Kirby guided the group of men to my last empty table. All but one man was covered in soot smeared with a day’s worth of sweat. The clean one seemed to just be tagging along, his freshly washed hair barely long enough to hang into his eyes. The others looked pleased with their exhaustion, a hard, long shift behind them.

Only the tourists stared at the ragged men. Locals knew exactly who they were and why they were there. The men’s dusty boots and the three bright blue hard hats sitting on their laps, bearing the Department of Agriculture’s emblem, made their specialty easy to guess—a hotshot crew, likely the Alpine division out of Estes Park.

The spot fires had been particularly relentless that season, and it seemed like the Forest Service had dispatched their interagency crews from every district, some as far as Wyoming and South Dakota. Colorado Springs had been hazy for weeks. The smoke from the fires in the north had turned the afternoon sun into a glowing bright red ball of fire. We hadn’t seen stars since before my last paycheck.

I greeted the men with a polite expression. “What are we drinking?”

“You sure got pretty hair,” one of the men said.

I lowered my chin and cocked an eyebrow.

“Shut the fuck up and order, Zeke. We’ll probably get called back out soon.”

“Damn, Taylor,” Zeke said. His frown was then targeted in my direction. “Get him some food, will ya? He gets cranky when he’s hungry.”

“I can do that,” I said, annoyed with them already.

Taylor glanced up at me, and for just a moment, I was captured by a pair of warm brown irises. In less than a second, I found something familiar behind his eyes. Then he blinked and returned to his menu.

Although usually cute, mostly charming, and always with a respectable amount of muscles, men who blew through our town with a dusting of ash on their boots were only to be admired from afar. No self-respecting local girl would be caught dating one of those fascinating, brave tanned young men for two reasons. They were seasonal, and they would leave you behind, pregnant or heartbroken. I’d seen it so many times, and not just with the hotshot crews, but with the airmen passing through, too. To the young men my father referred to as vagrants, the Springs was a buffet of young girls just desperate enough to be fooled into loving someone they knew wouldn’t stay.

I wasn’t one of them even if, according to my parents, I was the most educated whore in Colorado Springs.

“Let’s start with drinks.” I kept my tone pleasant and my mind on the decent tip the hotshots would usually leave on the table.

“What do you want, Trex?” Zeke asked the clean one.