"Sorry," Evan mumbled automatically.
He retrieved his phone and squinted at the message on the app.
"Shit," he said again, suddenly fully awake as he read the terse message.
The adrenaline rush hit him. This is bad. This is gonna be really bad.
"What is it? Mrs. Johnson having shortness of breath again?" mumbled Mary from beneath the shelter of her pillow.
Mrs. Johnson lived in town, was nearly eighty years old, and suffered from various minor ailments. She had fallen into the habit of calling the emergency number at least once a month since her husband passed away last year.
Evan had finally set up a regular coffee date/welfare check for every Tuesday afternoon, when one of the town's volunteer firefighters would stop by Mrs. Johnson's cottage, located just off Main Street, and have a cup of coffee with the lonely old lady.
When it was his turn to visit, Evan always picked up a few lemon bars or shortbread cookies from Cinnamon + Sugar to share with Mrs. Johnson. This had mostly stopped the middle-of-the-night calls for "medical emergencies."
"Not this time. The Bearpaw Ridge Inn is burning down," Evan told Mary, throwing back the comforter and reaching for his uniform pants. "And there are people trapped inside."
Mary raised her head, looking appealingly disheveled in a cloud of honey-colored hair and smeared mascara. "Oh, no!" she exclaimed, with real dismay.
Like all of his brothers, Evan served as a volunteer with the Bearpaw Ridge Fire Department whenever he was home from field assignments. Because the Grizzly Creek Ranch was a twenty-minute drive out of town, Mary had invited him to stay over for the nights when he was on call.
The worst calls rarely came in during the daytime, when he was collating and analyzing his fieldwork data at his office.
Nope, the really hairy—or really gory—accidents and fires all seemed to happen between midnight and six a.m., when Evan was usually curled up in bed with a soft armful of willing woman.
He'd known Mary for years. They'd gone to high school together, where his skinny freshman self had nursed a year-long crush on the sleek senior wolf shifter.
Then she'd graduated, gone away to the police academy, and married another wolf shifter.
When her marriage ended, she'd moved home to Bearpaw Ridge and taken a job with the town's police department, where her uncle Bill Jacobsen served as sheriff and chief of police.
And she and Evan had reconnected. He wasn't a skinny freshman anymore, and she was lonely and unattached. Once her divorce became final, they'd settled into a friends-with-benefits arrangement whenever either of them was between relationships.
Mary was not only damned attractive, she was safe.
She had made it clear right at the beginning of their on-again, off-again arrangement that she would only consider mating another wolf shifter. She was willing to sleep with Evan because they had excellent chemistry and he could outlast any Ordinary man in bed.
But since he wasn't a wolf, Evan felt that there wasn't any danger that she would try to shift their comfortable arrangement into something more.
After his breakup with Emma, Evan had set his ShiftMatch account to inactive. It hadn't taken long for him to ask Mary out for a drink and to resume their arrangement.
Evan finished buttoning his pants, leaned over, and gave her a quick peck on the cheek. "Not sure when I'll be back," he told her.
"I hope everyone's okay," she mumbled and rolled over to go back to sleep.
She didn't have to be at work for another three hours, and every moment of sleep was precious when you worked in law enforcement.
It was dark and quiet outside, and there would be no one to see him use his shifter speed as Evan sprinted for the fire station, located just three blocks away.
* * *
When the four volunteer firefighters on duty arrived on the scene seven minutes later, the three-story wooden hotel building was blazing, sending thick plumes of smoke up into the night sky.
Evan, his older brothers Mark and Dane, and longtime firefighter Fred Barker pulled up in the Bearpaw Ridge Fire Department's ladder truck. As usual, Evan was driving. He loved big vehicles, and the ladder truck was probably the largest truck in town.
"Holy-moley," said Fred, sticking his head out of the fire truck's window to peer up at the hotel. "That's going to be a challenge to search. Other than the woman who called it in, do we know how many guests might be trapped in there?"
He was an older wolf shifter with salt-and-pepper hair, deeply incised crow's feet at the corners of his eyes, and smile lines bracketing his mouth.
