The Firefighter's Family Secret
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Lisa Childs
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CHAPTER ONE
THE SMOKE WAS THICK, the flames hot and rising high, eating at the wood that crackled and sparked as the fire consumed it. “Where are you?” Colton Cassidy shouted the question but doubted anyone could hear him through the protective gear he wore as a fireman. The other men who’d gone into the burning house didn’t even have a mask.
Those men were his brothers and his dad.
He had to find them. Had to get them out. Before the fire consumed them along with the house where they’d all grown up. His boot struck something, and above the roar of the fire, he heard a loud grunt. A body. He’d found a body.
He pulled the man up from the floor and dragged him toward the door. The porch was nearly gone, the boards weakening and cracking beneath him, but he got across it with his brother.
His twin. Collin’s shirt sleeves were scorched, like his arms. Panic gripped Colton. Collin was a doctor. He needed his hands.
A paramedic rushed up from the rig that had pulled into the yard. Colton yanked his mask aside to tell his coworker, “He needs oxygen and his burns treated.” At fiftysomething, Ed Meyer had been a paramedic firefighter longer than Colton had at thirty-two; Ed knew what to do without his input.
“Marsh and Dad are still inside,” Collin said between gasps and coughs for breath.
Colton affixed his mask again and rushed back inside the house. Like with the porch, the floor shuddered beneath him, the joists, weakened from the flames, threatening to give out. The whole two-story farmhouse was about to collapse. Colton tore through the house, searching in the smoke and flames. Finally on the back porch, he saw them.
His older brother Marsh, a sheriff’s deputy, was dragging his dad out the back door. Their clothes weren’t as scorched as Collin’s. He rushed out after them, pulling his mask aside. “Get to the paramedic rig. Get oxygen.”
Dad couldn’t be without it for long, not with his new heart. He’d only had it four months or so, and his body hadn’t rejected it yet. Not like it had his first kidney transplant. But now...with the smoke...
“Find the boy,” Marsh said. “The nurse’s kid. Mikey. He’s missing. That’s who we were looking for.”
He knew that already. The boy’s mother, Sarah, had been frantic when the fire truck had pulled up. Darlene, Colton’s late mother’s best friend, had been holding her back from rushing headlong into the fire. Darlene obviously hadn’t been able to stop Colton’s dad and brothers, too. They’d already been inside the burning house.
After watching Marsh lead his dad away from the fire, toward the rig, Colton headed back inside. Through the radio in his helmet, he coordinated with his team. Every room of the house had been searched. No bodies found, living or not.
The kid couldn’t be inside. But Colton did one last walk-through, searching all the places he’d hid as a kid. The cupboards. The tub. The cellar.
He didn’t have to find the door to it; he was able to drop down through a gaping hole in the floor. And as he searched, he found no kid in the smoke. But he did find something else, something sparkling beneath a fine sheen of soot. He grabbed it up from the ground. The metal was hot yet...even through the thickness of his gloves. And even through the thickness of his gloves, he could feel the distinctive engraving on the silver: horseshoes that spelled out CC.
He hadn’t seen this lighter in seventeen years. Since his oldest brother, Cash, who’d been gifted the lighter, ran away. How had it showed up now? And what the heck had it been used for? To start the fire? Since the flames had already burned through the floor in this area, the kitchen might have been the point of origin.
The house creaked and groaned above him.
“Everybody, clear out!” The order came through the headset in his helmet. “It’s going to cave!”
And where Colton was, in the cellar, the rest of the house would fall on him, burying him under burning debris and flames. This wasn’t the first time he’d been in this dangerous a situation and it wouldn’t be the last. That was why he’d vowed to never have a family of his own. To never have a wife and kids worrying that he wasn’t going to survive the next time.
He was going to this time, though.
He grabbed at the edges of the hole, pulling himself back out of the low-ceilinged cellar. But as his weight hit what was left of the kitchen floor, it shook beneath him and began to give way. He rolled himself across it, through the kitchen and into the living room. Then he regained his feet and ran out the front door. The porch was nearly gone now, more gaping holes than structure, but since it was narrow, Colton stretched his long legs across it and hurried down the stairs to the security of the ground.
Darlene must have still been holding Sarah outside the house, but now the younger woman broke free of Darlene’s arms and ran up to him, her dark eyes wide and as wild as the blond hair that curled around her pale face.
