Excerpt of A Cold Creek Reunion by RaeAnne Thayne

He loved these guys like his own brothers, but sometimes
Taft Bowman wanted to take a fire hose to his whole blasted
volunteer fire department.

This was their second swift-water rescue training in a
month—not to mention that he had been holding these
regularly since he became battalion chief five years
earlier—and they still struggled to toss a throw bag
anywhere close to one of the three "victims"
floating down Cold Creek in wet suits and helmets.

"You've got to keep in mind the flow of the water
and toss it downstream enough that they ride the current to
the rope," he instructed for about the six-hundredth
time. One by one, the floaters—in reality, other
volunteer firefighters on his thirty-person
crew—stopped at the catch line strung across the creek
and began working their way hand over hand to the bank.

Fortunately, even though the waters were plenty frigid this
time of year, they were about a month away from the real
intensity of spring runoff, which was why he was training
his firefighters for water rescues now.

With its twists and turns and spectacular surroundings on
the west slope of the Tetons, Cold Creek had started gaining
popularity with kayakers. He enjoyed floating the river
himself. But between the sometimes-inexperienced outdoor-fun
seekers and the occasional Pine Gulch citizen who strayed
too close to the edge of the fast-moving water, his
department was called out on at least a handful of rescues
each season and he wanted them to be ready.

"Okay, let's try it one more time. Terry, Charlie,
Bates, you three take turns with the throw bag. Luke, Cody,
Tom, stagger your jumps by about five minutes this time
around to give us enough time on this end to rescue whoever
is ahead of you."

He set the team in position and watched upstream as Luke
Orosco, his second in command, took a running leap into the
water, angling his body feetfirst into the current.
"Okay, Terry. He's coming. Are you ready? Time it
just right. One, two, three. Now!"

This time, the rope sailed into the water just downstream of
the diver and Taft grinned. "That's it, that's
it. Perfect. Now instruct him to attach the rope."

For once, the rescue went smoothly. He was watching for Cody
Shepherd to jump in when the radio clipped to his belt
suddenly crackled with static.

"Chief Bowman, copy."

The dispatcher sounded unusually flustered and Taft's
instincts borne of fifteen years of firefighting and
paramedic work instantly kicked in. "Yeah, I copy.
What's up, Kelly?"

"I've got a report of a small structure fire at the
inn, three hundred twenty Cold Creek Road."

He stared as the second rescue went off without a hitch.
"Come again?" he couldn't help asking,
adrenaline pulsing through him. Structure fires were a
rarity in the quiet town of Pine Gulch. Really a rarity. The
last time had been a creosote chimney fire four months ago
that a single ladder-truck unit had put out in about five
minutes.

"Yes, sir. The hotel is evacuating at this time."

He muttered an oath. Half his crew was currently in wet
suits, but at least they were only a few hundred yards away
from the station house, with the engines and the turnout gear.

"Shut it down," he roared through his megaphone.
"We've got a structure fire at the Cold Creek Inn.
Grab your gear. This is not a drill."

To their credit, his crew immediately caught the gravity of
the situation. The last floater was quickly grabbed out of
the water and everybody else rushed to the new fire station
the town had finally voted to bond for two years earlier.

Less than four minutes later—still too long in his book
but not bad for volunteers—he had a full crew headed
toward the Cold Creek Inn on a ladder truck and more trained
volunteers pouring in to hurriedly don their turnout gear.

The inn, a rambling wood structure with two single-story
wings leading off a main two-story building, was on the edge
of Pine Gulch's small downtown, about a mile away from
the station. He quickly assessed the situation as they
approached. He couldn't see flames yet, but he did see a
thin plume of black smoke coming from a window on the far
end of the building's east wing.

He noted a few guests milling around on the lawn and had
just an instant to feel a pang of sympathy for the owner.
Poor Mrs. Pendleton had enough trouble finding guests for
her gracefully historic but undeniably run-down inn.

A fire and forced evacuation probably wouldn't do much
to increase the appeal of the place.

"Luke, you take Pete and make sure everybody's out.
Shep, come with me for the assessment. You all know the
drill."

