Chapter 8 Caleb
CALEB
“How’s the lady friend?” Marco asks not one second after I step into the station.
I dump my bag into the fire truck.
Marco takes note of my rash movements and has his answer. “Sexual tension is the worst when it surpasses that exciting sweet point.”
“Tell me about it.” I jump into the back of the truck and do final checks to make sure we have everything ready for the night shift. I suspect it will be a quiet one. The only thing people do here in Maple Crossing is sleep. The money is easy.
I secure the back of the truck. Sweat is already running down my palms, and we haven’t even dealt with any fires yet. But I have a big one to put out in my pants, no thanks to Piper bending over and giving me a face full of ass.
My balls clench now at the memory.
“What’s her name again?” Marco asks.
“You have the memory of a fish.” I circle back around to the front of the truck. “And the Atlantic ocean is more likely to turn green than you are to help me out with loading the truck.”
“Tell me her name,” Marco demands once again in the middle of trying to reset the radio. “These damned things never work properly.”
I watch him with plain amusement. “Ever wondered that it’s maybe just your hearing?”
Marco and I met when I was here nine years ago, and bonded over the fact that we were both new in town. He had moved over a year before that. He was stationed over in Portland for most of his career, but eventually decided to move somewhere more remote.
A lot of us do.
Physically and mentally, you can only endure so much trauma as a human being.
And working in the city is tough.
Back-to-back work. No time for coffee. For food.
They pay double time and a half for the missed meals, which looks glittery on the paychecks. But after so many years of service, you reach a certain point in your life where you start to burn out more than the fires.
Stationed all the way out here in remote places like Maple Crossing gives you time to put your feet up between jobs. Or for the entire shift.
“My hearing might not be what it used to be.” Marco hops onto the couch beside me. “But I hear what I need. And right now I hear that you are smitten.”
“Exactly my point.” I point a finger at him. “That never came out of my mouth.”
“I read between the lines.” His eyes turn shrewd. “Tell me her name.”
Best to rip off the Band-Aid before he pries the answer out of me. The interrogation won’t stop. “Piper Hart.”
“Piper Hart,” he repeats, and then the penny drops. “That’s who you took in yesterday from the fire. The woman is her?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Is it your eyesight or hearing we need to test?” I huff.
“Yes. Trust me. It’s Hart. It might have been hard to tell yesterday in the heat of it all with the smoke and whatnot, but I knew straight away…
” I cut myself off. No need to overexplain.
“Yes. She’s Piper Hart, and she will be staying at my place with her son until the insurance is cleared. ”
“Her son. She didn’t have a son nine years ago.”
“She does now.”
Marco watches me for a moment before another thought takes precedence in his mind. “I received a text from Keller earlier today. A James Taylor from JT insurance is apparently interested in reading our case report.”
That sounds about right.
“It’s not his business to see the report.”
“I know. I agree. But you know how those insurance cash-pinchers get. They don’t see the fire, unlike the rest of us. They see the money.”
“Maybe they should join fire and rescue for a night. I’ll bet they wouldn’t last an hour.”
“Did you sleep with her?” Marco brings the conversation back around to its dreaded starting point for no reason at all. “She’s living under your roof and you have history. It’s only going to be a matter of time before you do, anyway.”
I grind my jaw. It’s hard keeping up with this man’s mind sometimes.
“No. I haven’t slept with her and don’t intend to.”
“You’re fooling yourself.”
I flash him daggers. We’re here to work, not discuss my love life.
“I bet she’s pissed at you. She has good reason to be.”
I choose to remain silent.
“And the sexting? How’s that going? Might be best for now to keep that one quiet.”
I need a dispatch call to come and save me right now.
“You could say that it’s…going.”
“The mystery woman still isn’t interested in meeting?”
“Turns out the mystery woman isn’t so mystery…” I shoot Marco a knowing glare and wait for him to catch on.
“Fuck, Rourke. Piper?” Marco’s eyes flare wide. “How did you not know?”
“Because she was more innocent back when I knew her before.”
We also never really got around to sexting back then.
Didn’t need to. One look in her eye always did it for me.
And it definitely did something to me earlier when her face was only an inch away from mine. Cornering her was a bad idea that worked more in her favor than it did mine.
