Seemed his heart was going to get tugged on plenty today. “That’s my point. We can’t always come. If we’re here when there’s an emergency, then someone else might go without our help. I know you don’t want that to happen.”

“No, of course not.” She hugged the cat hard. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

“No apologies necessary.” He scratched the cat behind her ornery ears and rose to leave.

Brooke blocked his path. She still held her stethoscope and blood pressure cuff, looking sweetly professional while she tried to maintain her composure, but her annoyance at being played was clear.

“I’d like to talk to you,” she said primly.

He enjoyed that, too, the way she sounded so prissy while looking so damn hot. So put together, so on top of everything, which perversely made him want to rumple her up. Preferably the naked, hot and sweaty kind of rumpled. “Talk? Or bite my head off?”

“I don’t bite.”

“Shame.” Passing her, he headed back to his rig to help Aidan put away the ladder. But she wasn’t done with him yet, and followed.

“I nearly climbed that tree, Zach. Without the benefit of the ladder, I might add.”

Aidan shot Zach a look that said Good Luck, Buddy and moved out of their way. Zach turned to face a fuming Brooke. “No one was going to let you climb that tree.”

“Really? Because I think that the crew thinks I was sent here to amuse them.”

“You have to understand, you’re the seventh EMT—”

“To walk out, yeah yeah, got it. But I’m not going to walk out. I’m not.”

“I believe you.”

“You do?”

He smiled at her surprise. “I do. And I was never going to let you climb that tree, Brooke. Never.”

She stared at him for a long, silent beat. “Is your word supposed to mean something?”

He was a lot of things, but a liar was not one of them. Not that she could possibly know that about him yet. “Hopefully it will come to mean something.”

She continued to look at him for another long moment, then turned and walked away with a quiet sense of dignity that made him feel like an ass even though, technically, he’d done nothing wrong.

OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS the calls came nonstop, accompanying a heat wave that had everyone at the firehouse on edge, Zach included. If they’d had the staff that they used to, things would have been okay, but they didn’t. So they ran their asses off in oppressive temperatures with no downtime, while the higher-ups got to sit in air-conditioned offices.

By the end of the week, they were all exhausted.

“Crazy,” Cristina muttered on the third straight day of record-high temperatures and calls. “It’s like with the heat wave came a stupid wave.”