It's a Wonderful Fireman: A Bachelor Firemen Novella (The Bachelor Firemen of San Gabriel) (7 page)

He could barely hear over the roar in his ears and the constant purr of the generator, but he caught her moaning sigh. It warmed him like a shot of whiskey burning away all common sense. He dragged down the neckline of her shirt. She wore a purple bra that pushed her breasts together and raised them in a diabolical way clearly designed to leave a man begging on his knees. The sight of the plump little mounds cresting over the purple fabric made his cock clamor with need.

“Lizzie,” he breathed. “I want you so bad. But it’s not right. I’m no good for you. Every time I’m with you I lose my shit. You don’t even know me. If you were smart you’d have nothing to do with me.”

Helpless to stop himself, he traced the skin of her cleavage along the cups of her bra, dying to dip inside to touch her nipple.

Her eyes were dark, pupils dilated. “Touch me. Go on.”

So he did. He reached under the purple bra and stroked her nipple, using his thumb and forefinger to bring the tender point of flesh to a hard peak.

“Oh my God, Mulligan,” she gasped. Color came and went in the peachy skin of her chest. She was so lovely he wanted to drop to his knees and worship her.

“There’s one good way for me to get to know you,” she murmured, her head thrown back, her eyes half-closed in dreamy pleasure.

“What’s that?”

“You could ask me out. We could go on a date.”

“A date.” He didn’t “date.” He hooked up. He had sex. He screwed. Always careful not to create false hope or put himself at risk. But . . . “date”? As in, take a girl out and talk about their lives? The last time he’d done that, the girl had turned into something of a stalker. She’d moved into his apartment, and they’d launched into the kind of trauma-drama relationship that gave him hives.

But instead of telling Lizzie what a crazy idea a date was, he found himself nodding. “Will you go out with me this Saturday night?”

She nodded, a wide smile lighting up her bright little face. “I’d love to.”

His heart seemed to swell until it felt nothing like the hard, shriveled organ he was used to.

“Y
OU REALLY MADE
me work for that date,” Dream Lizzie commented from her perch on the pile of smoldering concrete, where she sat tailor-style. “I couldn’t understand what was taking you so long.”

Happiness bloomed in his chest, and suddenly he barely felt the weight of the tree. “You’re back.”

“You know me. At your beck and call.” Her naughty wink made him smile.

“Yeah, right. I think you’ve been calling the shots all along.”

Her smile disappeared. “If that was true, we wouldn’t be broken up. You called that shot.”

“I’m sorry.” God, was he sorry. It seemed so stupid now. “Breaking up with you was probably the biggest mistake of my life.”

“It took you long enough to see it,” she said with a saucy smile. “And you’re supposed to be so smart.”

“I thought I was doing the right thing for you. I love you, Lizzie. I think I loved you from the very first second I saw you. You skipped through the firehouse and that was it, boom. I never even thought about another girl after that, not seriously.”

He thought that confession would make her happy, but instead it infuriated her. “
Why
did you never tell me? Why?”

“Because . . . you deserve . . .”

She jumped off the counter, a blur of red velvet, and stomped her foot. “Don’t say it.”

“Better.”

“Oh, Mulligan. You still don’t get it.” She gave a heavy sigh. “Fine. If I have to do this all night, I will. It took Clarence a few tries too.”

Alarm coursed through him. He couldn’t take another trip down memory lane. “Oh no. Not another flashback, Lizzie. Please—”

But she snapped her fingers and Under the Mistletoe disappeared.

“M
ULLIGAN
.” C
ALEB
H
ART
nodded at him as he slid onto the adjacent bar stool in an open-air tiki bar in some unremembered city in Texas, where they’d both just finished the last game of the Double A baseball season. “What’s up?”

“You mean besides my batting average?” Mulligan winked.

“Shut up.”

Caleb Hart was a brilliant young fastballer who’d gotten a huge signing bonus and was now working his way up through the ranks. No one expected him to be in Double A for long. He was a hot prospect, someone to build a team around, unlike Mulligan, who fought and scrambled for every edge. Not only that, but he had the loose-limbed, rangy, blue-eyed cowboy good looks that made the girls crazy. At every game, he had a cheering section of bikini-clad girls.

He would have been easy to hate, except he kept his head down and worked hard, and no one had anything bad to say about him.

