Chapter One | SUNNY #2
A sharp hiss cut across my line.
Not from the fire.
From somewhere behind me.
Joelle’s head snapped toward the dry grass edge. “Sunny.”
I turned.
A skinny thread of smoke lifted from beyond the fire mat, not from our raised pit but from the trampled golden grass near a half-buried root, maybe six feet outside the production zone. A tiny orange tongue flickered once, low and mean, where a stray ember must have landed.
The cone left my hand and hit the prep table. “Water.”
Joelle was already moving.
Ed swore.
Caprice shouted, “Nobody step on cables!”
“I need the bucket,” I said, reaching for the nearest handle.
The wind shoved hard across the meadow.
The little flame ran sideways.
It wasn’t big. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t even impressive by campfire standards. But it moved fast enough to turn my skin cold under the heat.
Joelle thrust the bucket at me. I grabbed it with both hands, took one wobbling step in my stupid perfect shoes, and nearly lost my ankle to a clump of grass.
“I’ve got it,” I said.
“You don’t have footwear,” Joelle said.
“Not the time.”
“Very much the time.”
I kicked one wedge free, then the other, my bare feet hitting hot dirt and dry grass. A rock jabbed my arch. I ignored it and lunged forward with the bucket.
A roar came from the ridge.
Then a hard blast of water slammed into the grass fire.
And into me.
The bucket flew out of my hands. Water hit my side, my back, my hair, my apron, the prep table, the reflector, and the berry tray. I shrieked, slipped in mud that hadn’t existed three seconds ago, and grabbed the edge of the table to keep from going down.
Another blast swept across the raised pit.
My neat little flame died with a wet cough.
So did twelve shortcake cones, four jars of lemon mascarpone, two trays of roasted strawberries, one basil bunch, and my will to be a reasonable woman.
“Hey!” I shouted through the spray. “Hey! Stop!”
The water cut off.
For one ringing second, no one moved.
Cream dripped from the prep table. Smoke curled weakly from the drenched grass. Ed stood soaked behind his camera, his headset crooked. Caprice’s sunglasses had vanished. Joelle held a towel in one hand and an extinguisher in the other.
And at the edge of my ruined set stood a man with a fire hose in his hands.
A very large man.
An infuriatingly large man.
He was tall enough to make the meadow look smaller, broad across the shoulders in a dark fire-resistant work shirt that clung damply to his chest and arms. Faded canvas pants sat low on his hips, tucked into scuffed boots planted wide in the mud.
A short beard shadowed his jaw. Sun-streaked dark blond hair curled at his temples beneath an old cap.
His eyes were blue-gray and hard as river stone, fixed not on my face but on the drowned patch of grass behind me.
A pale scar cut along one forearm where his sleeve had been pushed up.
The hose looked natural in his grip.
So did the audacity.
“What,” I said, water streaming off the end of my nose, “the actual toasted hell was that?”
His attention moved from the wet grass to me, slow and steady and not even slightly guilty.
“You had a spot fire.”
“I had a spot—” My voice jumped high enough to summon bats. “I had a controlled production setup.”
“You had flame in dry grass with wind pushing east toward pine.”
“I also had water, a fire blanket, an extinguisher, and a permit.”
He looked past me at the dead raised pit, the flooded table, and the soggy remains of my campaign. “You had a permit for that location?”
Caprice stepped forward, one hand up, smile bright enough to qualify as emergency equipment. “Hi. Caprice Calloway, producer. We’re fully permitted for Cinder Ridge Meadow. I have paperwork.”
The man didn’t look impressed. “Which zone?”
Caprice’s smile twitched.
My wet apron slapped against my thighs. “The meadow zone.”
“This meadow has three permit zones.”
Naturally, it had three ways to be wrong.
Joelle lowered the extinguisher by two inches. “We were given the north access clearing.”
“You’re east of the north access clearing,” he said.
Caprice’s phone appeared in her hand so fast it might have been spring-loaded. “I’m pulling up the map.”
“You should’ve pulled it up before lighting flame.”
I stepped toward him, mud squishing between my bare toes. “Excuse me, Smoky the Uninvited Bear, but I didn’t personally draw the map.”
His eyes flicked down for one quick, inconvenient second. Wet red bandana. Gingham top plastered to my skin. Apron. Bare feet in the mud. Abandoned wedges lying on their sides like two tiny crime victims.
Then he looked back at my face.
His jaw tightened.
Good. I hoped it was regret. Or basic fear.
“You’re Sunny Burns,” he said.
“That depends. Are you about to apologize with money?”
“No.”
“Then I’ve never heard of her.”
Ed snorted.
The man’s hands shifted once on the hose. He didn’t smile. “I’m Flint Sparks. Fire Mountain safety contractor. Volunteer department. Former smokejumper.”
