by Bella Andre
He immediately thought of Joseph and his chest grew tight. What the hell was he going to do if Joseph really was guilty?
Logan wasn't familiar with the bitter taste of fear and sure as hell didn't like swallowing it down. One thing was for sure: If Ms. Hotshot Investigator was going to keep pushing him, he hoped she was prepared for him to push back.
"Tell me something, did an investigator ever accuse your father of arson?"
Pain registered in her eyes, on the small lines around her mouth, and he knew he'd hit below the belt, but he was fighting for his life, for his fellow hotshots, for Joseph.
He'd do whatever it took to keep them all safe.
"No." She swallowed hard. "Never. My father was a hero."
"My point exactly," he said, invading her personal space one more time. He got close enough to see that her olive-tinged skin was still flawless and that her cheekbones were more pronounced than he'd remembered.
Something tugged at him, a remembered sense that she hadn't been all there six months ago, but then again, he hadn't exactly been studying her from a distance. He'd been rubbing his lips against hers while grabbing her ass with both hands.
"Hotshots don't light fires that kill their own men. Call McCurdy and tell him to pull my suspension."
"If you want a prayer of clearing your name, Mr. Cain, I suggest you stop issuing ridiculous orders and cooperate with my investigation."
Even though he was close enough now to lick her, her voice remained steady, irritatingly calm given all he'd just thrown at her. A part of him couldn't help but admire a woman this strong, even though she had his balls in a vice grip. She hadn't even tried to move away from him. In his experience, it was a rare woman who didn't run from confrontation.
"You and I both know there's nothing to investigate," he said again. She was one tough cookie, but he was a dog with a bone, one he wasn't going to relinquish anytime soon. "You saw what happened to Connor. I need to get back to the fire to make sure the rest of my men make it out in one piece."
Her mouth tightened as she grabbed her briefcase off the table. "Again, I am very sorry about the accident today. But this suspension stands. And I encourage you to abide by Superintendent McCurdy's instructions."
Fifteen years of fighting fire had taught him to refigure his plan of attack whenever flames shifted directions. It was time to do that very thing with Maya.
"Your boss know about us yet?"
Her eyes narrowed. "There's nothing to know."
"You sure about that?" Playing off his hunch that she hadn't forgotten the way she'd responded to his mouth on her breasts, his fingers in her panties, he said, "That day in the bar, I never got a chance to tell you how pretty you were."
She held her briefcase in front of her body like a shield. "I'm not interested in talking about that day. Our previous encounter has nothing to do with this situation. Nothing at all."
He allowed his gaze to roam her body in a leisurely fashion. "The way you reached across the bar and grabbed me was something straight out of every guy's fantasies. Especially when the girl looks like you. When she's that responsive."
"Mr. Cain," she said, her tone brittle and, finally, angry, "I am long past the point of humoring you. I will contact you again for a personal interview. Until then I advise you to stay away from the fire and not bother my boss. He'll know what you're trying to do." She widened her stance. "I can guarantee he won't kick me off this case. Something that happened six months ago isn't going to alter my methodology or my assessment of the crime."
A knock sounded and Gary's voice penetrated the thick fire-resistant metal door. "Logan, we've got more trouble on the mountain."
After ten years together on the fire line, Gary knew Logan's earlier trip to the emergency room didn't mean jack and that as long as Logan could walk and use his hands, nothing would keep him away from a fire.
Nothing except a fire investigator handing him his temporary walking papers, courtesy of numero uno at the Forest Service.
Logan yanked opened the door and Gary shot an apologetic glance at Maya. "Sorry to interrupt your meeting."
It was pointless to waste time on pleasantries. If Gary knew why Maya was really there, he wouldn't bother being polite.
"What's going on?" Logan asked.
"The winds have shifted and the fire's headed straight toward the new housing development on the southwest ridge."
Logan cursed. It was just the kind of bad news he didn't need right now. If the fire took out a neighborhood of multimillion-dollar houses, the insurance companies would pick up the tab. But the Tahoe Pines hotshots would shoulder the blame.
