Chapter 3
ALEX
IndexEcho: If you could move anywhere, where would you go?
DrunkenPoet: Probably Montana. They say it’s the last best place.
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In my defense, I didn’t know the fire chief had the power to arrest someone. That was my bad.
“For the last time, he didn’t arrest you, the sheriff did,” Ella muttered, not looking up from her phone as she read my mind. “Which of these mug shots should I send to the family chat?”
“It was a tiny fucking fire!” I railed, pacing the old Persian carpet in front of the wide, stacked-stone fireplace in my family’s lodge. “Like… like… less fire than Aunt Tilly had on her birthday cake this year. What the fuck is that man’s problem?”
“I’m choosing the murder-face one,” she continued, tapping the screen. “What did Chief Kincaid even say to you that made your eyes pop out like this?”
I ignored her. “You can’t arrest someone for a minuscule accidental fire that only damaged my own damned property!”
My sister flicked our grandmother’s colorful afghan to cover her outstretched legs on the overstuffed sofa.
“Westland arrested you for malicious mischief. You’re lucky he didn’t also cite you for disorderly conduct.
Kincaid wanted him to throw the book at you.
It’s only because you looked horrified the minute you slung the man’s iPad across the bar that he kept the charge to a misdemeanor. ”
I flapped my hands in the air. “I’ll buy him a new tablet. I told him I would! It was an accident.”
“Chief Kincaid is right. You sure do like to throw that word around,” she said with a snicker. “Accident, my ass.”
“Why are you so calm right now?” I shouted. “He could revoke my business license! The man has it out for me.”
“All you have to do for the fire stuff is to complete mandated staff training, submit to additional random safety inspections, and keep yourself out of trouble. He didn’t even charge you for lying in your testimony, or whatever that incident report interrogation was.
It’s the malicious mischief that’s going to fuck you up if you’re not careful. ”
“So I’ll pay a fine. Big deal. But if I can’t get the fire chief off my back, it’s going to be a problem.”
My cousin Lennon, who was quiet as fuck on his chattiest day, glanced up from the tattered paperback he was reading on a nearby armchair. “You’ll get farther with sugar cubes than a crop,” he murmured before going back to his book.
What the fuck? “I don’t know what that means,” I said.
Ella finally glanced up from her phone. “He’s talking about catching flies with honey. Try being nice to the new fire chief. Charm the man. Maybe then he’ll stop having it out for you and start giving you the benefit of the doubt.”
She tossed her phone on the sofa and stood up. “I’m in the mood for shitty mac ’n’ cheese. Who’s in?”
Lennon’s hand shot up, and I grudgingly agreed that I could go for a little toxic orange powder. “As long as you don’t tell a single soul I ate it,” I muttered, following in her wake toward the kitchen. “Because I will deny it to my dying breath.”
“Stop with the chef snobbery,” she said with a laugh. “Even Sam eats Kraft Mac sometimes.”
When we entered the large, sprawling lodge kitchen, the two of us immediately fell into the familiar rhythm of cooking together.
Our dads had forced the three of us to contribute to the family meals from a young age, and we’d also grown up around our uncle Sam’s restaurant since it was part of our family’s property.
Ella, our sister Mattie, and I knew our way around a kitchen.
I’d gotten so good at making quick, custom pizzas for everyone, I’d discovered a kind of meditative effect from it.
So when I’d decided to leave Napa and start my own thing in Montana, I’d had an easy time deciding what that would look like.
I’d grown up on a vineyard, the only son of a winemaker. Wine and pizza were my life, but they were also my peace. My anchors. They were an integral part of what family meant to me. And now they were my passionate career pursuit.
A pursuit placed quickly in jeopardy by a new fire chief with something to prove.
“Do you think he’s trying to make an example of me?” I asked once the water was on to boil. “Or do you think he was so used to excitement in Philadelphia that he’s making shit up here in Legacy to keep himself busy?”
Ella pulled two boxes of mac out of the pantry and reached for the fridge door handle to grab the milk and butter. “Was it Tavo? Is that why you lied to the chief about the fire?”
I sighed and nodded. There was no sense in lying to my oldest sister. She’d get it out of me eventually anyway. And she knew the trouble Tavo was in. “It was an accident, though. Just like I said.”
“Maybe you should tell Kincaid,” Ella suggested. “Ask him to keep Tavo’s name out of the reports.”
“Are you kidding?” I squeaked. “The man probably makes love to his fire code rule book every night! No way would he leave a detail off his beloved report.”
