Page 13 of Sizzle

Sam shook himself back to the moment, squinting through the pre-sunrise shadows filling the fire academy’s parking lot. He’d been disappointed that night, sure. But he was cocky, not a douchebag. Anything other than an enthusiastic yes, please was a no in his book when it came to hookups of any kind. Did he still think Lucy was sexy as hell? Fuck, yes. If anything, she was even hotter now that he knew her better. But even more, she was a fellow firefighter, and one he’d put in a bad situation, at that. Sam needed to make that right.

Enter: apricot turnovers from Sweetie Pies bakery, a.k.a. Lucy’s favorite.

A flash of red caught his eye, followed by the glow of two headlights, and ha, he’d known she’d show up early. He’d wanted to catch Lucy before they went into the academy so they could make amends and move on. He’d thought about texting her last night—all the firefighters on Seventeen’s A-shift had swapped numbers ages ago, although he’d never used Lucy’s outside of the house-wide thread that Hawkins had created for emergencies and special events, like when Gamble and his wife Kennedy’s son had been born earlier that year. In the end, Sam had made the executive decision to wait for her rather than ask her to meet him, wanting to do the whole thing in person.

Lucy pulled her SUV into a spot a few down from his, her car facing the academy complex, with its classroom facility, two burnout buildings, and large outdoor obstacle course. Although it was still fairly dark out since the sun wasn’t fully up, he could make out enough of her features to recognize her. She sat huddled in the driver’s seat, engine and lights now quiet. Sam moved to get out of his Jeep and meet her on the pavement, but then stopped as he realized two things.

One was that Lucy hadn’t budged from the driver’s seat. And the second was that she was staring at the academy with an expression that looked a lot like fear.

Sam was out of his Jeep before he even realized his legs would move. Lucy’s head whipped toward him, her eyes going round and wide as she scrambled out of her SUV.

“What are you doing here so early?” she asked, cutting off the “are you okay” he’d been working up. Her expression was perfectly neutral, to the point that he couldn’t be sure he had imagined the deep unease he thought he’d seen only seconds before. She was probably just dreading the next three weeks—God knew he was, too. Anyway, it wouldn’t put him in her good graces to ask if she was okay when he’d been the one to create the situation to make her decidedly not okay, so he slipped into an easy smile, lifting the bag he’d managed to grab from his Jeep.

“I’m waiting for you, actually.”

“You’re waiting for me,” Lucy echoed, eyeing him with a not-small amount of mistrust.

Damn, this was going to take more finesse than he’d thought. “Yep. I thought you might be hungry. These apricot turnovers felt like they were calling your name.”

“Let me get this straight,” she said, her mouth pressed into a thin line. “You think you can charm your way back into my good graces with a couple of pastries and a smile?”

Sam’s grin slipped. “Well, no. Not exactly, but—”

“Good.” Straightening her shoulders beneath her quilted navy blue RFD jacket, she speared him with a look. “Look, let’s not sugar coat this. I’m mad at you. Yes, I acted of my own volition yesterday, and those actions are on me. But you put me in a completely untenable position, and that’s onyou. Just because you didn’t ask me to break the rules for you doesn’t mean you gave me any choice in the matter. Your actions got me into trouble, Faurier. You got me fuckingbenched.”

She took a step toward him, but before he could open his mouth to defend himself, she barreled on. “This isn’t something you can just walk back with a wink and a pastry and a sexy little smile. I get that the rules don’t matter to you. You’ve made that wildly clear. But they matter to me.”

“Iknow,” Sam said, frustration flaring to life in his chest. “I know, and I’m sorry, okay? But aside from breakfast and an apology—which I really do mean, by the way—I don’t know what else I can do to make this right.”

Lucy crossed her arms, her exhale becoming a puff of white in the cold morning air. “Try learning from your mistakes, for starters.”

His frustration grew thorns. “So, the next time I see someone trapped in a burning building, I should stand around, resting on my laurels? Come on, de Costa. You know it’s our job to go in to save people.”

“It’s our job to follow orders. To save peoplesafely,” she shot back. “The rules exist for a reason, and that reason isn’t so they can be broken.”

“But you broke them when you disobeyed Captain Bridges,” Sam pointed out.

“And the fact that you haven’t learned anything from your error in judgment is making me regret it.” Taking a step back, Lucy eyed him, and he resisted the urge to fidget. “You think you’re just going to skate through the next three weeks, don’t you?”

“It’s the academy,” he said by way of an answer. Yeah, Sam knew he’d get his workouts in—those stair drills were a bitch. But come on. He’d been a firefighter for a decade. The rest of it would probably be cake for both of them.

Lucy rolled her eyes. “That doesn’t mean it’s easy. Why would Bridges send us back otherwise?”

He froze, because she had one hell of a point. Bridges had been mad, sure, but he’d never been mean. What was it he’d said? Something about re-learning the basics? “I’m sure it’s a lesson in following the rules. But the rest isn’t going to bethathard.”

Sam’s grin returned, because at least this part, he was one hundred percent certain of. “I mean, I might not be big on protocol, but there’s really no denying that I’ve got exceptional skills, and I’m very, very good at what I do.”

Another breath gusted out of Lucy, her eyes wide for just a split second before she shook her head and looked at the bag of pastries still in his grasp. “Do you really want to make amends with me?”

“I do,” he said, and he meant it.

“Then use this opportunity tolearnsomething other than what I like for breakfast.”

With that, she turned on her boot heels and walked into the academy without looking back.

* * *

When Sam walkedinto the academy’s main building a half an hour later, his stomach was full, the burn on his neck was throbbing, and his brain was on overdrive. Okay, maybe he’d been just a tiny bit overconfident that Lucy would forgive him if he simply asked her to. Yeah, he’d created a situation that had put her in a very uncompromising spot. But he really did feel badly that she’d gotten into this much trouble, and his apology had been genuine. Maybe genuine in a Sam Faurier kind of way—he hadn’twinked, like she’d said, because he had standards, but he’d admit, he’d leaned pretty hard on his charm. The fact that Lucy hadn’t even blinked her pretty brown eyes as she’d shot him down in flames still sat in his gut in a ball of unease.

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