by Lila Ashe
Bonnie looked at him gratefully, her eyes wide with relief. A man would ride a horse a long way to get a gorgeous blonde to look at him that way, Caz realized. He might even ride a bike to see her, a bike that hadn’t been ridden since he was a seventeen-year-old with nothing better to do than mess around on bikes all day.
“Nice try,” said Lexie. “This is my show, and you two will be the grand prize.”
Caz scrambled to think of something that would dissuade her. “What about the chief? Barger would be great up there. What if we dare him to shave off that mustache?”
Lexie gave him a look of horror. “We don’t want to see what he’s got under there. No. He’ll have to do something else for a dare. He is going to be our opener, though.”
Bonnie said, “You think you can make him do that?”
“Please. This is dispatch. We tell all y’all what to do. Speaking of which, I need Truth or Dare posters. A bunch of them. Make them big.” The 911 line rang, loud and jarring. Lexie answered, looked at the address, and waggled her fingers at them, shooing them out.
“Must be ours,” said Bonnie, pushing her way into the hall.
Caz followed her jog to the app bay, unable to keep his eyes off the way her sweet little rear swayed. In the rig, he got in the driver’s seat without discussion. He hit the lights and pulled out, headed to the accident Lexie had just dispatched them on. “So, let me get this straight, Mad,” he said. “We’re being put on poster duty?”
In his peripheral vision, he could see Bonnie smile. “I believe we just got put on that, yes.”
“I haven’t made a poster since…” He took a sharp turn onto 8th. “Since high school.”
“What was the poster for?”
“What?” He whooped the siren. “I don’t remember.”
“Yes, you do.” She had not an ounce of doubt in her voice.
Caz cleared his throat. “Cheer club.”
“Cheer club? You mean for the cheerleaders?”
“It was a club. My girlfriend made me.”
“She made you!”
“I’m telling you, she was mean.”
Bonnie laughed.
“Mean like a snake,” Caz went on, easing carefully around the Darling Bay Trolley (often full of day trippers who didn’t take the time to look before stepping into traffic on their way to the beach). Then he hit the gas again. “Mean like a mama bear who’s lost her cub. She said use the puff-paint, I used the puff-paint.”
Bonnie’s laugh was like alcohol in his blood. He probably shouldn’t even be driving. He was over the limit.
“I like you so much better like this,” she said, still laughing. “I like you talking. You can be fun.”
It sobered him quickly. Kiss or no kiss, he was here to get the job done. He couldn’t forget that. He wasn’t there to have fun. His mother had been one for having fun, all the time, until she’d left. Fun was a way of lying to yourself, and Caz didn’t lie.
“Numbers?” he asked.
Bonnie peered at the computer screen, always hard to read in daylight. “861. Should be that red house, right there.”
Caz braked too hard. He wasn’t here to be fun. Not for her or for anyone else. The sooner he remembered that and got over this little infatuation or whatever it was, the better off he’d be.
“Caz, I didn’t mean…”
He opened the door and got out, shutting it behind him, closing it on whatever she had to say.
CHAPTER TWELVE
They ran four more calls before sunset. And no matter what she said, Bonnie couldn’t get Caz to open up again.
They’d had a moment.
No, not that moment—not the kiss at Bud’s Bar—even though that was something she couldn’t stop thinking about. And while the kiss was a highly interesting thing to think about, she knew it wasn’t the most important. That had been in the rig, when Caz had made her laugh. It was a small thing, but it was something she and Caz hadn’t had yet together. That camaraderie. It’s what made the department special. Bonnie’s ex-partners were her best friends. Riding the rig together was how you got to really know someone. You saw them save a life, and then you saw them lose someone—you saw them hold an old woman’s hand as they told her her husband wasn’t going to make it, and you saw them swallow back tears. And then, in the rig, you laughed about the roller-skating tourist who had just eaten it when he tried to skate past the boardwalk onto the sand. That’s what partners were for.
