LITMIR.BIZ

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others pulled on their gear, Dylan stepped out the wide garage doors and looked down Boylston Street.

      He couldn’t see any smoke. Hopefully, they’d arrive to find a contained fire that wasn’t blazing out of control. The buildings in the older areas of Boston were built one right next to the other, and though firewalls prevented the spread of a blaze, the cramped spaces made it harder to get to a fire and then fight it.

      The horn of the fire engine blared and Dylan slowly turned and gave Ken Carmichael, the driver, a wave. The truck pulled out of the station and as it passed, Dylan hopped on the rear running board and held on as they swung out onto the street. His heart started to beat a little quicker and his senses sharpened, as they did every time the company headed out to a fire.

      As they wove through traffic on Boylston Street, he thought back to the moment he’d decided to become a firefighter. When he was a kid, he’d wanted to be a highwayman or a knight of the Round Table. But when he graduated from high school, neither one of those jobs were available. He wasn’t interested in college. His older brother, Conor, had just started at the police academy, so Dylan had decided on the fire academy, a place that felt right the moment he walked in the door.

      Unlike the days of his reckless youth when school barely mattered, Dylan had worked hard to be the top recruit in his class—the fastest, the strongest, the smartest, the bravest. The Boston Fire Department had a long and respected tradition, founded over three hundred years before as the nation’s first paid municipal fire department. And now, Dylan Quinn, who had had the most rootless upbringing of all, was a part of that history. As a firefighter, he was known to be cautious yet fearless, aggressive yet compassionate, the kind of man trusted by all those who worked with him.

      Only two other firefighters in the history of the department had made lieutenant faster than him and he was on track to make captain in a few more years, once he finished his degree at night school. But it wasn’t about the glory or the excitement or even the beautiful women who seemed to flock around firefighters. It had always been about the opportunity to save someone’s life, to snatch a complete stranger from the jaws of death and give them another chance. If that made him a hero, then Dylan wasn’t sure why. It was just one of the perks of the job.

      The engine slowly drew to a stop in the middle of traffic and Dylan grabbed his ax and hopped off. He double-checked the address, then noticed a wisp of pale gray smoke coming from the open door of a shop. A moment later, a slender woman with a soot-smudged face hurried out the front door.

      “Thank God, you’re here,” she cried. “Hurry.”

      She ran back inside and Dylan took off after her. “Lady! Stop!” The last thing he needed was a civilian deliberately putting herself in harm’s way. Although at first glance the fire didn’t look dangerous, he’d learned to be wary of first impressions. The interior of the shop was filled with a hazy smoke, not much thicker than the cigarette smoke that hung over his father’s pub after a busy Saturday night, but he knew a flare or an explosion could be just a second away. The acrid smell made his eyes sting and Dylan recognized the odor of burning rubber.

      He found her behind a long counter, frantically beating at a small fire with a charred dish towel. Grabbing her arm, he pulled her back against him. “Lady, you have to leave. Let us take care of this before you get hurt.”

      “No!” she cried, trying to wriggle out of his arms. “We have to put it out before it does any damage.”

      Dylan glanced over his shoulder to see two members of his team enter, one of them carrying a fire extinguisher. “It looks like it’s contained in this machine. Crack it open and look for the source,” he ordered. Then he pulled the woman along beside him toward the door.

      “Crack it open?” The woman dug in her heels, yanking them both to a stop.

      Even beneath the light coating of soot, Dylan could see she was beautiful. She had hair the color of rich mahogany and it tumbled in soft waves around her shoulders. Her profile was perfect, every feature balanced from her green eyes to her straight nose to the sensuous shape of her wide mouth. He had to shake himself out of a careful study of her lips before he remembered the job at hand.

      “Lady, if you don’t leave right now, I’m going to have to carry you out,” Dylan warned. He let his gaze rake her body, from the clinging sweater to the almost-too-short leather mini to the funky boots. “And considering the length of that skirt, you don’t want me tossing you over my shoulder.”

      She seemed insulted by both his take-charge attitude and his comment on her wardrobe. Dylan studied her from beneath the brim of his helmet. Her eyes were bright with indignation and her breath came in quick gasps, making her breasts rise and fall in a tantalizing rhythm.

      “This is my shop,” she snapped. “And I’m not going to let you chop it apart with your axes!”

      With a soft curse, Dylan did what he’d done hundreds of times before, both in practice and in reality. He bent down, grabbed her around the legs, then hoisted her over his shoulder. “I’ll be back in a second,” he called to his crew.

      She kicked and screamed but Dylan barely noticed. Instead, his attention was diverted by the shapely backside nestled against his ear. He probably could have spent a little more time convincing her to leave the shop, but her stubborn attitude indicated that it would probably be a long fight. Besides, she was just a slip of a girl. He’d once carried a three-hundred-pound man down three flights. She weighed maybe one-twenty, tops.

      When Dylan got her outside, he gently set her down next to one of the trucks, then tugged at the hem of her miniskirt to restore her dignity. She slapped at his hand as if he’d deliberately tried to molest her. His temper flared. “Stay here,” he ordered through clenched teeth.

      “No!” she said, making a move toward the door.

      She slipped past him and Dylan raced after her, catching up a few steps inside the door of the shop. He grabbed her around the waist and pulled her back against him, her backside nestling into his lap in a way that made him forget all about the dangers of fire and focus on the dangers of a soft, feminine body.

      They both watched as Artie Winton hooked his ax behind the smoking machine and yanked it onto the floor. Then he dragged it into the middle of the shop, raised the ax and brought it down. A few moments later, Jeff Reilly covered the mess of twisted stainless steel with a coating of foam from the extinguisher.

      “This is the source,” Jeff called. “It looks like that’s all the farther it got.”

      “What was it?” Dylan asked.

      Reilly squatted down to take a better look. “One of those frozen yogurt machines?”

      “Nah,” Winton said. “It’s one of those fancy coffee-makers.”

      “It’s an Espresso Master 8000 Deluxe.”

      Dylan glanced down to see the woman staring at the mess of stainless steel. A tear trickled down her cheek and she gnawed on her lower lip. Dylan cursed softly. If there was one thing he hated about fighting fires, it was the tears. Though he had given bad news to victims before, he’d never really known what to do about the tears. And to his ears, his words of sympathy always sounded so hollow and forced.

      He cleared his throat. “I want you two to check around,” he ordered as he patted the woman’s shoulder. “Make sure we don’t have any electrical shorts or hot spots in the walls. We don’t know what kind of wiring they’ve got in here. Look for a breaker panel and see if it’s flipped.”

      He pulled off his gloves and took the woman’s hand in his, then gently pulled her toward the door. He should have been thinking about what to say, but instead he was fascinated by how delicate her fingers felt in his hand. “There’s nothing you can do in here,” he said softly. “We’ll check everything out and if it’s safe, you can go back in after the smoke clears.”

      When they got outside, he led her toward the back of the truck and gently pushed her down until she sat on the wide back bumper. A paramedic came rushing up but Dylan waved him off. Her

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