Setting Off Sparks
Jennifer Bernard
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
About the Author
Also by Jennifer Bernard
1
Big Canyon, sixteen months ago
Finn Abrams had aced every training drill, certification test and physical challenge on the way to becoming a wildfire hotshot. He could do forty-two sit-ups in under a minute, followed by thirty push-ups and a five-mile run up a mountain wearing a forty-five-pound pack. He’d made top marks in every fire science course, and his crew captain called him the best rookie he’d ever hired.
But right now, staring down the massive flaming beast known as the Big Canyon Wildfire, he realized nothing could prepare you for this. Not even a whole summer of fighting fires, of proving himself in the hundred-degree heat, cutting line with guys who’d been doing this for years. This fire was so ferocious, so unpredictable. It had just changed course again and was now headed right toward the twenty members of the Fighting Scorpions Hotshots. Acrid whirlwinds of smoke blasted the crew and the roar of the fire-generated wind deafened them. Finn nearly choked on the hot stench of burning leaves and tree trunks. To one side of their location, the bare rock wall of a canyon loomed like an oasis in a world gone mad.
He barely heard Sean Marcus when he shouted the command to the crew. “We’ll deploy here.”
Oh fuck. Deploy. That meant the crew members would shake out their emergency shelters and hunker down as the flames ran over the top of them. A burnover, the hotshots called it. The worst possible scenario. They’d have to trust their lives to a thin layer of aluminum fabric. It was their only chance for survival.
It was a good call, and Finn knew it. He’d trained for this. He knew the drill. He wanted to follow the order to deploy his shelter. His life depended on it.
But he couldn’t move. Couldn’t make himself move.
Josh Marshall whipped out his shelter and dropped to the ground. Rollo Wareham did the same, barely managing to squeeze his big body under the edges of his tent.
Do it, asshole. Do it.
But he couldn’t. Because all of a sudden, he was somewhere else.
He was a boy trapped inside a world on fire. His parents were downstairs. They’d come back earlier, drunk and laughing from the bar where his father worked. He was hiding from the fire inside his toy chest—an old steamer trunk. He kept screaming for his parents but no one came.
With shaking hands, he opened the trunk lid just a crack. Orange flames filled the entire doorway like monsters. That was his death out there. He knew it. The fire was coming for him and he was trapped in this tiny space, alone and about to burn to death.
Sean shouted something and ran toward him. The world came back in a hot rush. Big Canyon. Wildfire. Deploy. NO.
He yelled something to Sean, words of pure panic—he didn’t even know what they were. He spun away and ran from the wildfire. He heard more shouting behind him, but then the roar of the flames overtook the sound.
Finn ran the way he’d wanted to back then, when his toy chest was his shelter. He ran until he came to his senses, until his lungs ached for oxygen. He bent over, heaving, shaking. Behind him, a wall of flames separated him from his crew. Smoke unfurled toward him. What had he done?
Oh God. Please let the guys survive.
He had no idea how long he’d been running, or which direction. He also had no idea what to do next. So he veered toward the next downslope. Maybe he could find a cave or a deep ravine the flames wouldn’t reach.
Heat fanned his back. He fought with his panic. Think, Finn, think.
The wildfire was coming. He was going to die. Deploy that damn shelter.
And then he saw a flash of cool gray off to the side. He blinked—was it smoke? Rock? Something that could help him? Tears streamed from his stinging eyes and he stumbled onto his hands and knees.
Get up, get up.
He pitched forward, half-tumbling, half-scrambling to his feet. The gray expanded to include some deep brown and even black. It was a stream bed. A dry one with an exposed gravel bottom.
He ran for it with everything he had. He dove into its exact center, where several feet separated him from the fire devouring the forest on either side of him. He plastered himself face down against the gravel to stay as low as possible.
Again that same vision came back to him. The steamer trunk. The terror.
He was five years old. His name was Elias, not Finn. And he was going to die.
Something whacked him in the face. A flaming log had flown through the air and struck him on the head. He batted it away as pain erupted across the left side of his face. He rolled to the side but not quickly enough, and the wind blew the burning wood against him and all of a sudden his entire side was on fire, despite his fire-resistant Nomex pants and shirt.
He rolled over to suffocate the flames, even though the agony made him scream.
Everything went dark.
When he came to, the entire landscape around him was a blackened, smoldering wasteland. But he was alive.
Over the next few hours, he hiked across the black toward the nearest checkpoint. Each step sent pain shooting through him. His clothes were rags, his face and body burned and throbbed.
And the entire time, he kept asking himself one thing. Where the fuck had that memory come from?
As far as he knew, he’d never been trapped in a fire. His name wasn’t Elias. His father didn’t work at a bar, he ran a movie studio and dated one actress after another. He hadn’t hidden in a toy chest. He’d never owned a toy chest.
Or had he?
2
Lisa Peretti had stopped believing in fairy tales somewhere between her mother’s third divorce and her first year of nursing school. But right now, pushing Molly McGraw’s wheelchair down the sidewalks of Jupiter Point, she wondered if she’d missed something. The town had storybook charm oozing out of every cedar shingle and wrought-iron lamppost. It was enough to make even a jaded big city ER nurse like herself give a sentimental sigh.
