Blaze (The Firefighters of Darling Bay Book 1) Read online

  The father looked as if he were watching his worst nightmare come true in front of his eyes. “Yeah. We’ve been giving him baby acetaminophen—did that cause it?”

  Tox shook his head as he tilted the baby’s chin. “No.” But he didn’t reassure the man, either. He just spoke quickly, words that Grace didn’t understand, instructing what each firefighter should do. “Febrile seizure. Postictal. Compressions if he doesn’t breathe in about twenty seconds.”

  The other two firefighters nodded, their hands full, poised to act on Tox’s command.

  Grace watched, holding her breath in her chest. Tox’s hands were so big, so wide, and yet his touch was almost delicate, the way he lowered his head to put his ear next to the baby’s mouth. No cars passed. Even the birds were silent, as if everyone was waiting.

  “He’s got air.” Tox’s voice was professional, unshaken. The baby gave a strange, small gasp, and then took another one. Color flooded back into his face—he went mottled blue and red, and then turned an unholy plum color.

  Coin said to the father, “He’ll be fine.”

  Grace forgot to look at the father’s face—she was too busy staring at Tox’s.

  There was no one else in his world at that moment. She had the feeling that if a car exploded or a meteor crashed behind them right now, the other firefighters would scramble to do what had to be done, but Tox—he wouldn’t move. He wouldn’t stop what he was doing—hooking up what looked like oxygen to the baby’s nose with the smallest piece of plastic. Who made that plastic? Who could possibly be responsible for manufacturing plastic for inserting into tiny children’s noses like that? Tox looked enormous, hunched over the child, but his huge fingers looked unbelievably gentle touching the baby’s nose. Earlier, when she’d seen him at her clinic, he’d moved as if he were caged, constantly rocking on his heels, pushing his fist into his palm, as if energy was roiling under his skin. Now, he was still. Contained. Almost peaceful looking.

  An ambulance had pulled out of the garage and already had the back doors standing open. A female firefighter said, “Sir? Do you want to ride with us in the back?”

  The man nodded numbly.

  Tox appeared reluctant to hand the child to the woman. A pretty woman with a short blond bob, she smiled at him encouragingly. “Come on, Tox.”

  Tox handed over the baby and turned to the father. “Name?”

  The father jumped and touched his chest. “Me? John Murray.”

  Tox shook his head impatiently. “Baby.”

  “Johnny. His name is Johnny.”

  A smile crossed Tox’s face, and Grace noticed small lines at the corners of his eyes. “Great name. Strong little guy you have there.”

  Relief wreathed the man’s expression. He launched himself at Tox in a hug. Tox went completely rigid, but then he gave the man a light pat on the back.

  The man turned in a circle, distributing thanks as he went, before leaping into the back of the ambulance. Grace smiled and nodded back at him—she couldn’t help it, even though she’d done nothing except run inside and yell for help.

  Tox turned his back on them, gathering gear off the lawn. A firefighter Grace hadn’t seen before said something about the Angel of Death being vanquished. Tox’s mouth twisted, but then he gave what sounded like a grudging laugh, his relief audible.

  Samantha tapped Grace on the elbow. “We should probably go,” she whispered.

  Grace jumped. “What? Yeah.”

  Samantha was all eyes and pale skin. She’d never done that well around medical problems. When their mother was sick, Sam had been great at dealing with doctors, leaving Grace to take physical care of their mother. It had been a good, fair division of labor.

  Now Grace put her arm around Samantha’s shoulders. “You ready to finish our walk?”

  Sam’s eyes got bigger. “Really? We have to do that?”

  Tox turned to face them. He’d gone back to looking like he had caffeine in his blood. His posture was rigid. Ready. “Just walk down to the breakwater and get a cinnamon roll at Josie’s Bakery Or a sundae at Skip’s.”

  Sam grabbed Grace’s hand. “Skip’s Peanutter Blast.”

  Grace shook her head. “No way. We’re out here being healthy.”

