Torch

by Roxie Noir

  Torch: A Second Chance Romance

  Roxie Noir

  Contents

  Thanks to…

  Author’s Note

  Mailing List

  Dedication

  Torch

  1. Clementine

  2. Hunter

  3. Clementine

  4. Hunter

  5. Clementine

  6. Hunter

  7. Clementine

  8. Hunter

  9. Clementine

  10. Hunter

  11. Clementine

  12. Hunter

  13. Clementine

  14. Hunter

  15. Clementine

  16. Hunter

  17. Clementine

  18. Hunter

  19. Clementine

  20. Hunter

  21. Clementine

  22. Hunter

  23. Clementine

  24. Hunter

  25. Clementine

  26. Hunter

  27. Clementine

  28. Hunter

  29. Clementine

  30. Hunter

  31. Clementine

  32. Hunter

  33. Clementine

  34. Hunter

  35. Clementine

  36. Hunter

  37. Clementine

  38. Hunter

  39. Clementine

  40. Hunter

  41. Clementine

  Epilogue: Clementine

  Mailing List

  Also by Roxie: Reign

  Also by Roxie: Convict

  Also By Roxie: Loaded

  Also by Roxie Noir

  About Roxie

  Ride

  1. Mae

  2. Jackson

  3. Mae

  4. Jackson

  5. Mae

  6. Jackson

  7. Mae

  8. Jackson

  9. Mae

  10. Jackson

  11. Mae

  12. Jackson

  13. Mae

  14. Jackson

  15. Mae

  16. Jackson

  17. Mae

  18. Jackson

  19. Mae

  20. Jackson

  21. Mae

  22. Jackson

  23. Mae

  24. Jackson

  25. Mae

  26. Mae

  27. Jackson

  28. Mae

  29. Jackson

  30. Mae

  31. Jackson

  Epilogue One

  Epilogue Two

  Epilogue Two

  Mailing List w/epilogue

  Thanks to…

  C.Y. and A.R., who probably won’t read this because they don’t know my pen name, but without whom I don’t know if I’d make it. Thanks for your enthusiasm for firemen.

  To Aubrey and Vivian, my sisters from another mister, who keep this bearable. It’s been a hell of a summer, but I’m glad we’re still truckin’ together.

  To Sennah, who’s braver than she thinks and is also my favorite editor.

  And finally, at the risk of being super cheesy: to the men and women who get out there and fight wildfires. It’s hard as hell and scary as shit, but you do it anyway, and everyone whose homes haven’t burned down thanks you.

  Author’s Note

  I made up almost all the geography in this book: towns, national forests, rivers, mountains, etc. They’re loosely based on real places, but not too closely.

  I’m also nearly certain I got some aspects of wildlands firefighting wrong. I’ve never done it before, and no amount of research is a substitute for experience, so apologies for anything I screwed up.

  But otherwise… enjoy the ride.

  Join my newsletter for a subscribers-only special epilogue, coming October 17!

  You’ll also get deals on new releases, giveaways, ARC offers, and no spam ever.

  For Mr. Noir, always.

  Sorry about the late nights.

  Torch

  A Second Chance Romance

  1

  Clementine

  The white-haired man at the front of the line grabs the salad tongs for the third time. He’s still holding his paper plate in his left hand and trying to hold both tongs in his right, which is his first mistake.

  Mr. Jessop’s second mistake is trying to grab the salad like a claw in one of those stuffed animal machines. The right move is to scoop it with the bottom tong and use the top one to keep the salad in place.

  Listen, when you go to enough spaghetti dinners hosted by the Ladies’ Auxiliary to the Lodgepole Rotary Club, you learn a thing or two.

  He’s got salad in the tongs. He’s moving his arm slowly from his shoulder, maneuvering the mass of green closer to his paper plate. Everyone behind him in line is watching, sweating in this non-air-conditioned basement, and praying that this attempt works.

