The Firefighter’s Bride (After the Ashes #2)

Chapter 1

Liam

I had everything I'd ever wanted—except someone to want it with.

The sunrise was doing that ridiculous golden thing over the mountains, spilling light across the pastures like it had somewhere better to be and decided to show off on the way.

Three hundred acres of Murphy land stretched out beneath it, green and gold and perfect. From here, I could see the barn full of healthy horses, fences that still held, and the farmhouse that had sheltered four generations of my family. It had good bones. Always had.

And there was me, standing in the middle of it. Alone. Again. Still.

Twenty-four hours on shift had left my bones hollowed out, that deep, marrow-level exhaustion you don't fix with sleep so much as endure until it loosens its grip. The horses didn’t care about my schedule.

Dawn meant feeding, and I was already halfway to the barn before my truck finished ticking in the driveway.

The smell hit me first. Hay and horse and old wood, the particular sweetness of grain mixed with the earthier notes underneath.

I'd been breathing this air since before I could walk.

My father used to carry me out here in the mornings, let me "help" with the feeding when helping meant sitting on a hay bale and watching him work.

I don't remember his voice as well as I should.

But I remember how his hands looked scooping grain: calloused, sure, gentle with the animals even when he was tired.

I grabbed the feed bucket and started my rounds.

The first horse was Ranger. He nickered when I reached his stall, shoving his gray nose over the door like I might forget him.

"Yeah, yeah. I know. I’m late." I measured his grain, checked his water, ran my hand along his flank while he buried his face in breakfast. He had been my grandmother's horse before he was mine.

Seventeen years old now and still going strong, which was more than I could say for myself most mornings.

Buck came next, then Dusty, then the newer rescues I'd taken in over the past two years. Each one got grain, water, a quick once-over for injuries or illness. The routine steadied something in me that twenty-four hours of sirens and smoke had knocked loose.

Then I finally reached her.

She pressed against the far wall the moment I appeared, ears flat, whites of her eyes showing. Twelve weeks, and she still flinched when I moved too fast. Still watched me like I might turn into something dangerous if she looked away.

“Easy, girl.” I kept my voice low and my movements slow. Unlatched the stall door with exaggerated care. “It’s just me.”

I set the grain down just inside the door and stepped back, giving her space. She watched me retreat, trembling, before inching toward the bucket. One step. Two. Her nose finally dipped toward the grain, and I let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding.

Some damage takes longer to heal. Some trust has to be earned one morning at a time.

I understood that better than most.

The mudroom door stuck when I shouldered through it, the way it always did when the humidity climbed.

I made a mental note to plane it down next weekend and added it to the list of projects that never seemed to shrink.

I was always thinking about them—the new boards on the south fence.

Patching the barn roof. The slow, necessary maintenance of a place that required constant attention just to stay standing.

I kicked off my boots, hung my jacket on the hook by the door, and that's when I saw it.

The empty hook.

Third from the left, right next to mine. The one where Claire's jacket used to hang, back when she still came home on weekends. Back when home still meant something to her.

I stood there longer than I should have, staring at a bare wooden peg like it owed me something. Three months, and I still hadn't moved the other jackets over to fill the gap. Three months, and some part of me was still waiting for her to walk through that door.

The memory surfaced before I could stop it.

Three months ago. Denver. The restaurant she’d chosen—white tablecloths, low lighting, the kind of place where the menu didn’t list prices and I spent the first ten minutes pretending I knew what half the words meant.

I’d worn my good jeans and a button-down that never quite felt like me, no matter how many times she said I looked nice.

Claire had looked flawless. Manicured. Polished. The kind of woman who belonged in that space now, who fit it the way she never quite fit here anymore. She’d held her wineglass by the stem, lipstick perfect, eyes steady in a way that set my nerves humming before she even spoke.

“Liam,” she’d said, voice calm, almost kind. “I’ve been thinking about this for a long time.”

I’d known then. The way you know when a call drops before the line goes dead.

“The ranch,” she continued. “The small town. The kids you want.” A pause. A breath. “It’s not the life I want anymore. I’m up for partner. I’m not giving that up to move back to the middle of nowhere.”

Anymore.

That word had done the most damage. Not the leaving. The revision of history. The quiet admission that she’d wanted it once. Wanted me once.

I’d sat there, hands wrapped around a water glass I didn’t need, listening as my future crumbled politely across from me. She’d talked about timing. About growth. About how sometimes love wasn’t enough when paths diverged.

I’d driven two hours each way, every weekend I could manage, for three years. I’d believed her when she said soon. Eventually. When the timing’s right.

The timing had never been wrong for her. She’d just been waiting for the courage to leave.

The drive home had been a blur of headlights and asphalt and tears I refused to let fall. Gran’s ring had been in my pocket, heavy as a stone. The ring she’d worn for fifty-three years. The one she’d pressed into my palm after Claire and I got engaged, eyes bright and knowing.

