Kristin Hardy - Where There's Smoke

He was right—this wasn’t about the job. It was about what had started in the tower and was moving out of her control with frightening speed. “Perhaps you just have an overactive imagination,” Sloane said, fighting to keep her voice even.

“I don’t know. Let’s test it. Empirical method.” Nick leaned in, sliding his fingers along her cheek. “Experiment and observe.”

“You’re out of your mind, Trask.”

“Nick,” he corrected softly, so close she could feel his mouth form the word.

“What?”

“Call me Nick.” Then his lips brushed hers.

Dear Reader,

Well, we’re getting into the holiday season full tilt, and what better way to begin the celebrations than with some heartwarming reading? Let’s get started with Gina Wilkins’s The Borrowed Ring, next up in her FAMILY FOUND series. A woman trying to track down her family’s most mysterious and intriguing foster son finds him and a whole lot more—such as a job posing as his wife! A Montana Homecoming, by popular author Allison Leigh, brings home a woman who’s spent her life running from her own secrets. But they’re about to be revealed, courtesy of her childhood crush, now the local sheriff.

This month, our class reunion series, MOST LIKELY TO…, brings us Jen Safrey’s Secrets of a Good Girl, in which we learn that the girl most likely to…do everything disappeared right after college. Perhaps her secret crush, a former professor, can have some luck tracking her down overseas? We’re delighted to have bestselling Blaze author Kristin Hardy visit Special Edition in the first of her HOLIDAY HEARTS books. Where There’s Smoke introduces us to the first of the devastating Trask brothers. The featured brother this month is a handsome firefighter in Boston. And speaking of delighted—we are absolutely thrilled to welcome RITA ®Award nominee and Red Dress Ink and Intimate Moments star Karen Templeton to Special Edition. Although this is her first Special Edition contribution, it feels as if she’s coming home. Especially with Marriage, Interrupted, in which a pregnant widow meets up once again with the man who got away—her first husband—at her second husband’s funeral. We know you’re going to enjoy this amazing story as much as we did. And we are so happy to welcome brand-new Golden Heart winner Gail Barrett to Special Edition. Where He Belongs, the story of the bad boy who’s come back to town to the girl he’s never been able to forget, is Gail’s first published book.

So enjoy—and remember, next month we continue our celebration….

Gail Chasan

Senior Editor

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For their invaluable assistance in my research, thanks to

Scott Salman of the Boston Fire Department, Joel Schwartz

of the Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corp.

and most of all, Stephen Hardy of the

Merrimack Romantic Development Corp.

has always wanted to write, starting her first novel while still in grade school. Although she became a laser engineer by training, she never gave up her dream of being an author. In 2002, her first completed manuscript, My Sexiest Mistake, debuted in Harlequin’s Blaze line; it was subsequently made into a movie by the Oxygen network. The author of nine books to date, Kristin lives in New Hampshire with her husband and collaborator.

Dear Reader,

The publication of Where There’s Smoke is a dream come true for me. About twenty years ago (when I was two, of course) I picked up a Silhouette Special Edition novel at the store and I got the bug to write a romance. Fast forward through several false starts and long hiatuses from writing. Even though I never finished a book, I always knew that one day I’d make my living as a romance novelist. Then in September 2001, I finally typed “The End” on a story and sold it to Harlequin’s newly launched Blaze line.

My heart has always been with Special Edition, though. When Gail Chasan bought the HOLIDAY HEARTS trilogy I couldn’t have been more thrilled. I have so many stories to tell, so I hope that this is a journey we can go on together as I continue to write for both lines.

I’d love to hear what you think of my first effort, so please drop me a line at kristin@kristinhardy.com. Stop by my Web site at www.kristinhardy.com for contests, details on upcoming books, recipes and more.

Happy holidays.

Kristin Hardy

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

It was beyond him how so much paperwork could stack up in such a short time. Nick Trask stared balefully at the forms piled up on his desk and sighed. He’d joined the fire department to battle fires, not to generate his own personal fire hazard.

When people asked him why he loved firefighting, he usually shrugged and said it was rewarding. It was true, that much of it, but there was more he didn’t say. He didn’t tell them of the fierce pleasure of firefighting, the euphoria of saving a life or the way the adrenaline blasted through him as he risked everything against the ravening beast of the flames.

Those were the moments that made it all worthwhile. Those were the times that made up for days like this one, he thought, raking an impatient hand through his cropped hair. It had been crazy from the get-go. They’d hardly had time to go over the morning announcements at the start of shift when the bells had sounded for a house fire in a triple-decker just blocks away. Climbing to the roof to ventilate the blaze, hands full with a chainsaw, Bruce Jackson had found out the twenty-foot ladder had a bad rung. The hard way. All things considered, it was a lucky thing he’d only fallen eight feet—if you could call a broken collarbone lucky.

