Shae McCullough wanted exactly three things: a long, hot bath, a heaping plate of chicken Parmesan, and her bed occupied by a very sexy man looking for an equally sexy time. But since she was a mere five hours into her twenty-four hour shift as Station Seventeen’s only female firefighter, she’d have to settle for a three-minute buzz through the house shower, a slab of meatloaf that could probably stunt-double as a brick, and a bunk full of co-workers who she’d never see as anything other than the brothers she’d never had.

Thank God she got to run into burning buildings for a living. That made all the other shit worth the price of admission.

“You done in there, Princess? Walker and Slater came out like ten minutes ago,” she called, balancing her towel and her bag of toiletries in one hand as she placed a sharp knock on the shower room door with the other. After five years of hauling hoses and fighting fires, Shae was used to rotating in for showers at Seventeen.

Just like she was used to a double dose of side-eye from her engine lieutenant, Ian Gamble, when she got brash enough to do things like call him Princess. Which—admittedly—was pretty often, but come on. Was it really her fault she got just as sweaty during their training as everyone else, or that the lieutenant in question took longer showers than a fifteen-year-old girl? She needed a scrub-down like nobody’s business, and she wasn’t going to get one by meekly waiting.

“McCullough.” Gamble opened the shower room door, a frown etched over the already hard line of his jaw, and while the expression probably would’ve tempted most people to tuck tail and run, Shae just returned it with a bright smile.

“Hey, boss. You thinking about finishing up anytime soon, or were you going for some sort of record with your loofah?”

One dark brown brow arched all the way up. “You know, I’d give you more drills for being a pain in my ass, but the problem is, you’d probably fucking enjoy them.”

“I do love me a good obstacle course. Or—oooh!” Shae paused, her pulse doing a hop-skip in her veins. “If you want to send me out with squad next time they practice rope rescue from the tower, I won’t complain. Or even—”

“Yeah, yeah. I get it, you little adrenaline junkie,” Gamble said, and although Shae knew he was fighting like mad to look mad, a hint of a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “Anyway, I’m done in here now. Obviously.” He dropped his black-coffee stare to his ridiculously muscular body, which was covered in a sheen of shower water, a half-dozen inky black tattoos, and—thankfully—a towel.

In truth, Shae’s gratitude had nothing to do with embarrassment or impropriety. If Gamble had decided to trot out bare-assed to ration up shit for cutting his shower short, she’d have responded with the same smile/sarcasm combo as if he’d been wearing a full set of turnout gear. Not that he wasn’t a good-looking guy, because hey, the truth was kind of hard to miss when it was standing in front of you in nothing but a scrap of cotton and a scowl. But Shae’s normally hyperactive libido didn’t so much as twinge for Gamble, or anyone else whose name got yelled out at A-shift’s roll call. Work relationships, even ones that stayed strictly between the sheets (or in the back seat of a car…or up against a wall…or…) were one of the very few things firmly in her “never” column. She had to trust the guys at Seventeen with her life, and they had to trust her with theirs. Fucking that up with a bunch of more-than-friends feelings?

So not on her agenda. After all, hot guys could be found damn near anywhere. But guys she could really trust when the world went pear-shaped?

Not so much.

Shae grinned, straightening to her full five foot eight as she reached up to clap Gamble’s shower-damp shoulder. “Awesome, because after those ladder drills you just put us through, I need a threesome with my soap and shampoo.”

She’d no sooner nudged past him, though, than the high-pitched blare of the all-call sounded off from the overhead speakers, and the karma of being a smartass came back to bite her square on the seat of her sweaty, seen-better-days uniform pants.

“Engine Seventeen, Squad Six, Ambulance Twenty-Two, Battalion Seventeen, structure fire, four hundred block of Crestridge Drive, requesting immediate response.”

“So much for that threesome,” Gamble said, making a quick grab for his uniform pants as Shae dropped her toiletry bag on the counter like a bad habit and turned to haul her cookies toward Engine Seventeen.

