Page 34 of Her Silver Fox Firefighters
I need to be somewhere else.
As I open the front door, however, I find myself breathing a sigh of relief. The kind that loosens all my joints and makes tears spring to my eyes. “Thank heavens,” I manage as I look at them.
They’re alive. Granted, they look like they lost a fight with a particularly vicious oven, but they’re okay. Dax has a bandage on his forehead. I measure each of them from head to toe before I’m fully able to breathe again.
I see light burns on their skin. Scratches and scrapes turned dark brown on account of Betadine. Smudges of soot and dried blood cover them. Their fire department–issued tee shirts are wrinkled and sweaty. They have messy hair and tired eyes. I catch a whiff of burnt wood as I breathe in.
“Olivia,” Dax says, his expression pained and exhausted.
“I couldn’t reach you,” I manage, the tears now flowing freely down my cheeks.
“I know,” he replies.
Beck comes closer. “We’re sorry. We were held back. Cops, arson investigators, doctors. They had us go through the whole incident before we could leave and the second shift took over.”
“Come in,” I say and take a step back.
They walk forward, zombie-like, and I want to do everything in my power to make them feel better.
“What happened?” I ask.
They join me in the hallway and start taking off their clothes. I listen as I help them undress and escort them to the bathroom, where I turn the shower on.
“Cold water, please,” Leo says. “I can’t stand the heat right now.”
“Whatever you need. I heard you lost one of your own today. I was coming out to find you,” I tell him.
Dax nods solemnly, then kisses my temple before getting out of his pants. “Our captain. It was an all-hands-on-deck type of situation. He took the candidates up to the roof to ventilate it.”
“I’m so sorry,” I say.
Beck washes his face and hair thoroughly in the sink before he slips under the cold stream, just as Leo comes out and wraps a towel around his sculpted waist. His injuries look much better now that he’s clean. He smells of strawberry shortcake, which is my favorite shower gel fragrance.
Were it not for the gravity of the situation, I know we’d have a laugh about it.
“We found a secondary device while we were sweeping the place, looking for survivors,” Dax explains, scrubbing his beard and face rigorously with lather from a bar of soap, occasionally stealing glances at himself in the mirror. “I had a guy on my shoulders. We were just about to get out when?—”
“It blew up,” Leo interjects, pulling me into his arms. He’s still wet, and the water seeps into my cotton dress, causing chills to run down my spine and igniting a fire deep within my core. “It caught the captain and the candidates while they were trying to get off the roof. The candidates made it out with a couple of broken ribs, a broken leg, and some scrapes and bruises, but at least they made it to the ladder. But the roof tore open under the captain’s feet.”
“Oh, Leo…”
“We tried getting here sooner,” Dax says as he steps into the shower after Beck steps out.
Beck joins Leo and me. He takes a deep breath as he looks at me. “We wanted to be with you, Olivia.”
“I was so worried.”
“I know,” Leo sighs. “For a moment, I wasn’t sure I’d ever see you again.”
When Dax is finished, I give him the first-aid kit from under the sink to change the dressing on his forehead wound. I help him while Beck and Leo open a bottle of wine from the fridge. They need something to take the edge off, to release the tension and ease the exhaustion.
“Was this from the explosion?” I ask Dax.
He nods once. “It knocked me out pretty good, to be honest. For a moment, I figured that was the end for me.”
“Dax…”
He pulls me into a deep, feverish kiss. “I know that we don’t yet know where we’re going with this or how we’re going to make it work in the long run, but I can’t imagine a future without you in it.”
