Brynn Alexandra Sawyer had been born and raised in the small town of Spencer, New Hampshire, which was where Gray Emmons had decided to escape to after his real life had pretty much fallen apart. He’d been a fireman – next in line to become an officer, in fact – for nearly fifteen years, since he graduated from high school. He’d started out first as a part timer, then had eventually slid into a full time slot once a rare one opened up after someone retired. It was all he could ever remember wanting to do, and he’d done well at it, taking all of the advanced training he could – hazmat, EMT, everything – to make himself more valuable to the station and therefore less likely to be laid off if and when the city decided to cut the budget.

Somehow public safety always went out the window first whenever there was an economic shortfall.

But the last call he ever went on as a member of the Upper Haven, Vermont Fire Department was that in more ways than one, and it was almost his ultimate last act. It was a bad one, granted; a general alarm fire that had all of the surrounding communities contributing men and equipment, even if only to cover the Spencer area if another fire broke out while their crew was still battling this one.

He’d already been in and out of the burning apartment building several times by the time the Chief got there. City ordinances didn’t require that he live in town, so he didn’t, and he was always one of the last on scene, which was a particular bone of contention with the men, who were all required to live within the city limits. He was an arrogant bastard at best, and an idiot who disregarded the safety of the men under his command at worst.

Word had come from a couple of the cops doing crowd control, via some of the gawkers who lived in the building, that not everyone was accounted for – that there was still a woman and her baby trapped on the third floor of the old building. Despite the fact that Gray had already done more than his share – or more likely not even knowing that fact – the Chief sent Gray right back in to fetch the two, with his best buddy, Kesslar, at his heels.

Kess was a newbie as far as the guys were concerned even though he’d been on the job for over eight years. That was still newbie status for men who had been fighting fires for decades. But he was smart and he was eager, just like Gray.

It had never – would never – have occurred to Gray to refuse the order, no matter how tired he was. He turned right around and ran back into the building that was now more than half engulfed in flames, trucks and men surrounding it pouring water into it from hoses on the ground and from on high on ladder trucks.

It hadn’t ended well, and if he’d had it to do over again – a scenario he played constantly over and over in his mind – Gray would gladly have told the Chief to shove it, and then given him the reasons why no one would have gone into that building.

But it was too late now.

Two men went in to retrieve a woman and a baby. Four people should have come out, but only two made it, barely, by the skin of their teeth, as the rest of the roof caved in behind them.

Regardless of how he felt about his job performance that night, Gray was lauded as a hero when that was the very last word he would have used to describe himself. TV cameras and interviews and proclamations and awards were being given to him right and left for his bravery, even in absentia. The Chief was only too happy to stand in for him and Gray was more than willing to let the bastard sop up all the glory he wanted, hoping in the pit of his stomach that he would choke on it somehow, but it never happened. Applause for a job well done was the last thing Gray wanted.

He spent months in the hospital recovering from the damage done to him during the amazingly short period of time spent in that inferno that very last time. He had some lung damage, a broken leg, to say nothing of very serious burns over various parts of his body, not the least of which was a large line of scar tissue that marked him from the top of one cheekbone to below his jaw line in ugly, red, wavy lines of flesh that even had him turning away from it.

His wife, Sue – a busy nurse he’d met at the regional hospital when they were both eager overachieving twenty somethings – made certain that he got the best care possible, but he knew from the moment she laid eyes on him in his hospital room that his imperfections weren’t going to cut it in her eyes. She knew he wasn’t the plastic surgery type, especially when every consultation he had mentioned many multiple rounds of operations. He’d never cared much about how he looked, especially now, while she was a real knockout. Gray had always wondered what she’d seen in him, and now he knew that, although she’d been able to overlook his physical imperfections – probably in favor of sex, which was pretty explosive between them, due mostly to his own efforts since she had a lot of hang-ups and do’s and don’ts – before, she was no longer going to be willing or able to do so.

Of course she said that he was turning away from her as they drifted ever further apart, accusing him of becoming a grinch and a hermit because of the scars and his inability to come to grips with the outcome of his attempts to save those people, but he couldn’t imagine discussing something like this with anyone else. Despite the fact that everyone around him was pressing him to get psychiatric care, he couldn’t go pouring his problems out to a stranger. What did a psychiatrist know about being a firefighter, about laying your life on the line – and those of your buddies and the people who were depending on you to save them – every time you stepped into a burning building?

