Rookie Female Firefighter Follows in Trailblazer Mom’s Footsteps.
That I might turn into a circus curiosity pisses me off to no end. My situation shouldn’t be that newsworthy, but I understand why the human-interest stories grab attention in our shit-soaked world. People need heroes—and city governments need heroes in underrepresented groups. Maybe I’ve brought it on myself by requesting to be stationed where my mother served, but it means a lot to me to be assigned there.
At least I’ll have someone in my corner, even if that someone is a ghost.
Sam has sent me a photo of Jude with his hand down Metal-Face’s pants—in the middle of the club! The things these boys get away with. A message follows: text me when you get home.
Only I’m not ready to go home yet. I want pie. A big slice of cherry pie—and I know just where to get it.
Made it, I text, so he won’t be worried. Then I give the driver new directions.
Fern’s Diner is quiet, not unexpected for a Tuesday night in early May and perfect for me to ease the bass thump of the club from my head. Fern is actually a grumpy Greek guy called Stavros, but he’s not usually here at night. Instead my favorite server is on duty.
Tessa grins at me, then does a double-take. “You’re wearing a dress!”
“Damn right I’m wearing a dress. It’s graduation night, baby!”
“Hey, congrats. And you decided to spend it at the 24-hour diner like a loser?”
“I did a bar crawl.”
“What constitutes a bar crawl in Abby’s world?” Finger quotes for extra derision points.
“One drinking establishment. But then …” I hold up a finger of my own to halt her colorful commentary. “I hit a club. For twenty minutes.” So I pretty much failed as a club kid. “I can’t keep up with the boys. They’re too sexy for me.”
“To have your problems.”
Yet my measly problems are a thing of the past because it seems Tessa and I are telepathically linked. How else to explain what’s waiting on the counter right in front of me? The perfect slice of cherry pie with a heaven-sent scoop of vanilla ice cream is haloed by the diner lamp above like an offering.
I throw my purse on a seat and clamber onto the one to the left of it, right in front of the pie. “How did you know?”
“How did I know what?”
I gesture to the pie. “That I would be stopping in at this very minute with pie-shaped intentions?”
“I’m good but not that good.” Sadness drifts across her face. “That pie is not your pie.”
“I beg to differ.” I pick up the fork. “It’s positioned right in front of me and I am seated right in front of it. This pie has my name on it. How is this not my pie again?”
“Because it’s mine.”
Alas, no, that is not one of my chatty voices asserting its right to pie. This is deep, external, and designed to send a sensuous shiver to every one of my nooks, crannies, and extremities. I swivel and yep, not a projection of my pie-hungry brain.
The guy claiming the pie is tall, dark, hazel-eyed, and steel-jawed. I’ve been working with buff firefighters for the last few months, but none of them hold a candle to what this guy is serving up. He’s older than them, for a start. Maybe early-thirties with that confidence that comes from seeing shit and knowing how to deal with it. His square jaw is dusted with stubble that has the makings of a sexy beard. His untucked blue Oxford strains a little in the chest and shoulders area, and while there might be interesting things happening further down, I’m not the ogling type. Not in public, anyway.
“Your pie?”
“My pie.” A diner-full of amusement is conveyed in those two syllables.
“Your seat, as well?” I sneak a glance at Tessa who is wiping a counter, resolutely neutral, the Switzerland of servers. There are ten empty seats at the counter and I have somehow landed on the one already occupied.
“Yep. I stepped away for a second. Didn’t expect to have to fight anyone for it.”
As I slip off the stool, the action moves my dress up a few inches. Not intentional, but the guy notices. And I notice him noticing.
That shiver from before graduates to a full-scale shimmy.
Leaving my purse, I aim for the seat on the other side of it which means I have to bypass Pie Guy who steps aside to let me, oh, about two seconds too late. Those two seconds have us standing there trying to decide if this is awkward or sexy. My fantasy says sexy. My history says exceptionally awkward.
“Sorry,” I say because he didn’t.
“No problem.” He takes the seat I’ve just vacated.
While every booth is empty except for the one where diner regular Doris and her gentleman friend are kicking it old style with chicken noodle soup, that doesn’t mean I could slip into one of the free ones. Stavros has a policy that singles eat at the counter, and even though he’s not present, he would somehow know and give Tessa hell for it.
So I sit at the counter two seats over with my purse as a buffer between me and the pie thief, who has picked up a fork and is contemplating that slice of heaven. This gives me a moment to contemplate him in profile. Tiny lines feather out at the corner of the one eye I can see. Dark, thick, lustrous, and charmingly tousled hair tops his head—tousled, possibly because he’s spent time scrubbing one of those big fork-holding hands through it. Who could be that frustrated with pie in play?
Now that the seating has been rearranged and pie ownership has been determined, Tessa saunters over to me. “What’ll it be?”
“I’ll have what he’s having.” Cute rom-com diner moment for those who know or care.
Tessa looks despondent, not the response I expected. “That was the last slice.”
“It was?”
I direct my most forlorn glance toward the pie that should have been mine. My counter-mate has yet to make a dent. Fork in one hand, phone in the other, he’s hovering in pre-pie-eating mode. Somehow this makes it worse.
Just eat the damn pie, idiot.
Tessa must have noticed my unattractive envy manifesting because she coughs to get my attention. Only it’s more than a cough—she’s trying to tell me something.
“What’s that?”
Another cough, this time with the word “up” at the end of it.
“I have no idea what you’re saying.”
She winks, though it looks like winking is a brand-new activity for her. Punctuating the move is a weird chin swivel to my left.
“Are you having a stroke?”
“She’s trying to tell you I’ve been stood up.”
Okay, if the pie-that-should-have-been-mine didn’t have my attention, that laconically delivered statement would do the trick. I snag gazes with Pie Guy—still with fork in hand and slice intact—and find him with a very expressive eyebrow in supreme arch.
“Sorry?”
“I think she’s telling you this so you’ll cut me some slack about having the pie you so clearly want.”
“I don’t—” I glare at Tessa who’s giving me a look that says Pie Guy has read the room correctly. There’s something different about his accent, too. It’s rougher with an East Coast flattening of the vowels. “So I came in here with cherry pie in mind but I can just as easily go for …”