Lights to My Siren (3 page)

Two of the firefighters on scene, Dillon and Bowe, helped Winter and me load the body onto the cot. From there, Winter walked out with the body, Dillon and Bowe. She waved at Luke as she went.

Dillon and Bowe were firefighter/paramedics that worked with us at station three. Dillon was the oldest person at station three at the age of thirty-six. He was of Irish decent, tall and blonde with arms the size of tree trunks. He was the FAO, or the fire truck operator, for truck three, and a stickler for the rules.

Bowe was just the opposite. He was Italian, through and through. Dark complexion, inky black hair. The men at the station called him ‘Chef’ because of his excellent cooking skills. He didn’t just stick to Italian either. He was skilled in any type of dish he deemed to cook. He was one of the youngest at the station at twenty-nine. He was also a charmer.

Peeling my eyes away from Bowe’s cocky knowing grin that said he’d caught me staring, I turned and regarded my brother who was watching my perusal of the young firefighter.

“Hey, Lucas. What are you doing here?” I asked as I rolled the soiled gloves off my hands, folded them in on each other, and hugged my brother.

Luke’s arms wrapped tightly around me, smashing my face into his chest. “How ya doin’, Bay?”

I smiled into Luke’s chest. I loved my brother senseless. As children, we’d been very close. When he’d enlisted into the marines, and then was deployed, I’d missed him like crazy. Then he’d gotten out of the marines because of my niece, Katerina, was born. He stayed in Casper for a year before moving to Texas.

Luke said it was because of a job offer; I had a different theory. Mainly, the she-devil of a girlfriend that broke up with Luke after she’d found out that he’d had a kid. It wasn’t pretty, and Luke had left her as soon as he’d become aware that Lydia wasn’t going to grow up and be an adult about the situation.

I’d missed my niece horribly in the last three years, but I was here now, and I’ve been trying to make up for it ever since.

“I’m doing well, big brother. Still sun burned, though.” I smiled wide at my brother.

He groaned. He’d been upset that he wasn’t there to help me put the deck together, but he’d been right. The backyard looked freaking awesome. Now all I needed was to spread the rock I’d bought last week around the deck, and I’d be done.

“I’m sorry again, Bay. I meant to get there, I really did.” Luke apologized.

I smiled at him. “It’s okay, big brother. I’ve got to run this guy down to the cooler. I’ll see you tonight when you drop Katy off for her sleepover.”

Luke ruffled my hair as I left the room and headed for the bus that now housed the dead guy who’d made the unfortunate decision to invade a mama bear’s territory.

Dillon was standing beside truck three with his arms crossed tightly across his chest. He looked intimidating with his trademarked scowl taking over his face. However, that wasn’t indicative of his mood. He could be in the best of moods and still be scowling. The way to tell was to watch his feet. If they were tapping, he was happy. If they were planted and still, he was mad.

Now, for instance, they were tapping.

“What’s up, Dillon?” I asked as I walked up between the two trucks.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d say Dillon looked almost nervous.

“Hey, girl. I know you’ve not gotten to too many places while you’ve been here. The boys and I thought we’d rectify that. I’ve got two tickets to the Ranger game in Dallas tomorrow. Want to go?” He asked.

Was Dillon asking me out? Or was he really trying to get me more acclimated to my new community? Was this platonic? I sure hoped so. I didn’t want to date anyone from the station. I’d done that once before and been burned.

I liked it here. I knew better than to jump in that particular pool.

“I’m sorry, Dillon. I’ve made plans with my niece to have a sleepover this weekend. I appreciate you asking me though.” I smiled.

“That’s okay. The boys and I go a lot. We share a pair of season tickets between the station. There’ll be a next time.” He said before turning and climbing into the truck.

The big beast roared to life with a rumble, and Dillon, Bowe, PD, and Fat-baby rumbled out of the parking lot.

PD and Fat-baby weren’t ones I knew well.

PD’s real name was Dean Hargrove. He was tall, like six inches over six feet tall, and towered over my own height. He was the second best cook in the station. They started calling him PD after Paula Dean. The men liked to tease him about his butter fixation, and the name Paula Dean stuck.

