Fire at Dawn: The Firefighters of Darling Bay 2 (6 page)

“No,” Lexie had said gently. “Click the next one.”

An hour later, Coin had the hang of it. He’d even reached the point of explaining it to her. Lexie leaned back in her seat to enjoy it.

“Look,” he said. “I get it. You go to their profile, and you decide if there could be something there, based on surface impressions.”

“Based purely on shallowness, yes. Why don’t you mansplain it to me some more?” She was teasing him. Of course looks were the first thing a person noticed. She found herself looking at the back of Coin’s neck, where his tee shift lay along his shoulder. A cord of muscle ran out of his short sleeve. His hands were sure on the computer now, pointing and clicking.

“Hey, have you been working out?” she asked.

It was an honest question—it looked like he had—but he laughed her off. “Okay, I get it. I’m shallow. But you have to have chemistry, right?”
Click, click, click
. “There are a few cute girls on here, but I have to say, a lot of them are just kind of …” He paused, and clicked a few more. “Not.”

Lexie inhaled sharply. Her own profile was on the screen in front of him. They hadn’t talked about it yet—she hadn’t shown it to him.

He clicked past the picture of Lexie and to the next one, a pretty brunette with a short bob and red lipstick. “I guess this one’s not bad.”

Lexie waited for him to laugh. Then she would punch him in the shoulder for being stupid, and they’d get on with their browsing.

“Nah,” he said. “She’s a vegan. Good for her, but I need my bacon on Saturday mornings.” He clicked past three more.

He didn’t say a word about flying past her own picture.

While he was talking about the
Nots.

Lexie’s stomach hurt, twisting into an acidic knot. The back of her throat tightened. He wasn’t joking. He wasn’t playing a prank on her. He’d looked at Lexie’s picture, and he hadn’t recognized her. He’d thrown her right to the bottom of the pile with the other girls who weren’t pretty enough.

911 rang.

Lexie lunged for the button, grateful for the ringer’s blare. So grateful she didn’t have to speak to Coin. Because if she’d had to, her voice would have wobbled, she knew it.

As it was, her clear, strong voice said, “911, what’s the address of the emergency? Okay, tell me exactly what happened.”

CHAPTER NINE

Lexie had gone weird there, at the end. Right when 911 had rung. Usually if firefighters were in dispatch and they ended up being the ones assigned to the call, she’d shoo them on their way even before she dispatched them to it, smiling as the waved them out the door.

But she’d gone all mechanical. Answering the call—a man choking on a meatball—and dispatching Coin’s engine without meeting his eyes. Sure, she was also giving the wife medical instructions at the same time she was banging out the engine and the rescue, but Lexie could usually do both those things while waving and taking a sip of coffee. Maybe she knew them or something. They were just around the corner from Lexie’s house, after all. Maybe they were favorite neighbors. That must have been it.

By the time Engine One got on scene, Lexie had talked the wife through the Heimlich, and the meatball had been expelled. Even though he was fine, Rescue One still transported the patient to the hospital, because he asked to go. In a British accent, the old man had pointed to his throat and said, “It’s still in there. ‘Ospickle. I want to go to the ‘ospickle to make sure she did me right. Maybe she kil’t me.”

The wife had folded her arms across her broad chest and said, “I saved your bloody life, man. I did you more right than I done in years. You should thank the men, you ingrate.”

Coin’s favorite part of the job was the interaction with patients. This wasn’t true of all his coworkers. It used to be that men—and back then, it was all men—wanted to be firemen because they wanted to fight fires. The fire service had attracted a certain kind of man with a specified skill set.

Times had changed. Instead of taking care of loved ones at home, people today relied on the fire service for medical care. People called 911 for things like migraines and turned ankles because they didn’t really know what else to do. And over the same few decades, buildings had become safer. Every new house and business in Darling Bay had to have sprinklers installed. Its attic might burn, but the house itself would be saved. True, they did have their fair share of older buildings with poor wiring, and there would always be the idiots who used cheap extension cords, but nowadays the fire service was primarily a medical organization. More than eighty percent of their calls were medicals now, and the older firefighters who hated that fact were reaching retirement age. The new, young guys, the eager-beaver twenty-one-year olds, were coming in with their paramedic licenses in hand, knowing how to start IV lines better and faster than the guys who had thirty years on the line.

Medicals were what Coin loved, the face to face, the way he could make people’s days better. No one called the fire department because they were having a good time. Everyone needed help at some point. Most people—and this still surprised him—apologized for calling, for interrupting the firefighters’ routine. “I’m so sorry you had to come out. You have better things to do.” They didn’t realize that
this
was what they did. What they’d signed up for.

“It’s no problem, ma’am.” He gave a small nod of his head to the patient’s wife. For a quick second he felt like doffing his invisible cap at her, and then realized it must be because of her British accent.

Back in the engine, Tox said, “Pizza? I don’t want to eat Luke’s chicken. Did you see how much red pepper he put on that?”

Coin took the right turn instead of the left that would bring them down to the wharf and Junior’s Pizzeria. “I gotta get back to the station.”

“Why?” Hank asked from the back. As usual, his headset crackled. He was the most junior so he had to use the worst headset in the rig.

“I got a couple of things to do.” Coin had to figure out what had been wrong with Lexie when he left. Had he screwed something up? She was the one who wanted him to go online, right? This whole dating thing had been all her idea, after all. Had he insulted one of her friends or something?

When it came to Lexie, he didn’t want to screw up one single thing. She was too … something. Coin didn’t want to name what it was. Come to think of it, he couldn’t.

Tox sighed heavily into the mike. “You have to get back to dispatch.”

Coin hit the brakes at the light too hard.

Tox said, “Geez, man, chill. What’s wrong with you? What was Lexie saying to you back there?”

