Burning Up with the Mountain Man Firefighter (Copper Peak Sparks #4)

1. Neve

NEVE

Eleven seconds.

The wax in the melting pot is clear and still, the surface barely trembling.

I have eleven seconds before I add the fragrance oil, and the timing matters because this part has never been about numbers.

It’s about instinct. Too hot, and the oil burns off before it has a chance to settle in.

Too cool, and it refuses to play nice with the wax. Ask me how I know.

There’s a window of maybe fifteen seconds when everything is exactly right, and after years of doing this, I can find it without a thermometer. I watch the surface tension instead. It relaxes just enough to catch my eye—a tiny shift most people would never notice—and that’s my cue.

Eight seconds.

The workshop smells like beeswax with a whisper of smoke from the wicks I trimmed this morning.

The pilot flame glows low and blue beneath the pot, and twelve jars wait in a perfectly straight line on the stone counter behind me, already labeled because future me appreciates it when present me gets her life together.

This batch is a new blend I’ve been tinkering with for weeks. Warm amber, clove, a base of raw honey, and one last note I still haven’t committed to because committing would mean deciding, and I’m not quite ready for that. I’m still following my nose and seeing where it wants to take me.

Four seconds.

The door opens.

I don’t look up. I can’t look up, because I’m at two seconds and my hand is already reaching for the fragrance oil. Whoever just walked into my workshop is going to have to wait until the pour is done.

The bell above the door is still ringing when I tip the oil into the wax, and the bloom of scent rises immediately, warm and sharp, filling the room in a way that I feel across my skin before I smell it.

“Miss Sinclair?”

The voice is low, controlled, and completely unfamiliar. I finish the pour, set the oil bottle on the workbench, and pick up my stir stick. Twenty steady rotations, clockwise, even pressure. Then I look up.

He fills the doorway with the kind of presence that has nothing to do with size.

Authority, quiet and practiced, radiating off him before he says a word.

He’s in a Copper Peak Fire Protection District polo, dark navy, tucked into tactical pants, and he’s holding a clipboard with a printed form already attached.

His jaw is clean-shaved and set, and his eyes are moving through my workshop with a focus I recognize immediately.

He’s assessing. Every surface, every flame, every inch of my space is being read and examined.

“I’m Lieutenant Trent,” he says. “Fire safety inspection. You should have received a notice.”

I did receive a notice. Two weeks ago—a single sheet slipped under my door with the district seal and a date and time printed in bold.

I put it on the bulletin board behind the register and forgot about it.

I’ve been running an open-flame workshop in a historic stone building for three years, and nobody has ever walked through that door with a clipboard.

“I’m in the middle of a pour,” I say.

“I can see that.”

He says it without judgment, without inflection, and that’s what catches me.

Most people who walk into my workshop react.

Tourists stop and inhale and say something about how good it smells.

The other Trading Post shop owners lean in the doorway and ask what I’m making.

Even delivery drivers pause and look around at the wax and the flames and the rows of cooling candles with something close to curiosity on their faces.

He’s not reacting. He’s surveying.

I watch him move through the space while I stir. He starts at the door and works clockwise, and there’s something almost hypnotic about it.

Each station gets the same amount of attention.

The supply shelf where I store fragrance oils.

The ventilation fan above the melting station.

The pilot flame under my pot. He checks the flame, and his eyes narrow for a fraction of a second before he makes a note on the clipboard.

Then his attention shifts to the fire extinguisher mounted by the back door—the one the landlord installed when I signed my lease. I’ve never checked it.

He lifts the extinguisher off the mount, turns it over, and reads the tag. “This is a Class A.”

“Okay.”

“You work with flammable liquids. Fragrance oils, solvents, wax at combustible temperatures. You need a Class B.”

“I didn’t know that.”

He writes something on the clipboard. His face gives me nothing, and his voice gives me less. The only sound is the scratch of the pen and the tight movements of his hand as he records the violation.

He walks to the back of the workshop. The emergency exit is behind my supply station, where I keep the wax pallets and empty shipping crates and the bulk boxes of glass jars that come in faster than I can unpack them.

I stacked them there because the door leads to the narrow gap between the Trading Post buildings, and I never use it.

The crates fit perfectly against the wall, and the space was wasted otherwise.

He reaches the door and stops. His hand goes to the push bar, and the door moves half an inch before the stack catches it. He pushes harder. The crates shift, glass jars rattling inside the cardboard, but the door doesn’t open.

He turns and looks at me. “How long has this exit been blocked?”

“I don’t use that door.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

His voice is the same pitch, the same volume, the same measured delivery he’s used for everything else. But something underneath it changes. I can hear it the way I hear a fragrance note shift when the temperature is wrong. A tightening. A wire pulled taut somewhere behind his words.

“A few months,” I say. “Maybe longer.”

He holds my gaze for one beat past comfortable. Then he turns back to the clipboard and writes. His pen moves longer on this one than it did for the extinguisher.

He moves to the workbench. My workbench, where the wax is still warm, the fragrance oil sitting three inches from the pilot flame.

My hair tie is draped over the corner because I pulled my hair up twenty minutes ago without thinking about where I set it down.

His gaze tracks from the oil bottle to the flame to the distance between them, and his jaw tightens by a degree so small, I almost miss it.

“Flammable materials need to be stored a minimum of three feet from any ignition source,” he says. “Your fragrance oils are within reach of the pilot.”

“I need them within reach. That’s how the pour works.”

“Then you need a separate storage station with a ventilated cabinet and a transfer protocol.”

He says transfer protocol the way I’d say fragrance load. Fluently, without thinking about it. This is his language, and he speaks it the way I speak mine, and the recognition of that does something unexpected to the base of my throat.

He checks the ventilation above the melting station, and I watch him register the inadequate airflow before he writes it up.

Each one gets the same treatment. Observation, notation, flat delivery.

No lecture, no warning, no condescension.

He gives every line item the same weight, and by the time he reaches the end of the circuit and arrives back at the door where he started, I’ve stopped stirring. I’m just watching him.

He tears the top sheet off the clipboard and holds it out to me without meeting my eyes. “You have seventy-two hours to address the violations. I’ll schedule a re-inspection after that window.”

I take the paper. His fingers don’t touch mine on the transfer. I’m aware of that. Aware of the care he takes to make sure they don’t.

“Thank you, Lieutenant.”

“Graham,” he says. Then his jaw resets, and he’s out the door before the bell finishes ringing.

I stand in my workshop holding the violations list and listening to his footsteps cross the courtyard cobblestones. They’re even and steady, the same rhythm start to finish, and they don’t slow down.

I look at the paper.

He cited four violations. Every one of them includes the specific code, the corrective action, the equipment required, and the manufacturer recommendation.

The extinguisher entry lists the exact model number for the Class B unit I need, the rated capacity, and the correct mounting height.

The ventilation note includes the CFM specification for a workshop my size and the name of the hardware store in town that carries the right fan.

He didn’t just cite me. He told me how to fix everything.

I fold the paper and set it on the workbench next to the amber blend. The pilot flame is still burning, low and steady. My hands smell like beeswax and smoke. The wax in the pot has cooled past the pour window while I wasn’t paying attention, and I’ll have to reheat the whole batch.

I haven’t lost a pour window in two years.

I reach for the temperature dial and start over.