Page 1 of Burning Up with the Mountain Man Firefighter

1

NEVE

Eleven seconds.

The wax in the melting pot is clear and still, the surface barely trembling. I have eleven seconds before I add the fragrance oil, and the timing matters because this part has never been about numbers. It’s about instinct. Too hot, and the oil burns off before it has a chance to settle in. Too cool, and it refuses to play nice with the wax. Ask me how I know.

There’s a window of maybe fifteen seconds when everything is exactly right, and after years of doing this, I can find it without a thermometer. I watch the surface tension instead. It relaxes just enough to catch my eye—a tiny shift most people would never notice—and that’s my cue.

Eight seconds.

The workshop smells like beeswax with a whisper of smoke from the wicks I trimmed this morning. The pilot flame glows low and blue beneath the pot, and twelve jars wait in a perfectly straight line on the stone counter behind me, already labeled because future me appreciates it when present me gets her life together.

This batch is a new blend I’ve been tinkering with for weeks. Warm amber, clove, a base of raw honey, and one last note I still haven’t committed to because committing would mean deciding, and I’m not quite ready for that. I’m still following my nose and seeing where it wants to take me.

Four seconds.

The door opens.

I don’t look up. I can’t look up, because I’m at two seconds and my hand is already reaching for the fragrance oil. Whoever just walked into my workshop is going to have to wait until the pour is done.

The bell above the door is still ringing when I tip the oil into the wax, and the bloom of scent rises immediately, warm and sharp, filling the room in a way that I feel across my skin before I smell it.

“Miss Sinclair?”

The voice is low, controlled, and completely unfamiliar. I finish the pour, set the oil bottle on the workbench, and pick up my stir stick. Twenty steady rotations, clockwise, even pressure. Then I look up.

He fills the doorway with the kind of presence that has nothing to do with size. Authority, quiet and practiced, radiating off him before he says a word. He’s in a Copper Peak Fire Protection District polo, dark navy, tucked into tactical pants, and he’s holding a clipboard with a printed form already attached. His jaw is clean-shaved and set, and his eyes are moving through my workshop with a focus I recognize immediately.

He’s assessing. Every surface, every flame, every inch of my space is being read and examined.

“I’m Lieutenant Trent,” he says. “Fire safety inspection. You should have received a notice.”

I did receive a notice. Two weeks ago—a single sheet slipped under my door with the district seal and a date and time printed in bold. I put it on the bulletin board behind the register and forgot about it. I’ve been running an open-flame workshop in a historic stone building for three years, and nobody has ever walked through that door with a clipboard.

“I’m in the middle of a pour,” I say.

“I can see that.”

He says it without judgment, without inflection, and that’s what catches me. Most people who walk into my workshop react. Tourists stop and inhale and say something about how good it smells. The other Trading Post shop owners lean in the doorway and ask what I’m making. Even delivery drivers pause and look around at the wax and the flames and the rows of cooling candles with something close to curiosity on their faces.

He’s not reacting. He’s surveying.

I watch him move through the space while I stir. He starts at the door and works clockwise, and there’s something almost hypnotic about it.

Each station gets the same amount of attention. The supply shelf where I store fragrance oils. The ventilation fan above the melting station. The pilot flame under my pot. He checks the flame, and his eyes narrow for a fraction of a second before he makes a note on the clipboard. Then his attention shifts to the fire extinguisher mounted by the back door—the one the landlord installed when I signed my lease. I’ve never checked it.

He lifts the extinguisher off the mount, turns it over, and reads the tag. “This is a Class A.”

“Okay.”

“You work with flammable liquids. Fragrance oils, solvents, wax at combustible temperatures. You need a Class B.”

“I didn’t know that.”

He writes something on the clipboard. His face gives me nothing, and his voice gives me less. The only sound is the scratch of the pen and the tight movements of his hand as he records the violation.

He walks to the back of the workshop. The emergency exit is behind my supply station, where I keep the wax pallets and empty shipping crates and the bulk boxes of glass jars that come in faster than I can unpack them. I stacked them there because the door leads to the narrow gap between the Trading Post buildings, and I never use it. The crates fit perfectly against the wall, and the space was wasted otherwise.