by Lila Ashe
“They denied you?”
“He said I should clean up first or risk giving myself a disease.”
“Did he bring one back for you?”
“You know he didn’t.”
Lexie said, “All right. He’s on my to-be-woken-at-one-a.m. list.”
Bonnie nodded in satisfaction. “That’s all I’m asking. Hey! No, wait. I’m his partner! If you wake him, you wake me.”
“Just enjoy his pain, my friend.” Lexie gave her patented grin and Bonnie was grateful all over again to have the job she did. There was nothing better than working with friends.
She’d just make Caz become one. Whether he liked it or not.
CHAPTER FOUR
Bonnie tried for the next few medical runs to make Caz laugh. The first was at one a.m., just as Lexie had promised (not that Lexie had anything to do with it, she knew that, but it was satisfying to see Caz’s sleep-creased face frowning in the dim light of the darkened apparatus bay). That was an easy run, a kid with asthma who was having difficulty breathing because she’d lost her inhaler. One hit of the nebulizer had stabilized her and they rolled code two to the hospital. Bonnie had told the little girl all her best jokes. (What’s brown and sticky? A stick!) When she’d run out, she’d raised her voice to say, “Hey, Caz, what’s your favorite joke?”
He’d ignored her.
“Hey! Buddy! You hear me?”
“I’m trying to drive here,” was all he said.
“Yeah,” she muttered with a cheeky grin at the girl. “Apparently he can only do one thing at a time. Me, I can take your blood pressure while I blow up this balloon.”
“That’s not a balloon!” the little girl said. “That’s a plastic glove!”
Bonnie pretended surprise. “Oh, my gosh! I thought it was a turkey! Look! Here are all his feathers… Let’s draw a face, huh? Here, use this pen.”
Caz didn’t even bother to glance over his shoulder at their awesome bird.
The next medical wasn’t until eleven the next morning. The call was an elderly male with chest pain, and it was Caz’s turn to be primary care while she drove but he remained tight-lipped through that run, too.
No, she took that back. He’d only been tight-lipped with her. Bonnie could admit that. Mr. Schmidt had been grumpy as sin when they got there, annoyed that his wife had called, annoyed that they were cluttering up his view of the television with their gear and bags.
Caz had kneeled next to the man’s armchair and said something Bonnie couldn’t hear. As if the sun had come from behind a cloud, Mr. Schmidt’s face had creased into a blindingly-bright smile. “She is,” he said to Caz. “She really is. Love of my life, that woman.”
Mrs. Schmidt snapped, “Then let them put that heart machine thingie on you already.”
“Fine, lovey.” Mr. Schmidt looked up at Caz. “Do what you gotta do, son. You’re right. I’d do anything for her.”
Later, on their way back to quarters, Bonnie asked, “What did you say to him?”
“Why do you whistle so much?”
Startled, Bonnie said, “What? I wasn’t whistling.”
“You whistle all the time. It’s like a nervous tic or something.”
Funny, at the station, Tox had mentioned it recently also. It had pleased her, actually. Her grandmother had been a whistler. Gramma Honor had whistled when she was happy, which was most of the time, and when she was sad. Almost tuneless, it had been the background music of Bonnie’s childhood. Sometimes she caught her mother doing it, too. “Huh. Was I doing it right now?”
“When you drive, you always whistle.” He paused. “It’s pretty annoying.”
“Get over it,” said Bonnie cheerfully, too pleased about by finding out she whistled like Gramma Honor to be bothered by his comment. “Back to my question. What did you say to him?”
“Who?” Caz was staring at his phone while she drove. He didn’t even glance at her.
“Mr. Schmidt. How did you get him to go along with what we wanted him to do?”
“Nothing.” He sounded put out to be asked.
Bonnie braked a little too hard at the red light at Bridge Road, and Caz jerked against his seatbelt. “You said something. Spill it.”
“No.”
Bonnie puffed out her breath. “Are you always this big a pain?”
He appeared to consider the question. Then he said, “Yes.”
“Awesome.”
“Are you always this talkative?”
Anger tingled at the ends of Bonnie’s fingertips. She wrapped her hands tighter around the wheel. “You bet I am.” She turned left into the shopping center.
