Rescue Me: Park City Firefighter Romance

by Hart, Taylor

  A few second later someone ran up, hit the emergency stop, and braced her until the torture device stopped spinning its belt.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” grunted Poppy. “I was kind of looking forward to having my back covered in skin grafts.”

  “Here,” said a man’s voice. A hand reached through her tangle of legs and grabbed her hand. It was a man’s hand for sure, solid and much larger than hers. “Lean to your left and we’ll get you right-side up.” Another hand rested against her knee and moving in harmony they guided her so that she was lying on her side, finally able to breathe normally.

  Poppy’s ponytail had exploded and her hair now obscured everything. “Maybe I’ll just breathe for a minute?” It was impossible to tell if the labored breathing was due to the exercise or the feat of unimaginable poise.

  “Let me just …” Someone started adjusting her shirt, pulling it down over what Poppy’s mother referred to as her “disproportionate roundness”.

  “Okay, then,” said Poppy, shooting up to a sitting position, realizing abruptly how exposed she was. She did a quick to make sure her sports bra hadn’t somehow been splattered across the wall behind her, and breathed a little easier when her hand brushed the strap. While she pulled her shirt to a state of public decency, she flipped her head back to clear her hair out of her eyes.

  It smacked the hot fireman in the face. The hot one with the eyes.

  For a second he sat there, eyes closed, mouth open. Stunned. Then he lifted an arm to wipe the residue of her sweaty hair off of his face.

  Nice one, Poppy. You’ve reached an entirely new level of smooth.

  “Well, Cap,” said the huge-fat fireman to the huge-muscular fireman. “Looks like Booter gets to fill out his first exposure report when we get back.”

  “Funny, JFK,” said the man she had drenched with her mop. Looking back at her, he said, “I’m Slade. I’m an EMT. Did you hurt yourself?” He was crouching next to her as the rest of his crew gathered behind him.

  Poppy somehow looked away from his dark blue eyes. “Hurt myself? What do you mean? Isn’t that how everyone dismounts from these instruments of torture?” The abrasion on her back stung, especially with her sweaty shirt laying across it, but there was nothing the fireman could do about the pain.

  “It’s one way to do it,” said Slade. “I won’t judge. Here, lean back against the wall.” He had a small grin on his face and Poppy realized she was smiling through the blush on her own face.

  With his help, Poppy was able to relax against the wall, keeping the raw skin on her lower back arched away. “I’ll just finish my workout down here. Since you didn’t let me complete the dermabrasion session.”

  “She seems fine,” said the one Slade had called JFK.

  When Slade looked over his shoulder at him, Poppy couldn’t prevent her eyes from quickly dipping to Slade’s arms. The t-shirt wasn’t skin tight, but it was tight enough to tell that the gym wasn’t the torture chamber to him that it was to her. Was he flexing? He had to be flexing.

  As he turned back to Poppy she brought her eyes up to his face.

  “Would you like me to check you out?” he asked.

  Check you out? Had he noticed the way she had ogled him when she thought she could get away with it? As in, My eyes are up here, ma’am. The lady firefighter and the muscle head looked at each other, focusing.

  Oh no. They saw me checking him out.

  The muscle head bent his ear toward the radio, which was blaring something that Poppy couldn’t follow. “That’s us,” he said.

  The female nodded. “Behind the Rite-Aid.”

  They all started jogging toward the exit. Except for Slade, who was still looking at her. “Are you sure you’re okay? We can send another unit to that call if you need us.”

  From the doors of the gym, JFK yelled back, “Get on the rig, Boot!”

  Slade didn’t budge, still waiting on her expectantly.

  “Go,” said Poppy, smiling and hoping it looked thankful and not like a creepy Joker smile. “I’m fine.”

  “Okay,” said Slade, rising. “Call us back if you change your mind. You know our number.”

  She watched him jog with the grace of a dancer to the door. Oh man did she watch him. Why, in the name of all the exercise gods, did that have to happen at that moment? Riding the treadmill wave like an epileptic cow in front of the gym-goers was bad enough. But no, that wasn’t good enough for Poppy Mercier. She had to do it in front of a gaggle of good looking men. A herd of hotties. A flock of fire—

  “Can I give you a hand up?” Alta was back, offering a hand.

