A Fighting Chance (15 page)

At least she thought Steph was exaggerating.
It was hard to tell with Boston. When she’d first arrived in the city, she’d felt like a rat in a maze tightly packed with cars, angry people, construction and one-way streets, and she still hadn’t quite mastered driving there yet. She could do it, but her knuckles would ache for an hour after from clutching the steering wheel. And she still had no idea how to calculate how long it would take
to get anywhere. Sometimes it took fifteen minutes to get to the dentist and sometimes it took an hour and twenty minutes.

At least she didn’t have to drive the fire trucks. She was perfectly content to ride shotgun when it came to getting a thirty-five-to forty-five-foot-long truck through the rat maze.

I want to see your apartment but the only day I have off is Tuesday and you have
to work every Tuesday.

There’s not much to see. Literally.

Give me a tour. I’m on break.

Jamie made herself a coffee while her laptop booted up, and then she initiated a video chat with Steph. After doing one slow swivel with the computer’s camera, she laughed and set it on the counter.

“That’s it?”

“Yup.” Jamie laughed at her friend’s scowl. With her blond hair pulled
back tightly into a bun for work and her glasses on because she’d once had an incident with contact lenses and hot pepper juice on her hands, the frown made Steph look like a disapproving school principal. “Easy to clean, though.”

There was a blue leather love seat and a glass coffee table in the living room area. A small glass kitchen table with two chairs between that space and the kitchen
space. And toward the back was the queen bed, with an oak dresser nearly hiding the door to the bathroom. She could have had more floor space if she got a smaller bed, but she refused to compromise when it came to sleeping and she’d spent a small fortune on the mattress set.

She didn’t even want to think about how much it had cost her to have what little furniture she had carried up to the
fourth floor. Hopefully her next assignment would be in commuting distance because she did
not
want to move again anytime soon.

“Tell me more about the new job,” Steph said. “I have five more minutes to kill.”

“I told you everything. I got the tour, met the guys and left. I won’t have anything more to add until after tomorrow, I guess.”

“You didn’t say much.”

“Because you were
working and I hate texting entire conversations.”

Steph shrugged. Because she worked for the family business and hadn’t yet fulfilled her mother’s dream for her of marrying a nice man and bearing a pack of grandchildren, she worked long hours and texting was sometimes the only way she ever got to talk to people who weren’t related to her or ordering food. “Are any of them hot?”

Yes.
Actually, a few of them were, but it was Scott Kincaid’s face that popped into her head. “I guess. I’m not there looking for a boyfriend.”

Her own fire company was the
last
place she’d look for a boyfriend, even if she wanted one. She’d never experienced a workplace romance, but she could only imagine how messy they got. Gossip and tension and, God forbid, the potential for a sexual harassment
situation. Everything she’d worked her ass off for could be gone, or at the very least tainted. She wanted nothing to do with any of that.

“You never know where you’ll meet your true love,” Steph said.

“I’m hanging up on you. Go back to work.”

Once she’d ended the chat, Jamie looked at the boxes still remaining and then carried the laptop and her coffee to the table. Pulling up
her Facebook account, she settled in to catch up on things. Her sisters’ kids were all still being cute and her mother was still sharing every knitting joke that crossed her feed. Jamie’s best friend from school was at Disney World with her family, and Jamie hit the like button on a few of those photos. Her aunt was really hitting some online game or another hard, and the rest of her feed was full
of political memes she skimmed past.

After privately sending her mom a picture of the apartment—which she’d taken from the door, so it showed almost the entire place—she closed the laptop and sighed. She really wanted to have everything in order before she left, but she’d also need to get to bed early. Nerves were always a bit of an issue before starting with a new company, and she knew she’d
have trouble falling asleep, which would make the twenty-four hour shift even harder.

It was time to get up off her butt and get stuff done. Tomorrow would be a big day.

* * *

S
COTT
SHOWED
UP
for his shift on Tuesday with his game face on. Jamie Rutherford was going to be working with them for at least six weeks, and probably longer, and he was going to treat her no differently
than he’d treated any of the other temporary replacements for Danny Walsh. Scott might have a reputation for liking women a little too much and having a bad temper, but he was also a professional firefighter. He could handle having a woman in the company, whether he’d had a particularly steamy sex dream about her or not.