It was what she hadn’t found in Caz. Not until earlier today. Then he’d gone all prickly again, and while she guessed he would say it was her fault, she wouldn’t buy that. She hadn’t done anything except tell him she liked him more when he was laughing.
He’d been surly ever since. Such a man move.
The night went much the same way—they missed dinner for a call where a woman burned her left pinky while making hard-boiled eggs and even though she had a Mercedes in the driveway and a husband on the couch watching the game, she’d wanted a ride to the hospital, and she’d complained the whole way that they wouldn’t put their siren on. When they got back to the station, Tox’s dog Methyl had grabbed the ribs the engine guys had left out for them, and she’d eaten every single one, bones and all. Tox was surly with Hank and Coin, and Lexie hadn’t slept on her nap and was grumpy on the radio.
Everyone seemed to be in a bad mood, not just Bonnie. Bed was the best place for her. She hoped she got to stay there.
But in bed, Bonnie had never been so aware of how close Caz’s body was to hers, separated as they were by only a thin partition cubicle wall, open at the top. Unlike some of her other coworkers, he was normally quiet once he was in bed. Guy Mazanti snored like a semi-truck climbing a steep hill, all wheezes and groans. Hank was a fish-flopper, flipping to one side, then flopping to the next seconds later. Tox didn’t snore but breathed so deeply he seemed to suck up all the air in the dorm and then expel it in a huge sigh.
Caz, though, was always quiet. It made her nervous. There was usually a clank of his belt buckle as he took off his uniform pants and changed into his shorts, and then a squeak as he sat on the edge the bed. That was it. Nothing more. He didn’t even snore.
Tonight Bonnie hadn’t even realized she was waiting for him until she glanced at her watch for the tenth time. It was after midnight, and she still hadn’t heard the tell-tale squeak of his bed.
He was probably somewhere in the station, doing something. It seemed like he always had something in his hands—if it wasn’t work related, it was his whittling. Some of the older guys were threatened by his energy, she knew. The old-timers, the ones retiring within the next couple of years, the ones who had no motivation to promote to a higher rank—they were the ones threatened by men like Caz. Caz showed them that there was always something to be done around the firehouse. Even if they hadn’t run a call in twenty-hours, the ambulance could always stand some tidying if not a full wash down. There was always laundry. There was always, always stainless steel to polish. Old-school guys grumbled from their recliners about new bucks trying to impress the brass.
Bonnie knew, though, that Caz wasn’t trying to impress anyone. That should have been obvious to anyone who met him. He might be newish to their department, but not to the fire service itself. He was a man who liked to be busy.
But he usually went to bed at a normal time. It was weird. She kind of…missed him, missed knowing that inches away from her skin, on the other side of the particle board, he slept.
She didn’t miss him enough to get up and look for him, though. No way. That would just be…
Bonnie rolled over and whacked her knee on the wall. It was a good thing he wasn’t in bed or she would have just startled him right out of it. Shutting her eyes tight, she told herself to sleep. Five minutes later, she was still telling herself the same thing. Twenty minutes later, she gave up. What if he was actually hurt somewhere in the station?
Her eyes flew open and she stared into the darkness.
Ridicul
ous. Thirty-four-year-olds didn’t usually die randomly of heart attacks or sudden strokes.
But heck. It did happen. Every once in a very great while, a young guy would trip and fall down, dead. That forty-year-old man the other day, for example. Healthy except for his epilepsy, dead a week before his wedding.
It happened.
Caz could be out in the apparatus bay right now, struggling to breathe, in anaphylactic shock from some brand new allergy, literally dying for someone to save him.
It was probably her moral duty to check.
Putting on her slippers, she sneaked through her curtain without moving it, avoiding the screech of the curtain rings.
The kitchen was dark and still smelled of the ribs Methyl had stolen. No Caz. The dayroom was deserted. She snapped off the television which was playing infomercials on mute to the empty room. She didn’t actually go into the men’s bathroom—some things should stay private—but she could tell by the crack at the door that the lights were out inside. The weight room was dark. The cardio room was empty. The app bay was her next stop, but after checking each rig she knew he wasn’t there, either.