Fred was also the town's electrician and had served Bearpaw Ridge as a volunteer paramedic and firefighter for fifteen years. His wife Linda was one of the county's emergency dispatchers, and it was she who had taken the initial call about the fire.
"No idea," Evan said tightly, staring at the burning building and trying to gauge how far the fire had progressed.
The Bearpaw Ridge Inn was nearly a century old and had been renovated numerous times, though the last time had been over twenty years ago. It was a rambling, three-story wooden building with a lot of rooms.
He noticed three men, ranging in age from high schooler to grandfather, standing on the sidewalk in their pajamas. All three had blankets wrapped around their shoulders, and they were standing guard over a pile of fishing gear.
As Evan slid out from behind the wheel of the fire engine, he wondered whether the three men had been hotel guests.
They looked uninjured, so he followed Dane around the truck to the locker where the SCBA masks and air tanks were stored
These mask and tanks would protect them from breathing in the toxic smoke once they entered the building. They were all already clad in the standard—and heavy—turnout gear of helmet, insulated coat, bunker pants, and steel-toed boots.
Once the SCBA mask was in place and covering his face, Evan felt like a medieval knight in full armor, ready to charge into the flames and confront a dragon. Or at least rescue a fair maiden.
Movement in the periphery of his vision caught his attention, and he glanced up at the hotel's façade. Linda Barker, the emergency dispatcher, had informed them on the drive over that there were guests trapped in Room 301.
Was that the room? Had he just seen a curtain move? It was hard to tell in the pulsating reflections of the lights from the fire engine.
One of the windows slid open, and a young woman in a loose nightshirt leaned out to wave frantically at him.
One fair maiden, coming right up, Evan thought with grim humor. He waved back and removed his mask.
The flashing lights from the fire engine played over her face and the exterior walls of the hotel and highlighted the thick clouds of smoke wreathing the top of the building.
Even sleep-rumpled and terrified, she was striking, with large eyes set under dark brows in a pale oval face and a cloud of soft-looking light brown hair floating around her face and shoulders. With her free arm, she was clutching a wailing baby to her chest.
"Stay put. We're coming for you! How many people in the room?" he shouted up at her.
Fred, Mark, and Dane all followed his glance up.
"Just us!" the woman replied. The wind shifted, pushing smoke into her face, and she began coughing violently.
Evan waved again to acknowledge he'd heard her. "Not gonna leave anyone behind!"
He turned his head. "Fred!" he hollered in the direction of the cab. "Third story, fourth window from the left. Get that ladder up—NOW!"
Fred immediately stopped what he was doing and ran for the ladder controls, located in the fire engine's cab.
"I'm coming up with you," Dane said, his SCBA mask in his hand.
Mark had unrolled a hose from the truck and was in the process of loosening a side cap on a nearby hydrant using a long hydrant wrench.
As the engine's ladder began to rise slowly towards the window, Evan saw his older brother return his attention to the task at hand.
/> As urgent as the woman's plight was, getting water on the fire was just as important right now, and Mark wouldn't abandon his assigned job unless things really went south.
A heavily stubbled man whom Evan recognized as Andy Schlumbacher, the Bearpaw Ridge Inn's night manager, came up the sidewalk in a stumbling run.
"Oh my God! Oh my God!" Andy repeated, coming to a halt near the fire engine. He looked around wildly at the equipment and flashing lights, the rapidly growing crowd of onlookers, and the burning hotel. "I was only gone for a half-hour! It was my dinner break! Oh my God! Gramma is going to kill me when she hears that her hotel burned down!"
Elsa Schlumbacher had owned the Bearpaw Ridge Inn for as long as anyone in town could remember, and until recently, it had been a well-respected hotel with badly dated decor.
The inn had really gone downhill in the past year or two, though, in terms of maintenance and cleanliness, and there had been talk that perhaps it was time for the old lady to pass the business on to one of her sons or grandsons.
But maybe not Andy. Evan recoiled from the stench of alcohol that surrounded the man like an invisible fog. His dinner had apparently been a liquid one.
