All Wrapped Up

Book 0: Pine Mountain Novel

by Kimberly Kincaid

Genres: Small Town & Rural; Women's Fiction; Contemporary Romance; Holiday Romance

Synopsis

Talk about a hot lead…

Christmas is coming to Pine Mountain—and it has a way of stirring up memories, good and bad. Nick Brennan may manage the Double Shot bar smooth as good whiskey, but his past is a hot mess. When he runs into a burning building to save a little boy, some people start thinking there’s more to his heroism than holiday spirit. And then the local reporter assigned to the story turns out to be gorgeous Ava Mancuso, the girl who got away.

Ava knows what it’s like to have a past. But the changes she’s seen in Nick since she knew him do more than set off her natural curiosity—his warm eyes and gruff charm have her instincts fired up. Still, all the chemistry in the world doesn’t erase history, even when Nick invites her to his little sister’s mistletoe wedding. Does he have a heart under all those secrets? Or is this going to be just another Christmas past?

Release date: October 1, 2015

Publisher: Zebra Books

Print pages: 291

Sample

Nick Brennan’s boots sounded off against the neat stretch of pavement in front of his apartment, and he inhaled a deep breath full of frozen air and screaming back pain. He’d learned to cope with an extended and somewhat brutal version of winter upon moving to Pine Mountain two years ago.

The pain was a little more difficult to swallow, but then again, the snap, crackle, and pop running the length of his spine was more rule than exception. After nearly two and a half years, Brennan had learned to suck it up and lock it away.

After all, there were worse things than blowing out a couple of vertebrae. Not to mention worse ways to deal with the pain.

Brennan stuffed back the thought, popping the locks on his Chevy Trailblazer and sliding into the well-worn driver’s seat. The Double Shot’s staff schedules weren’t going to write themselves, no matter how much his back creaked like a hundred-year-old staircase, and he needed to get to work, stat. Brennan might’ve closed the bar last night, and yeah, the four before it too, but his friends Adrian and Teagan needed all the help they could get.

With business booming under the new management of the burly head chef and the owner’s daughter, busy shifts were a foregone conclusion, especially around the holidays. Not that Brennan minded. All that work kept him moving forward, and that was a good thing. Because going back?

Not an option.

The handful of country miles between his apartment complex and the small-town bar and grill started flashing by in a late-morning slideshow of snowy pine trees and mountain backdrops, and Brennan cracked his window to take another deep breath despite the December chill in the air. Dwelling on the past and the physical pain that went with it only spelled trouble, and he forced the muscles in his shoulders and back to unwind as he slid more air into his lungs.

Wait . . . was that smoke?

Brennan’s pulse catapulted into go mode, his heart triple-timing it against his sternum even though he refused to let his movements follow suit. With his senses at Defcon One, he methodically scanned the narrow road in front of him from shoulder to shoulder, scooping in another lungful of air as he lasered his focus through the bare trees to the sky overhead.

Fuck. Definitely smoke. Enough to mean very bad things.

And it was getting stronger by the second.

Brennan swung the Trailblazer around a familiar bend in the road, whipping gracelessly into the parking lot of Joe’s Grocery. His palms went slick over the steering wheel as the building came into view past the tree line on either side of Rural Route Four. Black smoke funneled from the far end of the clapboard building near the roofline, billowing with enough density to kick his oh-shit meter up another notch. Fueled by nothing more than pure instinct and hard-edged adrenaline, Brennan threw his SUV into PARK and laid waste to the distance between his sloppy parking job and the front entrance.

“Joe!” Relief uncurled in his chest at the sight of the store’s owner standing outside the front door, despite the obvious panic on the older man’s face. “What happened? Are you hurt?”

“No.” Joe shook his head, eyes glassy and breath puffing around his face from the cold. “Caleb and I were stocking produce when all of a sudden the fire alarms started going berserk. I did a quick look for people in the aisles, but by the time we got Michelle from the register at the front and told everyone to get out, smoke was all over the place.”

