Page 16 of Ensnared By the Mountain Man

It took me three drafts to write five words.

Can you cover tomorrow morning?

I sent it before I could talk myself out of it, and then set the phone down and waited for the guilt to hit. It didn’t. That might be the most remarkable thing that’s happened in the last twenty-four hours, and a lot of remarkable things have happened in the last twenty-four hours.

“I should make you breakfast,” I say, because the instinct is still there. The pull to give, to do, to be useful.

“No,” he says. “You should stay right here.”

I look up at him. He’s not smiling, but his eyes are warm in a way I’ve never seen them. Warm and steady and sure.

“Okay,” I say.

I stay.

10

ELIAS

Three days.

Three days of Morgan in my life, and I barely recognize it. She comes to the cabin after her shifts and makes things in my kitchen with ingredients she brings in a paper bag from the market. Cookies one night. Soup the next. Last night she made banana bread from a recipe she knew by heart, and the cabin smelled like sugar and warmth for hours after she left.

She doesn’t leave until late. Sometimes she doesn’t leave at all.

When she stays over, I drive her to work. She sits in the passenger seat with her hiking boots on the dash and my thermal pulled over her T-shirt because the mornings are cold and she refuses to bring a proper jacket. I teased her about that once, and she laughed and said she’d rather wear mine. So I stopped mentioning it.

I still come into Sugar Moon at 6:30. I still sit at the window table. But now when she brings my coffee, she lets her hand rest on my shoulder for a second as she sets it down, and I spend the next twenty minutes thinking about that hand and all the places it was last night. I have to stare very hard at my mug to keep my face from giving me away.

Alicia knows. She doesn’t say anything to me, but I catch the looks she gives Morgan when she thinks I’m not watching—the grin she barely bothers to hide. I don’t mind. Let her grin. Let the whole town know. I don’t care anymore.

That should scare me. It doesn’t, and that’s what scares me instead.

The call comes in on a Thursday.

Structure fire on the east side of town—residential—reported smoke coming from a second-floor window. We roll out fast. Engine, ladder, full crew. I’m geared up and moving before the address even fully registers, because this part of me still works the way it’s supposed to.

The training doesn’t leave. The muscle memory doesn’t fade. You can spend four years running from what you did, but your body still knows how to do the job.

We arrive, and the smoke is thick and black and pouring from the upstairs window. The family is already on the lawn—mom, dad, and two kids—and the mom is screaming something about the dog.

Before anyone can react, one of the kids breaks free and runs toward the front door. He’s maybe eight years old, skinny and fast and so terrified he doesn’t hear his mother screaming his name.

He’s through the door before anyone can grab him, and the crew captain is calling assignments, but I’m already moving because the kid is inside and the smoke is getting worse, and this is the thing I’m built for. The thing that almost destroyed me once.

I go in.

The visibility is bad. Smoke down to my knees within ten seconds, and I drop low and move fast through the first floor. I can hear the kid somewhere above me, coughing, calling for the dog. The stairs are intact. I take them two at a time and find him in a bedroom at the end of the hall, curled around a beagle that’s shaking so hard I can feel it through my gloves.

“I’ve got you,” I say. “We’re going out.”

He won’t let go of the dog. I don’t make him. I pick up both of them—the kid and the beagle—and I carry them down the stairs and out the front door and across the lawn to the engine where the paramedics are waiting.

The mom grabs the kid. The kid grabs the dog. Everyone is okay. Everyone is breathing and crying and alive.

I walk behind the engine, pull off my mask, put my hands on my knees, and try to breathe.

The shaking starts in my hands and moves up my arms and into my chest. It’s not the fire. The fire was routine. Bad smoke, sound structure, manageable heat. I’ve been in a hundred fires worse than that one.