Wildfire Hellhound (Fire & Rescue Shifters: Wildfire Crew Book 5) Read online

  Wildfire Hellhound

  Fire & Rescue Shifters: Wildfire Crew - Book 5

  Zoe Chant

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Epilogue

  A note from Zoe Chant

  Also by Zoe Chant

  Author’s Note

  This book is a complete romance, with no cliffhanger for the main couple’s relationship. However, the Wildfire Crew series is intended to be read in order. Each book features a different couple but characters reoccur throughout, and there is an overall plot that develops as the series progresses.

  Wildfire Hellhound refers to events from previous books, so I recommend reading these first:

  Wildfire Griffin

  Wildfire Unicorn

  Wildfire Sea Dragon

  Wildfire Pegasus

  Chapter 1

  Darcy had been waiting two days, nineteen hours, and forty-two minutes for something to happen.

  As a private investigator, she was no stranger to long stakeouts. She’d once spent the better part of four days up a tree overlooking the seventh hole of an exclusive, swanky golf course. It had been worth it for the look on her target’s face when she’d dropped down to snap a picture of the cheating asshole going for a very different kind of hole in one.

  In that particular case, she’d then had to run like hell to avoid getting clubbed to death with a nine-iron. That had been an extreme situation though. Normally, her job was pretty uneventful.

  Naked men did not usually charge out of the bushes and run smack into her parked car.

  Darcy blinked, a powdered donut still halfway to her lips.

  The man who’d run into her car bonnet—and he was very definitely a man—staggered away, heading for the gas station across the road. He got halfway to the pump before collapsing, face-first, into a snowdrift.

  Cramming her donut into her mouth, Darcy hopped out of her car. She crunched her way through the snow to the fallen man, shivering as the freezing night wind bit through her parka.

  Pulling out her phone and turning on the flashlight, she scrutinized the guy. It was hard to tell, since he was lying flat on his face, but he didn’t look much like the photos her client had shown her. Still, people sometimes went to extreme measures to change their appearance when they had something to hide.

  Darcy nudged him. “Hi. Are you Vance Carmichael-Rhodes?”

  The man didn’t respond.

  Either he wasn’t her target, or he was dead drunk. Or both. Given that he was up a mountain in the middle of February in his birthday suit, Darcy was willing to bet cold, hard cash that he wasn’t sober.

  Though he wasn’t quite naked, she realized. A weird yellow harness stretched across his broad shoulders. If it was a gun holster, it had been designed by someone who’d never seen a human being. The broad straps cut into the man’s heavily muscled torso.

  Whatever the harness was for, it certainly wasn’t modesty. While the man was technically wearing something, in practice he was very, very naked.

  Something was written down the sides of the harness, in square black letters. Darcy twisted her head, squinting in the dim light from her phone.

  “Thunder Mountain Hotshots,” she read out loud. “Huh.”

  A hotshot was a kind of elite wilderness firefighter, she vaguely recalled. She’d watched a documentary about wildfires a while ago. There had been lots of shots of tough-looking people hiking through smoke-shrouded forests. She was pretty sure she’d have remembered if any of them had been naked.

  She shook her head in bemusement. “Guess you’re off duty, big guy.”

  Still, whatever the firefighter was doing out here in the middle of nowhere, she didn’t think he could be her target. According to her briefing, Vance Carmichael-Rhodes was a highly regarded doctor. In her experience, people like that didn’t suddenly throw away lucrative careers and decades of training in order to take up manual labor.

  Then again, she wouldn’t have thought someone like Vance would abandon a glamorous wife and a New York penthouse suite for a tiny town in the mountains of Montana.

  “Yet here we are,” she muttered. She nudged the man with the toe of her boot. “So if you aren’t Vance, who are you? A friend of his?”

  Whoever he was, he was out cold. He didn’t react at all to her tentative prod.

  “Hey.” Darcy poked him again, harder. “Hey, big guy. Wake up.”

  The man didn’t so much as twitch.

  He was breathing, at least. There didn’t seem to be a mark on him. From the massive curve of his shoulder to his muscled thighs, he was…perfect.

  Really perfect. Darcy realized that she was staring, slack-jawed, at the firefighter’s ass.

  “Get a grip, Darcy,” she muttered.

  She knelt next to the man. His skin was a pale, bluish color that didn’t look at all healthy. He wasn’t shivering.

  That wasn’t a good sign. She had enough experience with extreme weather conditions to know that people going into hypothermia stopped shivering.

  She set her palm against his shoulder. He was cold, so cold. His muscles were hard as rock. She might as well have been touching a statue.