He quickly issued his instructions. "Call in several urban crews to water down the rooftops and cut fire lines in the surrounding acreage of the border properties."
"Are you going to take the mountain or the housing development?" Gary asked.
"Neither," Logan said, dropping the hugely unexpected bomb on his squad boss. "I'm out for now."
"What the hell?"
"I put out a couple of random campfires in Desolation last week and some hikers reported me to the ranger. Plus, someone called my name in to the tip line and now the Forest Service honchos think I lit this fire. I'm on suspension until they find the real arsonist."
Gary rubbed his hand over his face and when he looked back at Logan, it was as if he'd aged a decade.
"I can't believe this. You're a goddamned hero and they're trying to pin this on you?"
"It looks good on paper. I'm sure she'd be happy to tell you more." But when he turned back to the room, Maya was gone. "Shit."
He had to hand it to her, on top of being fearless, she was wily. And quick. At this rate, she'd have the noose wrapped around his neck by nightfall.
"I still can't fucking believe this," Gary repeated.
Logan needed to get out of the station and on Maya's tail. If he were her, first place he'd go ask questions was Joseph's cabin. After all, the man had taken him in as a teenager for unspecified reasons. She wasn't stupid, she'd know there was a story there.
Only three people in Lake Tahoe knew Logan's true history: Joseph; his son, Dennis; and Logan himself. If Joseph were well, there was no way in hell that he'd give up Logan's secrets. But if Joseph's mind wandered into the darkness, even for sixty seconds, irreparable damage could be done.
Logan quickly reassured the squad boss. "You've got this under control, Gary. You don't need me out there. Put Sam at the anchor point with the radios. Take half the crew to the houses, dig a wide line along the wildland border, and keep the roofs and gardens wet."
He didn't wait for Gary's response. His squad boss and seasoned crew would deal with the fire. He had ultimate faith in them.
It was Maya Jackson he didn't trust.
CHAPTER FIVE
MAYA WHIPPED around a blind curve on the two-lane lakeside highway, desperate to put some space between herself and Logan Cain. The interruption had been her perfect chance to escape. That room had been too small. And Logan was too big, too strong, too sexy-- too everything--for her to keep her head on the case.
Every time he came close she remembered the heat of his lips on hers, the rippled muscles across his stomach as she'd run her desperate fingers across his skin six months previously.
She'd caught him off guard and he'd been angry, furious at the suspension, but instinctively, she knew he'd never physically harm her. Her traitorous body would do her in all by itself.
What would she have thought of him this afternoon had she never met him before? Would her gut still have told her he was innocent? Or would she have held on to her doubts a little longer? Their meeting had been fraught with tension, and yet, she couldn't help but feel that the Forest Service was going after the wrong man. It didn't help that no matter how she looked at the situation, it was impossible to separate their past from the present.
She'd thought he might use that one reckless, emotional afternoon in the bar against her, but she hadn't been prepared
for her physical reaction to him. He was her suspect, for God's sake. She couldn't let him off the hook simply because she wanted him to take her up against the wall of the station, up against any wall, anywhere.
She used her upper teeth to pull her lower lip into her mouth, chewing as she worked things out. Without any evidence other than the ranger's reports and her tense chat with Logan at the station, she had no clear sense of the case.
Maya's GPS system beeped in warning a moment before the screen went blank. She was trying to find Joseph Kellerman's cottage, but he lived too deep in the woods for her car's mapping system to keep up. The pine trees were too mature and tall for her to get a signal. Damn it. She didn't have any time to waste. Not when she had a feeling that Logan would be trying to track her every move.
How had he become the hunter and she the prey, when he was her suspect, not the other way around?
So far she'd passed a dozen dirt roads that snaked off the highway into the forest. One of them had to lead to the cabin Logan resided in as a teenager. Eyes peeled for a sign with the name Kellerman on it, she ignored a honking minivan on her tail and slowed way down. At last, she hit the jackpot when she saw a hand-carved "Kellerman" sign nailed to a tree ten yards ahead. Maneuvering her car into the narrow lane cut out between thick tree trunks, she turned on her headlights for better visibility. The dirt driveway wound up the hill.