Of course, it was all designed to inspire that reaction. Jupiter Point knew how to draw in the honeymooners and the tourists, not to mention the stargazers. Like naming every business with a “star” theme. Come on. Moon Glow Spa and Hair Salon. Really?
“Give me a Supercuts any day,” Lisa told Mrs. McGraw as they approached the salon, whose glass storefront was decorated—adorably—with beaming golden moons. “Haircuts are one thing, but I flat-out refuse to glow.”
Molly tilted her head back and laughed up at her, her lined face haloed by a white fluff of hair. Molly was, in fact, glowing. She had a perfect right to do so. She didn’t leave the house much anymore, with her advanced Parkinson’s. But with her daughter Evie getting married, and the whole fami
ly busy, they’d hired Lisa as a temporary caregiver. And Lisa’s first mission had been to get her out of the house more.
“But you, my dear, are another matter.” She smiled affectionately at the older woman. “You’re going to be glowing so much we’ll have to wear sunglasses to the wedding.”
“Be c-careful,” said Molly. “That smile glows.”
In the two weeks that Lisa had been working for Molly, they’d developed a teasing kind of banter they both savored. “You know me, I’m a hardhearted cynic. We don’t weep and we don’t glow.”
“But you smile. That’s a s-start.”
They reached the entrance. Lisa stepped around Molly’s wheelchair to open the door to the salon, only to find it already swinging wide. An older woman with foil in her hair held it open for them with a beaming smile.
“Molly McGraw, what a treat to see you here.”
A chorus of agreement and greetings came from the other ladies in the stylists’ chairs and under the hair dryers. The flowery scent of shampoo and overheated hair products made Lisa’s nose prickle.
A young woman with a pink bob wiped her hands on her smock and hurried toward them. She bent down to kiss Molly on the cheek. “You didn’t have to come all the way here. You know I’m happy to come to your house.”
“I know. But Lisa here is g-getting me on the move. I have to do what she says because she’s my f-favorite nurse. B-beautiful and kindhearted, although she tries to hide it.”
Lisa felt a blush sneak across her face. She hated her tendency to blush because it went counter to her badass, never-miss-a-beat crisis-manager reputation. “Where would you like us?” she asked the stylist.
“Call me Annie, and you can bring her right over here.”
Lisa pushed the wheelchair over to the spot Annie indicated, set the locks, then pulled a covered plastic cup with a straw from her tote bag. She gave Molly a sip, then made way for Annie, who offered her a warm smile.
“You can help yourself to water, or something from the Keurig.” She waved a hand at the cozy seating area just inside the bay window up front. “We have a pile of old magazines or you can just enjoy some good old-fashioned gossip.”
“We already covered all the big news in town, thanks to me.” The woman with the foil, who Lisa now recognized as Mrs. Murphy from the Third Book from the Sun bookstore, settled back under a dryer. “Now we want to hear about you, Molly. So you have a new nurse, do you?”
Lisa started to answer, but Molly forestalled her. “This is Lisa, she comes from T-Texas, she’s been with me for two weeks and I won’t have you s-scaring her away with your interrogations.”
Lisa laughed, though she had to admit she was relieved. Questions made her nervous. Not that she had anything to hide, but…well, she did. Two words defined her existence since she’d left Houston. Low. Profile. It had been nearly a year, and maybe soon she’d feel completely safe. But not yet.
Mrs. Murphy’s tinfoil quivered like a set of antennae as she eyed Lisa. If anything, she looked even more curious.
“I won’t be in town for long,” Lisa told her. “I’m sure you have better topics to discuss.”
“Yes, like Evie’s wedding.” One of the other hairstylists jumped in.
Letting out a long breath, Lisa picked up a copy of a tabloid and casually leafed through it as the discussion swirled around her. She had no interest in weddings, having been in more than her share. Her mother had remarried three times and her stepsisters had already racked up five weddings. Everyone in her family liked to get married—multiple times, apparently. Except her.
A photo in the tabloid caught her eye. It was a red-carpet photo of a couple arm in arm. The woman was a willowy blond actress whose name Lisa couldn’t quite place. The man looked like an Italian prince—dark-haired and stunningly handsome. And familiar. She stared at it, trying to remember where she’d seen him. In a movie? On a billboard?
Then her gaze dropped to the next photo. This one was taken in a hospital room. The same blond woman posed next to the bed—Lisa could tell it was a pose, having seen thousands of actual women next to real patients. In the bed lay the same dark-haired man, except now the entire left side of his face was covered in red burn marks.
Annika rushes to bedside of wounded fireman hero, read the caption.
Oh please. Could their writers be any more overdramatic? She skimmed the story, which talked about a “burnover” in the Big Canyon Wilderness. Twenty firefighters had nearly died when a wildfire had changed direction and they’d taken shelter inside their emergency tents.
