All Fired Up (Green Valley Heroes #7)

Chapter 7

Chapter Seven

HUNTER

S itting at the break room table, I force my knee to stop bouncing, not wanting to come across as nervous to the other guy in the room, Jed. He’s one of the full-time firefighters here, and I wish he’d leave already. So far, Harry’s the only one who’s wise to this feud Madeline and I have going on.

And I guess McClure, although he didn’t say anything else to us last Sunday afternoon about the sponge prank.

Damn Madeline. Why does she get under my skin so badly? It’s been a whole week and I still can’t stop thinking about her pranks. I have no idea how she pulled off that coffee trick. And a sponge disguised as a brownie? How did she come up with that?

Not that I’d ever tell her the pranks were good. The girl’s got a big enough ego already.

My prank this morning is definitely more crass, but it’s sure to get a reaction.

Jed’s bagel pops up from the toaster and Silas enters the room to put his stuff in his locker, giving me a head nod. I return it, then have a moment of panic. What if I got the wrong locker? He moves to the end of the row and I relax, then stiffen again as Madeline enters. Shit. I’m supposed to act natural.

I ignore her as she heads to her locker, but look up again as she turns away from me. My gaze zeroes in on the sliver of exposed skin between the bottom of her shirt and top of her pants that shows as she lifts her arm. I’d touched that same spot on her lower back last week when she’d nearly fallen off the ladder. It had been completely instinctual to catch her, for her weight to briefly rest against me as she’d righted herself, and my fingertips tingle in remembrance until I shake off the feeling. That’s not what I should be focusing on right now.

Somehow, I manage to contain my glee as the avalanche of condoms falls out of her locker and onto her.

She makes a sputtering noise as the other two men in the room stare in shock at her. Bending to pick one up, her face is bright red as she spins around to face me. Even better is her murderous expression, the one I was anticipating.

But then her face unexpectedly clears, a smile replacing it. What’s she doing?

“Hunter, I think you confused your locker with mine,” she says. “These are your extra small condoms, right?”

Damn, that was a good comeback.

Silas lets out a choked laugh, glancing at me, then hurries out of the room.

Jed eyes us both carefully. “You two are part of the volunteer program?”

We nod, neither of us saying anything.

“I’d clean this up before McClure sees it. He lets a lot slide, but I wouldn’t push it too far.”

He grabs his bagel and exits the break room, leaving me and Madeline staring at each other.

She crosses her arms over her chest. “I’m not cleaning this up.”

I shrug. “It’s your locker.”

“And your condoms.”

“You don’t have any proof of that.”

I get up and head to the doorway.

“Hunter,” she calls out, but I leave her there, grinning to myself.

She’s late to our first lesson, but since Jed is the one instructing us today, he doesn’t make note of it. It took her a while to clean those up. A part of me actually thought that might have been the last straw for her and she up and quit. The idea leaves me strangely unsettled.

It’s a good thing she didn’t, though. I’ve got another great prank planned for tomorrow.

“All right, we’re talking about forcible entry today,” Jed tells us. “It’s best to work on these skills as a two-person team first to get the basics down before trying it solo. One of you will use a flat head axe or sledgehammer, and the other will have a Halligan bar. You’ll be using the gap, set, force method you should have read about in the text.”

Shit. I didn’t do the reading for this week. There was so much of it, the idea of even starting had been overwhelming.

I’m paired with Waylon Clewis for the exercise, who I know for a fact didn’t do the reading either, and I pay careful attention to Jed and Chief McClure as they demonstrate what to do, not wanting to mess this up. This would’ve actually been a good time to partner with Madeline. She probably has every step of this memorized already.

Fucking egghead.

For the second exercise, I’m partnered with Waylon’s brother, Rodney, who’s even dumber. The guy’s got brute force on his side, though, and we muddle through fine, successfully opening our door.

Jed talks some more about door components and construction until I nearly pass out from boredom, then we break for lunch. I head inside to get my stuff, half expecting to find all the condoms stuffed in my locker, but they’re not. Madeline is mysteriously absent, too, even though she ate lunch here both days last week.

Whatever. She’s probably tired of me messing with her food.

My phone is blinking with a text, and I turn on the display, discovering it’s from...Who the hell is this from? It takes me a couple of tries to understand what it says.

The idiot who doesn’t have a password on his phone

What?

I open the message thread, the letters seeming to shift on the screen for a second before I focus, and it’s clear it’s Mom. She’s asking if I want to come over for hamburger macaroni tomorrow night, but I ignore her for now, going to my contacts. Every single contact is set to the same name: The idiot who doesn’t have a password on his phone .

I suck in a quick breath, glancing around, but no one’s here. It had to have been Madeline. She was in here forever earlier, presumably cleaning up condoms. But she was really pulling this stunt.

Fuck.

She knows I won’t tattle, too. I’d have to admit what I did in the first place, then. This is going to take me forever figuring out who’s who and changing everyone back.

Okay, time to move up my plan for tomorrow to today. It’s a good thing we’re changing into our PPE to practice chopping doors later.

Getting what I need from my car, I slip into the empty bay to do what I need to, then get out of there before anyone catches me in the act. It’s nothing that’ll hurt her, nothing harmful. Just a little something sure to get a rise out of her. I’ll have to come up with something good for tomorrow, now.

After lunch, everyone files back into the bay and to the protective gear lined up neatly in a row. Madeline is on the end again, her gear set aside since it’s smaller than everyone else’s. It still dwarfs her, but it’s all they had on hand. She puts her gloves on last but doesn’t react, and I frown, trying not to let my disappointment show. Maybe she can’t feel what’s in them, yet.

