It was Maya Jackson he didn't trust.
CHAPTER FIVE
MAYA WHIPPED around a blind curve on the two-lane lakeside highway, desperate to put some space between herself and Logan Cain. The interruption had been her perfect chance to escape. That room had been too small. And Logan was too big, too strong, too sexy— too everything—for her to keep her head on the case.
Every time he came close she remembered the heat of his lips on hers, the rippled muscles across his stomach as she'd run her desperate fingers across his skin six months previously.
She'd caught him off guard and he'd been angry, furious at the suspension, but instinctively, she knew he'd never physically harm her. Her traitorous body would do her in all by itself.
What would she have thought of him this afternoon had she never met him before? Would her gut still have told her he was innocent? Or would she have held on to her doubts a little longer? Their meeting had been fraught with tension, and yet, she couldn't help but feel that the Forest Service was going after the wrong man. It didn't help that no matter how she looked at the situation, it was impossible to separate their past from the present.
She'd thought he might use that one reckless, emotional afternoon in the bar against her, but she hadn't been prepared for her physical reaction to him. He was her suspect, for God's sake. She couldn't let him off the hook simply because she wanted him to take her up against the wall of the station, up against any wall, anywhere.
She used her upper teeth to pull her lower lip into her mouth, chewing as she worked things out. Without any evidence other than the ranger's reports and her tense chat with Logan at the station, she had no clear sense of the case.
Maya's GPS system beeped in warning a moment before the screen went blank. She was trying to find Joseph Kellerman's cottage, but he lived too deep in the woods for her car's mapping system to keep up. The pine trees were too mature and tall for her to get a signal. Damn it. She didn't have any time to waste. Not when she had a feeling that Logan would be trying to track her every move.
How had he become the hunter and she the prey, when he was her suspect, not the other way around?
So far she'd passed a dozen dirt roads that snaked off the highway into the forest. One of them had to lead to the cabin Logan resided in as a teenager. Eyes peeled for a sign with the name Kellerman on it, she ignored a honking minivan on her tail and slowed way down. At last, she hit the jackpot when she saw a hand-carved “Kellerman” sign nailed to a tree ten yards ahead. Maneuvering her car into the narrow lane cut out between thick tree trunks, she turned on her headlights for better visibility. The dirt driveway wound up the hill.
Several minutes later, her foot barely on the gas pedal as she inched forward, the single-lane road petered out. She parked behind a beaten-up old truck. Stepping out of her car, she was struck by the heady scent of pine trees and memories she wasn't quick enough to push away.
Her father had loved the forest and he'd taught her and Tony to love it too. She'd grown up in a pack on her father's back until she grew big enough to run along the trails, her chubby toddler legs moving as fast as they could, her hand in her father's.
Maya squeezed her eyes shut. It hurt just as much to think about her father today as it had last year right after the cancer had eaten straight through his lungs into his organs. Now that she was surrounded by hotshots again, she couldn't look at them without seeing traces of her father in all of them.
Logan's words bounced around in her brain. Did a fire investigator ever accuse your father of arson?
He'd been trying to get a rise out of her, but even though he nearly had, she knew that losing control of her emotions wasn't going to help her solve this case. Just the opposite, in fact.
Moving quickly through the dry pine needles and gravel, she pulled herself together as she headed for the rustic cabin. She knocked on the front door. The seconds crept by with no response, so she knocked harder. Finally, she heard footsteps.
A rumpled man with hair sticking up in a dozen directions opened the door. His wide smile took her aback, as did a clear picture of how handsome he must have been when he was Logan's age. He would have been just as much of a lady killer as his foster son.
“I haven't had a pretty girl like you on my doorstep in decades.”
She smiled back despite herself. “Mr. Kellerman?”
His grin didn't waver. “Looks like you found me.”
Another time—another life, long before she'd lost half her family and stupidly jumped a sexy stranger in a bar—she might have enjoyed bantering with a charming older man. Instead, she was all business.
“I'd like to ask you a few questions about Logan Cain, if you don't mind.”
“Sweet Jesus. You're not pregnant, are you?”
She swallowed her shock at being asked such a ridiculously personal question by an absolute stranger. “No. Of course not.”
Joseph frowned. “So you're not one of Logan's girlfriends? Although, come to think of it, he hasn't brought one around here for quite some time.”
She shook her head, praying he didn't notice her blushing in the dim light filtering through the trees. “No,” she said honestly, even though the truth was so much more complicated than that.
If those were Joseph's leadoff questions, how many girlfriends were there in Logan's posse? And just where had her midafternoon makeout session with him fallen on his list of sexual partners that day?
Women loved firefighters. Maya did too. How could she not? The truth was, she'd primarily dated firefighters for the past ten years, but that was before she'd finally figured out that firefighters always left, one way or another. Either they walked out on you by choosing fire first every time … or they died before they could.
“Who are you?”
She'd had doors slammed in her face more than once from people who were afraid of saying too much to a fire investigator. Frankly, she wasn't sure what to expect from Joseph.
“I'm from Cal Fire.” She repeated the exact words she'd said to Logan. “We're working with the Forest Service to conduct an origin-and-cause investigation.”
She never led with the word “arson.” It scared people. Made them clam up.
Joseph's deeply lined, scruffy face went white. “Shit.” He moved out of the doorway. “You'd better come in.”