Page 54 of Every Little Kiss
“You have a guy?” he asked, liking the sound of that too much.
“I did yesterday,” she confessed, walking to the edge of the clearing to look at the lake. “And it felt really good to not be on a team of one for a change.” She turned and looked up at him, those big expressive eyes filled with gratitude and warmth, and Ford felt like a fake. He didn’t deserve either emotion from her. And he especially didn’t deserve the other thing he saw lurking beneath it all—trust. “You really meant that all it would take was me saying I needed help.”
“I did, but don’t let that fool you into thinking I’m some kind of hero, Liv,” he said. “You need help, and I need to finish up here so I can get back to my life in Reno.”
She leaned against the trunk of a nearby tree and studied him. “If this was just you doing your job, then why are you here instead of heading into the office?”
Good question. And one he didn’t have an answer to. The only thing he knew for certain was that he was leaving in a few weeks, and this was the closest he’d come to finding peace in years.
“You’re not the only one who needs someone in their corner,” he said, picking up a stick and rolling it in his hands. “There’s a lot riding on my ability to pass this test, and when I’m out here like this, everything doesn’t feel so heavy.”
She looked at him for a beat. Her eyes serious, assessing, and so soft he wanted to look away. “You don’t look like the kind of guy to shy away from a challenge. So if it’s not the challenge or the test that’s weighing on you, what is it?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, tossing the stick. Bullseye halfway opened a lid, then closed it.
“It matters to me.” Then she quietly added, “You know, going it alone isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
He gave her a pointed look. “Ironic advice coming from you.”
“I’m working on the reaching-out part. You’re here, aren’t you?”
“Only because you were afraid of what people would think when they saw me trailing behind you in nothing but jeans and bedhead.”
“And because I know I can’t do this all on my own,” she said. “And that’s a scary thing for me to admit.”
“That you’re on your own?”
She shook her head. “That I can’t handle everything on my own, and relying on an outside factor for security takes me out of the driver’s seat. The rules can abruptly change, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”
Ford’s chest went tight at her admission. “Maybe we aren’t supposed to stop it?”
“If you believed that, you wouldn’t put your life on the line to save others,” Liv said. “It’s because we believe the way we do that makes us so good at our jobs. We’re protectors—it’s what we do.”
“But you can’t protect everyone,” he said.
“Maybe not, but knowing you did the best you could has to be enough.”
Ford had never considered how similar their jobs were. Just like he’d never considered how talking with Liv, aboutthis, could feel so natural. “The weekend of my test I was at a rescue in Montana. A mudslide took out six houses in a cul-de-sac at the bottom of the mountain, including the home of a young family of four.”
“Oh my God.”
“The mom told the responding officers that she heard a loud noise in the middle of the night and went out to see what it was. I guess the husband had come home from work sick, so she didn’t want to wake him. She figured she’d investigate the noise, and if it was bad, she’d wake him after. There wasn’t enough time for an after.”
“Was the family inside?”
“Sound asleep—they didn’t even know what hit them. It was so dark the wife couldn’t tell the difference between a wall of mud and the night. It took less than a second for all six houses to be completely buried under twenty feet of mud and clay.”
“Were you there?” she asked, reaching out to place a hand on his arm, letting it rest there. There was nothing sexual about the simple connection, but it rocked him all the same. Reminded him of just how long it had been since he’d opened up to someone like this.
“No, they flew me and Bullseye out the next day.” He remembered walking up on the scene, knowing he’d have to use GPS to even predict where the houses would have been. “It took less than an hour for Bullseye to identify the location of two of the bodies, but we couldn’t locate the third. And that’s when I noticed this kid. He was around eleven. All bony arms and legs, covered head to toe with mud, lying down on the ground.”
“Oh, Ford.”
He looked out at the lake, focused on the gentle ripples on the surface. “I went over to see if he was okay, and you know what he told me? That he’d snuck out that night to meet his friends. They were going to go watch the lightning storm from some peak, and he needed help getting back inside the house. He’d seen all of the mud, logically knew what it meant, but spent the night trying to crawl through it to be with his family.”
What Ford left out was that he knew exactly how that kid felt. He’d been trying his whole life to crawl back inside a home that was safe and full of life. He understood how impossible a mission it would be.
“That must have been devastating,” she said, and Ford realized her concern was for him, not the boy. “You’re a fixer who was placed in a situation where there was no perfect solution. That would shake anyone.”