  “Screw that. You see that baby?” Tox pointed at the ambulance pulling on to the street. “You never know in life. You might get hit by a car on the walk home.”

  “Cheery thought.”

  “Have ice cream first.” He looked down at his hands, hands that had just been cradling a tiny life. “You won’t regret it.”

  It was surprisingly sweet, coming from the man who seemed to have no soft edges. Grace felt herself melting like the ice cream still in the bowl Tox had put on the bench.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Come on, Sam. Peanutter Blast it is.”

  As they walked away, Grace could almost feel his gaze on her back. She tuned out Samantha’s chatter for a moment and steeled herself to look behind her. To meet those sea-green eyes. To see if doing so would make her heart skip again in that strange rhythm she didn’t really enjoy.

  She pulled her head high and pretended to look up in the sky, as if a plane were flying low overhead. Then she turned to look at him.

  He was gone.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The next day in dispatch, Lexie gave Tox a rash of abuse. After ten minutes of good-natured ribbing, Tox said, “Come on. It’s not like I was gonna adopt the kid.”

  “Really? Because I heard you were about to pull up your shirt and let little Johnny look for milk.”

  Tox sighed and popped the chair so that it reclined backward. “I was just doing my job. You know, my very important job. Unlike you, I get to actually get off my ass and save lives every once in a while.”

  Lexie threw a pencil at him. He caught it left-handed and threw it back at her. She missed. She always did.

  “Oh, yeah?” she said. “That guy on Route 119 that coded last week? You saw what his wife was like. And who talked her down? Got her to listen? Told her how to do CPR that guaranteed she wasn’t gonna get his life insurance quite yet?” She stuck two thumbs into her chest. “That would be moi.”

  Tox rubbed his neck. “Yeah, whatever. Field save, phone save, he’s still got to go sometime. We just put it off for a little while. Probably not for long. That man looked like he buttered his bacon.”

  “Is that sexual?” Lexie raised a cheerful eyebrow. “Because I’m so ready to sue someone.”

  “Good luck with that.”

  Tox rubbed his neck. Blast it, it ached. Something about being bent over that kid had tweaked it again—it had been hurting something fierce ever since last night.

  “What’s wrong with you?” demanded Lexie.

  “Nothin’. Where are those Red Vines you had last tour?”

  “I ate ’em. Is that your neck thing acting up again?”

  “No.”

  “Liar.” Lexie stabbed the pen in his direction. “That’s the injury you got last year in that garage fire.”

  “No way.” Tox had never gone after worker’s comp—way too much paperwork, and he had been scared of the time they might make him take off. Lexie was one of the few people in the department he’d told about it.

  “You’re so bad at lying. Your eyes go all squinty and creepy.”

  “Creepy?” He’d take a lot from her, but not that. “My eyes don’t get creepy.”

  “Like you’re outside my window peeping in.”

  “Dream on, woman. I’m not into redheads.”

  “Seriously, how many times do I have to lecture you about this?”

  “I can give you a good answer for that. None.”

  She held her right hand up, palm out. “I took an oath.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “Serve and protect. I serve the citizens and protect you guys.”

  He scoffed, “You give us heartburn with your addiction to red chili pepper, that’s what you give us.”

  “My friend’s an acupun
cturist. You have to go see her.”

  Instead of rolling his eyes, as he would have any other day of the year, Tox felt the skin prickle on the back of his neck. He tried to play it cool, like he had no idea what acupuncture even was. “Nah.”

  “Hey! That’s where the air conditioner fire was yesterday. At Grace’s clinic? That was One’s zone, right?” She tapped a few keys and peered at one of the five screens in front of her. “Yeah. I knew it. You went there yesterday. Was my friend Grace Rowe there?”

  He shrugged and looked up at the ceiling.

  “Squinty! Creepy!”

  “Yeah, I met her. The quack, right?”

  “It’s not quackery. I swear to you. You know how I know?”

  Tox sighed. “How?”

  “My friend’s cat.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “Mr. Sniffles. He got hit by a car, and his ass got broken so that he peed all over the house.”