I rush to finish getting my own gear on, the heaviness of the added clothes weighing me down. They said this stuff weighs forty-five pounds, but we have to get used to doing the exercises with our gear on, since that’s what we’ll be wearing in an actual situation.

As Jed tells us what we’ll be doing, I focus on what he’s saying and half forget about my prank. He leads us outside the bay to where a dummy door that’s seen better days is set up in the grass. Waylon gets a turn first at prying it open, and I shift on my feet, wishing I could fan out my turnout coat. It’s not even summer yet and I’m sweating like a pig in the afternoon heat. Grizz warned us the first day it’d be hot and we needed to get used to it, but goddamn. How’s it going to feel in an actual fire in all this gear?

Silas is up next and I resist the urge to wipe at the back of my neck. I’m only going to keep sweating.

Over at the far end of the group, Madeline takes off one of her gloves and swipes her hand across her forehead. Her gaze is glued on Silas forcing open the door and she doesn’t notice the pink glitter covering her hand. The sweat made it stick better than I anticipated.

She absent-mindedly puts her glove back on, unaware there’s a streak of pink glitter on her forehead. Damn, this is playing out better than I imagined.

Harry glances at her and does a comical double take, his eyes widening. His gaze shoots immediately to me and I narrow my eyes in warning. He straightens and looks guiltily at Jed, then Madeline again, but keeps his mouth shut. Note to self—never tell him a secret. The guy broadcasts everything.

Madeline picks up on his strange behavior and whispers something to him, but he shakes his head in response, not meeting her eye. She looks at me next and I turn away, keeping my grin at bay. She looks so ridiculous.

When Silas is finished, Jed calls on Madeline to come up next, then stops halfway through his sentence, blinking at her.

“What?” she asks, clearly bewildered.

Jed motions to her forehead. “You have . . .”

Her forehead wrinkles in confusion. “What? What is it?”

Jed clears his throat. “You have glitter all over your forehead.”

Her brows knit and she wipes at her forehead with her glove on, smearing the glitter everywhere. She looks at her glove, blinking, then shrieks when she removes it and discovers her hand looks like a glitter bomb exploded all over it.

Taking her other glove off reveals another hand made of pure pink glitter, then her gaze snaps up, meeting mine. That same murderous expression I’ve become familiar with is on her face as she strides over to me. The other guys step back to give her a wide berth, but I’m stupidly rooted in place, unable to look away from the fury that surrounds her like a storm cloud, something terrible and captivating about it.

My stomach dips low as she reaches me, curious to see what she’ll do.

“You like glitter?” she asks, restrained rage in her voice. “Here, have some.”

She wipes her hands over my face and hair, and it’s only then my limbs unfreeze and I jump away, getting her off me.

“Damn, Maddy. If you wanted to put your hands on me, all you had to do was say so.”

She screams, frustration echoing through the open air of the fire station’s lawn, and then she’s there again, trying to get glitter on me. I run and she chases, the other guys howling with laughter as she follows me like a Barbie zombie on speed, her pink glitter hands outstretched and reaching for me. I have no idea how she’s keeping up with me with all this turnout gear weighing us down.

I’m panting as Jed calls out, “Enough.” He moves between us, a hand on each of our shoulders. “How old are you two?”

We’re both silent.

“No, seriously. How old are you?”

Oh, I thought he meant that rhetorically.

“Twenty-five,” Madeline says.

“Twenty-six,” I mutter.

“Funny. I assumed you were a good twenty years younger with the way you’re acting. Madeline, that was unacceptable.”

Her nostrils flare. “He was the one who put glitter in my gloves.”

“Do you have proof?”

She throws her hands up, exasperation pouring off of her. “You know it was him. He pulled the stunt with the condoms, too. You saw.”

Jed turns to me, no doubt in his eyes that he knows it was me.

Shit. I have to defend myself.

“I wouldn’t have had to if she hadn’t changed all the contacts in my phone to other names. And made me eat a sponge last week.”

A sponge , Jed mouths to himself, then shakes his head. “Whatever. Just go inside and clean up. And Hunter.” He pauses, waiting until I look at him. “Why don’t you take a shower?”

I wince. Is the glitter that bad?

She stalks ahead of me back inside, and as we get to the hallway, I shoulder bump her, unable to help myself. I move past her toward the bunk room and private showers in an area we don’t normally visit, but the next thing I know, she’s shoving me from behind, and I nearly trip and fall.

I whip around, that blaze back in her eyes.

“Don’t shoulder bump me,” she whispers in a low voice, all defiance.

“Or what?” I ask, not thinking rationally as I crowd her against the wall, trapping her there with a hand on either side of her head.

Our bodies aren’t touching, but it’s close with how fast her breaths are, her chest nearly brushing mine. My gaze flicks down to her mouth, her lips parted. Her bottom lip is bigger than the top, her cheeks flushed, the hair around her temples slightly damp with sweat.

I have the sudden insane urge to kiss her. To find out if she gives back as good as she gets with her kiss, too. If she’d try to dominate me in this way. If she needs to be in control.

Or if she’d let me take over and show her how it’s done for once.

I glance back up, expecting to find fire in her eyes. To find challenge. For her to dare me to go ahead and kiss her already.

But there’s none of that.

There’s confusion. Unsurety. Maybe her heavy breaths aren’t from passion but from...fear.

I stumble back, giving her space to slip away, but she stays where she is, still looking at me like she’s lost.

“Sorry,” I mumble, and I get out of there, heading to the showers. My stomach churns with guilt and leftover arousal. I really am a sick fuck.

I need to let this go. Figure out a way to ignore her.

Because otherwise, she might literally drive me crazy.