All Summer Long (Fool's Gold #9)

“He did well on my interview,” Michelle said with a grin. “As much as I could concentrate on it.”


“Did he offer to show you his ass?” another firefighter asked.

“No, which is too bad, because I’m sure I would have looked. Touching would have gotten me into trouble, but it might have been worth it.”

Charlie didn’t like the way the conversation was going. Not only because hearing them talk about Clay this way made her chest feel all tight, but because he deserved better.

“Could we be focused, people? Clay has everything we’re looking for.”

“And more,” Olivia said with a wink. “But no from me.”

Charlie stared at her. “What?”

Her captain shrugged. “Come on, Charlie. Be serious. Sure, he’s physically fit and yes, he passed the interviews. I have no doubt he’d do fine on the psych exam, but so what? He’s not someone we can depend on. We put a lot of money into training our volunteers. We need to know we can count on them. I’m not going to spend money on a butt model.”

Charlie felt her temper rising slowly to the surface. “You’re telling me you’re not going to give him a chance because he’s too attractive?”

“No. He’s unreliable.”

“What is that based on? He was on time to each of my classes and stayed to the end.” She turned to Michelle. “Was he late to the interviews?”

“No, but...”

Charlie waited.

Michelle sighed. “He was on time.”

Charlie turned back to Olivia. “So how is he any more or less dependable than the other candidates?”

“You know what he is,” Olivia told her.

“No. I don’t. What I know is he’s interested and meets all our criteria. But that you don’t want to give him a chance. Wow, this is kind of like saying if someone wears glasses he or she must be smart. Or if a girl is too pretty, she can’t be intelligent, too. If he were a woman, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. We would, in fact, be going out of our way to make sure we were fair to her. I’m shocked that this is the message we want to send to the department and the community.”

Charlie stared at the other women at the table, genuinely surprised by the fact that they weren’t giving Clay a fair chance.

Olivia shifted in her seat. “You’re making this a big deal. Why do you care if he gets into the training program or not?”

“Because I do a lot of the training and he’s the best one we have. It pisses me off that he’s being dismissed because of how he looks. Probably because it’s happened a lot to me, but for very different reasons.”

Michelle drew in a breath. “She’s right. He knew more than the others. Not just about firefighting in general, but how we do things here. He’s put time into his research. Charlie has a point. Refusing to consider Clay because of how he looks or what he was doesn’t speak very highly of us.”

Olivia wasn’t pleased. “Fine. We’ll put him in the program, but if he screws up even once, he’s out.”

“No,” Charlie told her boss. “I don’t agree with that. We have very specific rules in place and consequences. If Clay breaks the rules, then the same consequences apply to him as they would to anyone else.”

“Whatever.” Olivia made a note on the list. “Who’s next?”

* * *

“I WAS so angry,” Charlie said at lunch. “They practically called him a piece of ass. It never would have happened if he were a woman. I don’t get it. I’ve been dismissed because of how I look. I know how it feels. Most of them do, too. So why are they acting like this?”

Annabelle reached across the table and grabbed a French fry from Charlie’s plate.

“Is that allowed?” Patience asked with a smile. “The fry, I mean. Not how the meeting went.”

Charlie eyed the other two women’s lunches, noting the big pile of greens in bowls. “If you don’t want salad, why do you order salad?”

“Because I don’t burn a million calories at my job and I’m as tall as a mushroom,” Annabelle said, then popped the second half of the fry into her mouth.

“I like the pretense of eating healthy,” Patience told her.

Charlie sighed and turned her plate so the fries were facing the other two, then motioned to Jo who stood by the bar.

Jo grinned. “They’re stealing again?”

“It happens every time.”

“I’ll bring out more as soon as they’re ready.”

“Thanks.”

Charlie picked up her burger. “What was I saying?”

“You were ranting,” Patience told her. “It was a good rant. I admire your ability to say what you think. My daughter’s good at it, too.”

“Lillie is good at a lot of things,” Annabelle said. “She’s so fun when she comes to the library. But we were talking about Clay and the meeting.”

“I’ve seen him around town,” Patience said, then sighed. “Wow. He’s seriously good-looking. It’s like he’s not really one of us. I admire you standing up for him.”