human-caused fire. Some idiot teenagers decided to light a campfire at their backyard keg party using gasoline, right in the middle of an area with plenty of dry scrub.
Where the hell the parents had been, he didn’t know.
At least no lives had been lost, unlike some other nasty fires he had battled—including the one that killed Steve Harper.
He didn’t like thinking about that night, about his own choices and their terrible consequences. He had not exactly blocked it out over the years, but he didn’t spend a lot of time obsessing about what had happened.
Somehow the memories seemed sharper and more intense over the past few weeks—probably because Olivia was in town and he couldn’t seem to stop thinking about her, which inevitably led him to thinking about her father.
Not that he had a lot of time to dwell on the past. After the brush fire was out, the morning had been one call after another, most of them sad and difficult. He had responded to a heart attack that Cooper was quite sure the man would not recover from, a car accident with injuries where they had to extract the driver with the Jaws of Life, and a drowning by an inexperienced diver who shouldn’t have been anywhere near the cliffs.
He loved what he did. He loved being able to help people, especially when the outcome was better than it could have been.
He loved putting out fires with minimal damage, suppressed by a fast-acting, well-trained fire response team. He loved responding to a call he thought would be a bad one, only to find injuries were less severe than feared. He loved helping kids get their heads unstuck from banisters, rescuing kittens out of trees, delivering babies, which he’d done four times now.
He loved helping people. That was the basic truth. Yeah, he knew the desire had deep roots in his psyche. He hadn’t needed the military shrink he’d gone to early in his service to tell him his need to help others stemmed from a childhood of trying and failing to fix his mother, with all her mental and emotional problems and the substance abuse she couldn’t seem to beat.
Most days on the job were a mix of good and bad, which he had a much easier time processing. Today had been relentlessly bad. He was tired, sweaty, mentally and emotionally drained.
He wanted to grab a pizza and a six-pack, go down to the beach and just sit on a blanket while he let the waves soothe his battered spirit.
That plan would have to wait. First, he had to plant some herbs as part of this stupid public relations promotion cooked up by the mayor and Olivia Harper. On the positive side, at least he could work out some of his tangled emotions by digging in the dirt, which had its own rewards.
While he waited for Olivia and his nephews to arrive, Cooper picked up one of the fire department shovels he had used on that brush fire earlier to turn the dirt so he could mix in some of the soil prep he had bought.
He was almost done when he heard a car pull up and turned around to find Olivia climbing out of her hybrid, along with her funny-looking dog.
Late-afternoon sunlight glinted in her hair and seemed to make her features glow.
“Hi,” she said, a little breathless. “Sorry I’m late. Everyone and their aunt Gladys came into the garden center today. I’ve been running all day and still haven’t caught up.”
He wanted to just stand here in the sunlight and stare at her as he felt a funny kind of peace trickle through him. How did she manage to push away all the dark sadness of the day, just by existing?
“I didn’t even realize the time,” he said. “I was busy trying to prepare the dirt.”
“I can help you with that.”
“You’ve been working in dirt all day. You’re probably tired of gardening right about now. I know the garden center was never your favorite thing.”
“How did you...?” She blinked, obviously taken off guard that he knew that about her. “I never really hated it. I guess I just...resented it. Does that sound stupid?”
“No. I get it.”
“It was all-consuming for my family, you know? That first year or so after my dad died, my mom threw herself into the garden center. She was busy with it from first thing in the morning to long after I went to bed at night. She didn’t have a lot of