wash over her when she met someone new. Automatically, she tugged her scarf more tightly around her face.
“I’m on a sabbatical.” There wasn’t much call for news anchors who look like macabre clowns.
The dispatcher gave her a closer look, her gaze uncomfortably penetrating. “Don’t worry about a thing, hon. I’m getting good vibes about your future.”
Although Kim wasn’t a great believer in psychics, she said, “Thanks. I’ll hold that thought.”
“You do that, hon.”
Kim noticed a plate of what looked to be homemade oatmeal cookies covered with plastic wrap on the counter that separated the computer area from the rest of the room. “Those look good. Are you the cookie maker?” she asked Emma Jean.
“No, not me, but help yourself. Mrs. Anderson brought them over for the guys and they’re going a little slow.”
“Thank you.” Tempted, she reached for—
Blindly, Jay grabbed for her wrist just as her hand closed around a cookie. “Don’t touch those. They’ll kill you.”
Her head snapped around. “What?”
“Evie Anderson is the world’s worst cook.”
“The city councilwoman?”
“The same,” Emma Jean said. “She’s also got a mad crush on the chief. Thinks the way to his heart is through his stomach.”
“A stomach pump is what you need when you eat any of her cooking.”
“Oh, they can’t be that bad.” Gingerly, Kim bit off a tiny bite of the cookie she’d snatched, chewed and choked, desperately wishing she could spit it out. “Eeew, yuk.”
“Told you so,” Jay chided.
“She must have dumped a whole box of salt in there. They’re terrible.”
“She fell a couple of years ago and suffered a concussion,” Jay explained. “I think she lost her sense of taste.”
“But she’s a very nice lady,” Emma Jean said, defending the councilwoman. “And I predict—”
“Don’t!” Jay held up his hand. “If the chief and that woman get together, there’ll be mass resignations from the department. That’s my prediction.”
Kim couldn’t help but laugh. Councilwoman Anderson was an attractive woman in her early sixties, practically an institution in Paseo del Real, if a little conservative for Kim’s taste. She and the widowed fire chief would make a good-looking couple—assuming he had an iron stomach, she thought as she dropped the remains of the cookie in a nearby waste-basket.
“Say,” Emma Jean said. “I bet you’d like to come to the station’s pancake breakfast this weekend.” She whipped out a pre-printed pad of tickets. “Only five bucks a crack. It’s for a good cause.”
Kim glanced at Jay in the hope of an explanation.
“We’re restoring a vintage fire truck to ride in the Founder’s Day parade next September,” he offered. “Whoever sells the most tickets gets to drive. I figure I’m a shoo-in.”
“In that case, maybe I ought to buy my ticket from Emma Jean.”
“What kind of loyalty is that?” he complained. “Wasn’t I the one who brought you to the dance?”
The dispatcher grinned at her. “A girl after my own heart. Don’t let these guys and their egos get ahead of you. How many, hon?” She started tearing off tickets. “You got a boyfriend you could bring? A good-lookin’ brother about my age?”
Kim shook her head. “Maybe my parents would come,” she said impulsively. Both professors at the local university, they did try to support the community in a variety of ways. And even if they didn’t want to come, Kim’s investment wouldn’t be large, only ten extra dollars….and it was for a good cause, as Emma Jean had said. That amount of money wasn’t about to break her, particularly since KPRX was still paying her salary. Her boss, Alex Woodward, had told her to “take all the time she needed” for her recovery, although his generosity wasn’t likely to last indefinitely.
She dug into the small purse she carried and passed over the money in exchange for three tickets.
A moment later, Emma Jean had to answer a call, so Kim and Jay excused themselves.
“Some friend you are,” he grumbled, but she knew he was kidding.
Surreptitiously using his hand on the wall to guide him, he took her upstairs to the living quarters. Instead of a dormitory as she had expected, each firefighter had a separate bedroom that he shared with the men on alternate shifts, although each man had his own private locker. Then Jay demonstrated how to change the men’s room into a women’s restroom with the simple flip of the sign on the door.
“I think my preference would be for a lock,” Kim said, a little suspiciously. “On the inside.”
“We firefighters are the last true gentlemen in America,” Jay assured her piously. “We’d never violate that sign. Unless we were invited to, of course. Or, in my case, if I didn’t see the sign, which would be a darn good excuse.”
She laughed. How he could joke about his blindness and at the same time be so stubborn about accepting help was beyond her.
They were in the third-floor TV room with its rows of recliners lined up in front of the big screen when the fire trucks returned. A loudspeaker announced, “Engine 61 in quarters.”
“Let’s go see how the guys did.”
She followed Jay across the room where he opened what looked like a closet door. Her eyes widened. She screamed and snared him by his T-shirt, pulling him back. “That’s not the way out.”
“Sure it is.”
“No, Jay! It’s a big hole! You’ll kill yourself.” And this was a man who didn’t think he needed help? She’d been right when she’d called him a lunatic.
“Not hole, sweetheart.” He laughed. “It’s our pole. Quickest way to get downstairs.”
She peered past him. There was a pole in the center of the closet, all right, about six inches in diameter, but it looked like a hole to her—a deep one all the way from the third floor to the ground level.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll slide down first, you follow me and I’ll catch you.”
She bristled. “I’m not going to do any such thing.”
“What’s the matter? Are you chicken?”
“Certainly not.” Although she did have a certain fear of heights.
“You’re not afraid I’ll look up your skirt, are you? I promise I’ll keep my eyes closed, if that’s the problem.”
She whacked him on the arm with the back