Caleb might be a superstar-in-the-making, but Mulligan had just touched him up for two doubles and a home run. There was a very good reason for that. Not only was Caleb a bit wild, but he had a tell. Mulligan, with his obsessive attention to details, had noticed that every time Hart set up for a curveball, he jerked his chin to the left. As soon as he’d figured that out, he connected every single time.

Caleb downed a shot of whiskey and signaled to the bartender for another. “What’re you drinking? Most everyone here’s getting one of those flaming tiki drinks in a skull, but I just didn’t have the heart for it. I’m doing straight shots, hold the lighter fluid. End of the season. Might as well go down in style.”

“You buying?” Mulligan asked, surprised.

“Why not? You killed me out there. To the victor go the shpoils. Spoils.”

Mulligan shook his head at the slurred words. The guy had already had a few, but hell, that wasn’t his problem. “I’ll take a beer.”

The bartender set them up with their drinks, and, surrounded by flaming tiki torches and waitresses in fake grass skirts, Mulligan and Caleb proceeded to get drunk. Well, Caleb was already halfway there, but Mulligan didn’t take long to catch up. He soon realized that he’d really messed with the young pitcher’s head, nailing him for three hits in one game.

“I’m fucking this up,” Caleb kept saying. “I don’t belong here. I got lit up like a Cuban cigar today. And I have all these people counting on me to come through. I got twin brothers and a sister, and they’re all depending on me.”

“Really? I gotta say, I had you pegged all wrong. Thought you were a golden boy.”

“Fuck that.” He dropped his head onto his folded arms, looking like death warmed over. “I’m going nowhere, brother. I’m on a slow ride to Fuckup-ville. I already see them putting me in the debit column marked Big Ol’ Waste of Money. I ought to just give it back. ‘Here you go, sorry for all the trouble.’ ”

“Don’t even go there, dude. You’re going to the Majors, for sure. First time I saw you pitch, I knew. You got it, Hart. You got the juice, the mojo, the whatever you want to call it.”

“You hit two doubles and a home run off me today.”

“Yeah, but that’s—” He stopped abruptly. If he told Caleb about his tell, he’d never get a hit off him again. As a marginal hitter, he survived on any little edge he could find. He’d been scrapping his entire baseball career. Fighting, surviving, stealing bases, messing with pitchers’ heads, making the unexpected throw to home or to first or to wherever the other team wasn’t expecting the play. That was his entire reputation in the league: minimal talent, relentless drive, and detailed knowledge of the game.

It was enough to keep him employed.

But eying young Caleb Hart’s gloomy profile, a piece of knowledge pounded its way through his thick skull. Caleb had tremendous potential. He was a true baseball talent, breathtaking to watch. A phenom. Mulligan loved baseball. That’s why he’d stuck it out all this time. He loved the sense of teamwork required to execute the plays, he loved the mental aspect, the way you could really get your brain into the game. And he loved the physical part, exploding off the plate, sliding into second, unleashing a throw to home plate.

Ever since he’d started playing at age twelve, when his mother needed a place to park him while she tried to get back on her feet, baseball had felt like home. The game had taken him in and offered him discipline, joy, and brotherhood.

Right now, he held a great talent’s psyche in the palm of his hand. What was more important, getting a few hits off him in the future, or watching this brilliant kid claim his place in the game?

“You have a tell,” he blurted before he thought better of it. “You jerk your chin before you drop the curve.”

Caleb lifted his head off his arms and peered blearily at him. “I do?”

“Yeah. Without that, I would have gone oh for three, no question.”

“Holy Mother Mary.” The despair seemed to lift off the young player like a thundercloud blown away by the wind. “Why did no one ever tell me?”

“It’s subtle. Probably no one knows. I have one of those brains that notices shit like that. And once I notice it, I have to figure it out. I’m a little obsessive, I guess you’d say.”

Caleb clapped a hand on his shoulder, nearly missing in his drunken enthusiasm. “Maybe I have a chance in this game after all.”

“Yeah.” Hart had a chance all right. The kind of chance someone like Mulligan could only dream about. “I’ll see you in the sports pages.”

“What are you talking about? You’ll see me next season, bro.”

“Nah. I’m quitting.” The thought that had been brewing all season burst into speech. “This is it for me.”

“Why? You can’t just walk away, Mulligan. You’re a good player.”

