Wilde Heat

  She'd never been this out of control, never wanted to come so bad. She clawed at his back, his hips, using all of her strength to pull him into her. He obliged and his clothed erection joined his hands between her legs, thrusting, pushing harder and harder. An orgasm took her, pulling her under wave after wave of intense pleasure.

  Maya was caught in the middle of a beautiful, violent ocean. Drowning, she cried out, begging for help, but she was too far gone.

  Sudden sobs wracked her frame with as much force as her ongoing climax and she was powerless to control either of them. The only thing she could do was hold on to the man between her legs.

  The weeping stopped Logan Cain dead in his tracks. This had been consensual, hadn't it? She'd grabbed his shirt, not the other way around. Still, he should have known better than to make out with a woman who looked that unhappy.

  The problem was, Logan hadn't had a woman in nearly six months. And damn, did this one look good when she'd banged on the door to his friend's restaurant. She'd demanded to come in and have a drink, but he would have let her in anyway, with her long dark hair, breasts that were peaking from the cool breeze coming in off the lake, and an ass so round and sweet it could make a guy cry.

  One fire after another had burned up his entire spring, summer, and most of the fall. Every fourteen days he'd gotten two days to sleep like the dead and refuel. And then it was back to the mountains--downing trees, lighting backfires, clearing fire lines, and hiking twenty miles with 150 pounds of water and chainsaws on his back.

  Being a wildland firefighter was the best damn job in the world, whether he was protecting a thousand acres of old-growth forest or saving houses at the forest's edge when the owners had already given up hope that they'd have a home to return to.

  Logan never forgot for one second how lucky he was to be a hotshot. Firefighting had saved his life, had given him a way to channel his innate wildness--and his teenage anger--for something good. Fifteen years later, sleeping on rocks under a cloud of black smoke was still as good as the Ritz, but six months of near celibacy sucked. Particularly if it was a dry year and people were stupid about cigarette butts and weed-whacking.

  Or, in some cases, if an arsonist had an axe to grind.

  Which was why he'd been happy to let this woman think he was a real bartender, especially since his friend Eddie Myers, who owned the place, wouldn't be back for at least an hour. Hell yes, she'd seemed like the perfect way to break this summer's dry spell.

  After the way she'd demanded to get inside for a drink he should have known better than to touch her golden skin, should have kept his mouth and hands off of the sexy stranger. But she'd tasted so sweet. And he'd been stunned by the instant electricity between them. He hadn't wanted a woman this much in years.

  As quickly as the woman's crying started, it stopped. Her arms went slack around his chest. After aiding frantic fire survivors his entire adult life, Logan knew to move slowly, carefully.

  Her pupils were huge and for a minute he didn't think she actually saw him. Suddenly, her gaze focused.

  "Oh God."

  He had to ask her the tough question first. "Did you want this?"

  She blinked once, then twice. "No," she said. "God no."

  Fuck. She was gong to turn him in for something he hadn't done. Not on his own anyway. But that didn't matter, not when the Forest Service honchos would have to pull him from his crew until they'd settled their investigation into the matter. All because of a few hot kisses.

  She wasn't looking at him anymore as she jumped away. Shards of glass crunched beneath her shoes.

  "I'm sorry," she whispered, almost to herself.

  She was sorry? He hadn't been expecting an apology, that was for sure.

  She flicked another glance at him. "I didn't mean for this to happen. For us to nearly ..."

  Her words fell away and he watched her carefully. She was skittish and unpredictable and he was long past wanting to get in her pants. Her tears put that fire out completely. Regardless, every instinct in him said she was in trouble. He put his life on the line year in and year out to protect people. Hell, when he was seventeen years old help had come his way when he most needed it. He couldn't walk away from trouble now, not even if it was the smart thing to do.

  "Do you need help?"

  She backed away even farther, knocking into the dark paneled wall with her shoulder. She shook her head.

  "I'm sorry," she said again. "I shouldn't have come here. It was wrong."

