“Leslie, I don’t have any spare chiefs. I thought about you filling in there, but you’re going to be busy for a while.”
“Oh, you are funny. So funny.” She turned her head with some difficulty. The left side of her face was covered in bruises. “Send yourself.”
“Me?”
“Other than Haskell, you’re the chief who’s most recently been a captain. It’s only been a few years for you. They’ll respect you. You scared the hell out of them at the debrief.”
“I can’t. I’ve got so much to do with the initiatives.”
“You don’t have to go on every call. You can bring your work; they’ve been doing all the administrative paperwork for their firehouse anyway. They need leadership and vision. You have both.”
“Leslie, no.”
“Do it for me. It’s only a couple of weeks. Once Williams takes over, you can wash your hands of it. They’ll be his problem.”
“That’s blackmail.” Noah didn’t have the energy to argue with her.
“Is it working? You know my battalion; you know the work I’ve put into the women. I need someone who I can trust to treat them well. Firehouse 15 has two thirds of the women in the department. Please?”
Noah might have been stern, but Leslie was right. Firehouse 15 had been through a harrowing ordeal, and they needed leadership now, not in a few weeks.
Even if it cost him personally.
“Only for you.”
“It’ll be good for you, Chief,” Leslie sighed, finally relaxing now that her duties were firmly on someone else’s shoulders. “Can you send Trevor in?”
“No problem.” He called Trevor in and quietly exited the hospital.
He hoped he wasn’t lying. With the programs on the verge of opening, his free time was being eaten up by the department. His ex, Kathleen, must have been right five years ago. Cleveland FD was his life and his love, which excused his discovery of her cheating two months into their marriage. She’d moved out that night, and they’d communicated solely through their lawyers.
The face of Erin Hudgens flashed before him, the incident in the yoga supply closet superimposed on her screaming at him in Sector 22. Noah knew himself well enough to admit that he was ridiculously attracted to her. If someone had been writing a rom-com, he’d have kissed her into silence by the SCBA tanks.
Even now, after her second incident of near blatant insubordination, his subconscious mind was more than willing to imagine her naked and let her defiant mouth run all over him. This same subconscious was the one that left him hard and taking himself in hand thinking about her regularly.
It was inappropriate for sure, but he would never act on those private thoughts. He was a healthy, heterosexual, thirty-nine-year-old man; it wasn’t surprising he had latched onto the nearest attractive woman.
He’d been so involved in these projects that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a date; it must have been at least six months or even longer. Sex wasn’t even on the menu. If he were considering Kathleen’s point of view or lusting after a subordinate, however enticing he found her, he was definitely in need of some physical fulfillment.
Boxing. Yes. Boxing could substitute, again.
* * *
The morning didn’t get off to a great start. For the first shift after the apartment fire, Erin forgot to plug in her phone after dinner with Theo and Drew. She fell asleep watching old reruns ofBattlestar Galacticaon Netflix on her couch alone. When her eyes flew open at 8:45, she was in trouble.
Next, she couldn’t find her short sleeve uniform top. Instead, she had to grab a long sleeve one from the bottom of her drawer which was less than perfect for the heat of a September Labor Day weekend. With no other choice, she shoved it on and smoothed her hair into a twist, skipping most of her morning hair routine.
There would be coffee at the station, and since it was a short six block sprint, she shouldn’t be too sweaty. Fortunately, her entire navy-blue uniform was made of cotton because synthetic fibers melted under high heat, as a furniture warehouse fire in South Carolina proved a decade ago.
Congratulations you didn’t die in the fire; you were liquefied by your own polyester uniform,she thought, uncharacteristically morbid. Probably an aftereffect of absorbing eight episodes of Cylons killing off humans on Galactica while she slept.
Then she rushed back upstairs when she realized she forgot her watch. Every firefighter needed to wear a watch at all times. She left her charger, but someone would lend her one at work. Passing the blonde woman playing with an orange dog, whom she believed was her new neighbor, Erin gave a polite wave and made tracks to the firehouse.
On most days, she would have been proud that she managed to get to her station with five minutes to spare. Today, however, she crashed into someone trying to enter the back doors at the same time as she did.
This particular someone was wearing the black uniform of a chief. And since she’d heard McClunis was still in the hospital, it wasn’t her battalion chief.
Based on her body’s response, she knew who it was immediately.
