Playing With Fire: inspirational romantic suspense (Montana Fire Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

what looked like a graveyard. Once-majestic white pines and spruce, blown down a decade ago, now lay stripped and gray, the ground littered with the debris of the trees, sapwood slabs, limbs, bark, and a crusty scattering of brown pine needles embedded in the forest floor.
    Tinder. Just waiting for a spark.
    And with the fire in the distance turning the sky an eerie orange, the smoke threading through the forest, the entire scene resembled something out of a horror movie.
    Clearly, he needed a shower. Food. A bed. Not necessarily in that order.
    But they still had a quarter mile to dig to the gravel pit that served as the left flank line. With the main blaze a little under two miles away and the wind at five miles an hour, they had a day, at least, to establish the rest of line. To stop the dragon.
    Conner had used his video footage, posted at NFS fire stations, to analyze the fire behavior, and after conferring with Jed what seemed like days ago, agreed that cutting a line along the logging road would be their best bet at stopping the fire before it reached Evergreen Resort.
    Or Deep Haven.
    And there he went again, his mind drawn back to Liza Beaumont. Who knew an impulsive decision to stop by her booth and say hi would result in an easy, comfortable evening spent listening to music, talking about his life as a firefighter and hers in this small hamlet. They talked movies and books—and she pointed out their resident author Joe Michaels in the crowd of street dancers. Conner had told her what he could about military life and growing up on his grandfather’s ranch, and she even listened to his way-too technical description of his brainchild, a firefighting drone, just in the sketching stage.
    She’d sat across from him on the shoreline and as the moon rose, she dug a trail into the pebbled beach, occasionally pitching a rock out into the waves softly whispering on shore. He couldn’t help notice how the wind played with her silky hair, the stars glowing in her eyes, and for the first time in he didn’t know how long, he just relaxed.
    He’d nearly heard his relief gusting out in a rush when she said she was a Christian.
    Because that meant she didn’t expect anything from him but an easy, right-now friendship. He didn’t have to worry about the what-ifs simmering between them, the kind that usually made him dodge these short-term, fire-line-induced relationships. He just wasn’t into flings, like some of the other guys might be.
    But he did enjoy her laughter, the way she leaned into his stories, listened to him. After spending a week with his sweaty, ornery, and occasionally rough-mouthed team, sitting with Liza felt like bathing in light and hope. Nearly intoxicating, and he dearly hoped he might find her again—
    “Conner! Watch out for that snag!”
    Jed’s voice, just down the line, and Conner looked up to see the wind had torched a nearby white pine, dead and dry, fallen at an angle. Flames raked over it, sizzling at the crown that dripped out over the edge of their line.
    In the orange haze of night obscured by the smoke drifting over their line, they might have lost track of how the fire had grown.
    Conner stepped away from the snag, jogging down the line. They’d cut in nearly half a mile. Another quarter mile away the road ended in a gravel quarry where the logging trucks turned around.
    A big, bare area suitable for a safety zone. But to get to it, they’d have to run through uncut forest.
    The snag lit another tree nearby, and fire blazed up the trunk, out through the woodpecker holes, and along the deadened branches.
    “We need to get out of here,” Jed said, meeting Conner. “I’ve called in for a tanker, but it’s ten minutes or more out.”
    “We might have ten minutes,” Conner said. “But—”
    “We don’t want to take the chance. Let’s get moving.”
    “To the gravel pit or—”
    “Back along the trail. I don’t like how the fire is blowing up down the line. We’ll tell them