“I’m going to apply for a transfer,” Vader grumbled as he hoisted two hundred pounds of metal over his head. “I don’t need this shit.”
“Yeah, right.” Sabina was working out her aggressions on the treadmill next to him. She’d set it to the highest level; sweat dripped off her. “Leave the Bachelor Firemen? I’ll bet you a soda you never even bother to get an application.”
Sodas were the common currency of the firehouse, actual gambling being forbidden. Sabina couldn’t even keep track of how many sodas Vader owed her.
“He’s going to ruin this station. Acting like he owns it. I can’t wait for those drills. I can’t wait to go mano a mano with the dude. I’m going to obliterate him. He’ll wish he was back in his pansy-ass New York station. I want Brody back.”
“Vader, don’t be a baby. Brody’s not coming back. I heard he loves his new job at the academy. Besides, Chief Roman’s a training officer, he won’t be here forever.”
In the corner, Double D made a strangled sound as he attempted a sit-up. His feet rose into the air and he toppled backward. Sabina stepped off her treadmill and ran to help him.
“I’ll hold your feet down, D.”
“Little thing like you couldn’t hold down a parakeet.”
She glared at him. Double D was old school and still resisted the very concept of a female firefighter. “Try me. Or I’ll peck your eyes out.” She knelt between his legs and pressed on his feet.
Double D leered. “Two, you don’t look so bad from this angle.”
She narrowed her eyes at him until he stopped snickering and attempted a sit-up. He barely completed one before collapsing back to the mat.
“I’m fucked,” he panted. “He’s going to write me up.”
“No, he won’t. Come on, try again.”
Wheezing, Double D struggled through another sit-up. “Chief Roman’s the king of hard-asses.” Pant. “Called my buddy from the Bronx this morning.” Pant, pant. “Ever since his wife got killed in 9/11, he’s been hell on his crews. Scariest bastard on the Eastern seaboard.”
In her shock, Sabina let loose her hold on his feet and he crashed into a clumsy backward somersault, contorted twist sort of move.
Vader cackled. “Nine point two from the German judge.”
Sabina crawled to Double D’s aid. “Sorry, D. His wife was killed in 9/11?” He lay like a plump beetle stranded upside down, legs wiggling. She offered him a hand.
“ ’Swhat I heard. She was like you.” Clearly not a compliment, from the tone of his voice.
“What do you mean?”
“Female on the job.” He was still trying to catch his breath. “Shows what happens. Wife and mother of a young kid, going inside that tower, getting herself killed.” Under Sabina’s fierce scowl, he backtracked. “Not to say she ain’t a hero. They all were. All three hundred and forty-three.”
Every firefighter in American knew the exact number of their fellow firefighters and paramedics killed during 9/11. Sabina felt ill at the thought of the way she’d yelled at Chief Roman.
“We should give him a chance,” she said. “So he’s not Brody. So what? We’ll get used to him. And he’ll get used to us.”
“Firefighter Lee,” came a harsh voice from the doorway. “Nap on your own time. I want ten sit-ups, starting . . . now!”
Sabina scrambled back to her position at Double D’s feet. She watched, amazed, as he reeled off a rapid-fire set of ten semi-decent sit-ups.
When he was done, he didn’t flop down as he had before. He stayed upright, looking at Chief Roman, who gave a brusque, unimpressed nod, then scorched the rest of the room with a hard stare.
“Firefighter Jones, you’re not working out today?”
“I was helping—”
“A hundred sit-ups, starting now.”
Sabina hid a smug smile. A hundred sit-ups . . . piece of cake. She’d always worked hard to keep her former baby fat at bay, for fear of resembling her old self too much. She launched into her crunches, aware of his eyes on her. Self-consciousness flooded her face with crimson. Under her San Gabriel FD T-shirt, her nipples pushed against her sports bra. He’d seen her naked from the waist up. Oh God. The new training officer knew exactly what her nipples looked like. He knew the sounds she made when she got turned on. Was he thinking of it right now? Because it sure felt that way, with his stern gaze surrounding her, bathing her in hot awareness.