Several minutes later, her foot barely on the gas pedal as she inched forward, the single-lane road petered out. She parked behind a beaten-up old truck. Stepping out of her car, she was struck by the heady scent of pine trees and memories she wasn't quick enough to push away.
Her father had loved the forest and he'd taught her and Tony to love it too. She'd grown up in a pack on her father's back until she grew big enough to run along the trails, her chubby toddler legs moving as fast as they could, her hand in her father's.
Maya squeezed her eyes shut. It hurt just as much to think about her father today as it had last year right after the cancer had eaten straight through his lungs into his organs. Now that she was surrounded by hotshots again, she couldn't look at them without seeing traces of her father in all of them.
Logan's words bounced around in her brain. Did a fire investigator ever accuse your father of arson?
He'd been trying to get a rise out of her, but even though he nearly had, she knew that losing control of her emotions wasn't going to help her solve this case. Just the opposite, in fact.
Moving quickly through the dry pine needles and gravel, she pulled herself together as she headed for the rustic cabin. She knocked on the front door. The seconds crept by with no response, so she knocked harder. Finally, she heard footsteps.
A rumpled man with hair sticking up in a dozen directions opened the door. His wide smile took her aback, as did a clear picture of how handsome he must have been when he was Logan's age. He would have been just as much of a lady killer as his foster son.
"I haven't had a pretty girl like you on my doorstep in decades."
She smiled back despite herself. "Mr. Kellerman?"
His grin didn't waver. "Looks like you found me."
Another time--another life, long before she'd lost half her family and stupidly jumped a sexy stranger in a bar--she might have enjoyed bantering with a charming older man. Instead, she was all business.
"I'd like to ask you a few questions about Logan Cain, if you don't mind."
"Sweet Jesus. You're not pregnant, are you?"
She swallowed her shock at being asked such a ridiculously personal question by an absolute stranger. "No. Of course not."
Joseph frowned. "So you're not one of Logan's girlfriends? Although, come to think of it, he hasn't brought one around here for quite some time."
She shook her head, praying he didn't notice her blushing in the dim light filtering through the trees. "No," she said honestly, even though the truth was so much more complicated than that.
If those were Joseph's leadoff questions, how many girlfriends were there in Logan's posse? And just where had her midafternoon makeout session with him fallen on his list of sexual partners that day?
Women loved firefighters. Maya did too. How could she not? The truth was, she'd primarily dated firefighters for the past ten years, but that was before she'd finally figured out that firefighters always left, one way or another. Either they walked out on you by choosing fire first every time ... or they died before they could.
"Who are you?"
She'd had doors slammed in her face more than once from people who were afraid of saying too much to a fire investigator. Frankly, she wasn't sure what to expect from Joseph.
"I'm from Cal Fire." She repeated the exact words she'd said to Logan. "We're working with the Forest Service to conduct an origin-and-cause investigation."
She never led with the word "arson." It scared people. Made them clam up.
Joseph's deeply lined, scruffy face went white. "Shit." He moved out of the doorway. "You'd better come in."
She followed him into the cabin, her nose wrinkling at the musty smell. A thick layer of dust covered everything. Newspapers were stacked high in corners and the kitchen was a mess of open cans and boxes and dirty plates. It was obvious that something wasn't right. How, she wondered, had Joseph's situation played into Logan's emotional state?
Joseph slid some dirty clothes off a beaten-up leather couch. He didn't seem to notice the mess. "You want a drink?"
She shook her head, idly wondering if alcoholism could be the problem. But she hadn't smelled anything on Joseph's breath, hadn't noticed beer cans and empty liquor bottles in the kitchen.
"No thanks." She pulled a small notepad and pen out of her big bag. "I'd like to ask you some questions."
He sank into an easy chair covered in shredding blue fabric. "Okay."
"Logan moved in with you as teenager, is that correct?"
