Shock Advised (Kilgore Fire #1)

by Lani Lynn Vale

  We all crossed the street at once, and we stopped just inside the entrance of the front lobby.

  “Well, hello,” the woman behind the front counter said pleasantly. “What can I help you with?”

  Charlie stepped forward and offered his hand to the woman.

  She took it, shaking it like only a woman could. Just barely giving him her fingers and shaking once before dropping it.

  “We’ve received some complaints on the fire code of this building by a customer, and we’re here to inspect the building for any possible violations,” Charlie said.

  He handed over a packet of papers to the woman, who took it with a shocked face.

  “Well, okay,” she said after scanning the papers. “That’s fine. Let me know if you need anything.”

  The boys and I spread out, and it didn’t take long for me to find four violations on my own.

  When we met back up, I handed over my sheet of the area I’d inspected.

  Then I’d looked at the sheets PD, Fatbaby and Drew handed over.

  My mouth kicked up into a grin as the boys and I left without another word.

  “You gave her a violation on the toilet paper being a fire hazard?” I asked PD with laughter in my voice.

  He grinned.

  “It was under the heater in the hall closet. Definitely a fire hazard if I’ve ever seen one,” PD explained, not an ounce of sorrow in his voice.

  “Bitch deserves it,” Charlie said as he finally joined us. “Her husband owns the business, and she had the nerve to ask me if you were single.”

  I lifted up my lip in a silent snarl.

  “Wouldn’t touch that bitch with a ten-foot pole,” I grumbled. “She better hope she doesn’t have a fire here that requires more than someone pissing on it to put out. She inadvertently pissed off the whole fire department with the way she spoke about Mia.”

  Charlie nodded.

  “That won’t affect the way you do your job,” PD said. “Nor will it affect how I do mine. It just means that we won’t go back in after her cat.”

  I laughed.

  A delicate sniff from behind us had me turning to see a woman standing there…the same one from earlier that I’d cursed in front of.

  “Can we help you, ma’am?” Fatbaby asked.

  The woman sneered.

  “No,” she said. “But you should be careful about what you say on public streets. There are ears everywhere.”

  I didn’t necessarily get the thought that she was talking about anything other than the cussing until the chief called me into his office later that afternoon.

  Knocking on the door, I waited for the ‘enter’ to come.

  It didn’t.

  In its place was a terse, “In. Now.”

  “Shit,” I sighed.

  The sound of his voice didn’t mean good things for me.

  Although Allen had nothing on Jack when he was in a rage. So as long as I kept my cool and didn’t mouth back like I was known to do, I should be fine.

  “Sit,” Allen said the moment my feet crossed over the threshold.

  I did, ignoring the mannequins in the seat next to me that looked like they were fucking.

  It was something we’d send the newbies or the paramedic students in to do.

  They had one objective. “Don’t get caught.”

  So the students would come into Allen’s office, rearrange the various mannequins that were stored in the corner, and get out without Allen knowing.

  We didn’t bother to tell them that Allen had his office wired. It was fun to watch the students think they’re getting away with something.

  We got to watch from the other room, laughing the entire time.

  Allen was also a good sport about it. He didn’t care as long as we weren’t being ‘mean’ to the recruits and students.

  The two mannequins on the chairs next to me were facing each other, one looking as if the other was riding him. Hands were placed perfectly, and the mannequin that was supposed to be the man on the bottom had his head thrown back as if in the throes of ecstasy.

  “I got a call today about you,” the chief said.

  I winced.

  The woman pushing the baby.

  Perfect.

  “Yes,” I said.

  He sighed at my evasive answer.

  “Let me read what she had to say,” he said, putting on his reading glasses. “Wouldn’t touch that bitch with a ten-foot pole. She better hope she doesn’t have a fire here that requires more than someone pissing on it to put out. She inadvertently pissed off the whole fire department with the way she spoke about Mia.”

  I waited to hear what else he had to say.

  It wasn’t much.

  He stared back at me with the same unwavering gaze.

  So I explained. For the tenth time.

  “Goddammit!” Allen said, slamming his hands down on the desk. “You can’t fuckin’ say stuff like that, even if it’s true!”

  I sat back, surprised by his outburst.

  He was always so in control. To see him not was a sight to see.

  “I never said it was true. I talk a good game, but that bitch will get the same great service that my own brother would get if it came down to it,” I told him honestly.

  “You don’t like your brother,” Allen said with a smile, taking his seat.

  I snorted. “I love my overbearing, always whining about my life, prick head of a brother. It’s just at times I forget that I do, and act accordingly.”

  He laughed.

  “Get out of my office, Taima. Don’t say shit like that anymore,” he ordered.

  I saluted him half-heartedly. “Sir, yes sir.”

  He flipped me off and I walked between the two chairs.

  The mannequins fell off, landing with a thump on the ground in a tangle of arms and legs.

  “Huh,” I said.

  The new position put the ‘woman’ on top, her knees up by the ‘man’s’ ears.

  “I’ll have to try that position tonight,” Allen laughed.

  I gave him a thumb’s up and left with a smile on my face. One that quickly fell off the moment I got into the main room of the fire house.

