Playing with Fire. Rachel Lee

do it in a business suit, male or female?

      Now he saw the signs of a woman who’d be capable of climbing through the ruins with him and across the rough, open spaces. Even her boots were sensible and looked as though they had steel toes.

      But she was still a pretty package. When he’d stared at her in surprise yesterday, all duded up in city clothes, the first thing he had noticed were her gentle curves. Just gentle ones, reminding him overall of a thoroughbred, perfectly shaped and in shape. Those curves hadn’t vanished in jeans and a long-sleeved button-down shirt. If anything, they stood out more. Her hazel eyes were probably a little more expressive than she realized. The rest of her face revealed little, if anything, and he suspected she had schooled herself to keep her secrets.

      Regardless, she was still a lovely package.

      Food for fantasy, he told himself, and nothing more.

      He stared down the roads, amused by himself. Why even waste the time noticing her appeal? She’d be out of here the instant she could shake the dust from her heels. Same as a lot of women. Same as his woman. She’d grown a taste for flashier towns, and coming back here had about killed her. At the end of a year she swore she was losing her mind.

      Finally, feeling he was being too silent and far from friendly, he asked, “What did you find out from the appraisal?”

      “Plenty. Mr. Buell was underinsured. That shouldn’t have happened. Somebody was asleep at the wheel.”

      “Meaning?”

      “We generally look at appraiser’s records and adjust values accordingly. We don’t want our clients getting caught short like this.”

      “You mean you can charge more.”

      She didn’t answer for a few seconds and he wondered if she was hanging on to her temper. Her face told him nothing. Too bad, but he didn’t believe insurance companies were in the charity business.

      “Yes, that, too. Although it doesn’t affect our bottom line any if we pay out less.”

      “But how often do you have to pay for a total property?”

      He glanced at her and at last saw a faint frown on her pretty face. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s reality. Everyone needs to make a living.” Even if some of them made more than a decent living. Way more. But this time he guarded his tongue.

      “Look,” she said finally, “I don’t want to argue with you. Believe it or not, I’m not here to cheat our client. My job is to prove that he isn’t trying to defraud us, then we’ll pay. From the look of it, fraud’s out of the question for now.”

      He didn’t miss the qualifier. He wanted to respond, but decided against it. Her job was to be distrustful. He let the conversation drop.

      “I’ll need to see the files from the other two arsons,” she said finally. “They’re not my clients, obviously, but there might be links.”

      “The biggest link is three arsons in such a short time. That’s not a routine problem around here. And ranchers are especially good about avoiding fires. It takes too long to get help.”

      “I know.”

      He glanced over and saw her staring out the window at the sage and fresh green grasses of spring. If the Buell place had gone up in a few months, they might have been fighting one hell of a brush fire. As it was, it was bad enough.

      “Our usual rule,” she said, “is not to insure a dwelling or business more than eight minutes from a fire station. We make exceptions for ranches and farms because, you’re right, they avoid fire. We get the fewest claims from that segment. As you noted, most of these folks are equipped to deal with a small fire on the spot. My company even gives a discount if they have a high capacity water pump and fire hose. You know, like we do for households with fire extinguishers and security systems.”

      “That’s good to know. I can tell you one thing for sure, these ranchers out here regard fire as their worst nightmare. They worry about it all the time, especially when we dry out in the late summer. Fighting brush fires and wildfires is a lot of my job. These guys are all over it. I’ve arrived at more range fires than I can count to find every rancher and hired hand in the area already trenching a fire line.”

      “I can believe it,” she answered. “I was impressed with the way you handled that fire yesterday, by the way. Good work.”

      He didn’t know how to evaluate that. “Thanks.” Then, “Do you watch many fires? I wouldn’t have thought so.”

      She made a small sound. A laugh? “Before I got into this business I was a volunteer firefighter.”

      Okay, then. He wasn’t dealing with a bean counter who knew next to nothing. That settled him a bit. The woman in the suit had transformed from a threat into a potential ally. She knew both sides of the problem.

      A few minutes later she spoke again. “The sheriff said you sent samples to the forensics lab already?”

      “I did. I’m sure I didn’t get everything. I need to look some more. It’s only been five days, and there’s a lot I still need to look at. I’m not even sure yet that I’ve found all the ignition points.”

      “It’s harder when there isn’t much left.”

      “No kidding.” He turned onto the Buell’s road. In the distance he could just make out the black smudge of what was left, an ugly hulk against a beautiful blue sky. Fred Buell was probably out there somewhere taking care of his herd as best he could. There were a lot of young calves at this time of year, still frail enough to develop problems. They probably needed all kinds of care, too, and Fred might even be sorting out the ones he’d sell. Wayne had never run a ranch, though, so he didn’t claim to know much about it. As a kid he’d lived in town, his dad a lineman for the electric co-op. Adulthood had taken him through some college and into working for a fire department in Glenwood Springs. Then he’d come home to be chief here.

      “How big is your department?” Charity asked.

      “Full-time? Part-time? Volunteers?”

      Her laugh surprised him. “That kind of headache, huh? And only three trucks?”

      “Only three plus two fire rescue ambulances. We have other heavy equipment garaged on the end of town. Never needed more yet.”

      “But what about wildfires?”

      He shrugged. “Then we get help from everywhere, up to and including heavy equipment lent to us by ranchers and the state. I’ve got twenty career firefighters. Sixteen part-timers. And a whole boatload of volunteers.”

      “Twenty full-timers doesn’t seem like a whole lot.”

      “There are smaller volunteer departments. But the full-timers make the core, and usually between them and the part-timers, we can handle the average incident. We spend an awful lot of time on training, though, especially with the volunteers.”

      She nodded as if she was familiar with that. “I was impressed yesterday, so don’t take my questions as criticism. I’m just curious.”

      “Well, if it’ll settle your mind any...” He paused as they went over a bump in the road and he had to steady the wheel. “There are a few very small outlying towns in the county. I’m talking around a hundred people per. They have their own volunteers. And of course the ranchers stand ready to jump in at a moment’s notice. It’s not as if we have to cover thousands of square miles with just three trucks. But we train everyone.”

      “A lot of open land,” she remarked.

      “A lot,” he agreed. He supposed it could be startling to someone from back East. Out here you could drive dozens of miles, sometimes hundreds of miles, and see nothing but fences and a ranch road from time to time. And the mountains. They could be seen from everywhere.

      At last they jolted to a stop in front of the burned-out lumps of the barn and the house