Claimed by the Mountain Man Hotshot

For twenty-three years she has been the sous chef everyone likes and nobody chooses, the woman who laughs first so no one notices she wants to be kept.

When a wildland crew arrives for three days of soft-open service, hotshot superintendent Reid Callahan tastes her sage-and-apple brown butter trout and looks past the joke she serves with every plate.

Quiet, more than a decade older, and sure the job already cost him a home, the mountain man will not accept the disposable version of her that every other table takes.

He starts waiting on the patio after close, after his crew has cleared out and the lights have gone dark.

With a truck due to carry him two hundred miles south by the weekend, she has only a handful of nights to believe a man who walks into fire might stay.