Every Breath You Take: a First Responder Forbidden Workplace Christian Romance (Book 4 of Legacy Falls series)

The ambulance brakes hissed as EMT Teagan Valencio eased the rig up to the curb behind a parked police cruiser. Her partner, paramedic Reeve Carlyle, slumped in the seat beside her.

The streets in this part of Los Angeles were cracked and grimy, their scars filled with oily rainwater and cigarette butts. Chain-link fences leaned inward as if exhausted, scraps of plastic bags and cardboard caught in their grasp.

She spotted three police officers talking to a pair of women in neat cardigans and sensible shoes who looked wildly out of place—the clean, careful world of social services colliding with the raw chaos she lived in every shift.

But no sign of the patient.

Her gaze swept the dark slits between buildings, her pulse ticking a little faster. The late-afternoon sun threw long shadows, each one capable of hiding someone—or something—unpredictable. A small, selfish part of her hoped the call would be a wash. A 29-year-old schizophrenic male, unmedicated and spun out on meth, wasn’t the way she wanted to start a twelve-hour shift.

Forgive me, God.

“I’ll go talk to them.” Reeve opened the door, letting in a gust of Santa Ana wind that smelled of dust and exhaust.

Though Reeve was of average height, there was quiet authority in the way he moved—a restrained readiness that came from years of seeing too much. The kind that said: I’ve seen worse. I can handle worse. And she knew from experience—he could.

As he approached the officers, he tugged his Sacramento River Rats baseball cap lower against the wind. The fabric of his uniform pants flattened against his legs, outlining his lean, athletic frame, and Teagan caught herself watching a beat too long before jerking her gaze away.

They were coworkers. Friends. Nothing more was allowed.

Reeve leaned toward one of the cops, his lips moving in conversation. His stance was casual, but his eyes never stopped scanning the block.

A minute later, he jogged back and climbed into the cab, bringing with him the faint scent of aftershave. “Patient bolted when the cruisers rolled up,” he said. “They’ve got officers searching the block. He’s barefoot, so chances are he hasn’t gone far. I told them we’d stick around for ten.”

Teagan’s nerves prickled, that familiar mix of adrenaline and dread threading through her chest, but her voice stayed steady as she picked up the radio to update Dispatch.

Reeve drummed his fingers on the dashboard, a restless rhythm that mirrored the hum in her veins.

“Tough way to start a shift,” he said.

“Just wait,” she said. “We’ll get the geriatrics right before clock-out.”

That was how they rolled. Reeve took the potentially volatile patients—the wild, unpredictable storms—while Teagan handled the old, the young, and the broken-hearted. They worked the trauma calls together, like a practiced dance choreographed by instinct and trust. What she’d learned from Reeve went far beyond her EMT training.

“There’s our guy,” Reeve said, nodding toward the far end of the sidewalk.

Two officers were struggling to restrain a man whose body jerked and twisted like a marionette in a gale. His bare feet slapped against the pavement, kicking up dust, and even from here, his high-pitched screams cut through the air, the sound scraping down Teagan’s spine.

“Looks like they’ve already got him cuffed,” Reeve said, his tone grim.

Teagan swung down from the cab, boots hitting pavement with a solid thud. Heat radiated off the asphalt, wrapping around her legs. She snapped on a pair of gloves, the latex stretching tight over her fingers.

Reeve rounded the ambulance, the wind tossing a stray lock of hair across his forehead. After nine months of shifts that had blurred into one long test of endurance, she could read him in ways most people couldn’t. The set of his jaw. The twitch in his cheek when a situation got under his skin. The way his voice dropped into that too-calm register when he was hanging on by a thread.

He was building the mental wall—fortifying himself for whatever was about to come.

“Here we go,” he muttered.

“Kill ’em with kindness, right?” she said, her attempt at humor thin but earnest.

Their eyes met, and something unspoken passed between them. Then they moved, stepping into chaos with nothing but skill, grit, and the belief that the other would be there if things went sideways.