Her breath came fast, and it wasn’t only from the exercise. Squinting her eyes, she willed herself to ignore his mountainous, commanding presence in the doorway of the workout room.
“Chief Roman, what do you lift?” Vader asked in a squeak. Sabina glanced over and saw his pecs quiver with the effort of holding two hundred and fifty pounds above his chest.
“Enough,” Roman answered in a tight voice.
Sabina imagined him stripping down to T-shirt and shorts and lying back on the bench press. Bulging muscles and mighty legs danced in her vision.
“You all right there?” Roman asked Vader. She glanced over at her friend.
“Ye-es.” Vader seemed to have no air in his lungs. The veins on his neck bulged. His eyes popped.
“Vader!” Sabina jumped to her feet. “Someone do something!” She was strong, but she couldn’t lift that amount of weight. She ran to help him, but before she got there, Chief Roman reached down with both hands and plucked the iron bar out of Vader’s loosening grip as if it were a cheerleader’s baton. He set it back on the rack.
“Don’t hurt yourself, Firefighter Brown.”
“No, sir,” Vader gasped. “I’m fine, sir.”
“We need you functional.” He addressed all of them. “Carry on. Drills start this afternoon, barring any calls, of course.” He left the room.
Sabina pounded Vader on the back while he wheezed and coughed. He clutched at her.
“Off day,” he managed. “I skipped my energy drink.”
Sabina rolled her eyes. Vader was her best bud at the station, but his obsession with his muscles had always struck her as ridiculous. “You’ll beat him next time.”
His eyes glittered. “I’ll beat him, then I’ll transfer. And he’ll beg me to stay on hands on knees. Fucking hands and knees!”
“Sure, Vader.”
He hoisted himself off the bench and lowered his voice to a hoarse whisper. “Need to talk to you about something private, Two. Tomorrow after work?”
She shrugged and nodded, and he went to work out his triceps. Sabina had to give Roman credit. She’d never seen either Vader or Double D this worked up. The man sure knew how to piss people off.
While Sabina was doing squats, which she hated, her cell phone rang again. She didn’t recognize the number, but anything was better than squats. “Hello,” she answered warily.
“It’s Max. Don’t hang up, munchkin,” said a nicotine-drenched voice.
“Max?”
“Max Winkler. Uncle Max. Your childhood mentor. You quit answering your phone? This is the third time I called you.”
“What are you—” She darted a glance around the workout room. She couldn’t talk to Max here. “Hang on.”
She darted out of the gym and into the bathroom, making sure to slide the sign so it said “Women.” “Why are you calling me?”
“It’s about your mother. When can we talk?”
“We are talking. Is she okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, she’s fine. How about lunch?”
“No, Max. I’m not even in LA. I’m not that person anymore. Just tell me or I’m hanging up.” As a child, she’d fallen for Max’s tricks every time. Hopefully she’d learned a thing or two since those days.
His deep-throated laugh, which inhabited the bottom-dwelling register of a bass line, made her pull the phone away from her ear. “Playing hard to get, huh?”
“I’m working, Max. I actually have a job that means something to me now, and . . .”
But she was talking to emptiness. She knew what that meant. A more important call had come in and Max had switched over without bothering to mention it to her. She ended the call and turned off her phone. As long as her mother was fine, she had nothing to say to Max.
She splashed cold water on her face to calm herself down. Was Max going to make trouble for her? He didn’t know where she lived. No one from her old life did.
Don’t be paranoid. She’d told him to get lost, and Max never wasted his time. Everything would be okay.
Stepping out of the bathroom, she gratefully inhaled the beloved smell of the firehouse—a hint of gas drifting from the apparatus bay, coffee from the kitchen, varnish from the ladders they’d been working on. And for the millionth time she gave thanks for the one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn that had landed her at San Gabriel Station 1.
For his first overtime shift filling in as battalion chief, Roman made a brief appearance at dinner, which was prepared by Fred the Stud. The easy flow of conversation was clearly hampered by his presence, so he returned to his paperwork as quickly as possible.
