Page 3 of Burning for the Mountain Man

"I'm assessing a situation."

"Uh huh. Maria's gonna love this." His phone is already out. Texting. "Twenty bucks says you're sleeping together inside two weeks."

"Get back to work, Bobby."

He grins. Types faster.

I pick up the wrench. Turn back to Truck 1. The coupling doesn't need more work, but my hands need something to do and I need to forget the calloused palms and amber eyes on the woman who just walked into my station with opinions about every protocol I've run for the last decade.

From above the engine bay, I hear the apartment door open, then the lock mechanism fight her before giving in with a grudging click. A pause. Then her voice, not quite loud enough to be directed at me but not quite quiet enough to be accidental.

"The water pressure in here is a hate crime."

Bobby loses it. Full body laughter, bent over Truck 2, donut crumbs flying everywhere.

September just got a lot more complicated.

CHAPTER TWO

AUTUMN

Five twenty-eight AM. Two minutes early. Coffee in both hands because I found the common area kitchen last night while reviewing incident reports until my eyes burned.

Nash Deveraux is already at the table.

Of course he is.

He's got a mug that says WHISPER VALE VFD in faded letters, a stack of fuel moisture reports, and reading glasses he puts on without acknowledging they exist. The glasses soften his face in a way that irritates me because nothing about this man should look soft. He's six feet of authority in a department t-shirt, forearms thick enough to make the sleeves work, burn scar running the length of his left arm like a road map of every bad day he survived.

Dark skin, close-cropped black hair, jaw built for giving orders. His eyes are warm brown until he's in command mode, then they go flat and hard. Right now they're somewhere in between because he's looking at me standing in his doorway holding two mugs of coffee.

"You're early."

"You said you don't wait. Figured I'd beat you here." Setting one mug in front of him, I take the chair across the table. "Black, right? You've got three mugs in the kitchen, no creamer, no sugar. Wasn't hard to deduce."

He picks up the mug. Drinks without thanking me. Fair enough.

"Northeast corridor." He spreads a topo map across the table, one corner weighted with his radio. "You wanted a fuel load assessment. Here's what you're looking at."

For the next hour, we argue.

He knows this terrain. Every ridge, every drainage, every access road that washes out in October rains. His knowledge is bone-deep, earned from a decade of hotshot work before he took over this volunteer crew and turned them into something functional.

The problem is he's running a reactive operation in a district that needs proactive management.

"You've got no prescribed burn schedule," I tell him, pulling up GIS data on my tablet. "This fuel load on the north ridge hasn't been addressed in six years. One lightning strike in the wrong drainage, and you're looking at a crown fire that jumps to the saddle before you can get a truck up the access road."

"I know what a crown fire looks like."

The scar on his forearm catches the overhead light. He doesn't move it. Doesn't hide it.

"Then you know prevention is cheaper than suppression."

Those brown eyes hold mine across the table. Reading glasses still on. His jaw does this thing where the muscle tightens once before he speaks, and I've known him less than twenty-four hours but I've already learned to watch for it.

"Three days on the north ridge," he says. "You want to assess fuel loads, I'll take you up. We'll camp the patrol route. But my territory, my protocols."

"Your protocols are why I'm here."