by L. P. Maxa
“I hope it’s not bad. So many people have cabins in the forest. Did the text say how far the fire is from here?” While they were making conversation, the feeling of his hand wrapped around hers had electric tingles zipping up her arm.
“No, but I need to get to the station.”
“You’re a firefighter with the city. You won’t have to go to a fire in the mountains, will you?”
“We could. In the past we’ve been put on structure protection.”
“Oh.” She chewed her bottom lip.
“Worried about me?” There was that damn dimple again.
“Maybe.”
His expression turned serious. “Look, Eva. I know we haven’t really talked, and you likely think I’m an idiot for getting in your business, but I like you.”
“Oh my.”
He rubbed his thumb across her knuckles, dialing up the tingling while his gaze remained fixed on hers. “What does ‘oh my’ mean? Is that a good ‘oh my’ or a bad ‘oh my’?”
“It means you’re not an idiot, and I like you, too, but I’m not getting involved with anyone right now.”
“Because…?”
“Don’t you have to go?”
“Yeah, but tell me.”
She let out an exasperated breath. Diego was certainly persistent. “Because my fiancé left me one week before our wedding. I’m done with guys.”
“Does that mean you’re going for girls?”
“That might be smarter, but no. I don’t want to date at this point.”
“That’s fine. We won’t call it dating.” He reached in his pocket to pull out a set of keys. He slid one off the ring. “Do me a favor?”
“What?”
“Would you water my African violet?”
“You have an African violet?”
“Sure. Why?”
“Oh, no reason. Of course I’ll water it.”
“Thanks.” He bent down to brush a kiss on her cheek. “Later.”
###
“Everyone’s aboard, let’s get the hell out of here.” The rumble of the fire engine competed with the roar of the fire that had grown from a few acres to over three hundred in a matter of hours. With sundown the fire might slow, but it also meant the aerial support would be grounded. Diego’s crew had been assigned to protecting a cluster of cabins around a creek. The homeowners had done their job and cleared fuel from the immediate vicinity and had good defensible space.
The inferno had come blazing down the mountain, the summer-dry brush ready fuel. They’d made their stand and saved the structures, but now had to race the fire to get to the highway. Diego looked in the side mirror and with a sinking stomach saw that the fire had jumped the road. The cabins they’d left would be okay since the area around them was already burned, but now the inferno was marching toward Hangman’s Loss.
That set the pattern for the night. They were fighting a war against a conflagration aided by searing hot weather and withering winds. The crew would combat the fire and protect structures, only to move on to another battlefield and do it all over again. And the flames never really laid down with the cooler temperatures at night, still snaking into canyons and up hillsides, like a fire-breathing dragon wreaking a path of destruction.
By daybreak, Diego was exhausted, thirsty, and hungry. The crew made it back to the base camp that was located at the high school in Hangman’s Loss. Long tables of food were set up under tents, and Diego sat at a table with his giant breakfast burrito with lots of salsa and about a gallon of orange juice.
“You gonna hit the showers?” Justin Trainer, one of the guys on his crew, had opted for scrambled eggs and a mountain of hash browns, all doused with salsa. His eyes were bloodshot, his face grimy with soot. Diego rubbed his own eyes and knew they were as red as Justin’s.
“Yeah, but not here.” Diego’s house was only a half mile away. He’d let incident command know he was leaving, then get his shower and a few hours of sleep in his own home.
###
Eva groaned. She rolled over and made the mistake of opening her eyes. A gray snout and black nose rested on the edge of the mattress, a soft golden-brown gaze silently pleading with her to get out of bed. The evening before she’d been busy at the middle school where a temporary Red Cross evacuation center had been set up. Eva, Maddy, and Logan had brought vats of soup, loaves of bread, and trays of pastries and cookies to help feed those who had been forced from their homes by the fury of the fire.
