by J. H. Croix
“Thank you,” I said, glancing up and catching Jessie’s eyes. He turned, leaning his hips against the counter with one hand hooked in the pocket of his jeans. Sweet hell. All that man had to do was exist, and he was sexy.
I tried to kick the thoughts away, but my pulse didn’t listen, speeding up again when his eyes caught mine. “No problem. Waffle’s a sweetheart. She found your mom before she knew her this time, so if your mom wanders off again, just give me a call. I’m not always around, but if I am, I’m happy to help.”
Emotion abruptly welled inside, tears pressing at the backs of my eyes. The ridiculousness of my life hit me every so often. I felt so alone most of the time. Lately, I felt completely out of sorts. By nature, I was a cheerful person. But cheer was hard to come by these days. The weight of trying to come to terms with my mother’s slow slide into dementia was more painful than I could have imagined. Layered onto that everything I’d been through with my family in the last few years, and Jesse’s simple offer meant more than he could imagine, and I didn’t quite know how to take it.
I planned to take Penny’s warm, but pointed advice that I needed to find some help during the days for my mother. Yet, just the thought that there was someone to call lifted a weight from me. However, the last thing I wanted was to start crying in front of him. Again. Because that would be ridiculous. He’d already found me crying once.
So I swallowed through the emotion clogging my throat, hoping my tears didn’t show in my eyes. “Thank you. It helps now that I’m starting to get to know a few people around town. Penny’s given me some suggestions of people who could come watch her during the day, and I’m going to look into that. Emily’s great at helping out after school, but I don’t like her being responsible for it. It’s too much. She’s only fifteen.”
Jesse nodded slowly. “Maybe so. But she seems to have a lot of patience for her grandmother. As teenagers go, she could be a lot less friendly about it,” he said with a little chuckle.
“You familiar with teenagers?”
Jesse’s eyes crinkled at the corners with his smile. “Oh yeah. My brother has a daughter who’s fifteen too. Wouldn’t be surprised if they’re in the same grade together. Anyway, let’s just say she might not have as much patience with our mother as Emily does with yours. She’s a good kid, but she’s got other things on her mind. Usually it’s her latest boyfriend.”
I had to bite my lip to keep from begging him to let me introduce Em to his niece. She’d been grumping about making friends here ever since we moved. She was a sweet kid, but she had withdrawn ever since her mom died. Back in Boston, she’d had a small circle of friends, but she’d never been the most outgoing girl. Her mom’s death had hit her hard, and she’d withdrawn even further. In the midst of the aftermath, she’d started dating a boy who was dabbling in drugs and subsequently got expelled from school for having drugs on school grounds. Though I didn’t believe Em had gotten tangled up in that, it had shown me how vulnerable she was to sliding into the wrong crowd.
Another downside I hadn’t considered moving to Willow Brook was how it might feel for a teenager to start over in a small community like this. But then I hadn’t been thinking clearly for too damned long.
I shut my mind off of the what if’s. No sense in rehashing a decision that had already been made. I met Jesse’s smile with one of my own.
“I know. She’s good with her. Em’s not the most typical teen these days. Except when she’s annoyed with me, that is.”
Jesse winked and chuckled, turning when my mother said his name. I forced myself to look away as he stepped over to her, responding to whatever she said.
It was late enough, I needed to get to bed and make sure my mom was settled for the night. Jesse said his goodbyes, and I watched from the windows as he disappeared into the trees with Waffle jogging at his sides.
Chapter Six
Charlie
Later that night, I lay in bed staring at the ceiling. Whoever had rented this home before us had left constellations on the ceiling with glow in the dark paint. Every night, I looked up at a replica of the starlit sky outside the windows. Smack in the middle of the constellations was a skylight where you could see the Little Dipper. Whoever had painted the ceiling had an eye for detail. After I figured out what they’d done, I’d taken a picture one night in the darkness and compared it to the stars outside. They’d recreated the entire sky around the constellation showing through the skylight.