“Ah, it’s all good,” she called over her shoulder, even though she really did need the lather/rinse/repeat. “I’d rather get down and dirty with my helmet and Halligan bar anyway. See you in the rig.”

The words barely made it past the shower room door before Shae heard the thing thump closed. Moving briskly and tempering her breath against the inevitable press of her pulse in her ears, she locked her focus on the fastest path to the engine bay. Her five years of tenure as a firefighter had earned her the operator’s spot on Engine Seventeen, and God, if there was anything that came close to the rush of running into a burning building, it was driving the big-ass vehicle that would get them all there in the first place.

“Hey, hey, McCullough,” came the twangy Southern drawl of Seventeen’s rescue squad lieutenant, Gabe Hawkins, less than a second after he entered the hallway from the common room with more than half the house on his boot heels. “You ready to drive that engine like you stole it?”

Shae channeled her adrenaline into a laugh, because it was either that or redline on the stuff, and she was none too interested in letting the natural response of her brain veto all the hard-fought training she’d put to her body. “That all depends.”

“On…?” Hawk asked, blond brows raised.

“Your goals,” Shae said. “If initiative is what you’re after, then my answer is yes with hell yes on top. But if you’re asking as a rescue squad lieutenant, then my answer is no, sir. I wouldn’t even dream of doing such a reckless thing with a department-owned vehicle.”

“You would too, you little kiss-ass,” joked Kellan Walker, her fellow engine-mate, who also just so happened to be a former Army Ranger and the current live-in boyfriend of one of the toughest female detectives in Remington.

Not that his badass résumé kept Shae from stepping up to the plate to answer him with a ball-busting grin. “Haters never prosper, Walker.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s cheaters,” Kellan flipped back, giving her shoulder a friendly nudge with his own as they hoofed it to the double doors at the end of the hall.

“Oh, please.” Shae nudged him in return. “If we’re going to dwell on semantics, I prefer to think of myself as an opportunist instead of an apple polisher.”

Hawk’s pop of laughter echoed off the cinderblock walls of Station Seventeen’s triple-wide engine bay as he headed for the squad vehicle on the far side of the room. “Opportunist it is. If squad needs extra hands on search and rescue for this call, you’re in, McCullough.”

Freaking yes. “Thank you!” Shae called out, hustling over the buffed concrete floor toward Engine Seventeen. Her excitement at the chance to run headlong into potentially grave danger—along with the banter that seemed laid back on the surface—probably seemed odd or even callous to most outsiders, she knew. But much to the chagrin of her parents and the bewilderment of her two older sisters, Shae just wasn’t a day-jobber. God, the mere thought of all that staid routine gave her the fucking sweats.

From blood to backbone, all she wanted was adventure. If she had to shred a little convention to find it?

All the better. She’d never been much for propriety anyway.

Clattering to a stop beside the bright red and white engine, Shae methodically slowed her breathing even though her movements kicked into double-time. As Engine Company’s operator, she didn’t have the luxury of being able to gear up on the way to the scene like Gamble and Walker and their rookie, Luke Slater, which meant she had about six nanoseconds to Houdini her way into the turnouts she’d left prepped and ready to go next to the front of the vehicle.

“Hello, baby,” Shae murmured, toeing out of her running shoes and skinning into her bunker pants with one swift slide. “Come to momma.”

Another seamless move had her suspenders in place over the shoulders of her navy blue RFD T-shirt, then the comforting weight of her coat on top of that—breathe in—and another still put her behind the wheel of the engine—breathe out. Shae’s heart thudded against her sternum in a solid bid to get her brain to give in to the triple-dog-dare coming from her central nervous system. But giving in to her physiology would only get her the world’s fastest tap-out, so she tightened her belly along with her seatbelt and kicked the engine into a low, diesel-fueled growl.

