“Sonofabitch,” Forrest mumbled to no one in particular, considering he was riding alone in his car. There was no one to see him smile, but he did that, too. It had to be divine providence that the woman who had woken up in his arms for the very first time that morning—the one who he couldn’t get off of his mind—should randomly and suddenly appear to him during the course of his shift.
By then he could spot Sierra's truck at fifty feet, even though it was identical to the trucks of the other rangers. The telltale “036” painted on the back of the tailgate was all he needed to know to tell him the truck was hers. He sped up and turned on the flashing lights on the top of his own truck, thinking to have a little fun.
The sex appeal in the notion of pulling Sierra over wasn’t lost on him. He wanted to do a lot more than flag her down. He would resist the urge to pull out the blanket he always kept in the back of his own truck and put it down in the bed of her truck, strip them both naked and ravage her again in the afternoon sun. But kissing her … Now that was something Forrest could definitely do. Even if she was busy on her shift, she could take a minute for this.
She pulled over at the flashing lights and Forrest jumped out, striding toward her car quickly. Knowing Sierra, she’d be looking through the side mirror to see him coming. He wondered whether she would go full role-play with him. If she did, that would just be more proof they were at the beginning of what would be a very fun relationship.
“You know how fast you were going back there, ma’am?” he asked in his best cop voice. She hadn’t bothered to stay in the car. She’d gotten out and leaned her hip against her truck, where she stood smiling up at him.
“You gonna give me a ticket?” she asked.
“No. But I do take bribes.” When he reached her, he circled his arms around her waist. “You promise not to do it again and I’ll let you off with a kiss.”
Reaching up toward her temple, he pushed her sunglasses off of her eyes until they sat on top of her head. But the look in her eyes was different than he’d expected—a mixture of exhilaration, and recollection and sadness.
Whatever it was that troubled her, it didn’t stop her from leaning into his kiss. A second before their lips touched, he wondered whether she was having doubts. Sleeping with someone was something he didn’t take lightly. But he could feel it—last night had meant something to both of them.
Don’t you feel how right this is?
Forrest poured his every emotion into that kiss, wanting her to know it had certainly not been some one-night stand, or the start of some meaningless fling to him or anything else she might be thinking. Not now, when they were on shift, but soon, Forrest would cop to what needed to be said. He was absolutely, indisputably falling in love with her.
He smiled into her lips as she hummed into the kiss. It caused him to press his body against hers. He didn’t exactly mean to, but when he finally came up for air, their position had changed—his fingers were in her hair and he’d flattened her against the truck.
“God, you’re good at that,” he breathed, unable to control his filter and uncaring that he could not. He bent his head to breathe her in and nipped at her neck.
“Forrest,” she nearly panted. It didn’t help his situation. His tongue was hungry to taste her again and he was rock hard.
“Forrest,” she said again. “We have to talk.”
Fuck.
It took him effort to process her words—which didn’t sound good—to step away and push sex out of his brain. He would’ve bet money she was about to spout off some reason why they weren’t perfect for one another. Forrest cracked his mental knuckles and prepared to argue otherwise.
“All right …” he said disarmingly. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“We’ve got a break in the case. I’m just coming from talking to someone who saw something.”
A rush of relief that she didn’t want them to stop what they were doing paired with exhilaration at the news. “Holy hell. We got a break in the case?”
Sierra nodded and bit her lip, seeming suspiciously unhappy for a woman who he’d seen talk about little else for a good three weeks.
“Well, are you gonna tell me what you found out?”
“Yes.” She frowned. “I’ll tell you. But …” She sighed. “You’re not gonna like all that you find out.”
“So rip off the Band-Aid,” he said as gently as possible, though something in the way she was setting this up felt wrong. And Forrest didn’t want a lot of preamble. He wanted her to spit it out.
“I talked to someone today who says he knows who’s starting the fires. He gave me the names of two Wraiths. He says he ran into them in the forest a couple of times. He says they’ve been dealing magic mushrooms that they’ve been foraging in the park. That after they harvest the mushrooms, they burn the patches up.”
Forrest took a step back into the deserted road, the quiet of the forest stretching between them for a long moment. Questions hit him, one after the other. Who was this someone Sierra had talked to? How did they know so much about the Wraiths? And why would any Wraith make a random someone who wasn’t involved privy to that kind of information?