"Andy, focus!" Mark snapped, coming up behind them, the hydrant wrench still in his hand. The hose leading from the hydrant to the fire engine was taut and swollen with water now. "How many people are in the building?"
Andy stared blankly at him for a long moment.
"How many guests?" Mark demanded impatiently. "And was anyone else working tonight?"
"No—I'm the only one on duty until five a.m." Taking a visible deep breath, Andy looked around again, scanning the sidewalk. He spotted the three pajama-clad men with their pile of fishing gear, and his shoulders relaxed. "Those guys, and…" He raised his gaze to follow the slowly ascending ladder. "That woman and her baby. Oh, God," he repeated.
"That's it? That's all? In the middle of fishing season?" Evan asked, torn between relief at not having to conduct a dangerous room-to-room search inside a burning building and disbelief that the Bearpaw Ridge Inn had only managed to fill two of its rooms on the eve of the Memorial Day long weekend. "You're absolutely sure that no one else is staying here?"
Andy shook his head mournfully. "We got some bad reviews on those hotel websites," he explained. "They called this place a dump. It ain't no dump—it's a historic building!" He blinked and his chin jerked up, as if he'd suddenly remembered something. "Shit! The computer! I gotta get the computer out of the office—"
He started forward, and Mark caught his arm. Andy tried to pull away, but he was an Ordinary, and Mark, like all of the Swansons, was a bear shifter, with a shifter's strength and quick reflexes.
"You're staying put, right here, until we get everyone out of the building and put out that fire," he told Andy sternly.
The two of them had been on the Bearpaw Ridge High School football team together, before Mark had left town to attend university and then law school out of state. Andy had stayed in Bearpaw Ridge, doing seasonal stints as a ranch hand before eventually going to work for his grandmother as the hotel's handyman and night manager.
By this time, the ladder had completed its painfully slow rise to the third-story window.
"You're absolutely sure that no one else is in that building?" Evan asked.
Andy nodded. "Swear to God."
"Good enough." Evan turned and climbed quickly onto the top of the fire engine, using the steps just to the rear of the cab. Moving easily despite his heavy, bulky protective gear, he speedily ascended the ladder, Dane close on his heels.
He didn't bother putting his SCBA mask on again—he needed to be able to talk to the woman and guide her safely down onto the ladder.
Below them, Mark and Fred were dragging one of the preconnected hoses into place so they could begin putting out the fire.
"Oh, thank God you're here!" the young woman said, leaning out of the window as Evan approached.
"It's gonna be okay," Evan assured her, relieved that she looked frightened but not panicked. "Anyone hurt?"
The young woman shook her head.
"Good. My name's Evan, and this—" Evan jerked a thumb over his shoulder "is my brother Dane. We're going to get you both out of there right now."
"I—I'm Stephanie, but everyone calls me Steffi," said the woman, still hanging on to the baby. "And this is Olivia."
Something pinged in the back of Evan's mind…those names sounded kind of familiar…
"Hi, Steffi. How about you hand me your baby first?" The baby was struggling in her tight hold and screaming for all it was worth.
"Hey there, Olivia," Evan crooned, stripping off one of his thick, insulated gloves and reaching out.
Then, to his astonishment and to Steffi's evident horror, the baby shifted in her hold, writhing uncomfortably for a few moments as her howls reached a new pitch of outrage and fright, then changed to a bear cub's yowls of terror.
And Evan made the connection. Olivia. This is Patrick's daughter Olivia. But what the hell is she doing here? Shouldn't she be at Aunt Margaret's place?
And then cub was wriggling and clawing at Steffi's shoulders, ripping the fabric of her pale pink nightshirt and leaving long, bleeding scratches on her flesh.
To Steffi's credit, she didn't let go of the cub.
Evan grabbed the cub by the scruff of the neck.
"I've got her," he told Steffi, and she released her hold on little Olivia at last.
The cub yowled again as he lifted it away from Steffi. Its arms and legs, which protruded from the baby clothes, windmilled wildly.
"Calm down, I've got you," Evan told it, injecting a note of authority into his voice, along with a subvocal rumble of reassurance.