Colton dragged off his helmet and mask and shook his head, sweat rolling down his face. “There’s nobody inside.” Not anymore. Not since he’d gotten his dad and brothers out. “He’s not in there.” Her son had probably never been in the house. The five-or six-year-old was rarely inside; since she’d moved to the ranch to help with his dad, Sarah’s son was always in the barn.
“We’ll find him,” Darlene assured the crying woman as she helped her up from the ground. Darlene was great like that; since she’d showed up at the ranch shortly after Cash had left, she’d spent most of her time comforting and taking care of them all.
Before he could tell Sarah where he thought her kid had safely been this whole time, a firefighter, from a Willow Creek rig, ran up to him. “Where do you need us?”
Colton blinked a moment to clear the smoke from his eyes, but it hung thick in the air all around them. There was no clearing it away, no making the image before him any sharper. Maybe that was why the guy seemed to look so much like him and his brothers. The same dark hair and chiseled features but his eyes were a lighter brown.
Was this the Willow Creek firefighter Colton sometimes got mistaken for? The same one Colton had seen at that horrific accident four months ago?
That accident made Colton think of his dad, and he turned his attention back to the paramedic rig parked a safe distance from the fire. His dad was his number one priority, had always been his number one priority.
“If you guys can finish up here, get the flames out, make sure it doesn’t spread to the barn,” he said, which was most definitely where little Mikey was, “I’m going to get my idiot brothers and my stubborn dad to the hospital.” He headed toward Ed’s ambulance rig with its back doors standing open.
The other firefighter followed him instead of heading toward the house with the rest of the Willow Creek crew. “I’m a paramedic, too,” he said. “Maybe I can help.”
With all of his family injured from trying to find the kid in the burning house, Colton could use the help, so he nodded. “Do you have idiot brothers, too?”
“Four...” The guy’s voice trailed off before he cleared it and amended, “Three of them.”
This was definitely the firefighter Colton had first thought he was, the one whose brother and sister-in-law hadn’t survived the crash four months ago.
A pang of guilt struck Colton, and he couldn’t look at the guy. He peered beyond him to where Darlene and Sarah stood. “We’ll find him,” he assured them. After clearing the house, the rest of his crew was spraying down the area around it, the grounds and the barn and other outbuildings. This late in July in Wyoming, it was so hot and dry that the fire could easily spread. “Her son is missing,” he told the Willow Creek firefighter. “I’m betting he’s in the barn. He likes the mare.”
“Sounds like my nephew,” the guy remarked.
“Did you check the barn, Darlene?” Colton asked her. She had to know how often the kid visited her mare. She visited it as often. Putting it up for sale had to be as hard on her as putting up the ranch had been on all of them; she’d given up a lot for their family. Colton wasn’t sure why. If she was just that good a person or if she figured she owed her friend’s family a debt of some kind...
Darlene’s hazel eyes widened with surprise, probably because she hadn’t thought of it. Then she and Sarah rushed off toward the barn.
“I’m sure he’s fine,” Colton said, but he was speaking into the ambulance now where his two brothers and father were crowded. “He’d rather be in the barn than the house anyways. He probably was nowhere near the fire. Unlike you idiots...” He couldn’t believe they’d gone back inside after the fire had started, that they’d been so close to the flames...to death. Panic gripped him at the thought of losing not just one of them but all of them. He’d already lost Mom to cancer and Cash to whatever had made him so angry that he had disowned them all and run away. He’d vowed then to never return. But that lighter...
Despite the heaviness of his gear, he could almost feel the silver heirloom inside his pocket. The weight of it, the heat of it...the implication of it...
Cash was back. But where?
“We need to help her search,” Marsh said, then he dissolved into a coughing fit.
Collin reached for an oxygen mask for Marsh, but his hands were so heavily bandaged that he fumbled with it. Colton took it from him and fixed it over Marsh’s face, which was red from the heat and probably from struggling for air. Their dad was the opposite, deathly pale, as he’d been so often while Colton was growing up. So sick...so close to dying...
The panic that had already been gripping Colton tightened its grasp now. His dad and brothers needed to get to the hospital, and obviously Colton’s partner knew it since Ed had already climbed into the driver’s seat. “I got this,” Colton told the Willow Creek firefighter. “You can close the doors. I’ll have my partner drive us to the ER.”
The guy hesitated for a moment, staring at them all with such an odd expression in his pale brown eyes. Then he stepped back and finally shut the doors.
