“You could take a picture, it lasts longer.”

Dustin didn’t rise to the bait. “I’m just wondering if you’re okay.”

“Ah, and here I thought I looked so pretty today.”

“Seriously, Jase.”

“Seriously?” Jason set down his soda and hit Mute on the game, turning to face him. “Seriously, I was going to ask you the same thing. You look like shit. What’s up?”

“I asked you first.”

“Okay, what’s wrong with me is that the big bad world out there sucks right now.” Jason lifted a shoulder. “I work my ass off to do my part to fix it, but I can’t, and if I think about it too much it seems stupid even to be trying, so I am not going to think about it. Not for at least the next two weeks before I have to head out again. Now you.”

“Me what?”

“You might as well tell me before I knock it out of you.”

Given Jason’s new physical prowess, he could do it, too.

“Is it the job putting that look of misery on your face. Or a girl?”

Dustin let out a breath. “Both.”

“So there is a girl.”

“I don’t think so, no.”

Jason blinked. “A guy?”

“Jesus!”

“Well, use your words, dude.”

Dustin rolled his eyes and ate some more chips.

“Come on, Dus. You’re the middle child. You’re the talker.”

“Fine.” Dustin pushed the chips aside. “I’m in a job that was supposed to be just a phase, a little fun before we got our renovation business going.”

“Don’t look now, but our renovation business is going. We’ve got good equity in this place.”

“Sort of my point. We could be doing more and yet here I am, still driving an ambulance…”

“So quit and get a move on. I’m game. Let’s sell the house. We can use my portion of the profit for a new down payment on another fixer-upper, and your labor. And I say we go big this time and do it right. Bigger house, bigger profit margin. If you’re serious about being done as an EMT, you’d have the time to put in.”

True.

“So…the girl,” Jason said, leaning back to close his eyes. “Get to the girl.”

Right. The girl. How to say that he was more than halfway in love with a woman who wasn’t ever going to love him back? “She’s a coworker, which is colossally stupid.”

“Only if you intend to repeat.”

“Last night was a repeat.”

At this, Jason opened his eyes and turned his head to eyeball Dustin. “Is it that firefighter chick you’ve been hung up on since day one? The hot one who looks like…what do they call her? Kick-Ass Barbie. Cathleen?”

“Cristina.”

“Ah, Christ,” Jason said with a groan. “It is. Man, you’re going straight down the path to Heartbreak City with that one. She’s out of your league.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Look, life’s too short to get kicked in the balls or the heart, and with Cristina, you’ll get both.”

DUSTIN DIDN’T REALIZE exactly how true that statement was until his next shift. He got to the station, and found Cristina in the kitchen with everyone else. She was doing her usual dig through the refrigerator-she was the most notorious food thief in the entire station. “You stealing someone’s lunch again?” he asked lightly, as if she hadn’t dumped him.

Well, actually, you had to have a relationship with someone to be dumped. They didn’t have a relationship, they had a thing. A sex thing. That was all.

At his question, Eddie and Sam, both at the table eating cereal, went still, swiveling wary gazes to Cristina. Blake, drinking coffee at the sink next to Aidan and Zach, raised a brow. It was unlike Dustin to start the bickering but what the hell. It was time for a new thing.

Cristina slowly turned to face him, her eyes unreadable. She hadn’t changed into her uniform yet and wore army-green cargoes and a snug long-sleeved T-shirt that fitted her curves like a glove, curves he knew intimately. Curves he’d kissed every single inch of. “No, smart-ass,” she responded. “I made cookies.”

“Made them? Or bought them?”

It was a long-standing joke that the only girl in the station couldn’t cook, but still, the entire room held their breath and swiveled their gazes to Cristina as if watching a tennis match.

“I baked them myself,” Cristina said. Stiffly. “I’m actually leaving them in people’s lunches to make up for all the stuff I’ve…borrowed.”

“Wow.” Dustin leaned back against the wall, crossing his arms so that he couldn’t reach for her, which is what he suddenly wanted to do, even surrounded by everyone else. She looked good, he thought, rested, with color in her cheeks. She had gloss on her lips, her only makeup. Her hair was loose, which made him remember how it’d felt brushing his chest.

He wanted both to touch her and to strangle her. “I’m impressed.”

“That’s because whatever we women do, we have to do it twice as good as a guy to be thought of as half as good. Luckily, that’s not difficult.” She shut the refrigerator, and avoiding looking at him, headed across the kitchen.

