“Relax, Captain, it’s fine.” Her eyes wavered briefly towards Tanner Rey, who met her gaze with a smirk, but she looked away just as quickly and shrugged.
“It’s my bad. I didn’t know we weren’t supposed to have it on.”
“No wonder you passed out,” said Jake. “I think any one of us would have.”
Paisley reached out to steady herself on the fire truck, swaying again where she stood, and Korbin handed her a bottle of water which she took and drank gratefully. Fury simmered in my chest as I looked from man to man, ready to rip them apart for putting a fellow squad member in physical danger.
“Training is over for the day,” I said, my voice booming over my men. As Jake and I helped Paisley gather her gear to put it away, she leaned over in the parking lot and vomited, skin now ashy with fatigue and nausea. I took one of her arms, and Jake took the other as we stepped towards the station to get her into the cool. Behind me, Tanner and Nick gathered their things to come in after us.
“Not you,” I said, turning back to them. “Tanner, Nick, and Korbin, you’ll run another two drills. Don’t come inside until they’re done and done well.”
Tanner cussed under his breath, and Nick rolled his eyes, but Korbin just smiled that shit-eating grin and nodded at me.
“No problem, Cap. We can handle it.”
As the rest of my men trudged upstairs to shower before dinner, I helped Paisley put away her equipment in the ambulance bay, mostly there to ensure she wouldn’t pass out again. Her hair floated wild about her face from where it had fallen out of her ponytail, cheeks streaked with dirt and grime, movements stiff and weak—careful.
“I wish you wouldn’t have done that,” she said, not looking at me as she shut her locker door and rested her head against it. I longed to reach out and touch her, comfort her, but I didn’t. I stayed back because the back was where I knew I needed to be.
“Done what?”
“Made them keep going.” Paisley looked at me for a fraction of a second before looking away. “You’re just giving them more reason to hate me.”
“I know it was one of them.” I folded my arms across my chest, refusing to apologize for the punishment I’d inflicted. My men were big boys; they’d get over it. “They won’t get away with treating you like shit,” I continued. “I’m the leader of this house when Chief Davis is not around, and I would never permit them to bully each other like that, either.”
Paisley was silent, body resting against the steel of the locker, eyes downcast to the floor. I wasn’t sure if she heard me—or had even been listening—so I spoke again, trying to steer this in a safer direction.
“How are you holding up?”
Paisley shrugged and sat down so she could kick off the boots, supporting her back against the locker. “Exhausted,” she said, hands shaking as she pulled each one off.
“I meant about the call yesterday.”
“You already asked me that.”
“I know. And you got kind of tense and made a crack about your feelings—obvious deflection, by the way—but you never actually answered,” I said. This must have caught Paisley off guard because the muscles in her jaw twitched suddenly, but even then, she didn’t look at me.
“Hansen,” she said softly, pushing a breath of air between her lips. “I’m still exhausted, okay? I’m exhausted thinking about it. Exhausted because I can’t sleep over it. Exhausted, wondering if there was something I could have done to save that little boy’s life that I didn’t do.”
“You know that’s not how it works.” I sat on the hard, concrete floor next to her, resting my elbows on my thighs. Being so physically close to her sent a shiver of desire down my spine, and I had to focus on the ground in front of us so I wouldn’t be entirely consumed by her sheer energy. “There was nothing anybody could have done. That’s just the cold truth. He was gone before we even got there.”
“He had a pulse.”
“That doesn’t matter.” I cleared my throat and rested my head in my hands with a sigh. “We did everything we could, okay? There was nothing else to do.”
“I know that Hansen,” she said evenly, and a red tint in her cheeks appeared, making her appear angrier. “I just don’t like it.”
“Nobody does.”
When she said nothing, I changed the subject, hoping to find a more stable territory. “I heard you and Korbin arguing earlier. What were you guys talking about before I showed up?”
“Nothing,” she said shortly. “We were just discussing the training.”
“Was he the one who told you to put on the vest?”
“No.”
“Really?”
