Fire at Sunset: The Firefighters of Darling Bay 4
Read Fire at Sunset: The Firefighters of Darling Bay 4 Online
Authors: Lila Ashe
Tags: #love, #danger, #sweet, #darling bay, #Romance, #fire man, #hazmat, #firefighter, #vacation, #hot, #safety, #gambling, #911, #explosion, #fireman, #musician, #holistic, #pacific, #sexy, #dispatcher, #singer, #judo, #martial arts
Fire at Sunset
The Firefighters of Darling Bay 4
By
Lila Ashe
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.
Fire at Sunset / Lila Ashe. -- 1st ed.
Copyright © 2014, Lila Ashe
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 978-1-940785-12-7
Praise for
Lila Ashe’s
Work
“Hilarious romance. You'll be packing your bags for Darling Bay after reading her hot firefighters.” –Rita Hedger
“Looking forward to reading more in this series.” –All Night Books
“Ashe's writing sparkles with humor and twists you won't see coming but that have you unable to turn the pages fast enough.” –Theresa Rodgers
DEDICATION
For Jessie Evans and Ruby Laska. My girls.
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 yellow 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.