“I thought we were heading to quarters.”
“We were. Now we’re getting ice cream.”
“I made a sandwich for lunch.”
Of course he had. It was probably the most boring sandwich ever made. “Let me guess,” she said. “Bologna. Dry.”
He frowned. “No.”
“Peanut butter and really old jelly, the kind that’s been on the door of your refrigerator for at least a year. On stale white bread.”
He frowned harder. “No.”
Bonnie smiled. At least a frown was a reaction. He was talking to her, no matter how minimally. “Liverwurst.”
Caz couldn’t hide the snort. “No.”
“I can guess all day if you don’t want to tell me.”
“I’m torn.”
“Between?”
“Between letting you guess all day and telling you the answer just to shut you up.”
“Oh, go on and tell me. It’ll tell me something about your character.”
He looked out the window as if there was something interesting to be seen instead of just the pink and white awning over the taffy store. “Ham and cheese.”
“On rye?”
“I have no idea.”
Honestly exasperated, Bonnie blew out a breath. “How can you not know? Did your mommy make it for you?”
“Nope. But I did make the same kind for my dad before I left the ranch.” The words came slowly from him, as if pulled from his throat one by one.
Pulling into the parking spot in front of the newly rebuilt Skip’s Ice Cream, Bonnie hit the brakes too hard again and Caz rocked forward and back.
“Do you mind? I’d like to avoid whiplash.”
“You live with your father?”
Caz gave her a look as black as new asphalt. “If you’re getting ice cream, go get it.”
“Oh, you’re getting ice cream, too.”
He crossed his arms. “I’ll wait here. Leave the keys.”
“So you can take off, leaving my sorry butt here?”
“I would never leave my partner.”
“At least you have a few morals. Now, get out of the rig, or I’m going to get you a triple scoop of spumoni.”
His scowl continued, but there was a glint of humor she’d never seen behind his blue eyes. “I love spumoni.”
“No one loves spumoni.”
Caz was finally beginning to reach for his door handle when the radio beeped. Lexie’s voice said, “Engine One, Medic One, medical emergency, 378 Ritchie Street.”
Bonnie sighed. “Saved by the bell.” She put the ambulance in reverse. She wanted desperately to know why he lived with his father. He didn’t seem like a family guy.
He seemed the opposite, more like he’d been raised by wolves.
CHAPTER FIVE
It wasn’t a secret Caswell Lloyd had taken the job because of Battalion Chief Jack Barger. Barger’s family had the adjoining property to the Lloyd’s, and their families had been friends for almost a hundred years if you went back far enough. There was a rumor that a Lloyd had prevented a Barger from getting shot in the back in a bar once, but since that Barger got shot in the front a little later, some of the rumor couldn’t quite be trusted.
But when it came down to trust, Caz knew one thing: he could trust the chief.
Until just about two minutes ago.
He
stared at Barger. Usually when Barger was joking, his mustache wiggled up and down—it had been his tell for years and years. The mustache was still now.
“We have to what?”
Barger winced. “Did I stutter?”
Next to Caz, Bonnie seemed shocked into silence.
Chief Barger pinched the bridge of his nose and shut his eyes for a moment. “I don’t want to run a charity fundraiser either, but the city manager has left me no wiggle room. The Darling Bay Alzheimer’s Support Initiative needs help keeping their doors open, and if we don’t do it, I don’t know who will. You of all people should understand that, Caz.”
Him? The chief was going to bring his father into this?
“But,” said Bonnie slowly. “There are charities who specialize in getting grants for that type of thing, aren’t there?”
Chief Barger humphed. “We are the charity this time.”
Bonnie clapped her hands against her thighs, as if she were calling Methyl, the station dog. “Okay, then! If we have to do this, we’ll do it right.”
Caz hated when the fire department was used as a wishing well. In his world, when people needed something, they went out and got it. They knew where to go to get it, and if they didn’t, they found out. When his father had gotten to the point of needing a full-time caretaker, Caz had found one for him. He’d taken a week of vacation to do the interviews. He’d met with references. He’d treated it like his full-time job because it was that important. And when he needed more money, when his father’s insurance refused to cover the meds he needed, Caz had changed jobs. Darling Bay was a sight smaller and a lot more provincial than his last agency, but they had funds. It was a tourist town. They paid their firefighters better than almost anyone else in the state.
