Read Flaming Desire - Part 4 (An Alpha Billionaire Romance) for Free Online Page B

shoulder.
    I looked and saw a cluster of firefighters hovering around a smaller Shelby-sized tent. They walked away with a variety of tools. I wanted a fire ax. Or a hatchet. I didn’t like to go anywhere on the fire line without one. That and a shovel, which was easy enough to latch onto my backpack. Still, if they had a Trailblazer, a relatively new yet handy piece of equipment, I’d take it. The Trailblazer was used for scraping, trenching, and grubbing. Its blade was over six inches long and had tines much like a metal rake on the other side of the shovel/ax part. It could roll logs, cut a trench, scrape, and clear a trail.
    Alas, when we got to the tent that type of equipment was gone, but I snatched up a Troop Tool, a combination tool that had a diagonal angle shovel like a fire shovel, with a ninety-degree angle for line scraping, changing, and mopping up. The blade of this tool could fold up against the handle and be used as a staff or a walking stick when traversing steep ground, which sounded like the area into which Matt and I would be heading. In spite of the multi-tool, I also grabbed a short handheld hatchet and a military style shovel that could be broken down and folded. I shrugged out of my backpack, attached the shovel and hatchet to the sides, and then re-situated the backpack on my shoulders, reaching down to grasp my multi-tool.
    Matt had chosen the Bonnie Hammer, which looked like a combination ax on one side and a long, narrow hammer on the other. He also selected a Dragon Rhinehart, which was also a short-handled piece of equipment with a curved triangular shaped metal head riveted to the top that could be used to dig a trench, chop at underbrush, and like my Troop Tool, it could be folded and broken down into smaller sections.
    The equipment we had chosen wasn’t heavy, on purpose, as I knew that we would have to travel fast and light. I thought of this assignment as a recon of sorts. Each of us grabbed a walkie, and I checked to make sure mine was working, just as Matt did. Then, we looked at each other, nodded, and wordlessly stepped onto the crew truck that would take us closer to our ultimate location.
    Bearing our tools and weapons against the fire, we marched off into battle, or at least that’s how I saw myself. Marching off to battle a faceless enemy, one that left nothing but pain and devastation in its wake. We were both focused on the task ahead. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard of homes, neighborhoods, campgrounds, resorts, you name it, having been cleared by local authorities, only to find, sadly, charred bodies after a fire had swept through.
    From the looks of the map on the brochure, it looked like the valley we would descend into was quite narrow. Almost a gorge of sorts. I don’t know why anyone would want to go camping in there, but that was not for me to say.
    I sat beside Matt on the seat, so close yet feeling so distant from him—emotionally at least. It made me a bit sad to think that our relationship might be coming to an end, but I shook my head and looked out the window, refusing to think about it. Today was going to be an incredibly physical and exhausting day, even more so than what I had endured over the past several days. Added to that would be the sense of urgency in checking and making sure that all the campsites in the sprawling campground were indeed abandoned, just in case the fire managed to sweep down the ridge line. If the fire did manage to head down slope, a full retreat would probably be called and the base camp would once again have to relocate.
    The mountainsides were so close in the narrow valley into which we would be heading that it wouldn’t take much of a wind for the fire to jump over the gap and leap onto the next mountain. I glanced at Matt, saw him sitting calmly in this seat, hands clasped together, but not tightly, almost as if he was just relaxing. His body seemed loose, his eyes closed, and I wondered what he was thinking