By now, Barbie Firefighter Cristina was out-and-out grinning. Cutie Firefighter Aidan was smiling. Harry Potter look-alike Dustin was, too. Not Eeyore, though. Nope, Blake was far more serious than the others, she could already tell, though she’d have sworn there was some amusement shining in his gaze.

Zach was either wiser, or maybe he simply had more control, but his lips weren’t curved as he watched her. Quiet. Aware. Speculative.

Sexy as hell, damn him. Fine. Seemed she had a lot to prove to everyone. Well, she was good at that, too, and she stepped toward the tree.

“Brooke—”

She put a finger in his face, signaling Don’t You Dare, and something flashed in his eyes.

Respect? Yeah, but something else, too, something much more base, which would have most definitely set off one of their trademark chain reactions of sparks along her central nervous system, if she hadn’t been about to climb a damn tree. “I can do this,” she said.

His eyes approved, and even though she didn’t want it to, that approval washed through her.

So did that sizzling heat they had going on.

Oh, he was good. With that charisma oozing from his every pore, he could no doubt charm the panties off just about any woman.

But though it had been a while since anyone had charmed Brooke’s panties off, she wasn’t just any woman.

Reminding herself of that, she stepped toward the tree.

3

ZACH WATCHED how Brooke handled herself and something inside him reacted. He didn’t know her, not yet, not really, other than that they had some serious almost chemical-like attraction going, but she was crew, and as such, she was family.

Except he felt decidedly un-family-like toward her. Nope, nothing in him looking at her felt brotherly.

Not one little bit.

The gang was being hard on her, there was no doubt of that, but he’d seen many new hires hazed over the years—six in the past few weeks—and it had never bothered him.

Until now. This bothered him. She bothered him, in a surprising way. A man-to-woman way, though that wasn’t the surprise. It was that he felt it here, at work.

People came in and out of his life on a daily basis. It was the nature of the beast, that beast being fire. Every day he dealt with the destruction it caused, and what it did to people’s existence. Hell, he’d even experienced it in the most personal way one could, when he’d lost his own parents to a tragic fire. He coped by knowing he made a difference, that he helped keep that beast back when he could.