Caz had left his cabin and his dream of finishing it, by hand the way he wanted to, behind him in his rearview mirror when he’d pointed the front of his truck at his new life.
That was the point. You did what you needed to do, you didn’t go looking for a handout. He could feel his lips forming around the words, but Bonnie, as if reading his mind, kicked his shoe.
He changed the words to simply, “Why us?” Then he felt another swift kick to his ankle. “Hey!”
“Oh, my gosh, did I kick you? So sorry about that,” Bonnie said sweetly. “Like I was saying, we’d be happy to help, Chief. What do you need?”
She was lying. No way did she want to do this any more than he did.
The chief nodded, apparently mollified. “The dinner has already been set up, and you should be grateful. Lexie and Coin got it donated from Caprese, and that was the hardest part. Hank and his girlfriend Samantha volunteered—” he looked over his glasses as if to imply they should be volunteering, too, “—to do the decorating of the apparatus bay. You’ll both be in charge of the after-dinner fundraising.” He pulled out a yellow legal pad. “We’ll need some kind of entertainment. We need to get our citizens inside the apparatus bay and keep them there until they write a check big enough to leave. We’ll have plenty of donated wine from Forget-Me-Not, so that’ll help.”
Bonnie looked at the paper. “So we have the venue and the drinks—we just need party games. Easy,” she said brightly. “We’ve got this.”
“But why—” Caz started.
Bonnie nudged his shoulder with hers. “Come on, buddy.”
He wasn’t her buddy. In truth, the chief was his only friend at the department. “Why us?”
Chief Barger leaned back, as if he’d been waiting for this. He flipped a yellow mechanical pencil from hand to hand. “You’re the newest.”
“I am,” said Caz. “But she’s not.”
“Unluckily for her in this matter, you’re her partner.”
“But—”
“And I’ve heard that you two have been fighting.”
Fighting? Fighting was when you had to haul a three hundred fifty pound man high on meth off his girlfriend who already had a broken nose. What he and Bonnie had been doing was squabbling, that was all. Nothing more. “Nah,” Caz said.
“Fighting?” Bonnie shot him a look like she thought he’d ratted them out. “Really?”
“We’re good, boss.” The sooner they got out of here the sooner he could go back to the dayroom and work on the tiny horse he was whittling out of a scrap piece of oak.
“Best friends,” said Bonnie. “Couldn’t be closer.”
Completely unbidden, an image of Bonnie being closer to him filled Caz’s mind. Her lips, close to his. The scent of her—he caught it from here, light and flowery and somehow complex—filling his senses. His hand cupping her chin… The sudden image was unexpected and unwelcome and entirely way too hot. “Yep,” he said, almost forgetting what he was agreeing to.
“You haven’t been fighting over who’s primary on calls?”
“Sure,” said Bonnie easily. “Everyone argues over that.”
“It’s not really arguing,” said Caz, even though it had gotten heated more than once already. The problem was that she thought she was better at patient care than he was. Just because he didn’t want to talk to her (or any of the rest of the crew at the station, for that matter) didn’t mean that he didn’t want to talk to patients. He was good at it—he knew that. And she was a good driver. It was a match made in paramedic heaven.
Chief Barger leaned back in his chair and stared. “I heard you. You were shouting at each other like four-year-olds angry about whose turn it was to play with the toy truck.”
Bonnie cleared her throat. Caz shifted uncomfortably in his chair.
They had, actually, been shouting at each other. They’d gotten a rash of crap about it later from the guys when they came back to quarters, too. Tox had said they sounded like cats fighting and Hank had said he’d almost called the cops to separate them. Caz had ignored them and Bonnie had said something funny that had defused the tension, but it had been nothing but embarrassing.
“Most partners take turns,” said the chief. “Why the heck can’t you just do that?”
They did. For the most part. The argument he’d overheard had been the first call of the last tour. Caz thought he should be primary because she’d been primary on the last call of their previous shift, and she’d thought they’d established that she was primary on the first call of a new shift.
