Twisted Up (Taking Chances #1) - Erin Nicholas Page 0,103
Sometimes she’d be called out at three a.m. Sometimes it would be ten below zero. She would be at risk each time.
And there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it.
It really hadn’t hit Jake before this. He’d been home for almost two weeks now, and since the tornado, in which he’d been able to hold her and ensure she was as sheltered as she could be, the greatest risk to Avery had been fatigue and dehydration. He’d been plying her with water and trying to be sure she rested whenever he could—for one, by not crawling into her bedroom window at night and keeping her up until dawn with more physical activity.
He’d told himself he was trying to show her he cared. But was that truly all this was? Maybe he couldn’t let her be at risk. Maybe he couldn’t handle that.
Fuck.
“I need to go. This time,” he told Wes.
Jake knew he had to stand outside that burning building, knowing Avery was inside, and see if he could do it. If he could leave her alone to do her job. See how it felt.
It didn’t get any more personal than this. Not only was the woman he loved in a burning structure, but there wasn’t a thing he could do to help her. Firefighting was one of the few things involved in disasters that he was not trained in. He knew he would be more of a liability than help.
This was Avery’s specialty. Could he stand back, literally, and watch her do it, knowing that if something went wrong, if it turned bad, he could do nothing?
Not wanting to come back to Chance and possibly fail someone he knew and cared about had kept him away all these years. But being here for the good stuff these past days had shown him that he could take the bad with the good, because there was a lot of good. He was willing to take the risk now.
Especially because the past week had shown him something else—he’d been waiting until he could have Avery. He couldn’t have imagined living in Chance, seeing her, working alongside her, and not having her in his life—at his mother’s dinner table, his friends’ barbecues, in his bed, and in his heart. Now he had her, now that she would be a part of his life in Chance, he was ready. He hadn’t fully been aware he’d been waiting for her, but now . . . it was as clear as anything had ever been.
But in this moment, this moment of helplessness and worry, he was also very aware that he liked having control. He liked knowing he could keep her safe.
“She’s good,” Wes said in all seriousness. “She knows what she’s doing.”
For some stupid reason, that made Jake’s breath hitch, too. Avery knew what she was doing, she wasn’t on her own, she had her crew, but she was the leader. She was in charge there. He’d be nothing but an onlooker.
“The fire is at Fourteenth and Oak,” Wes said. “House fire.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t do anything stupid.” His dad moved his hand.
“Who, me?”
Wes frowned at his son’s attempt at flippant. “I’m serious, Jake. I want to know she’s safe.”
Jake swallowed hard. “Do you mean at the fire? Or something else?”
“Everything.”
That also caught Jake in the chest. His parents loved Avery. He had to take care of her for them, too.
Jake nodded, and Wes turned his attention to herding the remaining revelers into city hall. Jake started for his truck. He calmly inserted the key in the door, calmly got inside, calmly started the ignition, calmly eased the truck out onto the street.
All the while his heart was threatening to beat out of his chest.
Avery had been exhausted when they’d started, and now, an hour later, she was . . . she didn’t know a word for “beyond exhausted.”
“Second floor clear?” she asked. The fire had spread quickly, and she and a lot of the crew had been working on the first floor, trying to contain things to the east side of the structure.
It sounded crazy that they’d been battling to put out a fire in the rain, but when the fire was in the walls, it didn’t matter much what was going on outside. In fact, the rain had complicated things immensely by impairing the firefighters’ vision and making the surfaces they needed to cross, including the ladders, slippery.