Blaze (Bearpaw Ridge Firefighters Book 8) Read online

  Blaze (Bearpaw Ridge Firefighters Book 8)

  By Ophelia Sexton

  Published by Philtata Press LLC

  Text copyright 2018 by Ophelia Sexton. All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Jacqueline Sweet

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Dedication

  In loving memory of Susan M. Garrett

  Artist. Writer. Friend. Mentor. Empress of Obscure Fandoms.

  You were witty and kind and wrote kick-ass fanfiction. You are missed.

  Excerpt

  She smiled at him, and Dimitri stopped in his tracks, feeling like he'd just been hit by an anvil.

  He could feel the vibrations from the invisible impact shuddering through his entire body, right down the marrow in his bones.

  The cool breeze ruffling the grass in the pasture next to the highway carried her scent to him, clean and healthy under the soft perfume of her shampoo and laundry products.

  His bear roused from its sleep.

  She's the one. Our mate, it rumbled inside Dimitri's head.

  Oh hell yes, he agreed without thinking.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 – Special Assignment

  Chapter 2 – Wayward Son

  Chapter 3 – Target

  Chapter 4 – Date with Danger

  Chapter 5 – Decision Point

  Chapter 6 – Out of the Box

  Chapter 7 – Getting to Know You

  Chapter 8 – First Date

  Chapter 9 – If Wishes Were Horses

  Chapter 10 – A Place to Belong

  Chapter 11 – Too Hot to Handle

  Chapter 12 – A Grizzly-Sized Secret

  Chapter 13 – Confession is Good for the Soul

  Chapter 14 – Truth and Consequences

  Chapter 15 – Breaking the News

  Chapter 16 – Lifeline

  Chapter 17 – The First Step Away

  Chapter 18 – Second Dads

  Chapter 19 – Mama Bear

  Chapter 20 – Uncomfortable Reunions

  Chapter 21 – Fireworks and Disaster

  Chapter 22 – Bear Justice

  Chapter 23 – Happily Ever After

  Epilogue

  Books by Ophelia Sexton

  Chapter 1 – Special Assignment

  New York City

  "I love how you always make it look like an accident," said Tony "The Fixer" Rizzo.

  He held out a white envelope stuffed with bills.

  "That's because I hate it when cops poke around," Damaris Markidis answered. "And the cops in this precinct hate doing extra work. So it's a win-win when some lowlife has an accident and no one feels compelled to investigate."

  She grabbed the envelope and yanked back her hand…but she wasn't quite fast enough. Tony captured her hand and raised it to his lips.

  Damaris shuddered as he slobbered over her knuckles. She tried to pull away, but his grip turned bruising.

  "Quit it, Tony," she snapped, keeping up the pressure. She couldn't afford to let him think that he had a chance with her. "How many times do I have to tell you that I don't date my clients?"

  "C'mon, D, I just wanna take you out to a nice dinner," he wheedled. "To show my appreciation for your work. I made reservations for 8:00 p.m. at a really classy place. Five stars on Yelp."

  As the languid pulse of a pop ballad filtered through the walls of Tony's office from the strip club's lounge and bar area, Damaris wondered what Tony considered a "classy" place.

  Probably not sushi.

  Outside the office, soft leather chairs, faux Oriental rugs, and a long, mirrored antique mahogany bar helped make Topaz by Tony Gentleman's Club the kind of upscale joint where businessmen took male clients to break the ice or close a deal.

  But inside Tony's office, his cheapskate personality shone front and center.

  Years ago, the walls had been painted plain white. Now they were a blotchy grime-gray, the lower half marked with dark scuff marks. The furnishings consisted of a battered computer desk with fake wood veneer peeling away from the corners, a desk chair that looked like it had been salvaged from an office furniture dump, and a low, overstuffed leather couch with sprung cushions that sucked the unsuspecting guest down like quicksand.

  After her first entrapment in the Quicksand Couch's depth, Damaris always remained standing when she visited Tony. She needed room to maneuver when he tried to make a pass at her.

  "Thanks, but no thanks." She kept pulling away, hoping he'd finally take the hint that she wasn't just playing hard to get.

  He never did, though.

  She added, "I have to take Sophie to her dance recital tonight."

  Tony scowled but finally released her hand. It hurt, and she knew she'd be seeing bruises there in a couple of hours.

  His cold blue eyes narrowed in suspicion. "You're not seein' some other guy, are you?"

  He stared at her intently, his bushy white-blond brows pushing together in a frown.

  Damaris tried to hide her shudder behind a cool lift of her own brows. Tony was a predator. The minute he scented blood—or fear—he'd be on her like a lion pouncing on a gazelle in one of those nature documentaries that Sophie loved to watch.

  The trick to surviving around people like Tony was to convince them that you were just as tough a predator as they were.

  And that wasn't easy when you were on the short side and a few pounds overweight rather than tall and athletic.

  On the other hand, being petite and curvy meant that none of her targets ever suspected her until it was too late.

  "As if I've got time to date anyone!" Damaris scoffed, staring him down. "I'm a single mom, Tony. And I have a business to run."

