Hunted Hotshot Hero, page 1
“What happened that night?” Brittney asked. “If you don’t tell me, I’ll find someone who will.”
“You ask so many questions,” Rory murmured. “Occupational hazard?”
“I just have so many questions,” Brittney said. “I always have.”
“So that’s why you became a reporter?”
“You ask a lot of questions, too, Mr. VanDam,” she pointed out.
Rory shrugged. “I usually don’t. But I’m interest—no, I’m curious.”
She was amused that Rory had stopped himself from saying interested. So to tease him, she batted her eyelashes and stepped closer to him. “About me?”
“About why someone would threaten you and force you off the road,” he said.
“I’m curious about that, too,” Brittney said. “It has to be related to the plane crash.”
“You ran that story months ago,” Rory said. “And you already covered it. So why would anyone be trying to back you off from what you’ve already done?”
“Because they know what I know, that there’s more to that story.”
Dear Reader,
Welcome back to Northern Lakes, Michigan, for another installment in my Hotshot Heroes series with Harlequin Romantic Suspense. I hope you’ve all been looking forward to finding out more about Rory VanDam and that mysterious plane crash he and Ethan Sommerly survived five years ago. And if anyone can find out the truth, it will be determined reporter Brittney Townsend. But Brittney’s quest for knowledge just might get both her and Rory killed as there are numerous attempts on their lives. Being a hotshot has never been more dangerous for Rory.
With so many recent wildfires in areas in Canada and in the US, including the town on which I’ve based Northern Lakes, hotshot firefighters are being hailed as the heroes that they are when they selflessly put their lives on the line to battle these unpredictable blazes.
I have so much respect for the dangerous job that hotshot firefighters do. They are definitely the perfect heroes. And I love writing about the perils of their careers and their private lives in my Hotshot Heroes series. I hope you’ve been enjoying the series as well. Or if you’ve just discovered it, I think you’ll be able to jump right in and know what’s been going on in Northern Lakes—a lot of danger, betrayal and romance.
Happy reading!
Lisa Childs
HUNTED HOTSHOT HERO
LISA CHILDS
New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling, award-winning author Lisa Childs has written more than eighty-five novels. Published in twenty countries, she’s also appeared on the Publishers Weekly, Barnes & Noble and Nielsen Top 100 bestseller lists. Lisa writes contemporary romance, romantic suspense, paranormal and women’s fiction. She’s a wife, mom, bonus mom, avid reader and less avid runner. Readers can reach her through Facebook or her website, lisachilds.com.
Books by Lisa Childs
Harlequin Romantic Suspense
Hotshot Heroes
Hotshot Hero Under Fire
Hotshot Hero on the Edge
Hotshot Heroes Under Threat
Hotshot Hero in Disguise
Hotshot Hero for the Holiday
Hunted Hotshot Hero
The Coltons of Owl Creek
Colton’s Dangerous Cover
The Coltons of New York
Protecting Colton’s Secret Daughters
Visit the Author Profile page at
Harlequin.com for more titles.
With great appreciation and respect for all the hotshot firefighters—the real heroes!
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Excerpt from Undercover Cowboy Protector by Kacy Cross
Prologue
The hotshot holiday party ended without the bang everyone had been expecting and dreading, no one more so than Rory VanDam. Ever since that reporter dredged up the plane crash that had happened five years ago.
No. Ever since the plane crash.
No. Even before that.
Rory had been waiting for the big bang or the next crash. While he’d been waiting the longest, the other hotshots had begun to expect bad things to happen, too, and not just because of their jobs. Being a hotshot firefighter was more dangerous than being a regular firefighter because they battled the worst blazes—the wildfires that consumed acres and acres of land and everything in their paths. But it wasn’t the job that put them in danger lately, it was all the bad things that had been happening to the hotshots. Explosions. Murder attempts. Sabotage.
But tonight, the holiday party ended with an arrest but no gunshots, no fight, not even a fire. The party was over now and the hotshots, who had traveled to their headquarters in Northern Lakes, Michigan, to attend it, were tucked up in the bunks at the firehouse unless they had other places to stay. And, since falling in love and getting into relationships, many of them had other places now. So maybe it wasn’t just bad things that happened to hotshots. But for Rory, to fall in love or have someone fall in love with him would be a very bad thing. He couldn’t risk a relationship with anyone ever again.
So, with nowhere else to stay, he was lying on his back on one of the bunks, staring up at the ceiling. Despite that arrest tonight, Rory was still uneasy, waiting for the next bad thing to happen.
