Page 19 of Smoke and Roses

“I’m doing this right, Lindsey. Now go inside. I’ll be right over there if you need me. Call me and I’ll come over, or you come to me. Either way, I’ll gladly support you.”

I go in with both sadness and hope in me. I lean against the door.

When I go to the window an hour later his light is on.

Chapter Seven

“Rule one,” Rob says. “You don’t step off a rig until it stops.”

“I know.”

He frowns at me. “I know you know. I’m saying it anyway.”

Across the bay, Cassia cracks up. “You’re doing the rules on Travis?”

“I’m his training officer.”

“He taught you how to shoot a rifle!”

“Not the point.” Rob points at me. “Rule two. When I tell you to get back on the engine⁠—”

“Even when you’re wrong,” I say. “Especially when you’re wrong. Rule three, you’re going to be the hardest training officer I ever have.”

Rob stops. He looks at Cassia and she tries to look innocent.

“You told him,” Rob says.

“I tell everybody,” Cassia says. “It’s my favorite story.”

We spend the morning working with ladders in the lot behind the station. Twenty-four-foot extension against the training tower, up, down, up again. We do it again and again until my shoulders burn.

Devin Mathews is on the other ladder with Clint timing him, and Clint is enjoying it even more than Rob is.

Devin is thirty-four, ex–Coast Guard, twelve years as a rescue swimmer out of Kodiak. He’s got frostbite scars across the backs of both hands, shiny and pink, and an easy grin that never quite makes it to his eyes. He talks enough for both of us. I don’t mind. It saves me the trouble.

“Hey, Ranger,” he calls. “Bet I beat you up and down.”

“Bet you don’t.”

“Ten bucks.”

“Make it twenty,” I counter.

“Oh, hell, he talks,” Devin says to Clint. “He talks when there’s money.”

I beat him by four seconds. Devin pays up with a ten and two fives and a lot of opinions about the Army. Rob writes my time on his clipboard and underlines it twice.

I haven’t slept. That’s not new. What’s new is the reason.

Every time I close my eyes, I’m on her porch with her back against her front door and her hands in my jacket and her mind-blowing mouth against mine.

It’s clear in my head—that throaty sound she made. The way it felt when her fingers slid under my shirt, cool against my stomach, and the way she breathed my name like she didn’t know she was saying it out loud.

I walked away from that.

Fuck.

I stood at the bottom of her steps with my hands in my pockets and waited for her to get her key in the lock, and then I went upstairs and stood under a cold shower on purpose until I couldn’t feel my feet. It didn’t help.