“Who is this person?”
Sierra hesitated to answer. Now Forrest’s hackles were fully up. Something was very wrong.
“Jake Stapleton,” Sierra reported in a voice that seemed artificially light.
“I didn’t know he was back in town. Where’d you run into him? Down at the Piggly Wiggly or something?”
Sierra did something with her hands that straddled the line between wringing them and fidgeting her fingers. She shook her head. “I saw him in the park.”
Forrest’s initial theory—of her running into him in town—was a weak one to begin with. It wasn’t as if she and Jake would stop each other in the produce section and get to chatting. Frankly, Forrest was surprised that Sierra even knew who Jake was, seeing as how she was so new to town.
“That explains how he knew something about the Wraiths,” Forrest mused. “He is a Wraith.”
“No.” Sierra shook her head. “He’s not. He took his chance to get out of the Wraiths. That’s why he left town.”
“Sounds like he didn’t really leave if you ran into him in the park …” Forrest baited, knowing instinctively that she knew more, and that—whatever it was she knew—needed drawing out to say.
“I didn’t just run into him, Forrest,” she admitted in a way that told him she was finally about to come clean. “I’ve been talking to him for weeks. He’s been living here in the park.”
Forrest took another step back at the same time he was stolen of breath. An instant sense of betrayal set in, though—as he tried to process it—he couldn’t pinpoint which part of this was worse. No one “lived” in the park. Campers camped and they needed permits to do it. If he’d been there for weeks, he’d been there illegally, as a squatter.
“Are you kidding me, Sierra?” When he spoke again, all calm was gone from his voice and its volume was louder than he wanted it to be. “Why would you not tell me Jake Stapleton was living in the park?”
She came back in a heated whisper. “Oh, I don’t know—maybe because it’s illegal?”
“You know goddamned well that someone who fits our profile is relevant to this investigation. Jake Stapleton is the definition of a troubled youth.”
But Sierra came back with her own fire. “Jake Stapleton was born into a bad situation. He can’t help that he was brought up in the Wraiths. And it’s to his credit that he took his chance to get out.”
“Jake Stapleton’s got a rap sheet, Sierra, which has nothing to do with what he was born into and who brought him up.”
Sierra blinked and shot him a disbelieving look. “Are you serious right now? You’re trying to tell me that growing up in an environment like that didn’t predispose him to trouble with the law?”
But Forrest doubled down. “Don’t make this about something that it’s not. I’m sure there’s a reason why he is the way he is. But the ‘why’ of things doesn’t change the ‘what.’ Jake Stapleton’s been in trouble with the law. He fits the profile and he’s living in the park. That makes him a suspect.”
Sierra stepped toward Forrest and got in his space, only this time it didn’t turn him on. For the first time, he looked down at her angry, lovely face and didn’t know who she was.
“Jake Stapleton,” she began again with emphasis, “is a kid who has always had the odds stacked against him. Has it ever occurred to you that any trouble he’s been in hasn’t been because he was the one who did it—he was just the one who got blamed? Do you think Jake Stapleton’s ever gotten the benefit of the doubt when it was his word against someone else’s, when the someone else was thought of as an upstanding member of the community?”
“That’s not what this is about,” Forrest ground out through clenched teeth.
“Then what is it about, Forrest? Because I thought it was about figuring out who set those fires. I just served up a damned good lead from a kid who didn’t have to tell me anything, and you’re so busy vilifying an eighteen-year-old you don’t even want to pursue it.”
“Oh, I’ll pursue it.” Forrest didn’t back down. “And don’t think I don’t want to know all about those Wraiths he said did it. But I’ve got a few questions to ask Jake, myself. And I still haven’t heard any good answers from you.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means you lied to me,” he practically roared. “Not just Fire Marshal Winters, your partner in the investigation. You lied to me, Forrest Winters, the man who thought you trusted him, and who cares more about you than he should.”
“There’s a difference between lying and waiting until the right time. Did you think the second we started working together on the investigation, I would bare my soul?”
“No, not your soul. Just things I needed to know. I thought we were together in this, Sierra. You let me think we were a team. I thought—”
But Forrest cut himself off, unable to finish the thought out loud.
I thought you’d finally let me in.
It hurt to even think it.
“I guess I thought wrong.”