then handed him the wet rag. “Wash your face. I don’t want you getting soot in your eyes. And no arguments, okay? I just want to get this over with. You’re my last patient on my last run as a paramedic, and I don’t want any hassles. Think you can manage that for me, fireman?”
“And I suppose you expect me to smile, too?” he asked, half cracking that smile.
“What I expect is that I’m going to do the paperwork now, and you’re going to answer my questions. Smiling is optional.” Sitting down on a fixed bench across from him, she picked up the clipboard, clicked her pen and wrote the date on her transport form. “Do you have a name?” she asked.
“It’s Jess. Jess Corbett.” He thought he heard a little gasp from her.
“Okay, Jess.” She twisted until her back was almost to him, as the ambulance lurched forward, then lowered her mask and pulled off her goggles. “So, tell me, how did you end up here?”
“Kid trapped in a closet. I gave him my oxygen. My captain wasn’t happy that I didn’t go in with backup. You know, same old story.” Now, this was frustrating. He thought she looked like … no, couldn’t be. Voice was different. Hair much shorter. Curves more filled out. Julie had been a couple pounds shy of skinny, with long straight hair. Thin voice. Pretty, not gorgeous. But his paramedic, what he could see of her, was gorgeous.
“I mean here, in New York City, fighting fires. How did that happen?”
“That’s on the paperwork?”
“No, but getting to know my patients gives me a better sense of what’s going on with them. As in, are you always so grumpy or is this a reaction to your smoke inhalation?”
“Trust me, it’s a reaction to my smoke inhalation, but not the kind of reaction you think it is.” But she could be Julie. Except, Aunt Grace had told him Julie was working in the south. “In answer to your question, though, let’s just say that I got tired of my old job, quit it and decided to try something new.”
“Well, I suppose quitting is good … for some people, isn’t it? You know. As in running away.”
Julie! He sat up, swung his legs over the side of the stretcher and yanked off his oxygen cannula. “I thought you were working down south someplace.”
She turned to face him, full on. “This is south, compared to Lilly Lake.” She reached up, switched on the bright overhead so he could see everything. “Julie Clark, R.N., paramedic.” Said in all bitterness.
Well, this was certainly awkward. His first love. His first … everything. It was so awkward he didn’t know what to do. Bail out of a moving ambulance, lie back down, shut his eyes then pretend she wasn’t there? Let her have it out with him before they got to the hospital? Which was long overdue, actually.
With the way her eyes were sparking now—the same beautiful blue eyes that kept nothing hidden—jumping from the ambulance seemed like the best way out of this mess … for him. But he’d been the one who’d laid out that mess back then, and running away a second time sure didn’t feel like the honorable thing to do. Hadn’t then, didn’t now. So, Jess gritted his teeth for the confrontation, and since this was Julie, he knew there would be one. Being feisty had always been part of her charm, and he didn’t expect any of that had changed.
“It’s locked,” she said, as if sensing his thoughts. “You’re not going anywhere.”
Was that a barbed smile crossing her lips? “So, what’s the protocol here, Julie? Do I ask how you’ve been? Should we sit here in silence and stare at each other? Or would it be easier if you beat the hell out of me and just got it over with?”
“If I weren’t on the job, I might just take you up on that one. But since I am, here’s an idea. How about you be a nice, cooperative patient and lie back down, and I’ll be the paramedic who watches your vital signs and makes sure you don’t go into respiratory arrest as some aftereffect of the smoke inhalation? Does that work for you, Jess?”
“Are you going to put a pillow over my face and smother me?”
“Is that what you want me to do? Because I can.” “Look, Julie …”
She shook her head, and thrust out her hand to stop him. “Lie down. Now! And don’t argue with me.”
“Sure,” he said, doing just that. “And I suppose if you really want me to wear a mask …”
Julie laughed, but it had a cutting twinge to it. “Jess Corbett, trying to comply. It doesn’t become you, Jess. Not at all. Besides, I’d rather watch you lie there and be uncomfortable around me. Good show, watching you squirm.”
He did stay down for about a minute, hating every blasted inch of silent space around him. Then he popped back up. “You said I’m your last patient. Does that mean you’re quitting?”
“Moving on. Went to nursing school part time for years, all the way through to my doctorate, and now I’m going to work as a full-time nurse.”
“Congratulations,” he said, still pretty much at a loss for words. It wasn’t every day that you ran into a childhood sweetheart, one he’d actually had feelings for. Of course, he’d made fast work of that. But, still, Julie … She was a memory-maker. Gone from his life, but never forgotten. “Well, I hope you have a good career. Aunt Grace would have been proud of you.” What a lame thing to say, but he really couldn’t think of anything else except, maybe, to apologize. After all this time, though, that seemed so trite, and under these circumstances so contrived.
“Oh, I intend to. So now, unless you have a medical concern or question, be quiet. Okay? I don’t want to talk to you anymore. Don’t want to listen to you either.”
Too bad, because he liked the sassiness in her. He’d liked it seventeen years ago, and it hadn’t changed much. But once they dropped him off at the hospital, that was going to be the end of the line for Julie and him … again. It was for the best, he thought as he sank back down on the stretcher, shut his eyes and tried to blank her out. Definitely for the best.
“Signing out for the last time,” Julie said, handing in her badge. This was it. After so many grueling years in the back of an ambulance, she was finally moving on to the place she’d always wanted to be. And it was a good move, being a nurse. Grace Corbett had helped her, had made everything possible. Had dreamed the dream with her. She sighed, thinking about Grace, missing Grace. “And glad to be moving on.”
“Well, you take care of yourself. It’s not going to be the same without you around here, Julie,” her supervisor, a tall, big-boned woman named Gert, said, giving her a hug.
Good times, good memories, being a paramedic. Better ones ahead of her, though. She hoped. And two hours later, when she was tossing the last of her few incidentals into a cardboard box, she was still looking forward, not backward, because looking backward would be filled with thoughts and memories of Jess Corbett … the last person she’d ever expected to find in the back of her ambulance tonight.
Jess … darn! Now she’d opened the floodgates, and he’d poured through in a huge way. The funny thing was, she didn’t try holding him back. In fact, she shut her eyes for a moment and indulged herself. Jess … He was bigger than he was last time she’d seen him. More muscled. Lean. Fit. Broader shoulders. Face more chiseled, edgier lines to it. His eyes, though … still the
