All Wrapped Up (A Pine Mountain Novel)

by Kimberly Kincaid

  “You’re right. It’s not.”

  For a minute, nothing passed between them but footsteps and silence as they bundled up to cross the threshold to the sidewalk outside, and Ava’s cheeks flared with the rare prickle of a blush. She might not be an expert in decorum, but pushing Brennan into a conversation he didn’t want to have wasn’t on her agenda, no matter how much the sight of his scars—not to mention the look on his face—said he had a story to tell.

  Only this time, he didn’t dodge the question. “Before I moved to Pine Mountain, I was a firefighter in Fairview. I spent almost four years on engine at Station Eight.”

  “I thought you might have been a firefighter,” she said, falling into step next to him. There was no point in skirting the topic, and Brennan wasn’t stupid. He had to know she’d made that connection when she’d prepared for their interview last week, even if he’d flat-out refused to answer her questions about it. “You were so gung ho about going to the fire academy after that summer on Sapphire Island.”

  “Yeah. Being a firefighter turned out to be nothing like I’d imagined, that’s for sure.” His expression grew wistful, but he wore enough of a smile that Ava bit.

  “So the job was harder than you thought it would be?”

  His smile morphed into a chuckle, albeit short lived. “Every single day. But being in an engine company was better than I imagined too.”

  “Sounds like an interesting mix,” Ava said, following Brennan’s lead as he paused at a small intersection to look for passing cars.

  “If by interesting, you mean it kicked every part of my ass while simultaneously showing me exactly where I belonged, then yeah. I’d say that’s pretty accurate. But being a firefighter isn’t a job. It’s a lifestyle, and there are no half measures. You’re either in or you’re not.”

  “That makes sense.” After all, she couldn’t imagine being a firefighter was a paper-pushing nine to five. Not that Ava had any experience with that kind of job either. “It must be tough to get used to the intensity, though, even for the best firefighters.”

  They crossed the street, their feet keeping comfortable time on the asphalt as Brennan seemed to think about his answer. “I guess it was hard to adjust at first. But to be honest, even though we kept regular hours at the academy, being on shift at Station Eight wasn’t always insane.”

  “So how does it work, with the schedule and everything? I mean, is there a night shift and a day shift, or do you switch, like doctors in an emergency department?” Ava asked, her curiosity snapping through her like a live wire. She’d learned ages ago that making assumptions that hung on face value—or worse yet, stereotypes—was dangerous territory. Better to just voice the questions and get the truth.

  And Brennan didn’t disappoint. “Scheduling usually depends on the size of the company. Fairview’s a pretty big city, so in our house we had three shifts, which rotated. Most of us did twenty-four hours on, forty-eight off.”

  “Whoa.” Ava blinked in surprise. “You worked for twenty-four hours straight, every shift?”

  This time, he laughed. “Well, yeah, but the calls aren’t constant, so in that way, I guess it is kind of like a hospital. The fire station has bunks and a kitchen, and we basically live there while we’re on shift. Sometimes it’s dead, sometimes we’re slammed. Even then, most of our calls are incidents other than fires or false alarms.”

  “Incidents other than fires?” Ava slowed in front of the tiny strip mall restaurant tucked between the Riverside pharmacy and a hardware store, gesturing to the red and white awning in a nonverbal is this it?

  He nodded, pulling the door open and ushering her through with a gentle hand on her back. The flow of their movements around each other was as effortless as the conversation, and it only made Ava’s interest burn more brightly.

  “Sure. You name it, we’ve probably seen it. Downed power lines, people stuck in flash floods, pileups on the freeway . . . and before you ask, yes. I’ve even saved a kitten from a tree.”

  Ava’s laugh escaped in a quick burst. “You have not!” So much for ditching assumptions.

  “Cross my heart,” Brennan promised, motioning an imaginary X over the front of his sweatshirt with one finger. “I think it was maybe the third call I ever went out on. Rookie always draws the short straw. The cat was fine and the owner was grateful, but let’s just say I’m glad we wear gloves.”