So the mystery man was a fireman. Had she met him last summer, when she’d volunteered at the Breton Forest Service lookout tower? A memory tugged at her.
An excited voice caught her attention.
“Oh my goodness. Would you look at that?” Mrs. Murphy jumped to her feet, bonking her head on the metal dome of the hair dryer. It didn’t faze her one bit as she rushed to the door of the salon. “Finn’s back. And he has that actress with him. They must be here for the wedding.”
Finn. Finn. Now she remembered. In excruciating detail.
It had happened a few weeks ago, when she’d first returned to Jupiter Point. She’d decided the town would be a good place to stay off the radar. She knew the area because she’d spent all the past summer at the Breton lookout tower volunteering for the Forest Service—but hiding out, really. For six months, she’d been mostly alone in the remote wilderness looking for smoke that would indicate a wildfire. She’d loved every quiet, healing minute in that tower.
So the first thing she did when she got back to town was hike out to Breton, which wasn’t staffed in the winter. But instead of the peace and quiet she’d expected, she’d stumbled onto an engagement party. Twinkle lights lit up the observation room, some of them spelling the words “Bri and Rollo 4 Ever.” Brianna, the bride-to-be, had invited her to stay, so she’d accepted a glass of champagne and some cheese and crackers.
And then someone had planted himself in front of her. Someone extremely good-looking—and extensively scarred on one side of his face, from jaw to cheekbone. Burn scars, she knew from experience. Wide shoulders, lean build, thick dark hair, smoldering brown eyes with ridiculously long eyelashes—the entire package was breathtaking. And he was staring at her as if he never wanted to stop.
It made her so uncomfortable, she nearly swallowed a cube of cheese. She didn’t want attention. Not even from an attractive man.
“So, do you come here often?” He winced as soon as he asked the clichéd question. “Don’t answer that. What I mean is, I think I saw a picture of you on that corkboard.”
He waved in the direction of the kitchenette where she’d cooked her meals last summer.
She nodded, making a mental note to confiscate that photo as soon as possible. She hadn’t known it was there.
“So, I figure you’ve been here before. Not that I’m stalking you or anything. I didn’t know you’d be here. I mean, I kind of hoped you would be.” He clawed one hand through his dark hair, leaving it romantically tousled. With a pained—but charming—smile, he finished with, “I’m making a mess out of this, aren’t I?”
She wrinkled her forehead, still not really getting it. “A mess of what, exactly?”
“Let me try again. I hiked out here a couple months ago with some friends. I saw that photo, which I now know is you, and I thought, ‘I hope I meet that woman someday.’ And here you are. Sounds like destiny to me.”
“Destiny?” She finished her cheese and wiped her fingers on a napkin. “Sorry, I’m not much of a believer. I put destiny in the same category as cheesy pick-up lines.”
“Are you a magician?”
“Excuse me?”
“Every time I look at you, everyone else disappears.” He looked at her expectantly, waiting for her to smile.
She narrowed her eyes at him instead. “That’s the cheesiest line I’ve ever heard. It’s actually an insult to cheese.”
He laughed. �
�Did you read Dr. Seuss as a kid?”
“What?”
“Because green eggs and damn.” He shoved his hands in his pockets, raking her with an exaggerated, appreciative survey.
Finally, she laughed. It was an involuntary, incredulous laugh, but still. “Okay, you got me. That is the worst pick-up line I’ve ever heard.”
“Oh, I’ve got more. I have an extensive collection.”
Honestly, she was surprised he needed pick-up lines. A guy like him, with his looks and charm, could probably pick up a woman with half a wink of one eye. “Strange thing to collect.”
“Yes, well, I grew up in LA.” He gave her that flashing, groove-in-the-cheek smile again. “Misspent youth on Sunset Boulevard. How about you? Where are you from? I’m Finn Abrams, by the way.”
“Well, Finn, I don’t think we’ve reached the sharing-life-stories phase, sorry.”
“I think I heard a ‘yet’ in there. We’re not at that phase yet. But I know a good way to get there. So how about we back up and start again. Will you have dinner with me, mystery tower woman?”
She shook her head, bewildered by how quickly the conversation had morphed so it felt like she actually knew this stranger. Like she wanted to know him. Wanted to know how he’d gotten the scars, why pain still lurked behind his eyes. How he could still be so charming, despite such a recent—to her expert eye—trauma.
But she had to stay cautious. And she didn’t go for the charming type anyway.
“We’re in a tower in the middle of the wilderness. What exactly did you have in mind?”
“Leave it to me. We’ll gorge on cheese and crackers and drink champagne under the stars.”
Everything about him was so warm, so inviting, so enticing.
So not happening. “It’s January.”
He cocked his head at her. “Do you believe in love at first sight?”
She gaped at him.
“Because I can walk by again.” Mischief glittered in his dark eyes.
She snatched her backpack off the floor. This engagement party was nice and all—Rollo and Brianna seemed great— but this was crazy. “Let’s start over completely, shall we?”
Setting Off Sparks (Jupiter Point Book 4) Page 1
