Free Her Only Hero by Marta Perry

the
nightlight, and the zebras and elephants smiled protectively.
    “Sleep tight.”
    By the time they’d covered the few steps to the living room,
Laura had managed to get her breathing under control. She turned to Ryan.
“You’ve learned some more sign language, haven’t you?”
    “Nolie taught me.” He shrugged it off. “It seems like a useful
thing to know.”
    “I
suppose.” As long as that was all there was to it.
    “By the way, she and Gabe have some new puppies at the farm.
Since Mandy likes puppies so much, you ought to bring her out to see them.”
    “We’ll see.” That was a useful phrase for avoiding something she
wasn’t sure she wanted to do. “Please, sit down. I’ll get the coffee.”
    The cups, sugar and cream were ready on a tray in the kitchen.
All that remained was to set the coffeepot on its trivet. She had no excuse to
delay going back to Ryan.
    When she pushed back through the swinging door, she found he’d
made himself comfortable on the couch.
    He looked around the small room. “This is nice. I suppose you
did it all yourself.”
    “Of course.” She’d loved filling the apartment with the warm
glow of chintz and patchwork, so different from the sterile modern furnishings
her husband had preferred. She’d taken the red, white and blue color scheme in
the living room from the patchwork quilt she’d thrown over the back of the
couch to disguise the worn places.
    “Thanks.” He took the mug she handed him and snagged two cookies
from the plate. “Chocolate peanut butter chip oatmeal. I’d recognize my
mother’s cookies anywhere.”
    “It was nice of her to bring them over.” She hesitated. “She
really seems to remember me from when she taught my church-school class. She
mentioned a lot of things that happened when we were in high school.”
    “Mom has an encyclopedic memory for detail.” He shuddered.
“Especially for things you’d rather she forget. Did she bring up the time I got
suspended for kidnapping Winston High’s mascot before the homecoming game?”
    She smiled. “As a matter of fact, she did. Said she never could
understand why you did such a thing. I didn’t enlighten her.”
    His eyebrows lifted, and he turned toward her, stretching a long
arm along the back of the sofa between them. “You think you know?”
    “Sure. Your brothers had done it. You were just carrying on the
family tradition.”
    “Hey, my brothers just tried to do it,” he corrected. “I
succeeded.”
    Something in his voice alerted her to the truth, and she was
surprised she hadn’t seen it before. “It was important that you do better than
they did.”
    He shrugged. “When you’ve got two big brothers— actually three
counting my cousin Brendan—you’re always coming along at the tag end of
everything. They never let you forget that you’re the runt of the litter. I wanted
to rock the boat a little.”
    “Show people who you are,” she suggested.
    “Something like that.” His lips curved in a smile. “Dad always
had to go through the whole list of names before he got to me when I was in
trouble. Gabriel-Brendan-Seth-Ryan, he’d yell.”
    “Is that why you want to go into arson investigation? To stand
out from the rest of the Flanagan firefighters?”
    He looked a little startled. “Maybe so, partly anyway. I guess
I’m still looking for the thing that’s just mine, no one else’s.”
    He was confiding in her, and it felt surprisingly natural.
“Maybe you’ve found it.”
    “I hope so.” His fingertips brushed her shoulder. “What about
you? What do you want beyond fixing up this place to sell and seeing Mandy
through her surgery?”
    Her mind went blank from the combination of the question and his
nearness. She’d been so focused on her immediate aims that she hadn’t really
thought beyond them, except to envision a vague, happy future. What did she
want?
    The telephone rang, saving her from an answer she didn’t know
how to make.
    “Excuse me.” She