priest's words flow over him, conscious of a crushing heaviness in his chest. He'd known that Darcy would be at the service. After all, she was Mike's niece, his official next of kin. And she had loved the old man almost as much as she'd loved Pat.

  Pat and Mike. Burly, redheaded, hard-living Irishmen and proud of it. A widower at the age of thirty, Pat had loved the land and the pear trees his ancestors had planted by hand a hundred years earlier.

  Mike loved excitement and danger and pretty women. Both had been crazy about Pat's only child, Darlene Clancy, called Darcy from the time she'd been a toddler trying to wrap her tongue around a name bigger than she was.

  Judd had only to lift his head and he would see her, sitting in the row reserved for the next of kin. He had seen her bright head bowed in prayer when he'd slipped into the pew.

  He had spent a lot of years trying to forget the last time he'd seen her. He hadn't succeeded, but at least those years had blunted the pain. Until
he'd walked through the familiar doors of Saint Stephen's again. Until he'd seen the fragile curve of her cheek and the pale cameo profile that had grown only more lovely with time.

  The man next to him stirred, and Judd raised his head. The service was over and those who cared to were filing forward to offer Darcy their condolences.

  In the way of men dealing with strong emotion, their voices were hushed, but here and there, over the drone of the organist's dirge, Judd heard the low rumble of nervous laughter.

  Firemen were known for their irreverence as well as their devotion to one another. Dealing with death every day toughened a man to pain or it broke him. Sometimes it did both.

  Stepping from the pew, he allowed those behind him to exit. He hesitated, then decided that a crowded church wasn't the place to renew old acquaintances and turned toward the big double doors that someone had already swung open.

  Outside, a hard March rain was pounding the streets of the mountain-ringed community in a steady downpour, and thunderheads seemed to hover just above the trees like a thick gray blanket.

  Oregon sunshine, they used to call it when he'd lived here a lifetime ago. In those days the road to the Kerrigan orchards would already be a bog. Now that, along with a lot of things, had changed.

  Darcy ran the Kerrigan Orchards now. It was her land he'd driven past on his way into town. And her house that sat like a benevolent dowager at the end of the long, tree-lined lane.

  Judd paused on the threshold to put on the white cap of a senior officer, one of the youngest in the history of SFPD, and take a long, deep breath of rain-soaked air. He'd been twenty years old the last time he'd stood on the steps of this church. Another funeral Mass had just ended then, too, for Pat.

  Darcy had been sitting down front on that day, as well, tears dulling her brilliant Irish blue eyes and her small body huddled against her Uncle Mike's. Judd had been seated on her other side, his own eyes dust dry and his throat clogged with grief.

  He remembered watching her, wishing he had the words to express the guilt clawing at him, but she hadn't looked at him once during the interminable service. Afterward, when dozens of Pat's friends had come up to her to mouth useless words of sympathy, they, too, had looked right through him as though he hadn't been standing rigid and red-faced to one side, unable to leave her to face her pain alone.

  No one said it. But everyone knew the truth. A good man was dead because of him.

  Two days after the funeral, Judd had left Grantley for good, swearing to himself and anyone who would listen that he'd never be back. For twenty years he'd tried to forget the place even existed. Or that he'd ever grown up there.

  But he knew the old streets as well as he knew the Mission District in the city where he'd been stationed for the past fifteen years. Maybe better, he thought as he stepped into the downpour and limped heavily down High Street toward the car he'd rented that morning at the Eugene airport.

  His mother was buried in the old cemetery adjacent to another of Grantley's churches. Smaller, less ornate, it was still there, too, standing on the wrong side of town, looking even colder and more forbidding than it had when his father had occupied the pulpit.

  Next door the pastor's plain, utilitarian residence, where Judd had been born, was still standing on a stretch of river frontage. But the tree where he'd pretended to be Tarzan was gone, and so was the old woodshed where he'd spent countless hours alone as punishment for his many sins.

  His gut churned just thinking about Sunday mornings in those days. Scrubbed, starched and warned to behave or face his father's wrath, he'd sat for hours on the hard, cold wood of the pastor's pew, wishing he was anywhere but there. Wishing he had a different father, a different name, a different soul.

  To this day, if he closed his eyes and concentrated, Judd could hear his old man's strident voice spewing dire warnings to the sinners cowering in the punishingly hard pews.

  There is no peace, saith the Lord, unto the wicked. And in Turner Calhoun's eyes, no one had been as wicked as his only son.

  Judd allowed his hard mouth to slant into a cynical smile as he left the rain-drenched sidewalk and angled across the patched and repatched street to his car. His old man had been a smug, humorless, bigoted prig, but in this case he'd been dead right.

  Judd had been wicked, all right. He'd broken his word to a man he'd idolized and hurt the only woman who'd ever made him feel safe inside.

