Heat (The Firefighters of Darling Bay Book 4) Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Praise

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  About the Author

  Other Amazon Books by Rachael

  Heat

  The Firefighters of Darling Bay 4

  By

  Rachael Herron

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Heat / Rachael Herron. -- 2nd ed.

  HGA Publishing

  Copyright © 2014, Rachael Herron

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-940785-12-7

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  Praise for

  Rachael Herron’s

  Work

  “A poignant, profound ode to the enduring and redemptive power of love.” – Library Journal

  "A celebration of the power of love to heal even the most broken of hearts." - NYT Bestselling Author Susan Wiggs

  “A heart-warming story of family, friendship and love in a town you’ll never want to leave.” – Barbara Freethy, USA Today Bestseller

  CHAPTER ONE

  “It’s a right turn, here.” Bonnie pointed out the ambulance window. “At the post office.”

  Caswell Lloyd ignored her, blowing past the turn. The siren blared, and two children in a crosswalk waved.

  “Caz?” Bonnie waved back at the kids and then blew out a breath, thumping backward into her seat. “Fine. If you think you know where you’re going better than I do, even though you’ve worked this zone, for what, like five minutes?”

  He didn’t even have the grace to look her direction as he turned right at the bookstore.

  Bonnie bit the inside of her mouth to keep from saying another word. They’d been on three calls so far that day, and he’d been like this on all of them, taciturn, practically non-verbal, and now he wasn’t even driving in the right direction. He was going to have to double back half a block. Precious seconds would be lost, seconds that might mean the difference between life and death…

  Well. Since they were responding to a medical alarm at Ava Simon’s house, the chances were pretty good it wasn’t that big a deal. When Ava’s grandkids had given her the medical pendant a year before, she’d spent the first two months pushing it just “to see how fast you could get here.”

  Bonnie hated change in her ambulance. Just when she’d finally gotten used to her partner, she’d gotten stuck with someone new. Johnny Kling, her last partner, had taken her six months to train, and then he’d been promoted to firefighter and transferred to Engine Three, moving Caz up the list to Station One. Of course, Johnny took the transfer. They all went somewhere—anywhere—to get off the ambo.

  The problem lay in the fact that a lot of the guys, although they were all paramedics, didn’t actually want to be on the ambulance. Ever. They wanted to do their paramedic time and mark it off their checklists. They wanted to hurry up and promote. Then they could do what they really wanted to do which was roll code three to the calls in their nice, clean engines, assess the patient, save a life with some simple CPR if they could, and then hand that patient over to Bonnie and whoever she was paired with for the difficult and stressful transport to the hospital—drives during which the recently-saved patient might code and have to be restarted all over again, while the vehicle flew fifty miles-per-hour around curves. It didn’t help that the medics were the ones who spent hours waiting for busy hospital staff to take over care of patients, not the firefighters. The medics (not the firefighters) were the ones who ended up covered in vomit or worse. Who cleaned out the ambulance after a particularly gross call? Bonnie and her partner did.

  The thing was, Bonnie freaking loved it. Maybe few others did, but she knew she belonged on the ambulance. She’d taken and passed all the classes, her log books were signed off. She could promote to firefighter during any testing phase. But she didn’t want to. Riding in the back of the ambulance, pushing the morphine and then holding the hand of a person who was more scared than they’d ever been in their whole lives? Nothing was better than being the person who got to look a terrified patient in the eye and reassure them that yes, she was going to be just fine.

  Even if it was—an awful lot of the time—a lie.

  It was a lie Bonnie Maddern was honored to tell, a lie she believed every time she told it. Because if she didn’t believe her patient was going to make it, who would?

  Caz had figured out his mistake and made the correct turn.

  “There,” Bonnie said, gesturing to the old house. It was covered in peeling olive paint, and upstairs, a broken window was held together with blue painter’s tape. A yellowed curtain hung crookedly at one window, and a rusted bicycle missing one wheel was upside down in what might have been a garden at one time.

  Caz still hadn’t said a word to her.

  Fantastic.

  Bonnie hadn’t spent much time with Caz since he’d joined the department two years before. He’d been consistently assigned to a different house, and they’d only crossed on overtime shifts, never partnered. He’d always seemed a bit too cocksure, too confident, with that wide cowboy walk of his that took up too much of the hallway now that he was at Station One. It was too bad he was so good-looking, the rancher version of Matthew McConaughey. Caz’s intensely light blue eyes made it startling to run into him in the dayroom. It made him a little less easy to ignore.