But it was necessary.
I needed to make her cave.
And I almost did.
Now I find myself dealing with a high-stakes situation.
I have never been tested this way before, brought right to the edge of temptation.
I had to relieve myself in private before heading downstairs to begin dinner, but one look into her knowing eyes and my cock sprung right back to its original hardness.
Fucking minx.
Relieving myself is all well and good until I see Piper and realize that I want her. So fucking bad. Even those oversized sweats find a way to turn me on.
“Evening, gents.” Ryan strides into the room with a coffee in hand. “Rourke,” he starts. “You have the face of someone who has irregular bowel movement.”
“It’s the girl,” Marco comments. “Possibly her son too.”
I elbow Marco in the side.
Ryan switches off the TV and hands over a pile of documents for us to sort through.
“We all moved out of the city to cut down on responsibility, but that doesn’t give you two idiots the right to slob about all night.
” He snaps his fingers. “Latest case files—unsigned.” He’s looking directly at me.
“Electronic signatures aren’t a thing out here, Rourke.
Manually sign each of these documents and organize them by date.
The computer doesn’t do that for us here.
” He tosses a giant pile onto my lap and continues, “I have training for the pair of you to complete after that.”
“Yes boss,” Marco says, with sarcastic privileges I don’t yet have.
I’ve only been working here for two months. I need at least a year to prove myself.
“Marco—fetch that case file. I sent the number over to you earlier. James Taylor is requesting a copy.”
James Taylor. What a spiteful old man.
I drop my shoulders as soon as Keller is out of my hair, and get to work on the signatures.
My head starts spinning again as I start signing the documents. Piper possibly committing insurance fraud should create some good emotional distance between us.
A voice inside tells me she didn’t burn down her house.
But I’m still skeptical about those finances.
I approached her earlier in the corridor to test how easily she would cave. Safe to say she’s a tough cookie to crack. Even more than last time.
But I know how she operates.
As soon as she admits something, other truths come spilling out.
Although, I lost direction the moment she decided to wrap her hands around my cock. Everything else became irrelevant after that.
The rest of the night is a breeze. Marco helps me sign the documents, and we spend most of the night talking about sports. We receive a call from dispatch to rescue one cat from a tree, and head back to the station to pour coffee.
Piper frequents my mind, and I find myself checking my phone notifications, anticipating a text message from her. I don’t get any. She’s asleep. But even if she was awake, I’m sure she would give me the silent treatment.
Or a naughty text.
One or the other.
I finish up on the last of the paperwork and decide I’m going to leave work thirty minutes before the end of my shift to prepare breakfast.
The roads are desolate, and the drive back home has me thinking about Piper. About what we used to have, and how easy we had it.
I arrive back home just in time for sunrise. My jingling keys ring loud into the morning. Long Island never used to be this peaceful, even in the middle of the night. The silence is good but it’s been carrying feelings of melancholy in it ever since Piper moved in.
I’m surprised to find the door already unlocked, and the kitchen occupied with two of my favorite people on this earth. Piper and Ellie. Cooking together, each with a smile on their face.
My presence in the kitchen interrupts the giggling.
“Dad!” Ellie darts over to me, and I lift her up, planting a kiss to her cheek.
“You’re up and at ’em early this morning, sweetheart.”
“Yeah,” Piper says from the stove. Hesitation is written all over her face. “I hope you don’t mind. Ellie woke up and I was already awake, so I decided to make pancakes. Don’t worry.” She backs away from the stove with both hands in the air. “I was careful. Your house is still intact.”
The house is.
But me?
Walking into laughter and the fragrant smell of pancakes is something I’m not used to after my shift. Ellie is normally still asleep when Grace is on duty.
I know my girl. She loves to wake up at the crack of dawn. But I don’t think Grace likes to entertain Ellie in the morning after being on duty the whole night.
I watch Piper as she flips the pancakes, and I feel it drill a hole in my chest. The house feels complete.
And it’s making me feel more broken each day.
Piper finishes serving up the pancakes, leaving some saved for Sonny.
I sit at the table and stuff the food into my mouth, hoping it’ll quiet my mind.