And, apparently, what didn’t he know, himself, considering the horrible job he’d done.

Sue would never leave him while he was still being lauded a hero, though, regardless of her unease at his new appearance. Of course not. That might make her look bad. But as soon as he was out of the hospital and able to get around on his own, he confronted her, watching how her eyes skittered away from him to look anywhere else. And she was a nurse, for crying out loud!

It was going to be a lonely life from here on out, what he had left of it, anyway, which wasn’t much.

Not that he’d been any sort of a Brad Pitt before hand, but he’d managed to do all right with the ladies, and his size had always been an attraction, especially coupled with a bit of charm and more than a little intelligence. He’d even been able to find one or two – before Sue – who seemed to have the same predilections he did, who enjoyed submitting to him, and letting him care for them in that very special, very intimate way.

Well, not any more, he thought as he signed the final divorce papers that left him gloriously unentangled and alone for the first time in a long time. No one wants Quasimodo as their dominant and certainly not their husband.

He knew he should just suck it up and get the plastic surgery. It had been really pushed while he was in the hospital, but he’d already been through so much already. And he didn’t really want to erase the scars. They were battle scars, as far as he was concerned, reminders of who and what he’d been at one time in his life, and he wasn’t much interested in erasing that, no matter how screwed up it had all turned out.

He was giving serious consideration to moving, though. Everyone in town knew him, and he could see how uneasy he made them now, feeling as if they should come up to him and thank him for some strange reason, yet put off by his appearance. Not that he felt he deserved the thanks in the least. He was just doing his job, and not very well, at that.

Everyone should have lived, and he couldn’t quite forgive himself for the fact that they hadn’t. And if he’d done it better, all four of them would have gotten out of that building alive.

He was sick to death of watching daytime TV since he’d been flat on his back in the hospital, and then home medical leave, and now disability. He would be pensioned off with a very nice stipend from the grateful city - as well as a hefty lump sum from the union insurance, having been injured in the line of duty - that was just as happy to tuck him away on a shelf somewhere where they didn’t have to look at him.

So he began to scour the internet and found a very nice place – one he knew he would never have been able to look at if it hadn’t been for the insurance money - outside a small town called Spencer, New Hampshire. He thought he and Sue might have driven through it at one time, although it hadn’t made much of an impression because he didn’t remember it. He saw the house, which came with a fair chunk of land including woods on either side, and a large, open back yard that sloped down into a stream. He’d be able to hunt and fish on his own land, both pursuits he’d learned from his father, who he heartily wished was around to enjoy it with him. Hell, he’d never get the old man off the place once he invited him!

Moving wasn’t a hassle when you had others doing it for you. He could have called on any number of friends, hell the whole department would have shown up to help if he had let them know what he was doing. But the visits had dropped off quite considerably from when he was in the hospital, especially since he’d stopped returning anyone’s phone calls. He knew he would be just as happy to have strangers do it for him that were paid to go away when they’d finished. And he was far enough out of town that there wasn’t anyone trying to force feed him the welcome wagon or be obnoxiously neighborly. He got his stuff moved in and then started to assemble the décor to his liking, but the first thing he did wasn’t to the inside of the house. It was to the perimeter of all of his land, to which he’d had the realtor give him a very specific outline, even before he’d bought it. He tacked “No Trespassing” signs up every few feet, doing his damnedest, despite the pain of stretching his newly scarred skin, to make sure that they would withstand a New England winter.

He wasn’t quite the hermity grinch Sue had accused him of being yet, but he was working at it. He wanted to be alone. Hell, he needed to be alone. He didn’t want to deal with any more curious stares or well meaning questions, or even pats on the back, especially since he certainly didn’t believe that he deserved them.

And it was just as he’d hoped it would be – wonderful and peaceful and quiet, for the most part, for the first several months or so. The nightmares didn’t abate, nor did the niggling survivor’s guilt, but he could cope so much better with it on his own than with multitudes of people gawking or – even worse – trying to help.

News of his arrival hadn’t gotten by the town gossips, of course. Everyone knew even before he’d arrived who he was, what he’d done for a living, and that they’d have an injured hero in their midst.

