Slow Burn (Smoke Jumpers) by Anne Marsh Page B

and thought it over. “Professional?”
    A professional photographer was both better and worse than a random lady with a camera. She might actually know how to do some of those things he’d seen on TV. Maybe she’d blow up the photos, blow up his cover. On the other hand, she could also put him on the magazine cover. He’d done some seriously heroic shit out there, and clearly she’d liked what she’d seen. She’d taken his picture.
    “Yeah.” The other man grabbed a handful of paper napkins and looked around for a spot to sit. “She’s getting paid. Sounded professional enough to me.”
    “Our shot at getting famous, huh?”
    “Sure.” The guy was already beating feet for an open spot at a nearby picnic table. “All she has right now is a bunch of pics of that roadside fire we snuffed yesterday. That’s not much.”
    Fuck him. That fire had done its job, hadn’t it? They’d gotten called out and spent an afternoon actually fighting fire rather than sitting on their asses at base. His paycheck would definitely notice the difference, and he’d gotten the eyeball from the female photographer. So that had been more than enough fire.
    Picking a different direction, Hollis headed off, carting his plate. He hadn’t gotten caught. He’d fucking pulled it off. True, it had been close. Kinda like getting it on right in public, where anyone might walk in on you. He’d done that once. Not with a girl, but almost as good as.
    He’d unzipped and pulled his dick right out in the parking lot behind his old high school. He’d liked revisiting his old stomping grounds, not that he’d ever gotten much action out there in the backseat of his car. The girls had mostly ignored him, and he’d mostly pretended he didn’t care.
    Now that he was fire crew, he was finally getting some action.
    That night, he’d fisted his dick and rubbed one out right there next to his car, standing in the open where anyone could see. The first stroke was awkward, but in a couple of minutes he had his groove, and his hand was going up and down like a piston, and he was harder than he’d ever been. Coming was an added bonus, a little something he got out of his giant fuck-you to all the school admins who’d told him he’d hopped the train to Loserville and didn’t he want to trade in that ticket for something better.
    He was a firefighter.
    A damned good one.
    If he kept it up right, got enough fires under his belt, he’d make that jump team. There wasn’t going to be any holding him back.
     
    As they drove away from the fire camp, Evan filled Faye in about the jump team. She knew he was giving her the pretty version, skimming over the parts that the magazine’s readers wouldn’t want to know. For every jump, for every fire, there were often days and even weeks of downtime. Mike had complained about the boring day-in, day-out at the firehouse, about how a man did more sitting around than he did riding out. It came with the territory, though, and it had never kept him from returning to the firehouse.
    She asked questions, listening to Evan’s answers, her eyes on the dark road ahead as she drove. She could hear the quiet laughter in his voice as he told her about the funny mishaps when one of the jumpers hung up in a tree and had to cut himself free. And what it looked like to clear a mountain and come face-to-face with a wall of smoke. Fire was beautiful, seen through his eyes, until you were on the ground, fighting for every inch. Even then, she supposed, there was a savage beauty to the flames, but no one he knew had time to sit around and write poetry about it. The smoke jumpers did what they had to do.
    “You jump with the same team every summer?”
    “Yeah.” He shifted in his seat, one arm riding the edge of the open window. Summer air filled up the inside of the Corvette. “I do. You met my brothers. Together, we’ve got one of the best smoke-jumping outfits in the north-west. When it works well, you don’t mess with