Wildfire Hellhound - Zoe Chant

Chapter 1

Darcy had been waiting two days, nineteen hours, and forty-two minutes for something to happen.

As a private investigator, she was no stranger to long stakeouts. She’d once spent the better part of four days up a tree overlooking the seventh hole of an exclusive, swanky golf course. It had been worth it for the look on her target’s face when she’d dropped down to snap a picture of the cheating asshole going for a very different kind of hole in one.

In that particular case, she’d then had to run like hell to avoid getting clubbed to death with a nine-iron. That had been an extreme situation though. Normally, her job was pretty uneventful.

Naked men did not usually charge out of the bushes and run smack into her parked car.

Darcy blinked, a powdered donut still halfway to her lips.

The man who’d run into her car bonnet—and he was very definitely a man—staggered away, heading for the gas station across the road. He got halfway to the pump before collapsing, face-first, into a snowdrift.

Cramming her donut into her mouth, Darcy hopped out of her car. She crunched her way through the snow to the fallen man, shivering as the freezing night wind bit through her parka.

Pulling out her phone and turning on the flashlight, she scrutinized the guy. It was hard to tell, since he was lying flat on his face, but he didn’t look much like the photos her client had shown her. Still, people sometimes went to extreme measures to change their appearance when they had something to hide.

Darcy nudged him. “Hi. Are you Vance Carmichael-Rhodes?”

The man didn’t respond.

Either he wasn’t her target, or he was dead drunk. Or both. Given that he was up a mountain in the middle of February in his birthday suit, Darcy was willing to bet cold, hard cash that he wasn’t sober.

Though he wasn’t quite naked, she realized. A weird yellow harness stretched across his broad shoulders. If it was a gun holster, it had been designed by someone who’d never seen a human being. The broad straps cut into the man’s heavily muscled torso.

Whatever the harness was for, it certainly wasn’t modesty. While the man was technically wearing something, in practice he was very, very naked.

Something was written down the sides of the harness, in square black letters. Darcy twisted her head, squinting in the dim light from her phone.

“Thunder Mountain Hotshots,” she read out loud. “Huh.”

A hotshot was a kind of elite wilderness firefighter, she vaguely recalled. She’d watched a documentary about wildfires a while ago. There had been lots of shots of tough-looking people hiking through smoke-shrouded forests. She was pretty sure she’d have remembered if any of them had been naked.

She shook her head in bemusement. “Guess you’re off duty, big guy.”

Still, whatever the firefighter was doing out here in the middle of nowhere, she didn’t think he could be her target. According to her briefing, Vance Carmichael-Rhodes was a highly regarded doctor. In her experience, people like that didn’t suddenly throw away lucrative careers and decades of training in order to take up manual labor.

Then again, she wouldn’t have thought someone like Vance would abandon a glamorous wife and a New York penthouse suite for a tiny town in the mountains of Montana.

“Yet here we are,” she muttered. She nudged the man with the toe of her boot. “So if you aren’t Vance, who are you? A friend of his?”

Whoever he was, he was out cold. He didn’t react at all to her tentative prod.

“Hey.” Darcy poked him again, harder. “Hey, big guy. Wake up.”

The man didn’t so much as twitch.

He was breathing, at least. There didn’t seem to be a mark on him. From the massive curve of his shoulder to his muscled thighs, he was…perfect.

Really perfect. Darcy realized that she was staring, slack-jawed, at the firefighter’s ass.

“Get a grip, Darcy,” she muttered.

She knelt next to the man. His skin was a pale, bluish color that didn’t look at all healthy. He wasn’t shivering.

That wasn’t a good sign. She had enough experience with extreme weather conditions to know that people going into hypothermia stopped shivering.

She set her palm against his shoulder. He was cold, so cold. His muscles were hard as rock. She might as well have been touching a statue.

She felt her way up his neck, pushing through his tangled beard in search of a pulse. Her fingertips unexpectedly brushed something hard and smooth. Whatever it was came loose as she prodded at it, falling into her