Eva had stayed past midnight, setting up cots, handing out toiletries, and at the end of the evening, she was helping a mom whose husband was fighting the fire to calm her children. Eva had rubbed their little girl’s back until she slept while the mom walked the floor with a fretful infant. Worry about Diego and the other firefighters was bad enough, but hearing the rumor that spread through the center that the fire had been deliberately set was doubly disheartening.
“It’s not even ten. Give me a break, I was up late.” Finn didn’t care. His stomach told time better than the clock. “Okay, okay. Your breakfast is late. I’ll get up.”
After he’d gone out and done his business, he stood watching her as she scooped food into his bowl and set it on the floor, then put the coffee on to percolate. When she looked at her dog a second later, his bowl was clean and his expression said, Was that all?
Then she remembered Diego’s African violet needed water. A big, brawny firefighter with an African violet. It was kind of cute. She retrieved the key, slipped on flip-flops, and after confining Finn to her front yard, crossed her driveway to the house next door. Using Diego’s key to enter his house felt a bit awkward. She pushed open the front door to reveal a living room to the right, the kitchen to the left, and a long hallway between that suggested the bedrooms and bathroom were in the back. Basically, the same floor plan as her cottage.
Figuring the kitchen was the most likely room to find the plant, she headed in that direction. While the living room had been fairly tidy, the kitchen looked like what she expected from a single guy. Dishes were piled next to the sink, there were a couple of empty beer bottles on the counter, and the trash smelled ripe. Trash pickup was in the morning, so she’d take care of that for him. While he had a bowl with bright red apples in the center of the table, there was no houseplant.
The living room yielded similar results. That left the back rooms. The smaller bedroom had been turned into a serious exercise room. A complicated-looking weight set took up a quarter of the room, a punching bag hung suspended from the ceiling, and other pieces of machinery she couldn’t identify occupied the remainder of the space. No wonder the guy had such yummy shoulders.
She stepped into the master bedroom and when she caught a look at the bed, gripped the door jamb as her breath backed up in her lungs. Oh. My. God. Diego Jones was home, he was in bed, and he was asleep. Naked. He was naked in his bed. Had she thought he was gorgeous before? No, gorgeous was a severe understatement that didn’t catch the perfection that was Diego Jones. She swiped the drool from the corner of her mouth, grateful for the slowly revolving ceiling fan, even if it did little to assuage the heat pulsing from her body.
He lay sprawled on his back, one arm thrown over his head. Dark lashes formed an arc under closed lids. Wiry hair covered his pecs and upper abs until narrowing to form a strip arrowing straight south. If she’d ever wondered if he was circumcised, now she had her answer, because, yes indeed, he was. The doctors back then had done a good job.
She tried to breathe normally, a nearly impossible feat because her breasts felt hot, her cheeks burned, even her fingertips tingled. Did non-menopausal women have hot flashes? Maybe her head would erupt like a volcano and she could be memorialized as a modern marvel of science. At least if she exploded all that heat would dissipate. She fanned her cheeks with her hands and tried not to pass out.
Like breaking a bond of superglue, she gave a heroic effort and dragged her gaze to his face. Diego’s eyes were open and focused on her with an intensity that had t
he heat boiling over to flash point.
Good thing he was a fireman.
Chapter Five
“You want to join me?”
Talk about hot. His gaze crackled as it traveled over her, searing her skin. Which served to remind Eva she was wearing what she’d slept in, a thin tank top with no bra and the shortest of cotton shorts.
Her mouth fell open to answer, and all she could do was pant.
His brows lowered. “Are you hyperventilating?”
She fanned her cheeks with her hands. “No. I, uh—” Her mind blanked. Why was she in his house again? Oh, yeah, the African violet, she remembered in a thankful rush. “I was, um, looking for your African violet. To water it. Because you asked me to water it. I don’t want it to die.” She was an articulate person, so why had speech become so difficult?
She gave a sad groan of disappointment when he sat up and pulled the sheet across his waist.
