“You have pretty blue eyes, firefighter… ” I was turned from him enough for him to see my last name on the back of my turnout coat. “Rourke.”
“Thanks. Now let them tend to you, Chip. I have to try to save the gym.” He gave me a smile, something meek yet powerful, which made my gut tighten. Even with his face coated in soot and his green eyes wide with fright, he was strikingly good-looking.
“Thank you for saving Sable. And me.”
“It’s my job, Chip.” I gave him a nod and hustled back to the fire. The chances of saving the gym were looking slim, but we’d managed to save a man and his dog. I’d take that as a win, and when they came, those were precious things. It was the losses that kept me awake at night.
Chapter 3
Chip
The ambulance smelledof plastic and medicine, and I couldn’t get the number forty-two out of my head.
Forty-two steps to the front door. I had told him that. I had said it out loud to a man whose face I couldn’t see, a man who picked Sable up and carried her toward the door ahead of me. Forty-two steps was the average gym layout for a single-story commercial space with an entry vestibule, allowing for treadmill rows, free weight zones, and ADA-compliant aisle widths. Cornish Iron was three feet wider in the cardio aisle, which made it forty-three.
I’d gotten it wrong.
I should tell him.
The paramedic clipped a pulse ox to my finger. She had red hair and freckles, and a name tag I could read because she leaned in close. KAYLEIGH. She said something I missed because the oxygen mask hissed and the siren above us started up. Sable pressed her body along the length of my left thigh, hard, deliberate because she knew my anxiety was spiking.
“Heart rate’s high,” Kayleigh said. “Sir, can you tell me your name?”
“Russell Cornish. Chip. Russell is my legal name. Cornish became Corn Chip. Corn Chip got shortened to Chip when I was eleven and never left. Chip is what people use.”
“Okay, Chip. Are you having any trouble breathing?”
“Smoke in–inhalation reduces hemoglobin’s capacity to carry oxygen by binding carboxyhemoglobin?—”
“Chip,” she interrupted me gently. “Are you having any trouble breathing?”
I checked. The mask was loud. The air inside it tasted of nothing. My chest was tight in a way that was less about smoke and more about the encroaching panic.
“No.”
“Good. That’s good. Stay with me.”
The back doors were still open. They were about to close. I knew that because the second paramedic, a stocky man whose name I didn’t catch, had a hand on the inside latch. Then he stopped. Someone outside was talking to him. I heard a voice I’d heard ten minutes ago in the gym, lower than the sirens, steady.
“Hey. Two seconds.”
My firefighter, Rourke, ducked his head into the bay. His helmet was off. His hair was dark with sweat and stuck to his forehead, and his face was streaked with soot from the eyebrows down. Up close, without the mask, he had a wide mouth, and the blue eyes I’d already cataloged were now focused right on me.
“You good?” he asked.
I opened my mouth. Closed it. The script forgoodwas supposed to be automatic, but I couldn’t find it.
“My knee,” I said.
“Yeah, I figured.” Rourke glanced at Sable. Then at Kayleigh. “Hey, Kayleigh, the service dog will need to go with the patient.”
“Hey, Dane, and yeah, it’s all good,” Kayleigh said.
Dane.
Dane Rourke.
I scrambled to pull off the mask, rearing back when Kayleigh tried to get it back on me. Sable pressed right up to me, the weight of her head in my lap.
