Patsy hadn’t meant to ignore the man, hadn’t meant to be rude, but he’d been gone before she finished the training opportunity. And fire always took precedence. They’d done well and were, indeed, back down off the mountain in time for pizza and a beer.
Candace had led them to Maxine’s Pizza, a hole in the wall that had no hint of Bavarian from the outside. The insides only confirmed this was a strictly locals’ joint. No waitresses in cute Bavarian skirts, no pomp and oom-pah-pah from the jukebox; the Stones were rocking it over the speakers. She went up to the faded “Order Here” sign, and saw that the options were slices or a whole pie and a pint or a pitcher. No burgers, no soups or salads, just pizza that smelled incredible. Worked for her.
Twenty hotshots, first day on the fireline, she ordered eight large pizzas but only three pitchers—they were big here. Maxine returned her change with a smile.
“One beer each, maximum,” she told the team. “You never know what tomorrow has for us.” She took a diet Coke and a slice of pepperoni to wait for the pizzas to come up.
Patsy was looking for the logistics needed to pull a bunch of tables together in the crowded dining room when she spotted him. She threaded her way through the noisy area, dodged aside before one of Jess’ crew took her out with the back end of a pool cue, and made it to the small table close by the stairs to the upper dining area no worse for the wear.
“May I?” He was reading something in German. Might have been a cookbook.
He blinked up at her in surprise, “Female of the species.”
“Patsy Jurgen.”
He said something in German that her grandmother might have understood, but was meaningless to her.
“I speak English, bad English, and worse Spanish.” It wasn’t that her Spanish wasn’t fluent enough, it was that while she’d started her education in that language during high school, she’d finished it on the fire line. Vulgar would be putting it politely.
“Oh, sorry. Sam Parker.”
“Nope!” she told him as she sat and took a bite out of her pepperoni slice, which really was as good as it smelled.
“What do you mean, nope?”
“You read and speak German, and you bake the best apple-cinnamon bear claw I’ve ever tasted. Does that sound like a Sam Parker to you?”
“Can’t say that it does,” he sipped a beer. “However, Patricia Jürgen,” he said it with a thick German accent, “sounds like a wildland firefighter.”
“Thanks, I think. By the way, only Grandma ever called me Patricia.” Conversations with attractive men often stumped her, but this one with Sam Parker…
“So, that was really a ‘baby’ fire?” he waved in exactly the right compass direction indicating a good sense of where he was both indoors and out. He had strong arms, looked very fit; give her a month and she could make him a damn fine firefighter.
“Good for training. This crew was only formed up five weeks ago and the season is just starting up here. Arizona is the one being hammered right now. New Mexico and Colorado will be next. Nevada and Utah don’t really have enough to burn. But that’s only general patterns. We could light up tomorrow. Normally we would have let the locals deal with something the size of this morning’s fire, maybe send a couple of guys to assist.”
He looked right and left. Looked down at his beer for a moment.
Patsy had seen this reaction before. Despite Candace’s falling for a guy on her crew, that had never been her style. The problem was that someone who wasn’t a firefighter never knew what to do with a woman who was.
“So you fight wildfires?”
Why did they always state the obvious before the brush-off. She nodded. Here it came.
Patsy got her feet under her so she could stand and go back to her crew. There, at least, she fit in.
Then Sam grinned at her, “Did I mention that I’m a baker? That’s pretty dangerous work you know. Leave out the baking soda and you can be in a world of hurt.”
In general Patsy didn’t laugh much, but Sam made it easy to join in.