  She felt her way up his neck, pushing through his tangled beard in search of a pulse. Her fingertips unexpectedly brushed something hard and smooth. Whatever it was came loose as she prodded at it, falling into her palm. The man’s breath caught in a harsh rasp of pain. His muscles knotted, then relaxed again.

  Darcy squinted at the thing she’d pulled out of his flesh. It looked like a small glass syringe, except it had a tuft of feathers on the end instead of a plunger. A few drops of some oily, viscous substance puddled in the mostly empty barrel.

  “A tranquilizer dart?” She’d never seen one in person before, but she couldn’t think what else it could be. “Did someone mistake you for Bigfoot? Or did you fall victim to the world’s most thorough mugging?”

  A flurry of snowflakes stung her face. She looked up, startled. The weather forecast hadn’t predicted more snow for the rest of the week. The night sky was still clear and unclouded, yet white flakes swirled through the air in a thickening flurry. Pine trees rustled, branches creaking.

  She cast a glance at the gas station, but there was no shelter to be found there. This late at night, the attached convenience store was shuttered and locked.

  Damn it. All this w
ork wasted.

  She’d spent weeks trawling through computer logs, narrowing down her target’s location. She still had no idea why Vance routinely visited this particular gas station at midnight, but she knew that he only did so every four weeks, give or take a few days. If she missed him now, it would be another month before she could try again.

  But she didn’t have any choice but to abandon her stake-out. The mysterious man needed help, and fast. They were deep in the mountains here, at the ass-end of nowhere. By the time emergency services managed to reach them, it could be too late.

  “Vance, you’d better not turn up while I’m gone,” she muttered. She fisted her hands in the firefighter’s harness. “Come on, big guy. It’s going to be okay.”

  With a grunt of effort, she rolled the man onto his back. At barely four foot six in her thickest boots, Darcy was used to being the smallest person in any crowd…but this guy made her feel tiny. He was ridiculously huge, a great hairy mountain of muscle. He had to outweigh her twice over.

  “Momma didn’t raise no quitter.” She rolled her shoulders and set her jaw. “Sorry, big guy. This is going to be a bumpy ride.”

  With a lot of effort—and swearing—Darcy managed to drag the man into her car. She winced at every bump and scrape, but the firefighter himself didn’t react to her manhandling.

  She drove as fast as she dared down the twisting mountain track, but it still took fifteen minutes to reach the cabin that she’d rented. Vance had really wanted to get away from civilization. Which was a bit puzzling. She was only pursuing him to find out why he’d run out on his wife. It wasn’t like he’d skipped bail or had an arrest warrant on his head.

  She glanced at the unconscious firefighter in her rear-view mirror. Maybe he’d hold the key to unlocking some of the mysteries surrounding her target. It couldn’t be a coincidence that he’d been heading for the same remote gas station at the same time as Vance.

  “Hope you can answer a few questions about your buddy, big guy.” Darcy pulled up outside her rental. “Then I’ll finally be able to put this goddamn job to bed. I am not getting paid enough for this.”

  The cabin felt wonderfully warm after the arctic Montana winter outside. Darcy was sweating by the time she’d managed to wrestle the limp man to the living room. Getting him up onto the couch would have required a fork-lift, so she parked him on the rug.

  “Hang on.” She tucked her coat back around the giant’s torso. “I’ll be right back.”

  She whacked the thermostat up high, then gathered up every blanket and towel she could find. Arms full, she raced back to the firefighter.

  “Okay, big guy. Here you go.” She piled coverings on top of the man, swaddling him in a big, haphazard cocoon. “Don’t worry. I’ll get you warmed up.”

  To her relief, color seemed to be coming back into his face—at least, what little of it she could see. From the nose down, he was all beard. As a look, it was well past “hipster” and into “mountain man” territory.

  With the beard and his tangled mane of black hair, he could have passed as a Biblical prophet. Forget forty days wandering the wilderness; this guy looked like he’d spent years living in a cave.

  Fascinated by that feral profile, Darcy leaned closer. With his strong, heavy nose and thick black eyebrows, he should have been intimidating. Yet for all his wild looks, there was something strangely innocent about him.

  It took Darcy a minute to work out what was so odd about the man. In her line of work, she’d learned to trust her gut when it came to reading people. Whether it was lines from a perpetual scowl or a ready smile, faces betrayed the personalities behind them.

  But not his. He must have been in his late twenties or early thirties, but his forehead was as smooth as a baby’s. There were no lines about his eyes either. He seemed…new.

  It was uncanny to see an adult face that looked so unused. Darcy had the weirdest feeling that he’d fallen from the sky fully formed. It was like he was about to wake up for the first time…

  The man opened his eyes.

