Tall, Strong & Cool Under Fire. Marie Ferrarella

caught his friend’s attention. “Doesn’t look like your usual type.”

      Bryce raised a brow. “Meaning?”

      “Well, for one thing, she’s got a kid.” Riley knew better than anyone how Bryce felt about family. He paused, taking a different route than the obvious. “How do you know she’s not married?”

      CeCe turned at the island and waved at Bryce. He waved back. “Her daughter didn’t mention a father.”

      Riley shrugged carelessly. “Doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist, Walker. Maybe she’s just mad at him.”

      Bryce merely shook his head. He watched as, reaching the opposite street, Lisa and CeCe make their way to the second house from the end of the block. Funny how he’d missed the moving truck earlier. Now that he was aware of it, it was as obvious as an elephant standing in a front yard.

      “You had to be there,” he told his friend.

      “Sorry I wasn’t.” Riley leaned over a little farther as the woman waved over four burly men in beige coveralls. The latter came trotting over obediently. He would, too, Riley thought. “Nice rear view.”

      Bryce knew Riley meant nothing by the comment. Riley was all talk and as honorable as the day was long when it came to women’s feelings. Still, he couldn’t help the rejoinder that came to his lips. “You kiss your mother with that mouth?”

      Riley grinned. “Only when she insists on it. Do I detect a chivalrous note coming through?”

      Bryce saw another woman hurrying to Lisa, her arms outstretched. CeCe leaped into them. That had to be G-Mama, he decided. “No more than usual.”

      “Oh, but this one’s a little different than usual,” Riley observed. “Like I said, she doesn’t seem to be your type.”

      The reunion over, the three women went into the house. Bryce turned away. “And my type being?”

      “Stringless. Absolutely stringless.” Riley nodded toward the house. “In case you didn’t notice, this one looks like she’s full of strings.”

      Maybe he had been paying a little too much attention just now. Bryce laughed it off. “Hey, don’t get carried away, Riley. As you so delicately pointed out, the lady doesn’t even want to have dinner with me.”

      Riley knew Bryce better than that. There wasn’t a time he could remember Bryce being easily put off. “Do I detect the call of a challenge?”

      It was time to change the subject. Bryce indicated the rooms upstairs. “No, but I can see the dinner bell going off and ten hungry firefighters deciding to string you up because you didn’t make dinner when it was your turn to cook.” He flicked his thumb and forefinger at the date on the calendar that graced the side wall. Riley’s name was written in in the appropriate space.

      Riley dragged his hand through his wayward chestnut-colored hair. “Hell, I forgot about that.” He caught his lower lip between his teeth as he looked up at his friend. “The refrigerator still empty?”

      Bryce looked at him innocently, as if he didn’t know what was coming. As if they hadn’t danced this dance before a number of times. “Last I looked.”

      Riley raised his eyes hopefully to Bryce’s face. The latter’s expression was deadpan. “You wouldn’t want to take my turn, would you?”

      “I took your turn,” Bryce reminded him. “Last time, remember? And the time before that,” he added before Riley could protest. “The men are beginning to think you can’t cook.”

      Riley sighed. He knew his limitations. “The men are right.”

      Riley’s mother ran a restaurant and her cooking attracted people in droves. How this talent hadn’t been passed on was beyond Bryce. Even he had picked up a considerable number of pointers during the years he and his brother had lived with the Rileys. Riley, however, was just slightly beyond the boiling-water-without-burning-it-stage with no progress in sight. “No time like the present to learn,” Bryce commented.

      Riley gave him a dark look. “That’s not what you’ll say when you’re at the hospital, having your stomach pumped.”

      Bryce glanced over his shoulder toward the doorway, impulse pushing forward an idea. “Tell you what, I’ve got a few things to pick up at the grocery store myself. I’ll do the shopping for tonight. But then you’ve got to do the rest.”

      It was only fair, he knew, the men each taking turns. But Riley really wished they’d give the assignment to someone who was better at it than he was. “Get something simple.”

      “You read my mind.”

      Riley watched his friend leave and thought of the expression he’d seen on Bryce’s face when the woman had turned down his offer.

      “Only part of it, Walker,” he murmured to himself. “Only part of it.”

      Bryce tucked the coloring book that was beginning to slip back more securely under his arm.

      It wasn’t like him to go where he wasn’t wanted so he wasn’t altogether certain just exactly what he was doing here, standing on Lisa Billings’s doorstep, ringing her doorbell, flowers in one hand, a bag with a loaf of bread in the other and a coloring book tucked under his arm. There was also a broom leaning against the wall where he’d rested it.

      He had a number of excuses ready to offer her when she asked, but explaining it to himself was a whole different matter. He wasn’t sure if he could.

      It wasn’t as if he lacked female companionship. Now or ever. As Riley enjoyed ribbing him, he had more than his fair share of women ready to make themselves available to him.

      There was no conceit involved. Bryce figured that women were attracted to the uniform and to resistance, both of which he possessed. He’d been a firefighter for eight years and as for the other, that had been an ongoing thing from the very first time he ever kissed a woman. He wasn’t interested in commitments and forever. He was already committed to his work and because of that, it precluded any other long-term relationships that might be headed to the altar. Any woman he ever went out with knew he was not the marrying kind. Not from any desire to remain free or to sample as many women as he could, but from a very humane standpoint. He’d been thirteen years old when his father died in the line of duty, sacrificing his life while trying to save two children from being burned to death. And then Bryce had watched, day in, day out, what that sacrifice had done to his mother. It took away the laughter from her eyes and for a while, had sent her into a depression so deep, nothing and no one could reach her.

      Even when she recovered, she was never the same after his father died.

      To him, marriage was a pledge in which two people promised to live the rest of their lives together. It was only natural to assume that life would be for as long a time as could possibly be managed. That didn’t mean taking on burning buildings on a regular basis, which was what he did for a living. A firefighter risked his life every day, risked the happiness of those he loved every day, pitting his life against a force of nature. And sometimes, he lost. The way his father had.

      The tears Bryce saw in his mother’s eyes for a full year following his father’s death at the age of thirty-four made him silently vow never to put anyone through what his mother had suffered.

      Since his heart had been set on being a firefighter from the very first time his father had brought him down to the station, Bryce thought it only right to make a choice. A home and family, or a career, but not both. So he followed one dream and gave up the other. Most of the time, it seemed like a fair tradeoff.

      But every so often, he caught himself wondering what it would have been like if he had followed the other path. If he’d gone into engineering homes instead of saving them, or harnessing nature instead of battling it.

      Talking to CeCe had made him wonder again. But he told himself that it was only a passing thing and that coming here this evening, after he’d gone off duty,