Sweet Justice by Cynthia Reese

Author:Cynthia Reese
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2016-09-25T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

THE WORST THING about a firefighter’s job, Andrew decided, was the waiting. With his pocketknife, he whittled on a single piece of wood, making a ball and cage and chain.

Jackson looked up from his video game. “How do you do that? You’ve got that ball almost perfectly round.”

“You should try it,” Andrew urged him. “It gives me time to think, you know?”

“And what have you got to think about, huh? Got a girl we don’t know about? Man, you get the best-looking girls. How do you manage that anyway?”

Mallory’s perfect features and glossy hair and understated but polished looks instantly filled Andrew’s mind. “I’m giving dating a rest right now. And I’m trying not to date the glamour-girl types anymore.”

Jackson let out a bellow of laughter. “You with a plain Jane? This I gotta see.”

Andrew stood up and dusted off the wood shavings that had collected on his navy blue uniform pants into the trash can he’d been using to catch the shavings as he carved. “You won’t see me with anybody for a while. Besides, take it from me, the really pretty ones tend to be superficial and self-absorbed.”

“It’s because you go for the looks, man.” Jackson stretched out his arms, the video controller still in his hand. “You don’t trouble yourself to see if you have anything in common with them. That last one you dated—whenever she came around here, it was obvious she was too good for a blue-collar kind of guy.”

This was exactly the conversation he didn’t want to get into, especially with Jackson, who’d been dating a great girl for the past three years. Maybe he was right. But Andrew didn’t want to stir around the ashes of his past mistakes.

Especially when it looked as though he was falling right back into the same trap with Mallory.

To his relief, Daniel came trotting through the fire station. “Hey!” he said. “About that idea you had, for the spring coat collection.”

Andrew waited for his big brother to trash-talk the idea, which was to gather coats for next winter’s coat drive as people were clearing out their closets for the spring and summer.

“Yeah?” he asked.

“I got permission for us to use the county shop as a storage place, but you’ve got to set up the collection points.”

Relieved to have something to do, Andrew sprang from the saggy chair in the station’s rec room. “I’ll get started on it now. It’s so—”

“Don’t say it!” Both Jackson and Daniel spoke at the same time, alluding to the superstition that if any firefighter commented on how quiet it was, it would let loose a torrent of terrible call-outs.

“I nearly did say it,” Andrew conceded. “What I meant to say was that I’ll go around to different businesses and see what support I can drum up.”

“Yeah, but before you do, you need to go by Dutch’s office and get official clearance from legal,” Daniel warned.

“For a coat drive?” Andrew scoffed.

“Hey, that’s what the county manager said. We clear everything through legal, that’s the rule.

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