  “What’d he want?” Winter asked.

  Baylee, her partner, was sitting directly in front of her. They were playing a card game that looked confusing as hell.

  “He wanted to yell at me for some bitch overhearing a comment I made today while we were inspecting that lady’s business,” I explained.

  Winter narrowed her eyes. “What are you talking about?”

  “Oh,” Drew said. “You don’t know that Taima, your favorite brother-in-law, has a crush?”

  I pushed Drew, nearly toppling him out of his chair.

  He righted himself with a laugh.

  “Shut up,” I said.

  “Why?” Drew asked. “It’s true.”

  It was.

  I was falling fast and hard.

  “Why is it always the broken ones?” Winter asked. “She’s a nice woman, after all, but she has some work to do before she’s ready to take you on.”

  I scowled. “What are you talking about?”

  Winter gave me a glare.

  “That girl,” Winter said. “What was her name? Randi?”

  I blinked.

  I hadn’t thought about Randi in a very long time. In fact, until Winter brought her up, I knew it’d been years since I’d even heard her name.

  “What about her?” I asked, taking a coke out of the fridge and bringing it to the table where I took a seat and watched the game being played.

  Bowe was busy cooking our dinner, and I watched absently as he stirred something in a pot that was boiling on the stove.

  “You went to jail because of her,” Winter said.

  “I went to jail because that bitch of a mother of hers was trying to sell her on the street for drugs,” I growled.

  “You hit a woman,” she countered.

  I shrugged. “That wasn’t a woman. Tha
t was a monster.”

  “Hmm,” Winter said. “What about Ella?”

  “What about her?” I asked.

  “You didn’t go to jail for her, too?”

  I laughed.

  “Winter, I was a street punk who had a vendetta against all things asshole. You may think that I ‘go for the broken ones’ but I don’t. I was just trying to help them. They didn’t deserve to be treated like they were trash. They deserved to be treated as normal human beings.” I growled.

  “So what, you were some modern day version of Robin Hood?” PD asked, poking his big head in on the conversation.

  I nodded.

  “That must be it,” I said through clenched teeth.

  “So what is it that you’re doing with Mia? Do you like her?” Baylee asked.

  I nodded. “I do.”

  “And you want to be with her?” She continued.

  I nodded again.

  I seemed to be doing a lot of nodding.

  Mia was making me into a simpering idiot, though.

  I had done nothing but think about her for the last three months, and now here I was, falling head over fucking heels for her, and she may or may not even feel the same way.

  “Then go for her. Put in the work. The pain is worth the gain and all that shit,” Baylee teased.

  I snorted. “Thanks. I’ll have to remember that.”

  The tones dropped, and we all halted in our conversations.

  “Engine one, medic one,” the dispatcher said. “There is a structure fire at the Azalea Hills Trailer Park off…”

  We all got moving.

  I wasn’t a medic today, I was on the engine, so I walked to my bunker gear and slipped my feet into it easily…expertly.

  I’d done it so many times that it was like second nature by now.

  PD followed suit on one side of me and Bowe on the other.

  “They better not burn my sauce,” Bowe grumbled.

  I snorted. “They can cook better than I can. So you have a fifty-fifty chance of it being all right when you get back.”

  Bowe shot me a glare.

  “You better be right, or you won’t be getting any lasagna.”

  “Well, we can’t have that, can we?” I said, then called louder to the ladies. “Y’all keep an eye on the sauce. Don’t let it burn.”

  I got thumbs up.

  Turns out it didn’t matter anyway.

  When I got back, lasagna was the very last thing on my mind.

  ***

  The next morning as I got off shift, I was still nauseated.

  The fire we worked in the trailer park had spread from the original location, to about fifteen other trailers, wiping out nearly the whole freakin’ park.

  I walked slowly to my truck, watching my feet the whole way.

  Which was why I didn’t see Mia until I was standing directly in front of her.

  “You okay?” She asked in a soft, honeyed voice.

  My head snapped up, taking her in like a breath of fresh air in a room full of smoke.

  I nodded, looking at her from head to toe.

  “You were on the news last night…and the front page,” she said, holding out the morning’s newspaper to me.

  I took it, scanning it.

  Surprisingly, everything was correct.

  I hadn’t realized any of the boys had talked to the paper, but after reading the article, someone clearly had.

  The article was too informative.

  But the more I read, the more I realized that none of the boys would’ve given this kind of information out.

  “What the fuck?” I asked. “They gave the names of the victims?”

  Mia’s eyes widened. “Were they not supposed to?”

  I grabbed Mia’s hand and led her back into the building, my untied boots flapping as I hurried.

  B Shift, which included Winter and Baylee, gave me a weird look as I came in. Their brows rose.

  “What are you doing back?” Winter asked.

  I didn’t answer, instead heading straight into Allen’s office.

  “What’s up?” He asked, catching sight of Mia who was right behind me.

  He stood and walked around the desk, gathering Mia up in a hug.

  “How are you, girl?” He asked.

  Mia smiled. “I’m doing okay. It’s getting better all the time.”

  Allen patted her shoulder.

  “Look at this,” I said, holding the paper out for Allen.

