07 It Had to Be You

by Jill Shalvis

  “Forever,” Aubrey repeated emphatically. “I’m off men forever,” and Leah felt herself relax a little.

  Which was silly. Jack could date whoever he wanted, and did. Often.

  “And anyway,” Aubrey went on, “that’s what batteries are for.”

  Ali laughed along with Aubrey as they all continued to watch Jack, who’d gone back to the griddle. He was moving to his music again while flipping pancakes, much to the utter delight of the crowd.

  “Woo-hoo!” Aubrey yelled at him, both she and Ali toasting him with their plastic cups filled with orange juice.

  Jack grinned and took a bow.

  “Hey,” Ali said, nudging Leah. “Go tip him.”

  “Is that what the kids are calling it nowadays?” Aubrey asked.

  Leah rolled her eyes and stood up. “You’re both ridiculous. He’s dating some EMT flight nurse.”

  Or at least he had been as of last week. She couldn’t keep up with Jack’s dating life. Okay, so she chose to not keep up. “We’re just…buddies.” They always had been, she and Jack, through thick and thin, and there’d been a lot of thin. “When you go to middle school with someone, you learn too much about them,” she went on, knowing damn well that she needed to just stop talking, something she couldn’t seem to do. “I mean, I couldn’t go out with the guy who stole all the condoms on sex education day and then used them as water balloons to blast the track girls as we ran the four hundred.”

  “I could,” Aubrey said.

  Leah rolled her eyes, mostly to hide the fact that she’d left off the real reason she couldn’t date Jack.

  “Where you going?” Ali asked when Leah stood up. “We haven’t gotten to talk about the show. Sweet Wars. Episode one aired last night, and you were awesome.”

  “And also, you looked great on TV,” Aubrey said. “Bitch. I know you were judged on originality, presentation, and taste of product but you really should get brownie points for not looking fat. The show runs once a week for a month, right? Do you look as good for the next three episodes?”

  This subject was no better than the last one. “Gotta go,” Leah said, grabbing her plate and pointing to the cooking area. “There’s sausage now.”

  “Ah.” Aubrey nodded sagely. “So you do want Jack’s sausage.”

  Ali burst out laughing and Aubrey high-fived her.

  Ignoring them both, Leah headed toward the grill.

  Jack flipped a row of pancakes, rotated a line of sausage links, and checked the flame. He was in a waiting pattern.

  The status of his life.

  Behind him, two fellow firefighters were talking about how one had bought his girlfriend an expensive purse as an apology for forgetting the anniversary of their first date. The guy thought the present would help ease him out of the dog house.

  Jack knew better. The purse was a nice touch, but in his experience a man’s mistakes were never really forgotten, only meticulously catalogued in a woman’s frontal lobe to be pulled out later at her discretion.

  A guy needed to either avoid mistakes entirely, or get out of the relationship before any anniversaries came up.

  “Wuff.”

  This from Kevin, trying to get his attention.

  “No more sausage,” Jack called to him. “You know what happens when you eat too much. You stink me out of the bedroom.”

  Kevin had a big black spot over his left eye, giving him the look of a mischievous pirate as he gazed longingly at the row of sausages. When Jack didn’t go get him, the dog heaved a long sigh, and lay down, setting his head on his paws.

  “Heads up,” Tim called.

  Jack caught the gallon-sized container of pancake batter with one hand while continuing to flip pancakes with his other.

  “Pretty fancy handiwork,” a woman said.

  Leah.

  Jack turned and found her standing next to Kevin, holding a plate.

  Jack pointed just as the dog would have made his move. Great Danes had a lot of great qualities like loyalty and affection, but politeness was not one of them. Kevin lived to press his nose into ladies’ crotches, climb on people’s laps like he was a six pound Pomeranian, and eat…well, everything.

  And Kevin had his eyes on the prize—Leah’s plate.

