Primal Threat by Earl Emerson Read Free Book Online

brother, and one of her brother’s buddies, a soft-looking young man introduced as William Potter III but called Scooter by the Newcastles. Zak immediately tagged him as a soul who wouldn’t last ten minutes in the fire service. A lot of people came through the station because they wanted to be firefighters, and it was impossible for Zak not to regard each one the way a horse trainer eyed a colt he was thinking about taking on. Not that Potter wanted to be a firefighter. The watch he wore was easily worth a month of Zak’s salary.
    Twenty minutes earlier, they’d received a call on the main phone from the assistant chief telling them that the chief of the department and several other city officials would be visiting, along with a civilian who wanted to donate a good chunk of money to the Medic One Foundation. The civilian turned out to be Donovan Newcastle—Nadine’s father.
    Before Zak could finish polishing his boots, the visitors showed up in staggered formation: chiefs, a couple of newspaper reporters, the boisterous family and friends pouring through the front door like partygoers and, except for the girl on crutches, all chattier than magpies.
    Nadine Newcastle was prettier than he remembered, with an open face, guileless gray-blue eyes, and lustrous brown hair that hung below her shoulders. And she was sweet—in fact, that seemed to be her main trait. He found himself immediately attracted to her. Her brother was a year or two older, about her height, the same stocky build as their father but with the pug nose and freckles of his sister. His name was Kasey.
    The Newcastles told everybody how grateful they were for the rescue of their daughter, who, according to the doctors, might have ended up a quadriplegic had the firefighters been even the tiniest bit sloppy in their spine management.
    Mr. Newcastle was dressed in a formal suit and at various intervals stood off to one side as if he wasn’t interested in talking to any firefighters. Mom flirted with the chiefs, who tried not to ogle her plush figure. The Newcastles had money coming out their ears, and Zak couldn’t help noting that the son, who wasn’t more than twenty or twenty-one, wore an expensive-looking European-styled suit. Muldaur tried to politely engage him in conversation, but he and his friend Scooter turned their backs on Muldaur to zero in on the lone female firefighter in the station.
    All in all, there were probably eighteen or twenty people crammed into the beanery and adjoining watch office. At one point the crew of Engine 6 was asked to line up in front of the apparatus with Nadine Newcastle while a newspaper photographer stood outside the open bay doors in the rain and shot photos. Mrs. Newcastle had brought a small cake, and it was served on mismatched plates from the station’s beanery cupboards. It was then, while everybody was standing around holding crumpled paper napkins, that Zak stole out of the room, squeezing behind the two bulky pieces of fire equipment in the tight apparatus bay, and was startled to find Nadine Newcastle more or less hiding behind Ladder 3.
    Even though their initial meeting at the accident nearly a month earlier was the genesis for all the pomp, they’d exchanged only a few words until now. “Looking for the restroom?”
    “I was just standing here thinking.”
    “And what were you thinking?”
    “That I don’t like parties.”
    “I don’t either. What’s
your
excuse?”
    “Do I need an excuse? I just don’t like them.”
    “I was sneaking away myself.” When Nadine smiled, it made her look even younger and prettier than when she’d first walked in out of the drizzle.
    Zak made his way around her and headed for the bunkroom fifteen feet away. When he reached the door, he turned and looked back at her and thought for a moment he’d never seen anyone looking quite so blue. They were celebrating the fact that she was alive and not in a wheelchair, that her father was bestowing a hundred grand on