“NO!” THE SHARP denial hung in the air even after the door slammed, leaving Avery Kincaid standing in the foyer, her mouth open with shock.
Laughter rang out behind her. “First time a guy ever turned you down for a kiss?”
“Two guys,” Avery pointed out to her amused sister. “They both told me no.” She watched through the window as her nephews ran down the driveway to jump through the side door of the van that had pulled up. They had wriggled away from her before she could give them good-bye kisses.
“Well, they’re twelve,” Kim said, her deadpan delivery cracking Avery up. “Not that that ever prevented you from getting kisses before.”
“When I was twelve, too,” Avery said. “Maybe eleven.” She turned back to her sister.
Kim looked older than five years her senior now—older than thirty-two. She had lines around her mouth and eyes, a tension in her that Avery had never seen before. She kept glancing out the window even though the van—with the boys inside it—was gone. They’d just gotten a ride with a friend’s mom to soccer practice.
“Are you okay?” Avery asked. “They’re only going to be gone a little while.” She wasn’t certain exactly how long soccer practice lasted. She usually wasn’t around to catch their games much less their practices.
Kim’s eyes, the same turquoise blue of Avery’s, filled with tears. “I didn’t think they’d make it to become teenagers.” Her voice cracked. “I didn’t think I would ever see them again—hold them again...”
Avery closed her arms around her sister and held her trembling body. “It’s okay. They’re fine.”
Avery trembled a little, too, as she remembered her sister’s desperate call two months ago. She’d been getting ready to board a plane in Chicago and head home to Northern Lakes, Michigan. Then she’d been just a reporter preparing to cover the story of a wildfire consuming acres of national forest. After Kim’s call, she’d been an aunt desperate for news about her nephews lost in the middle of that national forest. They and their Boy Scout troop had been camping in the forest when the wildfire struck with no warning and not enough time for them to escape.
“It’s just so hard,” Kim said. “So hard to let them leave again...”
It probably wouldn’t matter how many weeks passed. A mother would never forget how close she had come to losing her children.
Avery squeezed her sister a little more tightly before releasing her. “They’re fine.”
Thanks to the special team of firefighters who’d rescued them from the blaze. She walked over to the coffee table where the boys had left their photo of the Huron Hotshots. Hotshots were a special team of the US Forest Service fire department—the firefighters who battled blazes on the front line.
Avery had included that in the short special feature she’d done about the fire. To write the copy for the feature, she’d researched Hotshots. But she hadn’t learned enough. Her story had been about Hotshots in general, not the specific men who’d battled the Huron National Forest blaze—not the Huron Hotshots. Because they had refused all interviews...
There was more to the story—about the firefighters and about the fire. The tight nervous feeling in the pit of her stomach told her that; she had that feeling to thank for her career—for moving her from a small-town television station to larger networks, first out of Detroit and now Chicago. While the Chicago station was a national network, Avery wasn’t on very much. She had to fight for airtime. And she suspected this story would make that fight much easier.
She wanted to dig deeper, cover the Huron Hotshots in more detail. Most importantly she wanted to find out what had really caused the Huron National Forest fire...
And maybe she could start by getting closer to one particular Hotshot. Maybe then he would grant her an interview.
She picked up the photo of the twenty team members. It was a press release photo—the only thing the US Forest Service had released to the media. The Hotshots hadn’t released any information about the fire or the rescue. Of course they had been busy battling some more blazes. Fortunately those bigger fires had been in other areas. Northern Lakes hadn’t recovered yet from the fire that had nearly taken the lives of so many children. And every once in a while another hot spot flared back up...
She shuddered as the nightmare returned to her, the knowledge of what could have happened had it not been for these men. She could have lost her nephews and even the town and everyone in it. Maybe that was why she kept coming back every few weeks—if only to stay a day or two—since the fire. Because nearly losing it had reminded her of how much she missed home.
But that was only part of the reason she’d taken a week off from the television station in Chicago. It wasn’t to vacation, as she’d told her boss, but to cover what her instincts told her would be the most important story of her career.
The story was there—in that photo. In the one soot-streaked face that had caught her attention even before the boys had pointed him out. The grime did nothing to disguise his chiseled features—the square jaw with the slight dimple in the chin, the high cheekbones, the line of his supple lips...
She would like to kiss those lips.
The other guys were all grinning. But he looked serious—focused—his eyes the only lightness in his face. Were they blue? Gray? Silver?
She couldn’t tell—no matter how closely she studied his picture.
“I should bring something by the station again,” Kim murmured as she peered over Avery’s shoulder at the photo.
“What?”
“I know it’s not enough,” Kim said. “That there’s really no way to thank them for saving my kids. But I’ve been taking cookies and brownies to them when the Huron Hotshots are here in Northern Lakes.”
Avery smiled. Kim was so like their mother, who’d headed up every church and school bake sale in Northern Lakes. Their parents had moved downstate when Dad traded his high school teaching job for a college position. Apparently Kim had taken over for Mom. “You’re thanking them with baked goods?”
“You have a better idea?”
Avery stared at that face—and the heavily muscled body that went with it. His arms bulged, his chest pushed against the thin material of his damp soot-stained yellow T-shirt. He was in the front row, so he was hunched down, his thighs straining against the pants that matched his T-shirt. Oh, she had some ideas how she’d like to thank him...
Kim had known her too long and too well. She smacked Avery’s shoulder. “Hey! You shouldn’t be thinking like that.”
“I’m not married,” Avery said. “I can think like that all I want.”
Kim sighed. She’d been married since she was twenty—when she’d gotten pregnant during her sophomore year of college. Rick