The immediate danger was only over for Trent Miles tonight. The person who had been threatening Trent in Detroit, where Trent worked out of a local firehouse when not on assignment with the hotshots, followed him up to Northern Lakes. While the young man had run Trent and his girlfriend off the road the day before, he hadn’t harmed anyone tonight. Trent’s girlfriend, a Detroit detective, quietly arrested her and Trent’s would-be killer. Except for that whole running them off the road thing, Rory was relieved that the killer was the only one who’d followed Trent up to Northern Lakes and not the man’s sister again.
Trent’s sister, Brittney, was beautiful, with her long curly dark hair and big topaz-colored eyes. But Brittney Townsend was also an ambitious young reporter who would sell out her own soul for a story. Or at least her own brother.
Not that Rory could judge anyone for selling out their soul, not when he’d already done it himself. But it still affected him, leaving him feeling hollow and empty inside and alone even in a bar full of other people like he’d been earlier tonight for the party. His coworkers. His friends. At least he hoped they considered him a friend and not the saboteur.
Who the hell was behind all the damn dangerous “accidents” the hotshots had been having? Broken equipment. Like the lift bucket coming loose with Trick McRooney in it and all of the cut brake lines on trucks that had sent or nearly sent hotshots to the hospital. And the loose gas line on the stove in the firehouse kitchen that had caused the explosion that had taken out Ethan’s beard and revealed his real identity as the Canterbury heir.
Rory touched his jaw where stubble was starting to come in again. And his uneasiness grew. His disguise was being clean-shaven and short-haired; something he hadn’t been for a while until his hotshot training and his new identity.
His new life. But this new life was proving to be every bit as dangerous as his last one. And he couldn’t help but think that this life was going to end, too.
As he lay there, he heard the rumble of an engine and then another and another. The firehouse was on Main Street, but there was never much traffic in Northern Lakes at this hour and especially during the winter. And these engines weren’t just passing by, they were running inside the building.
The fire trucks.
Who started up the truck engines?
They hadn’t been called out to a fire because the alarm hadn’t gone off. It would have woken up everyone in the bunk room if it had. And as far as he knew, he was the only one awake because all around him, other hotshots snored.
Trent Miles stayed behind in Northern Lakes after his girlfriend left. A couple of the younger guys, Bruce Abbott and Howie Lane, stayed because they’d been drinking at the party. And a couple of the older guys, Donovan Cunningham and Carl Kozak, stayed, probably for the same reason.
Michaela was here, too. The female hotshot worked as a firefighter in St. Paul, which wasn’t far away, but while she hadn’t been drinking, the party ended too late for her to want to make the drive home.
Not everybody staying was a hotshot. Stanley, the kid who kept the firehouse clean, was sleeping here tonight with the firehouse dog, Annie. Stanley’s foster brother, Cody Mallehan, and his fiancée, Serena Beaumont, had recently gotten licensed as a foster home and had taken in a kid who was allergic to Annie. And Stanley didn’t like to be separated from the big sheepdog/mastiff mix that had saved his life.
His life wasn’t the only one she’d saved, though. She’d rescued many other hotshots and their significant others over the past year since Stanley had adopted her to be the firehouse dog. Maybe she was about to make another rescue because she whined and crawled off the bunk below Rory where she’d been sleeping with Stanley. Then she jumped up, put her paws on the side of Rory’s bed, and she whined again, obviously as confused and concerned as he was about those running trucks.
“You hear ’em, too,” Rory said, and he jumped down from his bunk. While the diesel trucks didn’t emit as much carbon monoxide as gas engines, if all of them were running, like he suspected they were from the sound, the level could get high enough to kill.
The air was already getting thick. He coughed and sputtered, trying to find his voice to wake the others. “Hey...” he rasped out the words. “Hey...”
Annie barked, but it wasn’t as loudly as she usually barked. Rory needed her to bark as loud as she had the first time she’d seen Ethan without his beard. He needed her to wake the others, or they might not be able to wake up ever again if the carbon monoxide level rose any more.
And he needed to get the hell downstairs and shut off those trucks. He would pull the alarm in the hall, too, before going downstairs. That would certainly wake up everyone easier than he and Annie could.
But once he stepped through the door to the hall, something struck him hard across the back of the head and neck, knocking him down to his knees before he fell flat on his face. His last thought as consciousness slipped away was: Would he be able to wake up again or was his most recent life ending right now?
Chapter 1
He was having that dream. The one where he was falling through the air, his arms flailing as he kept reaching and reaching, but just nothingness slipped through his fingers. Nothing.
That was all he had now, all that he was now. He had a new name to replace the one he never wanted to hear again. But he’d lost much more than his old name.
And he was about to lose even more.
Before jumping out of the sputtering plane, he’d strapped on a chute, and the weight of it was pulling at his shoulders. It was supposed to open. He had been trained as a smoke jumper. He knew how to do this. But whoever had sabotaged the plane might have rigged the chute, as well. He wasn’t the only one who’d jumped out, though.
