Hard to Resist - By Kara Lennox Page 0,47

her independence to not wanting Samantha to get the wrong idea, and I don’t know what to do about it.”

“Be patient, for starters. Who knows how bad she’s been burned in the past? She’s entitled to be cautious.”

“I haven’t told you the worst of it. She’s found another apartment, some place bigger, with a pool, and she’s moving away.”

“Oh, Ethan. I’m sorry. I know you liked having Kat and Sam right there. But it’s not the end of the world. I mean, you’re not breaking up or anything, are you?”

“No.” But he was afraid that was coming next.

She nudged him. “Then stop borrowing trouble. Hey, the shuffleboard table is free. Want to challenge…” She trailed off mid-sentence as her gaze focused on something behind Ethan. He turned to see a group of guys enter, shirtsleeves rolled up, ties askew or missing altogether.

One of the guys was Roark Epperson. He’d been in the news a lot lately as the pressure increased to catch the serial arsonist.

No wonder Priscilla was staring. At the fire academy she’d been enthralled by the subject of arson and eager to learn everything she could about how to spot suspicious fires, how the evidence was gathered. He wouldn’t be surprised if someday she became an arson investigator herself.

Ethan grabbed Otis’s burger and left a fiver on the counter. “Let’s go get the shuffleboard table before those guys grab it.”

“Uh, I think I better get home,” Priscilla said suddenly. “It’s late.”

Ethan looked at his watch. “It’s just eight-thirty.” They’d spent half the afternoon studying together, and they both felt confident they’d pass tomorrow’s test, so he didn’t think it was that.

“I have to do laundry. And you know how long that takes me.” She cleared out without another word.

That was strange.

Ethan decided to do the networking thing, which was better than sitting alone drowning his sorrows. He walked up to Roark Epperson, held out his hand and introduced himself. “I was in the last class at the fire academy,” he said.

“Oh, yeah, I remember you. You used to do construction. That’s a helpful skill in arson investigation. Where’d your friend go?”

“My friend?”

“The woman who lit out of here like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were chasing her. Priscilla.”

“You know her?”

“There was only one woman in your class. Hard not to notice her.”

“Anybody would notice her,” one of Roark’s friends said, elbowing a buddy. “If you know what I mean.”

Roark gave his friend a shriveling look that shut him up. All of which made Ethan wonder if there was something he didn’t know. Did the arson specialist and Priscilla know each other?

“I was just about to see if I could get a shuffleboard game up,” Ethan said. “Any of you guys interested?”

A couple of them were, so they formed teams and went to it.

Ethan lined up to make his next play. “Any progress on catching the arsonist?” he asked Epperson, then pulled off a particularly good shot that had his opponents groaning.

“Precious little. That abandoned gas station that burned over on Ledbetter a couple of weeks ago? That was him. He’d planted a homemade bomb inside, but luckily it didn’t go off.”

Ethan hadn’t heard about the bomb. “He’s trying to kill firefighters.” What a grim realization.

“Looks that way.”

“Could he be a former firefighter? Someone who was fired from the department, disgruntled?” It was an unfortunate fact of life that many arsonists were, in fact, also firefighters. Sometimes they were just bored and wanted to create some action. But sometimes their motives were darker.

“That’s exactly the direction I’ve been looking, but so far nothing’s panned out.” Epperson looked deeply troubled, and Ethan felt bad for bringing up the subject. The investigator had probably come to Brady’s so he could forget work for a few hours.

“Your shot,” Ethan said. “We can cinch it with this one.”

They won, and as a team they played and beat all comers, including Tony, who’d spent most of the evening flirting with one woman after another.

“You da man,” Tony said, acknowledging his defeat. “Hey, I’m going home. You gonna hang out here a while?”

“Home?” Ethan looked at his watch and was surprised to find it was after midnight. Where had the evening gone?

“Hey, how come you’re not out with Kat?” Tony asked. “Is it mother-daughter bonding night?”

“Something like that.” Although not much like that. The truth was, Ethan hadn’t called her. He needed some time to process the fact that not only did she not want to move into his house, she wanted to move