“I’ll take care of it. But thanks.”
“No problem. I didn’t see your truck, or I wouldn’t have used the key.” She backed up a step. She had to get out of there before she did something truly embarrassing, like tackling him so she could lick him like a melting ice cream cone. Not that she wasn’t embarrassed enough to have been caught drooling over him.
“Base camp was set up at the high school so I walked home to get a shower and a few hours of shut-eye.”
“Right. Good plan. I’ll leave you to it, then.” She took another step in retreat.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
His statement stopped her in her tracks. “Oh no, big boy. You can’t ask me to join you when you’re all,” she waved a hand up and down, “like that. It’s not fair. I’m going home to protect my sanity.”
“How about a kiss? Just a little one.”
“No way am I coming anywhere near you in your naked state. I’m smarter than that.”
The image of his wolfish grin stayed in her mind all the way back to her house.
Thankfully, Finn was where she’d left him in the yard. Determined not to think about Diego, she retrieved training treats from the house and spent the next hour going through simple commands and training exercises to find out what her best bud knew. Which turned out to be not a lot.
“Sit,” she commanded. Finn flopped down and rolled onto his back, paws in the air. “What the heck, dog?”
When he gained his feet, she tried again. “Okay, Finn, sit.” She accompanied the voice command with a hand gesture. He seemed to get it, because this time he planted his butt. Until he rolled over on his back. “Right. That needs work.”
The postal worker waved as she delivered the mail. Eva opened the packet holding a wire ring and Finn’s tag engraved with his name and her cell number. “Okay, Finn Man,” she said as she worked the ring onto his collar, “even if you escape, you’ll be identified.” She added the rabies tag, and with the collar back around his neck, he shook his head and tried to bite the tags. When that proved impossible, he caught sight of his tail and began chasing it.
“Crazy Dog, I’ve got to get to work. I told Maddy I’d make more soup and sandwiches to take to the evacuation shelter.”
She brought the dog into the house with her while she showered. In the hot steam the image of Diego stretched out on his bed had her turning the taps to cold.
###
Business at the café was slow but steady throughout the lunch hours and into the early afternoon. The growing fire dominated conversation. The dry hot weather contributed to its spread, and speculation that it had been caused by arson brought out a lot of heated comments.
Diego came in, dressed in heavy-duty pants that she guessed must be fire resistant, and a navy t-shirt with “HL FIRE DEPT.” printed across the back in block letters. The material stretched across broad shoulders and his wide chest, bringing back the vivid memory of how she’d seen him that morning. She felt a trickle of sweat between her breasts as heat rose from her chest to her cheeks.
His serious expression helped her to tamp down on the barely banked lust.
“Are you going back to the fire?”
“Yeah. We’re heading out in an hour. I wanted to see you, and thought I’d come in for a sandwich.”
Damn it. The flutter his words caused plus her physical reaction to him made it apparent that her efforts to resist him were futile. Risking her heart was scary after the fiasco that was her ex-fiancé, but apparently falling for Diego wasn’t something she could control.
She passed Diego’s sandwich order to Drew in the back and handed Diego the iced tea he’d ordered. He drank half the glass in one gulp. God, even his throat moving when he swallowed was sexy. She brought his meal to his table and he grasped her hand, rubbing his thumb across her knuckles. She’d already noticed it was a favorite gesture of his. “Sit with me?”
She wavered, and when she nodded, she felt that she’d agreed to more than sitting with him. She retrieved her own glass of iced tea from behind the counter and told Mariana she was taking a break.
Diego sank strong white teeth into the thick sourdough bread as he took an enormous bite of his roast beef sandwich. After he swallowed, he said, “You see any more of Lancaster?”
She shook her head. “No. Hopefully Brad rattled his cage enough that he’s backed off.”