Jesus. Something must be burning back there, and fast.

“Okay. If everyone’s out, we need to move away from the building and call nine-one-one.” Brennan turned toward the opposite side of the parking lot, where the two college-aged kids on Joe’s staff stood alongside a smattering of shoppers, thankfully all far enough from the building to be out of harm’s way.

For now, at least. Fires could turn on a dime and leave nine and a half cents change, and the smoke now steadily pushing at the expanse of windows on Joe’s storefront was thick enough to make Brennan twitchy.

Right. Time to go. “Come on.” He turned to lead Joe across the parking lot, ready as hell to let the Pine Mountain FD have at the building so he could get out of there and slide back into the shadows, when an ungodly scream stopped him cold.

“Matthew? Matthew!” The woman belonging to the noise came hurtling around the corner of the building from the back, her head whipping from side to side in a panicked search.

“Whoa!” Brennan looped an arm around her waist to stop her midstride as she angled herself toward the front door. “You can’t go in there.”

“My little boy!” She struggled against his grip, turning to fix him with a wild-eyed stare. “He was in the bathroom, but I can’t find him. I think he’s still inside. Please, you have to let me go!”

Realization punched Brennan’s gut full of holes. “Ma’am, it’s not safe inside. You need to wait for the fire department.”

“No.” She shook her head, vehement. “No, I don’t see him anywhere. He’s not out here. I’m going back inside!”

For a split second, the entire scene froze into place. Black smoke, foreboding and malicious, pushed from any exit it could find. The heat pouring off the building, demolishing the chill of winter from twenty feet away, was a clear-cut sign of a large, active fire within. Brennan’s brain screeched at him to restrain the woman and fall back, to let the fire department arrive and secure the scene, to not act impulsively in a way that could cost him everything. Again.

But then he caught sight of the propane tanks Joe sold in the summer, lined up in a chain-link storage locker against the side of the clapboard building, and he was done thinking.

“Joe, get my cell phone out of my truck and call nine-one-one. Tell them you have an active fire with reported entrapment. Round up everyone on the outside and stay as far away from the building as you can until they get here. Go now.” Brennan flipped his keys to the older man, scanning the grocery store for the best strategic point of entry. Damn it, despite all the possibles, this still had spectacularly bad plan written all over it.

He turned toward the woman, purposely slowing his words and movements so he didn’t spook her further. “The last place you saw Matthew was the bathroom in the back of the store?”

“Y-yes,” she sputtered. “When the alarm went off, I looked all over, but I couldn’t find him. I thought . . . maybe he got out another way, but . . . oh God. He’s only seven. You have to help him. Please.”

Serrated echoes of a different voice yanked at his chest from the depths of two and a half years ago, stealing the breath from his lungs and cementing his body to the asphalt.

You don’t have time for this. Your only job is to get this kid. This. Kid. Right fucking now.

Before Brennan could register the movement, the past was gone and his boots were crunching over the frost-encrusted gravel strip leading to the side of the building. The bathrooms were in the back of the store, and he needed to start there and work forward. Just because Matthew’s mom hadn’t seen him there didn’t mean he wasn’t there, and it was the last place the kid had been for sure. With the fire alarm going full bore and the building full of smoke, they could’ve missed each other, and at seven, Matthew had to be terrified.

Probably enough to hide.

Jacking the neck of his long-sleeved thermal shirt up to cover his nose and mouth before zipping his black canvas jacket tight, Brennan clattered to a stop by the side door, marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. Although it was ajar, he laid a quick hand on it to assess the temperature, relief splashing through him at the relatively cool feel of the steel panel. This had to be where Matthew’s mom had exited the building.

Calculating his surroundings with every move, Brennan swung the door open and stepped inside the space, squinting hard against the thick curtain of smoke issuing up from the floor.

Christ. Until it had a place to go, this smoke was going to be a major roadblock. He needed to find Matthew. Yesterday.

