From The Ashes (Golden Falls Fire Book 3)

by Scarlett Andrews

  From The Ashes

  Golden Falls Fire #3

  Scarlett Andrews

  Contents

  Copyright

  Never Miss A New Release!

  Meet Jack & Elizabeth

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Epilogue

  Note To Reader

  Also By The Author

  About the Author & Contact

  FROM THE ASHES

  Copyright © 2018 Scarlett Andrews

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  CLOVER CREATIVES

  For more information about this book or the author, please visit www.scarlettandrews.com.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Edition ISBNs:

  Trade Paperback 978-1-947750-06-7

  Digital 978-1-947750-05-0

  Never Miss A New Release!

  From the Ashes is the third book in the Golden Fall Fire series of contemporary romances. While it can be enjoyed as a stand-alone novel, there are plenty more love stories for the Golden Falls Firefighters, so make sure to sign up for Scarlett’s newsletter so you don’t miss any of her new releases!

  Scarlett’s New Release Newsletter

  Introducing

  JACK & ELIZABETH

  Handsome fire captain Jack Barnes gave up hope of finding love long ago. He keeps busy leading his crew of firefighters at Station One in the small city of Golden Falls, Alaska, and riding his beloved horse, Honest Abe. He tells himself that’s enough, but he hand-built a house fit for a family and his heart yearns for the love of a good woman.

  Leave it to Jack to fall for the one woman he can’t have.

  Elizabeth Armstrong wants more out of life than to just be known as the daughter of the town’s most notorious corrupt cop. Barely making ends meet as a bartender at the Sled Dog Brewery, she has dreams of becoming a nurse, wife, and mother. To create the family she never had and to fill her house with love, laughter, and the smell of baking bread.

  When sexy, kind fire captain Jack Barnes helps her out of a bad spot one night, she falls hard … but dare she hope that the sparks flying between them could ignite into true love?

  Unbeknownst to Elizabeth, Jack is harboring a secret that destroyed her family in an attempt to save his own. Despite the heat between them, he feels honor-bound to keep his desire for her at bay, but secrets have a way of surfacing.

  When Jack reveals the truth about the past, Elizabeth must either forgive him, or walk away from the one man who can give her the happiness she deserves.

  1

  Elizabeth Armstrong was buckled into the passenger seat of her untrustworthy 1989 Ford Bronco with her eyes closed. Already tired from a long bartending shift at the Sled Dog Brewing Company, she’d reluctantly attended an after-bar party thrown by her brother Emmett’s friend who lived in a small community east of their hometown of Golden Falls, Alaska.

  Lulled by the rhythm of the windshield wipers fighting off what had been merely a soft snowfall when they’d left the party, she vaguely heard the song on the radio about summer and blue skies and a love that never ends. In her dreamy half-asleep state, that kind of summer felt possible in a way it never did when she was awake.

  Emmett was quiet beside her in the driver’s seat, and the drive was calm and peaceful—until it wasn’t. Just like her life. Going along and going along, and then POW, the universe would scream at her. Don’t get comfortable, Elizabeth. Don’t think for one second that life will ever be easy for you.

  The Bronco didn’t skid on the icy highway. A skid would have jolted her awake. Instead, she woke when her seat belt tightened against her as the vehicle plunged down an embankment after sideswiping a speed limit sign at full speed.

  She saw Emmett’s chest slam into the steering wheel and the side of his head smash against the driver’s side window. Thankfully, the window didn’t break. The headlights stayed lit, and all Elizabeth could see out the windshield was the soft white pillow of snow surrounding the vehicle.

  “Emmett!” she cried to her brother, older by five years. He was thirty to her twenty-five. “Are you okay?”

  He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. What was he thinking, driving at four in the morning during a snowstorm without buckling up? He wasn’t thinking, she knew. It was like his brain had stopped working in the past few months. Mistake after mistake was piling up behind him, and driving that night was yet another mistake. They should have gone home after she got off from work like she’d wanted.

  She grabbed the collar of his coat and yanked him upright. “Emmett?”

  He groaned but didn’t open his eyes. He was bleeding from the forehead, mouth, and from a gash on his right hand, and a lump was swelling on his temple.

  Elizabeth shook his shoulder. “Can you hear me?”

  When he didn’t respond, her fear went into overdrive. She pulled out her cell phone and could hardly hold it for how she was shaking. Emmett might be an idiot sometimes, but he’d stuck by her through the worst hard times, and her love for him was fierce. All they’d ever had in this world was each other.