“Hurry!” Colton urged the driver. Moss Valley ER was the closest, but it was still too far away. That was partially why Dad and Darlene had put the ranch up for sale; so they could move closer to town, to medical help. Something they should have done years ago. But Colton suspected Dad had held off because of Cash, because he’d thought he would come home one day.
But seventeen years had passed with no sign of him.
Until now...
Until the lighter, the one mom had given him that had belonged to her father, had turned up in the fire. Even though Cash had never smoked, he’d always carried that lighter on him. And Colton was certain he’d had it with him when he’d left. So why had he returned now...after all these years?
Had he found out Dad was selling the ranch? Colton could imagine how he might have learned about the sale. There was one person that Cash might have stayed in contact with...the realtor who’d listed the ranch for sale.
But none of that mattered now. Only Dad mattered now while they waited for news of his condition in the Moss Valley ER.
The little boy had been found safe and sound in the barn. Darlene had confirmed it when she’d showed up at the hospital a short while after they had. And Colton’s brothers had been treated and released to wait with Colton for news about their dad.
Hours passed with them pacing the waiting room floor. Darlene had gone to find them something to eat and drink while they waited for the doctor. They really hadn’t learned anything yet. Even Collin, who had used being their dad’s medical power of attorney to demand access to their father’s charts, didn’t know any more than the rest of them did. And he was a doctor. He could read the labs and all the reports and tell them his father’s prognosis. For so long, it hadn’t been good, but things had changed now.
Their father had a strong new heart, and since receiving it four months ago, he had been getting stronger, too.
Then the fire had started.
Colton’s stomach flipped again with that fear he’d felt when the call had come into his firehouse, when he’d learned the location. He’d known there were oxygen tanks on hand in his father’s room, tanks that could blow up...
He cringed as he imagined how much worse it would have been had Sarah and Darlene not acted as fast as they had in getting the tanks out of the house. But then Sarah hadn’t been able to find her son. Despite the danger, JJ Cassidy, Colton’s dad, had gone back into the house. And Marsh and Collin, who’d arrived before Colton and his crew, had gone in after him. They all could have died. Dad could still die.
So Colton didn’t want to think what he was thinking...about that lighter, about Cash.
“Hey, Colt,” his older brother Marsh called out to him, his already deep voice a little gruffer than usual. Probably from smoke inhalation.
Marsh wasn’t the only one who’d rushed into the flames without the proper gear. Colton glanced over at his twin. They looked exactly alike, but only their outward appearances were the same. In every other way, they were different. Collin was brilliant and driven, always had been, while Colton was laid-back and liked to joke around and have fun. Collin could never relax; even now he was struggling to hang on to his cell phone since both his hands were heavily bandaged. The burns were bad, but they would heal. Colton had seen worse.
That was what he kept telling himself. He knew how hard Collin had worked to get through college, med school, his residency and fellowship to become a cardiologist at thirty-two. But his bandaged hands weren’t keeping him from consulting, as he barked medical orders into his cell.
For Dad?
No. Collin couldn’t treat their father. He must have been consulting for someone else, probably at the hospital where he’d recently been hired in nearby Willow Creek. Thinking of Willow Creek brought that firefighter back to Colton’s mind, the one who looked so much like him and even had the same job as a firefighter and a paramedic. He had brothers, too, but had changed the number of them because he had lost one recently. Colton remembered his name now: Baker Haven.
“Colt!” Marsh said, his voice louder now.
He shook his head and focused on his older brother. “Sorry. What?”
“Are you okay?” Marsh asked with concern. He could have been a triplet with Colton and Collin; he looked that much like them. But he wasn’t the only one who looked so much like them.
Colton nodded. “Yeah, yeah. I’m fine. I wasn’t an idiot like you guys were when you rushed into a burning house with no protection.”
Marsh flinched but didn’t deny it. “If you’re fine, why are you so quiet?”
Colton tensed. He was usually the loud one, the funny one, the one who broke the tension in all the tense situations in which the Cassidy family had found themselves over the years. And there had been so many of those...
The lobby doors swished open, saving him from having to answer as everyone turned to see who was entering the small-town hospital. It was so small that there was only one waiting room right there in the lobby. The Willow Creek firefighter he’d talked to earlier walked through the doors with a tall, blond-haired woman at his side.
The woman gasped and murmured, “It is like looking at Jake and Ben, but there are three of them...”
