Scorched by the Firefighter (Heroes of Whispering Pines #3)

1. Brenna

brENNA

The smoke detector didn’t go off. I’d swapped the backup battery two weeks ago and pressed the test button until it chirped, and the damn thing still hadn’t made a sound.

I smelled it first. Not the sharp, obvious smell of something burning on the stove. This was sharper. Chemical. Wrong. By the time I turned from the display case and looked toward the kitchen, smoke was already curling under the door in a low, lazy drift, like it had all the time in the world.

I didn’t.

I was moving before I’d decided to. I shoved through the kitchen door and the heat hit me—not flames, not yet, but that thick, pressing heat that pushes against your skin and makes your lungs clench.

The back corner near the electrical panel was glowing orange behind a curtain of smoke so dense I couldn’t see the ceiling.

I grabbed the fire extinguisher off the wall.

My hands were shaking so badly I fumbled the pin twice before yanking it free.

I aimed at the base of the glow the way I’d been taught and squeezed the handle, and for three seconds I thought I had it.

The white spray hit the wall, the glow dimmed, and I thought, okay, I can do this, I can save this?—

Then something popped behind the panel, a sharp crack like a board snapping, and a line of fire raced up the wall to the ceiling faster than I could move.

I backed up and hit the prep table with my hip. The impact knocked the metal mixing bowls off the edge, and they hit the tile floor with a crash that I barely heard over the roar building inside the walls.

The roar was the thing that scared me most. Fire wasn’t supposed to have a voice.

Get out.

The thought was calm and clear and nothing like the rest of me. My eyes were streaming. My throat was closing. I turned toward the front of the shop, but the smoke was so thick now that the kitchen door had disappeared.

I dropped low the way every fire safety poster I’d ever seen said to do, and I crawled.

My palms hit the warm tile and I kept going, one hand in front of the other, until I found the metal base of the door frame.

I pushed through, and the air was a little better on the other side—enough to take a breath that didn’t feel like swallowing sand.

But I was turned around. The shop was small—six tables, a counter, a front door with a bell that chimed when customers walked in—and somehow I couldn’t find any of it.

The haze had swallowed the whole room. I could hear glass cracking somewhere behind me, and the heat was following me out of the kitchen, pressing against my back like a hand.

I made it to the counter. I knew it was the counter because my shoulder hit the corner hard enough to send pain shooting down my arm. I grabbed the edge and pulled myself along it, hacking so hard my ribs ached, and I was almost to the end when my legs gave out.

Not dramatically. Not the way it happens in movies. My knees just quietly buckled and I went down, and the floor was warm underneath me, and I thought, this is my bakery. I built this. I’m going to die in the thing I built.

I don’t know how long I was down. Seconds, probably. It felt like longer.

Then the front door crashed inward—not opened, crashed—and cold air rushed in like a wave. I heard boots on the floor and voices, sharp and clipped, cutting through the smoke. Radio static. Someone yelling about ventilation.

Hands found me. Big hands, steady, one under my knees and one behind my back, and I was off the floor before I could process what was happening.

I couldn’t see his face through the mask, but I felt his arms lock around me, his chest solid against my side, and I knew, in the part of my brain that was still working, that whoever had me wasn’t going to drop me.

The cold hit my face first. Then the light—early morning, barely past dawn, the sky that pale gray-blue that meant the sun wasn’t up yet. He carried me past the engine and set me down on the curb across the street, and I sat there coughing and shaking while he crouched in front of me.

He pulled his mask off.

Dark hair, cut short. Green eyes. A jaw carved out of the same mountain that loomed over this town. He was staring at me with an intensity that didn’t match the calm in his voice.

“You’re okay,” he said. Not a question. An instruction.

I nodded, even though I wasn’t sure that was true.

“Can you breathe?”

I took a breath to prove I could, and it turned into another round of coughing that bent me in half. His hand was on my back—steadying, not patting—and he waited until it passed.

“Slowly,” he said.

I tried again. This time the air went in and stayed.

“Good.” He was watching my face like he was reading something written there. “What’s your name?”

“Brenna.” My voice came out raw, scraped. “Brenna Mills. That’s my shop.”

His gaze shifted to the building behind me. I didn’t turn around. I didn’t want to see it yet.

“How long were you inside after it started?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Five minutes. Maybe less.” I looked down at my hands. They were black with soot, and there was a raw red patch on my right palm where I must have touched something hot without feeling it. “The extinguisher didn’t work. I mean, it worked, but it wasn’t enough.”

“Electrical fires usually aren’t.” He said it without judgment, just fact. “Is there anyone else inside?”

“No. Just me. I was prepping for the morning.”

He held my gaze for one more second—long enough that something registered, low and warm, that had nothing to do with the smoke—and then he stood.

“Stay here,” he said. “Paramedics are coming.”

I watched him pull his mask back on and walk toward my shop. The front door was gone—he’d kicked it in, I realized—and smoke was still pouring out, but it was lighter now, gray instead of black.

The rest of the crew was already inside. I could hear the hiss of water and more radio chatter and the sound of someone pulling down ceiling tiles.

He didn’t look back at me before he went in.

I sat on that curb, wrapped my arms around my knees, and watched the smoke thin, listening to my shop being taken apart from the inside. Everything I’d saved for. Everything I’d built with my own hands, in a town where no one knew my name when I arrived.

One year. I’d had it for one year.

The paramedics showed up and checked my oxygen levels and put a bandage on my palm and asked me questions I answered on autopilot. The whole time, I kept my eyes on the open doorway, waiting for the firefighter with the green eyes to come back out.

He didn’t. Not while I was sitting there.

Eventually, someone draped a blanket over my shoulders, and I pulled it tight and stared at the building that held everything I had in the world. I tried not to think about what I’d find when the smoke cleared.

One of the paramedics crouched next to me. “Is there somewhere you can stay tonight? We can’t clear the apartment until the building’s been inspected. Separate entrance or not, the smoke infiltration alone?—”

“I’ll figure it out,” I said.

I didn’t have anywhere to go. I’d been in Whispering Pines for a year and didn’t have a single person I could call at six in the morning and ask for a couch. That fact hit me harder than the fire.

A woman appeared at the edge of the scene—short curly hair, coffee cup in hand, a warm face I recognized from the diner up the block but had never spoken to beyond placing an order.

“I’m Bev,” she said, like I might not know. “You’re coming with me.”It wasn’t a question.