“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.”
So she wasn’t a fan of Christmas, so what. She had no family to speak of other than the one she’d made at the station, and therefore didn’t have a lot of happy yuletide memories. To her, Christmas was just another day at the firehouse, albeit with better goodies to steal out of the fridge.