  His seamless use of the present tense yanked at both Ava’s attention and her heartstrings, but she stuffed it down. Brennan’s crooked little half smile, paired with the total lack of visible tension across the back of his shoulders, spoke of his comfort level with the conversation. If he could handle it, then so could she.

  “I bet.” Ava inhaled the enticing scent of freshly baked pizza, heading for an unoccupied table by the open kitchen. They took a few minutes to get situated in the small booth toward the back of the mostly empty restaurant, but her menu lay unopened on the polished wood table between them.

  “It sounds like you saw a lot while you were there.”

  “Yeah. Station Eight houses a fire engine, a rescue squad, and an ambulance. Everyone responds to fire calls, but squad goes out on most of the other nine-one-one calls in our jurisdiction, too. For things like car accidents or other non-fire emergencies, a lot of times engine is on scene to assist.”

  “Okay, you’re losing me,” she said, trying to organize the information in her brain. “The ambulance, I’ve got, and I’m pretty sure I’m straight on the engine and the fire calls. But what’s the deal with the rescue squad?”

  Brennan laced his fingers together, dark eyes glinting warmly as he leaned in toward her. “The training for squad is more specialized, and not every house has one. They don’t just go out on fire calls. They go out on every call. Hazmat, building collapses, water rescue. They do it all.”

  “And you guys sign up for this?” Ava asked, only partly kidding. But God, hazmat and building collapses? Even without the fires, it sounded top-shelf crazy.

  “Squad’s extremely elite. Guys don’t just sign up for it. They bust ass, sometimes for years, just to be considered. I told you, it’s a lifestyle, not a job.”

  She considered that for a minute. “So it’s like Special Forces in the military?”

  “That’s a loose interpretation,” he said, nodding slowly. “But you’ve got the right idea.”

  “Were you on the rescue squad, then?”

  Brennan’s slight flinch told Ava he was grateful for the waitress’s timing as she arrived with two glasses of water and her order pad at the ready. After turning Brennan’s request for iced tea and a sausage and mushroom calzone into a double order, Ava let loose with the apology on her tongue.

  “I don’t mean to be nosy or put you on the spot. The idea of a rescue squad is just pretty fascinating. But we don’t have to talk about it.” She bit her lip in an effort to keep her churning thoughts limited to the space in her head, but Brennan caught her gaze and held tight.

  “It’s okay.” His voice was quiet but full of honesty as he said, “The answer to your question is actually yes and no. Yes, I was technically a member of squad when I got hurt. But no. Nobody knew it but me.”

  Brennan sat, stone still and shocked as shit as he realized the words he’d kept on a two-and-a-half-year lockdown had actually come out of his mouth. He’d never told anyone about the short-lived conversation he and Captain Westin had shared just minutes before Station Eight’s overhead system blared out the automated request for engine, squad, and paramedics to respond to that apartment fire. It hadn’t been a secret that Brennan’s dedication had pushed him to want to transition to squad, but he’d been passed over once before for a firefighter with more seniority. So when the second opportunity had opened up, he’d kept his transfer request on the down-low.

  The unfiltered high of making squad had lasted seventeen minutes. The bone-ripping pain and guilt that had come after? Yeah, that was going to last forever.

  “Nobody knew
but you?” Ava looked at him, the shadow of confusion in her wide, green eyes totally at odds with the bright overhead lighting and cheery Christmas music filtering through the restaurant. It had been frighteningly effortless to tell her the logistics of being a firefighter, the obvious interest on her pretty face sparking his deep-seated nostalgia for the career he’d loved.

  This part? Not so much.

  “No.” Brennan cleared his throat, but still the words scratched out of his windpipe like sandpaper. “I found out I’d made squad just before I got hurt, so none of the guys on engine knew.”

  Not that telling them would’ve been easy. Going for squad was a hell of a lot different from making squad. Even though he would’ve stayed in the same house, the news would’ve earned Brennan a healthy ration of shit from everyone on Engine Eight. Except for Mason.

  Christ, he needed to nail his trap shut. Some things were just too far gone to fix with a little bit of airtime and a whole lot of regret.