I wondered if Jesse would know who had painted it. The moment my thoughts spun to him, heat bloomed through me. I couldn’t shake the memory of the way his lips felt against mine. I’d have thought a rather mundane dinner with my mother asking the same questions over and over, conversation repeated on a loop, would’ve snuffed out any desire flickering between Jesse and I.
But no. Oh no.
It wasn’t as if I’d been lusting after Jesse during dinner. Not at all. It was simply that watching him with my mother and with Emily and his sweet dog Waffle had only complicated matters. He wasn’t the man I’d expected. At all.
Before I’d known him as a rather irritable, sexy-as-hell hotshot firefighter. Now I also knew him to be a rather kind, funny man. Sleep was hard to come by. My mind kept flashing back to his tongue swiping across my lips and delving inside. I shifted my legs restlessly, the moisture between my thighs shocking me. Fantasy had been far from my thoughts. But right now, there was no sleep to be had, not with Jesse hot on my brain, and my body humming with need.
I could feel my nipples puckering against my thin T-shirt, and I finally gave in, sliding my hand between my thighs into the slick, wet heat there. In a matter of seconds, my channel clenched around my fingers and sparks of pleasure scattered through me.
I finally fell asleep, only to wake the following morning with Jesse dancing through my thoughts. Making a decision that morning as soon as I got to the office, I told Sandy to switch Jesse over to Dr. Johnson and not to schedule any further appointments for him with me. I didn’t care that it was a small town, and that I’d only seen him for nothing more than a dislocated shoulder. It didn’t feel right to climax on my own hand with thoughts of him, knowing that I might see him again as a patient.
Sandy looked askance at me, but she did as I asked. Just when I knew she was going to ask why, the office phone rang. Saved by the phone, I hurried off.
Later, after a very busy day, I sank into the chair in my office with a sigh. Closing my eyes, I leaned my head back for a few moments. When I’d gone to medical school, I had originally intended to specialize in something. Yet, my father passed away from complications from a stroke and my sister died after a battle with pancreatic cancer.
My reserves had been deleted, and I hadn’t had it in me to take more than the three years of residency required for family medicine. Between my mother’s grief, my own, and Emily’s, my last year of residency had been challenging. That didn’t even take into account the two years before that after my sister’s diagnosis. I’d been so muddled, the idea of moving to Alaska had seemed like a lifeline.
By accident, I’d discovered my default choice of family medicine was the best choice for me. I was never bored, and the variety in my daily work made it fun. Take today. My day had started seeing an elderly woman for a cough that she couldn’t shake before I’d moved on to a harried mother who got a paperclip stuck in her thigh when her toddler accidentally stabbed her with it. She’d laughed with me about it. There were a few others in the mix, and then my day ended with a cheerful little boy who had broken his big toe when he thought he could kick the stairs away.
It was just his toe, but a broken big toe could be painful. He’d been quite the good sport about it. His mother had simply laughed and shaken her head.
Aside from the various stressors that came with moving to Alaska, I was growing to love it here — the way everybody treated me as if I would become a friend even if I wasn’t yet, the way I felt as I was getting to know the town itself the more time I spent h
ere.
Opening my eyes, I spun in my chair to look out the windows. You couldn’t beat the view here. Dr. Johnson’s office was in downtown Willow Brook. The term downtown here was quite different from downtown Boston, or say, any other city. His office was on a side street off of Main Street. Like much of downtown, it offered a view of Swan Lake. Swan Lake was smack in the middle of Willow Brook. It was a large, sprawling lake with lodges circling most of it and wilderness on the far side.
With it being early spring, the days were getting longer. I was finding the shift from winter into spring here interesting. I was accustomed to winter. Boston certainly had its share of winter, but the darkness didn’t last long there. Here in Alaska, once the days started to become longer, there was a sense of quickening in the air, a burgeoning sense of growth.
Today was one of my late days at the office. Dr. Johnson kept the clinic open late two days a week to catch all of the patients who couldn’t make it during the day. The sun was starting to set, the sky streaked with scarlet and violet, the colors shimmering on the lake. I was told that the Trumpeter swans, the namesake for the lake, would be returning for the spring soon.
