Just Try Me.... Jill Shalvis

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      “Come here,” Jared said, daring her to go after what he knew they both wanted.

      Taking Lily’s hand, he pulled her down beside him on a rock. Looking around, Lily noticed that they were on the far side of the lake – still within earshot of the others, but just out of view.

      Fog hovered over the water, drifting over them, smudging the night scenery like a glorious wet painting. With a sigh, she let it all surround her – the crickets singing, the branches brushing together in the light breeze, the others talking back at camp…

       Her own heartbeat.

      Lily looked at him, at his profile with his strong, masculine features and the mouth that she so desperately wanted on hers.

      “I want to strip you out of your clothes and take you right here,” he growled.

      “The others –”

      “Can hear, I know. We’ll be quiet,” he said, his voice sharp with desire.

      He looked at her then, his glasses slipping just a little, a frown on his mouth. His jaw was shadowed with stubble and his hair had been finger combed. He was definitely a bad boy. An irresistibly sexy bad boy.

      And lucky for Lily, bad boys were her weakness…

       JILL SHALVIS

      also lives in the Sierras, where she regularly survives hiking expeditions while surrounded by quirky characters. But these characters are her family, and she hardly ever has to dive off cliffs and jump into icy rivers to rescue people. Any other similarities between her life and Just Try Me… are purely coincidental.

      Look for her bestselling, award-winning novels wherever romances are sold, and check out her website at www.jillshalvis.com.

      JUST TRY ME…

      BY

      JILL SHALVIS

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

       Prologue

      WILDLAND FIREFIGHTER Lily Peterson stood on the edge of a cliff, surrounded by a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vista of what should have been glorious Montana mountains. Instead, the peaks were charred black and still smoking.

      She was on mop-up duty. It meant walking and investigating every little plume of smoke rising from the dead mountains; arduous, dirty, exhausting work. She was at the far end of the burn, standing between devastation and new growth. Her job—protect the unscorched areas from a flare-up. No easy feat with the earth beneath her feet still radiating heat.

      Both above and below her, the trees were nothing but skeletons. Hundreds and hundreds of years of forest development destroyed because some jerk hadn’t put out his campfire properly.

      But they’d saved this part of the forest. It’d taken weeks. As a result, she was exhausted, right down to the bone, practically stumbling on her feet with it, but they’d done good.

      The sun was just rising. Eyes gritty from lack of sleep, Lily patted her pockets for her sunglasses, but she must have left them back at the barracks. Lifting her head, she shielded her eyes with her hand and looked around for the others. She stepped closer to the edge of the plateau on which she stood, high above the valley by a good hundred feet. Matt and Tony were far below her, at least half a mile away, separated from each other by several football fields, walking east, heads down, doing just as she was.

      Watching for flare-ups.

      After six straight weeks of firefighting, eating while standing up, grabbing only catnaps when they could, she felt woozy, dead on her feet.

      And the sun was killing her.

      She turned her back on the valley, and observed the burned area around her. There was so much to keep an eye on, too much. Budgeting and financial cutbacks kept them perpetually understaffed, resulting in too many hours on-site and too few hours off for recuperation, not to mention too few people working at any one time.

      When she found herself actually weaving, practically asleep where she stood, she backed up to a tree, slowly sliding down until she sat on the ground, her head resting against the trunk.

      She lowered her hand from her face and then couldn’t keep her eyes open in the bright glare. So she closed them, just for a moment.

      And never saw the new, dark-black plume of smoke rising from a hot spot, only five yards away…

      1

      LILY LAY FLAT on her back, her physical therapist pushing her leg up over her head as though she were a pretzel, telling her to “work it, Lily, stop whining and work it,” while pain seared a fiery line from her ass to the very tip of her hair.

      Lily would like to work him, all right—right into a bloody pulp.

      Instead she gritted her teeth and told herself that this was the price she paid for stupidity.

      No self-pity, she decided as she began to sweat like a stuck pig, her tank top sticking to her skin, her leg quivering wildly as she stretched her abused, injured muscles… Damn, she hurt.

      Maybe retiring wasn’t so bad. It wasn’t as if it was the first time. From high school, she’d gone into expedition guiding, which she’d retired from to become a paramedic. And when she’d burned out scooping stab victims off the streets of Los Angeles, she’d retired again to become a wildland firefighter.

      And she’d loved it. Thrived on it, actually, moving from fire to fire, exploring Montana, the Dakotas, Idaho, Wyoming…a perfect fit for her restless spirit.

      Until she’d screwed up and nearly gotten herself killed.

      Nope, there was no sugarcoating this retirement; she was no longer a firefighter—because of injuries, not by choice. She felt weak and insignificant, and at the age of twenty-nine-and-three-quarters, she wasn’t ready for either. She wanted to be back out there, damn it, doing her thing, going where she wished, doing something she loved and was good at.

      But she couldn’t have passed an agility test to save her life. Hell, she couldn’t even touch her toes at the moment.

      “Harder, Lily.”

      She squeezed her eyes shut and stretched harder, feeling her muscles pull and burn. And yet still, beyond the pain, she also felt…itchy. She needed to be on the move, working with adrenaline as her daily friend. It was a pattern in her life, an affliction. It was who she was, what she did.

      Or who she’d used to be anyway—a terrifying thought because…who the hell was she now? “Damn it, ow,” she said to her PT, a gorgeous man who resembled Denzel Washington.

      Eric nodded in approval and backed off. “Was wondering if you even had a pain threshold there for a minute.”

      “Got it, and we hit it.”

      He smiled—because it wasn’t his muscles they were torturing. “Wait here. I’m going to get you some ice.”

      She’d spent a lot of time in and out of the hospital since her Screw-Up. Major, life-threatening injuries did that to a person. But she’d still not learned to be a good waiter. In fact, waiting was for sissies who needed a minute, and she absolutely did not. She had things to do, places to go. Rolling over, she pushed up to her hands and knees, still trembling like a damn newborn.

      Or a wildland firefighter who’d woken up in the middle of a full-blown flare-up, forced backwards by the flames, where she’d taken a fall off the cliff, hitting a few burning trees on the way down. Forty feet down. An ex-firefighter now, who couldn’t move an inch. She collapsed to her belly,