Brynn remembered the first time she’d heard about him, really heard something juicy. She was having breakfast one Sunday morning with Kim, was her lifelong best friend, who had immediately claimed the only padded chair for a reason before sitting down very gingerly and spilling her guts.

“I got more information for you about the guy who bought the old Sellers place out on Pike Rd, where you go take Charlie and the crew for their exercise.”

Her girlfriend didn’t look quite as interested as she wished. Instead, Brynn leaned exaggeratedly over each side of the table, alternately, bobbing back and forth, as if trying to gage just how uncomfortable Hank had made Kim for their latest escapade.

“All right. You can stop with the overacting!” Kim sighed exasperatedly, then whispered, “I got a spanking last night, thanks to you!”

“Me? I’m a perfect angel, I am. Whatever could you possibly mean?”

Batting her eyelashes and trying to look innocent didn’t cut it with Kim. They’d been best friends since practically the womb, as their mothers had been best friends and pregnant for some months together. “I mean that you and your ‘just one more hand’ philosophy got me in trouble when I got home, as usual.”

It had been Brynn’s turn to host their monthly girls night get together, and they had gotten to playing cards and Kim had overstayed her curfew by several minutes – closer to an hour, really - all due to Brynn’s very bad influence.

But she couldn’t help herself. Her best friend was living the kind of life she desperately wanted, and she considered that it was her sacred duty to get her into as much trouble as possible, so that she could hear about what happened as a result, and thus live vicariously through her friend.

Hank and Kim had known each other since high school, and had dated a few times the summer before Kim left for college. Hank had laid down the law to Kim early on in their relationship, that if she ever wanted more from him than just a casual dating relationship, that she was going to have to learn to obey him, and rely only on his hard earned cash to fund their entertainment. Then he did one of the hardest things he’d ever done in his young – or old – life: he stepped back and let her decide whether or not that would work for her. She had nearly done him in when she got back to him about it, not that he’d ever let her know that. And Brynn had been the problem then, too.

When Kim had told her of Hank’s ultimatum, she’d done her best not to reveal that what Hank had said to Kim was exactly what she was hoping some man in her future – hopefully not too far in her future – would say to her, only she wouldn’t be hesitating like Kim was, unless she had good reason not to trust the guy in the first place. And Hank – even just out of high school - was as trustworthy as the day was long, and Kim knew that better than anyone.

“But I don’t want to be ordered around by my boyfriend! And even my Daddy never spanked me!” she’d wailed to her friend, but Brynn knew it was crocodile tears about the spanking. She and Brynn had had long discussions about what they wanted from their husbands, and one of the points that the two of them agreed on, surprisingly, was that they both craved men who were the no nonsense type. It was much more surprising to Brynn that that was what Kim wanted, because she was the town princess. Her father made more money than anyone else, having invested early on in plastics, and there had never been a little thing her heart desired that hadn’t found its way into her possession at one time or another. She was spoiled and used to having her way, but wasn’t nasty or stuck up about it.

And here she was, balking at having exactly what she’d said she wanted handed to her on a silver – well, not quite silver in Hank’s case, yet, anyway – but on a platter, and a damned good looking one, at that.

Hank did not come from a monied background - quite the opposite. And he wasn’t about to let Kimberly’s father pay for their amusements – not so much as a French fry. If he didn’t have the money for it, then they weren’t going to do it, and if she didn’t like the fact that he preferred to pay his own way - and that he expected she was going to be on board about it, as well as following his lead and doing as he said especially when it came to money – then, as hard as it was for him to even think it, she probably needed to find a different man.

But he certainly hoped that she could come to grips with it, because he’d known beyond a shadow of a doubt for quite some time that she was the woman for him.

Even Kim’s father was urging her to date the guy, who acted much more like a man than he was chronologically, and certainly than any of the other young buck his daughter had brought home, who were all just looking past Kim at the size of her father’s bank account. Hank supported his family almost single handedly since his Daddy had left town, and he’d been working almost full time since he was twelve, under the table, of course. He had a knack for things mechanical, and the owner of one of the shops in town had taken him under his wing.

