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  Tasting Fire

  Steele Ridge: The Kingstons

  Kelsey Browning

  Tasting FIRE

  Steele Ridge: The Kingstons Novel, Book 2

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  Fire in one hand, ashes in the other.

  Studious tutor Emmy McKay fell in love with Cash Kingston over a biology textbook, never expecting the high school football hero to give her a second thought. But his feelings for her burned just as hot. All too soon, Emmy’s choices destroyed their youthful relationship, reducing it to a pile of ash. Years later, she has landed her dream job as an ER doctor in her hometown. Now it’s time to win back her dream man.

  As a firefighter and tactical medic, Cash Kingston is no stranger to white-knuckle situations. But when he learns his beautiful—and brilliant—ex-girlfriend has returned to Steele Ridge, he feels as if he’s standing on the roof of a blazing building. With no escape route in sight. Emmy is the only woman who’s ever had the power to build him up one minute and burn him down the next.

  But when someone targets Emmy and they begin to suspect the danger stems from their past relationship, it’s impossible for Cash to stay detached. Will the struggle to untangle a web of half-truths bring them closer together, or will it tear them apart for good?

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  Published by Steele Ridge, LLC

  Steele Ridge Characters

  The Steeles

  Britt Steele - Eldest Steele sibling. Construction worker who has a passion for the environment and head of Steele-Shepherd Wildlife Research Center.

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  Miranda “Randi” Shepherd - Owner of Blues, Brews and Books aka Triple B and Britt Steele’s love interest.

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  Grif Steele - Steele sibling. Works as a sports agent and Steele Ridge’s city manager.

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  Carlie Beth Parrish - Steele Ridge’s only blacksmith and Grif Steele’s love interest.

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  Reid Steele - Steele sibling. Former Green Beret and head of Steele Ridge Training Academy.

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  Brynne Whitfield - Owner of La Belle Style boutique in Steele Ridge and love interest of Reid Steele.

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  Mikayla “Micki” Steele - Steele sibling and Jonah’s twin. Master hacker.

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  Gage Barber - Injured Green Beret and Reid Steele’s close friend who comes to Steele Ridge to help run the training center. Love interest of Micki Steele.

  Jonah Steele - Steele sibling and Micki’s twin. Video game mogul and former owner of the billion-dollar company, Steele Trap. Responsible for saving the town of Steele Ridge, formerly known as Canyon Ridge.

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  Tessa Martin - Former in-house psychologist at Steele Trap and Jonah Steele’s love interest.

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  Evie Steele - Youngest Steele sibling. Travel nurse.

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  Derek “Deke” Conrad - Commander of SONR (Special Operations for Natural Resources) group and love interest of Evie Steele.

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  Joan Steele - Mother of the six Steele siblings.

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  Eddy Steele - Father of the six Steele siblings.

  Contents

  Steele Ridge Characters

  Steele Ridge: The Kingstons

  Steele Ridge: The Steeles

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Discover More Steele Ridge

  Also by Kelsey Browning

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Steele Ridge: The Kingstons

  Craving HEAT, Book 1

  Tasting FIRE, Book 2

  Searing NEED, Book 3 (October 2018)

  Striking EDGE, Book 4 (Coming 2019)

  Burning ACHE, Book 5 (Coming 2019)

  Don’t miss out on a single release—or sexy hero!

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  Want to help Kelsey, Tracey, and Adrienne get the word out about their Steele Ridge series? Write a review and/or recommend to a friend!

  Steele Ridge: The Steeles

  The BEGINNING, A Novella, Book 1

  Going HARD, Book 2

  Living FAST, Book 3

  Loving DEEP, Book 4

  Breaking FREE, Book 5

  Roaming WILD, Book 6

  Stripping BARE, Book 7

  Enduring LOVE, A Novella, Book 8

  To all the first responders and emergency room professionals who put others’ health and safety above your own. You are the real heroes.