And the day had just gone downhill from there.

Accident reports, damaged property reports, defective equipment reports…Nick was tempted to put a lump of coal underneath them and see if he could make a diamond. It wouldn’t have been so bad if it hadn’t been for the rescue call, the inspections and the car fire. Not to mention the medical aid calls. Three of them. Even after spending every moment in between calls filling out forms and cursing the department for not having it all online, he was only a little over half done, and everything had to be shipshape by the time they made the shift change.

Nick shook his head and glanced at the books he’d optimistically spread out, hoping to study for the promotional exam. His chances of getting any time to look at them this shift were about as good as his chances of winning Powerball.

“Yo, cap, give me a hand for a minute?” The question was shouted up from the garage area below, rising above the sounds of rock music on the radio. If he craned his neck, Nick could see out the open door of his office and through the stair railing to the long, gleaming red shapes of the fire engine and ladder truck, massive yet oddly sleek under the fluorescent lights of the cavernous garage. Something of the boy in him smiled then, something of the man felt a swelling pride, underlain by a breath of challenge, a taste of danger.

Firefighting was his life. It touched the essence of him in a way nothing else ever had.

Feet thumped up the stairs. “El capitan?” A burly, middle-aged firefighter with a blunt-featured face leaned into the office. From behind him came the sound of U2 singing about a beautiful day.

Nick put down his pen. “Still stuck on these reports, O’Hanlan, sorry.”

“Remember the other day when you were asking me why I didn’t want to take the exam to move up? ’Nuff said. You officer types, you gotta love paperwork. Me, I’m an action guy.”

A corner of Nick’s mouth quirked as he looked at O’Hanlan’s florid face. “An action guy, huh?”

“Every minute of every day.”

“No wonder your wife looks scared. Look, I’ve got to keep working on this pile if I’m going to get through it by shift change, so if someone else can help you, go for it.”

“No problem. I understand. Some people are born bureaucrats. But if your hand starts getting tired and you want to be reminded what the apparatus looks like…”

Nick stopped and considered, tapping forms-in-triplicate with his pen and eyeing the door where O’Hanlan beckoned.

“Were you ever in sales, O’Hanlan?”

“Just pointing out your options.” He tipped his head in the direction of the apparatus floor, wagging his eyebrows.

It was Nick’s duty as captain to take care of any problems, and God knew he could use a break from the endless writing. Nick grinned and tossed down his pen. “All right, you got me.”

“Cap.” Todd Beaulieu, compact and dark-haired, met them on the stairs, a slip of paper in his hand. “I just found this note by the phone. Looks like you got a call sometime yesterday.”

“Yesterday?”

“I guess the other shift forgot to tell you.” Beaulieu squinted at the paper. “Jeez, O’Hanlan, this writing looks as bad as yours.”

“Hey, I’ve won awards for my handwriting, I’ll have you know,” O’Hanlan protested.

“Probably for cryptography,” Beaulieu shot back.

Nick reached out for the message. “Eq tes tom?” he asked squinting at the scribbles. “Anybody want to guess?”

O’Hanlan considered. “Abusing a cat?”

“Leave your personal life out of this,” Beaulieu told him.

Nick struggled for a moment to make sense of the hasty scrawl. “Looks like someone’s doing something tomorrow. Which means today. I guess we’ll find out eventually.” He shrugged and turned to the stairs. “What did you break this time, O’Hanlan?”

Down on the garage floor, Nick and O’Hanlan threaded their way around the pumper to the ladder truck. The music on the radio segued into a no-nonsense woman’s voice reading the morning news.

“In Dorchester, Councilman Donald Ayre, running for reelection next month, spoke again about his new safety plan for Boston firefighters.”

“We can’t have fire safety in Boston until our firefighters are safe,” Ayre said self-importantly. “That’s my mission, and that’s why I’m looking for reelection.”

O’Hanlan rolled his eyes at the sound bite. “Looks like old Hot Ayre is at it again,” he said, climbing on top of the ladder truck. “Funny, the last time he got yapping about firefighters it was an election year, too.”

“And the time before that, I think,” Nick said, following him. “’Course, he doesn’t talk about how he pushed for department budget cuts once the voting was over, does he?”

“He’s probably shy about his accomplishments,” O’Hanlan guessed. “Besides, if the equipment was good enough for our great-grandfathers, it’s good enough for us, right?”

“Sure. Just ask Jackson.” Nick’s lip curled. “Twenty bucks says that inside of two weeks we’ve got our illustrious councilman in a photo op with some high-tech gizmo the department will buy one of for tests and never use.”