Gamble stealthed his way into the officer’s seat next to her, which was downright goddamn freaky considering he was roughly the size of a professional wrestler and a lumberjack combined, and Shae grabbed her headset from its resting spot over her right shoulder. By the time she’d maneuvered the thing into place, Gamble had put eyes on both Walker and Slater in the step behind them and given up a clipped, “fall out” over his own headset, and hell if he had to tell her twice.

“Okay, let’s see what we’re dealing with here,” he said, turning his attention toward the dashboard monitor that gave them updates from emergency services as Shae steered the engine from the fire house garage into the deceptively sunny January afternoon. “Dispatch has report of a house fire at four ninety-two Crestridge Drive.” With a few keystrokes, he clacked the rig’s GPS to life. “Looks like the nearest major cross street is—”

“Glendale,” Shae supplied, her brain mapping out the city blocks of their call area that she’d long since memorized.

“That’s in North Point.” Walker’s voice was slow and full of caution as it filtered over the shared channel. “I know the neighborhood from the Julian DuPree case.”

Shae’s stomach squeezed. Kellan had been a somewhat inadvertent part of the police investigation that had taken down one of Remington’s nastiest criminals a few months ago, and he had the literal scars to prove it.

“It’s a rough part of the city,” Slater agreed quietly into his mic, and Shae nodded to turn the assessment into a trifecta. Run-down houses with poor construction and even poorer upkeep, all crowded together like a mouth full of crooked teeth? It was a five-star recipe for Very Bad Things, especially when fire joined the party.

“Well, wherever it is, it’s burning pretty good,” Gamble said. “This report from dispatch has flames showing on Alpha, Bravo, and—shit. Charlie sides of the residence.”

Unable to help it, Shae gasped, the sound of her shock mixing in with the soft static on the line. “Already?”

It wasn’t as if burning houses didn’t attract attention, and dispatch never sat on their thumbs when someone called 9-1-1 to report a fire. How the hell could a house—even a small one—burn that fast? Unless…

Gamble leaned in for a closer look at the update flashing over the monitor and bit out a top-shelf curse. “And to put the frosting on this little cupcake, the 9-1-1 caller is reporting the house to be a known meth lab.”

“Oh, hell,” Shae murmured. They knew better than to take call-ins as gospel—after all, civilians could run the gamut from mistaken to malicious. But the solvent-based chemicals used to cook crystal meth were highly flammable, not to mention highly toxic. A fire could definitely start and spread more quickly than usual with those sorts of extra-curriculars going on.

“Alright. Gear up,” Gamble said gruffly, the same thoughts doubtlessly going through his head. “Squad will take point if there’s a hazmat situation, but it looks like this one’s gonna be all hands on deck, so have your masks ready to go. And McCullough?” He spared her the briefest glance from across the front of the engine, but God, she felt every inch of his seriousness as he added, “Don’t dawdle getting us there.”

“Copy that, Lieutenant.” Locking down her focus even further, Shae stared through the engine’s windshield and dropped her foot a little harder over the accelerator. Maneuvering through traffic oddly soothed her nerves—right turn on Hamilton Avenue, breathe in. Cut over to Queen Anne Street to save a few seconds, breathe out—and by the time she pulled up to the dilapidated two-story house at the end of Crestridge Drive, her mind was as lasered in as her body.

Which was great, because the scene in front of her was a pure shit show.

“Radios on,” Gamble called out amidst the heavy thump of bootsteps on the pavement as they all clambered out of the engine damn near simultaneously. Shae flipped the switch on the two-way at her shoulder without looking, taking in her surroundings instead. Her gut filled with dread as her gaze swept methodically from left to right, and the sensation didn’t get any better when she reversed it for a lightning-fast double-check, just as she’d been trained to.

Bright orange flames licked upward from all four windows on the first floor, carving a path for the steady plumes of smoke that followed. There were no signs of entrapment—nobody stumbling through the front yard with panicky reports of a family member still inside; or worse yet, leaning out the second-story windows hollering for help. Still, Shae had been on far too many calls to feel relief until search and rescue came up clean. Although the yard was surrounded by a sturdy perimeter of padlocked chain link fencing all the way around, the house’s front door appeared otherwise unimpeded. But between the swiftly moving fire and the harsh tang in the air that Shae immediately recognized as some sort of chemicals burning, an easy breach would be all the silver lining this call was going to cough up.

