“What’s so hard to believe? Maybe she succumbed to my many charms.”
His so-called friends burst out laughing.
“Dan was about to get his ass handed to him by a reporter so I asked Jazz to help bail him out,” Dallas explained. “When the reporter asked her who she was, the opportunist here”—he gestured at Dan—“jumped in and claimed she was his girlfriend. Then he milked it for the rest of the day.” He flicked Dan’s shoulder with the back of his hand. “You owe me for that, by the way.”
If memory served him, Dallas had left him to fend for himself and it was only good luck that Jazz happened along. He was in too good a mood to challenge him on it however, especially since things had worked out for the best as far as he was concerned.
“I’ll write you a check.”
“Seriously, Dan. Are you really interested in her?” Ryan asked.
Dan sincerely hoped Ryan wasn’t interested in Jazz, too. He might be one of his best friends, but he was also too late. “What if I am?”
“Quit looking at me like that. She’s not my type.” Ryan’s eyes held a hint of worry—something else Dan didn’t like, because it meant there was abutcoming. “I like her. Don’t get me wrong,” Ryan continued. “But”—and there it was—“she’s very focused on her career. She likes a challenge. There’s not a huge demand in the marketplace for smokejumpers or base managers, so her options are limited in terms of opportunities for advancement. I’m pretty sure our piddly little Custer County base isn’t going to satisfy her for longer than it takes her to find something better.”
Dan read between the lines and got what Ryan didn’t want to come right out and say—she wasn’t going to be satisfied with the local sheriff either, no matter how rich he was. In fact, Jazz being Jazz, the money didn’t really even work in his favor.
“I disagree.” Dallas stuck his oar in the water. “Firefighting communities are pretty tight-knit. Now that Jazz isn’t a smokejumper anymore, she’s looking for a place to belong. A home. You could always offer her a permanent position at the base and see what happens,” he suggested. “There are lots of things she could do around here during the off season.”
“That’s a terrible idea. What if it doesn’t work out? What’s Dan supposed to do then? Fire her?” Ryan, the voice of doom, demanded.
Dan decided it was time to put the brakes on this conversation. They’d talked about women plenty of times in the past, but he didn’t want to discuss Jazz and where she might see herself in a few years. “You’re getting ahead of yourselves. We haven’t even discussed who gets custody of the kids yet.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.” Dallas shifted his weight in the back seat, which put the car’s rear suspension system to the test. “She actually slept with you?”
Dan sifted through what he’d just said and couldn’t come up with a thing that would cause him to reach that conclusion. There was no figuring out what went on in the guy’s head. “Whatever gave you that idea?”
“In order to have kids, you have to have sex. Did no one ever explain basic biology to you?”
Dan decided to neither confirm nor deny. “I know this will come as a shock, but there are parts of my life that are none of your business. This is one of those parts.”
Dallas nodded his understanding. “That’s probably wise. I can’t keep a secret.”
“You’re a doctor,” Ryan said to him. “Aren’t you supposed to swear to respect the privacy of your patients?”
“Which is why you didn’t hear from me about the giant boil on Weldon Scott’s nethers that I lanced,” Dallas replied. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Except on YouTube maybe. Besides, you guys aren’t my patients.”
While Dan highly doubted that Weldon had a boil on his nether regions—or any of his regions, for that matter—this seemed like a good opportunity to call it a night.
He opened the car door. “I’ll see you guys in the morning.”
He was in bed with the lights out before it occurred to him that, while Weldon Scott’s boil might have deflected the topic of conversation off him and Jazz, and Ryan had managed to divert Dan’s attention away from whatever darkness plagued him, neither one of them knew what Dallas had been doing in the garage so late at night, too.
*
Jazz was monitoringa wildfire in Southern California when her cell phone pealed out “Dancing Queen” and broke her concentration.
She flipped off the ringer, although the phone continued to vibrate on her desk. Eli, sitting beside her, asked her a question she didn’t quite catch. She removed one of her earbuds and he asked it again.
“Aren’t you going to get that?”
“No.”
There could be only a few reasons why her mother would call, none of them good, and they all involved money. She had far more important things to worry about at the moment.
It looked as if she’d have to deploy smokejumpers to California and she was both nervous and jealous—nervous because she had other people’s lives to consider, and there was nothing she could do to help them if anything should go wrong, and jealous because she desperately wished she could go with them. Sitting in an office all day made her restless. She missed the outdoors.
The icon on her phone signaling she’d received a voicemail lit up. She planned on ignoring that, too. She settled her earbud back in place.