He and Cody Shepherd, a young guy in the last stages of his
fire and paramedic training, headed into the door closest to
where he had seen the smoke.

Somebody had already been in here with a fire extinguisher,
he saw. The fire was mostly out but the charred curtains
were still smoking, sending out that inky-black plume.

The room looked to be under renovation. It didn't have a
bed and the carpet had been pulled up. Everything was wet
and he realized the ancient sprinkler system must have come
on and finished the job the fire extinguisher had started.

"Is that it?" Shep asked with a disgruntled look.

"Sorry, should have let you have the honors." He
held the fire extinguisher out to the trainee. "Want a
turn?"

Shep snorted but grabbed the fire extinguisher and sprayed
another layer of completely unnecessary foam on the curtains.

"Not much excitement—but at least nobody was hurt.
It's a wonder this place didn't go up years ago.
We'll have to get the curtains out of here and have
Engine Twenty come inside and check for hot spots."

He called in over his radio that the fire had been contained
to one room and ordered in the team whose specialty was
making sure the flames hadn't traveled inside the walls
to silently spread to other rooms.

When he walked back outside, Luke headed over to him.
"Not much going on, huh? Guess some of us should have
stayed in the water."

"We'll do more swift-water work next week during
training," he said. "Everybody else but Engine
Twenty can go back to the station."

As he spoke to Luke, he spotted Jan Pendleton standing some
distance away from the building. Even from here, he could
see the distress on her plump, wrinkled features. She was
holding a little dark-haired girl in her arms, probably a
traumatized guest. Poor thing.

A younger woman stood beside her and from this distance he
had only a strange impression, as if she was somehow
standing on an island of calm amid the chaos of the scene,
the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles, shouts
between his crew members, the excited buzz of the crowd.

And then the woman turned and he just about tripped over a
snaking fire hose somebody shouldn't have left there. Laura.

He froze and for the first time in fifteen years as a
firefighter, he forgot about the incident, his mission, just
what the hell he was doing here.

Laura.

Ten years. He hadn't seen her in all that time, since
the week before their wedding when she had given him back
his ring and left town. Not just town. She had left the
whole damn country, as if she couldn't run far enough to
get away from him.

Some part of him desperately wanted to think he had made
some kind of mistake. It couldn't be her. That was just
some other slender woman with a long sweep of honey-blond
hair and big blue, unforgettable eyes. But no, it was
definitely Laura, standing next to her mother. Sweet and lovely.

Not his.

"Chief, we're not finding any hot spots." Luke
approached him. Just like somebody turned back up the volume
on his flat-screen, he jerked away from memories of pain and
loss and aching regret.

"You're certain?"

"So far. The sprinkler system took a while to kick in
and somebody with a fire extinguisher took care of the rest.
Tom and Nate are still checking the integrity of the
internal walls."

"Good. That's good. Excellent work."

His assistant chief gave him a wary look. "You okay,
Chief? You look upset."

He huffed out a breath. "It's a fire, Luke. It could
have been potentially disastrous. With the ancient wiring in
this old building, it's a wonder the whole thing
didn't go up."

"I was thinking the same thing," Luke said.

He was going to have to go over there and talk to Mrs.
Pendleton—and by default, Laura. He didn't want to.
He wanted to stand here and pretend he hadn't seen her.
But he was the fire chief. He couldn't hide out just
because he had a painful history with the daughter of the
property owner.

Sometimes he hated his job.

He made his way toward the women, grimly aware of his heart
pounding in his chest as if he had been the one diving into
Cold Creek for training.

Laura stiffened as he approached but she didn't meet his
gaze. Her mother looked at him out of wide, frightened eyes
and her arms tightened around the girl in her arms.

Despite everything, his most important job was calming her
fears. "Mrs. Pendleton, you'll be happy to know the
fire is under control."

"Of course it's under control." Laura finally
faced him, her lovely features cool and impassive. "It
was under control before your trucks ever showed up—ten
minutes after we called the fire in, by the way."