The two-way radio on her shoulder crackled to life. “Okay, everyone,” came Captain Bridges’s calm, controlled voice. “Hawk, you and Dempsey are on search and rescue, but make it fast. Faurier, you and Gates get a vent on this roof. Gamble, tap a hydrant and get those water lines ready to go. Send anyone you can spare with Hawkins for that sweep. If there are people trapped in this house, we need them out now. Go.”

A litany of “copy that”s filtered over the line, followed quickly by Gamble’s voice in real time as he pegged Shae, Slater, and Walker with a piercing stare.

“Walker, you’re with me. I want those lines prepped five minutes ago. Slater, today is your lucky fucking day. You’re with McCullough, backing up squad on S&R.”

Whoa. Score one for the rookie. Shae’s brows would’ve shot toward the brim of the helmet she’d just buckled into place if she’d had so much as a second to spare. But Gamble and Walker were already moving toward the back of the engine to ready the hoses, and shocked or not, she wasn’t about to lag behind.

“Alright Slater,” Shae said, looking the rookie in the baby blues at the same time she grabbed her Halligan bar from the storage compartment to her left. Breathe in. Breathe out. “Time to put the last three months’ of training to work. You’re on my hip. Not in my dance space, not ten paces behind me, but on my hip until you’re told otherwise. You copy?”

“Copy.” To his credit, Slater’s nod was firm as he fell in at her six, his own Halligan already in hand. They reached the gate to the front-yard fence just as Ryan Dempsey, the newest member of their rescue squad but the best at breaching everything from back doors to bank vaults, took care of the padlock with a quick snick of his bolt cutters.

“Now that that’s out of the way,” Hawkins said, the serious set of his jaw a complete one-eighty from his earlier cockiness as he led them over the narrow concrete walkway and up to the house. “Dempsey, let’s make hay on getting this front door knocked in. I’ve got a feeling we ain’t gonna have time on our side for this sweep. McCullough, Slater, you’re on floor one. Dempsey and I will take floor two.”

Shae nodded, both her lungs and her muscles squeezing beneath the familiar weight of her SCBA tank and the rest of her gear as the four of them clattered to a stop in front of the timeworn threshold of the house. “Copy that, Lieutenant.”

Heat and potent, chemical-laced smoke poured from the house, grabbing Shae by the throat before Dempsey could so much as get his Halligan bar between the door hinges.

“Masks on,” Hawk barked, but Shae had been halfway there. Reaching the rest of the way up, she yanked her mask over her face, the oxygen from her SCBA kicking in with a low hiss. Thankfully, Slater’s instincts were as good as his training, and he mimicked her movements to follow Hawk’s command after only a brief hitch.

Hawkins jerked his chin at the three of them. “Let’s rock and roll, y’all.”

With a hard jerk of his Halligan and a perfectly placed kick, Dempsey sent the front door flying on its hinges, and a few seconds later, they were all over the fiery threshold.

“Okay, Slater,” Shae said, scanning the space around them as soon as Hawk and Dempsey cut a path into the house and headed for the stairs. Damn this place was burning fast. “This fire already has a lot of teeth. We’re going to have to split up if we want to cover the whole floor in good time.”

Dividing forces wasn’t unusual for S&R, although considering the hairy factor of this call along with Slater’s rookie status, it wasn’t ideal. But he’d done plenty of S&R on Gamble’s hip at smaller fires, and he was coming into his own. Plus, they really didn’t have a choice.

Which he seemed to realize all too well, because he answered with a tight, definitive nod. “Copy that.”

“You take the Delta side and I’ll go Bravo. Be quick but don’t rush.” Flames climbed the walls around them in irregular patterns, heat and uncut adrenaline forcing an instant sheen of sweat over Shae’s brows, and oh hell, as much as she loved the rush of her job, they needed to do this sweep and get gone. “Don’t be shy about using your radio if you need it. I’ve got your back. Go.”