“Thanks for the meal,” he told Stud, scraping his chair back from the table.
“Sure thing, Chief Roman. We never had a battalion chief at the station before. What about the dinner rotation?”
“Stud,” said Captain Kelly sharply. “Chief Roman will not be cooking.” He shot a glance Roman’s way. “Unless he wants to, of course.”
“No,” said Roman, more brusquely than necessary. “No cooking.”
As he disappeared into his office, he heard a few mutters. “Of course not . . . hard-asses don’t cook . . . Chief Bighead . . . Brody always made pot roast . . .”
He ignored the complaints. He wasn’t here to make friends.
Victor Renteria, chief of the San Gabriel Fire Department, called soon after dinner. “Heard you’re already making an impression over there.”
“Just doing my job.”
“I knew I got the right man. If you can keep those guys out of the news for two weeks, I’ll buy you a bottle of Jameson’s.”
“I don’t foresee any problems.”
Chief Renteria gave a long, ironic chuckle. “Glad to hear it. Have they briefed you on the curse yet?”
“No one’s mentioned it.” He’d heard about it, of course. Virgil Rush, the 1850s volunteer fireman jilted by Constancia B. Sidwell, his mail-order bride, had been so tormented by his crewmates’ teasing that he laid a curse on all San Gabriel firemen, dooming them to disaster in their love lives.
Since he didn’t have a love life, he couldn’t care less about the “curse.”
“Media eats it up. We used to like the publicity—bunch of good-looking, single firemen landing in People magazine—good for the image. But it’s gotten out of hand. The opinion pages are making mincemeat out of me. Did you see their nickname for me? Chief Rent-a-Mirror. They’ve taken this too far, Roman. It’s personal now. I can’t think about those bastards without a stiff drink in my hand. Get this damn thing under control, that’s all I ask.”
“I’m on it, Chief. Total media blackout.”
“You can make exceptions for fires, of course,” said Renteria dryly. “But only for fires.”
As Roman hung up, Stan opened one eye and bared his teeth. For a beagle who slept most of the time, he sure was feisty. He gave Roman a long, meaningful look, then collapsed himself into a ball on the floor.
So the dog didn’t like him. Why the hell should it bother him?
Only two calls came in that night, both handled perfectly well by the men and woman of the B shift. Roman got almost no sleep, tossing and turning on the narrow bunk, which was six inches too short for him and about seventy-five feet too close to Sabina Jones. Although he’d tried not to acquire this information, he knew exactly where she was sleeping. And now he knew her first name. Sabina. Unusual. Kind of romantic-sounding. Of course, everyone at the station called her Two. Of all ridiculous names. She wasn’t the second of anything; she was one of a kind. Even after such a short acquaintance he knew that much.
As he fell into a brief snooze, his last thought was about what the fire chief would say if he knew that he and Sabina had been one second thought away from hot, naked, sweaty, spectacular sex.
Luke raced across the San Gabriel Airport terminal and launched himself at Roman, who caught him in a tight hug. Being mostly Italian, their family had never been shy with physical affection. Roman loved ruffling his son’s hair, giving him random bear hugs, slinging his arm around his shoulder as they walked. Like a flashback to the old Luke, he talked a mile a minute as they waited at the outdoor baggage carousel in the glaring sunshine.
“Nonna gave me money to rent a DVD player and I watched ten movies, fast forwarded right through the boring parts, where’s our house, did our stuff come, cuz I wouldn’t mind camping out a couple nights, I think it would be fun, maybe we’d see some coyotes, Ben knows someone whose cat was eaten by a coyote, do you think we could get a dog now that we have a backyard, I was thinking maybe a Great Dane, like a huge dog, because we’re Romans and our family is big, even Nonno is huge he says it’s because we’re part Cherokee but I thought we were part Viking, do you know, Papa?”
