Ellie stirred as he lifted her head off his chest and eased her aside, tossed back the covers, and strode to the window.

“What is it?”

“Can’t be anything good.” He pulled on his jeans and zipped them, heard his cell phone ring and grabbed it off the nightstand. Wyatt’s number appeared on the screen.

“What the hell’s going on?” Kade asked.

“Turtle spotted flames on the mountain near Bear Tooth Ridge. We’ve called it in, but the wind’s blowing toward the east pasture, so we’ve got to move the cattle.”

“I’m on my way.” He turned to Ellie, who sat up in bed, anxiously clutching the blanket over her breasts. “Looks like there’s a fire on the mountain near the east pasture. I need to get up there.”

“You might need an extra hand. I’ll go with you.”

He started to argue, caught the mulish expression he recognized as trouble, and nodded. “All right, but we need to get there as fast as we can.”

She was dressed in minutes in jeans and boots, her fiery hair pulled back in a ponytail. They grabbed their jackets off the hooks in the kitchen. Kade grabbed his hat, and Ellie grabbed a bill cap with the Diamond Bar emblem on the front.

The men were ready to leave. The back of a pickup had been loaded with a water tank, picks, shovels, axes, and rakes. The truck towed a horse trailer, the animals inside saddled and ready to go. A Bobcat had been loaded into the bed of a second pickup. Men not riding in the trucks rode ATVs.

Kade brought out his four-wheeler, Ellie climbed on behind him, and they moved to the front of the caravan heading up the hill toward the mountain.

It took twenty minutes to get there with everybody hauling ass. The fire was burning in a stand of timber at the edge of the far side of the pasture. Once it hit the dry, brown grass in the flat open meadow, it would spread like flaming oil across water.

“Let’s set up a fire break between the edge of the forest and the fence line,” Kade told Wyatt. He pointed. “Right about there looks like a good place to start.”

Wyatt’s gaze followed. “Thirty feet of clear-cut might do it.”

“Fifty would be better, but we’ll do what we can.”

Slate backed the Bobcat down the ramp out of the truck, fired the engine, and started scraping a path through the shrubs on the other side of the grass. Men grabbed shovels and picks, then spread out in a line and went to work. The water tank in the truck bed held only enough for spot fires that managed to jump the line, but it was the best they could do for now.