Crash and Burn (Wildfire Hearts Book 1) Read online

  She missed A-team, too. Maggie didn’t like the resentment that kept creeping up about Rex and Hannah, but Sebastian’s shy smile softened some of her irritation.

  With his bag slung over his shoulder, he looked like the quintessential bad boy. What Maggie had discovered in the past few months, was that his bold looks and on-site confidence were deceiving and he was actually quite shy.

  She was about to wish him a good day when he turned back and popped an unexpected question into the space between them. “You don't want kids?”

  Her heart sank. There was no good way to answer this. So she fumbled it. “I do want kids. Just not like this. Not yet.”

  Sebastian nodded. “Rex got dealt a tough hand.”

  That was understating it, and probably why Maggie didn't resist more than she did. Though he'd known about his daughter and paid regular child support, he didn’t have much contact with Hannah. Then, when he'd moved here, training as a firefighter after he left the Los Angeles Police Department, Hannah's mother had done her best to cut Rex out of his daughter’s life completely.

  But suddenly, Maggie's carefree boyfriend had become a full time dad. And she'd somehow become his full-time babysitter. So now she looked at Sebastian, wondering if she had dated the wrong guy in the first place. Not that Sebastian had asked her …

  She had what she had. “He did get dealt a rough hand, and I adore Hannah. I would do anything for her, but …” She shrugged, letting the words fall away.

  Sebastian might not be loud, but he was relentless. He still stood there, bag over his shoulder, clearly ready to go home after his own shift, but he wasn't budging until she told him what was up. “But what?”

  “I'm supposed to be renovating the house, which, of course, is going slower than it was supposed to.”

  He tilted his head. “You've got your offices all set up in the front room. You've been seeing clients.”

  She smiled, glad that he knew that. Then again, Sebastian just seemed to know things. Maybe it wasn't clear to everyone that she was fully set up despite the shingle she'd hung out front. The crowds weren’t rolling in yet. Advertising needed some of her time, too.

  Maggie almost sighed, it was just one more thing on her list. “The rest of the house needs work—more work than I estimated. I'm supposed to have more rooms to use … And now I have a toddler every third day.”

  And then some. But she didn’t add the last part. More than once, Rex had asked her to babysit so he could sleep or go to the grocery store or run some errand. She was going to have to start saying no.

  Sebastian nodded, the move looking a little tight, as though there was something else he wanted to say. When he did speak, it seemed he was biting his tongue. “Well, I'll see you around then.”

  Once again, Maggie wondered what would have happened if Rex hadn't asked her out first. Was she brave enough to find out?

  Chapter Four

  Maggie pulled her front door open at the knock, hoping it was a client.

  “Come in!” she offered cheerfully, still looking down at the document she’d just printed. That was bad form, and she swiveled her head to glance at him, her gaze traveling up the tight-fitting jeans and navy blue t shirt. She hadn't needed to get past the biceps to recognize that it was Sebastian Kane standing on her doorstep.

  Surprise, she thought, he knows where I live. Then again, he had commented she was seeing clients, so clearly he knew how to find her. Small Town, she reminded herself.

  Maggie really hadn’t considered that factor when she decided to live and work in the same place. She’d simply wanted to get away from the city, away from running into her ex-fiancé or anyone who wanted to talk about her canceled-at-the-last minute wedding. And she needed to get away from a job that she hated. Had she gone too far coming to a town as small as Redemption?

  “You look nice,” Sebastian told her as he stepped across the threshold. The floorboards squeaked underneath his feet as he stepped inside. Yet another thing she really needed to fix. She could just add it to the very long list.

  Maggie closed the door behind them, suddenly feeling intimately close in the small, poorly lit space. She wanted to blurt out, why are you here? But she didn’t. Maybe he was here as a new client. So she left her voice professional. “How can I help you?”

  “Oh,” he replied, his smile almost shy. “I just wanted to check in. Make sure you got some sleep …” he let his voice trail off.

