Hot Intent (Hqn) by Cindy Dees Page A

far from the crest now. Another fifteen minutes of carefully picking their way forward, and they topped the low rise.
    The ocean and a blond beach stretched away in front of them. And praise the Lord, this side of the ridge was bare of vegetation until the margin of the beach below. They made their way down the hillside relatively quickly with only sharp stones and treacherous slides of gravel to avoid.
    But then they got to a literal wall of destroyed scrub trees, bushes and random vegetative debris. It was easily eight feet tall and looked like a loofah sponge. “How on earth are we supposed to get through this?” she demanded. “Even if we had a machete, it would take hours to hack through all that.”
    “That, grasshopper, is why man conquered fire,” Alex answered.
    “Isn’t it too wet to burn?” she asked dubiously.
    “Only one way to find out,” he answered absently as he commenced laying a fire at the base of the pile. The wind was still brisk in the lee of the hurricane and the fledgling flame blew out twice before it finally caught and held.
    In seconds, though, it flared from the size of her hand to waist high, and from there to well over her head. Apparently, enough of the material had been dead long enough that a single day in the sun and wind, posthurricane, had dried it out. The pile went up in a firestorm that swept down the beach at shocking speed. No fire department on earth could put that out. She and Alex scrambled back from the intense heat as the debris burned with a roar of sound.
    “My God! What if there are houses down the beach?” she cried.
    “No house survived two-hundred-mile-per-hour winds for fourteen hours. And if one did, it was wrecked, anyway. A stone structure might survive the hurricane, but it won’t burn.” Alex shrugged, pragmatic. “Burning this stuff off is how a cleanup crew will get rid of it, anyway.”
    She watched the fire rip down the beach in front of the stiff wind with deep misgivings. The good news was the wind was headed out toward the ocean. If they were lucky, they hadn’t just set the entire island on fire. And the salt factory was on the other side of the island, well upwind of this conflagration. Still, the ease with which Alex had taken radical action without concern for peripheral damage sent up warning flags in her head.
    The debris burned hard for maybe thirty minutes. Where there were decent-size tree trunks and brush, the fire continued to burn. But here and there, where the pile had been mostly small brush and dead vegetation, the fire started to blow out.
    Katie spied a small shape well out on the water. “Is that a boat?”
    Alex pulled out binoculars to have a look. “That’s our ride,” he announced. “Time to head down to the water. Keep your feet moving and your shoes won’t burn as we cross over the embers.”
    She stared at the remnants of the fire in front of her, maybe fifteen feet wide. Whoa, whoa, whoa. “I don’t do the walking-across-beds-of-coals thing, Alex.”
    “Walk lightly and quickly on your entire foot. Don’t run. You’ll be fine.”
    She scowled ferociously at him, but he only shrugged back. “Follow me.”
    This was how life was always going to be with him, wasn’t it? He would blithely lead her into danger, and she’d follow along like a lamb for the slaughter. She sighed and walked fast across the coals, distributing her weight across her entire foot with each step.
    Vague heat registered around her, but before she knew it, she was on the other side of the glowing ember field. Her heart was racing like a runaway horse, and one spot on her leather hiking boots was smoldering a bit, but otherwise, she was intact. That hadn’t been so bad, after all, darn it. She hated it when he was right.
    A dark-skinned man angled a crappy little fishing boat toward them. It barely looked seaworthy and was in desperate need of a barnacle scraping and paint job. He stopped about a hundred feet shy of shore and gestured for