At least one other chute had opened. He could see it in the distance. Just as he could see the plane, continuing on its doomed flight, spiraling toward the ground as the engine cut out entirely. He was spiraling, too.
Free-falling...
For a second, despite all of his training, he forgot what he was supposed to do. And he’d been trained by the best in the elite firefighting business: Mack McRooney.
But he forgot more than his training. He forgot who he was now: a hotshot. Mack’s voice echoed inside his head. “Breathe. In and out. Relax. And pull the cord.”
Mack, with his bald head and booming voice, demanded total obedience. And this student obeyed. He reached for the rip cord, pulling it, and he waited for the jerk on his shoulders, for his body to go up instead of down.
But there was no jerk; it didn’t come. The chute hadn’t opened, hadn’t rescued him. He kept hurtling toward the mountains, to all the pine trees and jagged ridges. And he braced himself for the impact.
For death.
Jolting awake, he jumped and gasped, trying to breathe. But something had been shoved in his mouth and down his throat. Panic gripped him.
They had found him again.
And this time they would, no doubt, make certain that he died.
* * *
You are being watched, and if you don’t drop this story, you will die.
Brittney Townsend’s fingers shook slightly as she held the note she’d just pulled from beneath the windshield wiper of her van. When she’d seen the slip of paper, she figured it was a ticket or a flyer for a restaurant or a food truck. She had not even considered that it would be this: a threat.
After weeks of alternating between feeling paranoid and flattered, she should be relieved that her suspicions were confirmed. She’d had this strange feeling someone was watching her.
It had been easy enough to spot the ones who openly stared at her, some of them because they must have recognized her as the reporter who’d broken the big story, who had discovered that Jonathan Michael Canterbury IV was still alive. Or maybe they’d been staring because they had recognized her from the other stories she did. For the fluff pieces her local Detroit station had hired her to do, like report on gallery openings and concerts and new shops and restaurants.
She hated doing stories like that and figured she got saddled with them because she was young and, as her producer told her, cute. And the way he said it...
She had considered reporting him to HR, but everyone else loved him. So she let the comments go. For now. He was probably harmless enough, and she doubted that he was the one watching her. She also doubted that it was any of the people who’d spoken to her after recognizing her. None of them had given her that uneasy feeling that she kept having.
That creepy sense of foreboding, like whoever was watching her wasn’t doing so out of admiration but something else...
Obsession. Anger. Revenge?
Her brother had recently had someone go after him for revenge, because Trent hadn’t been able to save that person’s loved one from an apartment fire. But Trent was a firefighter. His job was definitely a lot higher stakes than hers.
Except for the one big story she’d done about the hotshots. And that plane crash.
She glanced around now, peering into the shadows of the parking garage. It was late, so the only light was the soft glow from the small overheard fixtures scattered throughout the concrete structure. Was whoever had stuck the note under the windshield wiper out there? Watching her from the cover of the shadows?
Goose bumps lifted on her arms despite the heavy wool coat she wore. She reached for the door handle she’d already unlocked and jumped up onto the driver’s seat of the van. She suspected that someone had been watching her when she left the station a short while ago. Because it was late, she was the last one leaving the building for the parking garage. But she’d heard shoes scraping behind her on the sidewalk.
She glanced over her shoulder, but in the darkness, she wasn’t able to see anyone. But she knew they were there, just as she’d known all those other times she had that uneasy feeling.
Someone was definitely following her. But her stalker wasn’t a new fan like she wanted to believe, someone impressed with her reporting, someone who recognized her talent. No. This was someone threatening her.
You are being watched, and if you don’t drop this story, you will die.
She really didn’t have to wonder what story. Because she knew.
This threat wasn’t for her to stop working on any of those fluff pieces. Nobody cared that she covered a gallery showing or the opening of a new restaurant; sometimes not even the owners cared because people didn’t watch the news on TV. The read it on social media instead.
No. There was only one story of any interest that she had ever covered. The plane crash from five years ago, which had presumably taken the life of Jonathan Michael Canterbury IV and confirmed his family curse, that all of the Canterbury male heirs died much sooner than they should.
But Canterbury hadn’t died. Other men had, though, except for one: Rory VanDam. Like Canterbury, he’d survived for a couple of months in the mountains before the two of them had been rescued. Because both men had refused to give her an interview, she wasn’t sure how long each had been on their own before finding one other and then being rescued together. The wreckage of the plane and the pilot and a couple of other men, who’d just completed hotshot training and been on board, too, had never been found.
Nobody knew for sure why and how the plane had crashed. Or what had happened to the others. Canterbury claimed he didn’t know for certain, but he’d suspected that it was because of him, because someone had been trying to kill him even before that crash.
But what if he was wrong?
