Page 16 of Heat Exchange
“Whoa!” Jeff Porter yelled, wading into the fray. One of the senior firefighters with Ladder 37, he was a big man with a big voice that mixed equal parts authority and menace.
Everybody stopped talking, until the guy in the button-down shirt and tie waved his hand at the crumpled nose of his SUV. “Who’s going to pay for this?”
“I ain’t your insurance company, son,” Porter barked. “Are you hurt?”
“No, but I want this fixed.”
“I ain’t a body shop, either.” Porter looked at the others. “Anybody hurt?”
The cyclist shook his head while the woman who’d presumably been driving the pickup glared. Porter repeated the question and she shook her head.
“Look at my vehicle,” SUV guy said, gesturing again at his front end. “Look at it!”
“Maybe if you’d been looking at the front of it instead of your phone, you would have braked,” the woman said.
Aidan exchanged looks with Cutter, Walsh and Cobb as he leaned against the truck to watch. There was nothing to do here but leave them to the cops and tow trucks, once Porter was done playing peacemaker.
“How’d you get involved in this?” the big guy asked the cyclist.
“I was behind this dumbass when he rear-ended that dumbass and I didn’t want to cool down, so I went out around. This dumbass flings his door open and down I go.”
“What kind of moron goes around a car on the left?” SUV guy demanded.
“What kind of moron runs into a big-ass bright red pickup?” the cyclist shot back.
Porter looked at the police officers and shook his head. “Good luck, guys.”
“That was a waste of time,” Cutter said when they were back in the truck.
“You never know,” Aidan replied. “Besides, the time it wasted is less time until you can get ready for your hot date with Nicole.”
That perked the kid up. “True. You got any plans for tonight?”
“Nope.” Just going home to his empty apartment, where he’d try to convince himself that being able to walk around in his boxer briefs, belch without apology and scratch whatever might itch was a payoff for being alone.
* * *
ASHLEYCHECKEDTHERINGERvolume on her phone and then rolled her eyes at her own stupidity. It was turned up all the way, just as it had been when she’d checked it an hour before.
Danny wasn’t going to call tonight.
Even though it was her own damn fault, she put her hand over her queasy stomach and fought back another wave of tears. She was going to dehydrate if she kept it up.
She’d pushed him too far. Even as she pushed at him, hoping for a reaction, she’d known on some level she was going too far, but she hadn’t stopped. While she was afraid of the possible consequences, she was even more afraid of living the rest of her life in what had come to feel like an emotional vacuum.
When she said the worst of it—that she wasn’t happy and wasn’t sure she wanted to be married to him anymore—she’d been hoping she’d finally break through his wall of reserve. She was starving for an emotional response from him, even if it was anger.
Instead he’d accepted what she’d said with nothing more than a clenched jaw and left.
When her cell phone rang, Ashley almost knocked it off the couch in her rush to grab it. Her heart was pounding, but it was her father’s number on the screen. Her thumb hovered over the button that would reject his call, but some subliminal part of her brain refused to forget the fear she’d felt the night Fitzy Fitzgibbon had called to tell her Tommy had had a heart attack and was in an ambulance. She’d answered every call from her dad since then.
“Hello?”
“What are you doing?”
As usual, the question sounded demanding and a little judgmental rather than conversational, and she bristled. “I’m folding laundry.”
That wasn’t entirely true. She’d dumped the basket of clean clothes on the couch, but she hadn’t so much as matched a sock yet. Mostly she was staring at a repeat of some crime drama on the television while thinking about her husband.