Where was he? Firefighters and paramedics didn’t get to go home on a bad day. You couldn’t just leave if you came down with the flu—you had to get coverage before you could leave or you left your whole crew a body short. An engine couldn’t go to a fire with two people on board; an ambulance didn’t roll with just one person.
You didn’t just get to leave the firehouse.
So he was somewhere.
The only two places she hadn’t checked were the dispatcher’s dorm (no firefighter would dare, even Coin, who shared Lexie’s bed when they weren’t at work) and the outdoor patio where they kept the grill.
And he was there, on the patio. Sitting on an old wooden chair, with his legs kicked up onto the stump of the palm tree they’d cut down the year before when it got struck by lightning, Caz was asleep. At his feet were curled shavings of wood, resting on top of the newspaper he always laid down when he whittled. In his lap was a half-formed wolf—the head and front paws were startlingly clear, the back haunches still uncarved. Caz’s cheek was propped on one arm. He looked like someone in a hospital waiting room. She’d seen that look a million times before. Someone too worried to go home and lie down, but too bone-tired to stay awake.
What was Caz Lloyd so worried about?
And geez, wasn’t he cold? Bonnie wrapped her arms around herself. It had been a gorgeous, barbecue kind of day, yes, but with night, the air had gone cold again. Without the usual layer of fog for insulation, it was downright chilly outside.
She should leave him.
He was out here for a reason, because he didn’t want to sleep inside. Maybe he didn’t want to sleep next to her.
She turned to go back in.
“Sorry I’m not cracking jokes, Mad.”
Bonnie jumped. “I didn’t want to wake you.”
He shrugged. The dark circles under his eyes were deepened by the yellow light streaming over Bonnie’s shoulder. “But then you did.”
Her temper frayed at its tired edges. “What’s your problem?”
Caz shoved his hand through his hair and it stood up even more angrily than it had been. “Why does everyone in this department ask me that?”
Bonnie stepped forward—ignoring the crackle of electricity that jumped between them—and lowered her voice. There were no windows facing the patio, but the back door to the chief’s dorm was just around the corner, and she didn’t want Barger to hear them arguing. Again. “Because you’re a pain in the ass.”
“Excuse me?”
The words had been pent up too long. “You act like you’re so much better than the rest of us. You just can’t come down to our level, can you?”
“Wait—”
“No, you wait. I’m sorry that maybe the move to this department isn’t everything you wanted it to be.”
“It’s—”
“But you’re here. Like my mother would say, ‘You made this bed, now you have to eat crackers in it.’ ”
“What?”
“And you’ve got the ranch and your other job there, and I strongly suspect the reason you live with your dad is because you have to take care of him.”
He stared, his blue eyes darkening to a bruised purple.
“But when you’re here, be here. You’ve got nowhere else to be when you’re at work. You do such a great job with patients. I’ve seen it. If you could just…be nice to your coworkers. What makes you so much better than us that you can’t sit and enjoy a meal with us? Why won’t you laugh when Guy farts doing that beer commercial dance? Why don’t you ask us how our weekends were?”
Caz unfolded from his chair, standing to his full height. Bonnie lost her breath—he was so tall and suddenly so close. But she went on. “Why can’t you just try to fit in? Everyone wants to like you. They have no reason not to, or at least they didn’t when you started here. You’re making enemies now, and I hate that. This is a family.”
“I don’t need family. I’ve had—” He looked down at the carving still in his hands. “You can go on being the popular one, the one saying what everyone else wants to hear even when it’s not the truth.”
Bonnie was so close to him that she could feel the heat from his body, could smell the fresh wood scent he always seemed to carry, even when he wasn’t actively whittling. She could feel the desire to touch him in the very ends of her fingertips, and it didn’t make sense—nothing made sense when he was right there, right in front of her. Her anger dissipated, leaving her with nothing but a desire she couldn’t—and didn’t dare—name.