  “That sounds amazing.”

  Lexie hit a button on the side of her chair. It sunk down so she could sit back and stick her legs out straight. “Yeah, it was great. The house smelled like a litter box, only a little worse. They had to manually make him pee, squeezing him like a lemon twice a day. I didn’t even know you could do that to a cat.”

  “No freaking way. I have to deal with enough catheters in my line of work.”

  “Yeah. So, my friend’s wife wanted Mr. Sniffles put down. I have to say, I can see the argument there. I didn’t know what kind of a life it was for Mr. Sniffles to drag himself around the house like that. He didn’t even look comfortable. But James was desperate to save his cat. Went everywhere, talked to everyone. Someone suggested acupuncture at some place up in Eureka. It was a day off for me, and there’s a sushi place we like there, so I went along for the ride, thinking I’d get a good laugh and some great baked scallop nigiri.”

  “Everything about this conversation is gross.”

  “I didn’t believe in it at all. The acupuncturist, though, he kind of just looked like anyone else in Eureka. Jeans, carefully groomed facial hair. More hipster than hippie, you know? And Mr. Sniffles is freaking because it smells like a vet’s office, and he’s been in about a million of them. James puts the cat on the table and holds him down. He’s getting scratched, and Mr. Sniffles is fighting, and the doctor doesn’t even trip. He just sticks a couple of these little needles into the cat. And then the craziest thing happened.”

  Tox couldn’t help asking, “What?”

  “Mr. Sniffles started to purr.”

  “Huh.”

  “No, dude, that’s big. He started to purr and then he conked out, fast asleep like the doctor had drugged him or something. James is standing there openmouthed, and the doctor just walks out, saying he would leave them in for about twenty minutes.”

  “What the point of this story? That acupuncture makes cats purr?”

  “It means cats don’t know what the needles are supposed to do to them. But they react to it, without knowing. And yeah, after about twelve sessions, that dang cat was peeing on his own again, jumping in and out of the litter box. It was crazy.”

  Tox said, “He probably just finally healed.”

  “Sure. That was obvious. But something made him finally heal, and the only thing that changed was the acupuncture. And for me, it helps my insomnia.”

  Tox pulled at the edge of a sticker on the side of the phone monitor.

  “Stop that.” She slapped his hand. “I’m going to give you two sessions with her.”

  He would have to spend more time with Grace if Lexie did that. No, he didn’t think so. Tox didn’t want that.

  Except that he did. “Nah,” he made himself say.

  Lexie swung in her chair to yet another computer. “I’m doing it.” She typed something, then pulled her wallet out of her purse.

  He pointed to her credit card. “What are you doing?”

  “Gift certificate.” Lexie entered her card numbers faster than he ever could have. When Tox used the computer in the day room to type up his reports, he had to hunt and peck with two fingers, and it always hurt his neck. Which was why Susie Costello at Admin was always breathing down his neck about missing reports.

  “No, don’t—”

  “Too late.” She tapped something loudly and the printer began to spit out a piece of paper. “You are no match for technology.” She held it out to him. “Take it.”

  “No.”

  “Fine.” She put it on her desk and started folding it.

  Tox watched.

  Sixty seconds later, Lexie sailed a perfect paper airplane at his head. It hit him square in the middle of the forehead. “Now take it. And go. If you don’t get fixed, you’re gonna end up on light duty, in here with me, and neither of us would be able to stand that.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Grace was settling into the rhythm of the clinic. Finally. It felt good. The first year she’d been open, she hadn’t known what to expect. She could go from busy to dead in the space of fifteen minutes. About six months ago, she’d had a Friday on which every scheduled patient had canceled and she’d gotten no walk-ins, not one. It had scared her so badly she’d spent her whole weekend on the computer, setting up advertising, brainstorming ways to get the clinic’s name out there. And then, that following Monday, she’d been so busy she’d never gotten a chance to eat lunch. She hadn’t even had her tea.

