LITMIR.BIZ

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I can see that.” She approached his truck. “Can’t remember the last time I did this.” She extended her hand. “I’m Meadow.”

      Dylan looked at her elegant hand. He considered rolling up his window because this woman represented all the trouble he tried to avoid.

      Instead, he took her hand gently between his fingers and thumb and gave it a little shake. But something happened. His smile became brittle and the gentle up-and-down motion of their arms ceased as he stared into bewitching amber-brown eyes. After an awkward pause he found his voice.

      “Nice to meet you, Meadow. I’m Dylan Tehauno.”

      Her voice now sounded breathy. “A pleasure.”

      Her eyes glittered with mischief. Now he needed to get by her for other reasons, because this was the sort of woman you put behind you as quickly as possible.

      She slipped her hand free and pressed her palm flat over her stomach. Were her insides jumping, like his?

      “What’s your business, Dylan?”

      “I’m a hotshot.”

      She shook her head. “What’s that, like a jet pilot?”

      “I fight wildfires. Forest fires. We fly all over the West—Idaho, Oregon, Colorado. Even east once to Tennessee. Man, is it green there.”

      “Really? So you jump out of airplanes with an ax. That kind of thing?”

      “No, those are smoke jumpers. We walk in. Sometimes twenty miles from deployment. Then we get to work.” In fact, he had most of his gear in the box fixed to the bed of his truck.

      “That’s crazy.”

      He thought standing in the sun with a GoPro was crazy, but he just smiled. “Gotta go.”

      “All right, Sir Dylan. You may pass. How long will you be up there?”

      “Hour maybe.”

      “Time enough for me to get my shot then.” She reversed course and moved her tripod behind her sports car.

      Dylan rolled past. He couldn’t stop from glancing at her in the rearview mirror. He kept looking back until she was out of sight. Soon he started the ascent to the house, winding through the thick pines and dry grasses.

      His shaman and the leader of his medicine society, Kenshaw Little Falcon, had recommended Dylan for this job. This was his first commission in Flagstaff. He’d recently earned his credentials as a fire-safety inspector in Arizona. As a fire consultant, it was usually his role to give recommendations to protect the home from wildfire, identify places where wildfire might trap or kill people and provide fuel-reduction plans. Something as simple as trimming the branches of trees from the ground to at least ten feet or not placing mulch next to the house could be the difference between losing a home and saving it. But this consultation was different because so many did not want this house completed. Cheney Williams, the attorney who had filed the injunction, waited for him on the ridge. Dylan felt important because he knew that his report might prevent the multimillionaire Rustkin from securing insurance. At the very least it would buy time. That would be a feather in Dylan’s cap. He lowered his arm out his window and patted the magnetic sign affixed to the door panel—Tehauno Consulting.

      Dylan smiled and then glanced back to the road where he could no longer see Meadow Wrangler. He should be looking ahead. By the time he finished with the attorney, would Meadow be gone?

      The flash of light was so bright that for an instant everything went white. Dylan hit the brakes. The boom arrived a moment later, shaking the truck and vibrating through his hands where they gripped the wheel. Artillery.

      His brain snapped to Iraq. He had served two tours and he knew the sound of an explosion. He glanced up, looking for the jets that could make such an air strike and saw the debris fly across the ridgeline. A fireball erupted skyward and rained burning embers down from above. Rocks pelted the road before him.

      Meadow.

      Dylan made a fast three-point turn and was hurtling down the mountain as embers landed all about him, erupting into flames. It was July, over a hundred degrees today, and the ground was as dry and thirsty as it had been all year. Perfect conditions for a wildfire. But this was not one wildfire—it was hundreds. Burning debris landed and ignited as if fueled by a propellant. The flames traveled as fast as he did. Faster, because the wind raced down the mountain, pushing the growing wall of flames that licked at the trunks of the piñon pines. Once it hit the crowns of the trees it would take off. There was nothing to stop it. His only chance was to get ahead of it and stay there.

      * * *

      MEADOW GAPED AS the top of the ridge exploded like an erupting volcano. With her camera still running, she stood in the road, paralyzed by what she witnessed. The house that had broken the ridgeline collapsed, falling in fiery wreckage into the gap below. The steel skeleton vanished amid tails of smoke that flew into the sky like launching rockets.

      Dylan.

      He was up there. Her impulse was to flee, but the urge to reach him tugged against her survival instinct.

      The rockets of fire flew over her head, and she turned to watch them land, each a meteor impacting the earth. The vibrations from the explosion reached her, tipping her camera and making her sidestep to keep from falling beside it. She lifted the running GoPro and held it, collapsing the tripod as she panned, capturing the flaming rock touching down and igniting infernos to her right and left, knowing the HDMI video interface and antenna in her car compressed the video data before sending it to the live feed.

      The desert bloomed orange as it burned. She turned back to the ridge, seeing the smoke billowing up to the sun. Beneath the yellow smoke came a wall of fire and the cracking, popping sound of burning. A hot wind rushed at her, burning her skin. She felt as if she stood in an oven. She had to get out of here. Meadow turned in a circle and saw flames on all sides. The smoke was so thick she began to choke. Should she try to drive through the flames?

      How had the falling rock and fire missed her? She stood in the road as she realized everyone had been right. She wasn’t going to see thirty.

       Chapter Two

      Had she gotten out? Dylan wondered as he barely managed to navigate his truck along the thin ribbon of gravel to the bottom of the ridge and onto the straight stretch that led to Meadow.

      He prayed that she had, but the fear in his heart and the flames already crowning in the pines warned him she was in danger. He listened to his instincts, slowed his speed, fighting against the urge to accelerate. Moving faster than he could see could cause him to crash the truck or to hit Meadow. He was close to her position now. He knew it. Where was she?

      He saw her Audi parked exactly where it had been—only now the wall of fire to his left glimmered off the mirror surface of the black paint reflecting the approaching flames. Soon the paint would melt, along with every bit of plastic. The inferno was close to jumping the road. Dylan hit the brakes, sending gravel spraying from his rear tires.

      “Meadow!” he shouted as he threw open the door. “Meadow!”

      The blaze was loud now, sounding like a locomotive. His eyes burned as he swept the ground for any sight of her. Then he saw a flash of white. She was running. Strong legs pumping as she darted from behind her car and then in front of his truck. In one hand she held her camera by the folded, compressed tripod. She reached the passenger side, and his arms went around her instinctively as he pulled her into the truck and set them in motion again.

      Not here, he thought. There was too much fuel. Too much energy for the flames to consume in the surrounding pines.

      “There’s no way out,” she shouted.

      He knew that. He knew they were trapped. It was not a question of if but when the fire would catch them.

      Not

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