  Nice of her to wait until Poppy was done admiring Park City’s Finest. No wait, Finest was for police, wasn’t it? These guys were the Bravest. Though Poppy hadn’t met many finer than that Slade.

  “I love it when they come in,” said Alta with a sly smile, helping Poppy to her feet.

  “Oh, they’re regulars?” Poppy tried to sound casual.

  “Yeah, they come in and play wallyball about once a week.”

  “Oh good,” said Poppy. “I think that dismount was only about an eight. Next week I think I can pull off a ten if I land face down on the treadmill instead of head down on the ground.” She reached up and felt the goose egg forming on the back of her head. At least she hadn’t cracked her head all the way open. But hey, Slade would be back in a week or so. That might be enough extra motivation to keep Poppy’s butt coming back here.

  “It looked pretty painful,” said Alta.

  “Yeah, but in an agile, attractive sort of way, right?” The sting of sweat on raw skin hadn’t faded much.

  Alta laughed. “Yeah, you were as nimble as an elephant in ice skates.”

  “My mother’s right.” Poppy groaned. “I’ll die single for sure.”

  Alta laughed again. “There’s no way. A funny girl like you with such a gorgeous smile? How have you not been scooped up yet?”

  It was no surprise to Poppy that she was single, but it also wasn’t the time to drag out the Litany of Lack. “That’s nice of you to say.” Especially since you look like you should be on a magazine cover.

  “Are you feeling alright?” asked Alta. “Need to sit down, or need someone to check you out?”

  “I think everyone in the gym already saw more of me than they wanted to.” When she made it back to the shelter, Daria could bandage up the abrasion.

  “Okay. I have some first aid training, and they give all of us a concussion class when we start working here, so I know a little bit about some danger signs.”

  “That’s really nice of you, Alta. I’m actually a vet, so if I start walking in to glass walls or barking incessantly I’ll have a pretty good idea what’s wrong.”

  With a chuckle Alta nodded and started toward the front desk. “I’ll be up here if you need anything.”

  Quiet enough so no one else could hear, Poppy said, “I need to show you that you can’t throw me around.” She put on her pit bull face, the dog, not the singer. Her enemy couldn’t know that, like most of the Pitties that had come through her rescue, Poppy was a softie inside.

  Show no fear, feel no compassion.

  Poppy hit the start button and took a deep breath as the machine taunted her with the three-beep countdown, and started sliding.

  “Yeah, well your mom was probably a conveyor belt, and not like the cute little one at the all-you-can eat sushi. She’s … an industrial sized one in an Amazon warehouse or something.”

  Before the treadmill was up to speed, Poppy was too out of breath for any more insults.

  I got this. Only three miles to go. Don’t look down.

  Miraculously her Bluetooth earbuds were still around her neck, so into her ears they went. Without crashing and burning, she found the play button and the narrator’s voice picked up again.

  For a while Poppy lost herself in a fictional world—a world about a running protagonist interestingly enough—and continued to remind herself to not look down. A watch
ed pot never boils and a watched treadmill logs no miles. The rivulets of sweat started running again. She had brought a towel to wipe up after her run, but maybe that fireman would be back and she could just use his face again.

  Don’t look down.

  If she wasn’t so scared of crashing and burning again, she’d grab the towel and lay it over the display, but two catastrophic failures in one day might make it hard to show her face here again. No, the gym would probably refund her money and tell her she was too much of a liability to work out there.

  Don’t look …

  Poppy looked down at her adversary, expecting to be in the mid twos. Its beady little display numbers sneered back a measly .9 miles.

  “Oh … now you’re just lying.” Feeling like a failure, Poppy decreased the pace to 5.5. “But you know what? You can’t beat me. Winston Churchill … would give up … before I will. I might die here, but you can’t, make me stop, pounding you, until I get my, three point one.”

  Focus on breathing, Poppy told herself. And don’t look down.

  Two Hearts Rescue will be released January 17, 2017. You can pre-order it here!

