Smoke (Bearpaw Ridge Firefighters Book 7) Read online

  She returned her mother’s hug. “I was pretty worried there too, for a while,” she admitted. “Thank goodness the fire department arrived in time.”

  Mom released her and stepped back, giving Mary a maternal once-over. “I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw Tyler Swanson, of all people, at my door this morning. My heart almost stopped, because I thought he was coming to give us bad news.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” Mary apologized. “But like I said earlier, I got out of the house with just my pajamas. Tyler was doing me a favor.”

  A sudden vivid flash of just how good his mouth had felt, moving against hers, sent a flush of heat to her cheeks.

  Mom, being Mom, noticed.

  “Oh Mary, not another bear shifter?” Mom said in a tone somewhere between disappointment and despair.

  “I—” Mary began. Then stopped, because it felt wrong to deny whatever the hell it was that had just happened between her and Tyler. So she spoke another version of the truth. “Look, it really will be more convenient for me to rent a room here in town. I know that you, and Dean, and Uncle Bill all mean well, but I need my space.”

  And my wolf has this irrational desire to stay as close as possible to Tyler and to snuggle him whenever he’s in the same room.

  What was it about Tyler? She thought she’d fallen in love with Evan Swanson, but her connection to him, even after they began sleeping together, had been one of deep affection mixed with great sex.

  This sudden weird and intense connection with Tyler felt deeper than just attraction—it was a bone-deep craving to be with him.

  She knew she should find it completely unsettling, and on some level she did, but on another level, it just felt right.

  “I’m worried about you,” Mom said bluntly. “I think you’re in shock or suffering from PTSD or something…”

  She turned her head to where Dad was standing awkwardly to one side and addressed him in a pleading tone. “Derek, say something! Tell her that she needs to go in for an evaluation or something…”

  Dad cleared his throat. He and Uncle Bill looked a lot alike. They were both tall and wiry, with sandy-blond hair that was going silver around the ears and the backs of their heads.

  Dad’s personality had always been a lot less serious than Uncle Bill’s, though, as evidenced by the smile lines carved deeply around his mouth and the crow’s-feet radiating from the corners of his blue eyes.

  “I think that Mary’s old enough to know if she needs a referral to a psychologist,” he said calmly, and she wanted to hug him. “But you know what, Malia? I think our girl is going to be just fine.”

  “Thanks, Dad.” Mary looked around. “I should be clocking in to my shift now, but I’ll call you on my lunch break.”

  Mom blinked as if noticing Mary’s uniform for the first time. “Sweetie, after everything that happened to you this morning, aren’t you going to take the day off?”

  “And do what?” Mary shrugged. “I don’t have a car, all my stuff is gone, and it’ll be a few days before the insurance really gets rolling. I might as well work now and then take some time off later, once everything is a little more settled.”

  At her mom’s dismayed look, she repeated the same thing she’d told Uncle Bill earlier. “Plus, working will keep my mind off things.”

  “If you say so.” Mom sounded doubtful, but she kissed Mary’s cheek.

  Dad hugged her, surrounding her with his usual sharp scent of disinfectant and medications. “If you need anything, call or come by.”

  “I will,” Mary promised, with a deep surge of gratitude. It was nice to have family—and a pack—who had your back when things got tough.

  Speaking of which…she had some pastries to deliver to a certain pack member.

  When her parents had left, Mary made her way down the hall to the small office that served as the police communications center and public safety answering point. There, Linda Barker, alternating shifts with four other members of the Jacobsen pack, manned the incoming 911 lines.

  Fortunately, things were quiet at the moment. When Mary stuck her head into the office, she found Linda busily typing up a report.

  Linda was a wolf shifter in her sixties, originally from Atlanta. She had large, whiskey-colored eyes that were always impeccably made up, a flawless light brown complexion, and dark hair that she wore in a tight French braid. She favored chunky jewelry that complemented her brightly colored outfits, and she was definitely the best-dressed person in the Bearpaw Ridge Police Department.