But every time I look over and see Piper shoveling pancakes into her mouth, I’m reminded of how head-over-heels in love with her I was nine years ago.
Piper slots into our life so seamlessly, and Ellie has warmed to her so well.
I catch Piper’s eyes across the table. We couldn’t cut the tension with a knife. I chew on my last bit of pancake and suddenly feel like throwing it up as my brain recounts the past text messages we shared.
We were sexting in the same house. Under the same roof.
Fuck.
I swallow the rest of my breakfast and take away the dishes as an excuse to leave the table.
“Thanks, girls,” I say from the sink. “Best breakfast I’ve had all day.”
“Dad!” drawls Ellie. “You always say that!” She giggles and I hear Piper chuckling too.
The rest of the day feels like I’m watching movie clips of her.
I wake up around lunchtime and hear laughter.
It’s coming from outdoors. Peering through the window, I see what I thought I would—Piper chasing the kids through the lawn.
The pair of them wail with laughter as she imitates what must be one of Sonny’s airplanes, her arms extended wide.
The yearning returns to my chest again when she’s cooking dinner, shaking a stray piece of hair from her eye. All I want to do is tuck it behind her ear.
But I can’t.
I watch introspectively as she uses the stove. She knows what she’s doing in the kitchen. If she wanted to set fire to her own house, I’m sure she’d know how to do it.
Sonny hands over one of his toy planes and lists out some rather impressive facts about it. He’s like her. Has a curious mind. And just like her, he can never sit still.
His brown hair has a mind of its own, which he definitely inherited from Piper. But as for those brown eyes, they must have come from her partner. Whoever he was. She hasn’t spoken about Sonny’s father once. And interestingly, Sonny doesn’t speak about him either.
Which suggests he doesn’t even remember who his father was.
I catch Piper’s gaze several times throughout the day. But with kids in our space, we glance at each other for only a second. And then look away.
It’s only after the kids go to bed that we actually start holding eye contact. She’s boiling the kettle, and I’m out on the porch rifling through pages of documentation that Keller wants me updated on.
“Hey.” She gingerly joins me outside, both hands wrapped around a steaming mug of tea. “Hope I’m not interrupting anything.”
Sparks fly the second I look at her face, reminded of yesterday when we were dangerously close to kissing. When she wrapped her hand around me and flashed me a wicked smile.
Her eyes are a startling shade of blue tonight.
“Apparently the universe doesn’t want to keep us away from each other,” she jokes.
I’m glad she’s the one addressing the elephant in the room. I probably wouldn’t have made it to the end of the sentence.
“Yeah.” I stare at the steaming mug of tea in her hand. “It never occurred to me that it could have been you I was texting.”
“The town is small,” she states. “But I never thought it would be this small.” Her eyes catch mine. “You kept pestering me to meet up.”
“And you kept refusing. Why was that?”
“Because I don’t have time for much else. And honestly?” she adds, taking a sip of tea. “A few text messages here and there was all I wanted.”
The silence rings extra loud tonight. Of course it’s all she wanted. You can’t get any more noncommittal than a few anonymous text messages. And a nude photo.
She doesn’t want to be involved in anything serious.
“What happened with you and Sonny’s father?”
Good thing I didn’t ask that question when her mouth was full of tea. Her eyes go wide, and she clutches the mug tighter. “Um. Nothing much. What happened with me and Sonny’s father isn’t worth talking about. Trust me.”
I don’t. But I do choose to leave the conversation there. Something clearly happened between them, because she’s being vague. But I decide not to press. Ignorance is bliss and I’d rather not know about the competition.
Piper fell in love with me first.
I was her first.
Please, God, don’t let there be another man out there who stole her heart.
“What about you?” she asks after a beat of silence. “What were you doing on the dating apps?”
“Similar to you,” I admit. “Ellie keeps my hands full. I was only searching on the side to—”
“Get laid.” She looks up at me, the hint of a smile on her face. “You can say it.” She takes another sip of tea and looks over the rim at me with a darkened expression. “We all need a release somehow, right?”
My balls tense at her even alluding to the idea of sex.
“Right,” I grunt, unsure how long I can go on being in pain like this.