Four Weddings and a Fireman (2 page)

 

Chapter One

V
ader, wearing firefighter's pants, suspenders, and nothing else, bent the giggling blond girl backward over his left arm, flexed his right biceps, and grinned for the camera. “How does that look?”

Stupid
, mouthed Fred, also known as Stud, who was manning the Firefighter Photo Booth.

“Perfect,” squealed the girl. “It looks like you're saving me from a fire, right?”

“Well, I normally wouldn't fight a fire without my shirt on.” He lowered his voice to Elvis Presley range and wiggled his eyebrows. “Except on certain special occasions.”

She laughed and playfully swatted his chest, letting her hand linger. Vader plastered the grin back on his face, added a little Elvis lip curl, and jerked his head for Fred to take the photo. As soon as the telltale
click
had sounded, he dropped the pose and planted the girl back on her feet.

“Whew,” she said, a little breathless at the speed with which she'd been righted. “You sure are strong. Do you work out?”

Vader caught a spluttering sound from Fred's direction.

“In our job, it pays to be fit,” Vader told the girl. Her gaze drifted back and forth over the musculature of his torso. He fought the urge to say,
Eyes up here
. “The better to rescue pretty girls from all those fiery infernos.”

She sighed at the prospect of a fiery inferno. But Vader wasn't paying attention to her anymore; Cherie was somewhere in the crowd. He knew it, even though he couldn't exactly say how. Maybe he'd caught a glimpse of her red hair, the color of Hot Tamales, through the throng of visitors. Maybe he'd heard a thread of her voice, that silvery, tender, maddening voice of hers, between the shouts of the Muster Games participants scrambling to don turnouts. Or maybe it was his sixth sense that always responded whenever Cherie was near.

Stud brought the photo to the blond girl, who by now had realized that Vader's gaze had wandered. She shifted her attention to Fred.

“Hey, you're kinda cute too,” she told Stud. “Are you a Bachelor Fireman?”

“We don't really call ourselves that.” Fred reddened. According to local legend, a volunteer fireman from the 1850s, thwarted in love when his mail-­order bride ran off with a robber, laid a curse on the station. Since, in the time-­honored tradition of firemen everywhere, his fellow firefighters had relentlessly teased him about his broken heart, he'd vowed that every San Gabriel fireman forevermore should suffer in love the way he had.

The curse certainly seemed to apply to Vader and Fred, both of whom were still single.

“You want a picture with Stud too? I'll take it,” offered Vader. Normally he liked feminine attention. In fact, he loved it. But this thing with Cherie had been knocking him off his game for a while. Two failed proposals took it out of a guy. He'd been avoiding her since Psycho's wedding two weeks ago. He wasn't sure what she was doing here. Hope for Firefighters was
his
turf.

He realized the girl was waving a hand in front of his face. “You all right there, big guy?”

“Sure. Little thirsty. Hot day, huh? Hey, you have fun today. Thanks for supporting the San Gabriel Fire Department, we sure do appreciate it.” He moved her away from the backdrop under the guise of reaching for a water bottle. With a sulky pout, she snatched up her photo and wandered to the next booth, where Ace, the blond surfer-­boy rookie, was serving up his mother's Southern fried chicken.

“I need a bathroom break,” said Fred, slapping a “Closed” sign on the photo booth. “Be right back.” He hurried away as Vader slouched against one of the sawhorses that partitioned off their area. Three city blocks had been cleared of cars for the Hope for Firefighters event. White canopied stands lined both sides of the street, and happy crowds of sweaty San Gabriel residents strolled from one to the next. Vader loved this event, because he actually got to talk to ­people when they were in a good mood, rather than terrified, traumatized, or unconscious.

He tilted his head back and let the water flow into his mouth. It was a scorching hot August day. The force of the sun overhead was nearly physical, reminding him of the way air heated by a fire beat against his body. A few stray drops of water rolled down his throat and chest, offering some welcome relief. He should have signed up for the dunk tank. But since he, more than anyone else at the station, fit the image of a macho, ridiculously muscled superhero-­type, once again he'd been given photo booth duty.