“Why are you out here?” His voice rumbled in his chest.
“I was looking for you,” said Bonnie. He was too near, too close. If she took half a step forward… No, she should back up. She should run away.
But Bonnie didn’t run away from much. She continued, “I was worried.”
That made him smile. Her worry was funny, apparently. “Worried I’d fallen asleep in an inappropriate place?”
Unforgivably, the thought of her own bed popped into her mind. That would be an inappropriate place to sleep. “No…”
Slowly, Caz set the half-carved wolf on the table and lifted his hand, touching the side of her cheek. “Worried that I’d forgotten to stay here? That I’d gone home?”
“Maybe something like that.”
His thumb rubbed softly against her jawline. “I shouldn’t do this,” he said, his voice even lower. Darker.
“No,” she agreed. But her own hand lifted and pressed his to her cheek. “You shouldn’t.”
Their eyes, already locked, heated. In that second, Bonnie could see reflected on his face the way she felt—the intensity of her longing swept through her.
She wanted him.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Bonnie couldn’t tell who moved first, but the kiss was sudden—explosive—and she lost her breath like she’d fallen out of a tree onto her back. She gasped against his mouth and he made a low groan in his throat. As his tongue plundered hers, as she tasted him, her senses filled with the headiness of the kiss. Caz’s arms went around her and his hands went low, cupping her buttocks, pulling her tightly against him. He was hard against her—she could feel exactly what she was doing to him. His lips teased and bit, tugging at hers. The harder she kissed him, the closer her got to her. The more strongly he pulled her against his body, the more she pressed herself against him. She wished she could feel more of his skin, more of his body… More.
“Stupid clothes,” he muttered.
“I hate them,” she agreed, and then his mouth took hers again. Caz bit her bottom lip and then sucked it sweetly as if to make up for it. She dug her short fingernails into the ridge of muscle at the top of his deltoid, and his quick intake of breath didn’t stop her from digging in harder.
The lower half of Bonnie’s body seemed to be on fire. If she’d pulled away from him and seen that her uniform shorts w
ere smoking, she wouldn’t have been surprised.
Caz pulled away an inch and locked his gaze with hers again. His eyes were even darker now, indigo and midnight. “I want you,” he said.
Common sense, Bonnie counseled herself. Common sense. She knew she had some. She wasn’t exactly sure where it was right now, but she was known for it. Bonnie kept a cool head in the most difficult of settings. That’s what she was good at.
Not one single part of her was cool right now.
Not one.
He said it again, “I want you, Bonnie.”
The words, all by themselves, had a devastating effect on her. The few remaining muscles in her body which hadn’t been trembling started to shake. She wanted to sit, to slip to the ground, but his arms were still around her, and the hard rigidity of his body, of his…of all of him steadied her.
“I want you, too,” she said.
“But we can’t,” Caz said.
Disappointment was a sharp blade that cut into her skin, even though she knew he was right. She groaned and drove her hips against his. “Good grief. What have we been doing then?”
Was that a smile that played at the edges of his lips? Sure enough, his eyes warmed, too, the indigo melting to ultramarine. “I mean we can’t do anything here,” he said.
“What good does having a bed at work do me?” she managed to say through the tightness in her throat. Half of her was kidding, of course. The other half (the lower half) was frighteningly serious.
“A date,” he said, and then touched his lips to the sensitive part of her neck just below her earlobe.
“A date?”
“Like the last one. Only better.”
She shivered. “Better?”
“Just you. Just me. Dinner. My house.”
His broad arm wrapped around her and pulled her harder against him, leaving no doubt in her mind that neither of them were thinking about dinner at his house.
“Okay then.”
“Bed.”
“What?” Bonnie’s thoughts were muddled, her brain melted. “No, I agree, not here…”
“We both still have to sleep.” His voice was softer now. Sweet. “We go back to our beds.”
