Page 4 of Sizzle

Lucy stabbed her boots into the concrete, not moving. “Everything in pairs, Faurier. No exceptions. If you don’t go back, I’m not going back, either.”

“I didn’t ask you to follow me,” he said, and it was moments like these that made Lucy seriously irate that their masks hid the majority of their faces from view, because oh, how she wanted him to see her death scowl in all its glory.

“No, you didn’t. But you also didn’t give me a choice. We have each other’s backs in a fire. Even whenoneof us is breaking every fucking rule in the book by choosing to go in against orders. Now, are you going to waste time arguing with me, or are we going to find this person and get the hell out of here?”

For a beat, he looked like he might actually go with what was behind door number one. But then he shook his head, his spine pulling him up to his full six foot two. “This place is going up fast. We’ll only have time to search the ground floor, and we’ll have to haul ass.”

“Copy that.” Lucy sent her gaze on a whipcrack tour of their surroundings from left to right as Faurier mirrored her assessment from right to left. Dim hallways, barely-there daylight, and smoke chugging in by the second. Great.

“With half these windows boarded up on top of all this smoke, visibility is going to be for shit. Not to mention how fast these flames are jumping,” she said, eyeballing the sparks starting to cascade down from above. Normally, they’d split up to cover more ground, faster, but with conditions like this… “We need to stick together.”

Faurier nodded, just one jerk of his helmet, before turning himself toward the nearest hallway. “Looks like this leads to a bunch of separate storage rooms.” Lucy squinted down the shadowed corridor and made out a handful of doors dotted either side at regular intervals. “But only the ones on the left have outward-facing windows. We’ll start there and work our way as far down as we can.”

Considering their guy—woman?—couldn’t have gotten too incredibly far with all the smoke and heat pumping through the place, and that was where Faurier had seen him or her, it was a smart strategy. Especially if the person hadn’t been able to find a viable exit and had opted to take cover instead.

The reminder that they had a civilian to find turned Lucy’s resolve to concrete. “Copy that.”

She fell into step behind him, not arguing when he took point. Faurier moved forward with so much confidence that he might as well have been made of the stuff, absolutely undeterred by the fact that both Hawkins and Captain Bridges were repeating their fall-out orders over the radio, and that they both sounded mad enough to chill the sweat dotting Lucy’s brow beneath her hood and helmet. He took the hallway by force, each stride loaded with certainty that he’d seen someone and sheer determination to find them, and her gut stirred with some foreign, deep-seated reaction she couldn’t quite label.

She’d made the right call by following him in.

Use your fucking head, girl, she snapped to herself. She didn’t have time for unreliable crap like baseless gut feelings. She needed to focus. Follow the plan. Find this person and get the hell out of here.

Faurier arrived at the first door on their left, placing a quick hand on the panel before shoving his way over the threshold and into the dim space. “Fire department! Call out!” he hollered past his mask. Lucy took in the sloppily stacked wooden pallets—Christ, they might as well have been special-ordered from Kindling-R-Us—and the rickety metal shelving forming a haphazard grid in the large space. Enough grime covered the windows to render them almost useless, and the flashlight strapped to the front of her turnouts only gave her so much visibility in the thickening smoke and dusty shadows.

Her search and rescue training kicked in, hard and swift. “Take left,” Lucy said, her boots already thumping toward the right side of the room for a more thorough sweep. She bellowed her presence into first one corner, then the next—where are you, where are you—covering all the ground in between with fast, methodical steps. Flames had started licking down from the ceiling, traveling over the walls so quickly that Lucy’s head spun. She’d seen fire jump before, both in controlled environments like burn towers and in real-life situations. Granted, only a few as hairy as this, but something about the pattern and velocity of the flames snagged in her brain.

This wasn’t normal.

“Left side clear,” Faurier yelled, making her abandon the thought less than fully formed. She finished her search a few seconds later, falling into step behind Faurier as he exited the room and slammed the door shut with a bang. They moved on to the next room, which yielded a big, fat nothing-burger, just like the first one. By the time they got to the third, Gamble had joined in on the chorus of “you both need to get the fuck out of there, immediately, if not sooner,” and oh, hell, maybe thishadbeen a bad call.

“Faurier—” Lucy started, but he’d already turned to shout her name from his spot by the window.

“de Costa! Look.”

She squinted through the smoke, her pulse crashing through her as she caught sight of the backpack lying on the ground a handful of paces from Faurier’s boots. It looked empty, or damn close, but the scattered food wrappers, empty water bottles, and—shit, was that a sleeping bag?—nearby were clear indicators that someone had been squatting in the warehouse.

“Iknewit,” Faurier said, moving through the room with renewed intensity. “Fire department! Call out. We’re here to help you.”

An ominous whoosh drew Lucy’s gaze upward. Flames were slipping in through vents, creeping over the walls and eating everything in their path. But the pattern of movement still didn’t make sense. Yeah, the warehouse was probably older than dirt and had been abandoned long enough that any building codes it had once met were a very distant memory. But she was a firefighter, born and bred. She’d studied every resource she could get her hands on. Aced all her tests at the academy. For God’s sake, she’d watched her first training videos on her father’s knee. She knew how fire behaved, what it did, where it went, and why, and she’d never seen flames travel like this. Well, not unless they’d been ignited by an accelerant, anyway.

Holyshit.

Lucy’s gut forced her mouth open too fast for her brain to protest. “Faurier,” she bellowed, waiting until he’d turned toward her to point upward. “Does that look—”

A sickening crack cut her off, followed by a heavy shower of sparks raining down from above, and her heart catapulted to her windpipe as she reflexively threw one arm into the air to offset the impact of the heavier falling debris she knew would follow. Her equilibrium pitched, her body tumbling forward too fast for her to register exactly what had knocked her off her feet, and before she could inhale to replace the breath that had left her lungs upon impact with the ground, she’d been pinned to the floor.

No, wait. That wasn’t right. She hadn’t been knocked down. She wasn’t trapped. She’d been pushed out of the debris radius and shielded from harm. By Faurier.

Who was currently on top of her, protecting her head with both of his arms and her body with his.

“Fuck,” he hissed through his mask a beat later, swiping a hand over the back of his neck before pulling his head up to look at her. “Lucy, are you okay?”

For a sliver of a second, she couldn’t answer, couldn’t move or think or breathe. There was only Faurier, with his body covering hers, looking at her with concern and sending her belly into an unexplainable freefall. But then her brain was doing an automatic scan of everything from the neck down, methodically searching for pain and boomeranging her senses—andsense—back online.

She nodded. “Yes. I’m fine.”

The word held the metallic tang of a lie. Of course she wasn’t fine, the goddamn building was starting to literally come smashing down around them. But she wasn’t hurt, and there was still someone potentially trapped in here somewhere. She could compartmentalize the shitshow parts of her feelings later. Specifically, the ones that had surfaced (unbidden, thank you very much) at the realization that theonefirefighter she’d ever found attractive was lying on top of her right now.

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