Quinn sat in one of the two chairs across from Captain Bridges’s desk and tried with all her might not to scream. But seeing as how Bridges was a) the boss she highly respected, and b) on the phone with Dr. Keith Langston, who just so happened to be the head of the very same emergency department to which she’d rushed her partner ninety minutes ago, she bit her tongue in the name of propriety.

And what do you know, it mostly worked.

“Mmm hmm. I see. Of course. Well, thank you for the update.” Bridges replaced the receiver in its cradle on his desk, looking at her over the thin black frames of his reading glasses. “First things first, since I know where your head is. Parker is fine. No broken bones, his tendons look intact, and Dr. Langston expects him to make a full recovery.”

Her sigh of relief lasted all of a nanosecond. “How many stitches?”

“Quinn…”

“I saw the injury, Cap.” Quinn’s gut gave up a hard twist at the freshly minted memory of Parker’s hand, sliced wide and bleeding. “For God’s sake, I treated him two seconds after it happened. I know the number isn’t one or two.”

Bridges steepled his fingers over his desk. “Twenty-nine.”

Right. Looked like that twist in her gut had its sights set on becoming a full-blown cyclone. “How long will he be out of work?”

“A couple weeks, minimum, but realistically, probably three. It depends on how quickly he heals and regains his mobility. He’ll work closely with the docs, and they’ll evaluate his progress next week to give us a more specific timetable.”

Quinn swallowed hard, but managed a small nod. God, Parker must be going crazy. Or at the very least, driving the medical staff at Remington Mem crazy.

Cue up another corkscrew in her gut. “He’s my partner. I should be there with him. Helping him fill out the paperwork or…something,” she said lamely, but Bridges met the sentiment with a shake of his head.

“I sent squad over to the hospital. If Parker needs anything, Hawkins will make it happen. In the meantime, we’ve got some shifts to cover here on ambo.”

Well, hello, rock and hard place. But Station Seventeen was the closest thing Quinn had to a family—hell, it was the only thing she had, period—and she wasn’t about to let Bridges down. Especially if the guys on squad had Parker’s back right now. Hawk might talk a good game with his laid-back grin and that deep Southern drawl of his, but when things went mission critical? He was as steadfast as they came.

“Okay,” Quinn said. “I’m happy to do whatever I can to fill in the gaps until Parker recovers.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Bridges said, not skipping so much as a breath or a beat as he added, “because I’d like to put you in the lead paramedic spot.”

“Excuse me?” Her spine did its very best rigor mortis impression against the back of her chair, but somehow, her captain remained totally unfazed. Holy shit, he was serious.

“Temporarily, of course. Just until Parker heals up.”

“Okaaaay.” The word stretched out with far more uncertainty than Bridges had surely been aiming for, but come on. There were so many whammies in the plan he’d just tossed out, Quinn couldn’t even process them all. “Then who would be my partner? Someone from the float pool?”

Ugh, the thought of it sent a less than polite look over her face. Sure, it was only three weeks, but with the wrong partner? Those three weeks could turn into the third circle of hell super quick.

Bridges surprised her by shaking his head. “Actually, I’d prefer to stay in-house to make this as easy as possible. You’ve already been mentoring Slater, and he’s expressed an interest in extending his first responder training to full paramedic status. I thought the two of you would make a good team.”

“You want me to take lead and partner with Slater,” she said slowly, a flush spreading out over her skin, and good Lord it was hot in this office.

Thankfully, Bridges didn’t seem to notice she was having her own personal summer. “The city is short on paramedics right now, especially lead paramedics. You’re more than qualified to take Parker’s role for the time being, and you and Slater already know each other. Plus, he’s already earned his EMT credentials, so he’s qualified to ride on ambo under your command. This would be a good learning opportunity for him, and less of a disruption for you.”

The man had a point. Several of them, in fact. Quinn thought of how smartly Slater had realized Elena was deaf when the fact had gone so thoroughly over everyone else’s heads this morning—including her own. “Slater is a really quick study,” she agreed.

“Moving Dempsey back to his old spot on engine and pulling a floater from the pool to cover squad would be far easier than trying to drum up another paramedic for three weeks straight,” Bridges said. “Just as long as you’re okay with the arrangement.”

“Of course.” The answer catapulted past her lips before it had fully taken shape in her brain. But she’d do anything for this fire house, just like she’d do whatever it took to care for the people who needed medical help when she was on-shift.

Including squelching her libido’s dark and dirty thoughts of Luke Slater in order to work shoulder to shoulder with him for the next three weeks.

“Good.” Bridges nodded, reaching for a sheaf of paperwork on his desk. “I’ve already run everything by Gamble, and he’s on board with the shuffle just as long as Slater keeps up with his firefighter training on the side. I’d like to start the new assignments effective immediately so we don’t have to take the ambulance off rotation for the rest of this shift. As long as you think Slater will be okay with that.”

Quinn scooped in a deep breath and looked over her shoulder at the door leading back to the common room. “Guess there’s only one way to find out.”

