Emergency Reunion. Sandra Orchard
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reminders.
Cole smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling in that way that used to make her heart flutter.
She silently groaned at the realization that it still did.
“A flight medic, wow! I can’t help feeling a little proud that you took my advice.”
The warmth in his voice did funny things to her insides. That and the fact he remembered his murmured, “You’d make a good paramedic,” that day she’d treated his swollen knuckles.
“It’s good to see you doing so well.”
She pasted on a smile and nodded. “So what brings you back to Stalwart?” She glanced at his left hand, but his fingers were tucked out of sight. “You married? Come back to settle down?” Her cheeks heated. Why on earth had she asked him that?
His gaze darkened. “No, working law enforcement and marriage aren’t a good mix.”
“Hah,” she scoffed. “I have several happily married uncles and cousins who would loudly disagree.”
“Appearances can be deceptive.”
Resisting the urge to massage her bruised throat, she sat up straighter. Yeah, she knew all about keeping up appearances. “Then you’ll understand why I don’t want these incidents blown out of proportion. Because, between you and me, I’m pretty sure I’m just being hazed.”
“Hazed?” Cole’s eyes widened. “But you’ve already been on the job a couple of years. Haven’t you?”
“Almost three.” She pressed her lips together, wishing she’d kept her mouth shut. Hazing had seemed like an innocuous way to say her colleagues didn’t want to work with her.
Cole studied her too intently as he pulled a notepad and pencil from his shirt pocket. “How about you tell me what you remember about each incident?”
She exhaled, relieved that at least he hadn’t pressed for reasons for her hazing suspicions. “I’m not convinced they can be called incidents. Dan is overreacting. Nothing has happened to me that hasn’t happened to any other paramedic at one time or another.”
“Difference is they keep happening to you.”
Yeah, okay. There was that. “They were incidental things like being called to an address that didn’t exist or being propositioned by a half-doped patient who claimed he’d never called an ambulance.”
Cole flinched as if the thought of some creep pawing her made him feel sick.
“Nothing I couldn’t handle,” she stressed, trying not to squirm under the intensity of his troubled gaze. The reaction of the other paramedics, who’d slapped her on the back and complimented the Ice Queen for kneeing the loser in the groin, had been easier to handle. Ironically, their hazing probably had helped her tough it out when she’d felt like quitting as much as they wanted her to.
“When did the incidents start?”
“I can’t say for sure.” The whispering had started first. Luke’s death had been the tipping point for her colleagues. He’d been a good man, a true friend. And the only paramedic who hadn’t griped about teaming with her after she’d gotten her first partner fired for drinking on the job.
“You did the right thing,” he’d said the first time they’d driven to a call together. He hadn’t said what he was referring to. Hadn’t needed to. She wasn’t sure if he’d ever known how much those five little words had meant to her, because they’d never talked about it again.
“Sherri?”
She jerked her attention back to Cole. “Um.”
“Can you give me dates, addresses, descriptions?”
She stared at Cole, taking a moment to register his question. “I’d have to pull out my reports.”
“Are they handy?”
She rolled her eyes.
“Okay, we’ll worry about that later.”
No, there couldn’t be any later. With Eddie’s attack, her boss’s innuendoes and Cole’s unexpected charge back into her life, she was scarcely handling now. She pushed to her feet. “Just a second and I’ll grab them.” As she tugged the coil-bound book from the top shelf of her locker, her Bible toppled to the floor, spilling a month’s worth of church bulletins and inserts at her feet.
She quickly stuffed all but one back into her locker and rejoined Cole in her boss’s office. Handing Cole the pamphlet for Teen Challenge, a faith-based residential program that helped young men and women overcome addictions, she said, “I found this while I was grabbing my call journal and thought it might be something you’d want to look into for Eddie. Some of the men that are in the program spoke at our church last week. It’s turned their lives around. If you could convince Eddie to go—”
“I don’t want to send him away,” Cole said gruffly. He glanced at the pamphlet then slipped it into the back of his notebook. “I appreciate the suggestion,” he added, his tone gentler this time. “Helping him is the reason I came back to Stalwart.”
Of course it was. Sherri glanced away, focused on the world outside, blurred by the rain streaming down the window. In the months after he’d left, her imagination had read too much into his surprise parting gift, let alone the gratitude that had been in his eyes after that world-tilting hug. But when months turned into years, the truth eventually had sunk in. Not that it would matter anymore now. She couldn’t afford to let anyone get close.
“If I’d been here for Eddie in the first place...” Cole continued, but then shook his head and motioned to her call journal. “Tell me about the other incidents.”
She skimmed the entries and offered several examples, a few of which she had to admit that even she couldn’t see the guys pulling. She closed her journal. A lot of them may have been purely random occurrences.
Cole looked up from his notepad. “Is that all of them? Your partner mentioned your ambulance being hit.”
She frowned. “That couldn’t have been deliberate.”
“Where your safety is concerned, I don’t want to take any chances.”
She gulped at the determination blazing in his eyes. Did he mean her safety in particular?
Bothered that she cared one way or the other, she glanced away. She just wasn’t used to having an ally in her corner, at least not at work. Her family was great, but between the veteran firefighters and deputy-sheriff cousins and uncles, she preferred not to talk shop around them.
“Tell me about the accident,” Cole prodded.
“Oh, right. Um, it happened last week. A pickup sideswiped our ambulance as we turned on to County Road 15. There’s a police report on that one.”
“Did they arrest the driver?”
“No. The pickup was stolen. They found it abandoned down the road.”
“Did you get a look at the driver?”
For the first time she realized what Cole was really asking, had been trying to get at all along—could this guy have been his brother? This wasn’t about her at all. Not really.
“Sherri?”
“No, I didn’t.” She squinted at the window, picturing that night. “He was wearing a hoodie. That’s all I remember.” Was it any wonder the driver hadn’t seen her turning off the side road with his hood up like that? The collision couldn’t have been deliberate.
“Were you hurt?”
Cole’s anxious tone didn’t help her churning stomach, but she managed to shrug as if it was all in a day’s work.
He looked over his notes, his eyes as stormy as the sky. “Can you think