Page 9 of Hot Winter Nights (Bear Mountain Rescue 1)

“What do we have?” Hunter asked.

Shaking herself, she slapped on her all-business face. Old habits die hard, but she was determined to focus on cute, reliable men like Hunter, and not dishonest, sneaky, hot, sexy men like…

“Fifty-six-year-old male, suspected heart attack,” Dex said breathlessly. “He was unconscious in the field, and his pulse was weak and thready up until a minute ago—”

“Are you a paramedic?” Allie asked abruptly.

Dex paused in his compressions as he glanced her way, piercing her with those intense green eyes. “No.”

“Then maybe you should get off our patient and let us take over.”

Allie realized that she’d said the wrong thing the minute the air chilled around her. The two paramedics looked at her as if she were an insect, and even Hunter frowned at her.

Dex climbed off, and let one of the paramedics climb up. “Whatever the boss wants.”

Damn it, she’d let her emotions get the better of her and acted like an elitist bitch. She’d wanted him gone, but she hadn’t meant to sound so cutting.

“All right, Trauma Two, let’s go,” Hunter said.

As they rushed the man off, Allie hesitated, opening her mouth to apologize.

“Shouldn’t you go with them? Make sure they’re doing their job right?”

Allie’s cheeks burned. Of course he probably thought she was some kind of tyrant, but she really wasn’t. She had no idea what it was about Dex that made her want to prick him with every barb in her arsenal. She wasn’t usually like this.

But she couldn’t tell Dex any of that, because he was already walking out the door.

Pushing him from her mind, she hurried to Trauma Two and found the patient surrounded by Hunter and several nurses.

“We’ve got it covered,” he called out, barely glancing at her while he charged the paddles. Then he yelled, “Clear.”

His brush-off was so painful that Allie felt as if he had put the paddles to her. So much for having one ally.

Dex found his truck in the parking lot with Bluebell waiting patiently in the backseat. He’d asked Brian Darcy, one of Bear Mountain’s firefighters, to follow behind the ambulance in it, and Dex was definitely thankful to live in a small town where people could be trusted. Where people knew him and his background.

Everyone except Allie.

Dex slammed his palm against the steering wheel, letting loose a string of curses that would have made his grandma blush. It had taken all of his self-control not to lay into Allie Fairchild and her snotty, condescending attitude, but he’d been the bigger man, turned the other cheek.

For all the good it did him. He knew he’d be stewing for days about this incident.

Bluebell leaned over the back of the seat and nuzzled his ear. It was the hound’s attempt to calm him, but Dex was too fired up. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have any medical training, didn’t know how to administer CPR, yet he’d let her treat him like an idiot.

He hated that. Growing up with parents like his hadn’t been easy. He’d been an ordinary kid who preferred fishing to calculus, and their disapproval had given him a bit of an inferiority complex. He could admit that. And Miss High-and-Mighty New York Princess had hit the nerve like a dart to a bull’s-eye.

The only reason he had been at the scene of the accident was that he was driving behind them when the car had swerved off the road and hit a tree. Dex stopped to check on them and found the husband unresponsive, with a weak heartbeat. The wife was crying in the front seat with a head wound, and their two teenagers were in the back with minor injuries. Dex called it in and started on the husband, which was probably what had kept him alive until the ambulance arrived.

But he couldn’t tell Allie that or she might have thought he cared about her opinion of him. Which he didn’t. At all.

Heading out toward the Bear Mountain Search and Rescue building, he cracked his neck and rolled his shoulders, trying to relieve some of the tension plaguing him.

Suddenly, something small and brown ran out in front of his truck. Swerving, he glanced back to see the little fur ball in the road, unhurt. Few cars came out this way, so Dex stopped and got out, making his way back toward the animal. He wasn’t sure what it was until it lifted its head and he saw the floppy ears and long snout.

It was a puppy, and not a very old one by the looks of it. The dog cowered as Dex got closer, and started to slink away.

“Hey, buddy. It’s okay.” Dex kneeled down a few feet away and held out a hand. “I promise you’ll be safe with me.”

The puppy responded to his voice by submissively moving forward, and Dex saw the wet trail of urine it left behind. When it was finally within reach, Dex picked up the pup, noting its smelly, matted fur, and looked around. No one lived out this way, which made Dex suspect the little dude had been dumped in the forest.

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