Sparked By the Mountain Man Hotshot

A steamy firefighter romance featuring a hotshot superintendent certain he already burned his one shot at an ordinary life, a sous chef who’s everybody’s easy favorite and nobody’s first choice, and three days of soft-open service before his crew rolls out for good.

She cooked for a crew that leaves Thursday. He tasted one plate and wanted the woman behind it — the real one, not the easy one she hands everybody else.

I’ve spent twenty-three years being the easy one. The good sport who got told “that’ll be easy for you” like it was a compliment, who learned to laugh first so nobody caught her wanting. I’m very good at losing — I do it early, on purpose, before anyone can do it to me. No one has ever looked at me like I was worth keeping.

Then I sent a plate of trout out to a table of wildland firefighters who’d be gone by the weekend, and one of them didn’t eat like the rest. He tasted the sage-and-apple brown butter, the whole gold town I’d folded into it, and looked at me across the pass with something no man has ever aimed at me. So I did what I always do — cracked a joke and handed him the disposable version I give everyone. He didn’t take it. He said that wasn’t the one he came back for.

His name is Reid Callahan, and he runs the crew: the one who’s sure, the man who walks into fire and comes home to nobody on purpose. He decided long ago the job won and a home was never in the cards. He’s quiet, steady, more than a decade older than me — and the thing he wants most means unlearning eleven years of being the man who leaves first.

He started showing up on the patio after close, after the crew cleared out and the lights went dark. There, in the quiet, I stopped being the easy one, and he stopped being the man who leaves — three nights before a truck was supposed to take him two hundred miles south.

Click Read Now or Buy Now to fall for the quiet mountain man hotshot who tasted one plate and refused to be one more thing she lost.

Featuring these tropes:

Mountain man hotshot superintendent, certain he already spent his shot at home
Sous chef who’s everybody’s easy favorite and nobody’s first choice
He fell the second he tasted her cooking — and saw past the jokes
Instalove on a ticking clock: three days before his crew rolls out
Virgin heroine, possessive alpha hero