  He took it and read it, eyebrows lowering the more he read.

  “Who wrote this?” He asked as he flipped to the back of the paper to where it continued on the last page of the front section.

  And that, my friends, was the million-dollar question.

  Chapter 10

  The sheet got hung on my bra strap, and for a magnificent moment, I was fucking Superwoman!

  -Text from Masen to Mia

  Mia

  “Masen,” I said, turning to my very best friend in the whole wide world. “I will help you. Now sit down, pour us some wine, and stop whining. This’ll be fine.”

  Masen glared.

  “Make sure you specify in there that I’m a woman, not a man. I don’t want to pick up the wrong orientation. I’m desperate here. I could almost do that mail order bride thing,” Masen joked.

  She looked almost out of place in my house. Her designer clothes looked so much more fashionable than mine. Even now that we were both making the same amount.

  I guess it was the ingrained knowledge I’d been raised with that anything could happen and that I shouldn’t spend my money on frivolous things, like a pair of two-hundred-dollar pants.

  Mom and Dad had been barely making it with their two salaries, and when two salaries suddenly became one, we weren’t making it anymore.

  Hence the reason why we’d moved to Kilgore, Texas, hoping it would be easier for us both to live off of Mom’s smaller, single income.

  For the most part it worked, but we still had to make sacrifices that other kids would never have to make.

  “More wine?” Masen asked.

  I looked down at my now empty glass and winced.

  “No,” I said. “I better not. I haven’t had anything to drink in a long time. I fear I’ve become a lightweight.”

  I wasn’t counting the night with Tai and his brother and sister-in-law.

  Not because I didn’t want to, but because I just plain couldn’t remember it.

  Surely that meant it didn’t count, right?

  Masen stared at me in horror.

  “No!” She exclaimed.

  I grinned.

  “Yeah. Pretty depressing, huh?” I said, typing in the website Masen had told me about earlier in the evening.

  Masen had been on a backpacking trip to exotic faraway place…okay, she really went to North Carolina, but that was pretty darn far away from her home state of Texas.

  She’d been gone for a little over a month helping out people who had been displaced by flooding after a hurricane. She was doing clean up and helping with temporary housing.

  Secretly, I felt that under normal circumstances, she probably wouldn’t have done it.

  But her parents owned a huge chain store, and they had a big hand in community outreach programs worldwide.

  Since she was, technically speaking, a part of their company, she was expected to go to places where her face would be seen. And sometimes that meant going somewhere that she normally wouldn’t ever go.

  “Okay…,” Masen started. “Tell them that I like whiskey.”

  I blinked turning only my head to glare at her.

  “You can’t start off with ‘I like whiskey’,” I said. “You have to start off with something like…,” I hesitated, “I’m a country girl, looking for a God fearing, country boy that loves to get dirty, but doesn’t hate getting cleaned up, either.”

  “Okay,” she said. “But make sure you put that I like beer in there, and I’m not a martini kind of girl.”

  �
�Maybe I should just tell him that you’re an alcoholic,” I muttered.

  Masen punched me.

  “Alright,” I muttered, typing with my tongue between my teeth as I let my fingers carry me away.

  “And make sure you tell him that I like to read, so he won’t get disappointed,” Masen urged.

  “Why would he be disappointed?” I asked, knowing the answer.

  Masen was an avid book reader, and it wasn’t uncommon for her to get so lost in her fictional character’s world, that she would ignore her real life world in the process.

  I smiled.

  I’m a country girl, looking for a God-fearing, country boy who loves to get dirty but doesn’t hate getting cleaned up, either. I’m not interested in partying and staying out all night, unless it’s wrapped up in a blanket, standing in front of a bonfire with a beer in my hand. I need a man that’s not offended by my mouth, because when my Dallas Cowboys are losing, I tend to lose control of it.

  I’m a simple girl at heart that loves being on horseback, four wheeling and reading. And by reading, I mean binge reading many, many books a week. I love reading. I love to get lost in a fictional character’s world. I need a man that’s willing to let me be me, but who’s also willing to whisk me out of that fictional world and demand I spend time with him. I need somebody to be my other half. Be the Johnny to my June. The peanut butter to my jelly. The cheese to my macaroni.

  If you think that’s you, I’d love to meet you.

  Sincerely, a book nerd, country girl searching for her country boy.

  “There,” I said. “How’s that?”

  Masen read and slowly her mouth split into a large smile. “That’s perfect.” She hesitated, “But it sounds like you just wrote that for yourself, not me. I don’t like the Dallas Cowboys. You know I’m a Raiders Girl.”

  I snorted. “You’re not going to find a Raiders’ fan in Texas, sweetheart,” I said. “Trust me.”

  “Okay, I’ll add it to my site…but this better get me some hot, sexy cowboys,” she said, pointing her now empty wine glass at me.

  I grinned.

  “I bet you get a reply within two days,” I said, holding out my glass.

  She reached for the wine bottle, filled both glasses up and grinned. “You’re on.”

  The rest of the night flowed flawlessly.

  The only downside was that Tai was at work and hadn’t been able to answer a single one of my text messages.