She turned toward the left-hand side of the house, her boots already in motion on the floorboards. The place was fully involved, the fire spreading at a rate that bordered on ridiculous for a run-of-the-mill house blaze. Keeping her eyes wide open for both people and potential hazards, Shae moved into what she guessed to be a living room, surveying the sparsely appointed space.

“Fire department! Call out!” she bellowed past her mask. The windows were covered by dark, heavy curtains, which made visibility jack with a side of shit even though they’d already been half-eaten by the quickly moving flames. An odd sensation plucked at Shae’s spine, growing both stronger and stranger as she took in the erratic pathways of fire and the sheer intensity with which they burned. The couch in the middle of the room was in even worse condition than the curtains, and a fresh bloom of sweat trickled between her shoulder blades as she crouched down low and picked up the pace into the next room.

“Fire department, is anyone—”

Shae’s words crashed to a halt at the sight of a figure lying slumped on the floor. Things went from bad to cluster fuck when she registered the table along the far wall holding what looked like a full-scale science experiment, complete with two—dammit, three portable gas burners, and her heart launched against the wall of her chest, smacking every last one of her ribs for good measure.

“Sir! Sir, can you hear me?” she called out, dropping to her knees beside the lifeless figure. She palmed his shoulder, assessing him for obvious injures with a lightning-fast glance. But then flames rolled out over the ceiling above her, sending the curtains from the window in a heavy, flame-fueled thump, and dammit, there was no more time to waste.

“McCullough to command,” Shae reported into her radio, shifting the unconscious man onto his stomach to get him in position for a fireman’s carry.

Captain Bridges came back with a steady, “McCullough, this is command. Report.”

“I’ve got an unresponsive civilian down on floor one, Bravo side. Affirmative on the meth lab, too. This fire is going to flash over, Cap, and soon.”

“Command to McCullough, copy that. Are you clear for the primary exit?”

Shae shot a gaze toward the living room, now clouded by a nearly impenetrable haze of dark gray smoke. Not gonna be a cakewalk with fiery debris raining down harder by the second and the pretty much nonexistent visibility, but… “Affirmative, Command.”

“Good,” Bridges said. “Hawkins, Dempsey, Slater, I want you out of there now. McCullough, paramedics are standing by at the primary exit. Fall out.”

“Copy that.”

Coiling her muscles so hard they burned, Shae hooked her hands beneath the man’s linebacker-esque shoulders, stabbing her boots into the floorboards. Her training merged with her survival instinct and the adrenaline already cooking in her veins, and she hauled the guy up and over her shoulders despite what had to be a fifty-pound weight difference. Shae forced her lungs to expand—breathe in—and her heartbeat to slow as she retraced her steps—six, seven, eight, nine—through the room and toward the front door. Shock popped in her veins at how rapidly the path through the living room had deteriorated, but with the window frame and half the wall around it now totally engulfed in smoke and flames, the front door was still her best viable exit.

Breathe out. With a deep-down burst of energy, Shae powered her way to the door. The thing stood wide on its hinges from Dempsey’s earlier breach, and finally, finally she got close enough to see fragments of blue sky and clear daylight beyond the threshold. For a second, Shae’s senses short-circuited, her vision and balance and brain all scrambling to adjust to the searing brightness of the sun as she cleared the front door. But then Parker Drake and Quinn Copeland rushed up the concrete walkway, and the hard clack of the gurney wheels yanked her focus all the way into place.

“He was down when I found him,” Shae said after lowering the guy to the gurney and tugging her mask from her face to suck in a lungful of natural air. Parker’s gloved hands became a blue nitrile blur as he started a rapid trauma assessment, concern knotting his nearly black brows.

“Between the smoke and the fumes, that’s not too shocking. Ah, dammit. No pulse. Starting compressions.”