"He was seventeen. A hell of a kid. Still is."
"Are you a blood relative?"
"No."
"Why wasn't he living with his parents? Or with an aunt or uncle?"
Joseph's eyes were wary. He didn't want to say too much, knew better than to say too little. "His mother asked me to take him."
This part of Logan's file hadn't added up. He'd moved from Boulder, Colorado, to California his junior year of high school. She wasn't going to leave Joseph's house until she found out why.
"Why you?"
"We dated." His eyes lost focus. "A long time ago. Before she got married and had Logan. Before I met my wife."
Maya didn't see any evidence of a wife, even though Joseph wore a dented gold wedding band. "I take it he was getting into trouble?"
Joseph's eyes were clear as they locked back onto hers. "He wasn't different from any other kid. He just didn't know what to do with all that energy." He pinned her with a knowing glance. "All that passion."
Fuck. She was blushing again. If they'd been talking about anyone else, any other man she'd made out with, she wouldn't have been the least bit bothered. But fifteen minutes in Logan's arms had been long enough to brand her. One taste of him was not enough, could never be enough.
Even though it had to be.
She cleared her throat, sweeping away the sensual images. "I'm not going to lie to you, Mr. Kellerman. The Forest Service has reason to suspect that Logan set the fire currently burning in Desolation Wilderness."
Joseph sucked in a breath. "That's bullshit."
It was never easy to hear that a loved one was potentially responsible for causing such widespread destruction. Arson tended to be a secret passion, something that usually flared up into the open when provoked by great emotions. Even then, many arsonists' first fires went undetected, staying just small enough to remain under the radar.
"Your reaction is understandable," she said in a reasonable voice.
But rather than soothe Joseph, her words provoked him. He shot out of his chair and she had another glimpse of the strong man he used to be.
&n
bsp; "Fuck understandable."
Maya didn't move a muscle, barely blinked. When people grew agitated, they talked. And said things they would have otherwise kept hidden.
"That boy couldn't hurt a goddamned fly. Not even his shithead father, who deserves an ass kicking if anyone ever did. I don't care what Logan used to do when he was a kid, he'd never light a fire that could wipe out one of his crew. Never."
He wobbled on his feet and Maya jumped up to steady him even as she wondered, What bad things had Logan done as a kid?
Joseph gave her a weak smile. "I haven't gotten my heart racing like that in a while."
She helped him back into his chair. "I know I'm asking some hard questions, that they're difficult to deal with. But getting answers is the only way I can possibly clear Logan's name."
"Or convict me."
Logan's deep voice hummed up her spine, and her scalp tingled like she was a fourteen-year-old girl and the hot high school quarterback had finally noticed her.
She spun around. "I'm conducting a private interview. Please wait outside."
One side of Logan's mouth quirked up. "Like hell if I'm going to wait out on the deck while you grill him."
"Your girlfriend sure is pretty."
Maya turned back to Joseph, utterly confused by his random statement. Why on earth would he say such a ridiculous thing when he knew exactly why she was here?
"I'm not his girlfriend," Maya clarified.
Logan grabbed her elbow and hauled her into the kitchen. "Time to go."
She wrenched her arm from his warm grasp. She hated men who thought they could push her around simply because they were bigger. Even more, she hated the way her nipples immediately peaked beneath her bra at Logan's rough touch. "I'm not leaving until I'm finished with my questions."
Joseph shook his head and smiled. "She's tougher than your usual girls, Logan. And smart too, you can see it in her eyes. I wouldn't piss her off if I were you. I don't want to see you let go of a good thing. Gonna have to think about weddings and babies one day."
Joseph's eyes had become slightly unfocused and Maya shifted her gaze to Logan. She saw worry. Fear. And then she realized what was going on: Joseph was suffering from dementia. Or, worse, undiagnosed Alzheimer's.
Logan grabbed her briefcase, his voice low so only she could hear it. "There are plenty of other people you can grill about me. Guys on my crew. Old girlfriends. People whose lives I've saved. Not a tired old man who needs to rest."