  Rain beat like hot cinders against the roof of the rented compact, and the interior had the same clammy feel to it that a man got after wearing his heavy, saunalike turnout coat too long.

  He inserted the key in the ignition, then froze. Less than a block away, the pallbearers were reverently carrying the flag-draped casket to the waiting hearse.

  The heaviness in his chest took on scratchy edges as Darcy emerged from the church on the arm of a civilian in a dark suit. She paused, her small body half-hidden under the black umbrella her escort was holding over both of them.

  The wild red hair that Judd would have loved to comb with his fingers was now neatly contained in some kind of sleek coil at the nape of her milk white neck. Beneath the trim black suit, her once tomboy-lean body had a new lushness, the kind that made a man look twice. And then look again.

  Judd gripped the wheel and sat perfectly still as emotion tore at his legendary control. At twenty he hadn't known the first thing about honor and decency and promises. All he cared about was himself and appeasing his always out-of-control hormones.

  Darcy had been sixteen that last summer, chock-full of charm and energy and laughter, qualities that had been in short supply when he'd been a kid.

  "Heaven help the man who tries to tame this redhead," the caption under her picture in the yearbook had read that year.

  He'd been living with her family for six years by then. And for all of those six years, he'd treated her like a pesky kid sister and thought of her that way, too—until he woke up one morning to discover that the carrot-topped, hot-tempered tomboy with a wicked right cross had all of a sudden developed a woman's body and the most kissable mouth he'd ever seen.

  Even now, so many years later, he could see the shock in her eyes when she realized what they had done together on that starlit spring night by the river.

  As he watched the undertaker escort Darcy to the waiting limousine, he realized that he was shaking. If he had to, a man could change a lot of things, and, God help him, Judd Calhoun had. But no man, no matter how hard he tried or how desperately he wanted to, could change the past.

  His old man had called it squarely on target, he thought as he started the car and made a quick U-turn, taking him away from the hearse and the harsh, brutal memories he'd tried so hard to bury. He hadn't had peace in twenty years.

  The door to the big old house was ajar, allowing sound and smoke to blast into the night. A whiskey tenor was crooning an off-key version of "Danny Boy." Someone else, a woman, was shrieking laughter.

  The rain had stopped just before sunset, leaving the streets awash in sticky black mud. In the distance, a stand of towering myrtle trees was silhouetted against a flame yellow moon. Darned appropriate for a fire fighter's wake, Judd thought as he laid the flat of his scarred hand on the half-open door and shoved it wider.

  "You comin' in or goin' out?" demanded a slurred voice behind him.

  "In."

  The foyer was nearly as crowded as the big parlor to his right. Young, old, those in between. Mike had had a lot of friends.

  Feeling more and more like the stranger he was, Judd rested his hand on the newel post and tried to decide where to look for her first. In the kitchen, or upstairs, putting her two daughters to bed?

  His gaze drifted toward the second-floor landing. His room had been at the far end of the hall. Darcy's room had been at the top, which meant that he had to pass hers every morning and every night.

  In the dog days of summer, she had slept with her windows and door open for cross-ventilation. He still remembered the shock t
hat had jolted him when he'd caught a glimpse of perfect peaches-and-cream thighs and a hint of a bright red triangle beneath the thin panties under the tiniest baby-doll pajamas he'd ever seen.

  A gentleman would have averted his eyes when he passed. Thing was, everyone in Grantley agreed that Judd Calhoun was more street mongrel than gentleman. In those days he hadn't cared enough about his reputation to try to change their minds.

  Night after night he'd lain awake and tight-muscle restless at the other end of the hall, dead certain that the last thing he'd needed was the misery that came with the so-called honor of being the first. In spite of his reputation as the town stud, he'd made it a point to stay far away from any girl who hadn't known the score. Judd Calhoun made his own rules and steered his own course.

  What was it that Crane, the station house's current sage, was always spouting? Something about the more things change, the more they stay the same.

  In this case, however, Crane was dead wrong. After what he'd done, nothing would ever be the same for him in Grantley. Or in this house.

  Suddenly restless, Judd headed toward the parlor. As he stepped into the cigarette-smoke haze, the music changed to a rousing jig, and two couples near him began dancing.

  Sidestepping, he surveyed the packed room swiftly. There were a lot of impersonal smiles, one or two curious looks and a few suspicious stares.

  Yeah, folks, Judd Calhoun, terror of Grantley County, is back. Not that anyone much cared or even missed him.

  Hell, why should they when they all but lined up and cheered when he left?

  Never much for parties, he drifted toward an empty corner of the big, old-fashioned living room. Pat had taught Darcy to cast for trout here, ruining the flowered drapes in the process. But damn, she'd developed a wicked right-handed cast. Caught more fish than Pat and him together, and never failed to let them know it, either.

  Lord, how she'd crowed over almost record-sized steel-head that summer. Judd and Pat had assumed bored looks—until she'd emptied the contents of her bait bucket at both of them.