Thinking about that dream as he walked through the open bay door wasn’t
a good move, so Scott turned his attention to the truck. He knew the guys who’d just wrapped up their tour took good care of her, but looking over E-59 was how he started every day. She was one of the older trucks in service, since she took care of a primarily residential neighborhood without the industrial buildings or densely populated high-rises other areas did, and so got less of the budget.
But she was solid and dependable and looking her over always calmed him down.

When he passed through the second floor, he resisted the urge to look through the open office door and see if Jamie was in there. He never stopped to say hello to Danny, knowing he’d see him upstairs at some point, so he wasn’t going to stop and say hello to Jamie.

When he reached the third floor and heard
a woman’s laughter, he paused. She had a really great laugh, and he listened until whatever had been going on quieted before walking into the living room.

It looked like he was the last one there, which wasn’t surprising. He was never late, but the other guys had an annoying tendency to be early, which just made him look late. Everybody had coffee, most of them still in the slow stages of
coming fully awake.

“Hey, Scotty,” Aidan said. “You awake yet?”

“Not by choice. I hope you guys didn’t drink all the coffee.”

“We did.”

“But I made another pot,” Gavin said, probably guessing it was his coffee Scott would steal.

Jamie was just finishing making her own coffee when he walked into the kitchen, so she left the stuff on the counter for him. Her hair was in
a French braid—which he knew because every time the school had sent a lice notice around his mom had put his sisters’ thick hair into French braids so tight they’d whine. He guessed Jamie wore it that way because it kept her hair out of the way while not making a ponytail lump under her helmet.

“Good morning,” she said, and he realized he’d been staring at her hair.

“Morning. So it sounded
like I missed the party.” She frowned at him over the rim of her mug. “The laughing, I mean. I heard you laughing.”

“Oh, I was laughing at Jeff’s reaction to me telling the guys I’m a vegetarian.”

Scott almost dropped his mug. “You are? Seriously?”

She laughed again, the sound seeming to fill the kitchen. “No, I’m not. I just wanted to see what they’d say about not having meat with
any meals for the next two months or so.”

“That’s...wow, that’s mean. What did Jeff say?”

“He said there was probably some law that said she had to be accommodated and then told Grant to put a dozen steaks and a bag of carrot sticks on the grocery list.”

Scott laughed. “Yeah, nobody cares if you get the shower to yourself, but we’re not giving up meat.”

He probably shouldn’t
have brought up her in the shower if he was trying to stay in a purely professional head space, because his mind immediately wanted to picture her naked and covered in bubbly lather.

Rick Gullotti chose that moment to come in and wash out his empty mug. “Hey, Scotty, when you get home, do me a favor and ask Tommy if he knows anybody who wants to buy a snowblower. I know it’s the wrong time
of year and it’s a bit of a beater, but we’ll give somebody a good deal on it. Joe used it to do the walkways while I did the driveway with the bigger one, but now that he and Marie have moved into senior living with a grounds crew, I don’t need two.”

“I’ll ask him. You and Jess move downstairs yet?”

Rick shook his head. “We’re going to take our time and remodel it the way we want it,
and with her still traveling between here and San Diego a lot, that’s not high on our priority list.”

“You live with your dad?” Jamie asked when Rick had gone back into the other room.

“Yes and no. I rent the apartment upstairs, so I’m around if he needs me and I get a family discount on the rent, but I still have my own space. There’s no way we could actually live together.”

“I’ve
heard a lot about your dad, actually. He’s pretty well respected.”

“Yeah.” He wasn’t always the best father and he certainly hadn’t been a great husband, but he’d been a damn good firefighter. “You should come to Kincaid’s Pub sometime. It’s where we hang out and relax. Drink a beer. Shoot some pool.”

“That’s your family’s bar, right?”

“No, we just stuck our name on the sign for
grins.” When she rolled her eyes, he laughed. “Yeah, my old man owns it. My sisters, Lydia and Ashley, usually run the bar, though mostly Lydia these days.”

