“THE FIRE ESCAPE IS PERFECTLY STURDY, SEE? IT’S HOLDING US BOTH UP JUST FINE.”
Savannah lowered her gaze to the platform just for a second before latching back on to his stare.
“You still shouldn’t tempt fate.”
Her laugh coasted past his cheek on little more than a breathy sigh. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not really a play-it-safe kind of girl. I’m fearless, remember? I think fate shouldn’t tempt me.”
Oh, to hell with fate. Cole was going to tempt her, long and hard and right goddamn now.
He slanted his mouth over hers, kissing her in one seamless stroke. Her lips were so much softer than he’d expected, so sweet and seductive at the same time that they were almost like a puzzle he was dying to figure out. Cole uncurled his fingers from their grip at Savannah’s shoulder, sliding his palm under the curve of her jaw to cup her chin. Holding her in place, he coaxed her mouth open with a brush of his tongue. But rather than submissively giving in to the kiss, she returned every movement, sweeping her tongue from the hot confines of her own mouth to boldly kiss him back.
Read all of Kimberly Kincaid’s Pine Mountain series
The Sugar Cookie Sweetheart Swap
by Donna Kauffman, Kate Angell, and Kimberly Kincaid
Turn Up the Heat
Gimme Some Sugar
Stirring Up Trouble
Fire Me Up
Just One Taste (eBook novella)
All Wrapped Up
And don’t miss the Rescue Squad series
Reckless
FEARLESS
KIMBERLY KINCAID
ZEBRA BOOKS
KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.
http://www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
“THE FIRE ESCAPE IS PERFECTLY STURDY, SEE? IT’S HOLDING US BOTH UP JUST FINE.”
Read all of Kimberly Kincaid’s Pine Mountain series
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Epilogue
Teaser chapter
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ZEBRA BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2016 by Kimberly Kincaid
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.
If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the Publisher and neither the Author nor the Publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
Zebra and the Z logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
ISBN: 978-1-4201-3775-0
ISBN-10: 1-4201-3775-1
eISBN-13 : 978-1-4201-3776-7
eISBN-10: 1-4201-3776-X
To Robin Covington and Avery Flynn,
who have advanced degrees in talking me
off the book ledge
and get my crazy affinity for bunker pants.
There are no finer best friends than you.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am always astounded by the willingness of others when I utter the words, “So I’m writing this book and I was wondering if you’d help.” The following people went above and beyond (and above again, in some cases), and I am so incredibly grateful.
To the men in Atlanta Fire Department’s Squad Four—Captain Williams, Lieutenant Nour, Clarke, Jason, Jordan, and Peter—this book just never would’ve happened without y’all showing me how it’s done. Thank you for not laughing (too hard) when I did the obstacle course that I borrowed for this book. To Nicole Carter, for helping me keep my medical facts real, I am so thankful. Any mistakes or liberties taken are mine, but all the expertise belongs to you. To retired firefighter and wicked-awesome guy, Chris Kulak, for lending me your duckling story. I hope I did it justice. (No ducks were harmed in the writing of this novel. I promise!)
To the romance writing community that is full to the brim with amazing, talented, funny-as-hell people, I could never name you all (but you know I’m going to try). Alyssa Alexander, Tracy Brogan, Jennifer McQuiston, Liliana Hart, Bella Andre, Cristin Harber, Pamela Clare, Sara Humphreys, Kate Angell, Carly Phillips, Jill Shalvis, Susan Donovan—you have all touched my writing career with your encouragement and your kindness and your blurbs. Grateful doesn’t even begin to cover it.
To Robin Covington and Avery Flynn, thank you for keeping me sane with your never-ending patience, your plot panda sessions, and your unfailing ability to make me laugh when I need it most.
To Reader Girl, Smarty Pants, and Tiny Dancer, I love you bunches. To Mr. K., thank you for hearing me, getting me, and loving me. I do, however, love you more (heh).
And lastly, to every single one of you holding this story in your hands, thank you from the deepest part of my heart. I have the best job in the universe, but I could not write a single word without you wanting to read. I am honored and thrilled to share this book with you.
Chapter One
Cole Everett stared at the string of bright orange flames reaching up from the six-burner cooktop with a whole lot of business as usual filling his chest. Okay, so at least there was an actual fire at this fire call—unlike the last three he and the guys from Station Eight had responded to. But a kitchen flare-up in a hotel restaurant was hardly the high-rise fire they’d expected when they’d hauled balls out of the station, even if the flames had spread halfway up a small stretch of the grease-streaked wall behind the cooktop.
Cole blew out a steady exhale, aiming a look at his best friend and fellow firefighter, Alex Donovan. “You want to hit it or should I?”