  Technically, they were brown. But that didn’t do them justice. Mud was brown. These…these were the color of crisp fall leaves, or a glass of fine whiskey, or fragrant tea on a silent, frosty morning. Bright copper flecked the rich, warm shades, like sparks from a fire.

  Everything stopped.

  It made no sense. No matter how pretty, they were just eyes. There was no reason for her heart to suddenly stutter. No reason for her breath to catch in her throat.

  Yet as she met that calm, steady gaze, a rush of heat flooded through her. Her tongue dried in her mouth. He’d been compelling enough when he’d been unconscious. Awake…she wasn’t sure she would ever be able to tear herself away.

  For his part, the man just lay there, looking at her. His expression didn’t show the slightest hint of surprise.

  It was as though he’d expected to find her there, next to him, when he woke up. Like she’d always been there, and always would.

  “Oh,” the man said, and his deep, soft voice echoed in her bones. “The bitch.”

  Chapter 2

  There was no doubt. Fenrir knew the moment he looked into her eyes.

  Not that there was anything strange about that. He always knew a person’s name when he met them. There was no great trick to it. Any wolf could do the same.

  He’d never been able to work out why two-legs found that so strange. They were the strange ones, with the way they called themselves things like Rory or Edith or Joe.

  Those were just sounds. They weren’t names.

  Names were what a person was. Names were scent and self. You proclaimed your name with every action, every breath. No one could hide their name.

  With wolves, there was no need to turn names into words. But when he’d joined his strange new pack, he’d soon discovered that two-legs needed words to make sense of the world. He’d learned to translate for them, at least as much as such things could be translated.

  The one with the strength of mountains, embodying all the unbreakable endurance of the bones of the earth: Stone Bitch. The one who could be warm and nurturing, or fierce enough to scorch: Sun Bitch.

  There was Deep Bitch, with her true thoughts like quiet fish, far under the surface. And Sky Bitch, clouded and churning, hiding her bright, frightening power.

  But this one…this one…

  She was scent on the wind and meat in the mouth. She was the joy of the hunt and the contentment of the den. She was the howl and the moon, the wind and the fur, the heartbeat and the seasons and the stars.

  She was pack. She was life. She was everything.

  She was also, apparently, confused.

  “Uh,” she said. “What?”

  Pure joy filled him, singing through his blood like a whole pack howling together as one. Fenrir would have rolled at her feet in glorious submission, except it seemed that he was already on his back.

  “The Bitch,” he breathed, glorying in the sound of it, in her. “The Bitch.”

  Her forehead creased, which he’d learned was the two-legs equivalent of tilting an ear. “Did you just call me a bitch?”

  “Not a bitch,” he assured her. “The Bitch.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You might want to think twice about insulting someone who just saved your life.”

  Anxiety curled cold around his heart at that direct, hostile glare. If she rejected him, if she did not want him…

  He tried to flatten his ears in apology…but he couldn’t even feel his ears. His nose seemed numb, too. He could hear The Bitch’s voice clearly enough, but why couldn’t he scent her?

  No wonder he’d angered her. In this groggy, half-paralyzed state, his body language must be shouting a riot of mixed messages.

  He did his best to signal contrition, tilting his head to show his throat. “No insult. No challenge. No threat. Am sorry for offending The Bitch.”

  She let out a little huff of breath. “English isn’t your first language, is it?”

/>   “No.” Language wasn’t his first language.

  He was just grateful she could understand him at all. Most two-legs couldn’t.

  But of course she would be able to hear him in her head. She was The Bitch. He was hers, always.

  She was still glaring at him. He was sure that if she’d had hackles, they’d have been bristling.

  Fenrir became aware that he was staring stupidly into her eyes. No doubt she thought he was about to issue a challenge, like some idiotic, swaggering yearling drunk on his own newfound maleness. He dropped his gaze.

  “Sorry. Not mean to show disrespect. Just overwhelmed. The Bitch is…” he hunted for an adequate word, and had to settle for, “dazzling. Very dazzling. Am dazzled. Can’t think straight.”

  “Well.” Her voice smoothed, like fur settling back down. “I’ve been called a bitch before, but this is the first time someone seems to mean it as a compliment.”

  “Not a bitch,” he mumbled. “The Bitch. The one. The only one, always, ever.”

  He risked a glance at her, out of the corner of her eye. Her lips curled upward, like a tail rising, just a little. His own tail thumped in answer—or at least, it should have thumped. What was wrong with his tail?

  The absence of sensation nagged at him, but he couldn’t worry about it now. There was no room for worry. Not with her here, occupying all his senses, his entire attention.