Fat-baby’s real name was Aaron Sims. Aaron received his nickname because he’d bought a pair of Fat-baby boots without realizing they were women’s boots. From then on, the name had stuck. Although he’d been nice to me, he seemed a little standoffish, which wasn’t too surprising when I’d become aware that he had a wife who was a jealous bitch. Apparently, before I’d appeared, Aaron’s wife didn’t like the fact that there were women in the same building where her man slept overnight. Which was even more of the case now that I was there practically every other night.

“Let’s go, Bay! If we leave now, we’ll get back to the station before shift change!” Winter called from the bus.

I walked quickly to the truck. That was one thing I hated doing was going past shift change. It didn’t matter if the call happened after we were scheduled to be off. If dispatch called us for a call, and we were in the ambulance, we’d be going to the call. Then we’d have to stay after to write up the PCRs (or patient care reports) once we were back at the station. That was also if we were lucky we didn’t catch another call in route to the station.

We were lucky.

Forty minutes later, we pulled up to the station, got out of the bus, and even walked inside to the table before another tone dropped. Even luckier, the shift change happened five minutes prior, meaning we’d dodged the call. We still had to do PCRs, but those would’ve been done regardless. In turn, it meant we were out of the station only an hour off schedule, rather than our normal two or three.

Score!

“Do you want to meet at The Back Porch tomorrow for dinner?” Winter asked me.

I looked up from rifling through my backpack for my keys and looked at Winter. “Is this a girl’s night thing, or is this a family thing?”

Winter smiled that devious smile of hers. “Well, the kids have a babysitter, but the youngest of the bunch will be there. Ember and Gabe’s youngest, as well as James and Shiloh’s. They’re too young to be left alone in a group full of rowdy kiddos. Hell, it’s hard to get Jack to leave ours alone and she’s sixteen months now. With all that said, there’s no reason it can’t turn into a girl’s night thing.”

“Okay, well I have Katy tomorrow night. If you don’t mind that she comes along, then I can come. I won’t be drinking though.” I said, before crying in triumph when I found my keys at the very bottom of my bag.

Yanking them out, Sebastian’s black baseball cap flew out in my exuberance, and I caught it as if it were a piece of glass that would shatter if it hit the ground. There was nothing really special about the hat. It was completely black with
orrah
embroidered in black thread on the side of the hat. It had sweat lines, and looked extremely broken in, which meant that Sebastian must’ve worn it a lot.

Which, in turn, made me feel a little gooey in my center to know that he’d put a hat on my head that was most likely a daily wear for him.

“Geez, don’t break yourself. It’s just a hat.” Winter laughed as I fumbled for the hat, nearly falling backwards when I tripped on my own feet.

Hell, I couldn’t explain the attachment to the hat. I felt like the geek in high school who got to wear the letter jacket of the superstar jock that every girl drooled over. Then all the girls would envy me and call me a bitch behind my back because I got to sit with the most popular boy in school during lunch.

Without saying a word, I carefully put the cap back in my bag, zipped it closed, and walked over to my Cutlass. “I’ll see you tomorrow, text me what time.”

Winter laughed as she crawled up inside her lifted Chevy Silverado. Her husband bought it for her a few months prior, and Winter joked that she could run over my car if I wanted to collect the insurance money for it.

I’d laughed.

The Oldsmobile Cutlass wasn’t the nicest car on the block, but it ran.

I’d received the grass green 1971 Cutlass from my father for my sixteenth birthday. I hadn’t minded; I’d wrecked my father’s truck twice, and I was just happy to be getting a vehicle under the circumstances. He could’ve not gotten me anything, so even though the Cutlass was an eyesore to the extreme, I used it.

The insurance on the big beast was affordable. It ran well, and it was safe. Those three things right there made me keep the vehicle. Only when it gave up the ghost would I get a new car. It just seemed a waste to me to get rid of a working car. Although every time I had to fill up the gas tank on the car, my heart palpitated.

I had to wait to get out of the station’s lot because the tones dropped for a house fire in a residential district on the north side of town. The fire truck left first, followed shortly by the ambulance. I was glad I didn’t catch that call. Fires were no fun, and they were time consuming. There was a lot of sitting around and waiting, which for me, was hard.