  This Monday morning she had three appointments scheduled, and she hoped for more walk-ins. But usually no one came in before ten except for Mrs. Finch who got up at five every morning because she said a day without a sunrise was a day wasted. Grace tended to think that was a little overboard. The sun came up without her worrying about it. Most days, anyway.

  She walked out onto the front porch of her practice. She’d managed to grab the little Victorian cottage when it had come on the market, when it was still a fixer-upper. She’d put her own sweat equity into it, taking months to get everything done before opening. It had been a mark of pride, though, learning how to redo drywall and how to retile the roof. Knowing how the bathroom was plumbed made her confident she’d know what to do if the sink started leaking again. It felt more like home here, at the practice, than her own small house did, a quarter mile away.

  Grace set her mug of tea on the porch rail and looked out onto Jonquil Street. From here, if she stood on tiptoe, she could look over Felicia Dow’s low gabled roof and catch just a glimpse of Darling Bay. On foggy summer mornings like this, sound was captured and carried farther than normal. The noise of the seals barking down by the fishing pier lifted her spirits. She hugged her old blue sweater tightly around her and felt thankful, again, that she’d chosen the right town. She’d been raised inland, in a hot, dusty, farming community. Her father had grown strawberries, and while they’d hired pickers every season, she and her sister Samantha had been on the permanent staff, even being kept out of class during the height of the season. It had been worth it, to her father, to have the extra four hands working, even when he had to deal with the phone calls from school. “They’re my kids, and if I say they’re sick, they’re sick, and you have no right to come and check on them.” He would bang the phone down and point. “Pick as fast as you can, and we’ll get McD’s tonight.” To Grace and Samantha, to whom McDonald’s was the height of elegance and refinement, this was payment enough.

  Their father had stayed in the field until he died of skin cancer while Grace was in college. Their mother had died of a rare lung disease two years later. They were all sure it came from inhaling years of crop dust, but who could they appeal to? No one. Grace had tried so hard to fix them both, to get them out, to get them healed, and nothing had worked.

  Escaping to the cool, foggy beach town of Darling Bay was the best thing she could have done. In the ten years she’d been here, Samantha had been with her on and off, a year here and a year there. Grace cherished the time with her sister, trying not to grasp her too tightly, like she knew she sometimes did. She had to l
et her sister breathe. Knowing that and letting her sister have her own life, though, were two different things.

  A motorcycle took the corner at Taylor and First Street a little too fast. Speed demons always liked coming down First for its tight curve along the marina, but Grace hated it when they raced past her practice. The roar and gas fumes that came out of their tailpipes was one thing, but her real concern was safety. Someday she’d have to run out there to scoop one up off the roadway. She’d be the first person on scene, and yes, while she was CPR trained, she sure as heck never wanted to have to use it. Lifesaving was for people like Tox.

  Big, strong, grumpy Tox. The man wouldn’t leave her thoughts.

  The motorcycle paused, slowed, and then stopped in front. Great. Would he leave it parked there? In her best customer parking spot?

  The man got off the bike in one smooth motion, making it look like it weighed nothing beneath him.

  Then the man took off his helmet.

  Tox.

  As if she’d conjured him merely by thinking his name.

  He looked criminally sexy. In his black leather jacket, he looked more like he was about to knock over a liquor store with a sawed-off shotgun rather than stride confidently up the three steps to her porch.

  One thing she knew—he was a robber, because she couldn’t quite get back the breath she kept losing when he was around.

  “Hey.” The helmet hung lightly from a finger against his thigh. His wide, jean-clad thigh.

  “You actually like riding that thing?”

  “It’s nice to see you, too.”

  Grace realized she hadn’t responded to his opening salvo very appropriately, but she didn’t care that much. “You know the risks of riding a motorcycle?”

  “Not off the top of my head, no.” He took off his black leather jacket and laid it down on her porch swing. As if he owned the place.

  “You’re thirty-five times more likely to die in a crash than a person in a car, did you know that? And forty-eight percent of motorcycle crashes are a direct result of speeding.”