I didn’t want to imagine Judd Kincaid making love to anything, so why that expression had come out of my mouth was beyond me.
“I wouldn’t mind him making love to me,” Ella said, flashing me a grin. “Man’s a snack.”
I sputtered. “Ella, what the fuck? How can you be attracted to such an uptight, overblown, by-the-book…” I struggled for the right word. “Fire safety fetishist!”
I winced. Once again, it was unnecessary to sexualize the asshole fire chief. The man was already the personification of sex. If you were into that kind of thing.
I’d like him to be into me.
I gritted my teeth against my inner rogue slut. A part of myself that had no business expressing opinions since I, myself, had absolutely zero experience in the sex department.
Not that I didn’t want to have any.
I did.
I wanted very much to have quite a bit of it.
But, contrary to my rogue slut’s desires, my rogue heart was still stupidly and hopelessly devoted to an old flame. And had decided, somewhere along the way, to hold out for romance before giving the cow away. Or whatever.
I was in my Amish virgin era. Against my will and against my better judgment. Unfortunately, I was hung up on a someone from my past, and I worried no one would be able to live up to the comparison.
As steam began clouding over the pot on the stove, I moved to pour in the pasta. “I wish you and the chief well. May your flame of desire ever be doused by his overly generous extinguisher.”
“Ew,” she said, making a face. “Never mind. You made it weird.”
I busied myself with stirring the pot. “He’s good-looking.
I mean, that’s just an objective fact. The…
the hair with the barest silver at the temples.
The laugh lines around his eyes. And that eye color.
Are they silver or blue? IDK, but they’re piercing.
And of course, he’s built. What firefighter isn’t?
They work out all the time in their fancy gym at the station house, so of course he has muscles for days. Not that I noticed because… ew.”
“Ew,” she repeated with a smile in her voice I didn’t need to turn to see. “Right. Ewwwww.”
I nodded. “Exactly. Gross.”
“Disgusting.”
“It’s a good thing his job requires masks sometimes,” I added. “So no one needs to look at all that…”
“Perfection,” Ella added.
“Exactly.”
“Mmhm.” She moved around me to pull a bottle of water out of the fridge. “You wanna fuck him, though, right?”
I let out a whimper. “So, so much.”
“Same.” She sighed.
I turned to face her, putting my hands on my hips. “We can’t, though. No sleeping with the enemy. Agreed?”
She placed a hand on her chest and feigned innocence. “He’s not my enemy!”
“Whatever happened to family loyalty? Marian or die. Huh? What about that?”
She laughed. “Fine. We’ll compromise. I’ll wait until this feud between you ends before putting the flirt on. Fair?”
The timer for the pasta dinged, so I turned back to reach for it, grabbing the pot holders out of the drawer first. “You already flirted with him earlier today.”
“That was before I knew we were at war with the man.”
I nodded. “War. Exactly. We’re at war, Ella. And Chief Kincaid is the enemy.”
Six weeks later, the war escalated without warning. And it was all my fault.
In my defense, it was the Fourth of July. Who doesn’t love lighting sparklers on the Fourth?
Okay, fine. It was the second of July. But I was practicing.
“Do you have any idea how forest fires start?” Chief Kincaid roared out of his open window as his vehicle came to a loud stop, tires crunching over gravel on the side of the road as the headlights swept across me in the dark. “Because of reckless assholes like you!”
I stared at him in shock. “How… why are you even out here? This is private property.”
“Your sister called and said you needed help. That you were trying to light shit on fire. Have you lost your goddamned mind?”
My sister? Ella had ratted me out to the chief? Was she trying to make me look bad so she’d look like an adorable angel in comparison? I was going to murder her. And it was going to be a slow and painful death.
Kincaid pulled an extinguisher from the back of his SUV and strode over, inspecting the remains of a small brush fire a few feet away.
“Okay, now wait a minute,” I began, holding up my hands. “Because this was an accident.”
His eyebrows shot into his hairline. “Oh, really? That’s a shock. You mean it wasn’t malicious arson? Good to know, Alex. Good to know.”
It was the first time I’d heard the sound of my name in his voice, and it made something smooth and hot slither down my back.
“I was trying to record a light painting for Timber’s Instagram,” I snapped, gesturing to the camera set up on a tripod nearby.
“You know, the kind where you write a message in the air with sparklers while shooting it with a slow shutter speed—never mind. Anyway, it’s not as easy as it looks because you have to write the words backwards, and then you have to light the next sparkler before this one burns out, and I—”