Last year. He swore it. He was becoming a cliché.

“Isn't that your friend, Cherie?” A smirky male voice caught his attention. “I think he's trying out for a Crystal Geyser ad. Hand me the camera, Nick.”

Vader groaned. He knew that voice. While he didn't hate anyone—­it wasn't in his nature—­
if
he'd hated someone, it would be the owner of that voice, Soren. He was one of Cherie's housemates, the other being Nick. Soren and Nick had an emo-­goth-­trance band called Optimal Doom, which for some reason they thought was super-­hip.

Vader refused to say what he thought. Cherie's housemates were friends of her brother Jacob, and she was fiercely, unshakably loyal to her brother.

Reluctantly, he turned his head. And there she was, standing just behind the two weedy guys in their black T-­shirts, her cinnamon-­red hair in a haphazard pile, a little sundress the color of pink lemonade skimming her generous curves, looking so delicious every muscle in his body clenched.

She smiled uncertainly at him and gave a little wave. He frowned at her. How dare she smile at him, after shooting him down a second time?

She lifted her chin and intensified her smile. That was Cherie. Always determined to make the best of things and stay friends, no matter what. “Yes, that's my buddy Vader.”

Buddy?
Buddy?
Vader saw red. She didn't call him her “buddy” when she screamed his name in mid-­orgasm, she didn't call him “buddy” when he tied her to the bedposts—­granted, she'd been pissed that he'd used his socks, but that hadn't stopped her from coming three times and . . .

He shook himself to attention just as Soren took a picture of him, most likely looking like an idiot as he gaped at them over an empty water bottle. “That'll be five dollars for the photo,” he told Soren.

“But I didn't pose with you.”

“Doesn't matter. If you want a picture of me, it's five dollars.”

“Dude, get real. This is a public place. I can take whatever pictures I want.”

Vader's jaw tightened. “This is a charity event. It's five dollars.”

“Then I take my picture back. Here.” He deleted the photo from his camera. “Gone.” He smirked. “No more Poland Springs ad for you.”

“Hey,” Cherie protested. “Was that necessary?”

Vader would have liked to pick the loser up and launch him toward the dunk tank, but he reminded himself that Cherie appreciated Soren's prompt rent payments. “Let me guess. You guys have been walking around here, taking pictures and making fun of stuff, and you haven't bought one thing yet.”

The two guys looked at each other, smirking. “Yeah, pretty much.”

He shook his head, disgusted, and turned away. They weren't worth his time. He didn't know why Cherie put up with them. Maybe it was just one more indication of how wrong for each other he and Cherie were.

Too bad the rest of him didn't seem to believe that. Even now, a little current of electricity was racing through his body.

“Don't you worry, I'm spending enough money for all of us,” said Cherie, with a trace of a Southern accent and another determined smile. “I got a Sloppy Joe from Ryan that was pretty much out of this world. I bought a whole strip of those raffle tickets. They said the prize was a Firefighter for a Day.” She gave a nervous little laugh. “No wonder they're going so fast.”

Cherie was always innocently making comments that others could interpret as lascivious. Then she'd realize it, and two spots of pink would appear on her cheeks and . . .

Vader didn't want to look back at her, fought not to do so. He fixed his gaze on the orange and black swirls of the photo backdrop, but damn it, when it came to Cherie, his willpower evaporated faster than mist in the August heat. He gave in and let his eyes travel back to her. She was digging in her little silver purse, the one that was shaped like a dog bone. She triumphantly held up a twenty-­dollar bill.

“And now I'd like a photo with San Gabriel's sexiest fireman.”

“You're going to pay twenty bucks for a picture of you and your ex?” Soren laughed.

Nick chimed in. “Maybe he'll make his pecs do a little jig for the camera.”