“Maybe, but I don’t trust him. This fire is spreading fast and I’ll be on the line for the next week, so I won’t be able to watch out for you. But whenever we’re back at camp I’ll try to get home, make sure everything is okay. Call nine-one-one if anything seems off to you, and I’ll have my phone on me so don’t hesitate to call me, too. For anything.”
“You have enough to deal with without worrying about me, Diego. I’m fine.”
He bit off the red flesh of a watermelon slice she’d added to his plate, then wiped his fingers on a napkin. He leaned forward, forearms resting on the table edge, expression intent. “Eva, tell me I’m not alone in thinking we’ve got something between us. When I caught you looking at me this morning, I’m pretty sure there was more than simple lust there.”
Eva stifled the flippant answer that wanted to roll off her tongue. He was being sincere, and she owed him an honest answer. She took a steadying breath. “I like you, Diego. I like you a lot. But I’m not ready for a relationship.”
“What happened with the ex to make you distrust men?”
She shrugged. “I don’t distrust men as a general rule.” She held up a hand when he appeared ready to argue the point. “It doesn’t matter. He dumped me a week before the wedding. Said he needed more in life than he could get with me. That’s it.”
“Bastard.”
“Yeah. I wish he’d said something before my parents had spent so much money on the wedding venue, the caterers, my dress. Friends and family had made arrangements to come to Tahoe, and they’d spent money on gifts and travel expenses. Then I had to call every one of them and tell them the wedding was off.”
“Sounds like you were more upset by the change of plans than him leaving you.”
She wanted to snap at him, but he was right. “Maybe. Regardless, I felt betrayed. We had committed to each other, and then he broke it off without even a conversation. If he was having second thoughts, he should have said something much sooner.” She untangled the string of her apron she had wrapped around her fingers. “I thought we were friends. A friend doesn’t take off for a monastery in China without talking about it.”
Diego swallowed the last of his sandwich. “Do you love him?”
“I thought I did, but now I don’t think I ever truly loved him.” The knowledge that her reaction to Diego was what made her doubt her feelings for Bruce was better left unsaid. “Once I got over the hurt, I was glad he’d stopped the wedding. But I was so mad at him. That’s taken me longer to get past.”
Eva realized she’d told Diego more about her failed relationship with Bruce than she’d shared with anyone beyond her family.
“After that experience, I g
et why you’re cautious. But, Eva, I’m not going anywhere. What you see is what you get. And if you like what you see, if you think we could have something together, then let me know. We can start slow. I’m attracted to you, more than I’ve ever been with anyone else. I don’t want someone from your past ruining a future we might be able to build together. I don’t know if that’s where this is heading, but I’d like to find out.”
“You’re pretty direct.”
“I don’t play games.” Ice clinked as he set down his drink. He reached across the table and took her hand again, this time bringing her fingers to his lips. “Eva Gallagher, will you be my girlfriend?”
“This is you going slow?”
“This is me laying the groundwork. From there we can go as slow as you want.”
Time stretched as he waited for her response. He let go of her hand, but kept her gaze ensnared with his. That she couldn’t be near him without her heartbeat kicking up and her blood heating several degrees told her the chemistry was there. Diego’s honesty felt like a balm to her soul, exactly what she needed to heal from Bruce’s betrayal. And beyond that, she liked her hottie firefighter. She liked his looks, his protective streak, the easy way he had with people.
With no customers in the dining room, she stood and circled the table. Laying her hands on either side of his face, she leaned forward and pressed her lips to his in a kiss with the intention of making it as sweet as it was full of potential. “Yes,” she murmured, “I’ll be your girlfriend.”
A blur of movement out the window caught her attention and had her jolting upright. “I think that was Weird Guy.”
“Who?”
“Lancaster. I think he was outside just now.”
Diego shoved to his feet and was out the door in seconds. Eva followed him outside. The normally busy boardwalk along Main Street was mostly empty, and a smoky haze cast a pall over the afternoon sun. Diego looked down the side street and behind the café before returning to her. “If it was him, he’s gone now. When are you off?”