* * *

Luke sat in the back of Ambulance Twenty-Two, staring at the engine bay through the open rear doors and trying like hell to figure out what had just happened. One minute, he’d been on the couch in Station Seventeen’s common room reading The Practice and Principles of Paramedics, Volume Four, and the next, he’d been in Captain Bridges’s office, agreeing to temporarily swap his bunker gear for a T-shirt with the department’s EMT logo emblazoned across the back.

So much for keeping Quinn at arm’s length. Now he was about to work with her, up close and personal, for three whole weeks.

And oh, by the way, not only did he still find her as sexy as ever, but as of this moment, she was his immediate superior.

Fucking spectacular.

Quinn cleared her throat, pulling herself into the back of the ambulance from the floor of the engine bay. “Sorry to keep you waiting. I just wanted to check in with Parker now that he’s been released from the hospital.”

“That’s okay. How is he?”

“More pissed than anything else. Although I’m sure he’ll change his tune once the hi-test pain meds start wearing off. Anyway”—her chest lifted slightly beneath her uniform shirt as she paused to inhale, and Christ the next ten shifts were going to last an ice age. Each—“since you and I are going to be working together for the next few weeks, there are probably a couple of things we should talk about from the jump.”

“Okay.” Yes. Business. Medical things. Nothing personal, and for the love of all things sacred and holy, no more looking at her chest. Even accidentally.

Damn, she had a really nice chest. Curves just where he liked them. Pert, pretty breasts that would fit perfectly in his palms, with nipples that he’d guess were just one shade darker than petal pink…

Luke cleared his throat to mask the strangled sound rising from it. Boss! Boss! This woman is in charge of your training. Stop fantasizing about her nipples, you fucking horn dog. “Shoot.”

Quinn sat on the bench across from him, her expression wide open and bullshit-free. “I know I’m supposed to be the lead, or whatever, and since you haven’t completed all of your paramedic training, I’ll obviously take point on decision-making and higher-level treatments and procedures. But for the most part, I’d really like for us to treat patients as a team.”

“You take this partner thing pretty seriously, huh?”

Not that Luke should be surprised, he guessed. Quinn was close with everyone in the house. Well, everyone other than him, anyway. She was also stone-cold serious about taking care of people, from the tiniest scratches to the grisliest amputations. Of course she’d want to go all-in on them being partners.

“Well, yeah,” she said, all case-in-point. “I mean, I know it’s a little different than how things work on engine because there are only two of us. But we can’t treat patients properly if we don’t rely on each other. And I definitely take caring for people seriously.”

Although a tiny kernel of him squalled at the potential risk involved in working that closely with Quinn, he shook it off. The last seven months of training on engine had taught him all too well that teamwork was an absolute job requirement. He’d been able to balance the job with keeping his personal life personal. This wouldn’t be any different.

It couldn’t be.

“I do too,” he said, capping off the words with a nod. “Teamwork sounds good.”

Quinn smiled, and yeah, he’d need to start building an immunity to those dimples if he had a prayer of surviving the next three weeks without balls the color of the Pacific Ocean. “Great. Why don’t I show you where we keep everything back here, and we can review some basics as we go?”

“Sure.”

She gave him a quick but thorough tutorial on the lay of the land in the back of the ambulance, and he did his level best to mentally catalogue everything as much as possible. They were halfway through the third compartment above the driver’s side bench when the all-call burst out its harsh, high-pitched tone.

Engine Seventeen, brush fire. Route Four Ten, mile marker thirty-two. Requesting immediate response.

Luke’s boots had hit the buffed concrete of the engine bay floor for three steps of solid hustle before he realized his auto-pilot needed a reroute.

“Sorry,” he half-shouted over the thumping footfalls of his engine-mates and the churn and clack of the automatic garage door doing its thing. “Habit.”

Quinn waited out the throaty, diesel-fueled rumble of the engine as Shae guided it out past the flashing yellow caution lights in front of the house, smiling as she said, “Not a bad one. I’m sure missing all the action on engine is a little disappointing.”

“Not sure I’ll be missing all the action. Being a paramedic is hardly like watching paint dry,” he pointed out, hoisting himself back up to the interior of the ambulance. He’d seen her and Drake remove a guy’s arm from a wood chipper last month, for God’s sake.

“Okay, that’s definitely true.” The curiosity that had bubbled over her pretty face earlier went on a giant comeback tour, her blue eyes narrowing over his face. “So how come you want to do it?”

Luke’s heartbeat sped up. “I’m sorry?” he asked, hoping maybe she’d reconsider the question. Couldn’t they just talk about non-personal stuff, like the best way to splint a shattered femur, or the weather, or something?

Quinn’s expression refused to let go, and yeah, that was a great, big negative. “How come you want to be a paramedic and a firefighter? It’s a hell of an undertaking, especially as a rookie. And by that, I mean it’s practically unheard of.”

“I guess I just really want to help people.”