  “So, ah, then I got hurt and it didn’t really matter. Injuries like mine are career enders either way, so I decided to relocate, and here I am.” Brennan picked up the laminated card boasting the daily specials, giving it a hard stare even though they’d already ordered. A warm brush against his suddenly cold fingers snapped his gaze upward, and Ava curled her hand over his in a quick squeeze.

  “And here you are.”

  Her expression was so wide open, so wiped free of both judgment and pity, that Brennan nearly let the entire story break loose. But then their waitress swung by with two napkin-wrapped utensil rolls and their iced teas, and the impulse disappeared like smoke in a windstorm.

  “Your physical therapy is a bit different from the norm, huh?” Ava plucked the paper wrapper from her straw, taking a sip of her tea, and the swerve in subject matter kicked Brennan right back into gear.

  “I take it you’ve done conventional PT before,” he said, repeating her process with his own straw as she nodded.

  “I broke my wrist falling on a patch of ice a couple years ago. But I did my physical therapy over at the hospital. This facility is new, right?”

  “They moved over here last year, but I’ve been with Kat for the long haul.” Despite the crap he jokingly gave her, Kat had been the only therapist Brennan had been able to make any progress with. “She’s really open to alternative methods of therapy and pain management. It makes things easier.”

  “It makes things easier,” Ava echoed, and hell if he wasn’t in for a penny now. But detox had taught him to own up to his need for alternative therapy, even if he kept the reasons that had landed him in PT locked up nice and tight.

  “I had some issues with pain management after I got hurt.” Brennan inhaled, modulating his words with every ounce of control he could muster. “I started out taking oxycodone for the pain post-surgery. Four months later, I was popping it the way most people do breath mints.”

  Ava’s soft puff of breath was the only betrayal of her shock, but she battened it down with a frown as she pulled back against the leather booth cushion. “You had a substance abuse problem?”

  Oh hell. Hell. How could he have forgotten she’d been raised by raging alcoholics? “Shit, Ava, I’m sorry. I’ve gone a little over two years completely clean, but I didn’t mean to bring up a sore topic.”

  “You didn’t.” The answer was automatic, and she shook her head as if to punctuate the assertion. “I’m not going to lie and say the subject doesn’t sting, because you’re not an idiot. You know that’s not true. But not everyone with substance abuse issues is like my parents. And you’ve got two years clean. I’m sure you fought some demons to get there.”

  “Yeah. It was”—weak, hideous, well deserved—“a rough time,” he finished. While he never would have lied about it—after all, part of successful rehab was knowing you’d really fucked up—Brennan had also never admitted his addiction to anyone who wasn’t a medical professional or a direct relation. But rather than getting all awkward or gooey about it, Ava’s brows rose in question, and wasn’t that just par for the course.

  “So what happened? To make you stop, I mean?”

  “Ellie,” he said, and funny how the word was enough. “I was really distant, out of it most of the time, angry the rest. She’s a social worker, so she figured out pretty quick that I was abusing my meds. Once she called me on it, I agreed to get help.”

  His sister might be younger than him, but man, she was twice as tough. Brennan had entered a full-time rehab facility twelve hours after Ellie’s no-bullshit confrontation. Not that she’d really given him a choice, and he hadn’t cared enough about himself at that point to fight her.

  “Twenty-eight days of detox will give you a hell of an attitude adjustment,” he continued. “But I vowed then and there to do alternative therapy whenever possible. No narcotics. No exceptions. No matter how much it hurt.”

  Ava studied him for the longest minute of his life, her expression soft but without pity. Finally she said, “Coming off a back injury and finishing rehab with no medication sounds awful. You must’ve been in a lot of pain.”

  Understatement of the goddamn century. “It wasn’t fun,” he agreed. His addiction, as short lived as it was, had just traded four months of his life for the ability to be numb.

  But even numb, you didn’t forget. And it was better to focus on the pain than the truth.

  “So that’s why you do yoga?” Ava asked. Not even the gravity of the subject matter could put a damper on her curiosity, and damn, she really was a natural with the Q and A.