“Yeah, I’m all right. But I’m no Caleb Hart.” He offered a grim smile, draining his beer mug. “If I had one-tenth of your talent, you couldn’t pry me away from the game. But I don’t. Tell you the truth, I’ve been studying for the firefighter’s exam.”

“No shit.”

“Yeah. Sort of a backup in case Major League Baseball never figures out what a rock star I am.”

“Good luck to you, man.” Caleb swiveled the stool to face him and stuck out his hand. But Mulligan ignored it, looking over Caleb’s shoulder at a disaster in the making. One of the tiki torches was leaning over too far, making the flame splutter and spark.

A girl pushed her chair back from the table next to the torch. The chair leg collided with its base, giving just enough of a nudge to make the bamboo pole slowly topple in the direction of a waitress. Oblivious, she stood with her back to the falling torch as she took someone’s order. In a flash, Mulligan took in the entire situation, the flammability of the waitress’s fake-grass skirt and the angle of the tiki torch. He calculated the chance that the flame would be snuffed out by the speed of its fall, the damage that even a lick of flame would do to human skin.

He launched to his feet, pushing past Caleb, who spun around on his bar stool with a “What the fuck?” He scrambled across the room the same way he’d chase after a runaway grounder. The torch hit the floor, one flame leaping onto the grass skirt. He heard the waitress’s scream, saw smoke rise from her hem. He ripped a tablecloth from one of the tables, sending several skull-shaped mugs flying through the air. Then he dove on top of that waitress as if she were home plate and wrapped the tablecloth around her. He felt the burn of the hot grass.

The waitress was still screaming, but she sounded more shocked than hurt. When he was sure the fire was out, he rolled off her and checked the damage. The skirt was charred, exposing her legs underneath, but he saw no obvious signs of burn.

“Are you okay?” he asked her.

She put her hand on her butt, felt the scorched hole in her skirt, and burst into tears. “I . . . I think so.”

He didn’t want to put the tablecloth back on her; it was still hot. Instead, he ripped off his T-shirt and covered her with it.

“You saved me,” she sobbed. “I thought I was going to get burned alive.”

Someone started clapping, and soon everyone in the tiki bar was standing and applauding. He helped the waitress to her feet, and returned to the bar stool, the adrenaline now beating a tympani in his bloodstream.

Caleb Hart squinted at him. “If that’s not a sign from God, I don’t know what is.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Two minutes after you say you’re quitting baseball to be a fireman, you save a girl’s life in a freaking tiki bar? The Lord works in mysterious ways, my friend. I’d say he just gave your decision a big thumbs-up.”

“If there’s a God, he has better things to worry about than my career choices.”

But still, he often wondered, even years later . . .

“H
EY
, C
LARENCE
,”
HE
called to Dream Lizzie. “Aren’t you supposed to show me what would have happened if I hadn’t existed? Would that waitress have been okay?”

Dream Lizzie was brushing soot off her elf costume. “She would have been fine. The guy at the table she was serving was about to toss a pitcher of water at her. She would have been fine.”

“You’re not doing your job very well,” he complained. “Now I just feel useless.”

“You’re missing the point. If you hadn’t spoken up that night, both you and Caleb would have taken the wrong path. You would have stayed in baseball, and Caleb would have quit. But you put your ego aside and helped him get his head together. Then you made the gutsy choice to walk away from baseball and start over in a new career. Do I even need to tell you how many people owe their lives to that choice?”

“Hmm. Well, it might help.”

She laughed, a sound that always made warm, happy shivers run up and down his spine. “Then put your escape canister on, and I’ll get started.”

Escape canister
. Of course. How had he forgotten? The escape canister was a backup carbon filter that would allow him to breathe safely after his oxygen ran out. He reached his aching arm into the pouch that held the foil-wrapped package. Pinching it between his arm and his chest, he managed to rip it open. Snapping it onto his face mask, he took a breath of hot, stale air.

“Good boy,” Lizzie said as he lay back, panting from that exertion. “It’s a good thing I’m here, huh? Now let’s talk about your first day on the job at Station 1.”

“No. Hell, no. I’m not living that one again.”

“Oh really? I hear it’s a pretty good story. You earned a place in firehouse legend on day one. You’re the reason there’s a baseball in the display case in the reception area.”