Chapter Six – Life as We Knew It
Chapter Six
Beckett
LIFE AS WE KNEW IT
Performed by Lonestar
SEVEN YEARS AGO
HIM: I don’t care what you say, Tolkien was a genius.
HER: If you like pages and pages of war and death and depression.
HIM: Bravery, courage, and good winning over evil.
HER: Did they really win, though? At least at the end of a romance novel, you know they’ll have a happily ever after.
HIM: They end your books at the high point because if they continued, over fifty percent of the relationships would be destroyed by jealousy, selfishness, and death.
HER: Cynic.
HIM: Dreamer.
HER: Someday, I’ll prove you wrong.
HIM: …
HER: And no, before you even ask, I don’t want to make a bet.
PRESENT DAY
I loved my job. I loved everything about fighting fires.
Not only the actual time spent taming the beast but the preparation required to do it right.
The training. The time spent cleaning, repairing, and ensuring our equipment was in tip-top shape for when the call came.
It was comforting. Soothing. And today, I was grateful for every task that kept me occupied.
After pounding out some of my fury in the station’s gym over the chief’s call I’d overheard, I’d showered and dove into the list of things my crew and I needed to do. That included running drills with our probie.
I was manning the stopwatch as Leon rolled up the lines, when Vader came sauntering in the large roll-up doors. I barely shot him a look, keeping my focus trained on the time.
“’Bout time, dog. You almost missed a meal.”
Leon glanced over at my dog, and his grip on the hose loosened. “What’s he got? A dead animal?”
I stopped the watch and said, “That’s your worst time yet, probie. Do it again.”
I’d just turned to look at Vader as a mewl escaped his mouth—one emanating not from my dog but the animal he held tenderly between his teeth.
“Oh fuck, no,” I said, shaking my head.
Vader just sauntered over, plopped his butt on the cement next to me, and looked up at me with sad, sad eyes. The short-haired, gray-and-white striped kitten meowed again.
“You can’t keep doing this, shithead,” I told the dog.
“Is that a cat? Is he going to eat a cat?” Leon’s voice rose in panic.
“He isn’t going to eat it,” I said in disgust.
Somehow, the greyhound, hunting-prey instinct in Vader’s DNA had been mangled with the protective, caring instinct of his Labrador ancestors so that my dog was routinely bringing home abandoned animals, mostly kittens.
But there’d also been a baby chipmunk and an illegally kept ferret.
People found it endearing, but that was because they weren’t the ones who had to find families to take in the strays.
“Let me see what you got there,” I grunted, squatting down to take the kitten from him.
Slobber mixed with dirt coated the kitten. It barely looked old enough to feed itself, which had my stomach falling all over again. My last attempt at bottle-feeding had not ended well.
“Stretch the line, probie, and run the drill again,” I ordered before heading up the cement and metal stairs to the kitchen.
Vader followed on my heels, looking as proud as a father in a delivery room. “You’re a pain in the ass, dog. You’re lucky I don’t send you to the shelter along with this thing you dragged in.”
Kasey and Tejas simply watched, not even attempting to hide their amusement, as I dunked the cat in the sink. I washed the animal with Dawn dish soap, while the kitten complained viciously, and Vader whined in concern.
“Thanks for the help, assholes,” I groused, looking over at my crew.
Kasey’s cropped blond hair and broad shoulders shook with the force of her laughter. Once she got a hold of herself, she said, “Your dog, your responsibility.”
My good deed of cleaning the cat was rewarded with scratches up my arms and a set of teeth marks on my thumb, which I was certain would leave a scar.
I wrapped the kitten in one of the soft towels we used for waxing the wagons and placed it in a plastic crate.
Vader stuffed his nose inside it, sniffed in apparent approval, and then curled his body around it while I called Sheila at the shelter.
When she said she was full up and couldn’t take in another animal, I groaned.
“I’ll call around to my volunteers who foster litters and see if anyone has room,” she promised, but I knew how that went. At this point, I was pretty sure Sheila considered me one of her foster families.
While I’d been on the phone, Tejas had dug through our cabinets and come up with a can of soft cat food from the last time Vader had dragged in a pair of kittens.
He placed the disgusting glob of goo in a bowl and put it inside the crate.
I was relieved to see the cat lap at it with little growling noises.
At least I wouldn’t have to repeat the bottle-feeding nightmare.