  All of that was true. Not to mention that she wouldn't date Tony if he was the last man on earth. Even if you ignored his ties to organized crime, his relentless pursuit of Damaris while being married with two kids put him firmly in the "creep" category.

  And then there was the fact that Tony was blackmailing her into arranging the occasional "accident."

  She'd never planned on becoming a mobster's pet assassin. And she hated it.

  As far as the IRS and the authorities were concerned, Damaris owned Markidis Solutions, a sole-proprietor human resources consulting firm used by most of the Mob-controlled nightclubs, bars, and strip joints in this part of the city.

  Ninety-nine percent of the time, she was legitimately troubleshooting her clients' businesses and recommending perfectly legal changes to make things run more smoothly on the personnel end of things.

  But then there was the other 1% of her business, which was arranging conveniently fatal accidents for club owners. Because there was always that one employee who refused to play nice. And a businessman like Tony couldn't just fire that employee if he happened to be the local Mob boss's goon.

  The problem goons skimmed protection payments, drank up a bar's profits, and harassed the staff—especially the strippers, who mostly just wanted to work their shifts, collect their tips and paychecks, and then go home without any hassles.

  Normal methods used to rein in problem employees didn't work, because the goons were convinced that they were untouchable.

  That made them a problem for everyone, including their Mob bosses.

  When D
amaris had carried out her first hit, her consulting company had been less than a year old at the time, and her first and only client was Tony Rizzo. She knew she had to keep Tony happy until she was able to convince other businesses to hire her.

  And she needed more clients if she wanted to be able to give her daughter the happy, secure childhood that Damaris had missed out on.

  She had figured out pretty quickly that Tony wasn't just a club owner. But she had intended to keep her dealings with him strictly on the legal side, so she'd assumed that his organized crime connections wouldn't taint her.

  Looking back now, she realized that she'd been hopelessly naïve, and he'd just been biding his time, looking for an opening to exploit so that he could own her, lock, stock, and barrel.

  That opening had come when she'd encountered Nick the Handler. George Leonetti, the local Mob boss, had assigned his nephew Nick to keep an eye on Tony's club, and Tony was forced to hire Nick as a floor manager.

  Nick had been a terrifying bully. He had driven away Tony's most popular stripper. Then he had turned his attention to Damaris. Her attempts to avoid him when she went to Tony's club for her weekly meetings just seemed to encourage Nick to get creative in trying to convince her to sleep with him.

  If by "convince" you meant "grope and harass."

  And then Nick had made a fatal error. He had threatened Sophie unless Damaris had sex with him.

  As someone just starting out with her own business, Damaris had realized that she had to put up with a certain amount of crap from Tony. But no one was going to mess with her kid. No one.

  She had to do something.

  She managed to fend off Nick long enough to arrange for him to fall victim to a car accident that no one would suspect was anything but an accident.

  In the aftermath, she had been torn by conflicting feelings of relief and terror.

  For weeks afterwards, Damaris had jumped every time her phone rang or she saw a police car cruising by. Despite all of her careful planning, she found herself unable to believe that she might actually get away with it.

  No one, not even Nick's Uncle George, seemed surprised to hear that Nick had hit a patch of oil, lost control of his muscle car, and skidded off a dock into the Hudson River late one night.

  And no one pushed for an investigation—not Nick's uncle, not the coroner, not the cops.

  Damaris overheard Mr. Leonetti commenting, "I always knew Nick would kill himself someday in that souped-up piece of shit."

  That was when Damaris learned that guys like Nick made a lot of enemies, and as long as the accident seemed plausible and not a challenge to the local Mob boss's authority…no one would be interested in investigating too deeply.

  The only person who had figured it out was Tony.

  Damaris never did figure out what tipped him off that Nick's accident was no accident and that Damaris had arranged it.

  About a week after Nick's death, they were in Tony's office. He had just finished telling her that he wanted her to take on managing HR for Johnny Jackpot's Club—finally, a second billable client, yay!— when he ambushed her with, "So, how'd you get rid of Nick?"

  She could only gape at him speechlessly, terror burning like acid through her veins and her heart pounding like she'd just downed four shots of espresso.

  The only thought going through her brain was: I'm dead. I'm dead. I'm dead.

  Then Tony did the unexpected. He laughed, rose from his chair, and leaned over his desk to slap her on the shoulder like one of the guys.

  "Thought so, D. Served the asshole right," he chortled before handing her a CD and a set of file folders containing the personnel records for Johnny Jackpot's.

  Damaris was left to stare at him in shock and slowly fading terror.

  But of course, there was a price to pay for Tony's silence. The next day, he began to recommend her services as a "human resources consultant" to his organized crime associates in the adult entertainment industry.

  Apparently, most of Tony's associates also had "one of those guys" on board their various enterprises—a perpetual troublemaker who needed to just disappear.

  And Damaris found herself unable to say no when Tony handed her one of his "special assignments."

  Luckily for Damaris's sanity, most of her work still revolved around catching bartenders pouring free drinks for themselves and friends, resolving feuds between strippers, and figuring out which managers were skimming their employees' tips.