The cub didn't stop moving—it was too wound up for that—but its wilder movements calmed.
Evan turned and handed the cub down to Dane, who was waiting right behind him.
Dane cradled the cub in the crook of his arm. "Hi there, little Olivia," he rumbled.
The cub looked up at him and inhaled deeply, and Evan could see it relax as it recognized the scent of a family member. Then the cub yawned widely, exposing a long pink tongue and rows of small but sharp white teeth. In another moment, its eyes had closed and it curled against Dane, fast asleep.
I guess Dane finally got the magic Dad touch, Evan mused.
He hoped that none of the onlookers gathered below had seen the shift. It was dark and smoky out here—hopefully they'd only seen a shape in baby clothing.
"I—she—I don't know what just happened!" Steffi blurted when Evan turned back to her.
"It'll be okay," Evan assured her, wondering if this was the first time that Olivia had shifted.
Just how much about the Swanson clan had Cousin Patrick revealed to his Ordinary mate…and his Ordinary in-laws?
Centuries of persecution had led to a culture of deep-rooted secrecy in shifter communities like Bearpaw Ridge. Evan couldn't imagine being mated to a woman who didn't know what he was, but he had heard stories of marriages where the Ordinary spouse had no idea that their spouse was a shifter.
The breeze shifted, bringing Steffi's scent to Evan's sensitive nose.
Yep, she was entirely Ordinary…but hot damn, even partly masked by the stink of smoke and diesel fumes from the fire engine below them, she smelled good. Healthy, with a hint of peaches and musk under a faint taint of fear.
If they'd been on a date, rather than three stories above the ground in a burning building, Evan would have yielded to his desire to bury his face in the crook of her neck and just inhale her wonderful scent.
Time enough for that later, he told himself, yanking his attention back to the crisis at hand. First, rescue the fair maiden.
He reached out with his bare hand, and she took it. He felt an odd shock run up his arm and through his chest at the contact. Evan had touched lots of women, and he'd never felt anything like this before.
Steffi's eyes widened, as if she had felt the sa
me thing.
Focus, Evan told himself sternly.
"Can you swing one leg over the windowsill?" he asked Steffi.
She nodded, and using his hand to steady herself, straddled the wide sill of the old-fashioned window. This made the hem of her Hello Kitty nightshirt ride up to the top of her thigh.
Evan swallowed hard, trying to moisten a mouth and throat gone suddenly dry. He tried not to stare at the luscious expanse of her bare leg.
But he couldn't help wondering what Steffi's legs would feel like, wrapped around his hips while he—
Focus, damn it!
"Great. Now the other leg," he encouraged, relieved to hear that his voice sounded normal. Well, mostly normal.
Steffi froze. "Oh God. My dog! I can't believe I almost forgot Royce!" She turned her head to peer inside the darkened, smoky interior of the room. "Royce! Where are you! Royce, come here!"
She began to swing her leg back over the sill. Evan felt her tug at his hand, but he didn't let go.
"Don't," he said. "Let's get you out of there first."
"I can't just leave him!" Steffi protested, still trying to free her hand.
"I promise I'll go in there and get your dog—after we get you safely down this ladder. Just swing your other leg over the sill—yeah, like that," Evan encouraged her.
Now she was sitting in the open window, facing outwards.
Evan took another step up the ladder, came level with the window, and put both hands around her waist. She made a surprised squeak as he lifted her off the sill, and clutched at his coat sleeves.
'"Jeez, you're strong!" she exclaimed as he backed down a couple of rungs and set her gently down just above him on the ladder.
"That what all this fresh mountain air will do for a man," he said solemnly.
She laughed, a full-throated sound that quickly turned into a coughing fit as she inhaled smoke.
Evan carefully guided her down the ladder to the top of the truck, where Dane was waiting, little Olivia still nestled in his arms in bear shape.
"Okay, Dane will take over from here. He's trained as a paramedic, and he'll look both of you over to make sure you're okay," Evan told Steffi. "I'm going back up to look for your dog."
Ignite: A Werebear + BBW Paranormal Romance (Bearpaw Ridge Firefighters Book 3) Page 4