  But heck. There was no rule they had to talk on the ambulance, aside from what was necessary to the job. They didn’t have to be friends. It was only ten days a month, she told herself. She could handle anything ten days a month, even a guy like Caz. Walking up the driveway in silence with him, Bonnie realized she was actually missing Jimmy’s persistent throat-clearing.

  Bonnie knocked on the door.

  No answer.

  Caz reached around her and knocked louder. Yeah, he probably thought he could even do that better than she could.

  From inside, they heard a woman yell, “It’s open!”

  Inside, the house appeared somewhat clean. That was just about all it had going for it. The decades-old wallpaper—green and ye
llow stripes—was in as good repair as the peeling paint outside. The thin orange carpet at their feet must have been installed in the sixties or seventies. It smelled, as always, of garlic and lentils and something sweet, maybe a tropical air freshener.

  In a tattered recliner sat Ava, an elderly woman who looked as if she’d been in place for as many years as the carpet. “Hello, hello!” Her curly white hair was tucked neatly behind her ears, and she wore three pairs of glasses—one on top of her head, one on her face, and one hung around her neck by a long blue plastic cord.

  “Hiya,” said Caz easily. Oh, so he could talk.

  Bonnie came forward with her bag. “What’s going on today, Mrs. Simon?” There was no television in the sparely furnished room, just a couch and a small red table with two matching wooden chairs. She wasn’t holding a book, nor was there anything in her lap. Had she just been sitting there? For how long?

  Caz reached forward, “Caswell Lloyd, ma’am. Pleasure to meet you. I’m new on the ambulance.”

  He was trying to charm her? He knew how?

  “Ava Simon,” the woman said. “So glad you’ve come. I wish I could offer you a cup of coffee, but I’m fresh out.”

  “Not to worry. I had my required pot before I left the station.” He crouched in front of her, smiling. “What can we do for you today? How are you feeling?”

  At least the man was a little less scary-looking when he smiled. He went from resembling the Matthew McConaughey of True Detective to the one in Magic Mike.

  The woman’s face brightened. “Oh, my. I’m just fine, thank you for asking, you big hunk of good-looking, you.”

  Bonnie stepped forward. “All righty. Let’s get a read on your blood pressure. Did you take your medicine today?”

  Ava frowned at her and pushed away the BP cuff. Sitting forward, she peered around Bonnie and smiled at Caz. “Caswell Lloyd, you said? Any relation to Harrison Lloyd?”

  “My grandfather, ma’am.”

  “Oh,” said Ava with a giggle. “I had such a crush on him years ago, when we attended the same church. Such a fine man he was. And handsome! Just like you. You got your blue eyes from him, eh?”

  “Thank you kindly, ma’am. Now. What’s the problem today?”

  Ava batted her lashes at Caz. “It’s my toilet, honey. Something’s just not right.”

  “Your toilet?” sputtered Bonnie. “That’s why you pushed your alarm? Okay, that’s just not—”

  Caz cut her off. “I’m sure Bonnie won’t mind giving that a quick look while I look at something a little prettier. Mind if I take your pulse?”

  Bonnie stomped down the hall. The guy had nerve.

  Plumbing was the worst. There was a reason she didn’t work the truck with its water removal tools. She hated the way water glugged through a clogged pipe and she literally had to call a plumber to get the hair out of her own bath drain—the look of a sodden clump of gunk being pulled out was enough to make her gag.

  Working on someone else’s toilet really wasn’t what she’d gone into the fire profession to do.

  But it was better than watching Caz Lloyd flirt with Ava Simon. How was she going to work a whole year with him?

  Five minutes later, after quite a bit of plunging accompanied by increasingly creative under-her-breath cursing, the toilet was almost clear. She could hear Caz and Ava laughing.

  Oh, good. They were having a fine time while she used brute force and listened to pipes gurgle angrily.

  “I’m doing fine! Thanks for asking!” Bonnie blew her short blond hair out of her eyes. She gave one final shove of the plunger, but she did such a fine job of it that she couldn’t pull it back out again. She put one foot against the toilet and pulled harder. “Dang it, do not tick me off, you old porcelain bucket, you.” One more pull.

  With a small scream, Bonnie toppled backward as the toilet came off its seal, pulling away from the wall. There was a crash as the porcelain bowl and tank smashed into a thousand pieces, followed by a flood of dirty water that covered her from the waist down. The brown water was quickly followed by a frigid high-pressure spray of clean water, which jetted out of the pipe in the wall, hitting her in the face.

  From the living room she heard Caz roar, “What’s going on in there?”