Evan, Kim’s father, admired the young man’s grit and maturity, and he even got his wife into trying to steer their daughter towards Hank. All of that pressure had actually backfired for a while, though, having the exact opposite of its intended effect and driving Kim away from Hank until she returned from college after graduation and saw him standing outside the shop he now owned, downing a cold soda, shirtless in the summer sun, nicely tanned chest glistening in the bright sunlight.

Hank was just under six feet but well muscled, with jet black hair he kept almost militarily short, mostly because he didn’t want to fuss with it. When he wasn’t working on someone else’s car, he was usually working on his own, or, in weather like this, out fishing with friends or working outside the small house he’d bought on the right side of the tracks, in a nice little residential neighborhood.

Brynn’s head had swiveled violently at the sight, too, but it was Kim who came up with who it was that had grown up so bloody gorgeous. Exactly the man she didn’t want to want.

Brynn, of course, couldn’t help but tease her about it. “I think I hear a rattle in your engine. You’d better drop me off and take it back to Hank’s place.”

She’d found herself unceremoniously shoved out of the car at her parents’ house, as Kim peeled away, to go and do exactly what she’d been needled about, of course. He’d been in the back of her mind since she’d turned him down that summer between high school and college, and had looked so momentarily crestfallen, but then had recovered and promised her in that preternaturally solemn voice that he’d be around when she was ready.

And that was what he’d said to her as she walked up to him three years later, still rehearsing a fake car problem in her head.

“Are you ready, Kimberly Alicia Houghton?” he asked, levering himself away from where he’d been leaning against the building to stand much too close to her for her comfort.

She was flustered in a way no other man had ever made her, so much so that she didn’t even think of asking him how it was that he knew her full name. She’d been known as an ice queen in college. No man had been able to touch her, not that some of them hadn’t tried their darndest. But no one had ever cracked that perfect façade.

Except him. He’d never been anywhere but behind it, damn him, right where she didn’t want him, especially with his self confessed tendency towards keeping her in line with a firm swat to her behind!

“I - ” She realized she was going to stutter and drew a deep breath, trying futilely to calm herself. “Brynn thought she heard a rattle in the engine. I was wondering if you would be kind enough to take a look at it for me.”

Hank smiled that slow, confident grin of his as his eyes took in every inch of her – and some inches that weren’t even showing, she would have sworn - making her blush to the tips of where her pink painted toenails peeped out of her barely there pink sandals. “I’d be glad to, but I’m full up today. How about you bring her back first thing tomorrow morning, and I’ll be glad to see what the problem is for you?”

She bit her lip, and he doubted she even realized it, but she also reached back and began to twirl a few strands of hair from that perfectly coifed do. It was surprising to see her so unsure of herself. Kim was a very self confident woman who he knew had graduated top of her class at Harvard. What could be disconcerting her, he wondered. It certainly couldn’t have been little old him! “I kind of need my car tomorrow -”

“Not a problem,” he replied smoothly. “We have a loaner.”

He waved her off and made sure she was well out of sight before he punched the air, then went back about his business as if he hadn’t just gotten an unexpected reprieve from the Hell of wanting her and not having her, seeing her tooling around town and not being able to just walk up and kiss her any time he liked, trying to wait patiently for her to come to him when what he’d ever really wanted to do was to barge into one of her classes at that ivy league college and throw her over his shoulder like the cave man she probably thought of him as.

The next morning, Arlene, his receptionist, came and got him in the garage, saying, “Kim Houghton’s here to drop off her car, but she’s insisting that we have a loaner. I told her that we don’t -”

Hank smiled at her in such a glowing manner that she thought something was terribly wrong. Hank never smiled like that. And then he tossed her the keys to his own beloved car, a Triumph Spitfire that he had lovingly restored with his own sweat and blood – and hard won money. “Give her the keys and tell her that Hank said to be very careful with it. She’ll know what I mean.”

Arlene was flabbergasted, but did as she was told. As far as she knew, and she’d been with him since before the advent of the Spitfire, he’d never let anyone lay a hand on that car besides himself, and yet here he was, giving away the keys to Miss Hoity Toity. She also didn’t understand the bright blush she got when she relayed Hank’s message in full, verbatim.

Kim couldn’t believe that she had taken them, with no doubt in her mind as to the implied consequences if she returned it to him in anything less than the absolutely pristine condition in which she’d taken it.