  Maggie waited him out. Was he being sweet, checking up after she was clearly upset about the box of jewelry and Kalan’s offhand serial killer comment? Or was there really nothing else to do in town except check on the neighbors?

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to overstep. It’s just that you seemed a little upset when I was leaving the station the other day and I wanted to be sure everything was all right.”

  For a moment Maggie paused. Everything was not all right. In fact, she’d tried twice to sit down and talk to Rex, but he’d brushed her off, not even able to find a few minutes to listen to her.

  She needed him to find a real babysitter for Hannah and she wanted him to check into the jewelry. He was, after all, a former cop. As far as she knew, Sebastian had no such background. Yet, Sebastian was here and Rex had been a relatively crappy boyfriend of late, though that wasn’t his fault.

  “Maggie?” Sebastian pressed, leaning a little forward and trying to catch her eye as, clearly, she'd hesitated too long.

  So, she gave in with a sigh and everything tumbled out. “I’m not as good at DIY repairs as I thought I would be. I have these creaky floorboards …” she started to point toward the back room, but that was ridiculous, they almost all creaked! “Actually, I have a lot of them.”

  “I can help,” Sebastian offered, maybe a little too quickly and she must have looked at him oddly because he explained. “My dad's a carpenter. I can build a mean bookcase, install a new doorframe, and repair squeaky floorboards like nobody's business.”

  Maggie found herself smiling when she hadn’t expected to. His grin was infectious. Thank God for Sebastian, she thought. Heading toward the back room, she heard him follow. “This was the squeaky board I tried to fix where I found the box.”

  His curiosity was obviously piqued and as she led him into the room, she asked, “What do you know about the house?”

  He took a deep breath as though this were a pop quiz. “Well, it was a boarding house for a long time, up until a handful of months ago when Sabbie passed away.”

  “Why does everyone call her Sabbie?” Her aunt’s name was Abbie, and Maggie thought she’d been mishearing everyone until now.

  “She was always Miss Abbie … and my dad always knew her when he was little and couldn’t say it right. He said a lot of the kids called her Sabbie.” He paused a moment. “It’s sweet that she left you the house.”

  “She had no kids and I was her favorite of her sister’s grandkids. She left me the house and everything in it. The money—not very much—went between the other three grandkids.” Maggie replied. “I thought I could do an estate sale for the furniture and things in the house to cover the cost of repairs, but there’s not enough of it for me to have any furniture if I do that.”

  “They’re not antiques?” he asked.

  “Honestly,” Maggie stopped and turned toward him there in the hallway. “I don't know enough to tell what's valuable and what's not. So I'm still at the stage where I need to find someone to tell me what to keep and what to sell.” She didn't add someone I can trust.

  And she also didn't add that it should have happened well before now, but the house was rapidly becoming a money pit and time suck. The to-do list had been long when she arrived. Then, each thing she attempted revealed three more repairs. And then she’d lost so much time taking care of Hannah.

  “If I remember correctly,” Sebastian either caught her hesitation and understood or serendipitously turned the conversation. “The tenants left when she died.”

  “Close,” she told hi
m again. “I was not ready to run a boarding house full of people I didn't know. So I had the estate attorney handle getting them out.”

  Sebastian's brows shot up.

  “Not like that!” She held up a hand. Why did it feel so awful that Sebastian thought badly of her? “It wasn't that harsh! They knew Aunt Abbie was older, and she told them repeatedly that they would have to find somewhere else to live when she died. She told me she was leaving the house to me about three or four years before she passed. I gave them five months to find somewhere to live and all of them were out within four. So no one actually got evicted.”

  Sebastian was nodding along and Maggie was relieved.

  “Because it was all handled by the estate attorney—” she opened the door to the back room, “—I don't know who was in this room, and I don't know where they went. But they buried that strange box of jewelry under the floorboards in here.”