  Move your plate closer to the salad bowl, I think. You have two hands, use them both.

  Closer. Closer.

  Then, an inch away from his plate, a tomato slice falls to the floor.

  “Dang it,” Mr. Jessop says.

  “Whoops!” says Katie Parker, the rotund, cheerful woman serving meatballs. “Don’t worry about it, Mr. Jessop, we’ll get it in a minute.”

  Mr. Jessop just shakes his head, smiling.

  “I’ve got butterfingers these days,” he says.

  Please let this line move forward, I think. Mr. Jessop is a sweet old man who owns the tiny grocery in town, and we all love him, but right now we just want this buffet line to move, because I can feel the sweat trickling down my spine.

  Not that my seat is much cooler, but at least I won’t be standing in heels that I last wore three years ago. I’ve only been upright for ten minutes, but I swear my feet are about to develop gangrene and fall off.

  “Great spread as always,” Mr. Jessop says. “I keep comin’ back for the great food and the pretty ladies serving it.”

  He’s nearly ninety, so it’s charming instead of creepy when he flirts with a woman in her mid-twenties.

  “Enjoy!” Katie says brightly, and Mr. Jessop moves toward his table.

  The rest of the line takes a deep breath of relief, all at once. From there it moves more or less smoothly: we pick up plates and forks and knives and napkins. Nancy Turner gives me a regulation amount of spaghetti noodles, and Katie Parker gives me three meatballs and one spoonful of sauce.

  Say what you want about the Ladies’ Auxiliary, but they know what they’re doing when it comes to feeding a crowd. Every plate of spaghetti is perfectly uniform, and I’ve got no doubt whatsoever that the last plate they serve will look exactly the same as the first.

  These ladies do not run out of food early.

  I put my plate down on the buffet, serve myself salad with a tong in each hand, take a glass of non-alcoholic punch, and finally make my way back to my uncomfortable folding chair next to Jennifer, my boss.

  “They ought to clear up that bottleneck at the salad,” she says as I sit down, carefully folding my skirt under myself and lowering my butt toward my chair like a person used to wearing heels.

  “It’s the tongs,” I say. “They’d be better off with the plastic ones you squeeze, but they always use those fancy wooden ones that the Boy Scouts gifted them a couple years ago.”

  Jennifer just shakes her head, then points to my plate and hers.

  “Look at this. I bet if we were to get out a scale, we’d have exactly the same amount of spaghetti, sauce, and meatballs. They’ve got military precision with meatballs, but they can’t control their salad?”

  She’s mostly kidding. Like, eighty percent kidding. The other twenty percent of Jennifer loves efficiency and is obsessed with finding solutions to inefficient problems.

  Why she decided to work for the U.S. Forest Service, which isn’t exactly a
model of efficiency, is beyond me.

  I sit down, cut a meatball in half, and wind some spaghetti around my fork.

  “Are you gonna go tell Nancy how to make her buffet dinner better?” I ask, grinning at Jennifer.

  Jennifer just laughs and winds spaghetti around her own fork.

  “Please, my reputation in town is already bad enough after the Gertrude incident last week,” she says. “I don’t need to also be the woman who thought she could tell Nancy how to do something better.”

  Gertrude is a poorly-behaved husky who loves two things: escaping Jennifer’s yard, and stealing ladies’ undergarments from clotheslines. She’s a sweet dog, but it’s not a great combination of interests.

  “Yeah, you should probably lay low for a while,” I say. “Your invitation to the annual Pumpkin Festival Celebration Dinner is probably hanging in the balance.”

  Jennifer snorts, looking quickly behind her, as if to make sure that Nancy’s not listening in somehow.

  “If that’s the threat, maybe I should actually—”

  On the table, her phone starts buzzing, and a picture of her thirteen-year-old daughter Jessie pops up on the screen. Jennifer doesn’t finish her sentence, just sighs.

  “I’ll bet you five bucks she can’t find the microwave popcorn in the pantry,” she says, picking up her phone. “Hi, sweetie.”