Donovan dropped a calm, cool, and let-me-see-here glance to the commercial-grade fire extinguisher sitting between their booted feet on the kitchen tiles. “Be my guest, big shot.”
A cocky grin bracketed his buddy’s mouth, but Cole knew better than to metaphorically whip out his dick for a friendly game of I Can Piss Farther Than You. Screwing with Alex was like stepping in quicksand. The more Cole quipped back, the deeper they both sank, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred, keeping the peace by keeping his cakehole shut was so much easier than the alternative. Plus, knowing how much a non-response would hack Donovan off was worth the price of admission. He’d deal with the good-natured ration of shit the guy was trying to dish up later. Right now, they had a fire to put out. Albeit a small one.
Instead of giving Donovan
the friendly oh fuck you the guy damn well deserved, Cole turned to Station Eight’s rookie, Mike Jones, who stood behind him in the narrow aisle of the galley kitchen. “Okay, Jonesey. Knock this one out so we can go back to the house for lunch, would you? I’m starving.”
“Copy that,” Jones said, keeping his usual quiet efficiency as he reached down for the fire extinguisher. Pulling the pin and dropping it to the floor with a metallic clink, he focused his blue-eyed stare on the cooktop, dispatching the flames in a few minutes’ worth of decisive movements. A healthy dose of airborne chemicals stung Cole’s nose and lungs from the spot where he stood near the rookie, but it was better than the smoke beginning to clog the kitchen around them. Small-time fires still burned, and putting out the flames was the best part of the job.
Even if Cole had barely broken a sweat over this one.
“All right.” He took a step back, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and swaying back and forth so the motion alarm on his pass device wouldn’t let out an ear-shredding screech. After delivering an all-is-well update over the radio strapped to the shoulder of his turnout gear, Cole opened his mouth to remind Jones of the standard protocol for making sure the fire stayed out—after all, flareups could be a tricky bitch, especially with grease fires—but the guy was two steps ahead of him.
“Someone wants to impress the rest of the class,” Donovan said, raising a blond eyebrow to the brim of his helmet as he stepped back to watch Jones secure the scene.
But Cole just laughed. “Right. Because you were a total slack-ass as a rookie.” Even now, eight years removed from Fairview’s fire academy, Alex jumped into pretty much everything he did with both boots first and all of his questions on the flip side.
Hell if that didn’t make the two of them polar freaking opposites in terms of how they grabbed their ambition. But it also made them a kickass team, and had since they’d been recruits at the academy themselves. The only thing Cole knew he could rely on more than a good, solid game plan was that Donovan—or any man at Station Eight, on engine or squad—would always have his back.
Even if, for the last year straight, Cole’s biggest career wish had been to transition from engine to squad, no matter what it took.
Alex’s less than polite snort echoed through the galley of the smoke-hazed kitchen. “You’re a good one to talk about ambition, you goddamn overachiever,” he said, and hell, Cole should’ve known better than to think Donovan would let the conversation he’d overheard this morning between him and Lieutenant Crews ride.
“You really want to do this now?” Cole asked, keeping his easygoing smile in place as they both kicked their boots into motion to exit the kitchen.
The return smirk tugging at the corners of Alex’s lips marked his intentions loud and clear. “In a word? Fuck yes.”
“That’s actually two words,” Cole pointed out, although he knew the distraction strategy wouldn’t save him from the raft of crap Donovan had clearly been holding at bay.
“It’s cute that you think you’re going to get out of this on a technicality. But no chance in hell am I going to treat you all special once you move over to squad.”
Cole metered his breathing to match the precision of his footsteps. Focus. “Nobody said anything about me going anywhere.”
Alex’s snort returned with renewed intensity. “You’ve had a hard-on for a promotion to squad for the last year, easy, Everett. You’ve busted your balls on a metric ton of extra training, and your name is headlining the short list. Crews comes to tell you that not only is a spot finally opening up—at your home station, no less—but that Cap wants to see you as soon as he gets back from that redistricting meeting at the chief’s office, too? Yeah, man. I’m going to be ‘doing this’”—Alex paused to sketch air quotes around the words with his gloved fingers and a pop of laughter—“until you come out of Captain Westin’s office and confirm that as usual, I’m right, all that ruler-straight planning of yours has finally paid dividends, and your elitist ass is moving to squad.”
Despite the highly ingrained superstitious streak that Cole shared with pretty much every other firefighter on the planet, he cracked a grin. “There could be fifty different things Cap might want to talk to me about,” he said, but damn it, hope still flared in his chest.