  “Yes, although it’s more for the breathing than the actual exercise. Don’t get me wrong—Kat’s not about to let me get away without physical exercise, and we do some traditional therapy from time to time. But my injury happened two and a half years ago. At this stage in the game, I only see her when I have pain I can’t manage on my own. She helps me work out the kinks so I can get back on track.”

  “The kinks that you got pulling Matty Wilson out of the fire at Joe’s.” Ava’s fingers tightened just slightly over his on the cool tabletop, as if she’d anticipated the acceleration in his pulse. “If you were in pain, I wish you’d told me. All that hitting the heavy bag yesterday couldn’t have been helpful.”

  The same sensation that had elbowed its way past his hard-core need for control when Ava had walked into the therapy center made an encore performance in his rib cage, pushing the words on a hot path out of Brennan’s mouth. “But it was. It is. Being with you yesterday was the most relaxed I’ve been in . . . I don’t even know how long. And sometimes that helps more than anything else.”

  Relax your mind, and a lot of times, your body follows.

  “So hanging out together, just doing stuff like this, makes you feel better?”

  Ava’s velvety lashes swept into a wide arc over her bright green stare, but the question was so straightforward that Brennan simply said, “Yeah. It does.”

  The smile that broke over her face shot straight to his gut before nestling in for an extended stay. “Being with you makes me feel better too. So I guess that means we should stick together.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Ava put the finishing touches on her article on the Riverside Elementary holiday pageant at a few minutes past seven P.M., triple checking the copy before clicking SEND on her laptop. Okay, so it wasn’t Pulitzer material, or hell, even locally groundbreaking, but she’d meant what she’d said to Brennan when he’d called to ask her to lunch. Writing a small article was better than sitting at her desk, twiddling her thumbs.

  Even if she still needed a groundbreaker in T minus two freaking weeks in order to keep her job.

  Powering down her laptop for the night, Ava pulled her bag from the space beside her desk, popping it open to make room for the computer. Her fabric-covered story notebook fell out with a clunk, hitting the timeworn carpet with a sunny-side-up flutter of pages.

  “Damn it.” She knelt down low to scoop the book back to the confines of her leather to
te when the words in front of her stopped her cold.

  Fire @ Joe’s, unlikely rescue, reluctant hero. What is Nick Brennan hiding?

  Ava’s pulse picked a fight with her breathing, both of them speeding up in her ears. The instinct that had drawn her to Brennan’s story in the first place had been spot-on, and the more she unwittingly discovered, the more she realized the gut-wrenching truth.

  Now more than ever, Brennan was still the story of the decade.

  “Hey, Ava. You okay down there?” The masculine voice coming from the entryway of Ava’s cubicle startled her despite its gentle delivery, and her head whipped up as she slammed the cover of the book splayed beneath her fingers.

  “What? Ow!” Crap, that had hurt. “Oh, Ian. You took me by surprise.”

  “Sorry.” The sheepish pull of her coworker’s smile suggested he really meant the apology. “I didn’t know anyone was still here. I was actually just walking by on my way out. Are you working on a story?”

  His eyes dipped to her notebook in a pointed glance, and her gut knotted in an instinctive response.

  “Nothing solid, really. Just brainstorming.”

  “Oh.” Ian’s face twitched in what looked suspiciously like disappointment, sending Ava’s hackles into get-up-and-go mode. “Well, can I give you a hand off the floor?”

  Ian took a step closer, arm extended, but Ava jumped up and hugged her notes to her chest in a semiprotective hold.

  “I’m all set, but thank you.” Of course, from his vantage point at the front of her cubicle, Ian couldn’t have read the pages in her book any more than he’d have been able to read her mind, but still. As nice as Ian seemed, he was Gary’s golden boy. A girl couldn’t be too careful.

  “Ah. Right, then.” Ian rocked back on the heels of his loafers as if turning to make his way through the deserted newsroom, but at the last second, he swung back toward her. “Hey, really nice work on that exclusive you did last week, by the way. It was a great piece.”