But this morning, after having a dream about the arson fire, it wasn’t Brooke on his mind, and he changed his routine, running past Hill Street. When he reached the fire site, he thought maybe he was still dreaming.

The place had been demolished, razed.

He stared at it in disbelief. On a hunch, he ran back to his house, got into his truck and drove to the site of a different fire, the one from a few months previous, a fire he’d also “cried” arson to Tommy about and had gotten his wrist slapped for.

That property was also demolished.

And the one before that? Yeah. Demolished. Standing at the edge of the third lot, where nothing remained but dirt, he pulled out his cell phone, but didn’t hit any numbers as his last meeting with the chief ran through his head. He’d been asked, and not very nicely, to do his own job and no one else’s.

Somehow he doubted stalking the fire sites would be considered doing his own job.

Shit.

Tommy Ramirez had told him to be on his best behavior, but that was proving damn hard to do. Driving home, he called Aidan, but had to leave a message. While waiting for a return call, he tried to distract himself with a Lakers game but his mind kept wandering to the arson.

He couldn’t let it go. Driven to do something, Zach pulled out his laptop. He’d already typed up all his thoughts and notes on the fires. Now he needed to talk it out with someone, and oddly enough, the person that kept coming to mind wasn’t Aidan, but someone with sweet baby blues and a smile that pretty much destroyed him.

Brooke. He was driven by her, too, because, damn, she was something. She was something, and…and she wanted a relationship.

Driven as he was, he didn’t do relationships. Relationships always came to an end, and he hated endings. He didn’t need a shrink to attribute that to losing his parents so young, to growing apart from the brother he had nothing in common with except grief and, in a way, losing him, too.

No, he didn’t like endings, and therefore, avoided beginnings.

Still, Brooke drew him. She was a little buttoned-up, a little rigid, and—and hell. She had a smile that could melt him from across town, and a way of looking at him that suggested she could see right through to all his flaws, and she didn’t mind those flaws.

Jesus. He went back to his laptop, burying himself. He had property deeds, architectural plans, records of sales, and looked it all over for the hundredth time to see if there were any obvious connections.

When his doorbell rang, he figured it was Aidan. When he opened the door, it turned out to be a beautiful redhead.