“Uh-huh. And forty-nine of them qualify as bullshit.” Alex reached out to palm the handle to the door leading from the restaurant back to the sunbaked pavement where Engine Eight stood in all its bright red, lights-flashing glory. “Squad’s been running light ever since Jensen got promoted to lieutenant and moved to Station Twenty-Six last month, and with the redistricting that went through four months ago, they’re running way too many calls not to replace him permanently.”
“Yeah,” Cole said, although his agreement was short-lived. “But I don’t exactly have a stunt double. Moving me to squad would leave us down a man on engine.”
Alex, being Alex, refused to be swayed. “Funny thing about firefighters is they’re always making more. The academy just spit out a fresh batch of candidates last week. And even though Jonesey’s still technically at the six-month mark, he’s catching his stride. Shit, he’s barely a rookie anymore, and anyway, it’s not as if Eight has never had two candidates at once.”
No arguing the truth there. Hell, he and Alex were walking, talking proof. But still, Cole’s ironclad calm stood its ground against the yes-yes-yes trying to build in his gut. “Okay, but just because there’s a spot opening up on squad doesn’t mean I’m going to be the man to get it.”
For as much as Alex joked, squad was elite. While fire and rescue was their primary function, Cole couldn’t deny that the hazmat response, the water rescue, and the specialized calls like building collapses that squad also handled gave him a giant fucking hard-on. But half the FFD had the same career boner. Plenty of guys were gunning for a chance to prove their mettle on squad, and Cole had already been passed over once for a spot at another house. Granted, the firefighter who’d ended up landing the position instead had more seniority and training at the time, but being passed by had only made Cole work his strategy even harder.
He didn’t just want to be a firefighter. Hell, he didn’t even want to be elite. He needed to be the best, and that meant landing a spot on the rescue squad.
After all, if there was one thing his old man had taught him decades ago, it was how to prove the hell out of his worth.
“I don’t know,” Alex said, his cocky tone going uncharacteristically soft as his words yanked Cole back to the here and now of Oak Street. “Call me crazy, but I think your number’s up, dude. I’ve got a really good feeling about this one.”
Cole barked out a laugh. He might usually take the easy-does-it route, but this was too good to pass up. “A feeling? Seriously, Teflon. Does Zoe keep your nuts in her purse?”
A lightning-fast smile flickered across Alex’s face at the mention of his girlfriend’s name. Jesus, after only five months, the guy had it so bad, Cole couldn’t even enjoy mocking him. Even if Donovan was talking crooked out of his ass right now.
“First of all”—Alex tugged open the side compartment door on Engine Eight, swinging his Halligan bar inside with a metallic clunk—“that’s pretty rich coming from a guy who’s as unlaid as a pile of goddamn bricks. Christ, Everett. The last time you had sex, there was snow on the ground.”
Ouch. “I have . . .” Cole counted backward, his argument dying in his throat. When the hell had August rolled around?
“Not. Sorry, brother, but doing the no-pants dance with your hand doesn’t count,” Donovan said over a smirk. He tossed Cole a bottle of water from one of the storage coolers before swooping in for the kill. “And secondly, just because my gut feeling can’t be neatly quantified by one of your elaborate Spock strategies doesn’t mean it’s not spot-on. I’m telling you. Something major is going down at Eight, and it’s going down today.”
“Maybe.” Cole turned his glance about fifty yards up the street, where it lande
d on the guys from Station Eight’s rescue squad. They had been running light ever since Jensen’s promotion, with only four regular guys on C-shift and a floater here and there on weekends when they tended to go on more calls. Calls that had gone to nearly time and a half since the city had widened Station Eight’s response district last month.
Ah, screw it. For all their smack talk, it wasn’t as if Donovan didn’t know the score, and all of Cole’s planning and preparation did have him logically poised to get the next available placement on squad.
“I just want the spot, you know?” His throat locked over the massive understatement, and he uncapped his water for a long swallow. “Guess I don’t want to jinx it.”
“I get it,” Alex said, his tone backing up the sentiment for just a second before he added, “But it’s kind of hard to jinx a sure thing. Just don’t forget us common folk over on engine when you transfer over to squad, all fancy and shit.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Cole opened his mouth to deliver a decidedly un-fancy directive when their lieutenant cleared his throat from behind them.
“You two done gossiping over here?” Crews asked, the barely-there lift of his brows the only thing keeping his expression out of dead neutral. For a guy who was six-two and 230 pounds even before he slung on his turnout gear, the man’s stealth was actually pretty frightening.
“Yes, sir. As soon as Everett braids my hair, we’ll be all set.”
Cole shifted his SCBA tank from his shoulders, fixing Alex with a deadpan stare. “Don’t be an asshole, Donovan. It’s your turn to braid my hair.”
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