“Cut the sir stuff, Frankie. I used to bounce you and Monty on my knees when you were nothing but specks in this world. You think I don’t know when you’re ticked off?”
Ticked off? Frankie arched a brow. Was that how one should feel when everything she’d worked for, everything she’d ever wanted in her life, disappeared with—what had it been? Nine words?
“Sit down.” Bud gestured to the chair she’d ignored earlier. “Please.”
She sat. Not because she suspected he’d order her to if she refused, but because she wasn’t entirely sure her legs would continue to support her.
“Who did they promote?” Frankie asked. “There aren’t a lot of qualified people for the job in town.” Not that Butterfly Harbor ever paid much attention to protocol. A small-town department that ran mostly on volunteers didn’t have the luxury of falling in line with other departments. Of those half dozen volunteers, all of them, as far as she knew, were quite happy with their current employment, and none would have gone behind her back. As far as she knew, no one else had expressed any interest in becoming the new chief once Bud’s retirement became official next week. Everyone had assumed, Frankie included, that her eleven years with the department, a good portion of which she’d served as captain, meant her succession to the position was a given.
“No one’s being promoted over you, Frankie.” Bud’s jaw tensed as if he were gnawing on a particularly tough piece of jerky. “They’ve hired from outside the department.”
Outside the... Resentment collided with anger, ready to back draft its way out of her system. She’d worked her butt off to get where she was, and she took inordinate pride in her accomplishments. Knowing she was a lot of people’s first call when they needed help wasn’t a weight she carried; it was a badge she wore proudly. Not only that, she’d purposely gone to each and every town hall meeting since she’d joined the department, keeping her face in front of the town council, always happy to be the walking advertisement for the Butterfly Harbor Fire Department.
A pang of regret hit her square in her chest. Her father’s monogrammed baseball cap she’d been keeping safe for when the promotion came through was going to continue to reside on the peg by the front door. She’d vowed she wouldn’t wear the BHFD hat until she was officially sworn in. Now chances were good that day would never come. “So who stole it from me, Bud?”
“No one stole it, Frankie.” Her friend and boss sounded tired. No, he sounded exhausted, reminding her why he was retiring in the first place, but Frankie couldn’t dwell on that now. She needed answers. “It was decided with Butterfly Harbor going through such big changes, and given what’s coming down the road, that they’d rather have someone with...” Bud hesitated, and again Frankie arched a brow, silently daring him to finish that sentence. She knew what they wanted the chief to have, and she hadn’t been born with that...chromosome. “More pedigree.”
“Pedigree?” Frankie blinked, more surprised at the word than she had been to learn she was being passed over for someone with a... She shifted in her chair, tried to straighten her spine that seemed to have softened in the last few minutes. “You make this sound like one of those dog shows on cable. So what? I’m a prancing poodle and he’s a rottweiler?”
“That’s not remotely amusing, Frankie.” Bud’s disapproval sounded forced. “Besides, aren’t poodles the smartest of the dogs?”
Frankie couldn’t help it. She snorted. “All the more reason I should have the job. And I should have the job, Bud. You know it. Everyone in this town knows it.” And now everyone in town was going to know she’d been passed over for some outsider! As if losing out on the job wasn’t humiliating enough, she was going to come in second place to some...well, she didn’t know just what he was yet. She could see the headlines in the now-defunct Monarch Gazette, see the guarded gazes when she walked into the Butterfly Diner. Everyone was going to be chomping on the gossip rather than Holly Saxon’s famous homemade pies.
“How about you stop dancing around the facts and just hit me with them, Bud?” She was so tired of politics, so tired of unofficially campaigning for a position that was decided on by the town council. Her grandfather and father had both been chief. Not that she’d expected special treatment that would define her as a legacy appointment; she hadn’t, which was why she’d taken every hard road to get here. No one could argue she hadn’t done what it took to wear that badge.