  Linda looked up at Mary’s approach.

  “Do I smell some of Annabeth’s lemon bars in that box?” she asked with a big smile.

  “You sure do,” Mary told her. “And they’re all for you. I wanted to thank you for everything you did for me this morning.”

  In reply, Linda rose from her office chair and enveloped Mary in a sandalwood-scented hug. “I was so worried about you, honey, and I felt so helpless, since all I could do was stay on the line.”

  “You did a lot, and I owe you my life,” Mary said.

  Linda laughed. “Really? Because I heard you got rescued by Tyler Swanson. A little bird told me that he carried you out of there like a damsel in distress.”

  Well, that little detail didn’t take long to get around.

  Mary returned the hug. “Yeah, it was pretty dramatic. Think I should pick up some lemon bars for him too?”

  * * *

  “When you told me that you were going to rebuild the house, I didn’t think it would take so long,” Tyler’s mother said with a sigh. “If only your father were here, I’m sure things would be going a lot faster!”

  Phoebe Swanson looked sadly around the construction site that had once been their family home and would be once again when Tyler finished rebuilding it.

  The lingering sensation of Mary’s curves pressing against Tyler and the sweet taste of her lips dissipated at his mother’s words.

  He was catapulted back in time, to when he’d been a teenager and starting to realize that no matter what he did, he’d never be good enough to please his dad.

  “Dad was a park ranger. He didn’t know anything about construction,” Tyler said, before he could stop himself.

  He managed to bite back his next comment. And if you didn’t keep changing your mind about every little detail, I would have been finished last month.

  In the five months since the fire and Tyler’s return to Bearpaw Ridge, Tyler had learned not to criticize anything about his late father. Mom was in the process of canonizing her beloved mate, and she wouldn’t hear anything negative about him.

  After his conference call with Eddie, Tyler had driven out to his parents’ house to continue work on the restoration.

  He and his assistant Larry Tringstad, a wolf shifter, were just hanging the last of the new drywall when Mom phoned him with a list of questions and yet another set of last-minute changes to the finishes for the kitchen and bathrooms.

  Recognizing that she was lonely and grieving, he’d asked her to come out to the site to show her some alternative samples of flooring and countertop materials.

  Larry had fled to take a long coffee break as soon as he caught sight of Phoebe’s green Subaru station wagon pulling up the long gravel driveway to the house, which was located on a large lot just off the highway on the outskirts of Bearpaw Ridge.

  This left Tyler alone with his mother and wishing that just once in his life, he’d get some acknowledgment that maybe he wasn’t a complete fuck-up in his parents’ eyes, after all.

  I’ve come a long way since I was seventeen and angry at the world, Tyler reminded himself.

  He just wished that his Mom could see it. Instead, she seemed completely wrapped up in her grief. She’d cut her hair into a severe bob and stopped coloring it. The bright silver suited her, but without her usual sunny smile, the changes made her look like a solemn stranger.

  Tyler had once sworn he’d never come back to Bearpaw Ridge. But he hadn’t hesitated to tur
n his life upside-down after getting the news about the fire that had killed his father and destroyed his childhood home. He’d handed off the hospital project to Eddie and raced back here to attend his dad’s memorial service and to see how he could help his newly widowed mother.

  Near the end of the long drive from Portland to Bearpaw Ridge, he’d managed to hit a patch of black ice and wrap his SUV around a tree. The next day, he had gone to the church on crutches courtesy of two broken legs and a number of deep lacerations. It had made him the center of attention at the service, and not in a good way.

  Instead of grief, his overwhelming emotion at seeing Dad’s coffin had been anger and resentment at being robbed of his chance to make peace with his old man.

  He hadn’t spoken to his father in years. The last time they’d talked, just after the Police Car Incident, Dad had dourly predicted that Tyler would end up in prison sooner rather than later and had told him not to bother coming home if he was ever paroled.

  The sheer unfairness of that comment had helped to turn Tyler’s life around. He’d sworn to prove his dad wrong by making a success of himself in Portland.

