1

      HOT BREATH CARESSED his skin as someone panted in Cody Mallehan’s ear. Then a wet, warm tongue slid over his naked shoulder. He shivered and shifted on the stiff firehouse cot. His body tensed. He hadn’t brought anyone back to the firehouse with him the night before. He had never done that, so he had to be dreaming.

      The tongue moved to his face now, slobbering all over him. He cursed and opened his eyes and met the adoring gaze of a besotted female. Too bad she was a bitch.

      He pushed off the oversize puppy. She was some kind of mixed breed of big dog and even bigger dog. Maybe an English sheepdog and a mastiff because her black-and-gray hair was long and so were her drooling jowls. With the back of his hand, he wiped her doggy slobber off his face. His stubble, which always came in darker than his blond hair, scraped the skin of his hand. He needed to shave. And after the doggy tongue bath, he definitely needed to shower, too.

      “Annie, what the hell are you doing here?” he wondered aloud.

      Someone had abandoned the mutt at the firehouse a few weeks ago. But Stanley—the kid that Cody had convinced the superintendent to hire to do odd jobs around the house—was supposed to have delivered her to the humane society.

      A chuckle—too deep to be Stanley’s—echoed off the cement-block walls of the bunkroom. As far as Cody knew, he was the only one who’d been crashing at the firehouse. He sat up and looked around and discovered his boss kneeling just inside the doorway as Annie jumped all over him.

      “It’s not like you to turn away a female’s attention,” Superintendent Braden Zimmer said. His eyes, which were the same brown as his hair, twinkled with amusement.

      Cody grinned. He liked seeing the other man like this—joking around again—instead of all depressed over his divorce. So he didn’t correct him. Everybody had the impression that Cody was some big player. Okay, maybe that was because he worked hard to give that impression. But he didn’t even date during wildfire season—unlike some of his fellow Hotshots who’d recently fallen in love.

      Hotshots were the US Forest Service’s elite firefighters. During the off-season, they were regular firefighters, working out of firehouses all over the region. Cody worked out of the village of Northern Lakes, Michigan. He was in Northern Lakes now even though it wasn’t the off-season. There had already been a couple of huge blazes here in the Huron National Forest. And it was probable that there would be another... Unless they caught the person who had been setting the fires.

      No, Cody was too focused on the job to date, especially now with an arsonist preying on the town. He couldn’t afford any distractions. And he had never allowed himself any entanglements.

      “You must be having a dry spell,” Superintendent Zimmer continued.

      Maybe he hadn’t been working hard enough on his womanizing image. Or maybe he’d been with the Huron Hotshots long enough that they were getting to know the real him. This was his second season with them, and two years was longer than he’d stayed anywhere. His blood chilling, he shivered with dread. He didn’t want anyone to know the real him. “What makes you say that?”

      “Since your cabin burned down, you’ve been sleeping in the firehouse instead of some woman’s bed.”

      “I never sleep in some woman’s bed,” he quipped cockily.

      “That’s because he’s worried her husband will catch him,” another deep voice chimed in as Wyatt Andrews stepped into the bunkroom. His black hair was all slicked back with sweat; he must have just finished a workout in the weight room. “Cody only goes after other guys’ women.”

      He only flirted with them because he knew it was safe. He knew there was no risk—beyond getting his ass kicked. He could handle the physical pain. It was the emotional pain he avoided at all costs. A split lip or a black eye hurt a hell of a lot less than someone letting him down.

      Cody grinned. “Getting nervous?” he asked Wyatt. “There’s still time for your fiancée to realize I’m the better man.”

      Wyatt snorted. He had every confidence—and with good reason—that Fiona O’Brien would become his bride. Their wedding wasn’t until the wildfire season was over, though. The only thing that might thwart their plans was the arsonist. They needed to catch him.

      Cody wiped sleep and the rest of the dog’s slobber from his eyes, and peered at the clock on the wall behind Wyatt’s sweaty head. Had he slept late?

      “Why are you guys here already?” he asked. “The team meeting isn’t for a few hours yet.” Adrenaline coursed through his body. If there was a local fire, he would have heard the alarm. No matter how tired he was, he couldn’t sleep through that ear-piercing siren. So they had to be getting called out to a wildfire.

      He lived for this—for the travel, for the adventure, for the excitement and most especially for the triumph when they extinguished the blaze. All those things were why he had become a Hotshot. And the fact that he’d needed a couple of years of experience as a Hotshot before he could get a position as a smoke jumper.

      That job involved even more travel and adventure and danger.

      “Where are we going?” he excitedly asked. “Washington? California?”

      Wildfires had been raging out west for a while. They’d already done a couple of week-long stints on the front lines of each of those blazes, cutting breaks—trying to contain the beast. By removing all the vegetation, they starved the fire of fuel, until it eventually burned itself out.

      The hard work burned out a lot of Hotshots, too. They were probably needed to relieve another team.

      Braden shook his head. “No, I passed on this assignment.”

      They had been called up and Superintendent Zimmer had refused to go?

      Cody cursed—because he knew why. “That damn arsonist.” That was undoubtedly why Braden had called the whole team together for a meeting later that day. But that didn’t explain why Braden and Wyatt had come in to the firehouse so early.

      “Why are you two here now?”

      “Because of you,” Wyatt replied.

      “What about me?” Cody asked as his blood chilled again. The air was blasting in the firehouse, and the cement-block walls kept it cool. But that wasn’t why he was cold.

      Wyatt Andrews was one of Zimmer’s two assistants. In addition to his duties at a fire, he also helped Braden with personnel issues.

      Did they have a problem with him—with his work?

      Sure, he was a smart-ass most of the time. But he was also damn serious about his job. It meant everything to him; he had nothing else.

      “Let’s go to the Filling Station,” Zimmer suggested.

      Did his boss think he would need a drink to swallow whatever they had to tell him? Or that it was better to tell him in a public place so that he wouldn’t make a scene?

      “It’s