Consumed (Firefighters #1)(60)

Or that was the plan.

When she came up to her little house and saw a familiar car parked in front of her walkway, she hit the brakes. And then debated if she could just drive on by.

Her mother.

Pulling into her driveway, she got out and went on the approach. As she came up to the ten-year-old Honda Civic, the window went down—and she realized she hadn’t actually set eyes on her mom for months.

Nancy Janice Fitzgerald Ashburn did not look her sixty years. She’d never been a smoker or a drinker, had stayed out of the sun and followed a “regime”—whatever that was. So even without plastic surgery, her pale Irish skin was still fair and largely unwrinkled, the powder and foundation light, the lashes curled and darkened, the lipstick a perfect shade of pink for that complexion. And of course, the hair was done. She colored it to cover the grays, but not in a brassy way: Ginger streaks through the auburn, everything cut well so it framed her face and brushed her shoulders.

“I was going to call you,” Anne lied.

“I am so sorry to bother you, but I can’t reach your brother.”

“What’s up?”

“Do you want to get out of the rain?”

“No, I’m fine.” Anne looked up and got a raindrop directly in her eyeball. As she squinted and rubbed away the sting, she was frustrated with the whole world. “What’s going on?”

“You know that big maple tree in the backyard? The one you and your brother swung on—”

“Yes. I know.”

“Half of it broke off in the wind and landed on the house.” As Anne exhaled with exhaustion, her mother hurried through her speech. “The nice man behind me tried to put tarping up, but there’s terrible leaking in your father’s and my bedroom, and then downstairs. I need some place to stay—and I promise, I tried to reach your brother. He must be busy.”

What Anne wanted to say was that Nancy Janice should try her brother again. Try him a thousand times. But she wasn’t going to turn her mother out into a storm, for godsakes.

“Ah, let me go check my house. I’ve . . . ah, I’ve got a dog and I need to make sure he’s secured before you come in. I’m not sure how he’s going to do with strangers.”

“You got a dog? You should have told me.” The hurt that flared in that face went through Anne’s chest like a spear. “But it’s all right. I’ve been telling you for a year to get a pet. This is really good.”

“Stay here.”

Anne jogged up to her front door and punched in her code. Inside, she leaned in, expecting to see the sofa shredded. Nope. Proceeding into the kitchen, she found the trash bin was where she’d left it, no garbage strewn about. But he also wasn’t in his crate.

Dear Lord, her mother was going to spend the night.

As she wondered how this had happened, she was very cognizant that in most families, it was commonplace—.parents staying with their children.

But then their family hadn’t been normal. It had only looked that way from the outside, the hero firefighter, the perfect homemaker, and a boy and a girl to boot. Real nuclear stuff until you scratched the surface, particularly when it came to Tom, Sr.

And that was Nancy Janice’s problem. The woman was only surface, no substance.

Whatever, though. She could make it through one night with her mother.

After Anne finished with the first floor, she got paranoid. Soot had snuck out somehow and she all but ran upstairs. Flipping on the hall light, she—

As she looked through the open door of her bedroom, she saw her dog curled up on her bed, his nose tucked under her pillow as if he wanted her scent with him in her absence.

“Hi, Mr. Man,” she said softly.

He startled and lifted his head, sleepy eyes blinking. Then that bony tail of his thumped on the comforter.

Anne went across and stretched out with him, putting her face against his and breathing deep. In response, Soot nuzzled her, and she marveled at the connection they had. It felt as though she had had him all her life.

Pulling back, she stared at him. “I need you to do me a favor and not eat my mother, ’kay? She’s only going to be here until the morning, and she’s . . . well, I think she’d taste like a marshmallow Peep, anyway. Way too sweet. Not your kind of entrée.”



* * *



Soot was a perfect gentleman, and Nancy Janice fell in love with him. Then again, her mother’s very nature was fall-in-love. Everything in her life was “perfect” and “beautiful” and “wonderful.”

Her glass was not just half full. It was overflowing with rose-scented denial. And Anne refused to see her intolerance of the woman as some kind of moral failing.

They had nothing in common and never had—hell, maybe that was why Anne had felt so betrayed when she had learned what kind of man her father really was. Even though Tom, Sr., had passed when she’d found out the truth, she had been prepared to live up to his memory for the rest of her days, to follow the example of bravery and charisma he had seemed to set.

Instead, the curtain had been pulled back on his true character and that had left her with nothing in common with her family. Her brother had already been living his own life and going into the Academy, and as for Nancy Janice? Anne had barely made it through a childhood of being forced to wear dresses and ringlet curls and paten leather shoes.