“For the woman who chooses this life with you,” she’d said.

Claire had worn it for eight months. I’d thought it meant she was choosing me. This life. This ranch. Everything.

The highway had blurred through tears I refused to let fall. I'd pulled over twice—once to throw up, once to scream at the empty night until my throat went raw. By the time I reached the ranch, I felt hollowed out, scooped clean of everything soft.

I hadn't touched that ring since then. It was in my sock drawer, buried under things I didn't look at anymore. Waiting for a woman who could stay.

A woman who'd want this—the early mornings and the endless work, the smell of hay and horse, the small-town life that Claire had found so suffocating. A woman who'd look at everything I had to offer and decide it was enough.

I didn’t know if she existed.

My phone rang while I was mucking out Dusty's stall, and I almost ignored it. But the screen showed Patricia Chen, and she never called unless something was wrong.

"Liam." Her voice carried the weight of thirty years handling Murphy family business. She'd drawn up my parents' will, settled my grandmother's estate, watched me grow from a scrawny kid into whatever I was at the moment. "I'm afraid I have some difficult news."

I leaned the pitchfork against the stall wall. "What kind?"

"The kind that involves a deadline." She paused, the way she always did before delivering a blow. "You will turn thirty in three months."

"I'm aware."

"Which means three months until the deadline in your grandmother's will expires."

The words landed somewhere in my chest and sat there, cold and heavy.

I'd known this was coming. Had known since the reading of the will two years ago, when I'd sat in Patricia's office and heard Gran's final wishes laid out in black and white.

But knowing and feeling were different things, and right now I felt like someone had reached into my ribcage and squeezed.

"If you're not legally married by your thirtieth birthday," Patricia continued, "the ranch transfers to your cousin Derek. I've already fielded calls from developers through his people. He'll sell before the ink dries on the deed, Liam. You know that."

I knew. Derek hadn't set foot on Murphy land in fifteen years, had made it abundantly clear that he considered ranching beneath him. The only value this place held for him was what he could get for it in cash.

“Your grandmother was… specific.”

Gran had believed in legacy. In family. In doing things the right way, even if it meant forcing the issue. She’d assumed I’d be married by thirty. Had probably assumed kids, too. Sunday dinners with laughter and noise and muddy boots by the door.

She hadn’t planned on me standing alone in a barn with a phone in my hand and no idea how to save the thing she’d loved most.

“Thanks for telling me,” that was what kind of thing you used to say when there was nothing else to.

Patricia's sigh crackled through the phone. "I'm sorry, Liam. I wish I had better news. But three months is what you have. If there's anything I can do—"

"Thanks, Patricia. I'll figure something out."

I hung up before she could offer more sympathy. I stood there, alone in the barn, frozen, trying to figure things out.

Three months.

Three months to find someone willing to marry a man whose own fiancée had decided he wasn't worth the trouble.

Three months to save everything my family had built, everything I'd been working to preserve since my parents' pickup truck wrapped around a tree when I was nineteen and left me an orphan overnight.

My parents had died in a farming accident—that’s what everyone called it, though accident felt too clean, a word that didn’t match the reality.

A mechanical failure on the old tractor.

My father was thrown clear. My mother wasn’t.

I was nineteen when it happened, finishing my first semester of community college, planning to come home for the weekend. Instead, I came home for a funeral.

Gran was the one who held me together after that.

We moved into the farmhouse. She took over the business side of things while I learned how to run the ranch.

She taught me everything she knew—about the land, the horses, the seasons.

And before she died, she made me promise I wouldn’t let it go. Never.

"Keep it in the family," she'd whispered, her hand paper-thin in mine. "This land remembers us, Liam. It deserves someone who'll remember it back."

I'd promised. I'd meant it. I'd thought Claire would be there beside me, building the life Gran always wanted for me.

And now Claire was gone, and the deadline was three months away, and maybe I'd been fooling myself all along. Maybe the dream I was chasing—small-town firefighter, rancher, husband, father—was too small for anyone else to want. Maybe I was destined to love this land alone. And somehow, that still wouldn’t be enough to keep it.

My phone buzzed. A text from Cal.

Cal

Shift drinks tonight. You look like you need it.

I laughed, but there was no humor in it. Cal had been watching me spiral for three months, had probably coordinated with the crew to make sure someone checked in every few days. He meant well. They all did.

None of them could fix this.

I pocketed the phone and walked out of the barn, squinting against the morning sun. The mountains rose purple and gold in the distance, the pastures stretching green and perfect between here and there. My parents' dream. My grandmother's legacy. My inheritance—if I could figure out how to keep it.

Three months to find a wife.

Sure. No problem.

The land didn't care that I was alone. The horses didn't care that I was running out of time. But standing there in the place my family had built and lost and built again, I cared. Maybe too much.

Maybe that was always my problem—wanting things that weren't meant to be mine.