Sweet Justice (18 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

E
VEN
A
RIG
cleaned to a sparkling shine couldn't lift Andrew's spirits. Usually the morning labor of washing and prepping the fire trucks was enough to remind him how lucky he was to have this job. The gleam of a fire engine's red paint in the early-morning sun never failed to put him in mind of how many kids wanted to grow up and
be
Andrew.

Not this morning, though. He dropped his sponge into a bucket of suds, and it splatted like his own sour mood. Even after two days off, the meeting he'd had with Dutch and his brothers, not to mention seeing Mallory as he'd come out of it, still sat on him with the unmoving pressure of a sleeping elephant.

A jet of water shot his way. Eric and Jackson's raucous laughter showered over him as he jerked out of the path of the water. “Woo-hee!” Jackson yelled. “That boy can dance like a chicken on a hot tin plate! Do it again, Eric!”

Eric didn't have the chance. Andrew had closed the gap and snatched the hose out of his buddy's hand. He flung it on the ground, where a river of water ran between his legs and down the oil-stained concrete of the firehouse's drive. Afraid of what he might do or say if he hung around even a second longer, Andrew stalked into the engine bays.

A glance through the glass-paned door leading into the station told him that the rest of the crew had finished up with the indoor chores and had gathered together in the rec room. There'd be no peace in there. He walked farther into the bays, lowering himself down onto the bumper of the ladder truck.

The sound of boots—Eric by the way he was walking—echoed along the walls of the bay. Sure enough, his buddy came to stand alongside the front of the ladder truck. “What bear got you this morning?” Eric asked.

“Why does it have to be a bear? Why can't a guy simply not want to get hosed down first thing in the morning, huh?” Andrew stared at the scuffed toes of his boots, barely visible in the gloomy, unlit interior of the bay.

“Because your usual response is to return fire. If you're still ticked off with us for all the pranks, get over it already. You know how to hand it out to the rest of us, so suck it up and take it when it's your turn.”

Andrew worked his jaw, tried to think what he should say to Eric. “It's not the jokes—well, heck, not all of it. Sure, I know I get rowdy sometimes, but not nearly as bad as Rob. You guys didn't mean anything by it, I got that.”

“Shoot.” Eric scuffed the concrete with his own boot and leaned a palm against the rig. “I was afraid of that.”

Andrew turned full on to face him. “What do you mean, you were afraid of that?”

“That it wasn't the practical jokes, which meant I was gonna have to have one of
those
conversations with you.”

“Those conversations? What conversations?” Despite his foul mood, Andrew couldn't help but chuckle at the contortions Eric's face was going through. The guy could have been a five-year-old presented with a whole plate of broccoli to eat.

“That's part of the reason we all pranked you like we did. You've been moping around here for the better part of two months, traipsing off into corners and sighing like a lovesick pup. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to know what's going on.”

“There's nothing—”

Now Jackson had joined them, and he was vigorously nodding his head. “Not a thing, huh?” the firefighter asked. “When we hear that the kid you pulled out of that fire is having therapy at your sister's place, and that the kid's sister looks like a fashion model, that's not your usual recipe for disaster?”

“Mallory's not like that. Once you get to know her, she's actually nice—”

Jackson held out his hand. Eric swore, reached into his back pocket, pulled out his wallet and liberated a ten, which he slapped into Jackson's waiting palm. He shook his head in disgust. “I thought you had better sense. I even bet Jackson double or nothing that you weren't getting sucked into another diva disaster.”

Jackson smirked. “And you're supposed to be his friend. Ha! Do I know him or what?”

“Wait a minute.” Andrew stood up, looked from one to the other. “This whole ‘concerned for you' crap was just an elaborate way of confirming a bet?”

Eric and Jackson swapped high fives. “Had you going, didn't we?”

With considerable effort, Andrew reined in a temper that was on a turbo-charged boil. On some level, he was impressed with Eric's acting skills. He could enjoy a good prank as well as the rest of the gang.

