Fire at Twilight: The Firefighters of Darling Bay 1 (5 page)

Muttering under his breath, he folded it and shoved it in his back pocket. “You’re not a very nice person,” he said as he left the room.

“Screw you, too.” She flipped him off and followed it with a blown kiss.

“Thanks, Lexie.”

911 rang. “You’re welcome.”
Tap
. “911, what’s the address of the emergency?”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Grace was getting used to the rhythm of the clinic, settling in. Finally. It felt good. The first year she’d been open, she hadn’t known what to expect. She could go from busy to dead in the space of fifteen minutes. About six months ago, she’d had a Friday on which every scheduled patient had canceled and she’d gotten no walk-ins, not one. It had scared her so badly she’d spent her whole weekend on the computer, setting up advertising, brainstorming ways to get the clinic’s name out there. And then, that following Monday, she’d been so busy she’d never gotten a chance to eat lunch. She hadn’t even had her tea.

This Monday morning she had three appointments scheduled, and she hoped for more walk-ins. But usually no one came in before ten except for Mrs. Finch who got up at five every morning because she said a day without a sunrise was a day wasted. Grace tended to think that was a little overboard. The sun came up without her worrying about it. Most days, anyway.

She walked out onto the front porch of her practice. She’d managed to grab the little Victorian cottage when it had come on the market, when it was still a fixer-upper. She’d put her own sweat equity into it, taking months to get everything done before opening. It had been a mark of pride, though, learning how to redo drywall (the previous owners had a son who liked to put his fist through the wall when he was angry, which seemed to have been way too often) and how to retile the roof. The fact that she knew how the bathroom was plumbed made her confident she’d know what to do if the sink started leaking again. It felt more like home here, at the practice, than her own small house did, a quarter mile away.

Grace set her mug of tea on the porch rail and looked out onto Iris Street. From here, if she stood on tiptoe, she could look over Felicia Dow’s low gabled roof and catch just a glimpse of Darling Bay. On foggy summer mornings like this, sound was captured and carried farther than normal. The noise of the seals barking down by the fishing pier lifted her spirits. She hugged her old blue sweater tightly around her and felt thankful, again, that she’d chosen the right town. She’d been raised inland, in a hot, dusty, farming community. Her father had grown strawberries, and while they’d hired pickers every season, she and her sister Samantha had been on the permanent staff, even being kept out of class during the height of the season. It had been worth it, to her father, to have the extra four hands working, even when he had to deal with the phone calls from school. “They’re my kids, and if I say they’re sick, they’re sick, and you have no right to come and check on them.” He would bang the phone down and point. “Pick as fast as you can, and we’ll get McD’s tonight.” To Grace and Samantha, to whom McDonald’s was the height of elegance and refinement, this was payment enough.

Their father had stayed in the field until he died of skin cancer while Grace was in college. Their mother had died of a rare lung disease two years later. They were all sure it came from inhaling years of crop dust, but who could they appeal to? No one. Grace had tried so hard, to fix them both, to get them out, to get them healed, and nothing had worked.

Escaping to the cool, foggy beach town of Darling Bay was the best thing she could have done. In the ten years she’d been here, Samantha had been with her, on and off, a year here and a year there. Grace cherished the time with her sister, trying not to grasp her too tightly, like she knew she sometimes did. She had to let her sister breathe. Knowing that and letting her sister have her own life, though, were two different things.

A motorcycle took the corner at Taylor and First Street a little too fast. Speed demons always liked coming down First for its tight curve along the marina, but Grace hated it when they raced past her practice. The noise was one thing—the roar and gas fumes that came out of their tailpipes—but her real concern was safety. Someday she’d have to run out there to scoop one up off the roadway. She’d be the first person on scene, and yes, while she was CPR trained, she sure as heck never wanted to have to use it. Lifesaving was for people like Tox.

Big, strong, grumpy Tox. The man wouldn’t leave her thoughts.

The motorcycle paused, slowed, and then stopped in front. Great. Would he leave it parked there? In her best customer parking spot?

The man got off the bike in one smooth motion, making it look like it weighed nothing beneath him.

Then, as if she’d conjured him merely by thinking his name, the man took off his helmet.

Tox.

He looked criminally sexy. In his black leather jacket, he looked more like he was about to knock over a liquor store with a sawed-off shotgun rather than stride confidently up the three steps to her porch.

One thing she knew—he
was
a robber, because she couldn’t quite get back the breath she kept losing when he was around.

“Hey,” he said. The helmet hung lightly from a finger against his thigh. His wide, jean-clad thigh.

“You actually like riding that thing?”

“It’s nice to see you, too.”

Grace realized she hadn’t responded to his opening salvo very appropriately, but she didn’t care that much. “You know the risks of riding a motorcycle?”

“Not off the top of my head, no.” He took off his black leather jacket and laid it down on her porch swing. As if he owned the place.

“You’re thirty-five times more likely to die in a crash than a person in a car, did you know that? And forty-eight percent of motorcycle crashes are a direct result of speeding.”

“I did know that, actually. I don’t speed unless I’m alone on the highway.” He dragged his hand through his dark blond hair. Shaggy, and with just the right amount of curl to it, it looked amazing when he stopped. Grace knew that if she’d ever put a helmet on, she’d end up with worse hair than she did when she wore a baseball cap. But this guy looked tousled. She bet he always looked that good.
Boy
, that was annoying.

So she continued, “A little less than half of all motorcycle deaths involve only the motorcyclist.”

Tox almost smiled—she could tell he did. “How do you know all this?”

Years of worrying about Samantha and her stupid motorcycle which she finally sold for drug money before she got clean the last time.