  “I’m calling 911,” she said loudly, trying to rouse him. “Where are we, do you know? What mile marker? Emmett? Answer me.”

  “Can’t call,” he mumbled.

  “We have to,” she said, although she understood his reluctance. He had no health insurance, and they barely had the savings to cover even a simple visit to the doctor’s office. There went the few hundred dollars she’d set aside for pre-nursing classes at the community college. Her dream deferred, yet again. “You might have internal bleeding or a concussion or something even worse.”

  He pressed his right palm against his mouth, and his eyes latched onto hers. “I screwed up again,” he said, his words garbled from the injury to his mouth.

  Yes, you did, she thought wearily.

  “No worries,” she said with a resoluteness she didn’t feel. “That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right?”

  Emmett winced as he attempted to smile. It was their family motto or, more precisely, their brother-sister motto as they tried to make their way through the world alone—alone and together—burdened by the weight of their parents’ failings.

  As her finger hovered above the “Emergency Call” icon, a panicked Emmett grabb
ed her cellphone and clutched it to his chest.

  “Hey, give it back!” She unsnapped her seatbelt and reached for it, but he wouldn’t let go. “I need to call for help!”

  “You can’t.” He winced from the pain. “We need to handle this ourselves.”

  “We absolutely need to call for help,” Elizabeth said. “Otherwise, we could be stuck out here for hours, and it’s below zero. But it’s okay to call. You just hit a road sign. That’s no big deal.” Then a horrible thought struck her. “Wait—you didn’t hit another car, did you?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then it’s okay. Just give me back my phone.”

  But instead, he pushed open his door, shoving hard against the snow, grunting from the effort. He stumbled out, taking Elizabeth’s phone with him.

  “Emmett, get back here!” she yelled. “Stay in the car!”

  Blood dripped onto the snow as he tried to climb his way out of the ditch. He slipped twice and grunted in pain both times.

  “Stay here!” she cried, scrambling over to his side of the Bronco. He paid her no mind, so she went after him, but in the time it took her to get out of the car, Emmett had made the roughly eight-foot climb to the highway and stood on the road looking down at her.

  “I can’t go to the hospital.” A trail of blood revealed the path he’d climbed through the snowbank. “They can’t test my blood.”

  “Why not? You didn’t drink.”

  He gave her a hard look. “They’d check my system for drugs.”

  Elizabeth stood in the ditch, dumbfounded. “But you don’t—”

  And just like that, the realization dawned on her. He was on drugs. It explained so much: the loss of appetite, the ragged emotions, his wayward spiral.

  “With all the crap we have going on?” she said, stunned. “You choose to add to it by using drugs? What are you using?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I got myself into it, and I’ll get myself out of it. But you need to say you were driving. No one can even know I was here.”

  “That won’t work.” Her breath came out puffy, and her face hurt from the cold. It was the kind of cold that made it hard to talk right. A middle-of-the-night, January-in-Alaska kind of cold that made her wonder why she hadn’t packed up and left. Or, like the American golden-plover birds she loved, migrated south to Argentina for the winter.

  “I had two strong drinks at the party,” she said. “My blood-alcohol level might put me over the limit. You were supposed to be the designated driver!” Fury flooded through her. So did sarcasm. “Dad will be so proud, Emmett.”

  “Our father, the felon? I don’t care what he thinks.”

  “But he’s coming home soon,” she said. “And we need to have our act together so we can help him get his together. And now you’ve totaled my car, and you need medical help, and there’s no way we’re going to make it back in time for you to get treated and be at work in the morning, which means you won’t be able to pay your half of the mortgage. Again.” Tears of frustration blinded her. “No matter how bad things have been, Emmett, at least we had each other. And you’re ruining even that, don’t you see? You’re ruining the only good thing we have going for us.”

  “I’m sorry, Lizzie Bean, but you’ve gotta take one for the team tonight. If I go to jail, that’s months of me not being to help with the mortgage. And do you really want me going to prison right when Dad’s about to be released?”

  He tossed her phone into the snow and took off across the highway, lurching unsteadily. They were in the middle of nowhere—just where the hell did he think he was going?

  In the time it took her to scramble up the snowbank, he’d disappeared. She crossed the highway and peered into the culvert on the other side. She saw where he’d jumped and where he’d climbed up the other bank, leaving splatters of blood in his wake, but where had he gone from there? Was he right there, and she simply couldn’t see him because of the now-whiteout conditions? Or had he disappeared into the woods?

  “Come back, Emmett! You could die out there!”

  The wind blew her words back to her. She wouldn’t follow; it would be suicide on a night like this.

