Wild Heat
“What's the fastest way to Joseph's house on foot?”
“The deer trails behind my house.”
Maya didn't hesitate. “Let's go.”
“It's hilly terrain,” he warned. “We'll go at a pace you're comfortable with.”
“You lead and I'll keep up.”
Thirty minutes later, Maya's calves burned, her quads felt like jelly, and although the hot summer sun had quickly dried her clothes from the unexpected dip in Logan's pool, she was soaking wet from head to toe with sweat. She'd thought an hour at the gym four days a week kept her in good shape. She was wrong.
Even though they were jogging up steep, rocky slopes, Logan was barely exerting himself. Considering he wasn't wearing 150 pounds of equipment, this was probably the equivalent of a stroll in the park for him.
Without her, he could have gone at least twice as fast. But she knew he wouldn't leave her, so she saved what little was left of her breath.
Finally, the deer trail they'd been following connected with a Forest Service–maintained trail. Logan waited for her to catch up.
“We can slow down now. We're almost there.”
She managed to get the words “Which way?” out between gasps.
He pointed down the hill and she didn't waste another second before running toward Joseph's house. A handful of minutes later, she saw the roof. Logan sprinted past her and was already inside by the time she caught her breath. She wiped the sweat out of her eyes and stepped inside the cabin.
It was much tidier than on her previous visit. Almost eerily so.
Logan walked into Joseph's bedroom, concern etched into his face. “Where the hell is he?”
“Could he have gone on a trip without telling you?” Maya asked, working to mask her own concern.
“No way. I offered to send him to Hawaii but he refused to leave.”
“Are you sure he didn't decide go stay with someone until the fire stops spreading?” Lord knew, that would have been the smartest thing to do.
He opened closet doors, one after the other. “All of his things are here.” And then Logan's tanned face went white as he stepped away from a freestanding armoire. “He's out there.”
Maya hurried across the room, saying “Where?” even though she was afraid she already knew the answer.
“His gear is gone.”
“He's trying to fight the fire, isn't he?”
Logan nodded. “It's possible that he forgot he retired. He probably heard the wildfire was spreading.”
“And he decided to go help fight it.”
She'd never seen Logan's eyes look so bleak, even in the hospital with Robbie. She knew how horrible it was to lose a father. She didn't want that to happen to him.
“Go find him,” she said. “Go bring him back.”
“I can't leave you alone. You've got to come with me.”
“I'll only slow you down. I can take care of myself until you get back. You can't be in two places at once. Joseph needs your help more than I do.” She wrapped her arms around him. “I promise I'll be waiting for you when you both return.”
Going on her tippy-toes, she kissed him with all of the love she felt but couldn't say aloud. He kissed her back, hard and sure, and then he was gone.
She wouldn't let herself go to the window and watch him disappear into the hills. That was the kind of a thing a desperate, clingy girlfriend or wife did. Even after everything, she still didn't know what to do. Yes, she loved him. But was love enough? Would love prepare her for a dreaded phone call, for word from the Forest Service that Logan had been injured or, worse, that he was gone forever?
Again, it struck her that Joseph's cabin was oddly quiet. Goose bumps dotted her arms. The room was warm, but there was a chill lingering in the air.
She left the bedroom and poked her head into a second bedroom, down the hall. Two twin beds were on opposite walls, a Top Gun poster beside one of the beds, a Guns N' Roses poster over the other. It wasn't too hard to figure out which was which—Logan had definitely been in full-on badass mode as a teen. She smiled. He never would have gone for the regimented feel of the Tom Cruise hit.
It didn't look like the room had changed much in the past twenty years. Without a woman around to spearhead a house-wide cleanup, Joseph certainly didn't seem to be the kind of man who cared about updating his surroundings.
She opened the dusty dresser under the window and sneezed as she pulled out a pile of papers and photos. On top was a picture of Logan and Dennis jumping off a rock into a lake in cutoff shorts. She couldn't imagine having been a teenage girl and seeing such beauty. The years had given Logan a rugged, hard beauty, but even at seventeen, she could see the man he'd become.
She tucked the photo into her jeans and continued flipping through the stack of photos, until one of them made her stop and do a double take.
It was a fairly recent picture of Logan sandwiched between two women. And Maya was nearly certain that one of the women was Dennis's girlfriend, Jenny.
Maya studied the photo, taking in the fact that Jenny was looking at Logan with naked adoration, and all at once, that niggling feeling that had been dogging her heels all day clicked into place.
“Have you been under my nose the whole time?” she asked herself, her brain flying through the possibilities, through everything that had happened.
Her cell phone buzzed in her pocket and she was just reaching for it when the front door creaked open. Her heart pounded hard beneath her breastbone.
From the phone, she heard Chief Stevens tell her, “Tony dated someone named Jenny,” and she whispered, “I'm in Joseph's cabin. Help,” then closed the phone and slipped it into her pocket, along with a pen she found on top of an old wooden table in the hallway.
Slowly, making sure she was as calm as she could possibly be, she rounded the corner. Jenny was standing in the middle of the kitchen.
“Hey there, Jenny,” she said in an easy voice, even as the smell of gasoline permeated the cabin. Maya swallowed the bile that rose up in her throat.
“It's so nice to see you again, Maya,” Jenny said, as if they were two girlfriends simply getting ready to go out and grab something to eat. “Do you remember me?”
Maya forced a smile. “Sure. We met a couple of times yesterday.”
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