  She looked like she was going to crumple, and he took a step toward her, ready to catch her when she fell. Worrying that she thought he'd attacked her took a backseat to his concern for her health and safety. He needed to get her to a doctor to find out if there was something physically--or mentally--wrong with her that she was afraid to tell him.

  But before he could put his arms back around her, she flew out of the bar, down the steps into the dining room, and was through the front door in a flash. Thirty seconds later, she disappeared behind a grove of thick trees.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Six months later ...

  LOGAN SWUNG his chainsaw steadily through dry brush and dead tree stumps while Sam McKenzie and Sam's younger brother, Connor, worked alongside him to clear a fire line a quarter mile from the wildfire. The three of them were working the southern edge of the fire, while other hotshots worked the east and west borders.

  All morning and into the afternoon they set about clearing a four-foot path. No fuel meant no burn, so as long as sparks didn't jump the line, the wildfire would die here. Nothing fancy, just textbook wildland firefighting. Spread out, they worked in silence, their chainsaws, axes, and handsaws keeping pace to a mutually understood hard-rock beat.

  Desolation Wilderness was rugged terrain, but this forest was the backyard playground for the Tahoe Pines Hotshot Crew. There was no need to call for assistance from the state's smoke jumpers or Lake Tahoe's urban crews. The hotshots easily had it covered.

  In the past fifteen years, Logan had doused hundreds of blazes. Some fires scared the shit out of you. Others toyed with you a little before giving you the upper hand, like a woman playing hard to get. And some were rookie stuff. The rains had come late in the spring and it had been a slow fire season so far. This one was nothing more than a good training exercise, had only been burning for a couple of days. It was a sweet and easy burn to whet their appetites for some real action. They'd be back at the station by tonight with time for a shower and a beer.

  And yet, Logan was worried. Because he had a bad feeling about this fire. About how it had started. And who had started it.

  As soon as they put the fire out, he was going to head to Joseph Kellerman's cabin to have a very difficult chat--one that would hopefully ensure there were no further unexplained wildfires in Desolation Wilderness this summer.

  Cutting through thick undergrowth, Logan thought about the day he'd landed on Joseph's front porch almost twenty years ago. He'd been an angry, cocky seventeen-year-old, hell-bent on destruction. He still remembered the smile the middle-aged firefighter had given him that afternoon, almost as if he was saying This is going to be fun, you little shit. Logan hadn't known enough to back down. He'd assumed his young muscles could beat some old guy's any day of the week. One more thing he'd been wrong about.

  The two of them had gone head to head, chest to chest, toe to toe, until Logan finally realized Joseph wasn't out to get him. His rules and his tough love were his way of helping. Because he actually cared.

  Joseph had been--still was--the best damn hotshot Logan had ever worked with. Before he'd retired, he'd been fearless but smart, quick with decisions but not afraid to change his mind in difficult situations. Once Logan pulled his head out of his seventeen-year-old ass and came around, he'd looked up to Joseph as a mentor, a man to emulate. Nearly two decades later, he'd filled his mentor's shoes as superintendent of the Tahoe Pines Hotshot Crew.

  Logan could only pray that Joseph wasn't the one who needed sav
ing this time around.

  Realizing he was swallowing more dirt than spit, Logan pulled off his goggles to take a long swig from his water bottle, but it barely passed his lips when he saw smoke rising up in his peripheral vision.

  No way. No fucking way. He'd personally scanned the area by helicopter at sunrise. The blaze had been contained to the northeast of where they were clearing a fire line.

  Judging by the thick, dark plume in the sky rising just south of Sam and Connor, it definitely wasn't contained anymore.

  Logan wiped the sweat out of his eyes. They were working in the worst possible place. The first rule of wild fires was a no-brainer: Missionary position would kill you. Never get on top, because fires could--and would--outrace a man uphill ninety-nine percent of the time.

  Somehow, they'd ended up on top.

  A series of boulders had shielded them all afternoon from the dry winds whipping up the valley. Logan quickly hiked up, cresting the rocks, and a wall of heat hit him like a baking oven.

