Page 259 of Her Reluctant Hero
“Were you there?” she asked quietly.
No, but he could see it, could feel their panic. Experienced firefighters, and they’d been trapped, just like he and Peyton had been. He shook his head. “Not on the mountain, not till it was over.”
“Then you brought the bodies down.” Like he would later today.
He rubbed his hands over his face, as if the movement could erase the memories. “That was the thing, or part of it.” He dropped his arms to his knees, letting his hands dangle, consciously keeping them loose, though the rest of his body was tense. “We couldn’t bring them down right away. We had to identify them, to reconstruct what had happened. It was grisly work. Have you ever seen a burned body?”
“Pictures.” Her eyes hadn’t left him, but he couldn’t look at her and see her face superimposed over the images of death in his mind’s eye.
He shook his head. “Not the same. There’s nothing left that’s human.”
“And you knew these people?”
The room was getting too small. He needed to get up and move, to get away from the questions that hurt too much to answer, so he pushed to his feet, walked to the window, stared out over the mist rising off the blacktop. Still, if he was the hero Peyton called him, the pain wouldn’t stop him. He reached for his shirt to occupy himself while he spoke.
“One was a good friend of Jen’s and mine. I’d been to his house, met his family. The firefighting community isn’t very big.”
“So you were a member of the team that reconstructed what had happened to these people you knew,” she summarized.
“Yeah.” He glanced over, saw her hands fisted, her expression tight. She was living it with him. God, if he hadn’t already decided he could love her...but he didn’t want her there, not for any reason. He reached over and closed his hand over hers.
“How did you get through it?” She studied him closely.
Too closely. “One step at a time.” And even that had been too much.
“Did reporters go up with you?” she asked when he leaned against the dresser and linked his hands behind his neck before he looked up at her, signaling he was ready to go on.
“They were waiting at the bottom of the mountain, ready to pay for stories, pictures, anything they could get. Some of the pictures of the bodies that came out in the tabloids could only be from our investigation.” He dropped into the chair by the window.
“Did you sell them a story?” She kept her voice carefully neutral.
He brought his hands around, rested his elbows on his knees and rubbed his eyes. “I talked to a reporter. I didn’t take any money, but I didn’t watch what I said. My words came out twisted, and next to pictures of the bodies that devastated the families, so they assumed I’d sold the pictures, sold my story. I’d been angry when I spoke to the reporter, angry at the tragedy, at the BLM, at the Forest Service. But he took what I said and made it sound like something completely different.”
“How did they twist it?”
“Blame was flying all around at the time. Firefighters were blaming management, BLM was blaming the Forest Service, management was blaming firefighters. I came across as the firefighter blaming the other firefighters.”
“Surely when you told everyone the truth—”
He shook his head. “You of all people know how powerful the written word is, Peyton. The article cost me friends at a time when the community should have stuck together. So I don’t talk to reporters anymore.”
“Then why do you suppose Jen assigned me to you?” she asked. “Therapy?”
He laughed dryly. “I can’t figure it out, entirely. She doesn’t hate me, at least not anymore. Maybe to keep me out of her hair, since this is our first fire since the divorce. Or to keep you out of her hair.”
“Did you ever make peace with your friends? The ones who turned away from you after Angel Ridge?”
What, she thought he was that much of a loner? “Some of them. I didn’t want to have to beg them to believe me.”
“Imagine that. You didn’t want to swallow your pride.”
Damn, he loved her smart-aleck tone. “It’s not a good chaser to all the BS I’d swallowed.”
It was her turn to laugh.
“What else do you want to know?”
She leaned back, regarding him with surprise. “Really? You’ll answer anything?”