And Jackson had been so eager for his money that he'd horned in before Andrew could do what he'd been about to do. Five seconds more, and Andrew would have spilled out the entire story to Eric.

Sheesh. They would have had enough ammunition to tease him for weeks.

Andrew was an even better actor, when push came to shove, than Eric. And if it killed him, he wouldn't reveal a sliver of the truth.

“Jackson, you may need to repay Eric that dough,” he said. “No diva disaster. I learned my lesson. What's got me in a foul mood is being called on the carpet by legal. They give you a medal and put you on the front page of the paper, and then six months later, they're telling you, ‘Naughty, naughty, don't do that again.'”

“Dutch? You've been moaning and groaning because you're in hot water with Dutch?” With evident frustration, Jackson handed his winnings back to Eric, who took them with a broad grin. “That man is even screwing up my bets. Dang him and his policies and procedures. What are we, firefighters or a nursery school?”

Now it was Jackson who stalked off toward the open bay's doors, still muttering under his breath. Eric looked down at the ten-dollar bill in his hand, then slowly put it back in his wallet. As he tucked the wallet into his back pocket, he said, “It wasn't just for the bet, you know.”

“Uh-uh. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice—”

“No fooling. You all right?”

“I'm all right, Eric.”

Eric toed the concrete as he had before. “You sure?”

“Sure.”

“Because we
are
friends, you know, and if you ever—well, you know—”

“Shoot, Eric, we're not having one of
those
conversations, are we?” Andrew joked.

“Nah.” He socked Andrew lightly on the shoulder. “Nah, we're not having one of those conversations.”

In the awkward silence that followed, voices from outside floated back to them. Then the sound of footsteps echoed off the concrete again—Jackson's work boots and the tap-tap-tap of a woman's high heels.

Andrew peered around Eric to spy Jackson bearing a smug Cheshire-cat-size smile. In his wake came the source of the tap-tap-tap.

Mallory.

He hated the way his stomach lifted in the instant of recognition. Dutch had made the whole situation clear at the meeting, if he hadn't before. Even Daniel had come down on the lawyer's side.

Keep Mallory Blair at arms length.

It was hard to do when the very sight of her drew him. Eric and Jackson would swear that Mallory's looks were the draw, but they weren't.

In fact, her prettiness had been off-putting to him at first, too much akin to his previous...what had Eric called them? Diva disasters. It was only after he'd gotten to know her— little bits of her, like how she made her clothes out of thrift-shop discards, and that she liked to read the same authors he did—that he'd allowed himself to look past her physical appearance.

The guys would never believe him, though.

She was a vision. High heels, a skirt in some billowy fabric that brushed her knee, a blazer that clung to her curves like a glove.

Her face, though... Her expression was purely professional. Pleasant enough, but devoid of even a degree of the warmth he'd come to know.

Jackson halted. “Hey, Monroe, you've got a visitor.”

Mallory walked past Jackson, right up to Andrew.

“You've been ducking my calls,” she said cheerfully.

It wasn't real cheer. It was that bonhomie hail-good-fellow type of humor that always rubbed Andrew the wrong way.

Not to mention the fact that he
had
been ducking her calls.

“Looks as if you need some privacy,” Eric muttered. He melted away, joining Jackson. As they headed back to the front drive, he could see the silhouette of Eric handing Jackson what was presumably that ten-dollar bill.

“I've been busy,” Andrew told Mallory.

“Not at the farm. I went out there two days running, trying to find you.”

“Yeah, well.” He didn't want to admit that he had been avoiding her. “I had stuff to do.”

He could see she was primed to argue. He knew from his previous girlfriends what was coming. They were always in his face about how he disappeared when they needed to “talk.” A statement like he'd just uttered was practically all the ammunition LeeAnn had ever needed to go to DefCon 4 state of alert.

Andrew braced himself for the recriminations and accusations, prepared for her lashing out at him.

Only...

She didn't.