“Is something else happening at the ranch?” Colton asked. “Did the fire spread from the house to outbuildings?” If not for Darlene’s horse being in the barn, Colton probably wouldn’t have cared; it wasn’t like the place would be theirs much longer. Unless the sale fell through before the deal closed, and then it would be their problem again, as it had been the past several years when they’d struggled to keep it afloat while trying to keep their dad alive. They should have sold it years ago and moved him closer to town, to medical attention.
“No, we didn’t leave until all the hot spots were out,” Baker said.
Colton’s stomach began to knot with the tension that had already gripped him. “Then why...” What was the guy doing here? And why did he look so much like them?
“I wanted to check on you all,” he said. “How is your dad?”
Not good. That was Colton’s fear, the reason the doctors had to be taking so long to tell them how he was doing. Colton clenched his jaw so tightly that he felt a muscle twitch in his cheek. Before he could say anything, Collin called out, “Darlene! Are you okay? Are you burned?”
Colton whirled around to see his twin rushing toward the woman they treated as their surrogate mom, after Colleen Cassidy died. Darlene stood just within the doorway to the hall that led to the cafeteria. At this hour, it would have been closed, but she must have gotten some coffee from the vending machines. She’d just dropped those cups onto the floor, splashing the contents onto her jeans. But she didn’t even seem aware of what she’d done as she stared at the man from the Willow Creek Fire Department.
“What’s wrong?” Colton asked, his heart beating fast with concern for her and for that strange look on her face.
Marsh stepped closer to the Willow Creek firefighter and asked, “Who are you?”
“Baker Haven,” the younger man replied. “Darlene’s youngest son.”
Marsh turned toward their mother’s friend and gruffly asked, “Darlene?”
She said nothing, just continued to stand there, staring...at the stranger. With her sandy hair and hazel eyes, she looked nothing like the man who looked so much like them.
“I’m your cousin,” the man told them. “Your father is...was...my dad’s brother.”
“Are you crazy?” Collin asked. “What are you talking about? My dad doesn’t have a brother. And Darlene is...was...my mother’s friend.”
“Baker Haven...” Colton murmured as that knot in his stomach tightened. He had gone out on that call four months ago that had been personal to this firefighter. The scene of the man’s brother’s tragic car accident.
“What are you trying to pull?” Marsh asked Baker.
Darlene’s last name wasn’t Haven. It was Smith. But Colton couldn’t remember ever seeing anything with Smith actually on it. In the nearly seventeen years Darlene had been living at Cassidy Ranch, she’d never received mail at the house. Nothing with her name on it. Colton had never even seen her driver’s license.
“He’s telling the truth.” The woman who’d accompanied him spoke up in Baker Haven’s defense. “Ask her...”
When everyone turned back to Darlene, she remained silent but managed a faint nod.
“She might be hurt,” the blonde pointed out, and Baker Haven rushed toward the woman he claimed was his mother. He pushed aside Collin, who’d been clumsily trying to help her. After Baker’s friend steered Darlene into a chair, Baker rolled up Darlene’s jeans and examined her skin for burns.
“I’m okay,” Darlene assured him. “It’s really you...” And she took his face in her hands and added, “It’s my baby...”
Whatever else they said was just a buzzing sound in Colton’s ears as he reached into his pocket and clenched the silver lighter in his fist. He caught bits and pieces of the conversation, something about a grandmother and a heart attack, and then Darlene shared the news about their dad’s heart transplant.
Colton watched Baker’s face pale as the other firefighter came to the same realization he had. Colton knew whose heart his dad had and now he knew why it had been such a perfect match, since the donor had been his dad’s nephew. Colton also realized something else—that it wasn’t just the ranch that had burned down today. His entire life had. Everything he’d thought was true had been a lie. And for the first time, he understood his oldest brother running away.
For a second, just a second, Colton was tempted to run, too, because he had a feeling that it would be smarter and far safer than facing the truths he’d just learned.
He was a Haven.
LIVVY LEMMON PEEKED through the crack in the doorjamb and tried to ignore the small twinge of guilt she felt over spying on her grandfather. He’d been so upset when he’d gotten the call that had brought them to the hospital that Livvy was nearly as worried about him as Grandpa Lem was worried about his friend.
When Livvy had seen him earlier today at her father’s house, she’d been struck by the fact that he hadn’t changed at all since she’d seen him last over a year ago. He looked the same as he always had which, with his white hair and beard, was old. But not a feeble or fragile old.
