Friendly Fire (Hot Shots of Huckleberry Creek #4)

Chapter 1

ONE

ELLIE

Grandpa Gus had been trying to marry me off to Daniel Costello for the better part of a decade.

He wasn’t subtle about it. Augustus Granger had never been subtle about anything in his seventy-three years on this earth, and he saw no reason to start now.

Every Sunday dinner, without fail, he found some new angle.

Some fresh piece of evidence that we were, as he put it, cosmically intended.

Tonight’s exhibit was apparently the fact that Daniel had shown up with the same brand of sweet tea I’d brought, which Grandpa seemed to think was the kind of synchronicity that justified a church ceremony and a reception with a live band.

He waved his fork between us like a conductor cuing an orchestra. “You can’t tell me it’s not a sign.”

“It’s the only sweet tea brand the Piggly Wiggly carries since they stopped stocking Milo’s,” Daniel said.

“Details.”

I hid my smile behind my glass. Across the table, Daniel caught my eye, and the corner of his mouth pulled up like we were sharing a private joke the rest of the world wasn’t in on. Which, to be fair, we usually were.

That was the thing about Daniel and me. We’d been best friends since the third grade, when he’d appointed himself my personal defender after I’d dropped my lunch tray in the cafeteria and stood there frozen with humiliation while a circle of kids stared at the weird new kid in school who’d lost her parents.

He’d picked up half the mess without a word, daring anyone to comment, and that had been that.

I’d spent the rest of third grade teaching him to read a little better, and he’d spent it making sure nobody messed with me on the playground.

Twenty-some years later, the basic dynamic hadn’t changed much.

We had history. We had shorthand. We had a lifetime of inside jokes and emergency phone calls and knowing exactly how the other one took their coffee.

What we did not have, and had mutually agreed we would never have, was whatever Grandpa kept insisting we were missing.

“You two would make beautiful babies,” Grandpa said, moving on without shame to his next point.

“Grandpa.”

“I’m just saying what I see.” He stabbed a green bean. “Two good-looking people. Good heads on their shoulders. Daniel’s got a steady job—”

“I’m a firefighter, Gus, not a stockbroker.”

“Steady enough.” He waved his fork. “And Ellie, you’ve got that sweet little house, and you’re good with people, and Lord knows you can cook.

” He gestured broadly at the roast on the table, which, yes, I had made, because I enjoyed cooking and not because I was auditioning for the role of Daniel Costello’s wife.

“You’re wasting time is what you’re doing. ”

“We’re not wasting anything.” I kept my voice gentle, because I’d learned a long time ago that arguing with my grandfather was like trying to reason with a golden retriever who’d spotted a squirrel. All energy, no yield. “We’re happy exactly how we are.”

He looked at Daniel. “You happy?”

Daniel leaned back in his chair with the easy confidence of a man who had also spent years navigating this exact conversation. “I’m happy, Gus.”

“You don’t look like a man who’s happy.”

“I’m eating a home-cooked roast on a Sunday. I’m thriving.”

Grandpa made a dismissive sound and reached for the bread basket.

He wasn’t angry—he never was, not about this.

It was more that he genuinely could not comprehend how two people who obviously cared about each other could be content to leave it at friendship, like we were willfully ignoring a door standing wide open.

Maybe from the outside it looked that way.

I could admit it. Daniel was—objectively, as assessed by most of the women in Huckleberry Creek—extremely good-looking.

Thick, glossy brown hair, square jaw, muscles from actually doing physical labor rather than performing it in a gym.

He was funny and steady, the kind of person who showed up when things went sideways, no questions asked.

I’d known all of this since we were eight years old.

I also knew he left his shoes directly in the path of maximum tripping hazard, that he thought “I’ll figure it out when I get there” was a legitimate life strategy, and that he had once talked me into driving two hours for a barbecue festival and then remembered halfway there that he’d gotten the date wrong by a full week.

I knew him the way you know a person when you’ve let them see the messy parts of you and they’ve shown you theirs in return.

Such knowing was rare. It was worth more to me than any door Grandpa thought we should walk through.

