All He Wants for Christmas… by Jill Shalvis
EMT Dustin Mauer has one Christmas wish—to make tough firefighter Cristina Lewis realize she’s in love with him. And he’s using his considerable bedside charm to convince her!
My Grown-Up Christmas List by Jacquie D’Alessandro
Toni Rizzo is done with obnoxious firefighters. But flirtatious fireman Brad Griffin is managing to put himself at the top of her holiday list—one steamy kiss at a time!
Up on the Housetop by Jamie Sobrato
When Dr. Lorelei Gibson gets stuck on her roof half-naked, she’s mortified when she’s rescued by hunky firefighter Ryan Quinn—her high school heartbreak! Until she learns he’d like to get naked with her…
A short excerpt…
Cristina Lewis walked into the florist’s shop with a tiny bit of an attitude, which, at least according to those who knew her best, was nothing new. Whatever. She rarely wasted time thinking about her demeanor, or what people thought of it.
Probably not the best way to make friends, but she wasn’t out to do so. Not in her world, where she was the lone female firefighter at station #34 in Santa Rey, California, a surfer-boy beach town. Her attitude was her shield, which she backed up by being good at what she did. The best, actually, and as a result, she was respected and trusted. And maybe a little feared, which worked, too.
Give her a burning building or a wrecked car threatening to explode any day of the week and she’d handle it. Unfortunately, today’s task was picking out a Christmas bouquet for the new chief and his wife.
Cristina wasn’t a Christmas person. Hell, she wasn’t a people person, so the fact that she was the one in here while her crew waited outside on the rig was fairly ridiculous. “I know nothing about flowers,” she warned the clerk who came around the front desk with a welcoming smile. “And even less about the whole ho-ho spirit, so we can skip the sales talk.”
“Good. I hate the sales talk.”
Okay, the woman was tough and had a sense of humor. Perfect. “Can you get me a Christmas bouquet and make it painless?”
“I’m an expert in painless.” The clerk’s professional smile never wavered. “For a boyfriend? Husband?”
Ha. Cristina didn’t have a husband. She didn’t have a boyfriend, either. The closest she’d come lately was her vibrator, but that had broken a few months back and she hadn’t yet replaced it. As for a real live penis, that honor had all too briefly belonged to an extremely laid-back, easygoing, sexy-as-hell EMT named Dustin Mauer, whom she’d had to dump through no particular fault of his own—other than that he possessed the most baffling ability to make her want things. Things she didn’t want to want. Things like a happily ever after, which she’d never believed in.
“It’s for the new boss’s wife.” She slapped the seventy-five bucks the crew had all pooled together onto the counter. “In the name of sucking up to the powers that be, apparently.”
“Well, you came to the right place.”
“Great.” Cristina just wanted to do this and get out, maybe fight a blaze or rescue someone. Anything but this. She knew damn well she was in here only because she had the lone vagina on the squad. Any one of those guys out there would have done a better job on this and they all knew it, but they were too busy cackling like little girls over making Cristina do it.
From some hidden speaker came a soft medley of Christmas tunes, and when she looked around, her senses were assaulted with a myriad of scents and colors. Flowers, plants, crafty stuff, it was everywhere, like a nightmare, all in green and red and silver and gold. Festive chaos.
It made her feel dizzy, and just a little like a bull in a china shop.
“Make sure it looks pretty,” came Blake’s voice over the radio at her hip. The radio issued by the fire department, the one supposedly to be used for emergencies only.
Cristina sighed. At the moment she didn’t care that Blake had had an incredibly rough year and that she loved him like the brother she’d never had, she snatched the radio off her hip and snarled, “You sent me in here, you’ll deal with what I pick.”
“Scrooge.”