Despite all the things he might have wanted to say to her,
he had to first bristle at any implication that their
response time might be less than adequate. "Seven, by my
calculations. Would have been half that except we were in
the middle of water rescue training when the call from
dispatch came in."

"I guess you would have been ready, then, if any of our
guests had decided to jump into Cold Creek to avoid the
flames."

Funny, he didn't remember her being this tart when they
had been engaged. He remembered sweetness and joy and light.
Until he had destroyed all that.

"Chief Bowman, when will we be able to allow our guests
to return to their rooms?" Jan Pendleton spoke up, her
voice wobbling a little. The little girl in her
arms—who shared Laura's eye color, he realized now,
along with the distinctive features of someone born with
Down syndrome—patted her cheek.

"Gram, don't cry."

Jan visibly collected herself and gave the girl a tired smile.

"They can return to get their belongings as long as
they're not staying in the rooms adjacent to where the
fire started. I'll have my guys stick around about an
hour or so to keep an eye on some hot spots." He paused,
wishing he didn't have to be the bearer of this
particular bad news. "I'm going to leave the final
decision up to you about your guests staying here overnight,
but to be honest, I'm not sure it's completely safe
for guests to stay here tonight. No matter how careful we
are, sometimes embers can flare up again hours later."

"We have a dozen guests right now." Laura looked at him directly and he was almost sure he saw a hint of hostility there. Annoyance crawled under his skin. She dumped him, a week before their wedding. If anybody here had the right to be hostile, he ought to be the first one in line. "What are we supposed to do with them?"

Their past didn't matter right now, not when people in
his town needed his help. "We can talk to the Red Cross
about setting up a shelter, or we can check with some of the
other lodgings in town, maybe the Cavazos' guest cabins,
and see if they might have room to take a few."

Mrs. Pendleton closed her eyes. "This is a disaster."

"But a fixable one, Mom. We'll figure something
out." She squeezed her mother's arm.

"Any idea what might have started the fire?" He had
to ask.

Laura frowned and something that looked oddly like guilt shifted across her lovely features. "Not the what exactly, but most likely the who.''''

"Oh?"

"Alexandro Santiago. Come here, young man."

He followed her gaze and for the first time, he noticed a
young dark-haired boy of about six or seven sitting on the
curb, watching the activity at the scene with a sort of avid
fascination in his huge dark brown eyes. The boy didn't
have her blond, blue-eyed coloring, but he shared her wide,
mobile mouth, slender nose and high cheekbones, and was
undoubtedly her child.

The kid didn't budge from the curb for a long, drawn-out
moment, but he finally rose slowly to his feet and headed
toward them as if he were on his way to bury his dog in the
backyard.

"Alex, tell the fireman what started the fire."

The boy shifted his stance, avoiding the gazes of both his
mother and Taft. "Do I have to?"

"Yes," Laura said sternly.

The kid fidgeted a little more and finally sighed.

"Okay. I found a lighter in one of the empty rooms. The ones being fixed up." He spoke with a very slight, barely discernible accent. "I never saw one before and I only wanted to see how it worked. I didn't mean to start a fire, es la verdad. But the curtains caught fire and I yelled and then mi madre came in with the fire extinguisher."

Under other circumstances he might have been amused at the
no-nonsense way the kid told the story and how he
manipulated events to make it seem as if everything had just
sort of happened without any direct involvement on his part.

But this could have been a potentially serious situation, a
crumbling old fire hazard like the inn.

He hated to come off hard-nosed and mean, but he had to make
the kid understand the gravity. Education was a huge part of
his job and a responsibility he took very seriously.
"That was a very dangerous thing to do. People could
have been seriously hurt. If your mother hadn't been
able to get to the room fast enough with the fire
extinguisher, the flames could have spread from room to room
and burned down the whole hotel and everything in it."

To his credit, the boy met his gaze. Embarrassment and shame
warred on his features. "I know. It was stupid. I'm
really, really sorry."

"The worst part of it is, I have told you again and
again not to play with matches or lighters or anything else
that can cause a fire. We've talked about the
dangers." Laura glowered at her son, who squirmed.

"I just wanted to see how it worked," he said, his
voice small.