“It was stupid of us,” said Caz. “We apologize.”
Bonnie nodded. “Now we roshambo for it. We’re very sorry.”
Chief Barger’s mustache twitched. “You know what pisses me off the most about this?”
Caz could imagine, but he wasn’t going to volunteer extra information.
“Let me tell you,” the chief went on. “Let me illuminate you. You wasted time. Have I ever told you how I feel about wasted time in this department?”
Caz had only been a member of the department for a few months and he’d heard it more than a couple of times already. But you couldn’t tell Jack that.
“Wasted time means you’re killing someone.”
Caz and Bonnie met eyes. Her lips were pulled in as if she were putting on lipstick, her brown eyes wide. He could feel the muscle in his forehead jump, the one that always twitched when he clenched his teeth.
The chief put both hands flat on the table in front of him. “You’re in my apparatus bay yelling at each other? Every second you’re doing that after dispatch is a second you’re sending someone into an early grave. Seconds mean lives saved. You think that little boy at the bottom of the pool cares which one of you is primary? You think the old guy who just coded gives a crap who’s a better driver? Your egos are the only things you’re saving when you’re fighting like an old married couple. There’s no way I’m going to tolerate that in my house. You hear me?”
A man with less experience might mention that on the day in question they’d been dispatched to a thirty-year-old who’d tripped and sprained her ankle in front of her own house. No one had been dying. Caz caught Bonnie’s eye again. Something flipped low in his stomach. He�
��d call it relief that she wasn’t going to argue with the chief, either. That wasn’t what it was, though. It was something more primal than just simple relief.
“We hear you, Chief,” said Caz simply.
“Totally,” said Bonnie. “We’re very sorry. It won’t happen again.” She blinked and Caz had to tear his eyes from her mouth, which was puckered into something that was probably concern but actually looked highly kissable, which wasn’t an appropriate thought to have about his partner, ever, especially not at that moment.
Chief Barger nodded and looked satisfied. “Good. Raise the money they need, or we’ll have this same conversation at a louder volume next time. Now get out of my office.”
CHAPTER SIX
“Don’t put that there, honey.” Bonnie’s mother Marge flapped her hands. She took the fat white candle out of Bonnie’s hands and set it on a low glass table. “Oh, sugar, you really are a bull in a china shop, aren’t you?”
Bonnie couldn’t count the number of times she’d heard that in her life. Her mother owned the china shop (okay, it was an antique shop, Daring Trinkets, sandwiched between the pizza shop and the bike rental place), and Bonnie had always been the bull. “I just wanted to help…I thought it would look nice on that…what do you call it? The étagère.” She pointed at the metal shelf next to the register.
“I know you thought that, honey, but don’t you see that it’s full of other white things?”
Bonnie had, actually, seen exactly that. That’s why she’d thought the candle would fit in. “Yeah.”
“That candle would pull the focus away from the orb, don’t you see that? Go sit, sweetie. I’ll handle this customer and then make you a cup of coffee. You look exhausted.”
The orb. What was an orb? That round fountain thing? Who needed an orb? It wasn’t even an antique—most of the stuff in here wasn’t. Most of it was crap from China, home decorating stuff her mother picked up in San Francisco on her mega stock sprees. And the tourists loved it. All of it. The more crap her mother piled into the store, the more flew out on the wings of dollar bills. Older men with sad eyes and lots of money bought the chairs some general (might have) sat in, and young women with shining eyes and new, flashy rings bought the knickknacks. Bonnie loved to sit in the plush red armchair at the back of the shop and watch her mother work. Nobody in town could beat Marge at the hard upsell. Oh, isn’t this teacup sweet? It’s too bad it’s just a single cup. Did you see the Royal Halsey tea set on this shelf here? Isn’t it gorgeous? Totally intact. I know you only want the one cup, but I just have to tell you a story about when my mother gave me my first tea party on the back lawn of her house. It started to rain, and instead of whisking me and my stuffed animals indoors, she held three umbrellas over our heads as I continued my party… that set looked so much like this one. Oh, it just makes me miss her even more. All right, let me ring up that poor little orphan teacup for you.
