Gavin tuned out the ensuing back-and-forth between the other two guys and thought about Cait. Did she have any Valentine’s Day expectations? She hadn’t said anything. A lot of women started dropping hints as soon as the calendar flipped to February, making it known they expected the day to be special.
It wasn’t going to be easy to plan what—or even if—he should do without some kind of definition to their relationship. They’d joked about the trip to Brockton being their first date, but they were closer than one date implied. Or at least he thought they were. If, in her mind, they were friends and the date was just a means to a casual hookup, then a big romantic gesture from him would be awkward.
And there was her family to consider. Maybe he didn’t want to move too fast until he got a better handle on how they would affect his relationship with Cait.
But she deserved something special, and hewantedto make the day special for her. He just needed to figure out a way to balance doing something special with not even knowing if they were at that point yet.
How the hell had his life gotten so complicated in three and a half weeks?
When the tones sounded, he shoved Valentine’s Day to the back of his mind. He was ready to go, so he climbed into the truck and started gearing up as the other guys hit the bay.
MVA with entrapment. Confirmed injuries. Multiple victims.
The storm had begun.
* * *
“I need coffee.” Cait tried not to cry or press her face to the glass as Tony drove by a coffee shop.
He shook his head. “If you have coffee, you’ll have to pee and we ain’t got time for that today.”
“Boston’s been a city for almost four hundred years. I shouldn’t have to go without coffee because people haven’t figured out the pavement gets slippery when the rain freezes on it.”
“You are in amoodtoday, and I don’t think it has anything to do with not having coffee.”
“If you stop so I can get a coffee, I’ll smile for the rest of the shift.”
He snorted. “No, we’ll get a call and your coffee will get cold while we pick somebody up off the sidewalk and dust them off, and then you’ll bitch even more.”
“I’ll get an iced coffee. Problem solved.”
Before he could agree to her brilliant compromise, dispatch broke into the conversation. Surprise, it was a slip-and-fall on the ice, and Cait tried to resign herself to the fact she wasn’t getting caffeine until they were back in the garage, handing the truck over to the next lucky EMTs.
Between the constant calls, the lack of caffeine and the sound of the chain system that kept them from sliding into all of the other vehicles sliding around, she was starting to get a headache.
“Out with it, Cait. We’re about three minutes out, so talk fast.”
“I slept with Gavin.”
“Okay, that was concise.” He laughed. “In the two minutes and fifty seconds we have left, tell me why that’s a problem. Was it disappointing?”
She imagined she could hear Gavin’s affrontedheyin her mind, and she laughed. “No, it wasn’t disappointing. Far from it. But having to get up and leave after because my mother needed me wasverydisappointing.”
“You already know how I feel about your mother leaning on you as much as she does,” Tony said, and she did. When you spent five or six days a week in a vehicle together, you talked a lot. About everything. “But tell me, if she hadn’t reached out, would you have spent the entire night?”
“Yeah.”
“Because you didn’t want to make your way home in the dark or for snuggling.”
She smiled. “For snuggling.”
“It’s about damn time,” Tony said.
The dispatcher’s voice came through the radio. “Victim is an eighty-two-year-old female, confirmed head injury with possible hip fracture.”
“Shit,” Cait said as Tony gave it a little more gas.
She had her gloves on and was ready when Tony pulled the ambulance up to the curve. A woman was kneeling on the ground next to the victim, and a couple of men had taken their coats off to hold them above the women in an effort to keep the cold rain at bay.