  And don’t forget about all those hot, broken Football Players in my LAST PLAY series!….keep reading for an excerpt of Last Play!

  Get it FREE for a limited time HERE!

  Excerpt of Promise Me Love by Jennifer Youngblood and Sandra Poole

  Chapter 1

  The wedding was destined to be the event of the season, maybe even the event of the year. At least that was according to the society page of the Beaufort Gazette, the authoritative social voice of the region. Of course, anything involving her fiancé’s parents, the Thurmans, was big news in the small antebellum town of Beaufort, South Carolina. The Thurmans were akin to royalty with their long line of blood ancestry that ran bluer than the Atlantic.

  Chloe looked disdainfully at her reflection in the full-length mirror. Too bad the Thurman’s social standing didn’t equate to good taste in clothing. Why had she agreed to wear this horrible wedding dress? The once white silk had aged or “mellowed to a warm vanilla,” as her mother-in-law described it. “This dress is gross! I look like a lump of old mozzarella cheese,” she moaned.

  Her mother stepped up behind her and began fluffing the sleeves. “Oh, it’s not that bad,” she cooed, but the tone in her voice said otherwise. Her eyes met Chloe’s in the mirror. “You could always tell Jane that you changed your mind and want to wear your own dress. Every girl deserves to wear the dress of her choice on her wedding day. I’m sure she’ll understand.”

  “I seriously doubt that!” Chloe muttered, rolling her eyes.

  “It has certainly seen better days,” her mother quipped.

  Better days? She looked like she was wearing a funeral dress! Not to mention the fact that it was squeezing her in two! They could barely get the thing zipped. If only she didn’t have to breathe. She gulped in a shallow breath at the thought and felt the fabric stretch in protest.

  “What am I gonna do? Dan’s gonna take one look at me and want to run back to Afghanistan.”

  “He’ll think you’re beautiful, honey. No matter what you’re wearing.”

  Chloe ran her hands through her hair. “This thing is hideous! I hate it!”

  “Well … it’s not the most attractive dress … it’s just so … old.”

  “And ugly!”

  “Why don’t you let me talk to Jane? Surely she’ll understand.” She pointed. “Look, the waist is a little snug.”

  “Yeah, Mom. You do that. You talk to Dan’s mom and explain to her why I can’t walk down the aisle in the dress that has been in the Thurman family for generations. She made a such a big deal about giving it to me and told me this long story about how she wore it and how her mother-in-law wore it and so on.”

  Her mother started chewing on her bottom lip. “And all of these women were the same size? What is this thing anyway? A size six?”

  “I haven’t the foggiest, but it feels more like a size four to me. It’s so tight I can hardly breathe.” Chloe turned sideways and pressed in her stomach with her hands and looked at her reflection critically. “I guess I could not eat for a month.”

  Her mother laughed. “I think it’ll take more than a dress to separate you from those chocolate chip cookies you’re always making.”

  “MOM! That’s rude!”

  “I’m just saying …”

  She did have a point. A warm cookie with a scoop of vanilla bean ice cream was sounding good right about now. Chloe turned and faced herself in the mirror. “Maybe I should just wear the stupid thing to make everyone happy.”

  Her mother put her hands on Chloe’s shoulders. “This is your wedding day, not Jane’s. This day belongs to you and Dan, and I can assure you—the last thing in the world Dan will be worried about is which dress you’re wearing. I’ll talk to Jane; she’s a reasonable woman…” she frowned “ … I think.” She scratched her head. “Now let’s get this horrid thing off you.”

  “Gladly.”

  Her mother went to unzip it. The zipper came halfway down and then stopped.

  “Uh, oh.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s stuck.”

  Chloe contorted herself in an attempt to look at her back. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No, unfortunately, I’m not.”

  Chloe threw her hands in the air. “Great! What now?” She could feel the blood pumping into her cheeks, and she was starting to sweat.

  “Calm down. Let’s try moving it up to see if we can start it all over again.”

  She felt the dress tug, but the zipper wouldn’t budge. Tears sprang to her eyes. “I should’ve never tried to put this stupid thing on,” she growled. “I hate this dress!”

  “Chloe, calm down. You’re not helping the situation.”

