Honeyfires

She wiped the starlight from my eyes.

Petra Alves has survived things most people only see in nightmares. Two combat deployments. A field of wildfire. The weight of soldiers she couldn’t save.

She came back to San Jacinto, Arizona carrying all of it locked up inside her, and she learned to live there. Quietly. Alone.

Running toward burning things because it was the only way she knew how to feel useful.

She wasn’t expecting Vera Montgomery.

Golden-haired, blue-eyed, and dangerously optimistic, her new neighbor is everything Petra isn’t. Soft where she’s scarred. Warm where she’s guarded.

At home in a world made of books and vintage dresses and Jane Austen quotes. Vera is the kind of woman you look at once and never quite recover from.

Petra knows this the moment she sees her standing in their hallway in a flower-print pink dress, guessing her name through a smile that makes the whole world tilt sideways.

What follows is slow, and then all at once. Coffee and first dates and a kiss in a library that neither of them saw coming.

A love that builds itself quietly in the space between two very different lives, until everything that matters most gets tested by fire.

Because Petra is a helitack forewoman. She rappels from helicopters into active burns. She makes impossible calls with seconds to spare.

And when a career-threatening wildfire forces her to choose between following orders and bringing her crew home alive, she makes the only choice she can live with—and loses almost everything else.