Wild Heat (Hot Shots: Men of Fire #1)(53)
Author: Bella Andre

He opened closet doors, one after the other. “All of his things are here.” And then Logan’s tanned face went white as he stepped away from a freestanding armoire. “He’s out there.”

Maya hurried across the room, saying “Where?” even though she was afraid she already knew the answer.

“His gear is gone.”

“He’s trying to fight the fire, isn’t he?”

Logan nodded. “It’s possible that he forgot he retired. He probably heard the wildfire was spreading.”

“And he decided to go help fight it.”

She’d never seen Logan’s eyes look so bleak, even in the hospital with Robbie. She knew how horrible it was to lose a father. She didn’t want that to happen to him.

“Go find him,” she said. “Go bring him back.”

“I can’t leave you alone. You’ve got to come with me.”

“I’ll only slow you down. I can take care of myself until you get back. You can’t be in two places at once. Joseph needs your help more than I do.” She wrapped her arms around him. “I promise I’ll be waiting for you when you both return.”

Going on her tippy-toes, she kissed him with all of the love she felt but couldn’t say aloud. He kissed her back, hard and sure, and then he was gone.

She wouldn’t let herself go to the window and watch him disappear into the hills. That was the kind of a thing a desperate, clingy girlfriend or wife did. Even after everything, she still didn’t know what to do. Yes, she loved him. But was love enough? Would love prepare her for a dreaded phone call, for word from the Forest Service that Logan had been injured or, worse, that he was gone forever?

Again, it struck her that Joseph’s cabin was oddly quiet. Goose bumps dotted her arms. The room was warm, but there was a chill lingering in the air.

She left the bedroom and poked her head into a second bedroom, down the hall. Two twin beds were on opposite walls, a Top Gun poster beside one of the beds, a Guns N’ Roses poster over the other. It wasn’t too hard to figure out which was which—Logan had definitely been in full-on badass mode as a teen. She smiled. He never would have gone for the regimented feel of the Tom Cruise hit.

It didn’t look like the room had changed much in the past twenty years. Without a woman around to spearhead a house-wide cleanup, Joseph certainly didn’t seem to be the kind of man who cared about updating his surroundings.

She opened the dusty dresser under the window and sneezed as she pulled out a pile of papers and photos. On top was a picture of Logan and Dennis jumping off a rock into a lake in cutoff shorts. She couldn’t imagine having been a teenage girl and seeing such beauty. The years had given Logan a rugged, hard beauty, but even at seventeen, she could see the man he’d become.

She tucked the photo into her jeans and continued flipping through the stack of photos, until one of them made her stop and do a double take.

It was a fairly recent picture of Logan sandwiched between two women. And Maya was nearly certain that one of the women was Dennis’s girlfriend, Jenny.

Maya studied the photo, taking in the fact that Jenny was looking at Logan with naked adoration, and all at once, that niggling feeling that had been dogging her heels all day clicked into place.

“Have you been under my nose the whole time?” she asked herself, her brain flying through the possibilities, through everything that had happened.

Her cell phone buzzed in her pocket and she was just reaching for it when the front door creaked open. Her heart pounded hard beneath her breastbone.

From the phone, she heard Chief Stevens tell her, “Tony dated someone named Jenny,” and she whispered, “I’m in Joseph’s cabin. Help,” then closed the phone and slipped it into her pocket, along with a pen she found on top of an old wooden table in the hallway.

Slowly, making sure she was as calm as she could possibly be, she rounded the corner. Jenny was standing in the middle of the kitchen.

“Hey there, Jenny,” she said in an easy voice, even as the smell of gasoline permeated the cabin. Maya swallowed the bile that rose up in her throat.

“It’s so nice to see you again, Maya,” Jenny said, as if they were two girlfriends simply getting ready to go out and grab something to eat. “Do you remember me?”

Maya forced a smile. “Sure. We met a couple of times yesterday.”

“Oh no, I’ve seen you before. Six months ago, actually.”

Maya’s heart pounded hard. “Are you sure about that?”

Jenny’s mouth twisted. “I’ve never been more sure of anything.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

LOGAN RAN up the trail at a fierce pace, his lungs burning, sweat pouring into his eyes and down his chest. Smoke and ash fell from the sky, blanketing his clothes and skin in a dark, sooty layer of burned-up brush.

On the run from his house, with Maya following bravely behind him, he’d noted the astonishing growth of the wildfire. There must have been a thousand acres between these trails and the original burning point, and yet they were close enough now, he could see new smoke columns rising.

The fire was moving closer with every minute that ticked by. Time was not on his side. He didn’t have the leisure of running every trail split to locate Joseph. He had to guess right the first time and pray he wasn’t already too late.

It was not yet noon, and the wind had picked up speed, blowing more powerfully than usual for midday. Another strike against Joseph, against each and every one of the hotshots on this mountain working to put the wildfire out. If the winds kept up, they would send the flames straight into town, which was crammed full of tourists for the summer. Wildfire always looked for a way down to the flatlands, to the houses and cars and campgrounds, which were full of fuel. With only two main highways snaking out of town, the enormous traffic jams would make casualties inevitable.

Hitting a Y in the trail, Logan made a split-second decision to take the right fork north, even though Joseph tended to favor the other direction when hiking. If Joseph had suited up, it was because he intended to fight the fire. This trail would lead directly to it.

A quarter mile later, a fire whirl lifted off the hillside below him. Logan jumped back against a rock and watched the fire and ash rush up the hillside.

Barely breaking stride at the close call, he continued up the trail until he saw that the small meadow up ahead was burning. Without gear—without even so much as a fire shelter clamped onto his belt—he couldn’t go much farther. He prayed that Joseph had realized the trouble and was turning back as well.

A familiar sound buzzed through the sound of crackling flames. Moving closer to the fire, he scanned the area for a sign of life.