  “Don’t worry!” she yelled back. “I’ve got this!” Then she drummed her legs against the floor in a quick wordless fit, took a moment set her lips into a determined and very firmly closed line. Then she lunged at the pipe.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It was Caz’s turn to cook, his first night at Station One. Seeing as he’d already gotten crap from two of the guys for browning the meat too well on the industrial stove’s huge burners, it wasn’t going great so far. Not that he cared that much. He wasn’t here to make friends, after all.

  Tox Ellis, the engine’s captain, leaned over his shoulder. “That’s too many onions. Coin is gonna throw a fit.”

  Caz didn’t respond. It was usually the best course of action, he’d found.

  “You gonna take some out or what?”

  Did the guy actually think he was going to redo dinner because of someone’s preference? “No.”

  “Coin really hates onions.”

  “Then I guess he can make his own damn dinner.”

  Tox grunted. “You came from Los Robles FD, right?”

  Caz nodded. Was he going to have to talk right up until the food was on the table? Was that a requirement here? The way Bonnie Maddern chattered on the ambulance, it might well be.

  “You worked with John Martini?”

  He nodded again. Hopefully, the guy would get the hint. He didn’t want to be out and out rude—next to the battalion chief, it was clear that Tox ruled the roost around this station. It wouldn’t do to get on his bad side. But when Caz cooked, he liked doing it in silence.

  Heck, he liked doing just about everything in silence. He thought of Bonnie again. Never quiet, except after that last run when she’d been covered in toilet water.

  Tox popped a piece of red pepper in his mouth.

  Caz hated it when people messed with his cooking. “Do you mind?”

  The man’s thick eyebrows rose? “Not really. I like peppers. You got plenty. So, you and Martini get along?”

  Martini had been a blowhard engineer with britches that were about a mile too big for his five-foot-nothing frame. It was better not to answer. “Is anyone going to mind garlic?”

  “Nah. What about Horton, is he still a battalion chief there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good guy, huh?”

  Horton was one of the most boring people he’d ever met in his life. But he wasn’t bad. “I guess.”

  “You’re a tough nut, huh?”

  “Look, I just want to cook these carnitas and get it over with. That okay with you?”

  “What’s your problem?” Tox’s voice didn’t seem to carry the normal venom that went with those words. He seemed honestly curious. And no way was Caz going to confide in him.

  “Hand me the cayenne?”

  Tox sighed and gave over the Costco-sized container. “Whatever. You don’t have to have friends here, man, but a forty-eight hour shift is long. It goes easier if you play well with others.”

  “I hear you.”

  “There anything else you want to say?”

  Caz stopped and looked directly at the man. “I have no idea what you want from me.”

  “Man,” said Tox, clearly at the end of his friendly tolerance. He’d lasted longer than most. “How about chill the freak out?” He stalked out of the kitchen.

  Caz focused on the blade of his knife. Pineapple, instead of making the meat sweet, tenderized it. And it was satisfying to chop. He thunked off the top and the bottom, then whacked at the sides of it.

  “What’s that?” His next kitchen intruder was the tall engineer named Hank Coffee. He seemed nice enough, more mellow than Tox, but he was part of the house’s noise and bluster, too.

  “A pineapple,” said Caz s
imply.

  “I’m allergic.”

  “Okay.” He didn’t stop chopping.

  “Are you really going to put that in dinner?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even though I told you I’m allergic?”

  Caz’s knife slowed and he looked up. “I figured Tox told you to say that. Are you really?”

  Hank blinked. “No.”

  “Okay, then.”

  Hank leaned against the counter easily, as if he had nowhere better to be. “So tell me about yourself.”

  Caz hated open-ended questions that weren’t really even questions at all. “Nothing much to tell.”

  “You married?”

  He also hated yes or no questions. “Nope.”

  “Kids?”

  “Nope.” Caz finished chopping the pineapple and dumped it into the pork shoulder on the stove.

  “You live nearby?”

  “Nope.”

  “Dude. You make it hard to talk to you, anyone ever tell you that?”

  “Heard it said.”

  Hank didn’t give up, though. “Okay, then, where do you live? Exactly?”

  Maybe if Caz answered a couple of questions, he’d go away. “About fifteen miles outside town, due east out 119.”

  “There’s nothing out there.”

  Well, on one hand that was true, there was a whole lot of nothing near Caz’s ranch. But that was the best part of it. Nothing and no one. “We raise horses. My dad does.” Did.

  “Well, that’s something.” Hank looked cheered. “You’re a cowboy. That explains the hat in your truck.”

  “What were you doing looking in my truck?”

  “I was snooping,” said Hank cheerfully. “I do that. Who takes care of your horses while you’re at work?”

  “My foreman.”

  “Fancy! You got a foreman! Is it a dude ranch? Can I come out and ride?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” Just like Tox, Hank seemed curiously friendly.