Mallory's shoulders rose as she drew in a breath. She ran a tongue over her lips, started to speak, stopped. “I guess it doesn't matter about that,” she replied grudgingly. “I'm here now.”

“Yes, you are.” He blinked a few times, sure that any minute she was going to explode into LeeAnn-like shrieks. “Er—what was it that you needed to see me about?”

With LeeAnn, it hadn't ever been anything important, just that he wasn't willing to pick up the phone the sixteenth time she'd called him during a day.

But Mallory hadn't lost her temper over not being able to reach him.

“It's about Katelyn,” she said. Now her shoulders squared, and her back went even straighter. There was a rehearsed air about the line, as if she had been primed to say this for two days.

He propped himself against the fire truck, his palm flat against the cool red paint, his whole being drawing strength from the contact. He might not ever get women right, but firefighting had never yet let him down. “What about Katelyn?”

“It's about her school. About you telling her it was okay to quit school.”

He stumbled at her words. “Quit—I never said for her to quit.”

For a moment, Mallory looked nonplussed. “You didn't?” she faltered.

“No. An education's an important thing.”

“Oh,” she replied. The battle readiness had evaporated, and she was left slightly drooping. “Wow. I'm sorry. Katelyn told me the other night that she didn't want to take summer classes, and that you said I'd understand if she wanted to go for a cosmetology certificate.”

He lifted his shoulders in a shrug. “Sure. I told her that college wasn't for everybody. Take me for example. I get twitchy having to do an hour's worth of classroom training to keep up my certification. Maybe the Ivy League's not for her.”

Mallory's face went slack with what he recognized was speechless anger. It was that same expression he'd seen the first night they'd met.

“You—you—” Her voice shook. She calmed herself with visible effort. “Do you realize that her college courses
are
what she needs to graduate from high school?”

“Huh? I thought it was extra. You know, for bonus points.”

“No. In the spring of her junior year, she decided that high school was boring and dumb and that what she wanted to do was to go on to college. Like an
idiot
, I let her sign up for the precollege program. I thought it would be good for her, because she's smart as a whip.”

Her eyes closed, and Andrew could see her carefully applied, flawless eye shadow. With a pang, he realized he liked her face better when it was bare and exposed and unsophisticated.

Mallory was speaking again, and Andrew forced himself back to her words.

“—when she had the accident, everything was in jeopardy. She couldn't get credit for regular classes, because she hadn't taken them. And she was about to be booted out of the college classes. But I begged and pleaded, and I got them to give her independent studies in all of her classes.”

Andrew wasn't sure what an independent study was, but he could tell it had been a huge concession. “What's me telling her she could get a cosmetology certificate take away from that? Hasn't she been doing the work?”

“Yes, but she's still got to take summer classes in order to finish. She couldn't handle but one course and therapy, too, this semester—and now you fill her head with ideas about quitting?”

“Whoa.” Andrew held up a hand. “I agree that I should have laid off on the advice giving without asking you first. I didn't have a clue that her high school diploma hinged on her finishing classes during the summer. Still, I'm hearing something else under all this.”

“You're hearing that I'm ticked—”

“You're disappointed she's not interested in pursuing a college degree.”

“Disappointed? Are you kidding me? I'm not disappointed, because a cosmetology certificate is so not happening, Andrew Monroe. I won't be disappointed because my sister
will
get over herself and get that degree.”

Andrew couldn't stop his empty chuckle. “See? I knew it. You're an educational snob.
You
don't want your little sister to be blue collar.”

Her eyes rounded with even more anger. “Blue collar? Andrew, I
am
blue collar. I'm in retail, probably lower than blue collar. A plumber or an electrician makes a good living and has job security.”

“What's wrong with Katelyn wanting to do something besides being a doctor or a lawyer?” he asked.

She clamped her jaw shut, nothing coming out but a low groan of frustration. Her chest heaved with the effort she was using to keep her volcano-like temper within. He had to hand it to her; by now LeeAnn would have thrown something at him.