His blue eyes were bright with intelligence and humor, and his full cheeks were flush with color. With his round belly and his short height, he looked like Santa Claus, which was the role he’d played in the town square every holiday season for as long as Livvy could remember.
She had inherited his short height as well as his red hair. Or at least she’d been told his hair had once been red but a much darker shade than her strawberry blond. She had her mother’s green eyes, though, instead of his bright blue. She wished she’d inherited Grandpa Lem’s outgoing, jovial spirit and his forcefulness, too. But Livvy had always been an introvert except when she was working. She must have inherited his work ethic, though, since he was still working at eighty years old. But she suspected the mayor had convinced Grandpa to run as his deputy so that he had a distraction from his grief over Grandma Mary dying.
The only thing that had struck her as being different about Grandpa Lem was that his beard and hair had been freshly trimmed, and his usual wrinkly, ill-fitting suit had been replaced with one that looked custom-fit and cleanly pressed. He looked good. Or he had until he’d taken that call on his cell at her dad’s house.
Then all the color had drained from his face and he’d started to shake as he’d suddenly aged really fast, which had worried her. So she’d stuck around the hospital, just in case...
The Haven family had gone home, and she probably should, too. But she hadn’t seen Grandpa often over the last several years, so she wanted to make sure he was okay before she left. She peered through the door as her grandfather leaned over and pressed a kiss to the forehead of the white-haired woman lying in the bed.
So that was the formidable Sadie March Haven.
Her grandfather’s archnemesis since they were little bitty kids attending Willow Creek Elementary. The woman turned toward Grandpa Lem and stared up at him with such a soft look on her gently lined face, with so much love in her dark eyes that love flooded Livvy’s heart.
The octogenarians weren’t enemies anymore. And they were more than the friends that Livvy’s grandfather claimed was all they were. With a pang of envy and another of guilt, Livvy pulled the door closed to give the eighty-year-olds their privacy.
That was what love was supposed to look like. She glanced down at her bare left hand, at the faint indentation on the finger that had held her engagement ring.
She hadn’t had a love like that. She’d known it even before Steven had given her the ultimatum. She might have known it even before he gave her the ring. What she hadn’t known was how to say no to the ring, to the proposal and to the life he had envisioned for them...until the ultimatum.
When she’d said no to that, she’d known then that she’d done the right thing. And now, being back in Willow Creek, watching her grandfather with Sadie Haven, Livvy had no lingering doubts.
She was where she belonged. She was home.
Willow Creek was where she’d been born, but her family had moved away when she was six or seven. They’d returned for holidays and some summer vacations. Livvy’s dad had moved back earlier this year, and her grandfather had never left. And a part of Livvy wished her family had never left either.
Then she would have had more time with Grandma Mary before Alzheimer’s disease had so slowly taken her away from Grandpa Lem. Livvy’s mother was gone, too, to breast cancer. She and Dad had been living in Michigan then, at their lake house, but as close as they’d been, Livvy had been too busy to see them often. She regretted not being there for her grandpa and dad like she should have been.
That they had had to lose the loves of their lives and all without Livvy’s support. She’d been so busy, first with college and then med school and residency and Steven. He had kept her busiest of all. She would rather be alone than ever lose herself like that again.
Earlier this evening, one of Sadie Haven’s grandsons, who was actually the mayor of Willow Creek, had offered Livvy a strange warning: “You might want to make yourself scarce. I think she has plans for you, too.”
Ben must have just been teasing because clearly Sadie Haven had too much going on to give any thought to Livvy, let alone make plans for her. Heat rushed to her face with embarrassment and guilt that she’d overheard so much of the Haven family business while she’d been in the waiting room with Grandpa Lem and Sadie’s family.
Some of her relatives...
Apparently there were more Havens, a whole other branch of the family that Ben and his brothers hadn’t known about.
But that wasn’t Livvy’s business, and she didn’t want it to be, which was what she’d told the waiting room attendant who had tried to interrogate her when she’d asked the older woman for Sadie Haven’s room number. Livvy didn’t want to gossip with people with whom she would soon be working.
And she especially didn’t want to gossip about the Havens. While Grandpa Lem had a relationship with them, she didn’t want one.
She didn’t want a relationship with anyone but her own family. Her focus was on Dad and Grandpa and the new position she was starting as an attending ER physician.
Pride suffused her that finally her dream was coming true. And she was going to make certain this time that she didn’t let anyone and anything hijack and derail it.