Despite my mother’s flagging memory, which was skidding sideways more and more every day it seemed, she loved to research things. She always had. She wasn’t much of a fan of the Internet, but Emily had bought her a brand new set of bird books with her birthday money. When Emily had done that, I had simply slipped more back into her bank account.
I was so busy juggling too many balls, there was always something to drop. After we had moved here, I should’ve thought right away that Mom needed a new set of encyclopedias, but I hadn’t. Em, bless her big heart, had.
Anyway, Mom had been flipping through her books, looking up all the birds in Alaska, so she’d told me the swans would be returning for the summer soon. She’d also been chatting about some Bird Fest in a town several hours south of us, Diamond Creek. Apparently, she and my father had taken me to the first one the town had ever held the same year we moved away.
I reminded myself to see if we could go there for a day or so. I considered that perhaps we should find a rental with a view of the lake because she’d love that. I idly wondered if Jesse’s place had a view of the lake. As the crow flew, the lake was only a few miles from our house, but the trees obscured its view.
The moment Jesse strolled into my thoughts, my mind flashed to last night and then again to that crazy kiss. With a mental shake, I stood from my desk, just as Rachel popped her head around my door.
“Hey,” she said with a smile, her ponytail swinging. Closing the door behind her, she stepped inside and leaned her hip on one of the chairs across from my desk. I didn’t have many friends here. Like Emily, I was starting from scratch. But Rachel had become a fast one, which was great. Seeing as I spent most of my workdays with her, it was convenient we got along so well. Another bonus was she seemed to know everyone in town because she’d grown up here.
“Were you going to tell me something?” she asked
Leaning my hip against my desk, I picked up a pen, idly flipping it back and forth between my fingers. “Huh?”
She arched a brow, her lips curling in a sly smile. “Sandy mentioned that you asked to have Jesse Franklin switched over to Dr. Johnson. What’s that about?”
My cheeks heated, and I cursed my fair skin. Staring at her for a long moment, I finally shrugged. “Well, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but he found my mom yesterday afternoon.”
Rachel nodded. “Uh-huh. I know. Holly mentioned that he could barely keep his eyes off of you at the hospital.”
Fuck, fuck, fuck. Holly and Rachel were good friends. Downside to small towns was there was no such thing as a secret around here. I chewed on the inside of my cheek, considering whether to tell her about my rather startling and unexpected kiss in the hospital yesterday. Deciding against it quickly, I held her gaze and sort of explained.
“He’s my neighbor, and there might be a little something there. Small town or not, it just feels weird to keep him as my patient. Dr. Johnson can handle it, and it’s not like it’s anything major. It’s just his shoulder.”
“Oh, I think it’s great,” Rachel declared firmly.
“What’s great?”
“You’re totally uptight. You were freaked out just because he was eyeing your ass the other day. I’m all about you getting that obstacle out of the way. Jesse Franklin is totally hot, and I’m not the only one who thinks he’s got the hots for you. Holly does too. I think you should be all over that. He’s sex-on-a-stick hot.”
Rachel’s grin stretched wider. I rolled my eyes, trying to keep a level head. I didn’t need to get all excited over a man. Any man. But Jesse was so damned tempting. “You know, my life doesn’t exactly leave a lot of room for romance.”
“Oh, romance isn’t what I’m talking about. You need to get laid.”
At that, she spun out of the room, her laugh trailing behind her.
Chapter Seven
Jesse
I stood beside the ambulance, waiting with an elderly woman sitting in the back. Dana Halloran, one of our EMT’s and a friend, was checking her lungs and having her breathe into a respirator. Dana gave me a thumbs up, and I nodded, turning away. Our crew had been called to a fire just outside of town. We weren’t really into fire season yet, but there was always something.
