Mr Taken. Danica Winters

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СКАЧАТЬ as much as he loved the animals themselves. Most people might have found the scent of feed, sweat and grime too much, but for a firefighter like him, it was the perfume of life—and it reminded him how lucky he was to have the opportunity to live it. It wasn’t like the smell of ash. He’d read poem after poem that likened the scent of ash to renewal, but it never drew images of a phoenix to his mind; rather, it only reminded him of the feeling of what it was to lose and be destroyed from the inside out.

      He grabbed a steel chain and the keys that hung on the wall just inside the door, and made his way back outside to the tractor parked just under the overhang.

      The tractor started with a chug and a sputter. The old beast fought hard to start, thanks to the cold, but it had been through a lot. He pressed it forward and moved it out of its parking spot by the barn. The vehicle made groans and grumbles that sounded like promises of many more years of service. His parents had done a good job with the place, always setting everything up to last not just their lifetime, but for generations to come. It was hard to imagine that his parents used to have a life before—lives that didn’t revolve around the comings and goings of the ranch, its guests and the foster kids who had passed in and out of their doors.

      They had spent their lives giving everything they had to this place. He could have said the same things about his intention as a firefighter; he undoubtedly would give everything he had to his job, and the lives he would affect, but it wasn’t the same. His job and lifestyle were finite. As soon as his body gave out and he was no longer physically able to do the job, someone new, younger would come in and take his place. In fact, as soon as he walked out of the station’s doors, it would be like he had never really been there at all—likely only the people whose lives he’d touched would have any lasting thoughts of him.

      He blew a warm breath of air onto his chilling fingers as he drove the tractor around the corner and onto the driveway. Maybe he was wrong in thinking that he had nothing in common with the phoenix. Maybe he had simply already risen from the ashes of a firefighter who had served before him, and when he aged out, another would take his place to renew their battalion.

      The thought didn’t upset him—it was an unspoken reality of their lifestyle—but when compared to his parents’ lifestyle he couldn’t help wondering if he had made the wrong choice. In all reality, he had only ever pulled one person out of a burning building, and it had been the town drunk after he had passed out with a cigarette listing from his lips. Most of his calls were accidents on the highway, grass fires and medical emergencies. If he had stayed on the ranch, he could have helped build the place up and worked on creating a legacy for his family for generations to come. As it was, none of his brothers had ever spoken of what would come.

      What would come. Even with the roar of the tractor’s engine, the words echoed within him. If things continued going as they had been doing over the last few months, there wouldn’t be anything left to worry about. Reservations for the upcoming month had been tapering off rapidly. If they didn’t turn things around, by next summer they would be unable to support the overhead it took to keep the ranch up and running.

      He hated being the pessimistic type, so he tried to push aside his concerns. Things were never as bad as they appeared. For him, it always seemed like things had a way of working out. Hopefully the same could be said for the ranch. At least this month they had Yule Night.

      Maybe if Yule Night went especially well, it could lighten some of his parents’ burden. The last thing they needed after the murders was money troubles. It wasn’t his job, but he would do everything in his power to make sure that the ranch would stay afloat—especially if that meant he could save puppies and look every part of a hero to the one woman he wanted to like him.

      Whitney stood up and waved him to bring the tractor closer. She really was incredibly beautiful. She stretched, moving her shoulders back as she pressed her hands against her hips. As he looked at where her hands touched her round curves, he wished those hands could be his. It would be incredible to feel the touch of her skin, to run his fingers down the round arch of her hips and over the strong muscles that adorned her thighs.

      She was so strong. Not just physically, but emotionally, as well. In fact, she had always made a point of being so strong that he barely knew anything about her past. She kept things so close to her chest that he longed to know more, to get her to trust him enough that she would open up. As it was, all he knew about her was that she had originally been from Kentucky—but that was only thanks to the fact that he had managed to catch a quick glimpse of her application on his mother’s desk before she was hired.

      Why was she so closed off? For a moment he wondered if she was hiding from something or someone, or if it was more that she was hiding something from them. No one came to nowhere, Montana, and hid on a ranch unless there was something in their lives, or in their past, that they were running away from.

      Maybe one day, if he was lucky, she would open up to him. Though, just because everything seemed to work out in the end for him, he’d never call himself lucky—and that would be exactly what it would take to make Whitney think of him as anything more than just another source of annoyance.

      “What took you so long?” she asked as he climbed down from the tractor and laid the chains over his shoulder.

      He didn’t know what was worse: the heaviness of the chains that dug into his skin or the disgust that tore through him from her gaze. He hadn’t been gone more than a couple of minutes, yet he understood more than anyone that when there was an emergency, time seemed to slow down. Minutes turned into millennia, and those were the kinds of minutes which had a way of driving a person to madness.

      He smiled, hoping some of the contempt she must have been feeling for him would dissipate. “I guess I could have put the tractor in third gear, but the way I see it, that dog ain’t going nowhere.”

      She shook her head and turned away from him. Yeah, she hated him. She looked back and reached out. “Hand me the chain. We need to get the dog out of here before it gets hypothermic.”

      “Here,” he said, handing her one end of the chain. “Hook this to the tractor’s bucket. I’ll get the guard.”

      She took the chain and did as he instructed while he made his way over to the cattle guard and peered in at the little dog. It looked up at him and whimpered. The sound made his gut ache and he wrapped the chain around the steel so that when he raised the bucket on the machine, it would lift the gate straight up and away from the dog. He’d have to be careful to avoid hurting the animal. Something like this could get a little hairy. One little slip, one weak link in the chain, and everything could go to hell in a handbasket in just a few seconds.

      He secured the chain and made his way back to the tractor. In one smooth, slow motion he raised the tractor’s bucket. The chain clinked and pulled taut, and he motioned to Whitney. “Ready?”

      She gave him a thumbs-up.

      He lifted the bucket higher, and the tractor shifted slightly as it fought to bring up the heavy grate that was frozen to the ground. With a pop of ice and the metallic twang, the grate pried loose from the concrete and the tractor hoisted it into the air. He rolled the machine back a few feet, just to be safe in case the chain broke. No one would get hurt, not on his watch.

      He ran over to the dog and lifted it up from its den of ice. The pup was shivering and panting with fear. He ran his fingers down the animal, trying to reassure the terrified creature.

      Whitney stood beside him and looked at him for a moment and smiled. There was an unexpected warmth in her eyes as she looked at him and then down at the dog. As he sent her a soft smile, she looked away—almost too quickly, as though she was avoiding his gaze. She reached down and opened up the buttons СКАЧАТЬ