  Jack gestured Leah closer with a crook of his finger. She’d shown back up in Lucky Harbor with shadows beneath her forest green eyes and lots of secrets in them, but she was starting to look a little more like herself. Her white gauzy top and leggings emphasized a willowy body made lean by hard work or tough times—knowing Leah it was probably both. Her silky auburn hair was loose, the choppy layers blowing around her face. He’d have called it her just-had-sex look, except she wasn’t sleeping with anyone at the moment.

  He knew this because one, Lucky Harbor didn’t keep secrets, and two, he worked at the firehouse, aka Gossip Central. He knew Leah was in a holding pattern too. And something was bothering her.

  Not your problem…

  But though he told himself that, repeatedly in fact, old habits were hard to break. His relationship with her was as long as it was complicated, but she’d been there for him whenever he’d needed her, no questions asked. In the past week alone she’d driven his mom to her doctor’s appointment, twice, fed and walked Kevin when Jack had been called out of county, and left a plate of cream cheese croissants in his fridge—his favorite. There was a lot of water beneath their bridge, but she mattered to him, even when he wanted to wrap his fingers around her neck and squeeze.

  “You have any sausage ready?” she asked.

  At the word sausage, Kevin practically levitated. Ears quirking, nose wriggling, the dog sat up, his sharp eyes following as Jack forked a piece of meat and set it on Leah’s plate. When Jack didn’t share with Kevin as well, he let out a pitiful whine.

  Falling for it hook, line and sinker, Leah melted. “Aw,” she said. “Can I give him one?”

  “Only if you want to sleep with him tonight,” Jack said.

  “I wouldn’t mind.”

  “Trust me, you would.”

  Coming up beside Jack, Tim waggled a brow at Leah. “I’ll sleep with you tonight. No matter how many sausages you eat.”

  Leah laughed. “You say that to all the women in line.”

  Tim flashed a grin, a hint of dimple showing. “But with you, I meant it. So…yes?”

  “No,” Leah said, still smiling. “Not tonight.”

  “Tomorrow night?”

  Jack slid a look to Tim. “You have a death wish?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Rookies who come onto Leah vanish mysteriously,” Jack said seriously. “Never to be seen again.”

  Tim narrowed his eyes. “Yeah? Who?”

  “The last rookie. His name was Tim too.”

  Leah laughed, and Tim rolled his eyes. At work he reported directly to Jack, but he’d already been marked as having authority problems and he didn’t look chastened in the slightest.

  “I’ll risk it,” he said cockily to Leah.

  Jack wondered if he’d still be looking so sure of himself later when he’d be scrubbing down fire trucks by himself. All of them.

  Leah yawned and rubbed a hand over her eyes, and Jack forgot about Tim. “Maybe you should switch to Wheaties,” Jack said. “You look like you need the boost.”

  She met his gaze. “Tim thought I looked all right.”

  “You know it, babe,” Tim said, still shamelessly eavesdropping. “Change your mind about tonight and I’ll make sure you know exactly how good you look.”

  Jack revised his plan about Tim cleaning the engines. The rookie would be too busy at the senior center giving a hands-on fire extinguisher demonstration, which every firefighter worth his salt dreaded because the seniors were feisty, didn’t listen, and in the case of the female seniors, liked their “hands-on” anything training.

  Oblivious to his fate, Tim continued to work the grill. Jack kept his attention on Leah. He wanted her happy, but that didn’t mean he wanted
her dating a player like Tim. But saying so would be pretty much like waving a red flag in front of a bull, no matter how pretty that bull might be. She’d give a stranger the very shirt off her back but Jack had long ago learned to not even attempt to tell her what to do or she’d do the opposite just because.

  She had a long habit of doing just that.

  He blamed her asshole father, but in this case it didn’t matter because Leah didn’t seem all that interested in Tim’s flirting anyway.

  Or in anything actually.

  Which was what was really bothering Jack. Leah loved the challenge of life, the adventure of it. She’d been chasing that challenge and adventure for as long as he could remember. It was contagious: her spirit, her enthusiasm, her ability to be as unpredictable as the whim of Fate.