  “Unbelievable,” she said aloud. What was it about the Armstrong men, always letting down the Armstrong women? She crossed back so she could take shelter in the Bronco. She hated to go back down there—it felt like she was descending into a snowy tomb. What if the snow kept falling and the car got buried and she couldn’t get herself back out? What if she fell asleep down there and never woke up?

  Alaska was the land of big dreams and harsh realities, and the reality was that she was as likely to die on the road waiting for a passerby at four in the morning as she was to die in her vehicle. Probably more so, because her emergency supplies were in the Bronco and at least she’d be out of the wind. So into the snowy tomb she’d go.

  But before she descended, she retrieved her phone and nearly wept with gratitude to find she had a signal.

  She knew exactly who to call.

  2

  When fire captain Jack Barnes, riding shotgun in the Engine One fire truck, saw the slender bundle of a woman standing alone up ahead, shivering on the side of the highway, his heart went out to her. Wrapped in a red sleeping bag, she looked tiny and in danger of being blown over by a strong gust of wind.

  “Dispatch, this is Engine One.” He kept his eyes on her as he radioed in, wondering why she wasn’t flagging them down. People usually did, even when completely unnecessary. “We’re on Highway Thirty just past mile marker forty-six, and we see the vehicle and one patient standing on the road. No police on scene yet.”

  The dispatcher came back. “PD’s still en route. Sure there’s not a second patient? The trucker thought there were two people in the SUV.”

  “We’ll investigate,” Jack said. “We’re pulling up now.”

  “Minus twenty-two out there. Hell of a night to be out on the road,” said Sean Kelly, the engineer, as he slowed the fire truck and steered carefully onto the shoulder of the road, pulling to a stop a safe distance from the woman.

  Jack was the first to jump out of the rig. He bristled against the bitter wind as he began to approach her, but, struck by the image before him, he had to stop for a moment.

  At the age of thirty-six, he knew that some scenes from the job would stay with him forever like paintings in his brain, to be studied time and again, and he knew this would be one of those scenes—a woman entirely alone on a highway in Alaska’s dark, cold winter in the dead of night. The flashing red lights of the fire truck, help on the way. Snow assaulting her from the side. An SUV angled nose-down in the ditch. He’d call the painting “Brutal Alaska.”

  “I’m Jack Barnes from the Golden Falls Fire Department,” he called, approaching. The woman, slender and of average height, looked to be in her mid-twenties … and very, very cold. Her prominent cheekbones and big blue eyes gave her a gentle, doe-like look that made Jack want to protect her like one would a motherless fawn. She merely stared at him and said nothing. Was she in shock? “Ma’am? Are you okay?”

  Her nod was barely perceptible.

  “Is anyone with you? We got a call there were two of you in the vehicle.”

  “I’m alone,” she said, in a way that broke his heart a little bit.

  “Not anymore you’re not.”

  Now that he was right in front of her, her summer-sky blue eyes revealed fear, maybe even panic. He put out a hand behind him to tell the rest of the crew to halt their approach.

  “Can you tell me your name?” Jack asked the woman gently.

  “I’m Elizabeth,” she said.

  Her eyes were the sort a man could drown in. Big. Blue. Expressive. Midnight black lashes. And not surprised to find herself in a bad spot, not surprised at all.

  “Are you hurt, Elizabeth?”

  She looked familiar, with her long blond hair that weaved into black at the bottom. Ombre. He recalled the term from the magazines he flipped throug
h at the Golden Touch Barber Shop, owned by Andrew Blake, his former captain. He thought it was a cool look, but it hadn’t made its way to Golden Falls, that was for sure. And yet here she was, and he’d seen her before but couldn’t remember where.

  Thankfully, Sean Kelly did.

  “Hey, Elizabeth,” Sean said as he came over and wrapped the sleeping bag more tightly around her. “Rough night, huh? You’re a long way from the Sled Dog.”

  That’s right, Jack thought. She was a bartender at the most popular craft brewery in Golden Falls. He’d never spoken to her, but he’d noticed her from a distance on a few occasions while out with friends.

  “Is it just you out here?” Sean asked.

  “It’s just me,” she said, adding, “But why are you here? I didn’t call for help.”

  “A trucker was ahead of you and thought he saw you drive off the road,” Sean said. “He wasn’t sure, but he called it in just in case.”

  Normally, Jack would expect an expression of relief or gratitude for the trucker’s actions, but that didn’t happen. Instead, Elizabeth asked if the police were coming. When Jack told her they were on the way, her eyes took on a look of impending doom.