Fire at Sunset: The Firefighters of Darling Bay 4 (6 page)

She hurried out of the store, hoping her mother hadn’t noticed.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Caz muttered a curse. He wasn’t trying to protect his father’s ears—God knew Tony Lloyd had been the man who taught Caz what a true swearfest was. But his dad hadn’t spoken in almost a year now. It wouldn’t be fair to say the words his father had loved to utter in front of him when he couldn’t repeat them back with satisfaction.
 

His father had always been the best curser ever. He could make a bunkhouse full of cowboys blush like schoolgirls with his creative sentences that normally centered around the kind of hell the men would go to if they didn’t get the herd branded in time for market, or if they let one more coyote take down a calf.

Now Tony Lloyd was in a wheelchair during the day and in a hospital bed at night. His eyes stayed open when he was awake, but there was no awareness behind them. His full-time caretaker, Joyce Castro, said that she could tell what he wanted by the tilt of his mouth, but Caz thought she was full of it. His father had been the strongest man he’d ever known. To see him reduced to this—slack jawed and empty eyed—Caz was just glad his dad was too out of it to really understand his own state.
 

He and Joyce eased Tony into the wheelchair. Caz placed a small wooden horse he’d whittled at work into his father’s lap. Sometimes it seemed to help, something for Tony to hold, to work his fingers over.
 

“There,” Joyce said. “You got your horsie now. You’re gonna feel great today, Mr. Tony. Just great. It’s your son’s day to take care of you, and I know those are your favorite days.”
 

Caz knew they were
her
favorite days, her days off. She lived at the ranch in a room next to Tony’s, so she’d be back tonight, but two days a week, Joyce went into Darling Bay and saw her daughter and her friends. It was only fair. Everyone needed days off.
 

It hadn’t stopped Caz from wanting to hire another part-time nurse for those two days.
 

That would be stupid. He was a paramedic. Tony was
his
father, after all.

“I think we should go sit on the porch this morning,” Joyce said. “It’s supposed to be spring out there, but it feels like summer’s coming. Would you like that, Mr. Tony?”
 

As if he would answer. Caz pushed the chair, moving it smoothly across the old hardwood floors, over the planks his father had put in by hand. In a movie, his father would wake up every once in a while and say something soul-stirring. Sadly, though, this wasn’t a movie. Or if it was, it was the worst one he’d ever had to sit through.
 

Today, Caz would spend the day on the covered porch with his father. He’d read an old paperback Western out loud, not because he thought his father cared, but because he hated it to be so quiet, with nothing but the harsh sounds of his father’s breathing to break the day into manageable pieces.

“You go have a good day off, Joyce.” He tried to mean it.
 

“Okay, I will. He had a rough night last night. He might be tired today.”
 

Like father, like son, Caz figured. They’d lost a guy this morning who was supposed to get married on Saturday. He’d sat with the girlfriend on the couch for a while. It had been terrible.
 

Bonnie had held the woman’s hand, she’d said those things that women always said, over and over. “There, there. We’re here. It’s going to be okay. We’re here. It’s okay.”
 

That was the problem with women—they didn’t tell the truth.
 

It
wouldn’t
be okay for Shelley. It would probably never be okay again. Bonnie telling her it would didn’t help anything.

Words never helped. They only hurt. He’d learned that young from his mother when she’d playfully asked,
Who do you love more, Caswell? Me or your father?
He’d said the wrong thing, thinking of the way his father let him sit on the horses saddle-less, the way his father let him hold his best carving knife. It had been a lie—he’d loved her the most, with her soft hands and the way she kissed him goodnight, the way her eyes lit to see him each and every time. Caz had been teasing his mother. Of course he loved her best.
 

