“It’s different, huh?” she asked.

“I like it.” He was smiling like he enjoyed what he was seeing. He paused. “Do you like it?”

“I love it.” She shook her head from side to side.

“There’s some blonde in there. Still not your natural color?”

“No. But it’s closer.”

He stopped looking at her hair and found her eyes. “You’re beautiful either way, but I like the new do.”

Yeah, that’s what she was looking for. “Thanks.”

He leaned closer. “I’d kiss you, and show you how much I like it, but I’m working.”

She found his confession, and his restraint, endearing. “Being a professional is hard,” she teased.

He laughed.

She glanced over his shoulder at the crew. “Getting stuff for dinner?”

Matt rolled his eyes. “Yeah, if we can move Jessie along. The man takes issue with his produce.”

Tom looked over and waved.

She put a timid hand in the air. “I should say hi.”

Matt took that as an invitation. Before she could say a thing, his hand was on the small of her back, and he was leading her to their grocery cart.

“Hi,” she said.

A chorus of hellos followed. Tom continued with, “I hardly recognized you. I thought I might need to remind Matt he already had a girlfriend.”

“Hey!” Matt snarled. “Ignore him,” he told her.

She looked in the cart and only saw vegetables. “What’s for dinner?”

“Nothing, at this rate.” Anton gestured toward Jessie.

“You like my cooking, right?”

The three of them nodded.

“Then put up with my selection process.”

Matt may not be able to kiss her in public, but that didn’t stop him from touching her. He pulled her close and talked loud enough for Jessie to hear. “The rookie always cooks, and we lucked out with this guy. Except he hasn’t caught on yet that we need to get in and out of the grocery store ASAP or risk a call.”

She tilted her head. “What do you do when that happens?”

“Sometimes the food is in the rig and it does okay, if it’s a short call,” Tom said.

“Other times it heats up and can’t be saved,” Matt added.

“Most of the time we leave it at the store and pick it up after the call. But it would be nice to get it back to the station and in the refrigerator.” Anton’s last words were directed at Jessie, who seemed to get the hint and put the food in the cart.

Erin walked along with them as they scrambled around the store picking out food. “Why not shop before coming to work?”

“Believe it or not, this is easier. Once in a while we’ll plan ahead and bring stuff in, but this way we pick out what we all want and split the cost.” Matt moved to the other side of her, grabbed freshly baked bread from the shelf, and dropped it in the cart. The whole time he managed to keep one hand on her.

Halfway through the store she noticed the number of people watching them as they walked around. Mainly women. “You guys create quite a stir in here.”

Tom laughed. “You get used to it after a while.”

“We’re the first responders that people like to see. After last year’s fire, we were hard pressed to pay for a meal in this part of town. Restaurants took care of our meals, grocery stores had managers giving us big discounts and customers paying the difference.”

“I know how thankful Parker was after the fire. I can only imagine that times hundreds of people,” she said as they moved to the meat department.

Before long, the cart had all they needed, and they turned to the cashier and got in line.

Matt turned to her just as their radios went off.

Collectively, they sighed.

Around them, customers watched.

Anton listened intently to the call, and Jessie pushed the cart off to the side.

“We gotta go,” Matt told her.

“The food?”

“The manager will hold it for us. We’ll come back.”

And risk another call? “Or I can take care of it and take it to the station.”

Matt reached into his pocket and pulled out a set of keys. “That would be awesome.” He pushed them into her hand. “Leave the key on the counter and lock the door on your way out.”

“Thanks, Erin,” Tom called as they all fled the grocery store.

Matt blew her a kiss and walked away.

Alone with their food she realized that several people were now watching her.

She squared her shoulders and pushed the cart forward. It felt good helping them while they ran off to help someone else.

It felt better to know Matt trusted her with keys and responsibility for his crew.

And even his air kiss didn’t suck.

Desmond Brandt pushed down on the prescription pill bottle, removed one of the capsules, and swallowed it dry. He then leaned in his full-back leather chair and stared at the monitor on his desk. Beyond the door of his office, business ran as usual. With him in charge and people jumping to his every need.

But this bitch didn’t seem to understand her place.

For an entire year he waited out his undeserved sentence. A restraining order. From his own wife. All the times he’d pulled her back from the dead and that was how she repaid him.

He ran a hand over his chin and grazed the perfectly trimmed beard he’d grown out with her departure. It added to his character. The jilted husband who was mourning his wife’s absence.

For a solid year he employed three private investigators on two continents, one on the West Coast of the States and one on the East, and yet another in the UK. He was hours away from finding a fourth to search other portions of Europe when the image in front of him landed on his desk.

The small clip of video was an archived news feed from the winter.

Maci stood in the distance while a reporter was talking with a homeowner of a flooded property in California. This small taste of the original story was blipped on his PI’s radar because the one-year anniversary of the fire that preceded the flooding was coming up.

Desmond was thanking a slow news day that prompted using old coverage to sensationalize an otherwise normal twenty-four hours.

There she was. Standing in a coat he’d bought her while they were on vacation. She’d actually bought it herself, but with his money. Therefore it was his. Everything about her was his.

She owed her very life to him.

Wasn’t it he who pulled her out of their crumbled up car that could have caught fire? All while he himself had suffered a cut to the side of his face from the force of the crash?

He was by her bedside, bringing in specialists who worked with traumatic brain injury patients and the personality disorders that the accidents often caused. Or in her case, caused the accidents. They confirmed what Desmond had already learned. Maci wasn’t right in her head.

“Wires get crossed.” That’s what he’d been told. That’s what he made sure was written on her medical record.

So when she up and left him with nothing but divorce papers, a bitch of an attorney, and a goddamned restraining order, he took a long deep breath. A breath that resulted in the destruction of his stunningly beautiful living room. The pain he felt with her betrayal resulted in his demolishing everything. The whole house smelled of her. Reminded him of her.