Olivia howls, clearly sensing that something is wrong, and I "shush" her, humming a lullaby under my breath as I pull up in the driveway in front of the house, trying to calm my own racing heart.
As soon as I open the passenger side door, one of the volunteer firefighters – West Bend, Colorado is not big enough for its own fire department -- flags me down. "Autumn Mayburn?"
"That's me," I say. "This is my place. What's happening?"
"You've got a fire down in the orchard," he says. “It’s contained now.”
Olivia squeals from the back seat of the car. I'm half-listening to the firefighter as I walk around the front of the SUV toward the passenger side to pull Olivia from her car seat, when he comes walking toward me.
I don't know who the hell he is. I've never seen him before. But he takes my breath away, and I’m not just saying that because I’m inhaling a crapload of smoke in the air. I mean that literally. I swear that I stop breathing for a second, pausing for a moment to gape because he looks like he just stepped off the set of a romance movie.
He's walking toward me in jeans and boots, a t-shirt spotted with grime and sweat. The fabric sticks on his skin, outlining his chest muscles so clearly he might as well be not even wearing his shirt. I swear I can see the striations in his abdomen. His face is streaked with gray soot, his chiseled jaw clenched.
Olivia squeals again, and it shakes me out of my momentary trance. I turn to open the door to the backseat, but he reaches me first.
"Hey." He speaks the word angrily, and I turn to face him as I pull open the car door to grab Olivia. The man is close to me, only a few inches away, and when I look in his eyes, electricity rushes through my body even though he hasn't so much as laid a finger on me.
There's something both threatening and sexy in the way he stands near me. I'm not sure if he's trying to intimidate me, or if he wants to cover my mouth with his, and the fact that I can’t tell which sends a shiver up my spine. "Is this your place?"
"Yeah. I'm the owner,” I say, looking into his icy blue eyes framed with thick dark lashes. Shit, he's got to be in his twenties. He's young. Too young.
He points back toward the orchard. "I don't know what the hell kind of operation you're running here," he starts.
I bristle immediately at his tone. "Excuse me?"
He points his finger at me, and I very nearly reach out and smack it away. This guy might be the hottest thing I've ever seen, but he's very clearly the kind of guy who thinks he can get away with anything just because he's gorgeous. "Are you trying to singlehandedly burn down the fucking county, or just get people killed?"
"Who the hell are you?" I ask.
He ignores me, instead continuing with his lecture. "You've got a piece of shit foreman who's fucking drunk on the job, you know that?"
"I don't know anything right now. All I know is that I don't know you. And that you need to quit cussing and back the hell away from me before I slap you."
Olivia howls “mama,” and I pull open the car door all the way, half-hoping I smack him with it. Okay, totally hoping I smack him with the door.
I've never seen this guy before in my life and he's yelling at me in front of my toddler? Anyone who does that is a total dirtbag.
I slide Olivia out of the seat and turn around with her on my hip, only to see him standing there, gaping at me.
"I didn't know you had a...kid," he says.
All I know is that I don't want Olivia around this guy who's clearly an asshole, so I slam the car door closed, shielding her from him as I move toward the other firefighter who’s clearly more reasonable. “It’d be totally fine for you to yell at me if you didn’t have a kid?” I ask. “You just go around screaming at women?”
I don’t bother to wait for an answer. I don’t need some twenty-year-old kid lecturing me about how to run my own damn property. Hearing about my foreman already hits a nerve with me. He's the third foreman I've had, and I thought I smelled alcohol on his breath the other day, but I wrote it off as just my own paranoia. I don't even know how much of the orchard was destroyed or...holy shit...if anyone got hurt.
"Ma'am," the firefighter I spoke with before greets me.
"No one was -- I mean, nothing happened -- No one got hurt, right?" I ask. Olivia kicks at me, hanging over my arm and trying to get down. "Hang on a second, baby. There's too much going on out here for you to be running around."
The firefighter shakes his head. "Your foreman could have been, though. Ambulance brought him down to the hospital, treated him for smoke inhalation."
"What happened?"
"Foreman passed out. Looks like a lit cigarette started the fire."
"Oh my God," I say.