And then things went south. Alyssa grew moody and distant. He knew something was wrong but she denied it. Yet there were red flags all over the place. She wasn’t in the mood for sex, there was whispering into the phone, he caught her crying a couple of times—she blamed everything on her hormones. He decided to do something really nice for her so he took her car and washed it and detailed it to surprise her...but he found a pair of her sexiest panties under the seat. He put them on the kitchen table and asked her just what the hell was going on.

    “Where’d those come from?” she’d asked.

    “Under the front seat of your car. Care to explain?”

    She had claimed they’d been pinching her so she’d slid them off and stuffed them under the seat, out of sight and forgot about them. Then she’d laid into him for taking her car without telling her, and she was furious.

    Connie was getting desperate. He was close to asking Carlos for advice when it became unnecessary. He took some personal time from work one afternoon and went home with some flowers for Alyssa and a hope they might straighten some things out, but there in his drive was the car of a fellow firefighter, Christian Derringer. He was a little older than Connie, married with a couple of little kids, and he was a whore. He was a screw-around and didn’t have any conscience about it.

    Connie found them in the bedroom. He grabbed Chris by the ankles, dragged him through the house and out the front door, hefted him up and tossed his naked ass into the snow. All the way Alyssa was screaming, clutching a sheet to her naked body, raging at Connie.

    And right at that moment all of Connie’s ideals and preconceived notions collapsed.

    “I’m going back to work,” he told her. “I’m filing a complaint with the captain and while I’m there, you move out. Be gone when I get home.”

    “This is my house, too,” she yelled. “You can’t throw me out!”

    “Oh yes, I can,” he said. “We’re not married. Thank God.”

    “I’m keeping this house!” she screamed. “At least half of it.”

    “Sue me,” he said.

    His captain had talked him out of filing a formal complaint but he did move Chris out of Connie’s unit. For a couple of years it was kind of hard to tell whether Connie would pull Chris out of a burning building. They were never going to be able to work together again, but they were still from the same small town. Connie gave him a real wide berth. He sincerely hoped Chris would never be trapped on a ledge somewhere when Connie was on duty.

    The drama divided the firehouse. There were those who sided with Connie and thought he’d gone easy on the bastard. “I might’ve killed them both,” Rafe said. Rafe was the gentlest man in Timberlake. And then there was the other team—they were kind of a mishmash. Some thought Connie should’ve taken out his wrath on Alyssa and not Chris; some thought Chris was just screwing around and it shouldn’t be such a melodrama. “Get over it already! You dodged a bullet!” they’d say to Connie, like Alyssa was the only one at fault. And some thought all was fair in love and war.

    Chris had invaded Connie’s territory and Connie hated him for it. But he took the high road. He gave himself a reasonable period of time, maybe about six months, then decided Alyssa and Chris were in his past, they were dead to him. His secret was he might never be over it, not as long as he could remember what it was like loving her while she was loving him. But as far as others could tell, he had moved on.

    Of course Chris stayed married, kept running around on his wife, and Alyssa was still cutting hair in Timberlake. They couldn’t help but run into each other and after a year or so Connie told her he wasn’t angry anymore.

    “Connie, it’s the biggest mistake of my life,” she’d said with tears in her eyes. “Can’t we try again? We weren’t married, after all.”

    And he had said, “No. I can forgive you for what you did but we won’t be trying again.”

    Connie dated quite a bit. Hardly ever the same girl for three dates, always a beautiful girl. He had no trouble getting girls and no interest in being tied down. He half wanted half feared getting that feeling again—that lurch in the heart, that dazed brain, the fuzzy vision and lightness in the head. Rationally, he didn’t want to believe his one and only chance was Alyssa who would be so coolly and easily unfaithful. Emotionally, he had no interest in going through that again. Was it even imaginable that he would trust again?

    Not likely.

    * * *

    Sierra had to keep reminding Molly to stay with her; she had to keep reminding Beau, for that matter. Beau was a trailblazer—he liked to get out ahead of them and nose around. She wasn’t sure what she’d do if Beau cornered an elk buck or a bear. She had the small canister of mace in her vest pocket but she didn’t think it would do much good on an angry bear. She had dog treats in the other pocket and her water in her backpack.

    She kept telling Molly how good she was, how well she was doing, stopping every so often to work on voice commands. They were starting to experiment with “Down!” She had to add a little incentive, a gentle push on the head until Molly was in the down position. And she couldn’t help but fantasize her dog becoming the best trained dog in the universe. Of course Sully only said, “Let her get to be about four years old and you might really have something. Those goldens are the best-natured dogs.”

    The walks, at least one a day and sometimes two if she didn’t have to work at the diner, were good for the dogs. They were both less trouble, calmer. Well, except for bunny chasing. She probably shouldn’t have, but she hadn’t been able to resist letting Molly join Beau on a little chase. It just filled Molly with such joy. But Molly’s chasing days were now done. The problem came when the dogs had actually caught one. Beau, being older and better trained, just loped off to find Sully and present his catch and Beau soft-mouthed his catch so Sully could just release the bunny, usually back behind the garden shed. But Molly had brought Sierra a bunny that had been mortally bitten. “Oh God, what do I do now?” Sierra had wailed, horrified.