“She’s escaping, man,” Blake said to Dustin out of the side of his mouth.

“They must have slept together again,” Sam whispered to Eddie as if Dustin was deaf. “She’s looking relaxed and he’s not.”

“You doing it wrong?” Eddie asked Dustin.

Dustin sighed. “Cristina.” He watched her stop and go a little stiff in the shoulders. “Are we going to talk about it at all?”

“What, the orgasms?” She didn’t turn to face him. “That’s a little too risqué a topic for the workplace, don’t you think?”

Eddie snickered, only to be silenced by Sam’s elbow in his gut.

Dustin took a step toward Cristina. “Maybe we could discuss this in-”

The alarm bell interrupted him, then dispatch, calling for Dustin and James’s unit. No firefighters required.

“-private,” Dustin finished on a sigh, grinding his back teeth together in frustration as he was forced to head out. He brushed past her, making sure to touch her as he did, getting some satisfaction when her breath caught at the contact.

Which didn’t change the fact that they were back at square one-her holding him at bay with her sarcasm and sharp wit, and him nursing an aching heart.

6

THE MOMENT Dustin was out of sight, Cristina sagged to a kitchen chair. “I’m such an idiot.”

“Yeah,” Eddie said, patting her knee. “You are.”

Sam nodded.

Blake lifted a shoulder in silent agreement.

Cristina looked at Aidan and Zach, two of the most logical men she knew, hoping…but they also nodded.

It was unanimous. She was an idiot.

“I know you don’t like to clutter your plate with relationships,” Blake said tactfully. “Because you have to be free for…What is it exactly that you have to be free for?”

“Well…” Everyone waited for her sage, intelligent response. “I have to be free for…” Jeez. She suddenly had no idea. It’d started out because she’d spent so many years watching her mother never be free, always trapped in a bad relationship with one man or another, over and over again.

Trapping Cristina, as well, so she’d learned to gather her mistrust close to her like a cape. Once she’d gotten out on her own, she’d gone the opposite route, always staying on her own. She was, after all, nothing if not a creature of her own habits. But that all seemed short-sighted and a bit pathetic now. “I don’t know,” she admitted, and thunked her head to the table. “I guess I don’t know how to do things differently.”

“You can fix this,” Blake said so calmly, she raised her head.

He nodded.

The others nodded, too.

“All you have to do is stop running scared,” he said gently, rubbing her back.

“Whoa. I’m not scared.”

Five patient but amused faces just looked at her.

Okay, so she was scared. Oh, damn. “But what if I mess it up?”

“Well, you probably will,” Zach said.

“Gee, thanks.”

“No, everyone does once or twice, at least.”

“You can still turn this around,” Blake promised. “If you want it bad enough.”

She looked at the door through which Dustin, her mild-mannered best friend by day-big, bad, confident, sexy lover by night-had vanished. There’d been something different in his eyes just now.

Distance.

Her fault. He thought he’d been ditched. She knew that now. She’d pretended to want distance, but that wasn’t really what she wanted at all. She knew that now. “I want it bad enough,” she whispered. “What do I do?”

“You could tell him you love him,” Blake said.

“What?” She nearly choked. “I’m not-I can’t-I can’t say that-I mean, it’s not…that.” She grabbed Blake by the lapels. “There has to be something else.”

“Well, for one thing, you relax,” Aidan said as Blake pried her hands off him. “Ask him out. Show him you’re in this. Plan something fun. Take him jet-skiing, or something he wouldn’t do for himself. You know, show him you know what he likes.”

“Feed him,” Zach suggested, patting his belly. “Food always works.”

“You don’t have to cook it,” Aidan said quickly. “In fact, you shouldn’t cook it. Go out to a restaurant, or make a picnic.”

“But if you do the picnic,” Eddie interjected. “Make sure it’s not silly little finger food. Bring real food.”

“And try smiling,” Zach said. “You have a great smile, on the rare occasions you use it. He’ll be so stunned, you’ll have time to spit out the fact that yes, you’re an idiot, but you’re working on it.”

“It would help if you took off all your clothes first,” Eddie said.

“Guys like that,” Sam agreed.

“You could practice here,” Eddie suggested, nearly falling over when Sam shoved him.

Blake was shaking his head. “Just tell him you love him.”

No. No, she liked the other ideas much better. She’d just ask him out, that’s what she’d do. Plan that picnic. Smile. Bring food. Maybe wear some sexy outfit and let things take their course. She’d show him how much he meant to her.