  Chapter Five

  Sebastian didn't like the feeling in his gut as Maggie pulled the box out of the empty closet. She’d put it back into this room, out of sight? She clearly didn’t like it either.

  He didn't know what it was that made him feel this way, but it was the same visceral premonition he got right before a fire flashed over. It was like the sinking sensation when they were standing on a roof and he yelled, “Let's get out of here” moments before it caved in. Sometimes he yelled too late.

  That was the feeling tugging hard at him now.

  It wasn't any kind of psychic intuition. It was just about having been on the job long enough for the back of his brain to sometimes put things together before the front of his brain did. He looked at Maggie, who sat on her knees in her nice business suit and set the box between them.

  The old room had been emptied except for a nightstand and a dresser. Old wallpaper lined the walls with puffy roses that had faded to a pale pink over the years.

  He’d always wondered how Sabbie had housed grown men in such frilly rooms. He flipped the lid open and looked again at the jewelry. Though nothing in the box looked like something the older woman would have picked out—she’d always worn work pants and men’s shirts when he’d seen her—he reminded himself that what he knew about women in general could have fit in a box this size. “Is any of this maybe your aunt’s?”

  “I don't think so,” Maggie told him, rocking back a little bit. She shrugged as if she truly had no clue what the box was, or why it was here.

  For a moment his tongue got stuck. He’d told her she looked nice when he walked in the door. Had that been a good thing or a mistake? He reminded himself that it didn't matter. She was with Rex, and he'd been too slow. He’d asked her about wanting kids, thinking that if she didn’t it would help him slough off this useless crush he was carrying around. Instead, she’d made it grab him even harder.

  But Rex was a fellow firefighter, part of the brotherhood. So there was no making a move on Maggie.

  “No!” Maggie interrupted his pity party. “This can’t be Aunt Abbie’s. She had a box of jewelry that was given to my cousins as part of her will.”

  Sebastian nodded absently, still trying to make heads and tails of what he was seeing. There was a small handful of necklaces. The one with the diamond. Two looked cheap, like something you’d win at a county fair. The bracelet and the anklet—not just a large bracelet apparently. He wondered if Maggie wore anklets, because they looked sexy.

  But as he peered into the box a little more carefully, he thought she was right. The mix was odd.

  “I don't like it.” Maggie’s words mirrored his own thoughts. “It feels weird.”

  She didn’t mention Kalan’s comment, but they had to both be thinking it.

  Sebastian was now very curious. The rumors about Sabbie had been wild and too varied to believe. Some said she was hiding cash under the bed. Others whispered that she'd been dirt poor or that she was in love with one of the boarders. Sabbie would tell anyone who asked that she'd never been married, and she liked it that way, but the rumors flew that her true love died in one of the wars, and so on.

  “The jewelry she gave my cousins was only a small handful of necklaces. A couple of rings—one of them had a jade that was a couple of carats. But nothing crazy, no crown jewels.” She laughed a little and seemed as though she reached her hand out to touch him. But then she pulled it back. When she waved toward the open box and spoke again, she sounded a little strained. “But it was nothing as expensive or as cheap as some of this stuff. All the things Aunt Abbie left were clearly out of fashion. There was maybe one jade necklace I would wear, if I had to attend a ball or something.”

  For a moment, his mind cut to the annual Firemen's Ball and how she would look in a green gown with a jade necklace. Then he quickly reminded himself that she would look that amazing on Rex's arm, not his. And he reminded himself again that he was an idiot for not asking her out when she first got to town and had still been single.

  So he forced his mind back to reality and the boyfriend she had. “Did you show Rex?”

  She shrugged again, though it wasn’t about not knowing the answer. “He saw it at the station house, same as you.”

  “Did he say anything else?”

  “Only that Kalan shouldn’t have scared me like that.” Her jaw tightened and he could see she didn’t like the implication that she was frightened over nothing.

  Then she dropped a bombshell.

