Page 5 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

Two years since I stood at a graveside in Chicago. Two days of driving. And now here, the town I couldn't wait to leave, the only place left that'll have me.

My phone rings.

I'm not even through town. I'm not even past the feed store.

Tater's name on the screen. I put it on speaker.

"I can smell the brisket from here," I say.

"Don't kill me." There's noise behind him. An engine turning over. Men's voices, fast ones. "But how quick can you get to the station? Structure fire on Route 9 and I'm down two men."

Chapter two

Thirteen Weeks and Counting

NELLIE

There is a fishhook in Dwayne Pruitt's thumb, and Dwayne Pruitt is telling me how to remove it.

"My cousin says you push it through. Clip the barb."

"Your cousin sounds like a man with a lot of scars." I snip the line, numb the thumb, and back the hook out clean while he's still explaining the push-through method. I hold it up. "There. Tell your cousin I said hi."

He stares at his thumb. "Didn't feel a thing."

"That's the general idea, Mr. Pruitt."

Debbie Sue is waiting at the nurses' station with a tuna sandwich already unwrapped. She's not asking. She blew in an hour ago smelling like mesquite smoke, still tying her scrubs. When the tones go out in this county, brisket waits.

"You didn't eat lunch."

"I had crackers."

"Crackers are not food, Nellie. Crackers are what food stands on." She pushes the sandwich into my hands. "Eat."

Three weeks in Willowbend and Debbie Sue Monroe has appointed herself my work wife, my social director, and apparently my mother. I didn't interview for any of those positions. Doesn't matter. Debbie runs on casseroles and momentum, and I have learned it is easier to eat the sandwich.

Thirteen weeks. That's the contract. That's always the contract. Willowbend General needed a nurse practitioner to cover the ER while they hunt for a permanent hire, and I needed a town I'd never heard of. Locum work suits me. Full scope, no politics, and a built-in expiration date. Week three of thirteen. In ten weeks I'll be somewhere else, and the little rental cottage on Juniper Lane will belong to whoever comes next.

There's a box in the corner of that cottage I never unpacked. There's always a box I never unpack. It's not laziness. It's policy.

I'm two bites into the sandwich when the radio at the desk crackles.

"Willowbend General, County. Be advised, working structure fire, Route 9. Two inbound. Elderly male, smoke inhalation, alert. And one of ours with a forearm lac. ETA six."

Debbie's already moving. "One of ours means a firefighter. This better be worth my brisket."

"I gathered."

"They're dramatic," she says, snapping on gloves. "Fair warning. Worst patients in Texas. My husband once tried to leave with a chest tube."

"He did not."

"He negotiated."

The bay doors bang open on the first rig. The farmer comes in gray-faced and coughing, seventy-something, overalls smelling like a burn barrel. Mr. Amos Kessler, the medic says. Barn fire. Went back in for his dog.

"Did the dog make it?" I ask, because that's the only vital sign Mr. Kessler cares about, I can see it on him.