This elderly woman who lived alone had accidentally set her woodstove pipe on fire. Her small cabin was just isolated enough that we hadn’t gotten the call right away, and the home was destroyed. A neighbor had spotted the smoke and flames and called us. Spinning around, I scanned the smoldering remains of the home. The roof was caving in and only two walls were left standing. Ward, our crew superintendent was conferring with Caleb, the other foreman for the crew along with me.
I’d mostly been helping on the sidelines since I had another few days to get cleared for full duty. Striding over to meet them, I checked in. “What’s the plan?”
Ward caught my eyes. “Well, the fire’s out. Obviously,” he said with a sigh. “I’m going to leave half the crew here with hoses to monitor until it’s completely cool. You wanna stay or go?”
Before I could answer, Caleb did. “I’ll stay. Jesse stayed late the other night.”
Our crew was a solid group. I used to share foreman duties with Susannah, Ward’s wife. But she switched over to the local crew from our hotshot crew after she got pregnant. Our crew rotated duties for local calls as well. Caleb had fit in seamlessly. It helped that he’d been born and raised in Willow Brook. He was as solid as they came, a good friend, and he never hesitated to step up.
“Sounds like a plan,” I replied. “Looks like Hazel will be fine,” I said, referring to the elderly woman who was with Dana.
At Caleb’s nod, I turned and started to walk away when Ward called my name. “Yeah?” I asked, glancing back over my shoulder.
“Carrie Dodge called a few minutes ago. Herman’s back up in the tree again. If you don’t mind swinging by on your way home, that would be great,” Ward explained.
With a chuckle, I gave him a thumbs up. “On it.”
Carrie was known to all of the firefighters based in Willow Brook. The station served as a base for most of Alaska with two hotshot crews here, along with the local crew. Most of our time during fire season was spent responding to calls wherever we were needed, which often meant weeks in the wilderness. I loved the work, but it was hard and grueling at times.
Carrie often gave us a laugh. Her cat Herman liked to climb trees. A lot. She used to use her late husband’s excavator to get Herman out of his jams by herself. Until she and the excavator ended up in a ditch once. The station now “owned” her excavator, but we left it on her property. We left it there for the sole purpose of these calls.
As I drove home, the sun was starting to set in the distance. Denali stood tall above the landscape, its hulking form dark against the orange and gold sky. It didn’t matter that I’d been b
orn and raised in Alaska, I never tired of the views. I’d spent most of my childhood in the Fairbanks area, but my family moved to Willow Brook right after I graduated from high school. When a position opened up on one of the crews here, I jumped on it. Turning my truck onto the road toward Carrie’s place, Swan Lake shimmered in the distance, the watercolor sky reflected on its surface. I imagined Herman might enjoy the view from whatever tree he happened to be perched in this evening.
Within minutes, I’d arrived at Carrie’s place. She waved from the porch as I climbed in the excavator. Herman was in one of his preferred trees, high in the branches. As soon as the excavator bucket was close enough, he hopped right into it.
In short order, I carried him to Carrie on the porch while he rubbed his chin on my shoulder. “Here’s your boy,” I said, handing him over.
Carrie smiled and handed me an oatmeal raisin cookie, my favorite. Carrie knew how to bribe us, not that it was necessary.
“Thank you, Jesse.”
“Anytime, Carrie. All you have to do is call.”
She flashed a grin and immediately started fussing over Herman. With a wave, I left. Once I turned toward the station, my mind spun instantly to Charlie’s mother. Unlike the woman we’d helped out of her home today, Olive didn’t live alone. She had Charlie and Emily to take care of her.
I couldn’t think of Olive without thinking of Charlie. After I’d left the other night, I’d puzzled over my reaction to her. Any desire I had for her should’ve been snuffed out once I had a clear picture of her life. Far from it. I had no fucking clue what to think about that. I worried she had too much to take care of on her own, and I wanted to help however I could.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t a helpful guy. Hell, I was a hotshot firefighter. Yet, the idea of helping didn’t usually get all tangled up in the crazy, burning need I felt for Charlie. I wasn’t much for pondering the idea of a relationship. In fact, I was pretty easy come, easy go when it came to dating.
