Unwrapped (Copper Peak Sparks #6)

1. Weston

WESTON

The offer is in my back pocket, folded in thirds, already soft at the creases from how many times I’ve opened and closed it.

I don’t take it out. I’ve read it enough. Wildland/backcountry team, full transition, effective start of next month. Holt’s signature on the recommendation line. The chief’s signature below it. Two men who think I’m ready for something I haven’t said yes to.

The station is loud behind me. I can hear Mack through the open bay doors, arguing with Dean about whether smoked brisket counts as a food group.

Mack says yes. Dean says the nutritional value depends on the rub, the wood, and the internal temperature, and Mack tells him that’s the least sexy thing anyone has ever said about brisket.

Graham is cleaning the engine bay, which means he’s really checking all the compartment latches for the third time tonight.

Holt left an hour ago—walked across to Lea’s, kissed her in the coffee shop doorway, stayed ten minutes, and came back.

The whole thing was so easy and settled, it barely registered on the street.

That’s my crew. Years of eating together, training together, and dragging each other out of burning buildings and bad moods.

I know Mack’s laugh from three rooms away.

I know Dean’s hands shake for thirty seconds after every call.

I know Graham checks the locks twice and lies about it once.

I know Holt’s shoulders drop half an inch when he walks into Lea’s shop and pick back up the second he steps into the bay.

I know them, and they know me. Or they know the version of me that shows up every shift, does the work, doesn’t say much, and goes home. The quiet one. The steady one. The one who’s always there, which is the thing people only notice about you when you stop.

I haven’t told anyone about the offer.

I head out the bay doors onto Prospect Street.

The strip is quiet—restaurants winding down, a few tourists drifting toward the resort shuttle, the hardware store dark.

I pass the entrance to the Trading Post and glance in out of habit.

The courtyard is empty. Lea’s coffee shop is dark, the bookstore, the florist, the candlemaker, the gallery…

all of them are shut down with their owners gone home to the men who walked through that courtyard every morning.

Holt, Drew, Mack, Dean, Graham, Levi—every one of them found a woman in these old stone buildings.

Every one of them walked through this courtyard and got seen.

I walked through it too, right behind them, for years.

None of those women ever learned my name.

I’ve been on the crew since before Holt made captain. Since before Drew transferred in. Since before any of it. My guys know me. But out here, in the courtyard, I was the one behind the louder ones. The one nobody asked about.

Nobody noticed.

That’s not self-pity. It’s just true. Quiet people don’t leave marks on a room.

They leave the room the same temperature they found it, and everyone stays comfortable, and comfort is a kind of invisibility I chose a long time ago because the alternative—being loud enough to matter, then gone—is worse.

My father was loud enough to matter. Then gone.

I’m ten steps past the Trading Post entrance when I smell it.

Smoke.

Not wood smoke, not campfire, not the charcoal-and-pine scent of the mountains at this altitude in September.

This is acrid, chemical, concentrated—burnt sugar scorching past its flash point and throwing off dark particulate.

I stop walking. My body goes still, reads the air, and locates the source before my brain catches up.

The candy shop.

I turn back. Through the courtyard entrance, I can see one shop still lit—the candy shop at the far corner. Smoke is curling from the gap under its front door, thick and dark, pressing against the glass. No visible flame, no audible alarm, no sound from inside except a clatter of metal on metal.

I’m through the door in four strides.

The smoke hits me at chest level—dense, sweet, throat-coating.

I drop lower out of instinct, scanning the space in one sweep.

Copper pots on a commercial range against the back wall.

A marble slab to the right, dusted with powdered sugar.

Taffy hook mounted above a steel work counter.

Display cases along the front with trays of fudge, caramel corn, and candied nuts in wax paper.

The shop is small, hot, and alive with the smell of sugar that went past caramelization and straight into carbon.

No fire.

A woman is standing at the range with a damp towel in one hand, the other gripping the handle of a copper pot that’s pouring black smoke into the hood vent.

She’s dragging it off the burner, and the muscles in her forearm are tight with the weight.

Her face is flushed from the heat, and she’s talking under her breath in a steady stream of words I’m fairly sure she wouldn’t say in front of customers.

She’s not in danger. She’s furious.