Vader’s tail thumped on the floor, and I swore the dog smirked at me. Tejas did the wrong thing by pulling a dog treat from the cookie jar and handing it to him. My dog would never stop bringing animals home if he got snacks out of it.
“Well, you'd better be prepared to share your bed with this one for a few days,” I told my dog, running a hand over his smooth head. “You old softie.”
It tugged at something inside me. Old memories.
Old worries. My dad had been a softie too.
He may not have brought home strays, but he’d had his heart crushed multiple times.
Good thing my dog wasn’t out on the prowl for a mate, or he’d end up in the same shape as my father—old, single, and with a scarred heart.
The tap of high heels drew my attention to the stairs.
Delilah stepped into the kitchen in what I considered her work uniform.
The gray pencil skirt and pale blue button-down covered every curve in a classy, old school sort of way.
Her hair was up in a messy bun, and she’d slid a pair of tortoise-shell eyeglasses on her slender nose I was ninety percent sure she didn’t need.
Delilah was good at playing roles. Her personality flipped with a speed that made my head spin, rotating between wounded ex, sexy siren, and strict professional.
All of those were usually easy for me to ignore.
It was when she wore the depressed-friend role that I ended up sitting next to her at the bar.
The crew greeted her warmly. She was well-liked at the station. In truth, she was well-liked just about everywhere she went because she made friends easily. It was a skill she’d learned from her parents, the mayor and the chief. Only the Campbell girls and Delilah didn’t get along.
Del had valid reasons for hating Chelsea. But her reasons for disliking Maisey were as skewed as her beliefs about me.
“Your dad isn’t here,” I told her.
“I know. I’m dropping off the latest budget proposal for you and Nancy to look at,” Delilah said, waving a stack of papers at me.
It wasn’t really a secret around town that Rose Nattingly was grooming her daughter to take over as mayor someday.
But what I wasn’t sure many people knew, and what I wasn’t sure even Del herself remembered these days, was that politics had been the last thing Delilah had wanted to do growing up.
Even in college, when we’d carpooled to Fresno and back, her heart had been in her art classes, not business lectures.
“I’ll just go through the numbers with you,” Delilah said when I hadn’t moved.
The anger I’d spent an entire morning and early afternoon trying to tame after overhearing the chief’s decision about me flared back to life. Billie Nattingly hadn’t even looked at the budget in the last eighteen months. That had all been me and Nancy.
The truth was, I hadn’t minded taking it on because it had been one more item for my resume. One more reason I’d be qualified for the fire chief role when it became available. Now, I wondered exactly why he’d handed me the responsibility if he hadn’t believed I was ready for the actual job.
“Nancy isn’t here today,” I reminded her. As our department's admin, HR representative, and accountant, Nancy worked purely Monday through Friday, eight-to-five, unless there was an emergency that required all-hands-on-deck.
“You can pass on what I share to her next week.”
Delilah headed for the hall leading to the offices, and I sighed before going after her. A soft whistle followed me and a quiet, “Have fun with that,” from Tejas.
I flipped him off over my head but didn’t look back.
The team thought Delilah and I were doing the horizontal mambo on a regular basis, mostly because of the innuendos she dropped.
Even her dad had to have heard the rumors.
But the more I’d protested, the more my crew gave me shit, so I just left them to their own beliefs while holding on to the knowledge I’d never be sliding beneath her sheets.
My feet stalled, nearly causing me to trip, as an ugly thought slammed into me.
Was the chief putting this new requirement on the job because he was pissed?
Did he think I was slipping it to Delilah without asking her to marry me?
That idea was followed by an even worse one.
Were the chief and the mayor hoping that marrying us off would also help put their daughter in office?
Perhaps this entire scenario wasn’t about me and the fire chief position at all, but some mastermind plan to help make Delilah the next mayor.
A bitter, ugly taste coated my tongue.
By the time I got my feet working again and joined Del in my office, she’d already slid the papers onto my desk and turned to lean against the edge of it.
Her gaze skimmed my uniform, she bit her lip, and then said, “You ran out before we got to finish our talk last night.”
I stuffed my hands in my pockets and leaned a shoulder up against the wall by the door, careful not to smudge the schedule Stoney and I had written on the whiteboard.
“I’m not sure we really have anything to talk about, Del.”
“He’s not going to hire you. He’s looking externally.”
“I know.”