“Flint Sparks,” I repeated.
Because apparently the universe had looked at my life, my brand, my fire-themed food business, my campaign shoot, and decided subtlety was for cowards.
Caprice, traitor that she was, whispered, “Oh my God, that’s perfect.”
I pointed at her without looking away from Flint. “Don’t produce this moment.”
“I would never,” she said.
Ed’s camera made a tiny mechanical adjustment.
I whipped toward him. “Ed.”
“What? My finger slipped.”
“Your finger better slip into the off position.”
Flint Sparks, menace of Cinder Ridge Meadow and destroyer of dairy, glanced at Ed’s camera, then at Caprice, then back at me. “You’re filming this?”
“We were filming,” I said. “Past tense. Before you turned my set into a water park.”
“You were about thirty seconds from losing the grass edge.”
“And you were about thirty seconds from asking one polite question before blasting thousands of dollars’ worth of product into the dirt.”
His jaw flexed again. Heat rose in my chest that had nothing to do with the weather. The man had the kind of face that belonged on a wilderness calendar, which was deeply inconvenient because I wanted to throw a wet basil bunch at it.
He studied the flooded set, then the dead smoke, then the grass edge.
“Sunny,” Joelle said carefully.
I turned. “Please tell me the words about to leave your mouth are ‘the backup product is dry.’”
“The backup product is in the camper.”
“Great.”
“The camper door was open.”
I looked toward my retro camper.
Water dripped from the little striped awning. Inside the open door, one plastic tub had taken a heroic splash across the label marked SHORTCAKE / BEAUTY BATCH.
My eye twitched.
Caprice stared at her phone. “Okay. So. The map is... not ideal.”
Flint’s brow rose.
“Don’t look smug,” I snapped.
“I’m not.”
“You have a naturally smug brow.”
“I have a naturally accurate sense of wind direction.”
Joelle stepped between us with the courage of a woman who had once told me I couldn’t transport crème br?lée by kayak. “The brand packet shows the north access clearing, but the GPS pin drops here. The permit language names the clearing, not the pin.”
I stared at her. “In English, please.”
“In English, the paperwork is sloppy.”
Caprice nodded slowly, still scrolling. “The location contact told us to follow the pin.”
Flint looked at Caprice. “The pin is wrong.”
Caprice looked at me. Joelle looked at me. Ed looked at the sky like he wished a bird would carry him away.
I turned back to Flint. “So this isn’t my fault.”
“The permit mix-up isn’t.”
There was just enough emphasis in that sentence to make my hands curl.
“The permit mix-up,” I said slowly, “is the reason we were standing here.”
“The fire happened because the setup was too close to dry grass with wind shifting downslope.”
“My setup was where the production directions told me to put it.”
“And now it’s wet instead of spreading.”
I took one more step toward him. Mud squeezed up between my toes. My wet apron clung to my hips. My coppery hair, which had taken forty-five minutes and three products, hung in ropes against my neck.
Flint Sparks didn’t step back.
He should have. For his safety.
“You ruined my shoot,” I said.
“I stopped your fire.”
“You drowned my product.”
“I put out your spot fire.”
“You hosed my hair.”
“Your hair wasn’t my target.”
“It was collateral damage with volume.”
His focus moved once over the wet curls stuck to my cheek. His mouth stayed firm, but the line of his shoulders shifted. Barely.
Then he said, “You shouldn’t have been near live flame in those shoes.”
My entire body went still.
Joelle whispered, “Oh no.”
Caprice whispered, “Oh yes.”
I looked down at my bare muddy feet, then back at the wedge heels, then up at the six-foot-four lecture on boots and boundaries standing in front of me.
“These shoes,” I said, “have more brand identity than most men.”
“They have no tread.”
“They’re not tires.”
“They’re a turned ankle waiting for a witness.”
“They’re camera-ready.”
“This is a fire-risk meadow, not a soundstage.”
I laughed once, sharp and bright. “And there it is.”
His eyebrows drew together. “There what is?”
“That thing men do when they assume sparkle is the same as stupid.”
“I didn’t call you stupid.”
“No, you looked at my shoes, my apron, my hair, and my flooded dessert table and decided I wandered up here with a lip gloss and a prayer.”
“I decided the fire was unsafe.”
“I’m very good at my job.”
“I didn’t say you weren’t.”
“You heavily implied it while holding a hose.”
“My hose put out a fire.”
“Your hose is still pending charges.”
Ed coughed.
Caprice’s eyes were bright in a way I didn’t trust. She bent, retrieved her sunglasses from the mud, shook them once, and slid them back onto her nose even though they were streaked with water.
“Okay,” she said.
“No,” I said.
“You don’t even know what I’m about to say.”
“I know your voice. That was your terrible idea voice.”