She hasn’t seen me yet. She’s focused on the pot—hauling it toward the sink with both hands, the towel wrapped around the handle.

Honey-blonde hair peeks out from under a bandana, sticking to her neck.

Her apron is streaked with something dark—burnt caramel, solidified on the fabric in long drags.

Freckles across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose are visible even in the low light, even through the haze as she narrows her eyes at the pot with pure, personal contempt.

She sets the pot in the sink and hits it with cold water. The hiss fills the room. Steam joins the smoke, and for a second she disappears behind it, just her hands visible on the edge of the sink, white-knuckled, still gripping.

Then the steam clears. She looks up and sees me standing inside her door.

Everything stops.

Not the smoke, not the hiss of water in the sink, not the ambient hum of the range hood pulling air.

Those keep going. What stops is something inside me—a mechanism I didn’t know was running, a low, constant motion I’ve carried for so long I forgot it was there.

It stops, and the silence it leaves is deafening.

Her face shifts from fury to confusion. Her mouth opens, closes. She looks at me the way someone would look at a stranger standing in their living room at ten o’clock at night.

“Who are you?”

She doesn’t know my name.

I’ve walked through this courtyard a thousand times.

I’ve passed her shop window, seen her pulling taffy with an audience of kids on the cobblestones, heard her laugh carry across the Trading Post when the other women gather in the courtyard on summer evenings.

I know her name is Millie. I know she owns the candy shop.

I know she’s the one who’s always smiling, always handing something to someone, always bright.

She doesn’t know I exist.

“Weston Blair,” I say. “Station 1. I saw the smoke.”

“Oh.”

She lets out a breath, looking at the destroyed pot in the sink, the black residue climbing the copper walls.

Then something happens to her face—a reset, fast, practiced.

The frustration smooths out. The jaw unclenches.

She reaches for a tray on the counter and holds it toward me, and there it is. The smile. Wide, warm, effortless.

“Caramel? I have a batch from yesterday. Since tonight’s batch is…” She gestures at the smoking sink. “Deceased.”

She laughs. The sound is bright, easy, and wrong.

I know what it looks like when someone puts on a front to make a room more comfortable.

My mother did it every morning for three years after my father left—coffee on, smile on, everything fine.

My brother did it over the phone from whatever base he was stationed at, voice light and easy and already gone.

And this woman is doing it now. Standing in a smoke-filled shop with a ruined batch and burnt caramel under her fingernails, offering me candy with a smile she assembled in two seconds flat because someone walked in, and she doesn’t know how to be anything but sweet when someone’s watching.

I don’t take the caramel.

“You were different thirty seconds ago,” I tell her.

The smile flickers. “What?”

“Before you saw me. When it was just you and the pot.” I look at the sink, the smoke still curling off the water.

“You were mad. You were swearing. Your hands were shaking. Then I showed up, and all of that disappeared.” I look back at her.

“I’m not interested in the version of you that just showed up. The one before was better.”

The tray lowers an inch. Her mouth opens, but nothing comes out. The smile is gone, and underneath it, her face is open and startled. Something about that unguarded blankness hits me harder than the smoke did.

I shouldn’t have said that. I walked into a stranger’s shop because I saw smoke, and now I’m standing in her space telling her I prefer the version of her that doesn’t know she’s being watched.

That’s not a thing you say. That’s not a thing a quiet man who minds his own business and keeps his head down says to a woman he’s never spoken to.

But my hands are tingling and my pulse is doing something it doesn’t do, and the offer in my back pocket feels heavier than it did five minutes ago.

Five minutes ago, leaving Copper Peak meant leaving the crew.

Now it means leaving a room with this woman in it, and I’ve been in that room for less than three minutes.

“The smoke’s clearing,” I say. “You should open the back door for cross ventilation.”

I leave. The courtyard is dark and cool, and the cobblestones are steady under my boots. I walk all the way to Prospect Street before I stop, put my hands on my knees, and breathe.

That night, I don’t sleep. I lie in bed and look at the ceiling and think about a woman swearing at a copper pot with caramel in her hair. I remember the way her face looked in the two seconds between the smoke clearing and the smile taking over.

Unguarded. Unsweetened. Real.