It's a Wonderful Fireman: A Bachelor Firemen Novella (The Bachelor Firemen of San Gabriel) Read Free

operator, slid into the driver’s seat. “Got a little more info. It’s an electrical fire that started inside a shoe store. It spread fast through the rest of the mall. Six shops or so. I think there’s a Yogurtland in there.”
    Ace hopped in, followed by Skeet, the new captain of the truck company. One, the tiller man—or tiller woman, in this case—steered from the rear of the rig. Over in Engine 1, Vader, Double D, Sabina, and Sanchez were already rolling toward the big garage door as it rattled up.
    Once they left the garage, Fred hit the sirens and lights, and they rumbled through the streets, morning traffic parting before the mighty rigs of Task Force 1. Mulligan distracted himself from his nerves by waving to a kid in an SUV that had pulled over. The boy was halfway out the car window, waving madly. His golden retriever was trying to climb over his back until finally the boy’s mother pulled them both back in the vehicle, and then the SUV was ancient history, three blocks back.
    A boy, a dog, a mother . . . the dog reminded him of Bruiser, the stray golden he’d taken in and who’d followed him around the minor leagues until he got too old.
    The far backseat of the SUV had been loaded with boxes, and a spruce tree had been lashed to the roof. A boy, a dog, a mother, Christmas . . . damn .
    He hated this time of year.
    “Mulligan, are you listening?”
    “Huh?” Mulligan swiveled to see Fred glaring at him. He was fiddling with his breathing apparatus.
    “I said, don’t mess with my sister. If you do, things are going to get ugly.”
    Fred might look young, but he was actually a badass with multiple black belts in various martial arts Mulligan had never heard of. Mulligan was a fist-to-the-jaw sort of guy himself. “I’m not messing with her.”
    “She likes you.”
    “I’m sure you can talk her out of it.”
    “If you believe that, you don’t know Lizzie. Trent once tried to talk her out of trying to parachute off the porch roof with her Halloween butterfly wings. He had to pin her down, but even that didn’t work. We had to set up a trampoline. No one can talk her out of anything.”
    Mulligan’s heart sank. That meant he couldn’t talk her out of moving to Canada. Which would be tough to do anyway, since he couldn’t give her a good reason to stay. “Lizzie and I are friends.”
    “So are we. For now. ” With one last menacing hairy eyeball, Fred retreated behind his face mask.
    Great. Just what he needed—to piss off a martial arts master whose future father-in-law was a tech billionaire. If he got on Fred and Rachel’s bad side, he might get his ass kicked and his Internet erased.
    Like a roiling tornado, black smoke churned over the tiled rooftops up ahead. “Whoa,” said someone before they all went quiet and listened to the initial size-up on the dispatch channel. As the first on scene, the Battalion 6 chief took charge as incident commander.
    “Engine 6 is on the scene of a one-story, L-shaped strip mall; give me two additional task forces. Companies responding to the Sierra Vista incident, be advised there are no known current occupants on the premises. Heavy black smoke showing through the roof. No exposure problem. All companies be advised, Sierra Vista is blocked, enter from First Street. Engine 6, you are fire attack in division Alpha.”
    No occupants and no exposure problem—or risk of spreading to nearby buildings. That was a relief.
    “Truck 1, vent the roof. You will be known as Roof Division,” continued the IC as they reached the scene. “Heavy smoke is building up inside the Christmas store, Under the Mistletoe.”
    Truck 1 had their mission: they’d be going up on that hot, smoking roof.
    Fred pulled up close to the middle of the strip mall, where a storefront decorated like Santa’s workshop was declared, by an ornate, gold-and-scarlet sign, to be Under the Mistletoe. Smoke puffed through the doorjambs and various cracks in the façade. As soon as the