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perfected in high school and turned back to Patrick’s sister.
    “It must have come off when the elevator lurched and threw us to the ground,” she said.
    “Must have,” Shannon replied in a dry tone, giving Briana a look that suggested more than her button was missing.
    Briana knew she must appear mussed and hastily put back together. She detected the same telltale pewter color in Shannon’s eyes that were a dead giveaway in Patrick’s that he was angry about something. In this case, Briana realized that Shannon had made an educated guess at what had happened in that dark elevator and she didn’t like it one bit.
    Patrick landed beside Briana a moment later and she couldn’t stop herself from looking up at him, seeing him in the light for the first time since they’d made love.
    The blush she’d managed to suppress a minute ago swept over her cheeks now as she read the passion, intimacy and some other emotion she didn’t want to name deep in Patrick’s eyes. His weren’t pewter now, but the deepest Irish-Sea-on-a-sunny-day blue she’d ever seen them.
    Her heart seemed to stutter as the full impact of what she’d done hit.
    “Patrick, I—”
    “You forgot your purse,” Shannon said, reaching up into the elevator to haul Briana’s bag off the floor and hand it to her.
    “Thanks,” Briana said shortly, grabbing the thing. Her bag hid so much. The evidence of their passion, tucked neatly away, and that tape recorder, which she’d managed to switch off before their second bout of lovemaking.
    “Well, I guess you missed your meeting with the police chief,” she said to Patrick.
    “Yes.” He grimaced. “I doubt he even noticed. I bet he’s had a busier night than I did.”
    She stared at him, and he must have realized what he’d said, for it was his turn to display ruddy cheeks. She and Patrick had not been idle in that elevator.
    They were saved from awkwardness by the second firefighter, who said, “It’s been a busy night for EMS all right. Another one.”
    It was no longer night but morning now, Briana realized. Almost 3:00 a.m. If she weren’t torn between elation and guilt over what had transpired in that elevator, she’d probably be pretty tired.
    “What’s happening out there?” Patrick asked his sister,reverting from the tender loving man of the past few hours to the mayor of a town once again facing disaster.
    “Not good,” Shannon told him, her voice neutral. It was a tone Briana had come to associate with emergency personnel who were sometimes forced to give the worst news possible. “One woman was killed in the convenience store collapse. She’d been pinned under a beam, and by the time we got there…” She shook her head. “There was a second woman, a fire victim. We pulled her out of the basement suite still alive, but I wouldn’t put her chances of recovery past fair.”
    Shannon’s emotionless delivery almost fooled Briana into thinking Shannon was taking the violent deaths in her stride, but not her brother.
    “Hey, kid. I’m sorry,” he said, pulling his sister in for a hug, regardless of her bulky uniform and helmet.
    Amazingly, the tough, strong woman of a second ago let herself lean on her older brother. “Yeah,” she said, and in that one word Briana heard fatigue, despair and anger. “If we weren’t so stretched, and all of us running on too little sleep, maybe we could have got there sooner. Maybe—”
    “You can’t beat yourself up over this. You know that. Sometimes there are fatalities.” Patrick spoke with the authority of a former firefighter who’d been there and seen it all, but he still held his sister in his arms.
    Shannon couldn’t see his face, but Briana could, and almost as though she’d read his mind, she knew he was doing exactly what he’d told Shannon not to do. Blaming himself for the stretched resources, the exhausted emergency crews—the deaths of two more Courage Bay’s citizens.
    Their brief romantic idyll, Briana realized,