And Daniel knew it too. We’d talked about it once, years ago, with the blunt honesty that only works between people who trust each other completely. We were better as friends. The friendship was the thing. We weren’t willing to risk it.

Grandpa had never accepted this reasoning, but he’d never stopped loving us either, so we mostly let him have his theories and kept showing up for Sunday dinners.

“All I’m saying,” Grandpa continued, the way he always wrapped up this particular sermon, “is life is short and love is not something to be careless with.”

“Nobody’s being careless,” I told him.

He pointed his fork at me one more time, softer now. “You make sure of that, sweetheart.”

The table settled with his order, the conversation drifting toward easier things—the new development going up on Route 9, whether the Huckleberry Creek Founders Day parade would survive the new city council, the general and comfortable noise of people who knew how to fill a room together.

Daniel helped me clear the plates while Grandpa relocated to his armchair in the living room, and for a few minutes we moved around each other in the kitchen the way we always did, easy and familiar, handing things off without asking.

“He’s getting more creative,” Daniel murmured.

“The sweet tea thing was inspired,” I agreed.

“I saw him set up those two bottles side by side when he pulled them from the fridge.”

I turned to look at him. “He staged it?”

“Deliberately.” Daniel’s mouth was fighting a smile. “Took his time about it, too.”

I pressed my lips together to keep from laughing, because Grandpa had ears like a bat when he wanted to. “He’s going to be insufferable.”

“He already is. We just love him anyway.”

We did. That was the whole of it, really.

Grandpa had raised me after my parents died, had given me Sunday dinners and a warm place to land and an absolutely relentless belief that I deserved good things in this life.

That his vision of good things included Daniel Costello in a tuxedo was just one of his more persistent quirks.

I handed Daniel the last dish, and our fingers overlapped on the edge of the plate for just a second—the way they sometimes did, the accidental choreography of people who’d been in each other’s orbit long enough that proximity was second nature.

The spark ran from my fingertips straight up to my shoulder, quick and electric, and I pulled my hand back and turned to the drying rack like I had somewhere urgent to be.

It happened sometimes. Not often, but sometimes.

A rogue current of something I refused to name, flickering up without invitation before I could get ahead of it.

I’d learned to move through it quickly, the way you move through a cold patch in a swimming hole—acknowledge it with your body, dismiss it with your brain, keep swimming.

Daniel set the dish on the counter and leaned against the sink, crossing his arms, talking about something the guys at the station had done involving a raccoon and the engine bay, and I focused on the sound of his voice rather than the way his forearms looked when he crossed them.

The friendship is the thing, I reminded myself. The friendship is the whole point.

Twenty-three years of evidence sat behind that belief like bedrock.

He was the person who’d driven me to the hospital at two in the morning when Grandpa had his cardiac scare.

The person who kept up with exactly which restaurants served bread and butter pickles on burgers to remind me not to get them, and who was aware of my worst habits and the pitch of my laugh when something actually struck me funny versus when I was being polite.

You didn’t gamble that on a feeling that showed up uninvited during dishwashing and would be gone by the time I dried my hands.

“You’re not listening,” Daniel said.

“The raccoon got into the gear locker,” I said. “I heard.”

He gave me a long, measuring stare. Knowing me was, unfortunately, a two-way street.

I kept my expression neutral and folded the dish towel over the oven handle with more attention than it deserved.

“Gus asleep yet?” he asked.

I glanced through the kitchen doorway. Grandpa’s armchair faced away from us, and the quality of silence coming from his direction had the heavy, settled weight of a man whose eyes had closed somewhere around his third mention of wedding venues.

“Out cold.”

“Good.” Daniel pushed off the sink. “Because I ate three helpings of the roast, and I need someone to suffer through a walk with me before I drive home.”

The October air had gone sharp after sundown, the kind of cool that crept in fast once the hills swallowed the last of the light. A walk made sense. Fresh air, movement, the creek path lit up by a half-decent moon. Perfectly reasonable.

The fact that it felt, in some small and traitorous corner of my brain, like the setup to a date—two people, evening air, a sleeping chaperone—was so ridiculous I nearly laughed at myself out loud.

Grandpa would have had a field day with that thought. I buried it accordingly.

“Let me get my coat.”