  On the positive side, she also got to recommend trustworthy and hardworking employees for raises and promotions.

  At least Tony and his buddies paid generously for the terrible risk she took every time she arranged an accident.

  Damaris tried to convince herself that staying out of prison was worth her shattered nerves and the nightmares that woke her, sweating and gasping, in the middle of the night. As the child of a single mom, her daughter relied solely on Damaris for a secure—and most of all, safe—childhood.

  Sophie went to a private school, had a circle of friends, and attended dance lessons after school. And she had no idea what her mother did to earn the money to pay for it all.

  "Gotta go, Tony," Damaris said lightly and tucked the envelope away in her designer knockoff purse. "Dance recital starts in an hour, and I still have to deal with rush hour out there."

  She didn't own a car, but the subway was always packed, and the bus that took her on the final leg of her commute would be inching along in heavy traffic.

  She grimaced and began to back towards the office door. Almost there. This might be a lucky day… She dared to hope.

  Then Tony said, smirking as if he'd read her mind. "One more thing, D."

  So close! Damaris stopped and waited, tension vibrating through every nerve in her body. Please, oh please, let it be about Candi and Pamela's feud over their center pole shifts!

  "I got a special assignment for you."

  Oh no. Damaris's heart sank. Up until now, she'd completed maybe one or two "special assignments" a year. But to get another assignment right after she'd just finished one…

  I can't get rid of another guy this quickly! Not without someone asking the kind of questions we've been trying to avoid.

  Tony always looked like he enjoyed this part. They both knew that he held all the cards. All he had to do was let word get out to the wrong people about her special assignments, and she'd either be dead or in prison, leaving Sophie to fend for herself…

  She couldn't let that happen. When she fell pregnant, Damaris had sworn that she wouldn't let her baby girl grow up in the same kind of circumstances that she had.

  She tried her best to sound bored. "Yeah? Who is it this time?"

  Inside, she was shaking with rage and fear.

  She'd been looking forward to just sitting back and enjoying the dance rehearsal. Now, Tony had poisoned it.

  Damaris knew that her mind would be racing throughout the performances as she tried to work out a plan for carrying out the hit without getting caught.

  "I guarantee that you're gonna like this one, D." Tony's smirk widened into a shark-like grin. "We need to teach a lesson to a pair of real scumbags. Those low-lives screwed Freddy Fontina out of the money he owed Mr. Leonetti." He paused. "Freddy wants to send a special message to Anastasia and Mikael Medved."

  "Are those the bank Medveds?" Damaris asked warily.

  Tony nodded. "Freddy wants us to whack the son. And from what I hear, sonny-boy's a regular chip off the old Russian block."

  Damaris swallowed hard. Shit. A high-profile target.

  She remembered seeing Dimitri Medved mentioned in the tabloids a few years back. He was one of those sleek pretty boys who always seemed to be at some high-class nightclub with a model hanging off his arm.

  No matter how skillfully she made it look like accident, if something happened to the Medved kid, Damaris knew that there would be an investigation.

  And then I'll be going to prison for sure this time.

  Tony w
as still speaking. "…got himself a degree in finance from some Ivy League school, and now he's working at some computer gaming company. Probably screwing them without lube right now."

  Damaris agreed that the Medveds were scum. They'd been all over the papers a few years back.

  At the time, she had read about how they'd used their ill-gotten gains to send their kids to the best schools in the country while stealing money from hundreds of hardworking people who were saving to do the same thing for their own kids.

  Like a lot of New Yorkers, she'd gloated when the FBI and IRS came down on the Medveds like a sledge hammer.

  But then their prison sentences had been a slap on the wrist as far as she could see, complete with a couple of years at a minimum-security "Club Fed" prison and an early release on parole.

  Pleading bankruptcy, Anastasia and Mikael Medved hadn't yet paid any reparations to people that they'd cheated and embezzled from.

  Bankrupt. Yeah, right. Damaris was willing to bet that they'd squirreled away a nice stash in some foreign bank.

  The Medveds were terrible people. But that didn't mean Damaris wanted to sacrifice her freedom to kill one of them.

  Tony stopped speaking, and his icy blue gaze focused expectantly on Damaris.

  "Don't make me do this, Tony," she pleaded, even though she knew he didn't have an ounce of mercy anywhere in his soul.

  He scowled. Obviously not the response he wanted to hear from her.

  Before he could speak, Damaris said quickly, "Look, it's a really bad idea. Even if I can make the hit on Dimitri Medved look like an accident, we both know that Mr. Fontina's gonna open his big mouth sooner or later and try to rub the Medveds' nose in it. I mean, he wants the Medveds to know that their son got offed because of something they did, right?" She swallowed hard. "Do you really want the cops tracing this back to me…and you?"

  She held her breath as Tony appeared to think it over. Please oh please oh please…

  After a moment, he shook his head. "Sorry, D. I already promised Freddy we'd take care of it for him." He put on a fake regretful expression, and a surge of pure hate ran like acid through Damaris's veins. "I guess you're just going to have get creative and make sure the cops don’t find nothin' to make a case, no matter whether Freddy opens his piehole."