Winning my Best Friend's Girl - Piper Rayne Page 0,1
on his face when his exhausted wife walks through the garage doors is pretty awesome. I guess he won his battle.
Lou waves off my comment. “Your parents had nine kids, not you.” We sit in silence for maybe a minute because Lou hates quiet. “Aren’t you gonna ask me?”
“Ask you what?”
Now he’s the one sporting the insulted look. “The girl from speed dating. Your sister didn’t tell you?”
“No, she lives with Colton now. She’s moved out.”
He nods as though he didn’t remember.
“So she’s amazing,” he says without me asking for more information or really paying attention.
I love the guy, but this is same old, same old for him. This girl will have morphed into a blood-seeking piranha by next week. As much as I don’t do relationships, Lou thinks he wants one. He doesn’t. He just wants regular sex.
“Okay, boys, hate to interrupt the locker room talk, but we have a fire to fight,” Captain says from up front as we pull up to a burning apartment building. The fire isn’t out of control yet by the looks of it, but it will be if we don’t get in there. “We’re first on the scene. Since you’re so chatty, Lunchbox, you get to go in first with Romeo behind you. Greasy, you get the hose connected…” The Captain continues to rattle off responsibilities, and we file out of the fire truck.
After getting our gear together and pulling out our axes, Lou and I head in to investigate the fire. My adrenaline kicks into overdrive the closer we get to the building.
Once we’re inside the smoke-filled stairway, Lou talks again. “So this girl, she’s like no other girl I’ve ever met. She’s smart and gorgeous. She thinks I’m funny.”
“Then she must be a keeper,” Captain says over the radio. “Concentrate on the fire.”
Lou kicks in the door of the first apartment, and we walk through, scouring the rooms for people who might be trapped or too afraid to run.
“Tank is coming in now with Greasy,” Captain tells us.
I press the button for my radio. “Apartment one is clear. Filled with smoke, no flame.”
“We went to the bar for drinks afterward. Turns out she was there once before when I was, but we must not have written each other down because we didn’t connect,” Lou says as we walk up the stairs to the second floor.
“Cool.”
“I’m thinking of taking her to your brother’s restaurant,” he says.
“Why would you come to Lake Starlight?” I ask.
“This is the type of woman you wine and dine, not take to Tipsy Turvy to play darts and drink beer.”
“I’m not sure any woman is the kind who’d prefer to be taken to Tipsy Turvy on a first date. That’s more of a ‘we’ve been dating for a while and there’s a big game on, want to go for wings and a beer’ kind of thing.” I head to the stairs to climb up another floor.
“Are you dissing my game? I’ve got better game than you.”
“Captain, I’m not sure this building is occupied. Every apartment is bare of furniture,” Tank says over the radio.
“Hold on. I’ve got Sergeant Blecker,” Captain says.
I stop on the stairwell in case our instructions change.
“You’re right, the place is empty. Shift our search for source at this point.”
Tank and Greasy follow us up the stairs. “We’ll go to three,” they say, walking by us as we stop on the second floor to check behind the doors.
“I’m telling you. This girl is a game-changer,” Lou says.
Tank and Greasy laugh.
“You guys wait and see. You’ll be getting wedding invitations in the mail within a year. I promise.”
“You know all this from one night?” I ask.
“When you know, you know.”
I kick open a door and a cloud of smoke billows out into the hallway, making me unable to see an inch in front of me. I can’t deny I too believe you just know when you know. I felt a pull in my heart the moment Stella Harrison walked into my classroom in the fourth grade—her brown skin, pigtails and big dark eyes drew me in. My crush continued for years until she and Owen started to date. Then I tried to ignore that pull—which is when everything crumbled around me.
“Nothing on level two, we’re going to four,” I say into the radio.
We bypass Tank and Greasy on the third, where they’re outwardly laughing at Lou.
“I’m going to prove you all wrong,” Lou says, and there’s a conviction in his tone that makes me believe that