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       Prologue

      WILDLAND FIREFIGHTER Lily Peterson stood on the edge of a cliff, surrounded by a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vista of what should have been glorious Montana mountains. Instead, the peaks were charred black and still smoking.

      She was on mop-up duty. It meant walking and investigating every little plume of smoke rising from the dead mountains; arduous, dirty, exhausting work. She was at the far end of the burn, standing between devastation and new growth. Her job—protect the unscorched areas from a flare-up. No easy feat with the earth beneath her feet still radiating heat.

      Both above and below her, the trees were nothing but skeletons. Hundreds and hundreds of years of forest development destroyed because some jerk hadn’t put out his campfire properly.

      But they’d saved this part of the forest. It’d taken weeks. As a result, she was exhausted, right down to the bone, practically stumbling on her feet with it, but they’d done good.

      The sun was just rising. Eyes gritty from lack of sleep, Lily patted her pockets for her sunglasses, but she must have left them back at the barracks. Lifting her head, she shielded her eyes with her hand and looked around for the others. She stepped closer to the edge of the plateau on which she stood, high above the valley by a good hundred feet. Matt and Tony were far below her, at least half a mile away, separated from each other by several football fields, walking east, heads down, doing just as she was.

      Watching for flare-ups.

      After six straight weeks of firefighting, eating while standing up, grabbing only catnaps when they could, she felt woozy, dead on her feet.

      And the sun was killing her.

      She turned her back on the valley, and observed the burned area around her. There was so much to keep an eye on, too much. Budgeting and financial cutbacks kept them perpetually understaffed, resulting in too many hours on-site and too few hours off for recuperation, not to mention too few people working at any one time.

      When she found herself actually weaving, practically asleep where she stood, she backed up to a tree, slowly sliding down until she sat on the ground, her head resting against the trunk.

      She lowered her hand from her face and then couldn’t keep her eyes open in the bright glare. So she closed them, just for a moment.

      And never saw the new, dark-black plume of smoke rising from a hot spot, only five yards away…

      1

      LILY LAY FLAT on her back, her physical therapist pushing her leg up over her head as though she were a pretzel, telling her to “work it, Lily, stop whining and work it,” while pain seared a fiery line from her ass to the very tip of her hair.

      Lily would like to work him, all right—right into a bloody pulp.

      Instead she gritted her teeth and told herself that this was the price she paid for stupidity.

      No self-pity, she decided as she began to sweat like a stuck pig, her tank top sticking to her skin, her leg quivering wildly as she stretched her abused, injured muscles… Damn, she hurt.

      Maybe retiring wasn’t so bad. It wasn’t as if it was the first time. From high school, she’d gone into expedition guiding, which she’d retired from to become a paramedic. And when she’d burned out scooping stab victims off the streets of Los Angeles, she’d retired again to become a wildland firefighter.

      And she’d loved it. Thrived on it, actually, moving from fire to fire, exploring Montana, the Dakotas, Idaho, Wyoming…a perfect fit for her restless spirit.

      Until she’d screwed up and nearly gotten herself killed.

      Nope, there was no sugarcoating this retirement; she was no longer a firefighter—because of injuries, not by choice. She felt weak and insignificant, and at the age of twenty-nine-and-three-quarters, she wasn’t ready for either. She wanted to be back out there, damn it, doing her thing, going where she wished, doing something she loved and was good at.

      But she couldn’t have passed an agility test to save her life. Hell, she couldn’t even touch her toes at the moment.

      “Harder, Lily.”

      She squeezed her eyes shut and stretched harder, feeling her muscles pull and burn. And yet still, beyond the pain, she also felt…itchy. She needed to be on the move, working with adrenaline as her daily friend. It was a pattern in her life, an affliction. It was who she was, what she did.

      Or who she’d used to be anyway—a terrifying thought because…who the hell was she now? “Damn it, ow,” she said to her PT, a gorgeous man who resembled Denzel Washington.

      Eric nodded in approval and backed off. “Was wondering if you even had a pain

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