Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 48039 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 48039 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
Somewhere in the background, someone wolf-whistles; someone shushes them. I taste winter and cedar and Axel, and the rest of my life lines up like candles along this aisle, one after another, waiting for a match.
He pulls back a fraction, breath mingling with mine. “Mrs. Ramirez,” he murmurs, testing it.
“Say it again,” I whisper, drunk on him.
“Mrs. Ramirez,” he repeats.
Cheers crack like kindling. I turn and the sea of faces hits me—the crew, my people, our town, eyes bright, happy, curious. Levi is in fact crying without shame. Dax is smug. Captain Cole stands stiff, proud, softer than he’ll ever admit. Ash lifts Holly into the air and she scatters the last of her petals right over our heads like a blessing we didn’t know we could ask for.
We walk back down the aisle under a canopy of raised axes—polished and crossed into an arch the crew made without telling me, a firefighter tradition I’ve seen but never wanted until now. Metal glows in lantern light. Boots thump in rhythm. Each pair of crossed blades lifts just enough as we pass.
The clearing becomes a party in the way mountain parties do—small, loud, full of food and bad dancing and kids running in loops until they drop. Tables hold trays of barbecue and winter salads and a cake Briar swears is structurally sound even though it leans wildly. Kiln-fired mugs from the pottery shop in town sit ready at a hot cocoa station beside something much stronger. Lanterns swing; the cold nips and Holly steals my bouquet and returns with s’mores skewers like it’s an even trade. I don’t care. I have both hands free and Axel’s palm fills one like it was made to.
“Hungry?” he asks.
“Later,” I say, eyes on his mouth.
He laughs under his breath. “Greedy.”
“For you.”
“Good,” he says, leaning down, claiming my mouth again quick and hot, a contrast to the kiss at the arch. His hand tightens at my hip, fingers pressing possessive, protective, obscene in the best way. “You’re mine.”
“Say it in front of everybody.”
He turns his head, voice low but not quiet. “All of you,” he announces, and the conversations around us drop, amused and ready. “You see her?”
Calls of “we see her” chorus back.
“She’s my wife.”
The cheer that answers is ridiculous. To my left, Dax screams into the night like a rock star. Someone pounds on the closest table. Levi attempts a trumpet fanfare with his mouth and fails spectacularly. I’m laughing when Axel swings me around, then slides his mouth to my ear.
“Dance with me.”
“I hate you when you ask things you already know the answer to,” I say, going anyway.
There’s no DJ. Just a playlist and a mountain, and that’s plenty. He draws me into him under the strings of lights, my palms on his shoulders, his on my lower back, the distance between us gone like it never mattered. We sway to an old song that sounds like the inside of a cabin at three a.m.—low, crackling, sure. People join. Couples find each other. Holly spins between Ash and Lucy, throwing her arms out like flying. Snow begins to fall again, slow and theatrical, the flakes fat enough to catch and linger. They salt Axel’s hair. I tell him he looks illegal. He says I look like trouble.
“True.” I tilt my face up. “Want to commit some?”
“Say when,” he says, all appetite and control, and I feel a spark catch low and hot. His thumbs stroke circles that promise later. His mouth brushes my cheek. His breath is heat. Every inch of me is aware of every inch of him: disciplined strength, quiet power, the way he contains everything but never me.
The song changes. He spins me out and back, the kind of move you don’t plan but your body writes because it knows the language. I land against him with a soft oof. He laughs quietly, then goes still, eyes tracking something over my shoulder. I turn.
The crew lines the edge of the clearing with sparklers in their hands, unlit, waiting. Levi winks; Dax grins; Captain Cole lifts a brow with a well? that makes my throat go tight again.
Axel kisses my temple, then steps away, and I feel it before I see it—the way the group quiets for the ritual they didn’t put on the program because it would’ve made me cry. He retrieves the small handbell from a velvet-lined box on the table near the arch. The firehouse bell, not the big one, the one they use for weddings and retirements.
He rings it once.
The note is clear, bright, skating off the river and into the trees. The hair rises at the back of my neck. The crew lifts their sparklers to the lanterns and they take, flame racing along wire.
Axel turns back to me. The sparklers glitter around us like a ring of stars. “Inferno to forever,” he says, a vow.