Page 24 of Burnin' For You
“I’ll take six carrot-cake muffins,” he said in a voice barely above a whisper.
She pulled them out, boxed them, then put them in a bag. Rang them up.
He handed her a twenty, and she found change, dumped it into his hand.
Expected him to turn, leave. But he didn’t, just stood there. Then, “You okay, Gilly?”
And it was the soft drawl, the way he looked up, glancing fast to meet her eyes—his brown, dark and sweet—that had her suddenly realizing...
Maybe shedidswoon.
Oh, boy. She managed a tight nod, however, and he turned, walked out the door.
“That’s a hot cake if I’ve ever seen one,” her sister said, holding a tray of the still-warm banana muffins.
“Oh, please,” Gilly said. But she watched as Reuben climbed into his truck, slid on a pair of aviators, and pulled out from the curb. He hung his arm out the window, his biceps thickening against the frame.
Yeah, she needed to put out a fire, and pronto.
He’d hurt her.
Reuben pulled away from the Hot Cakes Bakery, Gilly’s words like a boulder in his chest.I’m not a hot cake.
It wasn’t so much her words as the way she’d looked at him. Her blue eyes wide in shock, and then a shadow across her face, their disaster on the dance floor evident in the way she glanced away, couldn’t meet his eyes after that.
Embarrassed. Probably even a little afraid of him, if not repulsed by his bull-in-a-china-shop moves after his spectacular landing, trapping her on the dance floor.
Then there were her words—Let. Me. Go! Which would have been enough if not for the lick of panic, the flare of fear deep behind her eyes.
She’d practically run from the Hotline, her sister hot on her tail, and they hadn’t returned.
He’d wrecked their evening out, and worse, he’d trampled all over their fragile relationship with his impulsive decision. There was no going back. And certainly no way to fix it.
Now, at best, things would be awkward between them.
He braked at the light then turned toward the campground that bordered the Ember Fire Base. Conner had called an ad hoc meeting to unravel the ongoing mystery of who had stolen Conner’s experimental firefighting drones and dropped them in the forest like matches. The working theory was that the arsonist was igniting the northern forest in hopes of taking out the smokejumper team.
That had Reuben pounding his fist against the steering wheel, another layer of frustration.
He’d like to find their arsonist as much as he’d like to go back in time and fix last night’s bumble.
On the seat beside him, his cell phone rang. He glanced at the caller ID then picked up the call, turning on the speaker phone. “Mom.”
He could picture her standing in their lodge kitchen, staring out the window to the vast pastureland that made up the Triple M Ranch, some ninety miles southeast of Ember. The herd often liked to mosey toward the house in the morning, Black Angus clumping together, grazing in the pasture closest to the house. Hondo, their Australian sheepdog, would be barking, anxious to get to work.
Knox and his other brothers would already be outside, saddling their horses. His sisters, too, probably—they worked the ranch as well as his brothers.
On a day like today, the blue sky stretched from the ends of the earth, cloudless and bright. Reuben could almost smell the piney, fresh wind through the towering lodgepole pines that bordered their house, cresting down from Black Mountain, across the Geraldine River, and through their nine thousand acres of legacy ranchland.
Mom would have been up early with his sisters, Ruby Jane and Coco fixing a mountain of eggs and sausage. He could almost hear Wyatt and Ford fighting Tate for the last helping. Knox would be outlining their projects for the day—probably haying, if he read the calendar right.
“I’m so glad I caught you, Rube. I thought you might be out fighting a fire somewhere.”
He sort of was—a fire of his own making, the kind that burned in his gut and never seemed to die.
“We’ve been home for a few days. But we might deploy to Idaho—Miles has us on standby.”
“I wanted to see if you were coming home for Labor Day. You haven’t been back to the ranch in ages, and your siblings would like to see you.”