Roman just shook his head, shouldered two of Luke’s duffel bags, and handed him the third. Hopefully, Luke’s excitement meant this move was the right step. For the first time in a year he didn’t seem irritated or angry.
“One thing at a time. Are you hungry? Did you eat anything on the plane?”
Luke reeled off every snack he’d had on the flight, including the homemade cannoli his grandmother had given him.
“I had an extra but I gave one to the girl next to me,” he finished, looking guiltily up at Roman. “She looked really thin and hungry. She hadn’t even eaten breakfast.”
“You’ve got a good heart, Lukey.”
“Not really. I had two myself before I even talked to her.”
Roman grinned down at his son. Honest to a fault, his Luke. Except for his height, he didn’t look much like Roman; his exuberant brown eyes and sandy hair came straight from his mother’s side of the family. Tall for his age, he used his wiry strength to whip fastballs past gawking batters.
“Home, then food?”
“I can’t wait to see the house!” And he was off again. He chattered nonstop through the tour of the little beige house. Luke’s bed had gotten broken during the move, but for now Roman had plopped the mattress in the center of his bedroom. Luke chose to shove it up against the window that looked out on the backyard.
“Can you believe how warm it is?” he kept saying. “It’s like summer vacation every single day!”
“Don’t you believe it. I’ve registered you at the toughest school in San Gabriel. The teachers are all ex-marines from Company F. Stands for Flunk.”
“Papa. Not funny. Don’t you think a Great Dane would love it here? Or maybe a Great Dane and a Newfie.”
“I’ll have to introduce you to the dog at work. You might change your mind about getting one.”
“Never,” Luke vowed.
In his joy at having his son back to normal, Roman forgot about the station, the awkward situation with Jones, and his sense of being a fish out of water—an enormous one. Maybe a shark.
For dinner, he took Luke to the neighborhood Italian restaurant, La Piaggia, whose stucco façade glowed a lovely apricot pink in the sunset. But when the hostess, an energetic young Indian woman in a hot-pink sari, brought him his penne al’arrabiata, his good mood disappeared.
He gagged on the thick, cloying tomato-ish sauce. Luke put his fork down, eyeing him nervously.
“Papa. It’s just pasta.”
“No. No, it isn’t. You can’t call this pasta. Arrabiata is not a challenging sauce. That’s why I ordered it. If they can’t do—”
The sharp-eyed hostess hurried to their table. “Is there a problem?”
“Yes. This sauce. It tastes like ketchup. I don’t think it has a single speck of red pepper in it.”
She raised her chin. “Our customers don’t enjoy spicy food. More’s the pity, because there are some excellent North Indian dishes that—”
“But it’s arrabiata! Do you know what that means?”
“I await enlightenment.” She joined her palms in a gesture somewhere between spiritual and sarcastic.
“Angry. It means angry. Fired up. Inflamed.”
“Inflamed?”
“And it’s not hard to accomplish.”
“Clearly.” She eyed him pointedly. “You are inflaming me at this very moment. And not in the good way.”
“Papa, please.”
Roman struggled for calm. “Here’s the thing. I’m new in town. You know the fire station nearby?”
Surprise flashed in her eyes and she nodded.
“That’s me. Respectable, law-abiding, life-saving citizen. So work with me here. If I show you how to make a proper arrabiata, will you try it out on your customers? I promise you they’ll love it. Everyone does. Right, Luke?”
“You’ll probably want to marry him,” said Luke, resigned by now.
“Highly unlikely,” the hostess said, gesturing to the red mark on her forehead. “Once is more than enough.”
“And another thing. Why is your restaurant named after a beach?”
“I’m Indian. You think I know?”
Roman lost his capacity for words. Luckily, she didn’t. “Come along then.”
“What? Really?”
“You offer to cook for me, I would be crazy to say no, would I not?”
Roman leaped to his feet, nearly upending the table in the process. Of all the times he’d offered to make a real sauce at an inferior restaurant, this brisk Indian woman was the first to accept. He loped toward the kitchen, Luke hopping after him.
Maybe San Gabriel had some potential.