His mother had left after his flippant lie, had left the ranch and her husband and her kid, to go find stardom. Tony Lloyd had raised Caz the best he could on his own, which included TV dinners and a lot of swearing. Words had chased away Caz’s mother, and words—all the words he’d been able to fit into his letters to her in Nashville—hadn’t brought her back. She’d died there of an overdose, still trying to get a record deal. Sometimes Caz wondered how good the medics had been who’d responded to the call. How hard had they worked to try to save her? Did they know how incredible her voice was? She’d have been the next big star if she’d lived. Probably. If Caz hadn’t chased her away.
 

Caz and his father both hated country music.
 

Now, Joyce waved as she walked down the driveway and got in the pickup Caz had given her last year when her ancient Ford had broken down for the last time on the long driveway to the ranch. She hadn’t wanted to take it from him, but what the heck was he supposed to do with his dad’s old work truck? Sell it? It was tired, too, just like his dad, without quite as many miles. The truck was safe, even if it made funny noises, and it ran. He was glad someone was using it.
 

Caz wondered—briefly—what kind of car Bonnie had. He’d only ever seen her arrive at work on a bicycle, which was kind of ridiculous given that they stayed at the station for forty-eight hours at a time. All of them lugged bags in with them when they came, fresh clothing, bedding (if they hadn’t gotten around to washing it at the station), and food, because even though they theoretically ate together, everyone had different food requirements. Caz liked a couple of handfuls of mixed nuts for breakfast instead of eggs, and sometimes he ate the same thing for lunch with a banana. Food was fuel. He couldn’t be bothered to think hard about it more than once a day, whereas some of the guys seemed to need to cook something on the stove three and four times a day.

Bonnie, he’d noticed, loved the breads. All of them. No gluten-free silliness from her, which was refreshing. She made pancakes in the morning, feeding them to whoever walked by, then she ate a double-decker sandwich for lunch. If it was her turn to cook, she always made pasta—something extra rich with lots of cheese, and of course, heavily loaded garlic bread on the side. Carbs plus carbs and then more carbs. No wonder she rode her bike to work, now that he thought about it.
 

She was a good cook, he had to admit. He looked forward to her nights of cooking way more than he did the nights of some of the other guys. Guy Mazanti seemed to think dinner was an iceberg lettuce salad with a rack of barbecue ribs. Well, of course, minus the salad, that wasn’t a bad dinner.
 

Work. Dang it. He wished he hadn’t thought about it, hadn’t thought about
her
. Lately, it seemed like he was doing too much of that. He’d only been her partner for a month, and she was taking up way too much space in his brain.
 

And what in the blazes were they going to do about that fundraiser?

Caz thought long and hard before digging his cell phone out of his pocket. He made sure his father was covered warmly enough. He offered him some water, which his father managed better than he usually did. As his father fell asleep on the deck, Caz ran his fingers idly over the wooden rail of the porch. He should sand it down, put another coat of paint on. Maybe in the summer he’d do that. His father was fine, snoring lightly in his chair, so Caz wandered around the big house and back to the deck of the little cottage he’d been staying in. Joyce had said she should stay with them, in the front house, but this cottage had been the first thing Caz had ever built with his own two hands. He and his father had planned it, raised the walls and put on the roof (which could use redoing, he noticed. He’d do that as soon as the spring rains were done). Building the cottage had put the need in his hands to keep building.
 

He missed his mostly-built cabin up north so much it sometimes hurt.
 

But this was where he was. At least until his father didn’t need taking care of anymore.
 

Caz sat on the bottom step in front of his cottage, his boots splayed out into the dust below. The sunlight was thin but warm. Then he dialed the number Bonnie had insisted he program into his phone.
 

Bonnie answered on the second ring. “You! If I said I was surprised, that would be an understatement. What’s up?”
 

“I don’t really want to work with you on the fundraiser.” As an opening statement, it wasn’t the greatest one he’d ever led with, Caz knew. But by then the words were out.
 

There was a pause. Then Bonnie said, “Look. I was working on my bike. It’s my day off. Do I really have to put up with this today?”
 

“But we do have to work together on this, and we have to do well. This is important to me. It’s a good cause.” He wouldn’t tell her about his father, about how hard every single day off was.
 

