Backburn

BACKBURN (The Sapphire Crew, Book 1)

Sadie Quinn survived the burnover that killed her captain. Ray Delgado counted his crew past him on a Helena flank road and went back in for a seventh man who was already safe, and two seasons later Sadie is still the one left standing in the ash, doing the arithmetic. Now she has talked her way onto the Sapphire Hotshots, the best handcrew in Montana's Bitterroot, and she means to earn her place on the line and never miscount a fire again.

Superintendent Wyatt Kane is the man she has to convince: third generation on the crew, controlled, exact, impossible to read. And from her first week she keeps seeing things that do not add up. A sawyer's stitched cut sealed shut overnight. A green fir trunk one man drags clear of a trail like a chair. A grizzly's track pressed fresh into an ash bed her crew raked flat at noon. The Sapphires heal too fast, hear too much, and carry what no human crew should be able to carry, and the reason is a hundred and forty years older than the crew itself.

Then a rescue on the Antler Complex leaves a story no report can hold, and Sadie signs her name under the version that fits in one anyway. She protects them in ink, at cost, unasked, before anyone has told her a single true thing.

So Wyatt Kane does what his family has done only a handful of times in a century and a half. He is not caught. He chooses. He takes her up to his family's meadow above Hamilton, says the words standing up in daylight, and shows her the grizzly.

Now Sadie has to decide what she is: a transfer passing through, a risk to be managed, or a keeper, one of the few humans the valley's families trust inside the fence. And Wyatt has to decide whether a man who has spent his life protecting his crew from everyone can let one woman all the way in.

A contemporary shifter romance on a wildland hotshot crew in Montana's Bitterroot: real fire, real craft, a secret older than the crew, and a slow burn that earns its fire. Explicit, adult, consensual. First in The Sapphire Crew series; Sadie and Wyatt's story completes in this book.