“Matthew!” The acrid air scraped a path into Brennan’s lungs, but that didn’t stop him from crouching down low and drawing in another ration of breath. “Call out, buddy! I’m here to help.”

But the bathrooms and the small office beside them turned up empty, and Brennan banged both doors closed behind him in an effort to isolate his search field and contain some of the heavy smoke. The heat had gone from zero to unbearable in about three seconds flat, and between the sweat stinging his eyes and the smoke clogging his path, visibility was pretty much nil.

Nope. No way was he leaving without this kid.

“Matthew!” Swiping an arm over his brow, Brennan tried again, the bellow burning in his chest as he called out over the clanging smoke alarm. “I’m here to get you out!”

The only answer was the incessant bell and the soft, underlying whoosh of unseen flames that told Brennan he needed to haul ass unless he wanted to die trying.

Pushing forward, he bent even further for breathable oxygen as he quickly checked the employee break room and made his way toward the main section of the store. Despite the high overhead ceiling, the normally wide-open space was cloaked in hot, soot-filled air and thin stretches of orange flames, and Brennan coughed hard against the sucker punch rattling through his lungs. Fully on his hands and knees now despite the bite of the linoleum through his jeans and the screaming tightness in his back, he forced Matthew’s name past the charred taste of smoke in his mouth.

Process of elimination told him the boy had to be somewhere in this room, so Brennan shuffle-crawled toward the wall to start a strategic search. Yes, he needed to move as fast as possible, but speed wouldn’t matter for shit if he missed the kid altogether. Starting in aisle one, Brennan clambered down the smoke-obscured rows, instinct thrumming through him as he shoved past metal shelves and cardboard displays. The first four aisles turned up empty, each one hotter and more smoke-laden than the one before it, and damn it, where was this kid?

Brennan sucked in a raw breath to call out again when a deep chill of fear plucked down his spine.

What if Matthew had gotten out safely? What if the boy was outside, right now, wrapped up in his mother’s arms, while Brennan was trapped inside?

What if history was cruel enough to repeat itself?

The barely there sound of a cough sank hooks into every inch of his attention, and he whipped toward it without pause. “Matthew?” The word flew past cracked lips, and Brennan crawled forward as fast as he could, searching wildly. “Call out, Matthew! I want to help you.”

“I’m here.”

The wavering reply sent a shock wave of relief through Brennan’s chest. A set of saucer-wide eyes blinked out from an oversized shelving unit half full of cases of water, and holy hell—Brennan never would’ve seen the boy hiding there if he hadn’t paused for that brief second.

“Hey, bud. I’m going to get you out of here, but we’ve got to hurry.” He didn’t want to frighten Matthew any further, but they’d been running out of time since the minute Brennan had crossed the threshold.

“I want my mom,” the boy said, coughing over the words, and Brennan instinctively pulled the collar of Matthew’s shirt over his nose and mouth to match his own.

“I want to get you to her.” Brennan calculated the distance between their location and the front door in his mind, weighing it against the return trip to the back of the store. The front door was the fastest route out, for sure.

Just as long as it wasn’t blocked.

“Come on.” Brennan stomped on the thought and reached for Matthew, who thankfully slipped from his hiding spot to crawl next to Brennan on the floor. Other than looking tearstained and terrified, he didn’t appear to be hurt, which was a huge mark in the win column. With one economical move, Brennan swung the boy to his back, and even though his muscles seized in pain from the added pressure, he aimed himself full-on at the exit.

“Hold on as tight as you can, okay?” He stabbed his boots into the linoleum in a wide stance, balancing Matthew’s weight with the need to stay as low as possible. Between the smoke and the tall shelving on either side of them, visibility was limited to only a few feet forward, but Brennan still covered the space with confidence. He’d memorized all the exits by his third trip to Joe’s, and by the sixth time, he could find the front door with his eyes closed.

Some instincts were sewn in forever.