Vader clenched his hands into fists so tight, they could have broken through steel. Sure, he played the clown sometimes. He liked to bring a smile to ­people's faces. That didn't give them the right to—­

A soft hand on his forearm interrupted his train of thought. “Ignore them,” Cherie whispered. The scent of lilac, her favorite, surrounded him, making him feel as if he'd just lain down in a spring meadow, with Cherie beside him. “They're just being jerks. Because they can. Now come on, let me make it up to you. Twenty dollars for a photo.”

He pulled his arm away from her touch. “I don't think so, Cherie.”

“Why not, for mercy's sake? It's for charity. Think of all those widows and orphans.”

He pulled her aside, well out of earshot of her housemates. “Why did you come here?”

Her lips parted, as if he'd taken her off guard. They were distractingly curvy, just like the rest of her. She studied him with serious gray eyes. They weren't really gray, he knew. One afternoon, during a picnic, he'd spent a long time studying them, noticing concentric rings and identifying their colors. The shimmery green of dew-­covered grass, the deep gold of an antique picture frame, the gray of evening fog over a lake. “Vader, please. I support the fire department just like everyone else here. I support you. And I wanted to see you. I . . . I missed you. Vader, you're . . . well, you're very dear to me. You know you are.”

He groaned out loud.
No freaking willpower
. “You turned me down, Cherie. Twice.”

“I thought we were going to erase all that. Besides, I wouldn't put it like that. What I said was that I wasn't interested in getting married. Lots of ­people aren't.”

“Yes, but your eyelid twitched.”

“Excuse me?”

“Don't you know that your right eyelid twitches when you're not telling the whole truth? I've really got to get you to a poker table one of these days.”

Her hand flew to her right eye. “It does not.”

“Fine. Five-­card stud, dollar a point.”

Just then Fred came back and flipped the sign back to “Open.”

“Hey, Cherie.” He glanced at Vader, clearly looking for a cue as to how friendly he should be to her. Vader shrugged, and Fred's smile broadened. “Great to see you. Ready for your close-­up?”

“You know it. Now, Stud, I'm paying extra for this baby, so make it good.”

He handed her a helmet. “Why don't you put that on? It'd be cute.”

Vader knew plenty of girls who wouldn't have wanted to mess up their hair with a clunky, heavy old fireman's helmet. But Cherie was game for anything. She grinned at Fred, then gave Vader the helmet. “Hold it for a sec, please.”

She reached into her pile of hair and pulled out the pins that were holding everything in place up there. A torrent of spicy, sun-­spangled hair came tumbling down over her bare shoulders.

Vader ground his teeth against the inevitable hardening of his body. Did she have to be so damn sexy? She planted the helmet on her head, and he lifted his eyes to the heavens, wondering just what he'd done to make the Almighty torture him like this. She looked . . . adorable. And he adored her. That's all there was to it.

And that's all there'd ever be. Him, adoring her. Her, back and forth about him.

He took a deep breath and stepped toward her. He could suffer a little more, for charity.
Widows and orphans. Widows and orphans
. “Come on. Let's get in front of the backdrop.”

Cherie glanced at the sheet of plywood behind them. It featured dramatic flames and billowing smoke taken from a close-­up of an apartment fire. “The photo's going to show a fire raging behind us?”

Hopefully it wouldn't also show the fire raging inside him. He wondered if she felt a fraction of the lust scorching through his veins.

Soren hooted with laughter. “That's called the fire down below, babe.”

She shot her housemate a scathing look. “Shut up, Soren. You're acting like an idiot.”

Instantly, the guy piped down. Vader rolled his eyes. Cherie loved to mother ­people, and in the case of her housemates, that included trying to correct their rude manners. Maybe he should let her boss him around too. But no. He had too much leader-­of-­the-­pack, take-­charge, tough-­guy in him. He'd tried to tone it down, but what was the point? He'd never be the emo type. He'd never be Nick.