Hard to Resist - By Kara Lennox Page 0,17

run, with a concrete floor and an insulated shelter and misters to keep Daisy cool during the hot months. The guys had spared no effort or expense in giving Daisy the best quarters possible, once she’d been banished outside.

Inside the run, spotted puppies were everywhere. They were about five weeks old now, at that cute stage where they were galumphing around with too-big clumsy puppy feet, curious about everything. Ethan opened the door to the run and they poured out into the yard—and straight for Samantha.

Samantha climbed Kat like a tree. “Mommy!” she shrieked with alarm, as Kat picked her up. Samantha was small for her age, probably no more than forty pounds.

“Samantha, honey, they won’t hurt you.”

Ethan, realizing he’d made a tactical error in letting them all out at once, hastily herded them back to their anxious mother, leaving just one outside the run. He scooped up the little female and held her out for Samantha to see.

“How about we visit with just one at a time?”

Despite her fright, Samantha did appear interested. Kat put her down, and she sat on the grass as Ethan set the puppy down close to her. Puppy and child eyed each other suspiciously. Then the puppy toddled close, and Samantha reached out to pet it. With the slightest encouragement, the puppy was all over the little girl. Ethan watched as Kat sighed with relief.

The two of them retreated to a picnic table. Ethan, Tony and Priscilla sometimes took their meals out here, when the tension inside the firehouse got a bit thick.

“Who does she belong to?” Kat asked. “Daisy, I mean.”

“All of us, I guess. She used to belong to John Simon.” He waited to see if she recognized the name.

Kat nodded. “One of the men killed in the warehouse fire. I read about it in the paper. What a terrible tragedy. He was from this station?”

“All three were. John Simon, David Latier and Lamar Burkins.” He spoke their names like an invocation. They were imprinted on his brain as deeply as they would be on the new firefighters’ memorial the city was planning.

Kat’s eyes dropped, and she shook her head as if she couldn’t even stand to think about it. After her recent brush with death, he wasn’t surprised. “That must have been awful for you guys. I’m so sorry.”

“It happened before I was assigned here,” Ethan said. “Tony, Priscilla and I filled the vacancies.” Which was a bit unusual. Normally, three rookies wouldn’t be assigned to the same station. But no experienced firefighters wanted to be transferred here. Firefighters were a superstitious lot. And when the old captain had retired after the tragedy and word got around that Eric Campeon was to assume his position, the department couldn’t get anyone with experience to move there voluntarily.

The deaths had rocked the firefighting community to the core. Ethan would never forget the day he’d learned of the tragedy. He’d still been in training, and classes had been called off for the rest of the day. One of his fellow trainees had been so unnerved by the event that he’d quit. It had been years since a firefighter had been killed in the line of duty in Dallas. Three at one time—it was almost too much to take in.

“Did they catch the arsonist?” Kat asked.

Ethan shook his head. “Roark Epperson, the lead arson investigator, is still looking into it. It’s not the arsonist’s first fire. He’s been at it for close to a year now, and his fires are getting more and more ambitious.”

They lapsed into silence briefly, watching Samantha play with the puppy. The little girl had lost the tight, wary look on her face, and she actually smiled when the puppy pounced on a ball.

“That’s a sight I haven’t seen lately,” Kat said. “A smile.”

“She’s not bouncing back?”

“That timid, sullen, terrified little girl is radically different from the Samantha I thought I knew. She seems to be afraid of everything, but mostly of having another fire. I just don’t know what—” She cut herself off as her voice choked with tears. “I’m sorry. You don’t need to hear about this.”

“Yes, I do.” Ethan couldn’t help himself. He reached out and brushed a tear away with the pad of his finger. “I’d like to help.”

“You can’t take on the responsibility for every person you help in a fire,” Kat said. “You’d be spreading yourself pretty thin.”

“Let me worry about how thin I spread myself. What about if I do a safety inspection of