  And unlike anyone else in his world, she alone could lighten a bad mood and make him laugh. But her smile wasn’t reaching her eyes. Nudging her aside, out of Tim’s earshot, he waited until she looked at him. “Hey,” he said.

  “Aren’t you worried you’ll vanish mysteriously never to be seen again?”

  “I’m not a rookie.”

  She smiled, but again it didn’t meet her eyes.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Always.” And then she popped a sausage into her mouth.

  Jack got the message loud and clear. She didn’t want to talk. He could appreciate that. Hell, he was at his happiest not talking as well. But she’d had a rough year, first with the French culinary school disaster, where she’d quit three weeks before graduation for some mysterious reason, and then Sweet Wars.

  Rumor had it that she’d gone pretty far on the show, outshining the best of the best. He knew she was under contractual obligations to keep quiet about the results, but he thought she’d talk to him.

  She hadn’t.

  The first episode had finally aired on TV the night before. Jack had watched every minute of it, cheering her on through the first elimination round task of creating puff pastries on the clock for a panel of celebrity chefs who yelled—a lot. Most of Leah’s competition had been completely rattled by their bullying ways, but Leah’d had a lifetime of dealing with someone just like that. She’d won the challenge, hands down. And even if Jack hadn’t known her as well as he did, he’d have pegged her as the winner of the whole thing.

  But the thing was, she wasn’t acting like a winner.

  Had she quit that too?

  Because the truth was, she tended to run from her demons. She always had, and some things never changed.

  She met his gaze. “What?”

  “You tell me what. Tell me what’s wrong.”

  She shook her head, her pretty eyes surprisingly hooded from him. “I’ve learned to fight my own battles, Jack.”

  Maybe. But it wasn’t her battles he wanted to fight, he realized, so much as he wanted to see her smile again and mean it.

  Look for another Jill Shalvis story featuring a sexy firefighter, coming soon from Forever Yours.

  Please see the next page for a preview of

  Seeing Red

  Chapter 1

  Present Day

  Joe Walker couldn’t believe his bad luck. He lay flat on his belly in an inch of cold, mucky water, surrounded by grime and soot and the thick stench of smoke, all of which was slowly permeating through his coveralls, his skin, and the mask he wore to protect his lungs. Just another day at the spa.

  Or a day in the life of a fire marshal who worked for MAST, the Metro Arson Strike Team out of San Diego.

  The fire had occurred only hours before. Now he turned on his camera, clicked the shutter, checked the digital display to make sure he had what he wanted, and blew a speck of dirt off the lens.

  Firefighting was a dirty business. But inspecting the damage, searching for burn patterns, putting together the story of what had happened and ruling for natural causes or arson, was dirtier.

  Even so, he’d never expected to be here again, in the very basement of the warehouse that had so irrevocably changed his life twelve years ago. It was just past the crack of dawn—he stifled a yawn as he glanced at his watch—far too early to think about the past.

  Damn he hated getting up before the sun, but given that the majority of arson occurred at night, early mornings were a common fact of his life. A common fact that never failed to annoy Cindy.

  “Being the lover of a firefighter was supposed to be exciting,” she’d murmured as he’d crawled out of her bed at four a.m.—an hour ago now. “Not utterly exhausting.”

  He opened his mouth to correct her—he’d gone from firefighter to fire marshal two years ago—but she’d run a hand down his torso, her eyes going molten as she did.

  That she found him so desirable still stunned him. He’d never told her that he’d been the fat loser all through school, or that he couldn’t have gotten laid if he’d begged, a phenomenon that had lasted until the sheer physical labor of firefighting had gnawed away at his baby fat.

  “Come back here.” Her soft voice had floated on the predawn air as he’d stumbled through her bedroom trying to find his clothes.

  “I can’t.”

  “Of course you can.” She opened her legs, danced her fingers between them.

  His tongue had nearly fallen out but he buckled his belt and added his gun and pager to it. “Cindy. I have to go.”

  “Fine.” She turned over, exposing a mouth-watering ass as she stretched for a pillow, which she then aimed at his head. “But don’t even think about coming tonight. Figuratively or literally.”