  He grabbed the radio from his back pocket and spoke into it. "I've spotted a fire rolling across the canyon a quarter mile south of the ignition point."

  Even though Logan would normally trust Gary Thompson, his squad boss and second in command, with his life, Logan knew not to wait for confirmation.

  It was time to get the hell out.

  He scrambled down the rock and sprinted toward Sam and Connor. The tall shrubs surrounding them were a temporary cool patch, one that gave no warning to the inferno dancing up the hill. Logan wasn't afraid for himself--he'd get out of there or die trying--but his men's lives were his responsibility. He'd been proud to lead his hotshot crew for the past decade. These guys felt more like family than most blood relations had ever been. At the very least, he'd make sure the MacKenzie brothers made it out of the blowup in one piece.

  Logan's radio crackled. "Logan," Gary said from the anchor point on top of the mountain, where he could watch the fire's progress, "you need to get out. Now."

  In all of their years of working together, Logan had rarely heard Gary sound so concerned.

  Logan knew Gary wanted to hear that he was already on his way. But he wasn't going to leave without his men. "I'm moving downhill to alert Sam and Connor and then we'll retreat."

  A muffled "Fuck" was followed by a tangle of voices. Logan concentrated on his mission. Speed was essential when you were trying to outwit a fire that was starving for fresh meat.

  Quickly, he scanned the surrounding hillside. A retreat along the east-flank line--the nearest clean trail-head--would be suicidal. They'd have to run west, up a nearly vertical slope.

  Rather than switchback down the mountain, Logan took the fastest route, jumping and sliding down steep grades, not giving a shit about bruises and scrapes if it meant getting his men out alive. The mountain below the McKenzie brothers was quickly disappearing beneath a cloud of smoke.

  Sweat poured out from beneath Logan's helmet; his heart pounded; his thigh muscles bunched and burned as he worked to stay upright on an increasingly treacherous slope.

  He'd done some shit-crazy things in his life, but running straight into a blowup trumped them all. And yet, he craved this kind of adrenaline, the rush of tackling a near-impossible situation. All of them did to some extent, and it was part of the strong bonds that held his group of twenty wildland firefighters together.

  Like hell if they were going to be minus three when the day was through.

  Nearly upon the brothers, he didn't bother yelling. They wouldn't hear him over the chainsaws. He ran across the uneven ground, hurtling over just-cut tree stumps, waving his arms in a wide arc to get their attention.

  Connor looked up first and cut his engine. Sam quickly followed suit. In the sudden silence, Logan could hear the growing roar of the hungry blaze.

  "We need to get out of this canyon," Logan said, pointing to the smoke column rising up over the thick brush. "Now."

  He appreciated how calm they were as they lay their tools down and took stock of the dangerous situation.

  "A blowup?" Sam asked.

  Logan nodded, his lungs burning from exertion and the thick, fresh smoke sucking away all of the oxygen. Enough chitchat. It was time to get the fuck out.

  Moments like this reinforced how crucial their daily hard-core training routine was. Running a six-minute mile with a hundred-pound pack on your back was nothing compared to running from deadly smoke and embers through black clouds, but at least, Logan figured, they had a chance to get out alive. Just as long as no one stumbled and no one let fear get the best of them.

  They took the first rise at a sprint, undeterred by the steep incline. A hundred yards ahead, the fire had overtaken the western slope. Chock-full of brush, it was the perfect midafternoon snack for the fire. Without breaking stride, Logan tossed his heavy pack several feet to the side. The wind whipped into them, driving sparks and smoke into their open mouths. It stung like a bitch and Connor coughed hard several times in a row, but barely slowed pace.

  Logan had never respected his guys more. Here they were, completely screwed, moving through white ash while the fire lapped at their heels, and no one was crying like a baby, no one was pulling out a fire shelter and crawling inside.

  Instead, they were running for their lives.

