Protecting What's Mine(78)

She didn’t need four new sweaters, even if they were as soft as Sunshine’s fur. Or the dress that would look really good once she was out of that damn boot.

Her plan to keep Linc at a distance failed just about every night that he wasn’t working the B shift. When he was working nights, she kept Sunshine. She’d even brought the dog into the clinic a few times, where Sunshine worked her loving magic on sick or nervous patients.

Her ankle was healing nicely—who said doctors were terrible patients?—and the orthopedist was confident she’d be boot-free in November.

Fall was a season of change. Of new beginnings and ends of eras.

She wasn’t sure which one of those Lincoln Reed was. But both possibilities made her nervous. He’d taken her and Sunshine canoeing on the lake and for slow, meandering drives through the countryside to see the leaves. They bought apple cider at roadside stands and posed for pictures with a three-hundred-pound pumpkin.

She helped man the registration table at the fire department’s chili cookoff and went to the Moretta’s backyard renovation unveiling. Under autumn sunshine and falling leaves, they’d all enjoyed Gloria’s mother’s enchiladas. Mrs. Moretta was still seeing the football player who had yet to get a word in edgewise but didn’t seem to mind.

At work, Mack had had to send her first patient to an oncologist, another to a cardiologist, and physically shared their worry.

She’d stitched up a high school football player. And after a long conversation about self-respect, the right to say no at any time, and how a baby could derail college plans, she prescribed birth control pills to a very excited seventeen-year-old whose mother gave Mack a brave, watery smile in the waiting room.

She stayed busy, but the ratio of work-busy to personal-busy had shifted dramatically. She still wasn’t on rotation for air shifts and had three days a week to do whatever she felt like. She was cooking on occasion now. And working out in Linc’s gym several days a week. She missed running, but the weight training had its own benefits. Namely, watching shirtless, sweaty Linc manhandle huge weight plates.

Meditation was still…not easy. But she stuck it out. Especially after Ellen reported in on her twentieth swim with a beaming, soggy selfie.

Everything was going well. And that, too, made her itchy. Because things never stayed that way.





Mack’s invitation to Benevolence Elementary’s First Responder Day was a pleasant surprise. To wow the kids, first responders competed for the most dramatic entry. The police went in with sirens and lights, sliding to stops in the parking lot below the field where the whole school gathered.

The fire trucks roared in and made a show of setting hose lines and climbing ladders.

But Mack’s team beat them all.

It was her first time back in the air since the walking boot, and it felt like coming home.

The helicopter skimmed over the treetops, nose tilted. It swooped dramatically low when the field opened up beneath them, and Mack watched the kids waving excitedly, saw the teachers and staff wrangling everyone well away from the landing zone.

RS did a tight, showy three-sixty before setting down dead center on the school’s soccer field.

“Way to stick the landing,” Bubba said.

RS gave the all-clear, and Mack and Bubba unhooked the radio lines and stepped out of the helicopter.

“I feel like we’re slow-motion hero walking,” Bubba whispered as they strolled—and limped—toward the crowd of elementary schoolers.

“We should take our helmets off and give them a hair toss,” Mack suggested.

A familiar voice carried to them courtesy of a bullhorn. “Dr. Mack, you’re stepping on my entrance,” Linc teased from his department’s command vehicle.

The kids had the chance to tour all of the vehicles, igniting dozens of career ideas in bright, young minds. They tried on helmets and stretched out fire hoses. They sat in the pilot’s seat of the helicopter and the driver’s seat of a squad car. They played victim and EMT.

Ava Garrison charged up and gave Mack a hug before running back to her little cluster of friends. A few of her other patients called greetings. “Hi, Dr. Mack!”

A long-legged girl with a cute gap between her teeth and braids popped up next to her. “Hi. I’m Samantha. We met before in my uncle’s backyard.”

“Right. You’re Chief Reed’s niece,” Mack said, recalling the water battle and ensuing death scene.

“And you’re his girlfriend,” Samantha stated.

“Uh. Well, we haven’t really discussed labels, and—”

“Don’t freak out.” The girl blew out a puff of breath that lifted her bangs off her forehead. “I’m not here about that. I have other business.”

“Okay. Why don’t we step into my office?” Mack said, gesturing to the helicopter.

They climbed inside. “So I thought I wanted to be a coroner or a mortician,” Samantha said, swinging her legs from her perch on the stretcher.

Kids.

“Uh-huh.”

Samantha gave her a cool look. “I know it seems weird. But everyone dies. It’s job security.”

Mack blinked and wasn’t sure if it was weirder that an eleven-year-old would consider being a mortician or that the deciding factor was job security.

“That’s true.”