Free Crash Lights and Sirens, Book 1 by Unknown Page B

tells Falvey, reaching into his kit for the Ewald tube so they can pump the girl’s stomach.
    They make it to Fairview with her vitals still strong, Taryn flipping on the siren and gunning it while Nick tries to get the patient to focus on him in the back. It’s hard going. According to her friend, her name is Sasha, but she isn’t responding to that or anything else he tries, barely managing to stay conscious. Nick can’t get a straight answer on what she took. She’s a surprisingly heavy transfer from the stretcher to the hospital bed, this thick solid weight like her body’s already starting to shut down.
    “Thanks,” the triage nurse says tiredly when Nick gives her a rundown of the girl’s vitals. “Looks like more of that cheap-ass ecstasy.” Nick can’t tell from her face if it’s going one way or another.
    Not that he wants to know, really. The trick to this job is to disassociate, stop thinking about patients immediately after the drop-off. All Taryn asks him when he joins her by the reception desk is, “Know the drug?”
    “Dirty E,” Nick says, zipping the blue EMT coat to his chin. He wonders if she was hanging back because she was hoping to avoid Pete or hoping to run into him. “That crap with the highway paint again.”
    “Ah.”
    They have a ton of paperwork this time, on account of pumping the girl’s stomach—sometimes it seems like the more complicated the care they provide, the more they have to cover their asses, a correlation Nick gets tired of day in, day out. At least there’s only an hour left of shift. Nick radios dispatch, asking them not to send any more calls to Bus #3451 unless it’s an emergency.
    “Want to take these back to the Barn?” he asks Falvey, holding up the stack of forms. “The other guys might’ve put a movie on.” The Barn’s got a rec room along with a kitchen, plus rows of cots in case anyone wants to take a nap between calls. It always smells like burned coffee and sweat inside, a locker room for grown-ups.
    Falvey smiles her secret, bitten smile. “I mean, we could,” she says, finishing the last bit of cookie from lunch. “Or we could stay right here.”
    It takes Nick a second to clue in to what she’s after, both feet up on her seat and her paperwork stacked on top of the console. When he leans in, she tilts her chin up right away. She tastes like chocolate and sugar, a couple of crumbs stuck to her plush bottom lip. Nick licks them off and slips his fingers into the hair at the nape of her neck. Just like last night, the skin back there is very warm.
    Taryn hums as he kisses his way deeper into her mouth, dragging her bottom lip down and nipping along the wet edges of her tongue. Two seconds into it, already it’s not a middle-of-the-day kind of kiss. It’s an awkward angle, both of them leaning across the gap between the seats. Taryn scoots closer until their thighs are touching, heat bleeding right through the scratchy fabric of their uniform pants.
    “Fal-vey,” Nick mutters then, real quiet and real slow. They parked facing a wall in one of the reserved spaces in the side lot to get the paperwork done, away from the ambulance bay, but it’s hardly an abandoned garage in the middle of the night. Her mouth is brand-hot against his jaw. “We’re at work.”
    “Mm-hmm.” Taryn nods, teeth back behind his ear and down underneath his starchy collar. She gets his shirt untucked, palms smoothing up and inside over the sensitive skin of his stomach, thumb dipping into his navel. Already he’s stupidly, ridiculously hard. “And lucky for us, our job has a bed built right into the back of it.”
    Nick snorts. “That’s not a bed.”
    “Well.” Taryn’s fingertips glance over his waistband. “Close enough.”
    Fuck, he wants to. He wants to take her into the back and lay her out and get her naked, to hook her knees over his shoulders and camp out until she keens. “Fuck, girl,” he says, cupping the back of her skull—it feels