Flame (Firefighters of Montana Book 5) by Victoria Purman Read Free Book Online

“You think it’ll be okay?”
    “Of course I do, honey.”
    Sarah smiled nervously and nodded. “It’s probably time she… okay.”
    Dex let out a deep breath. This was a huge step for Sarah and Mitch and a huge leap for him, too. He hadn’t taken Lila out since the accident. “I’ll check my roster and let you know when my next free Saturday is. In the meantime, you can get her used to the idea,” Dex told Mitch.
    “Lila won’t need convincing.”
    Dex grinned. “I was talking about your wife.”
    Mitch and Sarah shared a knowing smile.
    “It could be a few weeks. We’ve got Russ Edwards’s commemoration ceremony next Saturday and I’ll let you know when I have a Saturday free.”
    And then the three of them sat in silence, each thinking of the night of Lila’s accident. Each pondering what the future would be like for their little girl.

Chapter Five
    T he next Saturday, the day of the commemoration service for Captain Russ Edwards at the Glacier Creek service station, Cady packed up the last of the food into boxes, ready for loading into her van. She checked her watch. Jacqui and Vin were due any minute to pick up this final load and deliver it to the station. She’d been baking all morning and still needed to shower and change, to wake herself up a little more.
    She’d had a restless night, unable to sleep, and the vivid dreams she’d fallen into every time she closed her eyes make her even more tightly wound in the morning. Every dream had featured Dex McCoy. Ever since the day he’d swung by Cady’s Cakes to pick up the trail bars for the smokejumpers, she’d dreamt she was having dirty sex with Dex.
    She dreamt a lot. Her favourite was the one in which she was flying high over Glacier Creek, gliding on the wind right up past the timber line up to the tops of the mountains, and she would always land in a clearing with a soft touch of her feet on the grass and her mom and Grandma were there and they would sip hot coffee from a thermos and eat cupcakes and look up at the sky and Cady would wake in the morning with a sense of peace and comfort.
    There was nothing comforting about the dreams she’d been having about Dex. They were hot and confusing. There was sex with Dex in the fire station, both naked and covered by a parachute. In the next one, they were in the middle of the forest on a picnic rug, and her ecstatic screams scared the birds out of the treetops. Another time, they were in his truck. And in the most recent one, they were right here in Cady’s Cakes, out back in the kitchen, and there might have been chocolate frosting involved.
    The result of all this was, she had felt tense and unfulfilled and as useless as a half-risen sponge all week.
    Today, Cady couldn’t think about being naked with Dex McCoy. She had put a sign up on the previous Monday, advising her customers the shop would be closing up early on Saturday. She didn’t have to give them a reason. Everyone knew why and there hadn’t been one complaint. The whole town had been in shock a year before when Captain Edwards had died. It had seemed as if time stood still that day. Cady remembered it so clearly. She’d just returned to Glacier Creek from California and had been painting inside the newly-leased shop that was soon to become Cady’s Cakes. When the news spread, the town stopped. People pulled over on the main street, trying to absorb the news, not trusting themselves to drive and take it all in at the same time. Phones stopped ringing. A hush blanketed every town around Flathead Lake. The news spread as fast as one of the wildfires Russ had died trying to extinguish. It brought home all too clearly the risks the smokejumpers took to protect people and property and the mountains. She didn’t have to speak to that many people in Glacier Creek to hear stories of bad fires, properties and stock destroyed, whipping winds and flames and choking smoke. Everyone, at one time or another, had looked up into that big