  I can hear Jessie’s high-pitched voice from where I’m sitting, and Jennifer’s eyebrows both go up at once. She stands.

  “You’ve gotta slow down, sweetheart, I can’t understand a word you’re saying,” she says into the phone, mouthing sorry at me as she walks away from our table.

  “That girl was always a little high-strung,” says Mrs. Flughorn, seated across the long wooden table from me. “I wouldn’t have left her home alone tonight.”

  “She’s thirteen,” I say, already defensive of Jennifer. “I stayed home alone every day when I was thirteen.”

  “Some kids can handle it,” Mrs. Flughorn says, looking through her glasses at me. She’s got a helmet of gray hair that I’ve never seen move, no matter the weather.

  “Jessie has to learn sometime,” I say, even though I don’t know why I’m arguing about this. Mrs. Flughorn is exactly the kind of stern-but-secretly-kind small-town old lady who’ll probably die without ever changing her mind.

  I mean, I have no idea what her first name is. Everyone just knows her as Mrs. Flughorn. She just shakes her head and takes a dainty-yet-authoritative bite of her salad as Jennifer comes back.

  “A raccoon got in the house,” she says without preamble, and leans over her chair, still standing as she shoves half a meatball into her mouth from her plate.

  “Again?” I ask.

  Jennifer nods, her mouth full.

  “You have to do something about that dog door,” I say. “Or at least teach the raccoons that it goes both ways.”

  Jennifer shakes her head and swallows.

  “Every one of those fuckers is probably rabid,” she says, then looks at Mrs. Flughorn. “Sorry.”

  She leans over again, stabbing another meatball with her fork.

  “I gotta go, can you present the plaque?” she asks casually, stuffing the meatball into her mouth.

  My heart plummets, and suddenly I feel like something’s squeezing all my organs together, and it’s not my pencil skirt.

  I just stare up at Jennifer, my mouth slightly open.

  “Peez?” she says around a mouthful of meatball.

  My mouth’s gone dry, and I glance at the microphone in the front of the room. There’s probably a hundred and fifty, maybe two hundred people in here, and half of them I don’t even know. My palms start sweating, my toes curl inside my shoes, and the spaghetti inside my stomach starts writhing dangerously.

  “Can’t, uh...” I trail off, looking for anyone else here who can represent the Forest Service. “Can’t Bryce do it?”

  Jennifer glances over at our summer intern. He’s nineteen and currently being grilled about his future by Jane Widman, the high school’s college counselor. I can see him sweating.

  “No,” Jennifer says. “Clementine, you’re the Communications Ranger, just go up, say this is a token of our thanks for your hard work in containing the Elkhorn fire, hand it over, you’re done.”

  I feel like she may as well be asking me to juggle flaming torches while walking a tightrope across the Grand Canyon.

  “I’m only the temporary Communications Ranger because Becky got that job at Yellowstone!” I say.

  Jennifer puts on her jacket, and I can tell that the conversation is almost over.

  “Clementine, please?” she says. “You gave a talk to three hundred middle-schoolers last week, this is way less people than that.”

  But these are adults who will be looking at me, and thinking about what I’m saying, and noticing how sweaty I am....

  My heart is beating out of control, and I have to force myself to keep breathing normally. Jennifer puts one hand on my shoulder and leans in.

  “I wouldn’t ask if I thought you wouldn’t do a perfectly great job,” she says, and pushes the plaque in front of my plate. “Just pretend they’re a bunch of kindergarteners and you’ll be fine, I promise. You’ve gotta get over this public speaking thing sooner or later.”

  I just nod. My hair is sticking to the sweat on the back of my neck. Jennifer squeezes my shoulder.

  “The stakes will never be lower, I promise,” she says. “You’ll be fine. I gotta go trap a raccoon.”

  “Good luck,” I say, though my voice sounds far away, even to me.