“I know stuff.”

“How are you feeling?”

Oh. Tox was checking up on her. “You probably want your inhaler back. Hang on, it’s inside.”

He raised a hand. “I’m fine. I have more of them. Keep it.”

“You didn’t have to come here,” she said. It came out more gracelessly than she would have liked. “I mean, thank you so much. The way you helped me on Friday—twice—was great. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. But I’m happy to take care of myself, and I know what to do for difficulty breathing.”

“You’re going to stick needles in yourself?” Tox looked horrified.

“With that,” she said, “and the right herbs, I’ll be right as rain in no time.”

“Oh. Well,” he said, and ran his hand through his hair again.

Grace wished he would stop doing that. It was distracting.

“Anyway,” she said pointedly. “Thanks.”

“It was nice to see your sister.”

Ah, that was the game, then. It had been a long time since Grace
had
needed to fend off guys at the front door, but she remembered it well. “It’s good to have her back in town.”

“Must be.”

Grace waited, cupping her tea in her hands. He would follow up with a request for Sam’s phone number or at the very least a query about her relationship status.

“Coffee’s a good thing to have,” he said, gesturing. Was he uncomfortable? Why was he shifting from one foot to the other like that?

“I drink tea.”

“Huh. Why?”

“Lower cortisol response.” That was the truth of it, but actually, she still had a cup of coffee or two in the mornings. She hadn’t been able to cut herself off yet.

“Okay …”

Grace finally took pity on him. “Can I help you with something? Do you need to check the air conditioner? Because a friend of mine is in HVAC and he came in on Saturday. I got a whole new unit. It’s quieter than the last unit, but I can show you if you need me to.”

“I was actually…”

She waited again. Whatever he wanted to say, it was something he didn’t really like. She could read it in the way he held his eyes, tight and careful, and the way his mouth was folded, as if he’d tasted something sour. And heck. Even with his mouth pressed that way, he still had a sexy mouth. Fine, strong lips.

Grace jerked herself back to the present. She nodded in what she hoped was an encouraging way. “So …”

“Can you stick some of those needles in me?”

“Pardon?” She must not have heard him right.

He looked even more pained. “I got a gift certificate. I’m supposed to …”

“Oh! Lexie! I saw that come through online.”

Tox nodded. “One time she made me do a sweat lodge with her. All I got was a headache from the smoke. She gets me into the most stupid crap.”

“Wow,” said Grace.

His eyes widening, he hurried to say, “No, I don’t mean … That’s not what …”

Grace laughed. “It’s not the first time I’ve dealt with a skeptic. And I’m sure it won’t be the last. Come on in. I’ve got some paperwork I need you to fill out.”

CHAPTER NINE

Tox sat in a comfortable and probably ergonomically correct red foam chair in the outer office. It was a pretty room, done up in red and yellow and lots of green. There must have been twenty plants in the small front room alone, their vines twisting around each other. Small purple blooms warred with clusters of white. How did someone get flowers to grow inside like that?

Grace hadn’t been kidding about the paperwork. Tox was used to forms—used to dealing with and tracking the paperwork he encountered daily at work—but this was something else. Did she really need to know his sleep pattern (bad) or how many times a week he had sugar (at least seven, if he had ice cream every day, and sometimes he actually had it twice, and was he supposed to admit that too)? She wanted to know about any history of depression (he called it the blues, himself, and given long enough, it usually dissipated like drift smoke). Relationship troubles? That was one place he was good, he knew that. No relationship trouble at all. If you kept yourself happily single, you didn’t have any worries in that area.

And he was
not
going to tell her about his bathroom habits. No way.

But the other stuff surprised him. He didn’t lie about smoking, because he didn’t have to. He’d always hated the habit, and being in his line of work had made him hate it more. How many thousands of breathing calls had he been on over the years? Lung cancer was ugly, uglier than most other ways to die, and he’d seen a lot of it. Nothing fun about drowning to death.

Drinking? Sure, he had a few on the weekends. Lately he might have been having one too many on occasion, and it bothered him to admit it, starkly like that, in blue pen on white paper. It was actually a good reminder for him. It didn’t take very many to be too many. He resolved, sitting there, that he was going to let his bottle of Scotch maybe pick up a few cobwebs. He didn’t need it, and he didn’t ever want to.

Grace had given him a cup of tea in a green and white ceramic mug when he’d sat down with the questionnaire, and he took a sip absently.

Okay, normally tea wasn’t his thing, not even when they gave it to you free at Su’s Chinese on Fourth. This was different, though. It wasn’t sweet, but there was something to it … vanilla? Something sweet. Kind of the same scent he’d smelled on her last week, actually.

“You ready?” she said, reentering the small room.

He nodded. “Hey, you sure you have time for me today? Because I can come back another time.”

“This way,” she said, leading him into the next room. He hadn’t even given the room a second glance when he was there for the air conditioner fire on Friday, but now he took his time looking around. In another lifetime, this room was probably the parlor of the old Victorian. It was narrow, but it ran long. Green plants in brightly painted pots were everywhere, giving the room a lush, verdant feel. The walls were covered with red velvet wallpaper, the design ornate. While it should have made the room seem heavy and dark, the many windows, most of them standing open, made the room feel airy. The place where her fire extinguisher should have hung was still empty.

He pointed. “You need to buy another one.”

“I have it in my car.”

“No good to you out there.” Tox turned slowly. He counted ten simple recliners, nothing like the plush, heavy ones they had at work.

“You can fill all these chairs with patients? At the same time?”

“Sometimes,” she said easily. “I have a couple of private rooms for people who don’t want to share. Would you prefer that?”