“Yeah, yeah. Sure. I know. Alzheimer’s. Great cause. Also, I just want to get the chief off our backs. I want him to forget how mad he is at us. It would be even
better
if he got pissed at someone else. You think we can make that happen? Because I think we can. We just have to come up with some great ideas.” Her voice was so light and cheerful he wanted to crawl through the phone and wrap himself in that sound. What would it be like to feel that way all the time? Sometimes when he passed her in the hallway at work, when her blond hair was still sticking straight up from running her hands through it, her smile was so bright it almost blinded him.
 

“Let’s meet,” he said. “Tomorrow.” Joyce would be back to watch Dad and he could sneak away for a few hours.
 

“Meet? On our day
off
?”
 

He didn’t answer.
 

Eventually, she sighed. “Okay, but let’s ride bikes.”
 

“I’ll be fine in my truck, but you feel free to ride whatever you want.”
Save a horse, ride a cowboy
. When he was a teenager, he’d had that old bumper sticker on his first beat-up pickup truck.
 

“No.” There was a laugh in her voice. “I want
you
to ride a bike, too. That’s the point. You have one, don’t you?”
 

Somewhere in the barn was his old mountain bike, probably stuck under a tarp, spider webs wrapping the spokes. “I do, but…”
 

“Ride it. You live out Route 119, don’t you?”
 

No way was she coming to the ranch. “Look…”

“So we meet halfway. Hold on. I’m going inside the house. Let me look it up.” There was the slam of a door and then the sound of a keyboard clattering. “Oh, perfect. Bud’s Bar out where Lazy Creek joins the main road. Looks like it’s about five miles from both of us.”

“That’s a bar.”
 

“Give the man his prize! You don’t have to drink, my friend, but I’m telling you, the beers are cold and the burgers are a
maz
ing.”
 

She called him a friend.
 

They weren’t friends. At least, not that he knew of.
 

Bonnie went on. “Unless you don’t think you can ride ten miles round trip your first time back out?”
 

“I can ride ten miles.” Caz sure hoped he could.
 

“Great. Tomorrow, one o’clock. Don’t forget your sunscreen!” She laughed, a bright jingle of happiness, and then her voice was gone.
 

Caz held out his cell phone. He looked at it as if he’d never seen it before. Flat, matte black on one side, shiny on the other. Great reception. It was a good phone. A champion of a phone.
 

In fact, he didn’t think he’d ever had a better phone in his life. He kind of felt like kissing it, but that would officially be the dumbest thing he’d ever done in his life, so he just put it back in his pocket and went around the house to make sure his father was all right.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Bonnie sat at an outdoor picnic table with a beer and her book. It hadn’t been as hilly as she’d thought it was, and she’d made it faster than she’d planned.
 

That wasn’t a problem—she always packed a paperback in one of her panniers, for exactly this kind of situation. The sun was breaking through a thin layer of fog and it was warm enough on her shoulders. The beer was bold and hoppy. If only she didn’t have dealing with Caz on her list of things to do today, it would be just about perfect.
 

Speak of the devil.

Caz came into view at the bottom of the dirt driveway that wound through the live oaks and led to the porch at Bud’s Bar. The hill he had to climb was no joke. Bonnie hadn’t had to get off and walk, but she’d come close to it, and she rode her bike every day. He was going to struggle with it.
 

And she had a ringside seat. Bonnie grinned and settled back, the wood warming her skin through her thin T-shirt.
 

But good grief.
 

The man didn’t struggle.
 

Wearing a blue T-shirt and board shorts, Caz had to stand up on the pedals to make them turn, but he took the hill faster than she had. And the man’s calves…The closer he got, the more impressive they looked. They were solid roped muscle. She could probably cut an apple on the back of his leg. Even his thighs, where she could see them under the shorts, looked strong as the wood he whittled on the patio at work.
 

When Caz stopped short at her table, fishtailing his bike with a small flourish, she laughed.
 

“Not too shabby.”