  When he’d risen through the ranks at Schaeffer Construction to become CEO last year after Grandpa Rob retired, Mom had conveyed his dad’s only comment in reaction to the news: “Hope he doesn’t manage to screw it up.”

  And that was when Tyler had known that no matter what he accomplished, his father would never acknowledge his success.

  “Your father could do anything,” Mom countered proudly. “He was a wonderful husband and a great dad to you.” She sighed. “When we got married, your Aunt Elle told me that bear shifters always protected their mates and children, but I had no idea how true that would be.”

  Tyler shook his head but didn’t bother to argue. Sure, Dad had always treated his beautiful blonde Ordinary mate like a queen, but his son had been different matter. Tyler had been forced to grow a thick skin under the constant lash of paternal criticism.

  He tried to divert her from the subject of Dad by offering her his stack of sample tiles and finishes.

  “So you mentioned that you thought that the white subway tile backsplash in the kitchen might be too plain, so I picked out a few glass mosaic tile patterns that I thought you’d like. Depending on which one you pick, we may have to revisit the color of the quartz countertop you wanted—”

  His smartphone buzzed with an incoming message. “Sorry, I have to look at this,” he told Mom as he unlocked the screen.

  It was a text from Dane.

  Emergency meeting at the firehouse at 3:00 p.m.

  Chapter 7 – Reunion with a Bully

  “Ten suspicious fires in the past four weeks,” Fire Captain Dane Swanson said three hours later. “The situation is definitely escalating from what we saw this spring. No serious injuries so far, but I’m afraid that it’s only a matter of time before there are more.”

  He inclined his head in Tyler’s direction. “Nice work this morning, by the way. How’s Mary doing?”

  “Thanks. She’s doing okay. She went to work after breakfast,” Tyler said, both pleased and embarrassed by his older cousin’s praise.

  He’d always admired Dane despite the fact that for his entire life, Tyler had heard the refrain of, “Why aren’t you more like Dane and the rest of Elle’s boys?”

  Tyler and most of the rest of the Bearpaw Ridge Fire Department volunteers were gathered in the firehouse’s dining room/common area, which also doubled as a training room when needed.

  The BPRFD firehouse itself was an unpretentious single-story cinderblock building located just off Main Street. Most of the square footage was taken up by the big bays housing the department’s ladder truck, tanker truck, off-road brush truck, and paramedic van.

  The remainder of the firehouse consisted of a workshop for repairing and maintaining equipment, a small dormitory fitted with bunkbeds for those volunteer firefighters on night duty, a modestly sized kitchen, and bathrooms equipped with showers.

  Dane stood in front of the common area’s whiteboard, dressed in a cowboy hat, long-sleeved work shirt, dusty jeans, and even dustier work boots. He looked like he’d just come in off the range for this meeting, and he probably had, since he managed the Grizzly Creek Ranch.

  Like all of Tyler’s Swanson cousins, Dane had dark hair and hazel eyes, with the typical tall, broad-shouldered bear shifter build. He’d always been serious and a little reserved but had lightened up considerably since meeting and mating that cute redheaded baker from California.

  He was back to being Mr. Serious today, though. Another bear shifter stood at Dane’s side. He was an older man with graying reddish-brown hair and a deeply tanned and freckled face, dressed in a cowboy shirt and new jeans. The newcomer looked familiar, someone Tyler had seen around town for the past few weeks but didn’t know personally.

  Dane continued, “We’re lucky enough to have one of the state’s top arson investigators here to help us figure out what’s going on. Guys, if you don’t already know him, this is Owen Barenkamp—he’s Zack’s uncle, and he grew up here before moving to Boise to work for the State Fire Marshal’s Office. He’s been in town visiting family, and he’s volunteered to help us with finding the root cause of all these fires.”

  Owen looked over the assembled volunteers with a smile. “I’m looking forward to working with all of you, though I’m sorry about the circumstance. Together, I’m sure we can find out who—or what—is behind all of these fires.”

