and more trained volunteers pouring in to hurriedly don their turnout gear.
The inn, a rambling wood structure with two single-story wings leading off a main two-story building, was on the edge of Pine Gulch’s small downtown, about a mile away from the station. He quickly assessed the situation as they approached. He couldn’t see flames yet, but he did see a thin plume of black smoke coming from a window on the far end of the building’s east wing.
He noted a few guests milling around on the lawn and had just an instant to feel a pang of sympathy for the owner. Poor Mrs. Pendleton had enough trouble finding guests for her gracefully historic but undeniably run-down inn.
A fire and forced evacuation probably wouldn’t do much to increase the appeal of the place.
“Luke, you take Pete and make sure everybody’s out. Shep, come with me for the assessment. You all know the drill.”
He and Cody Shepherd, a young guy in the last stages of his fire and paramedic training, headed into the door closest to where he had seen the smoke.
Somebody had already been in here with a fire extinguisher, he saw. The fire was mostly out but the charred curtains were still smoking, sending out that inky-black plume.
The room looked to be under renovation. It didn’t have a bed and the carpet had been pulled up. Everything was wet and he realized the ancient sprinkler system must have come on and finished the job the fire extinguisher had started.
“Is that it?” Shep asked with a disgruntled look.
“Sorry, should have let you have the honors.” He held the fire extinguisher out to the trainee. “Want a turn?”
Shep snorted but grabbed the fire extinguisher and sprayed another layer of completely unnecessary foam on the curtains.
“Not much excitement—but at least nobody was hurt. It’s a wonder this place didn’t go up years ago. We’ll have to get the curtains out of here and have Engine Twenty come inside and check for hot spots.”
He called in over his radio that the fire had been contained to one room and ordered in the team whose specialty was making sure the flames hadn’t traveled inside the walls to silently spread to other rooms.
When he walked back outside, Luke headed over to him. “Not much going on, huh? Guess some of us should have stayed in the water.”
“We’ll do more swift-water work next week during training,” he said. “Everybody else but Engine Twenty can go back to the station.”
As he spoke to Luke, he spotted Jan Pendleton standing some distance away from the building. Even from here, he could see the distress on her plump, wrinkled features. She was holding a little dark-haired girl in her arms, probably a traumatized guest. Poor thing.
A younger woman stood beside her and from this distance he had only a strange impression, as if she was somehow standing on an island of calm amid the chaos of the scene, the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles, shouts between his crew members, the excited buzz of the crowd.
And then the woman turned and he just about tripped over a snaking fire hose somebody shouldn’t have left there.
Laura.
He froze and for the first time in fifteen years as a firefighter, he forgot about the incident, his mission, just what the hell he was doing here.
Laura.
Ten years. He hadn’t seen her in all that time, since the week before their wedding when she had given him back his ring and left town. Not just town. She had left the whole damn country, as if she couldn’t run far enough to get away from him.
Some part of him desperately wanted to think he had made some kind of mistake. It couldn’t be her. That was just some other slender woman with a long sweep of honey-blond hair and big blue, unforgettable eyes. But no, it was definitely Laura, standing next to her mother. Sweet and lovely.
Not his.
“Chief, we’re not finding any hot spots.” Luke approached him. Just like somebody turned back up the volume on his flat-screen, he jerked away from memories of pain and loss and aching regret.
“You’re certain?”
“So far. The sprinkler system took a while to kick in and somebody with a fire extinguisher took care of the rest. Tom and Nate are still checking the integrity of the internal walls.”
“Good. That’s good. Excellent work.”
His assistant chief gave him a wary look. “You okay, Chief? You look upset.”
He huffed out a breath. “It’s a fire, Luke. It could have been potentially disastrous. With the ancient wiring in this old building, it’s a wonder the whole thing didn’t go up.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Luke said.
He was going to have to go over there and talk to Mrs. Pendleton—and by default, Laura. He didn’t want to. He wanted to stand here and pretend he hadn’t seen her. But he was the fire chief. He couldn’t hide out just because he had a painful history with the daughter of the property owner.
Sometimes he hated his job.
He made his way toward the women, grimly aware of his heart pounding in his chest as if he had been the one diving into Cold Creek for training.
Laura stiffened as he approached but she didn’t meet his gaze. Her mother looked at him out of wide, frightened eyes and her arms tightened around the girl in her arms.
Despite everything, his most important job was calming her fears. “Mrs. Pendleton, you’ll be happy to know the fire is under control.”
“Of course it’s under control.” Laura finally faced him, her lovely features cool and impassive. “It was under control before your trucks ever showed up—ten minutes after we called the fire in, by the way.”
Despite all the things he might have wanted to say to her, he had to first bristle at any implication that their response time might be less than adequate. “Seven, by my calculations. Would have been half that except we were in the middle of water rescue training when the call from dispatch came in.”
“I guess you would have been ready, then, if any of our guests had decided to jump into Cold Creek to avoid the flames.”
Funny, he didn’t remember her being this tart when they had been engaged. He remembered sweetness and joy and light. Until he had destroyed all that.
“Chief Bowman, when will we be able to allow our guests to return to their rooms?” Jan Pendleton spoke up, her voice wobbling a little. The little girl in her arms—who shared Laura’s eye color, he realized now, along with the distinctive features of someone born with Down syndrome—patted her cheek.
“Gram, don’t cry.”
Jan visibly collected herself and gave the girl a tired smile.
“They can return to get their belongings as long as they’re not staying in the rooms adjacent to where the fire started. I’ll have my guys stick around about an hour or so to keep an eye
