Melinda Curtis - Getting Married Again

Her face turned bright red. “Yes,” she said through gritted teeth.

Lexie had slept with someone else. The room tilted. Lexie had slept with another man.

“I’m sorry you had to learn about it this way,” Lexie said. “I wasn’t sure how to tell you.”

“How could you do this to me?” He’d be the laughingstock of his Hot Shot crew, of every crew and support group from Montana to Arizona—if he wasn’t already. Had Lexie left him for this guy?

“I didn’t mean for this to happen, but it doesn’t change anything between us.”

“You’ve been walking around like…like…that for months, haven’t you? And everyone in town knows you’re pregnant.”

“Probably.”

Jackson rubbed his sleep-deprived eyes. “Who is he, Lex? Who did this to us?”

Lexie’s mouth dropped open, then she narrowed her eyes at him and said, “You did, you idiot.”

Dear Reader,

This year I will celebrate twenty years of marriage to the same man. But don’t look to me for marital advice. Sometimes I wonder how we made it, given several cross-country moves, job changes, financial challenges, kids, kittens and puppies. One thing I do know—we’re not the same two people who held hands and recited vows so long ago. We’ve grown and we’ve changed.

Lexie and Jackson Garrett are high school sweethearts who marry young. Jackson chases his dream of becoming a Hot Shot fireman—fighting wildland fires from Alaska to Florida. Holding down the home front alone for months at a time, Lexie faces a different set of challenges. It’s not life or death, but it’s still survival. Despite loving Jackson deeply, Lexie can’t handle facing another family crisis alone. Unwilling to settle for a relationship that is less than what she deserves, Lexie asks for a divorce.

When Jackson realizes he’s not immortal, when he understands what he’s lost, when he finally starts to change, he heads straight home to Lexie with one goal in mind…getting married again.

I hope you like Lexie and Jackson’s story. I’d love to hear from you. You can contact me at P.O. Box 150, Denair, CA 95316 or through my Web site at www.MelindaCurtis.com. Enjoy!

Melinda Curtis

www.millsandboon.co.uk

With much love and thanks to…

My husband and kids, who have learned this year—through trial and error—how to work the toaster, microwave and iron.

Michael Rhodes, Nicki Amburn and Rick Priest, for sharing Hot Shot and base camp stories, maps, nicknames and information. Any mistakes are mine alone.

Those who keep the home fires burning while their loved ones are away putting out fires—whether out on a fire line or away at the office.

And finally, to the brave men and women who fight wildland fires, who risk their lives to “face the dragon” without much more in return than personal satisfaction and a paycheck as they protect our homes and national treasures. You are an inspiration.

Those who have fallen will not be forgotten.

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

EPILOGUE

DRIVEN BY THE WHIPPING WIND, roaring flames made torches of the drought-dry trees on the ridge. Jackson Garrett could feel the heat increase as a wall of fire advanced toward him. Embers shot into the air like Fourth of July rockets, blossoming into flame as they hit the earth.

Ignoring the sweat trickling down his face, Jackson turned to watch the progress of the ground fire, which crept slowly up the steep slope in the direction of him and his crew. The panicked voices on the hand-held radio crackled in his ear over the building snarl of the fire. The words were in Russian and, although he’d been in Russia for nearly half a year, they were speaking too fast for Jackson to understand. Except he did understand.

They were dead.

Not yet, but it was only a matter of time. Ivan, Levka, Potenka, Breniv and Alek. Men he’d trained these past few months to fight forest fires the American way. Men he’d become fond of despite the language barrier and their reluctance to learn a method some bureaucrat figured would help the Russians stem their annual forest fire devastation.

What a joke. You needed equipment to fight fires—reliable equipment that wasn’t salvaged from some war fought fifty or more years ago—and well-trained, well-conditioned men. His Russian team was shaping up, but they had little experience. The men worked sluggishly on the mountainside in the one-hundred-and-ten-degree heat of the fire. They fought without the fire-resistant protective gear that Jackson had taken for granted in the States. As for equipment, in this area of Siberia it included garden-variety shovels, a relic of an airplane that was supposed to be used to drop retardant on the fire—except that after months of fighting wildland fires there was no fire retardant left—and an antique fire truck with only two working gears, reverse and first—not much use in the mountains.

When Jackson had arrived in Russia and realized the limited experience and resources of the men he’d been assigned to, he’d laughed. A smart man would have filed a report with the government agency that sent him over and taken the first plane back to the States.

But then, most smart men didn’t have a freshly signed divorce agreement tucked in their passport.

Jackson had nearly ten years’ experience as a Hot Shot, one of an elite group of government firefighters trained to battle the hottest part of wildland fires. Hell, Jackson figured, he’d be able to teach his ragtag crew a thing or two about fighting forest fires. They had shovels, didn’t they?

So he’d stayed, not yet ready to return home and smile at his Hot Shot buddies and hide the fact that his wife had blindsided him with a divorce, or fess up that he hadn’t been able to sweet-talk his way back into their bed. That last night he spent in Silver Bend, Idaho, he’d told his best friend, Logan McCall, that he wouldn’t have to sleep on Logan’s couch again because his wife, Lexie, had called and wanted to meet him for dinner.

When Jackson met Lexie at that Boise restaurant more than six months ago, he’d been stupidly sure of himself—even after he’d signed the divorce papers and finessed Lexie into a motel room in Boise, convinced they’d rip the papers to shreds come morning. He was so confident they’d reconcile, he’d been thinking about how he’d brag to his buddies about Lexie’s hot temper and how that made making up that much hotter—while she was putting her clothes back on and walking out on him for good.

“This was breakup sex. Nothing more,” Lexie had pronounced, her eyes brimming with tears, the divorce papers clutched in one hand and the motel room door handle gripped in the other. “I didn’t believe those empty promises of yours at dinner. I just had to…” Lexie paused, swallowed, blinked rapidly. “It was breakup sex,” she reaffirmed before disappearing out of his life.

Now, Jackson wondered why Lexie had slept with him that night and why she’d been so upset about it afterwards. He remembered the first time he’d asked her out in high school. He’d given her some smooth line. He couldn’t even remember now what it’d been. She’d laughed at him—after he’d spent weeks working up the nerve to ask her out—and told him he was full of hot air. She’d gone out with him anyway…after he’d asked her out three more times.