  He’d caught the pillow an inch from his face and sighed as he’d grabbed his shoes on the way out. After dating her for the past two months, he knew he had to give her a break. Nearly half of their overnights had been interrupted.

  He didn’t know how to tell her that the stats weren’t going to get better. Fine as her body was, and as much as he enjoyed it, he lived and breathed his work.

  Except today. He couldn’t believe he was back. Here. Drawn now by something beneath the shelving unit, he put both his past and Cindy out of his mind and inched in a little closer.

  There were no windows in the basement to let in the early sun. The electricity had been blown in the fire, which might or might not explain why the overhead sprinklers hadn’t gone off. There was nothing but the narrow beam from his flashlight guiding him as he followed a curious burn pattern underneath the large, heavy, unbudgeable metal shelving unit. He fired off a few more pictures, then swung the camera around his neck to lie against his back while he studied a particularly interesting find with his light.

  “Anything?” his partner asked from behind him, still standing straight up, and probably nice and dry to boot.

  “Yeah, I’ve got—” Joe broke off as his flashlight suddenly highlighted two glowing eyes only inches from his outstretched hand. Accompanying those feral eyes came an unwelcoming hiss. Shit. Jerking upright, he smashed his head into the metal shelf above him.

  “What the hell is that?” asked Kenny from his helpful perch five feet back.

  Joe waited until the stars faded from his vision, but his heart still raced, pounding his ribs as he eyed whatever was currently eyeing him right back. “I’m not sure.”

  After the historic bushfires in the entire San Diego area two years ago, which had drawn rabbits, raccoons, deer, and even mountain cats into the suburbs, the gleaming, sorely pissed off gaze could belong to anything.

  And nothing he wanted to be this close to.

  “Well, don’t get bit,” Kenny said.

  “Thanks.” Joe watched the animal as it watched him. Neither of them moving. “Helpful advice.”

  “I try.”

  Joe shifted his flashlight over the cornered animal, but it didn’t help because the shallow water covering the floor made a crazy reflection. “I can’t see.”

  “Who needs to see, it’s growling like a wild possum on a bad PMS trip. Get the hell out of its way.”

  “I think it’s hurt.” And Joe
had spent enough years growing up as the underdog to be unwilling to just leave it. “Do you think you could come closer than the two miles you’re standing back, and give me a hand?”

  “I have a healthy fear of rabid, hissing animals.”

  “We were just hanging off the roof staring a thirty foot fall in the face as we studied the loft and you didn’t blink, but a little animal scares you?”

  “I didn’t get enough love as a child. Are you sure it’s little?”

  Joe eyed the decidedly not-so-little silhouette hunched over and miserable. “It’s shaking like a leaf, does that count?” But since he couldn’t see its teeth, he still didn’t move. “Come distract it so I can back out of here.”

  Into Joe’s peripheral vision came Kenny’s two boots not caked in muck like Joe’s. Kenny’s boots rarely got dirty. In fact, Kenny rarely got dirty. It was just one of the strange little mysteries of life.

  “I’m going to scare it out from the back,” Kenny said. “So watch yourself.”

  “Wait.” Joe began to scoot out from beneath the shelving unit, his life flashing before the eyes he didn’t want to have scratched out. “Okay now,” he said, dirty water dripping off him.

  Kenny banged his flashlight against the metal, and with a screeching howl, the hissing thing zipped out from beneath the unit and into the inky blackness of the basement.

  Both Joe and Kenny whipped around, shining their twin beams across the wet, dank floor to the far corner, on the large, orange…cat. She had white paws and a deep scratch down one side of her face, which held one green eye, and one brown.

  “A cat.” Kenny shook his head, a few drops of dirty water marring his glasses. He removed them and wiped the lens with a handkerchief he pulled from his pocket. “A damn cat.”

  Filthy, wet, and overheated, Joe stripped out of the top part of his coveralls, letting the sleeves and torso hang off his hips. He wore a sweat drenched T-shirt beneath, but he left that on as he stepped closer in disbelief. “Socks?”