Shae shifted back to give him room to work, and God, what a cluster fuck of a call. “Is everyone else clear?” she asked Quinn, swiveling her gaze over the chaos of the scraggly yard. But before the worry in the woman’s dark blue stare could form an answer, Slater’s voice tore over the radio.

“McCullough! Shae. Help!”

Her breath slammed to a stop at the same time her pulse rattled at her throat. “Slater, what’s your status? Are you hurt?”

“Negative. I’m not injured or trapped,” came the immediate reply over the line. “But I…I can’t fall out…you need to see this.”

Shae turned toward the actively burning house behind her, and something snapped, hard and definite in her gut. “Dempsey and Hawk are clear, right?” she asked, reaching for the mask propped high over her forehead.

“Yes, but…” Parker frowned in confusion, transferring his stare to hers as Quinn slid monitor leads into place over their patient’s chest. “McCullough, Cap ordered everybody to fall out. You can’t—”

She was geared up and halfway back to the threshold before Parker could even finish.

“McCullough to Command. I’m going back in for Slater.” The call-in would earn her an epic ass-chewing, Shae knew. But if she wanted to have Slater’s back like she’d promised, she needed someone else to have hers.

“McCullough, this is Command,” Bridges bit out, and yyyyep. He was pissed. “Stand down immediately while I assess the scene. Do you copy?”

“Sorry, sir. Too late,” she clipped into her radio as she shouldered her way back through the door and into the hazy space of the foyer. “Slater, what’s your location?”

“Here! I’m here.” Thankfully, the rookie stood a handful of paces inside the doorway, upright and unhurt. But Shae’s sharp blast of relief at the sight of him screeched to an end at the fear in his voice as he added, “Come quick.”

He led her through the smoke-filled space to the right of the foyer, which was a near-identical layout to the side of the house she’d already cleared. Two long tables stood end to end in the middle of the first room, both filled to the gills with enough chemicals to make Shae’s throat go tight beneath her hood.

“Slater,” she started, but still, he pressed farther past the smoke and spreading flames, coming to a sloppy stop just inside the second room.

“I saw him just after Cap gave the order to fall out. I rolled him to check for spinal injuries, just like we’re supposed to before we move anyone, but—”

Shae’s stomach twisted, a shiver running the length of her spine despite the hell-hot conditions surrounding her on every side. The man on the ground was slumped over and lifeless, much as her victim had been. The giant pool of blood spreading out beneath him from the gaping, ear-to-ear slash wound on his neck?

That was definitely different.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe…breathe right. Fucking. Now.

“Okay, Slater.” Shae forced the words from her throat, marshalling every ounce of calm that she owned past her gag reflex and the reckless slamming of her heart. “We need to get this guy out of here.”

Still, Slater didn’t budge. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“We need to get him out of here,” she repeated, hoping like hell he wouldn’t notice her definite dodge of the question. “Are you good to take point?”

As wide as the rookie’s eyes were behind his mask, Shae couldn’t risk letting him lag behind her, and they had to fall out, fast. Shae maneuvered the victim closer for extraction, her boots slipping in the pool of blood beneath her feet, and Slater stood frozen to the floorboards, his stare unmoving.

Dammit. Dammit. “Slater, look at me. Look!” The scalpel-sharp edge in her demand grabbed his attention—thank fuck—and he lifted his stare from the blood now soaking through her turnout gear to meet her gaze. “I’ve got you, and you’ve got point. We’re getting this guy out of here, nice and easy, but I need you to lead the way. Do you copy?”

“Okay, yeah. Yeah.” Slater’s nod was still a little wobbly, but Shae would have to take it.

“Good.” She took one last look at the man on the floor, her gut pitching as she reached for her radio. “Command, this is McCullough. We’re going to need another ambo. And, Cap?”

She hooked her arms beneath the victim’s, the unnatural loll of his head on what little was left of his neck sending a fresh twist of dread from her helmet to her heels.

“Call the cops and tell them to get out here as quickly as they can. This place is a murder scene.”