Page 10 of Burning Up with the Mountain Man Firefighter

“You left.”

“I know.”

“My parents do that. When I’m too much, they leave the room. They don’t yell, they don’t argue, they just go quiet and walk away. And I stand there and keep my breathing steady and wait for the door to close, because that’s what I learned to do.”

“I know,” he says again, and his voice cracks on it. Just barely, a fracture at the back of his throat that I might miss if I weren’t listening for it. “I saw you in here with all these flames, and you were beautiful, and my body told me to shut it down. Every fire in this room, every open flame, every piece of it. My training, my history, everything I’ve built since I was eight years old screaming at me to contain it.”

“And you listened.”

“For four minutes.” He takes a breath. “Then I turned around in the parking lot and came back, because the thing that scares me more than fire is the look on your face when I walked out that door.”

My grip tightens on the pour pitcher.

“You’re not the fire that destroyed my life, Neve.” His voice is low and raw. “You’re the warmth I’ve been freezing without. And I don’t know how to stand in a room full of flames and not try to control them. But I want to learn. I need to learn, because the alternative is walking away from you, and I made it four minutes before that became something I can’t do.”

The candles are still burning. Every flame in the workshop is lit, throwing gold across the stone walls and the wooden shelves and his face, and he’s standing in the middle of all of it. The man who controls fire, choosing to stand in it.

I set the pitcher on the workbench. “Smell this.”

He blinks. “What?”

I hold up the stir stick. The amber blend, finished, with the smoke note he suggested two days ago.

“It’s done,” I say. “You were right. Smoke was the missing note.”

He crosses the last three feet between us and leans in. The fragrance reaches him, and I watch his face change. The tension loosens—not all of it, but enough. His eyes close for half a second.

“Warm,” he says. “Heavy. Grounded.”

“It needed something that knew about burning,” I say. “Something that had been through heat and came out different. The smoke doesn’t fight the honey. It gives it a home.”

He opens his eyes and looks at me, and I look at him, and the workshop is full of fire and neither of us is afraid.

“Stay,” I say.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

I reach up and put my hand on his jaw. He turns his face into my palm, and his breath is warm against my wrist. The candles are still burning, and the blend is ready to pour, and the man who walked out my door came back before the wax cooled.

That’s all I needed to know.

EPILOGUE

NEVE

Iwake up to the sound of water running.

The bedroom is dark, and the clock on the nightstand reads 1:47 a.m. Graham’s side of the bed is still made. He was on shift tonight, and I fell asleep with the lamp on and a book tented across my stomach, the way I always do when he’s working.

The book is on the floor now. The lamp is off. He must have turned it off when he came in.

The shower is running behind the closed bathroom door, and underneath the sound of the water, I can smell it. Smoke. Not my smoke—not the warm residue of a day spent making things. Structure fire smoke. Chemical and sharp and soaked into fabric and hair and skin. The kind of smoke that takes two washes to clear and still lingers in the seams of his turnout gear for days.

I get up. The hallway is quiet, Ember’s door is pulled shut, the nightlight glowing underneath it. She’s three and sleeps hard, the way children who are deeply certain of their safety sleep. She won’t hear anything.

I open the bathroom door. Steam rolls out, thick and warm. Through the glass, I can see him. Head down, both hands braced against the tile, water running over his shoulders and his back. Soot streaks across his arms, diluting gray and swirling toward the drain. He hasn’t heard me come in.

I pull my shirt over my head and step out of my shorts. The glass door opens quietly, and I step in behind him.