Brennan rounded the corner at the end of the aisle, sweeping his gaze in a lightning-quick one-eighty before tipping it upward. Flames sparked like bright orange pinpricks through the haze of black smoke, covering a huge section of the far wall, and what little breath he had left shot from Brennan’s lungs, making him dizzy. Shit, this fire had moved fast, changing the game with each passing second. Which meant he was only getting one chance at the door.

And dizzy or not, he needed to take it now.

Locking his hand over Matthew’s interlaced fingers to make sure the boy had a solid grip, Brennan gave all he had as he stood and pumped his legs toward the door. Clips of daylight showed through the window, peppered with flashes of red and white. His muscles played chicken with his lungs, each daring the other to give out first, but he thrust the burn of both from his mind and ran.

Ava Mancuso flicked a glance at the GPS coordinates for her latest story assignment, absolutely convinced she was in hell. Or at the very least, purgatory, because honestly, she’d been floating between both at the Riverside Daily for the past five years.

And the only thing she had to show for it was an extremely high tolerance for grunt work, and a standing prescription for antacids. Double strength.

“Whoa. What’s the matter with you?”

Ava blinked back to the reality of her tried and true Volkswagen Jetta just in time to catch the concern-tinged gaze of her coworker, Layla Ellis, as she turned toward Ava from the passenger seat.

“What makes you think something’s the matter?” Ava plastered a smile over her lips, her voice mired in cynicism even though she tried to keep it neutral. Layla had been a photographer at the Daily for nearly as long as Ava had been a reporter. Or at least, Ava would’ve been a reporter if her tyrant of a boss let her out from behind her laptop to actually investigate a decent story.

One screwup four and a half years ago, and Gary had never let it go. All Ava had ever wanted to do was tell real stories about real people. Not in that overblown sensationalist way so many other reporters adopted instead of digging deep to do their jobs, but respectfully. Truthfully. With power and emotion.

Instead, she was consistently assigned to cover events like the Riverside Turnip Festival, all because the source for her first big story had spun more fairy tales than Walt-freaking-Disney.

Layla lifted one white blond eyebrow over the rim of her glasses, rooting through the camera bag perched across her lap. “Ah, let’s see. For starters, your sarcasm is thick enough to spread on a cracker. And secondly, no offense, but right now you’re wearing a face only a mother could love. So what gives?”

Ava’s gut gave up a healthy yank, but she lifted one shoulder in a bored shrug to temper it. She wasn’t about to admit that her mother hadn’t even loved her face when she was born, and anyway, Layla knew all about Ava’s work-related misery.

Her personal life? Not so much. As in, not even a little, not ever.

Ava opened her mouth to deliver a tart reminder that they were on their way to cover the Pine Mountain Elementary Math Bowl, but a sudden blast of lights and sirens glued the words to her throat.

“Holy shit, hang on!”

Ava swung the Jetta to the tightrope-thin shoulder of Rural Route Four just in time to avoid being sideswiped by a convoy of not one, but two fire trucks marked PINE MOUNTAIN FIRE DEPARTMENT, followed closely by an ambulance. Jeez, they were hauling the mail. In the five years she’d lived in the Blue Ridge, she’d never seen anyone take the sharp twists of Pine Mountain’s main road so fast or so furiously.

With that much manpower, this emergency wasn’t a garden variety burned pot roast. Heck, even those barely happened in teeny-tiny Pine Mountain. Whatever this was had to be substantial. Gargantuan.

Newsworthy.

“You okay?” Ava asked, sliding a glance to Layla’s spot in the passenger seat.

Her friend nodded, although her knuckles flashed white over her camera bag from the sudden swerve. “Uh-huh,” Layla said, but her acting performance sure wasn’t going to win her any Oscars.

“Good.” Ava stole a deep breath, taking a second to wrestle her pulse back out of the stratosphere before pulling back onto the road.

“Where are you going?” Layla pointed to the GPS that was currently squawking at Ava about her missed turn, but no way in hell was Ava going to the Math Bowl now. She gripped the leather-wrapped steering wheel with enough determination to make her knuckles sing.

