Slow Burn (Smoke Jumpers) Read Online Free PDF Page A

bed. His pager picked that moment to go off, and fate handed him an ironclad exit plan. Spotter had seen a fire, and the plane was going up.
    “I’ve got to go.” He swiped his clothes from the floor and got ready to bail. Whatever it was she really wanted from him, he’d have to figure out later.
    Leaving. Story of his life.
    “Fire call?” She rolled over in the bed, taking his sheet with her. She didn’t look surprised, but then, she’d been married to a firefighter, hadn’t she? He’d bet Mike had left her on more than his fair share of late-night calls. “Or is this how you leave all your women?”
    Wordlessly, he tossed her the pager. He wasn’t going to argue with her, and he didn’t have the time, anyhow. Time was a luxury none of the jump team had. Summer up here might be slow and hot, real quiet—until the fires started, and the plane went up. But once a fire hit its sweet spot, found the fuel and the air to burn like hell, there was nothing slow about it. The men who fought fires knew, when that happened, that they were pure out of time.
    She tossed the pager back to him, but not before she eyeballed it. “I was teasing.”
    Grabbing his jeans, he stepped into them and pulled the worn denim up his legs. So much for taking another shower this morning.
    He could feel her gaze on him, and suddenly it was that much harder to get the denim past his erection. Hell .
    “I know you all work hard.” She sat up, and the sheet fell away. At some point during the night, his favorite T-shirt had tangled around her waist. From where he stood, he could spy a strip of bare, sun-kissed skin peeking out between the bottom of the shirt and her panties. With her hair tangled around her face, she looked like a woman who had been well-kissed. Last night she’d been a stranger. She’d been a name dropped in a phone conversation.
    Now she was half-naked in his bed, and Evan knew that this image of her was one he wouldn’t soon forget. She wasn’t just Mike’s anonymous ex anymore; now he had his own damned fantasies about her. He wanted to learn her. Wanted to thread his fingers through that silky hair, memorize the texture and the scent of her. Hold her real close.
    Instead, he grabbed a T-shirt and yanked it on. Not too far from the cabin, the powerful throb of a plane’s engine kicked to life. His boys were getting business done at the hangar across the runway, and he needed to be there.
    “You’re a firefighter,” she said for the second time when he didn’t break the silence but got on with dressing.
    “Smoke jumper,” he corrected, because as great as his admiration was for the boys who rode the trucks, that wasn’t who he was. He jumped.
    “I came to Strong to take some pics,” she informed him. “Firefighters, smoke jumpers, and progress on the new firehouse here.”
    He opened his mouth to share Mike’s request and closed it.
    His brother Jack was revamping the mostly volunteer fire department in Strong. Strong had been a one-truck town with a single paid fire chief, until Jack bought the old fire station earlier that summer, with visions of adding more trucks and more men. Too bad the place was a run-down piece of crap. Maybe it was an antique and on the historic register, but Evan figured that was shorthand for fixer-upper and money pit . Ben Cortez had held the place together all these years, whipping his volunteers into shape, but the older man had to be thinking retirement one of these days, and Jack had apparently picked up a vision of something a little bigger and better, along with a fiancée, in Strong.
    If Faye Duncan was supposed to be documenting Jack’s progress, Jack would be plenty pissed about her current location in Evan’s bed. He’d tainted the witness, all right.
    It didn’t matter that nothing—much—had happened. Jack had drummed into his brothers’ heads that sometimes appearances mattered almost as much as facts. And this was clearly one of those times. Jack had been