She snorts, and I let it go. For now. I mean, I get it. I have a reputation. I’ve dated around. That’s what landed us in this whole arrangement. But is it too much to ask for Noli to give me a chance to prove to her that I can be a decent guy? I guess that remains to be seen. I turn my attention to the monitor and enter our names in so they show up on the screen above our lane.
When Noli comes over with a ball chosen, she does a double-take.
I hit her with my trademark grin. On most other women, it would cause tittering, but Noli uses the occasion to look at me full on. She crinkles up her nose like I’ve got spinach in my teeth. “You listed yourself as ‘Doctor Rattler’? Seriously?”
“After today? Heck yes. I’m a natural, am I right?” I nudge her shoulder, and she grunts.
“Hardly.”
“Come on. You sent me because you knew I was the man for the job.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. You were the closest unit to the scene. I sent ambulance backup immediately too.” She fixes me with a glare, and not for the first time do I have to stop and marvel at the color of her eyes. All the Kasper sisters have blue eyes, but Noli’s take the cake, if you ask me.
“I know, and I’m such an overachiever that I got the job done before the EMTs even made it to the house.”
“Pretty sure Cynthia is the one who got the job done.”
I dip my chin in acknowledgement. “True. That was”—I shake my head—“something.”
Her brows come together in a V shape, like she can’t figure out what I mean.
“Have you ever seen a baby birthed?”
Her eyes widen.
I hold up my hands, palms outstretched. “Not that I was trying to pay that close of attention to, uh, Cynthia’s”—I clear my throat—“nether regions.”
Noli rolls her eyes.
“Well, I sort of had to in order to do my job. I don’t know. It waswild.An entire human showing up earthside.“ I shake my head. I still can’t quite get over what I witnessed. It was my first birth…on the job or otherwise.
Noli snorts. “Again, I’m pretty sure Cynthia would take issue with you saying the baby just ‘showed up.’ It was a lot of work on her part—today and for the last nine months.”
“She was amazing,” I say.
Noli nods. “Yeah,” she says quietly. She blinks and faces me, shaking her head ever so slightly. “Did you get a hold of her husband? I hate that she had to do that all alone.”
I set my beer bottle down and gaze at her. She’s peering back at me with a sea of emotion in her blue eyes. I recall the slight hitch in her usually even tone when baby Henry cried for the first time.
This is a side of Noli I haven’t seen. A softer side. On the job, she’s all business. She’s calm, cool, and collected, triaging and making split-second decisions. I’ve seen her in action, and she’s rock solid in a crisis. This past winter, when we lost power during a massive snow storm, she was in the call center with minimal systems at her disposal, and she was handling all the incoming 911calls, everything from people driving off the road and getting stuck in the blizzard to the call we got about the teenager who fell through the ice during a drunken walk out onto the cove.
The fire department got to him in time, but it had been a harrowing couple of minutes, and Noli never wavered.
Seeing her eyes sparkle with feeling and hearing her voice thick with emotion now is new.
Humanizing.
And my heartbeat is pounding out a steady rhythm ofmore, more, more.
“You getting soft on me, Kasper?” I ask, teasing her to keep my runaway feelings in check.
She socks me in the shoulder.
I rub it, laughing. “Guess not. For your information, Cynthia had me get the information for her husband’s unit out of her file, and she called his family readiness officer, who was going to patch through a message to the Red Cross, who would connect her to his unit. I was leaving when a video call came through. There was lots of crying and laughing, so I’m guessing they made contact.”
Noli sucks in a breath and lets it out. “Good. That’s good.”
“She wasn’t alone, though,” I say after a beat, lifting my ball and testing the grip.