“I’m going to find out what that’s all about.”

Layla pulled back in shock, her shoulder thumping softly against the Jetta’s passenger door. “Are you sure barging onto the scene of an emergency is such a good idea?”

“I’m not barging. I’m investigating. I want a Pulitzer, not a spot with the paparazzi,” Ava said, tipping her chin toward the stretch of road in front of them. She followed behind the ambulance at the rear of the convoy, calculating a respectable distance and then adding two car lengths just to be sure. While she had ambition to spare when it came to working a story, there were some boundaries she refused to cross. “But I’m not passing up a chance to prove myself with a first-rate story, either. Something huge is going on out here, and it just fell into our laps. I’ll be damned if I don’t at least find out what it is.”

The red and white strobe lights cut a painfully bright path through the smudgy gray shadows of the bare trees overhead, and a quick, relentless chill rolled down Ava’s spine at the sight of the fire trucks rounding the bend ahead of her. The image of a dark-haired, darker-eyed firefighter recruit flitted across her mind, knocking her heart against her ribs with an involuntary jolt.

Meeting a guy like Nick Brennan had been the last thing Ava had expected that summer after college, when she’d finally punched her one-way ticket out of Philadelphia and the upbringing she’d give anything to forget. But between his easygoing demeanor and his chocolate-smolder gaze, Ava’d never had a chance.

On second thought, meeting Nick Brennan had been the second to last thing she’d expected seven years ago.

Letting herself fall in love with him? Yeah, that had been the first.

The ambulance in front of her let out a sharp whoop as it barreled into a particularly tight angle in the road, slapping Ava back to the here and now. This was no time for a sap-happy jaunt down memory lane. As much as she might wonder what had become of the sexy firefighter-in-training, the past was meant to be left behind. Her parents were living proof that love could go as rotten as month-old milk, and no way was she going down that road.

She’d already walked away from it once.

“Do you smell that?” Ava’s senses sharpened over the pungent scent of smoke filtering through the vents in the Jetta, and she swung her gaze from side to side, squinting to gather details from either side of the asphalt.

“Yeah,” Layla said, craning her neck to look out the passenger window. “Something is on fire, and whatever it is, it’s close.”

The thin, gray haze that Ava had chalked up to road dust was becoming unmistakably thicker by the second, and she did a mental tally of the buildings in the immediate area. Nearly everything in Pine Mountain was located either at the plush mountain resort or on Main Street, where her brother’s bakery stood. The only three things on Rural Route Four large enough to require such a drastic response were that bar and grill she’d heard about but had never been to, the apartment complex where her brother Pete used to live, and Joe’s Grocery. Judging by the amount of smoke clinging to the air around her car, whichever one of those was closest was the one on fire.

And Joe’s Grocery was just around the bend.

“There!” Layla exclaimed, pointing to a clearing in the thick trees lining the road. The fire trucks whipped through the near-side turnoff for the grocery store, and Ava jerked her car to the gravel-lined shoulder of Rural Route Four.

Slinging off her seat belt and shouldering her bag, she thrust her feet onto the thickly wooded side of the road. “Okay. I’m going to get as close as I can to figure out what’s going on, maybe see if I can talk to any witnesses to get a story.”

“Right. I’ll try to get as many shots as possible, but I’ll probably need to move around a bit. It depends on the barricades,” Layla said, already in motion at Ava’s side.

“Just be careful. I’ve got my cell if you need me.”

Police cars blocked the far entrance to Joe’s, but they must’ve just arrived since the side where Ava had parked was still clear. Layla stopped to take a few quick photos of the outlying area, but Ava slipped through the snowy pine trees at the perimeter of the building, pulling her coat around her with a shiver. Her pulse hopscotched through her veins as the smell of smoke invaded her nostrils, prompting an unbidden cough from her chest. She flipped her cell phone into her palm and flicked the microphone icon on the screen, intending to dictate the facts from the outskirts of the area.