“Why?” Coin watched the light carefully, as if it might turn a new color any minute. Purple. Pink.

“You usually come out of dispatch with a smile. And now Lexie is all stink-pants on the radio.”

As if from a mile away Lexie could hear them, her voice came over the radio. “Engine One, status check?” It was her annoyed voice. She didn’t use it often, and because of that, the guys took it seriously.

“Did you hit the available button?” Coin pointed at the computer on the dash.

Tox said, “Crap.”

Hank’s voice crackled over the headset, “Ever since you and Grace got together, dude. You’re off your game.”

Tox twisted in his seat. “You want to say that to my face?”

Coin knew Tox was all bluster. And Hank was right. Ever since Tox fell for Grace, he’d been softened. A couple of his rough edges had been smoothed off. Coin approved. “You gonna answer dispatch or not?”

Tox clicked the radio button. “Engine One clear.” He released the button and spoke into his rig headset, so only Coin and Hank could hear him. “She knows that. She can see where we are on the computer. What I don’t get is when dispatch asks us stupid questions that they already know the answer to, like they’re trying to trip us up. Especially Lexie. She’s not usually a witch like that.”

Coin took the turn onto Lowry Avenue.

Lexie’s voice filled the cab. “Engine One, check for open mike.”

Coin felt a sick chill. “Tox,” he hissed.

“It’s not me.” Tox held his hands up. “I’m not touching anything.”

Hank said, “Dude. You’re sitting on it. Your shoulder mike fell off.”

Tox undid his belt and scrambled in his seat. Replacing his shoulder mike, he said, “Well. That sucks.”

Hank said, “You
so
owe her a coffee.”

Coin groaned. It had been Tox’s voice, but their engine. She knew they were talking about her. It was going to make whatever was going on in her head even worse.

They owed her more than coffee.

He turned on his left signal.

“Where are we going now?”

“Apple pie. And strawberry ice cream.”

“Yeah, man,” said Tox, his voice chastened. “I’ll buy.”

“Yep. You will,” agreed Coin.

CHAPTER TEN

Lexie was still in Coin’s profile. What she
should
do was insert something into the profile she’d written for him. Instead of “occasional life saver,” she should put “occasional jerkwad.” Instead of five foot nine, she should put that he was five one. For fun, she typed, “My feet stink but since I leave my shoes on for sex, you’ll never know.”

With a grim smile, she hit save.

For one second, Coin was available for dating on the internet with really stinky feet. It felt pretty good.

But it wasn’t fair. She erased the sentence and hit save again. He was back to being almost perfect. If it wasn’t for him having a kid, he would be pretty completely irresistible. Some women were going to dismiss him because he was a father.

But others? They would love him for it. They’d see his Brady Bunch potential. A ready-made family.

Gah.

And he’d flipped right past her picture.

She went to her own profile again, seeing it as he would, from his profile.

Lexie had thought it was a good picture. Her brother had taken it in his backyard as she helped him prune the roses that had gotten completely out of control. She’d had her hair piled messily on top of her head, yeah, but that was par for the course. One long curled strand was falling over her eye, and she was laughing, her mouth open.

When she’d posted the picture, she thought her eyes looked like the eyes of someone having a good time. Someone fun. Someone who could be attractive to the opposite sex. She’d gotten some “likes” from a few men just in the couple of days it had been up.

Coin had flipped past it. Right past it. Hadn’t even slowed down. For Pete’s sake, she’d been wearing a short-sleeved striped T-shirt, and her tattoo could be seen winding down toward her wrist.

How could Coin have not recognized her?

Was it possible it
was
a joke? Maybe he’d been planning on exclaiming, “Just kidding! Cute pic, Lex,” before she answered 911. For one second, Lexie let herself hope.

Then she gave it up.

He hadn’t been going to do that.

It hurt. Anyone else could have flipped past her picture and she wouldn’t have cared. For some reason, though, the fact that it had been Coin stung. Deeply.

The door to dispatch slowly opened.

Tox poked his head around the corner even slower.

“Permission to enter?”

Lexie sighed. “Why do you want to come in? To talk to a witch? You sure you didn’t mean there to be a letter
B
at the beginning of that word?”

Tox held the door open for Coin and Hank who slunk in behind him. Coin held a pie in his hands. Hank was juggling a quart of ice cream back and forth.

“We brought you pie and ice cream.”

“Good.” Lexie wouldn’t forgive them this easily. It had hurt her feelings, what Tox had said. She tried to be the best dispatcher in the department. She tried to be professional on the radio at all times. And still they talked crap about her.

“Dude, we’re sorry,” said Hank.

“Dude,” echoed Lexie. “Whatever. People always ask, but
this
is why I never date firefighters.” It wasn’t, but it sounded good.

Tox put the plates he’d brought on the counter, and Coin started slicing pie.

“What if I told you I didn’t want any?” asked Lexie, crossing her arms.

Tox laughed.

Coin said, his voice kind, “Of course you do. You love apple pie, especially Josie’s.”

Lexie softened, as if her insides were made of the same pink ice cream Hank was scooping onto each plate. That pie was special—Josie put something into the filling, something with a kick, almost as if she put a dash of cayenne in with the cinnamon. Whenever she was asked, though, Josie said it was just something she’d never had a recipe for. No one believed her.

Lexie reached forward and took a forkful. She couldn’t help it—she moaned. “It’s warm. Did you nuke it down the hall?”

Coin shook his head. “She’d just taken it out of the oven.”

“You are forgiven.” She took another bite. “In fact, you could swear at me on the radio. You could tell me I have no idea what I’m doing—” she glared at Tox “—which is pretty much what you did, and I’ll forgive you every single time. As long as you bring me this.”