  Sitting in her car at a stop light on Lake Tahoe Boulevard, Maya opened up her file on Logan Cain and stared at his photo. She couldn't make out many of his features beneath his helmet and sunglasses, but something about his cocky grin reached inside her and twisted her gut around.

  She wanted to believe that a guy with a smile like that--and with a perfect, fifteen-year record--couldn't set a potentially deadly fire. But as an arson investigator she'd been trained to look for the worst, even when no one else could see it.

  She'd worked for Cal Fire since graduating college five years earlier. When her brother had died, her boss, Albert, had told her to take off all the time she needed. But Tony's death had changed everything. Arson had become personal. Not just something horrible that happened to strangers she interviewed for her investigations. In the past six months, she'd put more arsonists in jail than any other investigator in Cal Fire history.

  Nailing arsonists had become more than just a great way to utilize her Criminal Justice degree while being a part of the firefighting world she'd grown up in: It had become her mission, along with finding the person responsible for lighting the fire that had taken Tony's life.

  She'd expected there to be a name and a face associated with that fire by now, someone she could pin down with her rage. But for six long months she'd followed one dead lead after another.

  It wasn't technically her case--she'd been in daily contact with Cathy Hart, the state fire investigator assigned to the case--but she was just as frustrated and determined as if it were. And, if she was honest with herself, she knew Cathy wasn't thrilled with Maya dogging her every step, and likely wouldn't be overjoyed when she found out Maya had requested the Desolation Wilderness wildfire as the perfect excuse to stay in Lake Tahoe for a couple of weeks.

  Maya wanted to do some digging into Tony's case in person, rather than over the phone or via e-mail. Especially since she knew Cathy was on the verge of filing the fire under "accident." Maya wouldn't sleep through the night again until she knew for sure exactly what had started the fire that took Tony's life.

  But for the next week or so, she needed to focus on the current wildfire. She looked back down at Logan Cain's file. It was a shoulder-high stack of heroics. The written records of his fifteen years as a hotshot painted a picture of a protector, a natural-born hero who saved expensive real estate, people's precious belongings, and human lives. He seemed to be a man who risked his own life on a daily basis because it was the right thing to do.

  At the same time, she didn't doubt that Logan was also addicted to risk. Hooked on adrenaline. That was part of the job.

  If hotshots didn't want--didn't need--to kick a fire's ass, it would kick theirs.
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  Arsonists, on the other hand, tended to be men and women whose fascination with fire brought them back to the forest summer after summer simply for the thrill of standing in the middle of an out-of-control blaze.

  But this case was different. Because this was the first time she'd ever had to assess a hotshot's guilt. If Logan Cain were a volunteer firefighter, things would be a whole lot more cut and dried. Volunteer firefighters were often desperate for glory and action. Several years ago, she'd even contributed to an FBI report on identifying and preventing firefighter arson. It wasn't just boredom that drove volunteer firefighters to start forest fires. Money was frequently a factor as well. They made more money fighting fires, often raking in overtime pay if the fire was a bad one. But hotshots got plenty of action and very rarely needed to resort to lighting their own fires.

  Still, even though putting a firefighter on suspension was one of the worst parts of Maya's job, right up there with questioning survivors who had lost everything, she'd do her job, no matter how ugly it got. And she'd make sure she put another arsonist behind bars.

  She shook her head, trying to make sense of what she knew about the case, given that nothing in Logan Cain's file fit the profile of a firefighter-arsonist. Nonetheless, she couldn't ignore the facts.

  Two times in the past week hikers had reported strange behavior to the ranger. Evidently, the hotshot had been seen fiddling with a campfire during no-burn days. She'd interviewed both sets of hikers over the telephone and they'd told her Logan had acted strangely when they came upon him. As soon as the wildfire had been noted, the ranger had contacted the Forest Service with this damning information.

  And then, just yesterday, Logan's name had been called in to an anonymous "Smoky the Bear" forest-fire tip line. Combined with his very public objections in recent weeks to reductions in pension and health care payments for veteran hotshots, her boss had assigned her to the case immediately.