She turns slowly, those deep brown eyes making me swallow before I can get any words out.
“Okay.”
She cups her hand around the shell of her ear. “I’m sorry?”
“You heard me.”
What more does she want? AScarlet Letterspeech?
“You’re impossible,” she says with a shake of her head as she leads the way to the EMT wing.
If I thought the barracks were quiet, you could hear a needle drop with how empty this room is. Minus a couple of medical gurneys, a locked hazardous waste box, and a long supply table, we’re the only ones in it.
Hailey grabs an oversized lunchbox with a white cross stamped on the front. The first aid kit opens with the squeeze of a buckle and the pull of a zipper but might need to be shrink-wrapped shut now that it’s been broken into. Supplies overflow onto the table. A saline solution wipe, a roll of gauze, and red medical tape are what she reaches for.
She gestures for me to sit in a fold-out chair across from her. I unlace my boots again and work them off my feet while she washes her hands in the sink, then she’s back in front of me and cradling my ankle as she lifts my foot onto her lap.
I’ve had worse moments, but I’m given an I-told-you-sosmirk when the Scooby Doo Band-Aid falls to the floor with my sock. I flinch when she dabs the surrounding area with a saline solution wipe. She uses two fingers to hold a square strip of gauze over the blister and her teeth to rip a strip of medical tape.
I find myself wondering what it would feel like if those teeth sunk into my bottom lip. Would it send an electric current through my veins like her hands are now?
I clear my throat, trying to focus on something other than her mouth and her hands and her impossibly close proximity and what it’s doing to my head.
“You want to tell me what you’re doing here, Red?” I ask.
“Same as you, it would seem.”
She’s wearing a pair of blue slacks and a far-too-sexy-for-a-wildfire-crew blouse that buttons up the front.
“A wildfire EMT, huh?”
She nods. “Got hired yesterday.”
My mind drifts back to our interaction for more pieces of the puzzle I think I might have missed.
Jack… Iseethe name on her phone screen. Ihearit whispered in my father’s voice inside my head.He’s been through a lot,him and his— It hits me like a tidal wave.
Hailey Hart is Jack’s daughter.He’sthe jerk who told her not to come.
The whole situation is muddy. I don’t know how to make it less so besides doing what I’m good at.
My lips tilt into a smirk. “You ready to be surrounded by a whole lot of those guys you love to hate? The ones who only ask questions so they can get in your pants?”
She lifts her gaze to me. Leans in close, only a whisper from my face, and says, “I think I’m good. I handled you, didn’t I?”
Heated eyes dart a path to my lips and back up again and hell if I don’t wonder what it would be like to lean the rest of the way in and kiss her. Wonder if she’d yelp if I grabbed behind herneck and crashed our lips together in the hungry way I want to right now. It’s impossible to think with her looking at me like that. Like she wants to lock that door and be alone in this room with me. It’s messing with my head.
She doesn’t need to be someone’s rebound, and I don’t need the distraction, but her breath iswaytoo hot against my ankle not to focus on our proximity to each other.
“There,” she says. “All finished. A hell of a lot better than a Scooby Doo Band-Aid.”
I work my foot from side to side, inspecting all the angles. “I don’t know… you think it’ll hold?”
She swats me playfully on the arm. “Get out of here, rookie. You need to get some sleep.”
I groan. “You can call me anything you want, butpleasedon’t call me that.”
She offers me a smug grin as a parting gift. “Since you asked so nicely.”
