Page 78 of Sizzle
Speaking of which… “So, let me get this straight,” she said, raising a brow at him as he handed over a cold pack for her head. “Malachi told you not to call the Intelligence Unit or he’d literally set me on fire, and you called them assoonas you got into your Jeep?”
“The paramedic said you need to ice that bump to keep the swelling down,” Sam said, and she lifted a brow, frowning.
“She also said I’m perfectly fine.” Of course, Sam, along with Sergeant Sinclair and all of the Intelligence detectives, had insisted she get a thorough once-over by paramedics as soon as they’d seen the blood on her sweater.
“Except for the bump on your head,” Sam said, and damn it, when had she lost her immunity to that charming little smile of his? He waited for her to put the cold pack—ow—on the back of her head, then continued. “And yeah, that pretty much sums it up. I knew Malachi was escalating, and that he probably had very little control left. Like Dallas said, he was getting sloppy. I also knew there was no way he’d let you go, and there was no chance in hell I wasn’t going after you.”
“So, you just walked into the warehouse knowing he wanted to kill you,” Lucy said, her heart lurching at the thought of him walking into Malachi’s trap, and how many different ways he could’ve been hurt.
“Yep,” Sam said, unblinking. “Malachi had you, and I knew he’d hurt you in order to hurt me. I had to get you out. But I couldn’t just barge in without thinking. I needed a plan, and for that, I needed help. I used the emergency roadside assistance button in the Jeep to call nine-one-one, and they were able to get me through to Isabella pretty quickly.”
Confusion clouded Lucy’s thoughts for a minute until she connected the dots. “She wasn’t at the scene of the bomb threat because she’s pregnant.”
Sam nodded. “She and Capelli were able to get ahold of the rest of the unit and pull them from the scene so they could come up with a way for all of us to extract you safely. Capelli met me five miles from here and put a handy little camera right here, in my button”—he tapped the button on his Henley shirt—“so the team could see and hear everything that I did, and they gave me an earpiece.”
“Are you serious?” Lucy asked, but in hindsight, it all made sense. The warehouse was a maze of storage rooms with blind corners and multiple dead-ends. Navigating them before the fire had been a challenge. After? It would’ve been a nightmare if the Intelligence Unit had come in blind.
Sam huffed out a soft laugh. “Yeah, I’m not going to lie. That part was pretty badass. I couldn’t hear them until right before they came in, though. They knew I was already pretty unsteady and didn’t want me to get distracted. My job was to keep Malachi talking until they could follow me into the warehouse and make a plan to take him down, then get you out of the line of fire once they were in position.”
“I should have known you’d break the rules and call them,” Lucy said, softening. “Even if it was risky as hell to come after me knowing Malachi wanted you dead, too.”
“Jesus, Lucy.” Sam leaned in from the bench seat beside the gurney, cupping her face with one hand. “OfcourseI came after you.”
“You could’ve been killed,” she argued, but he didn’t hesitate.
“I would put myself in harm’s way a thousand times to get you out of it just once. No matter what happens, Lucy, I’m always going to have your back.”
“Oh,” she breathed, her heart swooping. “Well, I guess we’re even on that one.”
Sam smiled, brushing a gentle kiss over her lips. “I’m always going to want to be even with you. I love having your back, and I love knowing you’ve got mine. You’re smart and stubborn and fierce and God, you’re so fucking beautiful, Lucy. I know it’s crazy, but I love you. I love you so much.”
Lucy reached out, wrapping her fingers around Sam’s forearm and holding on tight. “There’s no one I’d rather be crazy with than you, Sam Faurier. I love you, too. I’m always going to have your back.”
“Well, that’s a good thing,” Sam said, kissing her again. “Because you’re always going to have my heart, too.”
32
Three months later
Tyler Gates had a deep,dark secret. As far as secrets went, it was a fucking humdinger, too. Not quite secret alien baby or double life as a spy bad—Tyler was far too laid back for anything that extreme. But the same easygoing nature that had made him a damn good firefighter for the past ten years was also the very thing made his secret so far beyond the pale, he’d never been able to admit it to anyone.
Tyler had a planet-sized crush on his best friend’s little sister. And, by “crush”, he meant that he’d been dreaming of doing monstrously filthy things to her for the better part of a few years, all while pretending that he still looked at her like he should. Respectfully. Politely. Older brotherly.
An image of Chloe’s flame red hair and her sweet, single-dimpled smile flashed through his mind, making his dick twitch behind his uniform pants, and sweet Jesus, he was going to a special version of hell. Ryan Dempsey was his squad-mate. His best friend of over a decade. Practically his brother, and Tyler prided himself on being a good guy, decent and upstanding in a way that his own absentee father had never been. He wasliterallythe boy next door, having spent the last two years of high school living next to the boisterous and seemingly ever-growing Dempsey family, in the house where Tyler’s mother still lived to this day. The Dempseys had always included Tyler and his mom in their family celebrations and holiday gatherings, from Christmas dinner to summer barbecues. They’d been like a big, extended, surrogate family. It was wildly problematic that he wanted nothing more than to kiss Chloe senseless.
And not on her mouth.
“Whoa, you okay?” Dempsey’s voice wrenched him back to the present tense of Station Seventeen’s engine bay, where Tyler was (supposed to be) working on vehicle inventory. At least his buddy’s presence was enough to douse Tyler’s brewing hard-on, and the fact that Faurier and de Costa were hot on Dempsey’s heels sealed it.
“Absolutely,” Tyler said, slinging on his very best nothing-to-see-here smile. “C shift just left these storage compartments a fucking disaster area, is all.”
Not untrue, thank God, and de Costa’s black brows jumped upward at the sight of the mess. “Oh, my God. Those heathens,” she said, reaching out to help straighten the jumble of equipment in the wide-open storage compartment in front of him. de Costa had never met a reg she didn’t follow to the letter—how the hell she had ended up moving in with Faurier last month was seriously beyond Tyler, but the two were happy to the point of being like a living, breathing romance novel, so really, he wasn’t going to knock it. Especially when Faurier, the big old softie, started helping her with a goofy-ass grin on his face. But even though Tyler didn’t hesitate to join in when Hawkins and Dempsey gave Faurier a bunch of good-natured crap for taking the hearts and flowers route—and with a battalion chief’s only daughter, no less—he honestly thought it was cool that Faurier had found someone to be with for the long haul. Sure, it left him and Hawkins as the only single people in the house, but that was okay. He dodged the well-meaning “when are you going to find someone and settle down” bullet from his mother all the time. Plus, they were a bunch of firefighters and first responders. It wasn’t as if they sat around, talking about their relationship status all day.
“Oh, hey,” Dempsey said, rubbing a palm over the back of his neck. “Gates, do you have a second? I wanted to, ah, ask you something.”
“Sure,” Tyler said, leaving de Costa and Faurier to enthusiastically organize the storage compartments in the squad vehicle. He followed Dempsey a handful of steps toward the open bay doors, which wasn’t a hardship since today was pretty much the most perfect May day Mother Nature could rustle up. “What’s on your mind?”
Dempsey grinned sheepishly, which wasn’t quite on-brand for guy, and Tyler’s intuition twanged to life. “I’ve been giving this a lot of thought, and, well, you’ve been my best friend for literally half my life.”