Hot Pursuit. Lisa Childs

      He flinched. He didn’t care about himself as much as his team. It was his responsibility to make sure they were safe. Working fires like they did, they were in enough danger without a psychopath targeting them.

      Her breath whistled between her teeth and brushed warmly across his ear. He nearly shivered at the sensation. He hadn’t been this close to a woman in quite a while—not since the drunk women who’d tried to tear off his clothes some months ago. That would teach him for letting Wyatt Andrews talk him into checking out some new club—one that had featured male exotic dancers on the night they’d gone. Braden had fended the women off then, but he suspected he wouldn’t fight Sam McRooney too hard if she had the inclination to undress him.

      “Mack was right to be concerned,” she remarked.

      Braden uttered a ragged sigh of resignation. She was Mack’s daughter. And Mack was a friend. Braden wouldn’t cross that line with her even if she wasn’t the US Forest Service arson investigator.

      “You’re in danger,” she said.

      “We already knew the arsonist was fixated on us,” Braden said. “The fires only happen when we’re in Northern Lakes. He’s gone after a couple of my men directly.”

      “Cody Mallehan,” she said. “The arsonist cut his brake line and sabotaged a shower, making him slip. He got a concussion out of that.”

      Braden added, “He went after Cody’s girlfriend, Serena Beaumont, too.”

      “Her boardinghouse was burned down.”

      Maybe he shouldn’t have worried about wasting time bringing Sam McRooney up to speed. She obviously knew quite a bit about the fires.

      “Just like he burned down Avery Kincaid’s cottage,” she continued. “He’s targeting your superintendents and the women they’re seeing.”

      Braden’s stomach clenched with dread. If Dawson had lost Avery or Cody had lost Serena...

      He would have lost his men as well. They would have gone out of their minds if such amazing women had been taken from their lives.

      “Are you seeing anyone?” she asked.

      Braden turned his head, and his mouth nearly brushed across her cheek. Her eyes dilated, the pupils swallowing up the blue until it just rimmed the black. She jerked back.

      “Why would you ask that?” He doubted she was interested in him. As beautiful as she was, she was probably already seeing someone.

      “Because the arsonist appears to be targeting you now,” she pointed out.

      He glanced down at the note. And he couldn’t argue with her.

      “If you’re seeing anyone, she would be in danger, too.”

      Because of the arsonist, Braden hadn’t had the time or the inclination to date anyone—despite how some members of his team had pushed him into socializing after his divorce. But apparently that was a good thing, because if he had gotten involved with anyone, he’d have only put the woman in danger.

      “I just got divorced...” A year ago. It had been a year. The revelation stunned him. No wonder his men were pressuring him to get back out there. It had been a while. “So no, I’m not seeing anyone.”

      “That’s good,” Sam said, and she looked away from him, as if unwilling to meet his gaze.

      His heart rate accelerated. Was she interested? Not that anything could come of it...

      But it was nice to know that women didn’t have to be drunk in order to find him attractive.

      “Now we only have to worry about protecting you,” she continued.

      “Protecting me?”

      “Yes, you’re obviously the arsonist’s next target,” she said. Her brow furrowed slightly. “Or maybe you’ve been his ultimate target all along. So we need to make sure you have protection—around the clock.”

      “Who?” Braden asked. “You? Are you going to protect me, Sam?”

      He was just teasing. Even though she carried a gun, she was an arson investigator—not a bodyguard. He expected her to use that icy tone and remind him as much.

      Instead she replied, simply and succinctly, “Yes.”

      Maybe she meant well or she was only trying to please her father, but Braden couldn’t allow her to get that close to him. As she had just pointed out, any woman who got close to him would be risking her life.

       3

      SAM INTENDED TO protect Braden Zimmer—by stopping the Northern Lakes arsonist. It wasn’t going to be easy, though. In fact it felt a lot like when her brothers had gotten a head start on her in a game of tag. It hadn’t mattered that they were older and stronger. Eventually she’d caught them, though—just like she’d catch the arsonist. And maybe it would be the same way. Her brothers had let her catch them. The arsonist wanted to be caught. She could see that in his notes. He wanted the notoriety, but he also wanted to be stopped—at least subconsciously. He probably wasn’t aware that his letters were a cry for help.

      “I wish you would’ve called for help sooner,” she remarked as she walked across the charred ground in the Huron National Forest. On the other side of the dirt road on which Braden had parked the US Forest Service black pickup, the trees were vibrant with yellow, orange and red leaves. Where they stood, the sparse trees that remained were bare of leaves, their trunks as black as the ground beneath them.

      Braden sighed. “I was working it alongside the state police. I thought we’d have caught him by now.”

      “You were busy working other fires,” she reminded him. “This is all I do.” But she’d started out fighting fires, too, before she’d taken the special training to become an arson investigator.

      He ran his hand through his thick brown hair. It had dried now and looked so soft Sam was tempted to touch it. But she curled her fingers into her palm.

      “We still should have caught him by now,” Braden remarked.

      “We’ll catch him soon,” she promised. She flipped through the photos on her tablet. She had pictures of every crime scene. “This is the place where it started.”

      “Yes,” Braden replied, though she hadn’t asked a question. “The first fire was traced back to this spot.”

      She glanced around, studying the blackened area. “He restarted it a few times since...”

      Braden slid his hand around the nape of his neck and squeezed as if trying to relieve some tension. “More than a few—it’s like he’s determined for the forest to stay dead.”

      “This area was already slated for a prescribed burn,” she deduced.

      Braden’s dark eyes widened in surprise. Then he glanced at her tablet. “Were you told that? Is that in the records you have?”

      She shook her head. Nobody had bothered writing it into the report. “I grew up in the middle of a national forest,” she said.

      Her father had raised her and brothers in a US Forest Service cabin. The structure had been small—one bedroom for her dad and a loft in which she and her brothers had all slept on mattresses on the floor. But they had never spent much time inside; their home had been the forest itself. “Mack taught me about burns and breaks before I learned my ABCs.”

      Braden’s mouth curved into a slight grin, drawing her attention and making her wonder what it might be like to kiss his lips. “Mack knows his stuff...”

      And he’d taught his children well—all about the ways of getting burned. Professionally and personally.

      She turned her