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.
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 attention back to the crime scene. Her only interest in Braden Zimmer was getting whatever information he had about the arsonist. Not how he looked in a towel, or how his hair might feel, how his mouth might taste...
She shook off the fanciful thoughts. Maybe she’d been working too much—trying too hard to prove herself. And for what? Even catching the Brynn County arsonist hadn’t been impressive enough for Mack to mention to his friends. And she doubted her brothers talked about her at all...
Once she found this arsonist she would reward herself with a mini-vacation. But for now she had a job to do—and a criminal to catch.
“The arsonist seems to know his stuff, too,” she said. “I don’t think he intended to do the damage he did with the first fire.” That was why he’d started it where one was already intended to happen. But how had he known that?
Braden snorted. “He nearly killed a bunch of Boy Scouts.” Then he shuddered. “And a few of my guys...”
“That was just because it was unseasonably dry and the fire took off,” she said. “I don’t think that had been his intention with the first one.”
“Do you have photos of the others?” he asked as he stepped closer behind her. Since he was so much taller than her, it was easy for him to look over her shoulder.
She could feel the heat of his body against her back and her butt. She forgot what he’d asked her.
He didn’t wait for her to remember. He reached over her shoulder and touched the screen of her tablet. His arm brushed against hers, then fleetingly grazed her breast as he scrolled through the photos.
She held her breath but studied the photos. A cottage, its once-light-teal vertical siding blackened. A couple of photos later, the cottage was nearly gone.
“The fire wasn’t bad the first time,” Braden said. “So he came back. He nearly killed Avery Kincaid.”
“He left threatening notes on her doorstep,” Sam said, moving her finger across the screen until a photo of the notes was displayed. Her finger brushed against Braden’s, and she felt that disturbing jolt again.
He slid his finger across the screen, flipping through more photos. “He’s inconsistent, though. He didn’t leave any notes for Serena,” he said, anger rumbling in his deep voice. “He just torched the house, nearly killing her and her boarders.”
She glanced up at his face, which was so close to hers. A muscle twitched along Braden’s tightly clenched jaw.
“Maybe with this first fire he didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” Braden said. “But that quickly changed.”
Sam couldn’t argue that—not when she saw the photos of the houses. There had been even less left of the boardinghouse than the cottage. And Sam had seen photos of Serena Beaumont’s historic home before the fire. It had been a huge, plantation-style estate that had served as a former stagecoach stop.
