Chapter 1
Chapter One
KATIE
Iwonder if pain took my father’s mind off death.
Or does death take your mind off pain?
“Are you okay, Katie Kat?” Jeremy slides my usual vodka across the bar.
My gaze lifts from the candle I keep deliberate distance with, and I sigh.
“It’s this time of year. Rookies.” I nod to the gaggle of red helmets that strolled into Cowboy’s Paradise like they owned the place.
“It’s the same every year. They’ll take on two or three new guys, one of them will last, and all of town will have to deal with their idiotic hazing rituals for the next month. ”
I chug the entire vodka in one motion and slam it back down.
“Damn, icy much?” Jeremy cocks his head to the fire squad in question, playing some variation of flip cup with three of Dustin’s handcrafted tables smashed together like cheap plastic folding things.
“Yes. I am very icy. My father was fire captain of an entire district. It’s a position of honor, about saving lives and putting others first.” I sneer at the men across the room, cheering like it’s Friday Night Football when a quarter lands in a cup.
It's wrong to wonder why he had to die while absolute morons walk the streets every day contributing nothing but fluff to society, yet here I am.
I roll my eyes when the youngest looking of the bunch slides his arm around a hair-twirling Macy Honeycutt.
“Picking up women with uniforms so new they still show a factory crease isn’t honorable.
They haven’t earned anything.” I cross my arms over my chest. “Just look at the way they take zero regard for this town’s woodwork. ”
“I didn’t think you cared about wood. Well, certainly not firewood.” He snorts.
“I’m pretending you didn’t say any of that, so I don’t barf across your bar.
” I roll my eyes when he gives me an innocent wink.
“Don’t fall for their hotness, Jeremy. It’s all fake outerwear.
Real firefighters are out on the streets manhandling apparatuses and busting through windows, not pounding back pinkies at the town dive bar. ”
He gasps. “I take offense to that. I happen to make exquisite pinkies, thank you very much.” He fills a beer from the tap without breaking his glowering eye contact.
“And anyway, Miss Single-and-way-too-sexy-not-to-mingle, some of those guys are straight hotties. Unfortunately, emphasis on the straight part.” He sighs.
“Oh, shut up. You are so horny.” I shove my glass his way for a refill. “How is Corbin, anyway?”
Jeremy stills at the mention of his partner.
“He’s staying at his mother’s…indefinitely.”
“Oh, Jer. I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”
“It’s fine.” He pours himself a drink this time. “A story for another day. Besides, I have my sights set on bigger and better things.”
“Oh, yeah?” My heart tugs for Jeremy and whatever he feels he must go through alone, but his genuine grin eases my mind when he whips out a sparkling pair of blue poms.
“You are looking at Pine Forest High School’s interim varsity cheer coach!” He shakes the sequin monstrosities in my face. “Only until Coach Jasmine finishes treatment, but it’s the perfect distraction.”
“I’m happy you have this, Jer.”
“Me too.” He sighs. “But what about you? I am so proud of what you and Lem are doing for this community. The families you two house in the apartments upstairs are wonderful people who deserve every chance you’re affording them. I’ve met every one of them.”
“I believe that.”
Jeremy Callahan is one of the good ones.
Not that people in Pine Forest are bad. They don’t understand circumstances, though. If it’s not something that affects them directly, they develop blinders to the problem altogether.
I always wondered how people could so easily paint pink over blue and not see purple.
“We’re trying everything we can, I’ll be honest,” I admit.
“But it’s exhausting being the only social worker in this town.
Between guardian ad-litem meetings, placement appointments, family check-ins, food bank organization, and the group home, I hardly have time to brush my own hair.
” I hold up a matted mess of red curls and sigh. “See, I didn’t even today.”
“I wasn’t going to point it out.” We both laugh, but it’s dark how comedic it is.
My job is humanity. That weight can be intense most days, even before Ryder runs to my side at the group home and tells me about his day.
The mother I wish I could be for him.
For all the kids who don’t have someone assigned to them by circumstance. The truth is, he’s not mine. None of the kids are, even if their fears and hopes and all their firsts are embedded into my heart.
“Did you know some places have departments full of people like me?”
“God, that’s terrifying.” He gasps, sending us both into a fit of self-deprecating laughter again. “But can I ask you something?”
“I don’t like it, but yeah.”
“Do you think you’re spending too much time working? I know the town needs it, but you can’t pour from an empty cup.” He nods to the glass I already chugged yet am still trying to swig down again, and my face heats.
“I should turn in for the night.”
Dissecting this part of me might seem fun to Jeremy from beneath the glow of the bar lights and the buzz of liquor, but my past isn’t smooth as ice, like he thinks.
It’s a wildfire.
“Don’t leave just because I got real with you. You’re being a total Lemon. Sulk when you don’t get your way.” He folds his arms across his chest and waits for me to tell him he’s right.
He is, as it were, which just annoys the hell out of me.
I hate being wrong.
“I can’t settle down and have a life, Jeremy.
I have sixteen children under the age of twelve in my adjacent-guardianship on a daily basis, foster parents to counsel and license, thousands of dollars in relief checks to disburse to families all over town, and just when things couldn’t get any busier, Ryder has soccer camp coming up, and if the youth programs don’t show a successful turnout this season, the county is threatening to cut the funds for children under ward of the state to play in youth sports.
What the hell do I do with that? Snag a fire daddy over there and dance around his pole until he puts out all these goddamned fires? ”
Jeremy’s lips twist, eyes locked in cartoon hearts behind me.
“It’s a fire daddy, isn’t it?”
“We prefer the term ‘first responder,’” an amused voice says.
A deep, grumbly, not-attractive-in the-least sort of voice.
I do not give the rookie the dignity of turning to face him. First responder, my ass. They’re all so young they respond to the Flinger app more than emergencies.
Firefighters are a hard fucking no.
He doesn’t know this, though, and Jeremy is not a lick of help smirking behind the tap as this absolute skyscraper of a man twists my body to face him, and I see full-on red.
Instincts fit like armor, and I throw the hulking stranger over my shoulder and pin him to the ground before either of us can exhale. “Do not touch me.”
“Okay!” He holds up his free hand in surrender and meets my icy stare, the clear blue weapons that cut if I use them right.
But that’s not how I’m using them now, is it?
Disobedient is what they are, curiously tracing his neck tattoos, even as my brain commands they cease and desist this charade, but the unmistakable 5’s across his throat gives me pause. Four of them in a row.
It signifies a fallen firefighter.
I know it all too well, and even if this asshole did just touch my hips like death-wish is his middle name, my heart breaks for the fact he knows it too.
For a breath of time, we share the same heartbeat, and eyes darker than night pierce my own in a flash of pain that slips from my mind just as quickly as it comes.
Dark hair stubbles a chiseled jaw that flexes so precisely I feel it in places I shouldn’t dare, and full sleeve of tattoos I can’t make out beneath the haze of bar lights rolls over biceps that could lift ten of me.
“What huge arms you have.” I don’t mean to say. It’s the vodka, I’m sure.
I measure his palms against my own before I realize what I’m doing, and a heated spark passes through our bodies when the tips of his fingers curl over mine.
“The better to put out goddamned fires with.” He grins.
So why does it feel like one just started?