  “What am I supposed to do, Mom?”

  “Can you try and shimmy it off? If we could just get your arms out of these sleeves.”

  They tried to wedge her arms out, but it was like trying to push a hot dog through a pinhole.

  “I’ll get this thing off if I have to—” The sound of fabric tearing stopped her cold. “Oh my gosh.” She looked down. The right sleeve was ripped at the seam. “Oh no. Oh no!”

  “Stop, don’t move a muscle. I’ll be right back.” Her mom left the room.

  Chloe looked at herself in the mirror. She looked so ridiculous with the dress half on and half off that she would’ve laughed were it not for the crying. What a mess! How was she going to explain this to Dan’s mom? So much for scoring brownie points with the mother-in-law. At least Dan was coming home next week. If she could just focus on him instead of all of these stupid wedding details that were consuming her life. There was a time when she’d looked forward to planning her wedding, but now she just wanted to get it over with. It had been a long nine months without Dan. They were fortunate in that they were able to Skype a couple of times a week. The rest of the time, they corresponded through email. Dan had seemed distant and guarded when she talked to him the night before last, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. She knew he was in constant danger and tried not to dwell on it for fear that it would drive her crazy. He wasn’t allowed to divulge anything pertaining to his assigned mission, and she’d learned not to press him about it, but this felt different—personal. What was it that he wasn’t telling her? Her imagination had been running wild the way it always did, and she’d begun to fear all sorts of things—like maybe he was having second thoughts about the wedding. Hot prickles covered her and then went cold. What if he didn’t love her anymore?

  She felt something soft rub against her leg and heard the familiar hum that sounded like the faint roar of a motor. She looked down to see her cat, Beasty. She’d named him that when he was a kitten because of his loud purring, but now that he was a full-grown cat, the name was even more appropriate. He weighed twenty pounds. She’d tried putting him on a diet, but nothing worked. He wo
lfed down everything that was put in front of him and then some. With his thick coat of orange and white fur, he was a dead ringer for an overstuffed Garfield. Forcefully, he rubbed his head against her leg, purring so loudly that she swore she could feel the vibration in her chest. “Hey, boy, I see you. I just can’t bend down right now because I’m stuffed in this straight jacket!”

  Her mother stepped back into the room. “Okay, here we go.”

  Chloe gawked. “What’re you doing with those scissors?”

  “Cutting you out of this dress before you rip the thing to shreds.”

  “Mom, you can’t cut this dress.”

  Her mother’s hand went to her hip. “Have another solution?”

  Chloe’s shoulders fell. “No.”

  “I’ll cut it down the zipper, and then I’ll take it to the alterations shop and have them replace it. They can fix the sleeve too, and then it’ll be good as new.” She grimaced. “Poor choice of words. It’ll be as good as it was before.”

  Chloe felt a rush of love for her feisty mother, Naomi, who always seemed to have a solution for everything. She swallowed hard and asked her the question she’d been pondering for the past month. “Do you think that Dan and I are rushing things? I mean he comes home next week, and then the wedding’s three weeks later.”

  “Honey, I can’t answer that. Only you can. Do you love him?”

  “With all my heart.”

  Naomi smiled. “Then that’s your answer.”

  * * *

  After the dress fiasco, Chloe decided to take her mother’s advice and take a much-needed nap. She closed her eyes and let her mind drift to her favorite topic—Dan. Her mom was always talking about the miracle of unexpected blessings, and that’s what Dan had been. She still chuckled, remembering how devastated she was when her dad announced at the beginning of her senior year in high school that they would have to move because his company was transferring him to a branch of the corporate office in South Carolina. Then Chloe met Dan. From the moment she stepped out of chemistry class and saw him walking down the hall, she knew that he was the one. After they graduated from high school, Dan went to Georgia Tech to pursue a degree in electrical engineering, and she went to the Art Institute in Atlanta to study interior design. It worked out beautifully. The close proximity of the universities allowed them to spend their weekends and holidays together, and Chloe looked forward to the day when they would both graduate and get married. As far as Chloe was concerned, they had their future all planned out; and then out of the blue, Dan announced a month after his graduation from college that he was joining the marines.