Page 3 of Burning Hearts

The spotter yelled, “Your static line is clear.”

He held on. Felt the tap.

Jumped.

Logan peered through the grate of his helmet while wind whipped the high collar on the back of his jumpsuit.

Above him, the rectangular chute that had been pulled open by the static line fluttered. The thing that saved him every time he jumped—by the grace of God.

How sweet the sound…of a parachute in the wind.

He looked from his chute to the plume of smoke where the fire ate up vegetation, then to the snowcapped peak of Denali and adjusted to land on course. Green hills rose up beneath him. The river, with its ice-cold snow-runoff water. Crags and cliffs where the earth tumbled down into the drink. Clusters of Alaska spruce trees broken up by red roofs and blue-capped barns. Dirt roads that would be their exit—once they hiked far enough that they found one.

The wind current changed.

He fought with the toggles, but a particularly hot gust whipped him over and sent him west toward the densely packed trees of the forest on that side. The area the fire wasnotsupposed to reach.

Logan gritted his teeth and struggled against the fierceness of nature. The last thing he wanted was to get hung up on a tree.

Everyone else headed for the jump spot, apparently not needing to battle this gust that’d caught him. He wasn’t a rookie! He expelled a shout of frustration.

Apparently nothing was going to go right for him up in Alaska.

* * *

Jamie Winters gripped the satellite phone against her cheek, backpack on, trudging through the Alaska backwoods like this was any other hike with her best friend Kelsey in Last Chance County. Not a last-ditch effort to save her brother’s sorry hide.

She said, “I took a look at the early projections last night. I sent over some thoughts. Overall, I think the concept for the tracker ring is a good one, and it seems like a solid investment for us.”

The board of directors on the other end of the line, with her on speaker on the phone in the middle of their conference room table where she usually sat with them, washerboard of directors. Friends. Colleagues. Mentors. People she kept around to be a sanity check in her company.

Samuel, her chief operations officer, said, “Solid is what we were thinking too.”

Jamie stopped to catch her breath. While the sun lit the sky, it wasn’t all that warm. She’d opted for a long-sleeved sweat-wicking shirt, cargo pants, and hiking boots that were now giving her blisters.Wearing new shoes was a bad idea.She was so far out of her element it was throwing her off.

This definitely wasn’t a city-outskirts hike up some leisurely hill in the foothills around Last Chance County.

No, this was Alaska.

She was climbing amountain, of all things.

Samuel continued, “It’s new, but testing has been promising. If they’re gonna get it off the ground, they need solid backing. Which is where you come in.”

Wewas more like it.Even if she was the one who’d started the company, it was theirs now. She hadn’t worked alone in finance and investments for nearly a decade. Still, she was too out of breath from hiking to say more than, “I agree.”

They weren’t going to accept altruism as a reason to funnel millions of their capital into brand-new tech. But Jamie liked that it allowed firefighters, both ones who worked within city limits and those who fought wildfires, to be located if anything ever happened to them.

The fact she’d been in longing—she refused to call it love—with a firefighter for years was beside the point.

The tracker ring technology had far broader applications than only aiding those who fought against the destruction of flames for a living.

This wasn’t about Logan.

She’d read enough memoirs of smokejumpers, hotshots, and firefighters to have decided to “cut a line” around those feelings—or so they called it. She’d starved that part of her heart of fuel so the fire that had at one point burned hot and heavy for Logan Crawford had since exhausted itself and gone out.

These days it was barely a smolder.

“That’s great news, Ms. Winters,” Samuel said. “I’ll send the memo that we have decided to fund the project, and inform the woman who created it that we’re giving it the green light.” He paused. “Unless that’s the reason you’ve been up in Alaska these past weeks? You’re close to where I believe her base is. At least, according to the GPS on the tracker ring you have on your person.”

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