But the scene was so utterly surreal, she knew in an instant that any words she’d choose would fail to capture it.

The far side of the tall clapboard building was completely covered in black smoke and angry orange flames, and one of the freshly arrived fire trucks jerked to a halt in front of the blaze. Firefighters jumped down from both sides of the truck, scrambling to cover the scene with brisk, calculated movements. While the flames hadn’t seemed to reach the side of the store closest to where she stood, smoke plumed from the windows and roofline in a way that said they were damned close. The telltale shimmer of extreme heat blurred outward from the building, and smoke lifted heavily from the roofline, rising up to paint the sky overhead with fat smudges of foreboding gray.

Sweet Jesus. This fire was huge.

A heavy metallic clang rattled in Ava’s ears, and the brisk back and forth between firefighters as they readied the hoses and ladders for immediate use nailed her purpose back into place. She recorded a quick assessment of the scene, describing the details in her cell phone even though they were indelibly printed in her brain. A small group of bystanders lined the outer edge of the property, one of whom was a college-aged young woman who looked nothing short of distraught as she watched the firemen prepare to fight the blaze. Ava’s heart squeezed against her ribs, and without thinking, she stepped closer and put a hand on the girl’s shoulder.

“Are you okay?” she asked, and the girl turned, her eyes brimming with tears that she was clearly trying to fight.

“Oh! Uh, yeah. No. I don’t know.” The tears wobbled on the girl’s dark lashes, and she tugged at the hem of her cheerful red apron embroidered with the words JOE’S GROCERY. “We were just inside like ten minutes ago, and the fire seemed small. But now it’s really bad, and . . .”

“It’ll be all right, Michelle. I promise.” A pretty blonde in a chef’s jacket put her arm around the girl, squeezing tight, and Ava split her gaze between the two of them.

“My name is Ava Mancuso, and I’m with the Riverside Daily,” she said to the older woman, whose damp brow and disheveled ponytail told Ava she’d probably been inside Joe’s when the blaze started.

“Bellamy Griffin,” the woman said with a nod.

Ava gentled her voice over her next words. “Can you tell me what happened?”

“I’m not sure, really. Everything went so fast. One minute I was grabbing some extras before work, and the next, the whole back of the store was full of smoke.” Bellamy’s eyes skated over the scene, her shaky exhale puffing around her face in the cold. “I thought everyone got out, but then Kitty Wilson rushed out in a total panic without her son, and Brennan ran back inside—”

“Hold on.” The name pricked hard at Ava’s ears, but she shook it off in favor of the realization rocketing down her spine. “Somebody’s still in there?”

“Yes. A little boy got separated from his mother. The manager from the bar and grill up the road went in to try and find him before the fire department showed up, but now they’re here, and”—Bellamy lowered her voice, turning toward Ava so the young woman still standing close by couldn’t hear—“no one’s come back out yet.”

Ava pulled in a breath, and the acrid taste of smoke landed hard in her mouth. Instinctively, she narrowed her stare on the front of the store, her heart thumping a steady pattern against her sternum as she edged close enough to feel the heat churning off the building.

And then the main doors burst outward in an explosion of sound and movement, and a dark-haired man wearing nothing more than jeans and a winter jacket came flying out from behind the glass and steel with a child latched firmly to his back.

In an instant, the scene erupted. Paramedics swarmed forward in a rush of rolling gurneys and portable equipment, while firefighters closed in on the front of the building, knocking out windows to create an escape route for the smoke and closing in on the entryway with the hose. Miraculously, the man who had rescued the child sat upright on the gurney, appearing more irritated at the attention than injured from the fire. He fit into Ava’s line of sight for just an instant, leaning forward to look at the boy safely cradled in his mother’s arms.

Oh . . . God.

Absolute shock cemented Ava’s feet to the asphalt, and despite the pulse now going ballistic in her veins, she’d know that dark-eyed stare anywhere.

Nick Brennan, the man she hadn’t seen in seven years but had once loved with every last cell in her body, had just. . .