Wild Heat (Hot Shots: Men of Fire #1)(12)
Author: Bella Andre

Logan yanked opened the door and Gary shot an apologetic glance at Maya. “Sorry to interrupt your meeting.”

It was pointless to waste time on pleasantries. If Gary knew why Maya was really there, he wouldn’t bother being polite.

“What’s going on?” Logan asked.

“The winds have shifted and the fire’s headed straight toward the new housing development on the southwest ridge.”

Logan cursed. It was just the kind of bad news he didn’t need right now. If the fire took out a neighborhood of multimillion-dollar houses, the insurance companies would pick up the tab. But the Tahoe Pines hotshots would shoulder the blame.

He quickly issued his instructions. “Call in several urban crews to water down the rooftops and cut fire lines in the surrounding acreage of the border properties.”

“Are you going to take the mountain or the housing development?” Gary asked.

“Neither,” Logan said, dropping the hugely unexpected bomb on his squad boss. “I’m out for now.”

“What the hell?”

“I put out a couple of random campfires in Desolation last week and some hikers reported me to the ranger. Plus, someone called my name in to the tip line and now the Forest Service honchos think I lit this fire. I’m on suspension until they find the real arsonist.”

Gary rubbed his hand over his face and when he looked back at Logan, it was as if he’d aged a decade.

“I can’t believe this. You’re a goddamned hero and they’re trying to pin this on you?”

“It looks good on paper. I’m sure she’d be happy to tell you more.” But when he turned back to the room, Maya was gone. “Shit.”

He had to hand it to her, on top of being fearless, she was wily. And quick. At this rate, she’d have the noose wrapped around his neck by nightfall.

“I still can’t f**king believe this,” Gary repeated.

Logan needed to get out of the station and on Maya’s tail. If he were her, first place he’d go ask questions was Joseph’s cabin. After all, the man had taken him in as a teenager for unspecified reasons. She wasn’t stupid, she’d know there was a story there.

Only three people in Lake Tahoe knew Logan’s true history: Joseph; his son, Dennis; and Logan himself. If Joseph were well, there was no way in hell that he’d give up Logan’s secrets. But if Joseph’s mind wandered into the darkness, even for sixty seconds, irreparable damage could be done.

Logan quickly reassured the squad boss. “You’ve got this under control, Gary. You don’t need me out there. Put Sam at the anchor point with the radios. Take half the crew to the houses, dig a wide line along the wild-land border, and keep the roofs and gardens wet.”

He didn’t wait for Gary’s response. His squad boss and seasoned crew would deal with the fire. He had ultimate faith in them.

It was Maya Jackson he didn’t trust.

CHAPTER FIVE

MAYA WHIPPED around a blind curve on the two-lane lakeside highway, desperate to put some space between herself and Logan Cain. The interruption had been her perfect chance to escape. That room had been too small. And Logan was too big, too strong, too sexy— too everything—for her to keep her head on the case.

Every time he came close she remembered the heat of his lips on hers, the rippled muscles across his stomach as she’d run her desperate fingers across his skin six months previously.

She’d caught him off guard and he’d been angry, furious at the suspension, but instinctively, she knew he’d never physically harm her. Her traitorous body would do her in all by itself.

What would she have thought of him this afternoon had she never met him before? Would her gut still have told her he was innocent? Or would she have held on to her doubts a little longer? Their meeting had been fraught with tension, and yet, she couldn’t help but feel that the Forest Service was going after the wrong man. It didn’t help that no matter how she looked at the situation, it was impossible to separate their past from the present.

She’d thought he might use that one reckless, emotional afternoon in the bar against her, but she hadn’t been prepared for her physical reaction to him. He was her suspect, for God’s sake. She couldn’t let him off the hook simply because she wanted him to take her up against the wall of the station, up against any wall, anywhere.

She used her upper teeth to pull her lower lip into her mouth, chewing as she worked things out. Without any evidence other than the ranger’s reports and her tense chat with Logan at the station, she had no clear sense of the case.

Maya’s GPS system beeped in warning a moment before the screen went blank. She was trying to find Joseph Kellerman’s cottage, but he lived too deep in the woods for her car’s mapping system to keep up. The pine trees were too mature and tall for her to get a signal. Damn it. She didn’t have any time to waste. Not when she had a feeling that Logan would be trying to track her every move.

How had he become the hunter and she the prey, when he was her suspect, not the other way around?

So far she’d passed a dozen dirt roads that snaked off the highway into the forest. One of them had to lead to the cabin Logan resided in as a teenager. Eyes peeled for a sign with the name Kellerman on it, she ignored a honking minivan on her tail and slowed way down. At last, she hit the jackpot when she saw a hand-carved “Kellerman” sign nailed to a tree ten yards ahead. Maneuvering her car into the narrow lane cut out between thick tree trunks, she turned on her headlights for better visibility. The dirt driveway wound up the hill.

Several minutes later, her foot barely on the gas pedal as she inched forward, the single-lane road petered out. She parked behind a beaten-up old truck. Stepping out of her car, she was struck by the heady scent of pine trees and memories she wasn’t quick enough to push away.

Her father had loved the forest and he’d taught her and Tony to love it too. She’d grown up in a pack on her father’s back until she grew big enough to run along the trails, her chubby toddler legs moving as fast as they could, her hand in her father’s.

Maya squeezed her eyes shut. It hurt just as much to think about her father today as it had last year right after the cancer had eaten straight through his lungs into his organs. Now that she was surrounded by hotshots again, she couldn’t look at them without seeing traces of her father in all of them.

Logan’s words bounced around in her brain. Did a fire investigator ever accuse your father of arson?

He’d been trying to get a rise out of her, but even though he nearly had, she knew that losing control of her emotions wasn’t going to help her solve this case. Just the opposite, in fact.

Moving quickly through the dry pine needles and gravel, she pulled herself together as she headed for the rustic cabin. She knocked on the front door. The seconds crept by with no response, so she knocked harder. Finally, she heard footsteps.