  Jennifer gives me one final pat and then walks away, through the double doors that lead out of the church basement. For a moment or two, I imagine that she’ll come back and say False alarm, I can present the plaque, but she doesn’t.

  I look down at it. It’s your standard commemorative plaque, maybe six inches high and ten long, a metal plate on wood.

  This plaque presented to the

  Canyon Country Hotshot Crew

  by the

  United States Forest Service

  Big Sky National Forest, Copper Creek Ranger Division

  With gratitude for your hard work and dedication

  in containing the Elkhorn Fire

  Fighters for Life

  I know perfectly well that this shouldn’t be a big deal. No one in the audience is even going to remember what I say — I’m just the person presenting some plaque, between the performance by Twinkle Toes Tap Dance and America, the Beautiful sung by the high school chorus.

  But I can’t help it. The thought of saying two sentences in front of this many adults panics me like nothing else. At least Mrs. Flughorn, across the table from me, is telling someone else where they’re going wrong in disciplining their two-year-old and she’s stopped looking at me.

  I don’t eat the rest of my meatballs. After a few minutes, the mayor of Lodgepole, Barry Vashton, steps up to the microphone and starts in with his small-town, folksy act, introducing the sixteen-year-old who’s won an essay contest and is going to read a few pages on “What Service to My Country Means to Me.”

  The sixteen-year-old looks considerably less nervous than I feel. He does fine, then walks away from the microphone to polite applause. Barry comes back. There’s a kid reading her poem, a high school student singing a song he wrote himself, a group of little kids presenting their drawings to the firefighters.

  It’s all your standard, small-town, thanks-for-saving-our-asses stuff. I’m at the back of the room, so I can’t see the firefighters’ faces, but I imagine they see this sort of thing a lot. Hopefully they still find it charming, at least.

  Finally, Barry announces the Twinkle Toes. I feel as if someone’s kneading my stomach like bread dough, but I take a deep breath and rehearse what I’m going to say.

  On behalf of the Copper Creek Ranger Division, I’d like to present this plaque...

  Does that sound dumb? That definitely sounds dumb.

  I here
by present this plaque of thanks to the Canyon Country Hotshot Crew...

  Oh my God, that’s worse. The Twinkle Toes are tapping away at the front of the room, seven or eight elementary school kids with enormous smiles plastered on their faces, almost in sync. I take deep breaths and try to concentrate on just watching them, telling myself that the right words will just magically come to mind when it’s time for me to get up there.

  The song wraps up. Sweat trickles down the back of my neck, and I force myself to clap along with everyone else in the room, even though I’m trying to keep my hands from shaking. Barry walks back to the microphone.

  “Weren’t they wonderful, folks?” he says, grinning widely. “Let’s hear it again for the Twinkle Toes!”

  We clap again.

  Maybe he’ll misread the program, forget the plaque, and I won’t have to present it, I think.

  Maybe the earth will open, swallow me whole, and I won’t have to do this.

  “Next, I’d like to give the floor to the senior ranger from the Copper Creek Division, Jennifer Tetson. Jennifer?”

  Oh God, he doesn’t even know that she’s not here. Now I have to say that, too, along with some variation on, “Here’s a plaque, thanks for keeping things from burning down.”

  I’ve got the plaque in a death grip, but I stand. I swear I can feel a hundred and fifty or two hundred eyes on me, and I somehow navigate stepping away from the table and walking toward the microphone in my high heels.

  You can do this, McKinnon, I think. The stakes are never gonna be lower.

  My heels click across the tile floor. I hear the soft sounds of people whispering to each other, the scrape of plastic forks against paper plates, napkins rustling. Then I’m at the microphone, I’m clearing my throat, my hand is reaching out to adjust it in the stand.

  “Thanks, Barry,” I hear myself saying. My voice is higher pitched than normal, but it’s not even shaking.

  It’s a fucking miracle.

  “Unfortunately, Jennifer was called away at the last minute,” I say, and pause.