Read Against the Fire for Free Online Page B

and she had never met another man who had interested her enough to put aside her distrust and begin a relationship.
    Still, she was a woman, and for the first time in a very long while, Gabriel Raines had made her feel like one. She thought of the way he had looked at her at the end of the evening, his eyes hot and blatantly approving, his lips curving into a slow, sensuous smile. He’d looked like a hungry cat who wanted to eat her alive. He might not be her type, but her body felt the pull of his masculinity even if her mind did not.
    Mattie’s brain warned her in no uncertain terms to stay away from Gabriel Raines.

    After a working weekend, Gabe spent a good part of Monday tromping through the wreckage that had once been the nearly completed lobby of the Dallas Towers. Wearing a pair of high rubber boots, he kicked through the water-soaked wallboard, burned wood and broken glass and shoved aside the melted light fixtures that had fallen from the impressive three-story ceiling.
    “Ugly, isn’t it?” Sam McBride walked toward him in his own rubber boots.
    “Damned shame, is what it is.”
    “Heard they charged the kid who set the fire, the one we saw there that night.”
    “Kid’s only seventeen. And there’s a chance he didn’t do it.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Maybe. He was downtown with a buddy that night, spray painting walls. Claims he saw the fire and went to check it out.”
    “Tagging? I hate those little bastards. My dad would have beat my butt for doing something like that.”
    Gabe chuckled. Since his own dad had flown the coop when he was just a kid, he made no further comment, though he didn’t like vandals, either.
    “I’m supposed to talk to the kid this afternoon.” And since Mattie Baker had set up the meeting and said she would be there, he was more eager to go than he might have been.
    “Be interesting to see what the kid has to say,” Sam said.
    “He’s got friends who don’t believe he did it. They say he’s a real good boy. For his sake, I hope they’re right.”
    “What time’s the meeting?”
    “Two o’clock. A place called the Family Recovery Center.”
    Sam checked his watch. “That’s forty-five minutes from now.”
    “The address is nearby. Shouldn’t take long to get there. Let’s finish this inventory, try to see how much equipment we lost.”
    Sam nodded and settled his hard hat back over his short blond hair and Gabe put his own hard hat back on. They stomped through more water-soaked debris, the fire suppression damage as brutal as the flames themselves.
    Half an hour later, Gabe headed for the FRC. When he walked inside, Mattie Baker stood in the waiting room, a big open area lined with brown vinyl chairs and a couple of wooden tables covered with dog-eared magazines.
    She was as pretty as he remembered. He felt a sudden urge to unpin all that fiery hair and spread it across his pillow, to strip off her plain gray suit and run his hands over that luscious little body, learn every supple curve.
    His groin tightened.
    Silently he cursed.
    Mattie walked up to him and smiled. “Hello, Gabe.”
    “Mattie.”
    “Angel’s waiting. Now that Enrique’s come forward, he’s anxious to talk to you. He wants to tell you himself he didn’t do it.”
    “That sounds good.”
    Mattie led him down a hall decorated with amateur photos of the city, some of them pretty good.
    Gabe enjoyed photography himself, especially when he was out at the ranch in the Hill Country near Kerrville he had purchased a few years back. It was only three hundred acres, but he kept a couple of horses there, and it got him away from the city. One of his other loves was flying, and in his twin Aerostar, it was a fairly short trip. Someday he hoped to live at the ranch full-time, maybe raise some quarter horses. Deep down, he guessed the West would always be in his blood.
    He followed Mattie into the conference room and saw Angel seated at a long table next to a gray-haired man in a navy three-piece