  Chapter Six

  “I thought someone was in the house the other night …”

  Maggie let the words hang between her and Sebastian. She knew Rex would brush her off, but if Sebastian did too, she would finally let it go.

  Instead, he looked at her as though she was nuts. “You called the police?”

  Maggie shook her head and explained. “What would I tell them? There wasn’t an open door or window. Nothing was moved. Honestly, it might have just been the house creaking.” She hated admitting that she was in her thirties and still being kept awake at night by the sound of an old house.

  “You told Rex?”

  She tried not to let her lips press together, or let Sebastian see how she really felt right now. Because lately she hadn’t been able to even go to Rex. She’d been his babysitter, not his girlfriend. Surely, the cracks in her relationship were already showing. Probably everyone saw them by now.

  She liked Rex— but that was the problem. She liked him; she wasn't in love with him.

  She'd moved to town and he’d asked her out right away. He was charming, with his dark Italian good looks and ready smile. She was hoping to make friends and meet someone and maybe she’d said yes a little too quickly. They’d barely begun dating when Hannah had come along. And maybe that's when she'd known it wasn’t going to work, because Maggie had fallen in love with Hannah … not Rex.

  “Should we take the box to the police?” she asked, wondering if the PD would even have time to do anything with it. The box was the only evidence she had and it was just a stupid box in an odd position. Hardly worth the officers’ time.

  “If we take it to them, they're going to keep it,” he told her.

  She wasn’t ready for that. Besides, it wasn’t really hers. If it was innocent, someone had left it behind. “So how I do find out who it belongs to?”

  Even as she asked him, she caught a glimpse of the time. “Crap! I have a client on the way.”

  “Then leave me here. I can get photos of the pieces and see if anyone in town knows who they belong to.”

  “You can just do that?” That would not happen in LA. “Never mind. Yes, do it. Maybe someone can help. Thank you.”

  She was beyond grateful. She needed an extra pair of hands—or ten. She loved Hannah, but this wasn’t working. She was nowhere near the number of clients she’d projected to have at this time, and her savings would only take her so far. Maggie was growing concerned about admitting defeat. Sebastian's offer was a godsend.

  “Do you have a spare pencil?” He’d already used a pen from his pocket to lift the
first piece out and spread it out on the floor. As if he thought he shouldn’t touch it. His concern heightened her discomfort.

  She would feel better after she returned it to the owner. “You don’t want to touch it?”

  “I’m just thinking if we can get a fingerprint off of any of it, we might find the owner.” He didn’t sound too hopeful, but he wasn’t leaving his own prints behind, she noticed.

  Maggie was popping up to grab him the pencil when she heard a car pull up out front. Her client was early or she had yet another unexpected visitor.

  “Go meet your client. I’ve got this.” Sebastian waved her away with a reassuring smile. He must have seen her anxiety and it made her heart melt.

  She had to break up with Rex. Even if this was just a silly schoolgirl crush, her heart shouldn’t be flip-flopping for one man when she was dating another.

  Grabbing a pencil from her supply room, she turned back to hand it to Sebastian, only to smack into him. His broad chest in the soft t shirt stopped her like a wall.

  She was simply grateful that she hadn't poked him with the sharpened end. That would have been even more embarrassing.

  “Oh, I'm sorry.” He jumped back quickly, as though he'd been the one not paying attention.

  Sweet guy, she thought and held out the pencil, though she could still smell him in the air between them now. “Here.”

  She scrambled away as her front door creaked open behind her.

  “Dear? I know I'm early … Oh, I just love what you've done with the place!” Mrs. Miller was all of four foot eleven and her personality and forwardness filled up any space she didn’t take up physically.

  Maggie just smiled and nodded. She’d barely rearranged the furniture, not having the funds to replace it. And she wasn’t a fan, but she pasted on her best smile. “Mrs. Miller! I'm glad to see you. Don't worry about being early.”