  Another Barenkamp. Figures. Tyler tried to keep the disgust out of his expression.

  When he had taken his cousin Ash’s advice and joined the volunteer fire department as a goodwill gesture towards the community he had left behind, Tyler hadn’t expected to run into his red-headed high school nemesis Zack Barenkamp. Or to have all his old feelings of isolation and frustrated rage from that time period come flooding back.

  Tyler thought he’d left all that behind when he began his new life in Portland. But apparently, in this town, the past had a way of clinging to you like a burr on a flannel shirt.

  He and Zack hadn’t yet been on duty at the firehouse together. On those few occasions when they had encountered each other during training sessions or while on calls, they had maintained a wary distance from one another and focused on the matters at hand.

  It was a relief to Tyler that Zack seemed to have matured enough to behave like a professional when they were both called to a scene to put out a fire or administer first aid to an accident victim.

  Tyler still didn’t like the other bear shifter, though. It didn’t help that Zack’s scent stirred up bad memories of the darkest time in Tyler’s life.

  Owen was still talking. “I’ve looked over your recent log book entries, and I understand Captain Swanson’s concerns. In a community of this size, there shouldn’t be this many structure fires in addition to all the suspicious brush fires in the vicinity of town.” He turned to Dane. “We didn’t really have a chance to discuss anything before the meeting started. Have you found any proof that any of these fires were caused by arson?”

  Dane shook his head. “None of us is really trained in arson investigation, and it’s been really difficult to find a point of origin for these fires. Our priority is putting them out, and afterwards, well, you know what happens after we’ve turned our hoses on a building for an hour or two.”

  Tyler saw his fellow firefighters nodding. Since joining the BPRFD, he’d seen his share of the utter destruction in the aftermath of a major fire. Burned houses, like Mary’s cottage this morning, were usually reduced to piles of charred water-soaked wreckage and trash drowned in deep puddles from the hoses.

  “But as you said, something’s clearly not right, and we need to get to the bottom of this before someone else in the community loses their home, business, or possibly even their life.”

  What if someone set the fire that destroyed Mary’s house this morning? The surge of rage rushing through Tyler’s body took him by s
urprise.

  “After the latest structure fire was extinguished, I went to the site and conducted a preliminary investigation,” Owen said. “I didn’t find any obvious evidence of arson.”

  Tyler knew that meant Owen hadn’t seen—or more importantly smelled—anything suspicious at Mary’s place. A bear shifter’s nose when in bear shape was seven times more sensitive than a bloodhound’s. And at least as good as a dog’s sense of smell even when in human form.

  “Some of my men reported smelling gasoline this morning,” Dane said, “but I determined that the smell was confined to the garage, which contained a motor vehicle at the time of the fire.”

  “Any witnesses who saw this fire—or any of the others—start?” Owen asked, and scanned the assembled firefighters.

  They all shook their heads.

  “All the fires seem to start at oh-dark-thirty,” Fred Barker observed. “When everyone’s asleep. Including us poor firefighters, who get kicked out of bed every time.”

  A soft chuckle of agreement ran through the assembled firefighters. They were all too familiar with the adrenaline jolt of being booted out of a deep sleep by the first responder app sounding the alarm on their phones.

  “All right, then. I’ll take a look around Ms. Jacobsen’s home today and see if I can find any evidence that might point us in the right direction,” Owen promised. “And I’d like to take a look around at the other sites as well, if they haven’t started rebuilding yet.”

  The meeting broke up then.

  Some of the firefighters, including Fred Barker and Dane’s younger brother Mark, went to the whiteboard to introduce themselves to Owen and ask questions. Others headed for the firehouse exit, going back to work or heading home.

  Tyler stood and prepared to follow them. He had a conference call scheduled at 4:00 with his Ordinary cousin Eddie Schaeffer to go over the latest on the Doernbecher project.

  Eddie’s doing a great job so far, Tyler thought, but he’s a little too nice. He still needs to learn how to ask his construction crew and subcontractors the tough questions.