Authors: Ruby Laska
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Contemporary, #Romance, #firefighter
Black Heat
Please enjoy this excerpt of Black Flame
BLACK HEAT
THE BOOMTOWN BOYS
RUBY LASKA
Copyright © 2013 by Ruby Laska.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Black Heat / Ruby Laska. -- 1st ed.
ISBN 978-1-940501-08-6
CHAPTER ONE
If only there weren't spiders.
The afternoon light was fading fast, which was a problem because Roan hadn't brought a flashlight. But it was also a blessing, because in the shadowy corners of what had once been the dining room, it was too dark to see the webs that she was convinced were there—and the big, fat, hairy poisonous spiders just waiting to crawl up her legs, down her arms, into her shirt.
Roan had been terrified of spiders for nearly all of her twenty-four years. Maybe only children were more prone to phobias, because they didn't have siblings to tease them mercilessly about their fears.
Roan didn't have any brothers or sisters, but she once had a mother who never teased her, and never acted like it was silly to be afraid of a creature that was a thousand times smaller than she was. Whenever a spider found its way into their house, her mom would fetch a water glass and a piece of cardboard and gently coax the spider into the glass, then cover it with the cardboard and she and Roan would take it outside, far away from the house, and release it into the wild so it could go and find its spider family.
"That spider deserves to live a happy life just like we do," her mom would say, and then she'd hold Roan's hand and they'd walk back to the house together, picking flowers in the summer and catching snowflakes with their tongues in the winter. At least, that was the way Roan remembered it, but memories of her mother had grown hazy after all these years.
This had once been the prettiest house in Conway, North Dakota. It had been white, with green shutters and scalloped shingles and a white railing all around the porch. From the front of the house you could see the road that led into town and her mother's flower garden and the mailbox with the red flag that Roan was allowed to put up on days they had a letter to mail. From the side porch you could see the barn and the fields and the cattle grazing and, best of all, the bunkhouse where all the hands lived. When Roan grew up she planned to be a cowgirl herself, and she would take care of the cows who were sick, and the baby calves, and maybe even learn how to be a veterinarian in her spare time.
Roan sighed, dragging a stick along the floorboards, tapping the wood and listening for a hollow echo. This whole idea had been stupid. She would have to come back with a flashlight and a better plan for figuring out where the secret hiding spot was. All she knew for sure was that it was somewhere on the first floor—and even that was subject to the vagaries of her childhood memories, which probably weren't all that reliable.
Roan paused to wipe her hands on her jeans. There was a thick layer of dust everywhere, even though the county had nailed plywood over the windows after the fire. How long had it been? Four...almost five years now. Roan had moved out years before, but her father and Evil Mimi had lived in the house until his death. The fire had destroyed the home only two months after his heart attack. Everyone thought Mimi would have the place torn down and rebuilt, but instead she moved to town and left the barn and the bunkhouse to fall into ruin alongside the shell of the house that had been in the Brackens family for generations.
Roan swore she would never return. And she never would have, if she hadn't been desperate. Besides, she wasn't there for herself: she was there for Angel.
A sound outside made her freeze, her heart pounding in her chest. It was a footfall on the old porch. Then another one. Whoever was out there was moving slowly, which was smart, since it would be all too easy to put a foot through the rotting porch floor. Roan had broken a board herself that way.
She looked toward the arched passage from the dining room to the hall leading to the kitchen. The fire had destroyed most of the second floor but, miraculously, the center of the first floor was mostly unscathed. There, on the cabbage rose wallpaper, were the outlines of the paintings that had once hung there—paintings Mimi had sold after Roan's father's death. There was the door to the kitchen. And there—in the direction of the footsteps—was the front door.
Who would be out here snooping around? One of the oil men, no doubt. Half a dozen of them had moved into the bunkhouse last summer when Mimi figured out she could charge a fortune in rent, now that the oil boom had made lodging so scarce in town. Roan didn't know anything about the tenants, but she knew a fair bit about oil men, since she had waited on them at the Bluebird Cafe six days a week before she got the job at Walt's bike shop. Most of them were okay. Some weren't. They could put away a lot of food after a twelve-hour shift, and they tipped especially well on payday, and that's all Roan figured she needed to know.
"Hey," a male voice called. "I know you're in there."
Roan crept to the interior wall of the dining room, stepping as lightly as she could and pressing herself against the plaster. She edged cautiously toward the hallway, praying that the back door hadn't been nailed shut—and guessing that it had. She'd had to pry the nails out of the front door with the claw hammer that was in her backpack, and cut the padlock with the bolt cutters she'd borrowed from Walt’s tool chest. There was no way she'd be able to escape out the back without making a lot of noise.
