Bear The Blaze (Firebear Brides 3) Read Free Page B

much.”
    “Remember? So you’re not a Los Angeles kind of girl?” Ragnar asked, the words getting away from him before he could do anything about it.
    What happened to not engaging? he chided himself, though obviously there was no real point to it. What was done was done and apparently he was too damn enthralled by little Miss Wrench to listen to his sane and rational mind. So be it.
    “Nope. Kansas born and raised, if you can believe it,” she chirped, grinning.
    Those lips of hers were lush and perfectly kissable, and even Ragnar couldn’t deny that. He swallowed thickly as he watched her run her tongue over her lower lip, glancing at the sunset.
    “But your sunsets look the same. So at least there’s that.”
    “I think they look the same everywhere,” he offered blandly, kicking himself the whole way for being a morose conversationalist.
    Since when had that ever bothered him?
    “You’d think so, but they look a whole lot shittier in Los Angeles,” Abigail noted, relaxing her body and letting her head fall against the same metal beam as Ragnar was sitting against.
    “It’s the smog. Does the same in Phoenix.”
    And now you’re discussing weather. Great. Good going, Ragnar.
    “So, what brought you to your profession?” he asked, desperate to change the topic to anything that wouldn’t lead to a prolonged conversation about cloud patterns and wind cycles.
    “My dad, no surprises there,” she laughed, her lovely voice soothing his fraying nerves better than any shot of whiskey ever had. “He wanted a boy, and he had four, and then there came me. And out of his five children I was the only one who cared about what he was doing for work.
    “He played catch with my brothers and I’d get tackled in every flag football game, so I looked for other ways to spend time with him. So I started going to work with him in the shop, and that’s where I picked it up. Went to school when I grew up enough to know what I was doing. He passed away though. Few years ago.”
    She sounded so at peace with the world. Ragnar couldn’t help but be intrigued. He looked at her and Abigail met his gaze steadily, smiling slightly.
    “What?”
    “You sound… okay with it,” he said, frowning.
    “I am. He lived a good life. He taught me a lot of things and I knew him better than anyone else in the family, except Mom. It wasn’t his time yet but he said his goodbyes. Life’s to be celebrated, not mourned,” Abigail said, though her smile crumbled a little at the end of it. Before Ragnar could ask why, she’d shot him a question of her own. “What about you? Why a firefighter? Or fire investigator… researcher? I don’t know the jargon, I only work with the meatheads barging into the burning buildings. Not that I don’t appreciate them for what they are!”
    Ragnar grinned, something he rarely did. “I used to be one of those meatheads. Changed over to the analytical side a few years ago, but I still help out.”
    “What made you reconsider?”
    “Well, same old. Boy is born. Boy grows up. Boy sees his father die in a wildfire.” Ragnar shrugged. “I think it took me a while to get to the understanding that not all jobs are created equal and that I could do more as an investigator than on the line. Give people peace, find out what really happened.”
    His throat tightened. He wasn’t even sure why he was telling her all of that. No one knew that their father had died in a fire. The Hamilton brothers certainly didn’t talk about it amongst one another, even if it was entirely clear that it was an event that had shaped all of them. Their father had died trying to save them from a supposed freak accident, a wildfire that spread like a disease in the forest that had used to stand right where they were sitting now. It had been turned into farmland after the incident, but Ragnar still knew. Unlike his older brothers, Hamilton House had stayed firmly in his thoughts his whole life.
    “That explains it. I’m sorry for