It was a pat answer, and in honesty, one that knotted Luke’s gut. There was so much more to the truth than that. But ever since his mother had died and his father had walked out the door on the night before her funeral never to return, taking care of people had been his MO. He knew how to find solutions and fix things. It wasn’t just what he did. It was what he’d been hard-wired for. What he excelled at. What he needed.

And if by splitting time between both meant he wouldn’t get too emotionally attached to one versus the other? Yeah. All the fucking better.

“Ah,” Quinn said, and funny, the lift of her light blond brows said she actually understood his deep desire to help other people. “Well, if this morning is any indication, you’ve got a hell of a knack for it. You made a great catch with Elena. Patients in diabetic shock are usually really gorked out, so I didn’t think anything of her not answering us verbally, but…”

The guilt covering Quinn’s pretty features finished her sentence as loudly as if she’d shouted “I should have” through a ten-foot long megaphone, and a pang spread out from his belly to his chest.

“I got lucky,” Luke said, duking it out with his conscience over the lie. “Anyway, you shouldn’t beat yourself up.” Okay, at least that was all truth. “You diagnosed Elena’s diabetic shock way faster than I would have, and you and Parker took great care of her.”

Quinn nodded, although she still seemed unconvinced. “I’m just glad she’s going to be okay.”

Luke replayed the call in his head. “How did you know to skip right to a sternal rub to try and wake her?”

“How did you know she was deaf?” Quinn asked back, and shit, how had he not seen that one coming?

Deflect. “You first.”

“Okay.” Quinn shrugged, propping her first-in bag over the gurney and re-stocking the thing with fresh packages of QuikClot pads. “Elena’s LOC was pretty spontaneous and she’d been out for at least ten minutes. When someone’s lost consciousness for that long, it’s a solid bet the shake and wake isn’t going to work. A sternal rub isn’t fun for the patient,” she admitted, a tiny wince stealing over her face as if she hated the fact that she’d given the woman a bruise while simultaneously saving her life. “And I know your textbook says to start out with the shoulder shake to gauge responsiveness for that very reason. But given how quickly she’d lost consciousness and how long she’d been out, I knew I’d end up needing to do the sternal rub anyway. So I did.”

“That makes sense,” Luke said, processing the knowledge with care. “So how do you know the difference between cutting to the chase and cutting corners?”

Quinn closed her bag, the zipper sending a soft thhhrp through the interior of the ambo. “The same way I’d guess you do on engine. Lots of training, and even more practice.”

“Now that, I can get on board with.”

A chuckle crossed his lips, but it met an abrupt end a second later when she looked at him and asked, “Is that how you learned sign language? As part of some training program?”

“No.” His heart took a whack at his rib cage. “I, ah. I know someone who’s deaf. My sister, actually.”

The words were out before Luke could alter them, leaving a mental path of are you out of your ever-loving mind? in their wake. But he had to hand it to her—Quinn’s only sign of surprise was the slight parting of her lips before she replied.

“Oh. Well, sign language is a pretty cool thing to know. Maybe in our down time, you can teach me some basics. If you’d be willing to.”

“You want to learn how to sign?” His brows shot up, his jaw dropping in the opposite direction, but Quinn just jumped down from the back of the ambulance like no great shakes.

“What, you think you’re the only one who needs to learn new things?” she asked, sending a laugh over one shoulder.

Huh. When she put it that way… “No. I guess not.”

Her laughter softened, a more wistful expression taking its place as she turned toward him. “Knowing sign language, at least enough to be able to recognize it, would have made me a better paramedic this morning. Practice isn’t always about the medical stuff, proper. It’s about taking care of people the best way I can. Which”—she paused for a self-deprecating eye-roll—“I’m sure sounds all touchy-feely. But it’s also the truth.”

“It does sound a little touchy-feely,” Luke agreed, partly because Quinn wasn’t wrong, but more selfishly because he wanted her laughter to make an encore. Bingo. “I get it, though.”

“Yeah?” she asked, her smile growing even bigger as he nodded. “I’m glad.”

Luke moved from the ambo to the engine bay, squinting against the bright sunlight filtering in past the row of windows set into the garage door in front of them. Maybe teaching Quinn how to sign wouldn’t be that big a deal. Maybe they could even grab a cup of coffee, or go on a date or something, once they were done working together. His attraction to her sure as shit wasn’t going to take a hike anytime soon, and in truth, Shae hadn’t really been wrong earlier. Asking Quinn out was a far cry from marrying her, and just because he didn’t want to let his feelings flag fly didn’t mean he had to be a monk. Maybe—

The all-call blared from the overhead speakers, screeching his thoughts to an abrupt halt.

Ambulance Twenty-Two. Person down of unknown causes. Eleven-forty Beaumont Place. Requesting immediate assistance.

“Looks like I’ll need a rain check on that lesson,” Quinn said, her curl-filled ponytail swishing over the shoulder of her navy blue T-shirt as she turned to give the rear doors on the ambulance a firm slam. “You ready for your first med call, partner?”

Luke’s nod was firm despite the adrenaline sparking through his veins.

“Absolutely.”