I had what they call ADHD. I was an awful child, and I fully admitted it. I couldn’t help it though, and my parents knew that. I’d gotten help when I was young, and luckily, the medication had worked well on me. Allowed me to focus better. To this day, I still took medication. If I didn’t, I couldn’t function.

Some of the side effects of the disease remained, despite the medication. For instance, my inability to focus for long periods of time. PCRs were the absolute worst in my book, but over the years, I’d trained myself to get them done in between calls, which helped me at the end of the day so I didn’t have to write out ten reports. I’d learned that the hard way.

Then there was my chronic lateness, distractibility, and disorganization. Those three things had cost me my last boyfriend.

My life with Jackson, my ex, was more like a soap opera. There were a few times, okay a lot of times, that I stood Jackson up for dinner. Not because I was doing it on purpose, but I became distracted either at home, or at work, and I just didn’t realize the time. Then there were the times I was sitting right next to him, and he would talk, or explain something, and I just didn’t hear him.

He thought I didn’t care, and I got frustrated that Jackson refused to understand that I had a disease, not that I didn’t care. I did care. A lot. However, Jackson lost the desire to try after I continued to be myself.

I was devastated the night, eight months ago, when I’d gone on a call to a woman who had an allergic reaction to shrimp, and found Jackson sitting at a table with a leggy blonde practically curled around him.

He’d had lipstick on his neck and cheek, and I’d died a little inside when Jackson saw me, knew that I’d seen him with the blonde. Then he proceeded to curl his arm around the woman, kissing her just like he’d done to me earlier that evening.

It took me a month of moping after I moved my stuff to realize I couldn’t stay in Casper any longer. My father and mother had completely understood, and I’d gone to Texas, into the open arms of my big brother. Although I couldn’t say I’d been happy here, I also couldn’t say that I didn’t like it either.

I’d been just drifting along for the last six months.

That is, until I’d barged in on a sexy biker. This last week was the best I’d felt in months. Sebastian had woken something inside of me that’d been buried for nearly a year now, and I was ecstatic.

Chapter 3

They know how to handle big...hoses.

-Why you should date a firefighter

Baylee

“You ready to go inside, pretty girl?” I asked Katy as I helped her out of her car seat.

I’d been adamant with Luke. Katy needed to be in a child safety seat at the age of four. Luke had argued with me that the doctor had said she didn’t have to be anymore, and then I’d pulled out my war stories, relating what happened to children who weren’t restrained properly.

I had many stories. With over eight years of experience in traffic accidents of all kinds, there were many things I looked at with detachment that it was comical.

Until it came to a kid.

Then nothing about the situation was comical.

The day I was no longer affected when it comes to a child, was the day I’d hang up my keys.

“Yes, LeeLee.” Katy said, reaching her arms up high to be picked up.

I lifted the tiny little sprite of a girl into my arms, and then cursed when she couldn’t find her cup. “Where’s your cup at?”

“I dropped it.” She said with her twinkly fairy voice.

“Fuck,” I muttered under my breath. “Here, sit in my seat. Don’t play in my change tray, okay?”

At her confirmation, I dove into the depths of the backseat, searching for the elusive sippy cup. I found it, as well as the boots that belonged on Katy’s feet, a twenty-dollar bill, a bottle of beer, and a can of Wolf Brand Chili.

I really needed to clean out my car. I hadn’t done that since the move to Texas

Pocketing the twenty, I backed out of the back seat, cursing soundly when my knee struck the middle console and made shards of pain radiate throughout the entire lower half of my leg.

“I wear this, LeeLee?” Katy asked during my haze of pain.

“Yeah,” I panted as I continued to back out until I fell on the seat beside Katy.

“You need help?” A deep low voice asked from outside of the car, causing both Katy and me to scream.

The hat Katy was holding flew out of her hands and landed on the ground at his feet. A blush stained my face when I realized that Sebastian had to have seen my ass in the air as I backed out of the backseat. Nor could he have missed the fact that I was wearing bright neon yellow underwear underneath my blue jean skirt.

My arms were full of a thirty pound four year old as I climbed out of the car, careful not to flash my undies at the man who was now stooped down to pick up the hat at his feet.