Page 11 of Hot Response
Cait took a step back as Tony bent to pick up the clipboard Victor dropped. She didn’t want any part of a domestic.
“Get your ass in the house,” Victor’s wife yelled. “The kid down the street came running in, yelling for me and telling me you were layin’ on the sidewalk with blood everywhere. I had to leave before she got my top coat done. My whole manicure’s ruined because you have two left feet.”
The injury probably had more to do with his blood alcohol content than a lack of grace, but Cait had tried to reason with Victor’s wife before and it hadn’t gone well. And the woman still had one shoe left.
“Did he sign it?” she asked, keeping her voice low while the couple yelled obscenities at each other.
Tony looked at the paper. “Good enough.”
“You get yourself to the hospital if that cut doesn’t heal up right. Wash it out. No staples or glue.”
He waved a hand in their general direction as his wife tugged on his shirt, trying to drag him toward their house. They’d almost made it up the front steps when Tony pulled the ambulance away from the curb and she heard him laugh softly to himself.
“What are you chuckling about over there?” she asked, assuming he was thinking about Victor and his wife.
“I’m imagining what might have happened if that had been Ladder 37 going by.”
Immediately her brain coughed up the image of Gavin watching her ass that her brother had so helpfully sent her a screen cap of, as if just seeing it onhisphone wasn’t enough.
She hadn’t deleted it, though.
Cait decided she’d try denial first. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You might be a hard one to read, Cait, but I know you pretty well and you, my friend, have let a certain firefighter get under your skin. I saw your face when that truck went by. You were disappointed it wasn’t Boudreau’s.”
“That’s stupid.”
“It might be stupid,” Tony said, “but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
“I don’t even like him,” she said, but then she surrendered to the inevitable. “Why the hell can’t I get him out of my head?”
Tony limited his gloating to a quick, triumphant glance. “You don’t really know him all that well, so my guess is pure chemistry. He’s young and hot and, considering your dating situation of late, that makes him your type.”
“He’s cocky. That’s the opposite of my type.”
“Maybe your subconscious wants to shake things up a bit.”
“Then my subconscious can add itself to the list of things making my life more difficult right now.”
Truth be told, her subconscious was already on that list, thanks to the dream she’d had the night before last. She’d woken up overheated and yearning, with a quickly fading image of a very naked Gavin smiling down at her.
And that pissed her off. If she was going to have sex dreams about a pain-in-the-ass firefighter at night, the least her subconscious could do was let her savor them for a while. Maybe then she could spend a little less time during the day thinking about him.
Chapter Four
“So then she brings me her phone and tells me I’ll never believe who popped up in her Snaptalk or whatever it’s called.”
Gavin rolled his eyes, wishing Jeff would tell the story of the Snapchat picture a little bit faster. As soon as he got upstairs and saw that some smart-ass had put a printed and framed copy of the photo on top of the table the television sat on, he’d known this twenty-four-hour shift was going to feel like days.
“As soon as I saw that hair sticking up, I didn’t even have to zoom in to know it was Boudreau.” They all laughed while Gavin self-consciously smoothed a hand over the crown of his head. Stupid cowlick. “I told her I wanted a copy, but she said she couldn’t save it or whatever or the other kid would know, so I had to take a picture of her phone.”
“So your daughter and the EMT’s brother are friends?” Aidan asked.
“They have friends in common, I guess. He included her because he knows her dad’s a firefighter, though he doesn’t know who I am, or that I know the guy he’s taking pictures of.”
“She didn’t tell him?” Gavin asked.
“Nah. She just sent back an LOL or whatever it is the kids say.”
