LITMIR.BIZ

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lasting thoughts of him.

      He blew a warm breath of air onto his chilling fingers as he drove the tractor around the corner and onto the driveway. Maybe he was wrong in thinking that he had nothing in common with the phoenix. Maybe he had simply already risen from the ashes of a firefighter who had served before him, and when he aged out, another would take his place to renew their battalion.

      The thought didn’t upset him—it was an unspoken reality of their lifestyle—but when compared to his parents’ lifestyle he couldn’t help wondering if he had made the wrong choice. In all reality, he had only ever pulled one person out of a burning building, and it had been the town drunk after he had passed out with a cigarette listing from his lips. Most of his calls were accidents on the highway, grass fires and medical emergencies. If he had stayed on the ranch, he could have helped build the place up and worked on creating a legacy for his family for generations to come. As it was, none of his brothers had ever spoken of what would come.

      What would come. Even with the roar of the tractor’s engine, the words echoed within him. If things continued going as they had been doing over the last few months, there wouldn’t be anything left to worry about. Reservations for the upcoming month had been tapering off rapidly. If they didn’t turn things around, by next summer they would be unable to support the overhead it took to keep the ranch up and running.

      He hated being the pessimistic type, so he tried to push aside his concerns. Things were never as bad as they appeared. For him, it always seemed like things had a way of working out. Hopefully the same could be said for the ranch. At least this month they had Yule Night.

      Maybe if Yule Night went especially well, it could lighten some of his parents’ burden. The last thing they needed after the murders was money troubles. It wasn’t his job, but he would do everything in his power to make sure that the ranch would stay afloat—especially if that meant he could save puppies and look every part of a hero to the one woman he wanted to like him.

      Whitney stood up and waved him to bring the tractor closer. She really was incredibly beautiful. She stretched, moving her shoulders back as she pressed her hands against her hips. As he looked at where her hands touched her round curves, he wished those hands could be his. It would be incredible to feel the touch of her skin, to run his fingers down the round arch of her hips and over the strong muscles that adorned her thighs.

      She was so strong. Not just physically, but emotionally, as well. In fact, she had always made a point of being so strong that he barely knew anything about her past. She kept things so close to her chest that he longed to know more, to get her to trust him enough that she would open up. As it was, all he knew about her was that she had originally been from Kentucky—but that was only thanks to the fact that he had managed to catch a quick glimpse of her application on his mother’s desk before she was hired.

      Why was she so closed off? For a moment he wondered if she was hiding from something or someone, or if it was more that she was hiding something from them. No one came to nowhere, Montana, and hid on a ranch unless there was something in their lives, or in their past, that they were running away from.

      Maybe one day, if he was lucky, she would open up to him. Though, just because everything seemed to work out in the end for him, he’d never call himself lucky—and that would be exactly what it would take to make Whitney think of him as anything more than just another source of annoyance.

      “What took you so long?” she asked as he climbed down from the tractor and laid the chains over his shoulder.

      He didn’t know what was worse: the heaviness of the chains that dug into his skin or the disgust that tore through him from her gaze. He hadn’t been gone more than a couple of minutes, yet he understood more than anyone that when there was an emergency, time seemed to slow down. Minutes turned into millennia, and those were the kinds of minutes which had a way of driving a person to madness.

      He smiled, hoping some of the contempt she must have been feeling for him would dissipate. “I guess I could have put the tractor in third gear, but the way I see it, that dog ain’t going nowhere.”

      She shook her head and turned away from him. Yeah, she hated him. She looked back and reached out. “Hand me the chain. We need to get the dog out of here before it gets hypothermic.”

      “Here,” he said, handing her one end of the chain. “Hook this to the tractor’s bucket. I’ll get the guard.”

      She took the chain and did as he instructed while he made his way over to the cattle guard and peered in at the little dog. It looked up at him and whimpered. The sound made his gut ache and he wrapped the chain around the steel so that when he raised the bucket on the machine, it would lift the gate straight up and away from the dog. He’d have to be careful to avoid hurting the animal. Something like this could get a little hairy. One little slip, one weak link in the chain, and everything could go to hell in a handbasket in just a few seconds.

      He secured the chain and made his way back to the tractor. In one smooth, slow motion he raised the tractor’s bucket. The chain clinked and pulled taut, and he motioned to Whitney. “Ready?”

      She gave him a thumbs-up.

      He lifted the bucket higher, and the tractor shifted slightly as it fought to bring up the heavy grate that was frozen to the ground. With a pop of ice and the metallic twang, the grate pried loose from the concrete and the tractor hoisted it into the air. He rolled the machine back a few feet, just to be safe in case the chain broke. No one would get hurt, not on his watch.

      He ran over to the dog and lifted it up from its den of ice. The pup was shivering and panting with fear. He ran his fingers down the animal, trying to reassure the terrified creature.

      Whitney stood beside him and looked at him for a moment and smiled. There was an unexpected warmth in her eyes as she looked at him and then down at the dog. As he sent her a soft smile, she looked away—almost too quickly, as though she was avoiding his gaze. She reached down and opened up the buttons of her Western-style red shirt. “Here, let me have her,” she said, motioning for the animal.

      “You’re a good dog,” he said, handing her over to Whitney.

      Ever so carefully, as though she were handling a fragile Fabergé egg, she moved the dog against her skin; but not before he caught a glimpse of her red bra, a red that perfectly matched the color of her plaid shirt. His mind instinctively moved to thoughts of what rested beneath her jeans. She was probably the kind of woman who always wore matching underwear. He closed his eyes as the image of her standing in front of him in only her lingerie flashed through his mind. His body coursed to life.

      It was just lust. That was all this was. Or maybe it was just that she seemed so far out of his league that he couldn’t help wanting her.

      “Hey,” she said, pulling him from his thoughts.

      “Hmm?” he asked, trying to look at anything but the little spot of exposed flesh of her stomach just above the dog where, if she moved just right, he was sure he could have seen more of her forbidden bra.

      “Want a beer?” She pointed to something resting in the snow not far from the other side of the cattle guard.

      He jumped over the gaping trench and leaned down to take a closer look. There, sitting in the fresh snow, was a green glass Heineken bottle. Jammed into the opening was a cloth, and inside was liquid. Picking it up, he pulled the cloth out and took a quick sniff. The pungent, chemical-laced aroma of gas cut through his senses like a knife.

      He stuffed the rag back into the bottle and stared at the thing in his hand for a moment as Whitney came over to stand by his side.

      He shouldn’t have touched it. He never should have picked the dang thing up. Now his fingerprints were all over it.

      “What is it?” she asked.

      He glanced over at her and contemplated telling her the truth, but he didn’t want to get her upset over something that may turn out to be nothing. Yet he couldn’t keep the truth from her forever. It couldn’t be helped.

      “Unfortunately,

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