Page 125 of Protecting What's Mine

He wondered if she noticed the easy routine they’d settled into. How sharing a bed and a dog seemed second-nature, now.

“Good. Let’s take a field trip.”

The old fire station sat on a skinny lot on the far end of Main Street. There were two stories on one side and a long, low bump-out on the other. Paint peeled from the garage doors. The windows were dirty enough to obscure the view inside. But the brick, the roof, the bones of the building held up as they had for all the decades the building had been in service.

“Wow,” Mack said when Linc let them in through the side door.

Under the layer of mustiness that all old buildings had, it still smelled vaguely of diesel fuel inside. The concrete floors were stained from decades of use. The exposed brick in the main garage was a restorer’s dream, though the hideous green wood paneling in the community room and on the second floor left much to be desired.

“This was my home away from home when I was a kid,” Linc told her as they strolled over old oil stains and ducked under cobwebs.

The place held a host of memories for him, ghosts of times and people past. Of childhood dreams and young adult experience. He’d ridden to his first call out of this very bay. He’d scrambled around trying to collect “exhaust samples” in sandwich bags while the rest of the crew laughed. He’d celebrated his first save, mourned his first loss. All within these walls.

“There’s a pole,” Mack said with delight.

“Had to stop using it after one of the LTs landed bad and fractured his tibia,” he recalled. “I started visiting my uncle here when I was five or six. The guys would let me try on their helmets and climb around the engine. One time, I sat on my uncle’s lap while he pulled the truck out of the garage. I got to turn on the lights.”

“And you were hooked,” she said.

“Yeah. It was never going to be anything but fire for me.”

She nodded, getting it. Getting him.

“I had my prom pictures taken here,” he told her, pointing at a spot by the big doors.

“Who did you take to prom?” she asked with a smile.

“No one. I had a date, but she changed her mind.”

“Who turns down Lincoln Reed?” she teased.

“Karen Aucker.”

“And what happened to this Karen Aucker?”

“She became Karen Garrison, and a few years later, she died in a car accident.” He kept his tone even. But that didn’t make the feelings go away. “Let me show you the upstairs.”

He turned, not wanting Mack to see the sad.

She followed him up the creaky staircase to the second floor. Here carpet frayed, and more of that hideous paneling bowed off the walls. He paused in front of one of the windows that looked out over Main Street and the town that held all his memories.

“I’m sorry,” Mack said. Her hand settled on his shoulder. “I’d heard that Luke didn’t like you because you’d asked his wife out.”

He sighed. “We were all just kids. Luke wanted the military and for Karen to go to college. Karen wanted to get married. They broke up over it, and maybe I thought I had a shot.”

“You liked her,” she filled in.

He had. A lot.

“She was pretty and smart. Hard-headed, like someone else I know,” he said, shooting Mack a look. “Anyway, when I heard they broke up, I waited a respectful twenty-four hours before showing up at her front door with a handful of daisies—her favorite—that I stole out of my mom’s flowerbed. I asked her on a date, and she said yes. I felt like I was on top of the world.”

He could still remember how it felt. A victory a long time coming. Landing the girl he’d been thinking thoughts about since thirteen or fourteen.

“I took her to dinner at the Italian place. She was sad about Luke, but I worked my charming magic to cheer her up. It was working. We talked and laughed. And I was feeling pretty hopeful. So I suggested that since she didn’t have a prom date and I didn’t have a prom date that we should go together.”

He remembered exactly how she’d looked as he asked. Looking back, he could see the hesitation. But at eighteen, all he noticed was the yes. “She said yes,” he continued. “I was so sure that she was finally seeing me.”

Mack leaned back against the brick between dirty windows, listening.