“And Ashley’s married to Danny Walsh.”

“You’re pretty well informed.”

She shrugged. “People talk. Especially Danny.”

“What do you mean?”

“He reached out to me last night to see if I had any questions or concerns, which
was really nice. You can tell he’s bored and sick of being cooped up.”

“Talk for a while, did he?” She nodded. “He fill you in on everybody?”

Jamie smiled, her eyes crinkling at the corners. “Yeah, he did.”

He waited, but she didn’t say anything else. Usually he’d shrug it off, but for some reason he really wanted to know what Danny had told this woman about him. The seconds ticked
by, and he was about to ask when the alarm sounded and everybody started toward the engine bays.

“Suspicious odor in a residential unit. Haz-Mat en route.”

Scott paused on his way to the racks holding their turnout gear and looked at Rick. “Tell me it’s not a damn meth lab.”

“Won’t know until Haz-Mat goes in.”

Once they were geared up, Scott climbed into the driver’s seat and
fired the engine. As soon as he had confirmation they weren’t forgetting anybody, he hit the siren and waited a few seconds for pedestrians and drivers to catch on and get out of the way before rolling out.

Jamie was riding shotgun and she seemed calm as she monitored the radio while keeping an eye on any potential hazards on that side of the road, but he didn’t miss her sharp intakes of
breath or her fingernails digging into her leg or her right hand tightening on the door handle as he navigated the narrow streets and tight corners.

“Somebody’s double-parked,” she said as he swung wide around a right hand turn. “Flashers on, but it looks like somebody’s in it.”

Scott laid on the horn, since the sirens obviously weren’t enough, and slowed down enough to let the idiot
move.

“Don’t hit him,” she warned. “I’m pretty brutal when it comes to payback for any extra paperwork.”

He chuckled, but didn’t respond as he squeezed the truck down a narrow one-way with parking on both sides. They arrived right after the Haz-Mat truck, with Ladder 37 right behind them.

They’d stage for now, ready to offer support if something went wrong—like, God forbid, the
odor was some asshole cooking meth—but nobody would go in until Haz-Mat cleared it or there was a confirmed fire.

“I will
never
get used to these streets,” Jamie said as they stood and waited, and he looked over at her.

She wasn’t shaken, exactly, but he could see that she was trying to relax. “I was born and raised here, so if I didn’t want to spend my life walking or taking the T,
I had to learn to drive in it.”

“You’re pretty good at it,” she said, and he felt a weird rush of pride. “I like that, because it lessens the paperwork load.”

“Worst paperwork ever was probably the time Gullotti moved a cruiser with L-37’s front bumper. I’m still glad it was them and not us because the ass chewing lasted for
days
.”

“I can’t even imagine.”

“Rookie cop thought
he could do double the traffic control by blocking the road with his car and then going down to the other end of the street. There were kids trapped on the third floor and it was fully involved, so Gullotti moved it himself. Wrecked the hell out of it, too.”

“And the kids?”

“Everybody got out. Jeff Porter, the big guy over there? He printed out a photograph of the kids being hugged by
their mom that one of the news guys took, and pinned it to the bulletin board so every time somebody gave them shit about the police car, they could look at it and not give a shit.”

She nodded, her lips curving into a smile. “I think I’m going to like you guys.”

It was a simple, casual statement that anybody new to the company might have made, but something about the words coming out
of Jamie’s mouth seemed to set Scott’s blood on fire. He wanted her to like him, and that was a problem.

He realized they’d gravitated toward each other while talking, slightly separated from the other guys. While nobody else probably even noticed, he was suddenly self-conscious about it and stepped away from Jamie. “I just remembered I wanted to talk to Grant about something.”

She just
nodded, her attention on the voices coming through her radio, and Scott walked all the way back to the end of Ladder 37, where Grant was talking to Gavin Boudreau, the youngest guy in the ladder company. But he’d been lying about needing to talk to talk to the kid, so he just stood there and listened them to talk about a video game and waited for an update from Haz-Mat.