And she was a trespasser here.
"I'm coming in," the man called. The door swung open. A heavy boot crunched on the broken glass littering the front hall. A beam of sunlight momentarily blinded Roan, and all she could make out was the figure of a man standing in the doorway of the house that she'd lived in until she was eighteen years old.
Panic made her run. She burst away from the wall like she was coming out of the blocks at that long-ago state track championship, her lungs roaring with her breath and her fists and legs pumping hard. She bolted past the man, shoving him against the wall with her shoulder and barely breaking her stride, down the steps across the snowy yard and heading for the woods, before she registered what she'd seen in the split second before she burst out the front door:
The man had a gun, and it had been pointed at her.
#
It had been a girl—and he could have killed her.
Calvin Dixon stood paralyzed in the crumbling entry of the old farmhouse, his hands shaking. He'd returned his gun to its holster, where it damn sure wasn't at risk of going off and hurting anyone. He wouldn't even have been carrying the thing, except he'd been at the range with Zane, who had wanted Cal to come along and check his stance in advance of deer hunting season.
In less than a month Cal would be in uniform, carrying a department-issued Sig Sauer instead of his father's old Colt Double Eagle, on a regulation duty belt next to a pair of cuffs and a flashlight.
But for now he was still a civilian, and drawing a gun on an unarmed girl who was doing nothing more than trespassing—in a house that didn't even belong to him—had to count as one of the stupidest moves of his life. And that was saying something, because Cal was the king of the stupid moves.
Or had been, at any rate. Back when he was a kid. Back when he didn't know any better. But what was his excuse now?
"Damn it," he muttered, kicking a loose board along the base of the porch. It splintered off and skittered across the dead, matted weeds. The gun was legally registered to him. He had his North Dakota concealed carry permit. And he hadn't fired; hadn't even pointed the damn thing at the girl. Who he didn't even know was a girl, or he wouldn't have reached for it in the first place.
But with the series of break-ins around town, a girl was the last thing Cal was expecting. He listened to the police scanner whenever he was working out or doing chores, and he was now intimately familiar with the North Dakota radio codes and signals from studying for the test. So he knew that they still hadn't caught the three guys who'd been stealing copper and fixtures from abandoned buildings, and that they were armed and had shot at a neighbor who chased them.
Cal was just lucky no one had seen him pull a gun on the intruder and reported it. If this job fell through, Cal wasn't sure what he was going to do. Get a job on the rigs, he supposed, like Chase and Zane and Jimmy. It was honest work and they were happy with it, so maybe he could learn to be happy with it, too. Hell, the money was great—and he was quickly going through his savings. It wouldn't be the end of the world.
No: it would only be the end of his dream.
Cal cursed again, more quietly this time, and went to retrieve the broken piece of trim. Eventually Matthew and the rest of them might get around to fixing the house up, at least so that it wasn't a safety hazard.
While he was here, he supposed he might as well check the place out. As far as Cal knew, all the windows and doors had been sealed. Their landlady, Mimi Brackens, had assured them as much when they first moved into the bunkhouse next door.
"Just stay away from it," she'd suggested, her mouth set in a thin line. "I know it's an eyesore, but I haven't made up my mind yet whether I'm going to renovate."
Cal examined the door in the fading light of late afternoon. There was the problem: a few feet away, on the scratched hardwood floor of the parlor, lay the padlock that had been used to seal the front door. It had been cut clean through.
Cal picked it up to examine it. The metal was thin enough to be cut with a bolt cutter; hardly a deterrent against anyone determined to enter. The plywood nailed over the windows offered even less protection, since it could be removed with a simple crowbar.
Cal guessed that most would-be intruders wouldn't bother with the house because it was empty and damaged by fire. There were no furnishings to steal, and the fixtures had been damaged by smoke and flames. Sure, kids might be inclined to use the structure to get high or drink or have sex, but those kids would take one look at the vehicles parked a few hundred feet away next to the bunkhouse, and wisely conclude that there were better places to party, where they didn't invite trouble from five full-grown men and one woman trucker.
He slipped the padlock in his pocket and walked slowly through the parlor into the living room. He'd never been inside the house before. All he knew about it was that it had been built in the 1920s by the grandfather of the last owner of the ranch, Mimi's husband, who had passed away five years ago. The Brackens family once owned hundreds of acres, but all that was left was a few dozen acres, the bunkhouse, the barn and the burned main house.
