But then the rookie met my eyes and smiled at me, and I had to admit to myself that it wasn’t a coronary.

It was worse.

It was the rookie himself.

I was having a reaction to the rookie. A romantic reaction. The dumb kind.

A full-body reaction, too. Like someone had lit a Fourth of July sparkler inside my chest. It was so terrible. So humiliating. So … girly.

That kind of thing never happened to me. Not ever.

It’s worth mentioning that he wasn’t a calendar firefighter. He wouldn’t have stopped traffic or anything. He was just a normal guy. There was no reason at all that the sight of him should have hit me like that.

But it did.

I couldn’t turn my eyes away—which was okay, because everybody else was watching him, too. He climbed off the table and stood next to the captain, dripping. Then he took a few bows.

Get a grip, I thought. Pull it together.

I’d seen a thousand firefighters in my life. Tough ones, handsome ones, ripped ones. Hot firefighters were a dime a dozen. Heck, I’d spent three years working shoulder to shoulder with calendar-cover-guy Hernandez. I’d built up a solid immunity, and the rookie should have been no different.

What was it? The straight nose? The square jaw? The friendly curve of those eyebrows? What was I seeing in that face that was reverberating through my eyeballs, into my brain, and off to every corner of my body?

Maybe it was his teeth. They were so—I don’t know: so straight.

Good God. What was happening to me?

“Guys, meet the rookie,” Captain Murphy said, and the guys all shouted hellos and welcomes. “He’s a homegrown real deal from a long line of brave heroes.”

Not helping.

Time slowed down as I watched the rookie meeting all the guys one by one, stepping forward and reaching out with his wet, muscled forearm to shake hands over and over. Smiling at everyone with those heartbreaking teeth, including whoever had just duct-taped him to the basketball pole and turned the hose on him, with the most agonizingly good-natured crinkles at the edges of his eyes.

It goes without saying, but this was not good. Not good doesn’t even scratch the surface, in fact. Firefighters don’t feel sparklers for other firefighters—not if they want to keep their jobs.

Don’t panic, I told myself. It’s physical. He’ll turn out to be dumb, or rude, or narcissistic, or overly fond of fart jokes—and all this weirdness will dissipate. You’ll be fine.

I’d better be. Because there’s no attraction in a firehouse.

There’s no longing. There are no goo-goo eyes, or savoring glances, or secret trysts. Firehouses are temples to heroic masculinity, and ladyish things like heart sparklers are the absolute antithesis of everything they stand for—because there is absolutely nothing girlier than falling in love. As I’d just explained, with many eye-rolls, to my mother.

In fact, one of the reasons I’d always considered myself uniquely qualified to be a female working in a firehouse was that—whether by luck or design—I had always been totally immune to all that nonsense.

Until right now.

Because on the very first morning of the very first day of the rest of my firefighting life—the very moment I needed that immunity more than I had ever needed it before—I lost it.

Nine

THAT’S WHEN THE captain started introducing “our other newbie.” Me.

That’s also when I started to wonder if anybody had mentioned to the crew yet that the other new guy was a girl.

Later, I would reflect back on the captain’s pronouns as he introduced me. Did he ever actually use the word “she”? Maybe not, after all.

Because when he finished describing the new member of the crew to the team, everybody looked around the room.

And kept looking.

Like I wasn’t even there.

I mean, there I was, a total stranger in their kitchen, wearing department-issue Dickies and an unmistakable FD uniform shirt. I walked over and stood next to the captain, for Pete’s sake. I was the only unaccounted-for person in the room. There was no one else it could possibly have been. But their eyes swept past me—more than once—as the room murmured in confusion.

Was this really possible? Could what you expected to see alter so much what you actually saw?

Finally, somebody said, “Check the basketball pole.”

That’s when the captain, who seemed to be enjoying how flummoxed they all were, finally decided to clear things up. “Friends,” he said, sweeping his arm in my direction, “meet the new guy.”

The room fell silent.

“We thought she was a student,” one guy said.

“We thought she was the stripper,” another guy corrected.

“Sorry to disappoint you,” Captain Murphy said, meeting my eyes. “New guy—meet the crew.”

Next, the introductions. The captain pointed at the most calendar-like guy in the room. “The ladies’ man right here with the six-pack is Drew Beniretto.”

“You’re too pretty to be a fireman,” Beniretto said to me.

I gave him a look. “Right back atcha, pal.”

The crew chuckled at that, and the captain added, “We call him Six-Pack.”

Six-Pack lifted his shirt to show us his abs, and a couple of guys threw things at him—a paper cup, a Nerf football, a set of keys.

The captain went on. “The plump dumpling next to him is Tom McElroy. We call him Case.”

“’Cause Drew’s got a six-pack…,” one guy called out.

The rest joined in: “And Tom’s got a case!”

McElroy smiled and slapped his round belly. “Tight as a drum,” he said to me.

“Not sure that’s a good thing,” I said.

Case took a step closer to me. “Punch it.”

I shook my head. “You really don’t want me to do that.”

The captain kept moving, now pointing at Sullivan. “This is Sullivan, our engine operator. Stand up, Sullivan.”

Sullivan stood up. I revised my earlier guess. He was six-five, at least. Maybe six-six.

“What do you think we call this guy?” the captain asked me.

It was a challenge—to see if I could think like a firefighter.

“It’s either Shorty or Tiny,” I guessed.

All the guys burst out with laughs and shouts. “She got it!”

Tiny took a bow.

The captain gave me a nod of respect and went on with the introductions. “The cranky one with back trouble is DeStasio. I’ll give you a thousand dollars if you can ever make him smile. Whatever you do, don’t park in his space. He’s taking over cooking duties in the wake of the Patterson brothers’ departure. He can make a total of three different meals, and they’re all burned.”

DeStasio didn’t say hello. In a voice of pure dismay, he asked the captain, “Why is the new guy a girl?”

The captain nodded, like, Good question. “I thought you guys could use a little surprise. Plus, she’s a hotshot medic. And we were desperate.”

Then Six-Pack said, “I for one am all for it. I’m tired of looking at you ugly bastards.”

Another cheer of rowdy laughter and protest.

The captain put his hands out to settle them down. “Now, I know what you guys are all thinking about women.” Here he paused, seeming to think about women himself for a minute. “But this is who the chief hired, and you can be men about it or you can whine like little—”