  Author’s Note

  When I began writing romance, I stuck with happy-shiny contemporary stories. They’ve always been my first love as a reader. But when the opportunity arose to collaborate with two of my best writing friends, I knew I would have to jump off into the world of romantic suspense.

  By virtue of what they are, RS stories are darker and twistier. As authors, we pull from the world around us, even though it’s anything but easy to fictionalize devastating events. The plot for this story was brainstormed before the last tragic rash of school shootings.

  As the mother of a recent high school graduate, my blood runs cold every time I see that children are perpetrating these unspeakable acts. Tasting Fire isn’t in any way a political statement. It’s just the story that these characters demanded.

  Any sympathy I can offer those families fractured by real school violence is completely inadequate. I tried to honor your children by protecting the ones in this book.

  1

  Every day was crazy in the Baltimore General ER. Some days, it was merely batshit. Others, it was coked-up honey badger.

  Today qualified as full-on HB level.

  “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” Dr. Emerson McKay chanted as she carefully navigated an intubation tube down the throat of a kid who, in no version of this world, should be lying on a hospital bed. “Someone page Dr. Zopher!” He was the best trauma surgeon in the hospital.

  “Done,” Susan, one of Emmy’s favorite nurses, said as she finished hanging packed red blood cells and inserting a line into the boy’s arm.

  Although David Hernandez had been breathing—barely—when he was brought in, things had degraded as soon as he was transferred off the stretcher. A gunshot to the chest would do that to a person, especially someone who didn’t weigh in at more than eighty pounds. The boy’s brown skin tone had leached away to a sickly yellow, and now he was completely unresponsive.

  Once she had the tube in, Emmy tried to staunch the flood of blood coming from the entry wound in the boy’s chest. They’d found no exit wound, which meant a bullet was still lodged in that little body somewhere. “He needs to get to the OR now.”

  But with her years of professional experience and the heavy feeling in her heart, she knew it wouldn’t matter. He still wasn’t breathing an
d blood was raining from his chest, down the bed, and onto the floor.

  “Dr. McKay, he’s gone.” Susan said in a soothing tone, one a person might use with a wounded animal.

  Emmy’s hands stilled and she took a shuddering breath. A glance up at the clock and she said flatly, “Time of death, 2207.”

  From out in the hallway came a flurry of crying and fast-paced Spanish and English. “Mijo. Where is my Davido?” A wailing woman not much bigger than the boy on the bed came bull-charging into the room, pushing aside hospital staff twice her size. She took one look at her son, and it was if all the bones in her body were suddenly yanked out.

  Emmy caught her before she hit the floor, smearing bloody handprints all over the woman’s shirt. “Someone take her and any other family members to an empty room. I’ll be out to talk with them in a few minutes.”

  Then she took a last look at her doomed patient and gently closed his eyes. “Lo siento, Davido.”

  In the staff restroom, Emmy ducked her head to keep from looking at her reflection while she was cleaning up. But it didn’t require a mirror to tell her that her normally neatly braided hair was like cotton candy during a North Carolina summer, sticking to her face and neck even though it was February and in the thirties outside.

  She smoothed it back, but the motion didn’t make her feel any steadier about talking with David’s family. It didn’t matter how many times she’d broken news like this. It never, ever, became easier.

  She couldn’t blame her hair for resisting.

  She wanted to ditch her composure, too.

  But working in the ER didn’t afford her that luxury. She had to stay calm when others were chaotic. Stoic when others were unsettled. Detached when others were dying.

  Screw detachment.

  What she needed was a few minutes of lose-her-shit. But that couldn’t happen even if she didn’t have to face a devastated family, because there was no place private enough tonight. Every bed was filled, and someone might walk into the break room or medication room if she was indulging in an emotional meltdown there.

  “Breathe,” she whispered to herself as she strode out of the restroom and caught Susan’s eye.

  “I put them in that little alcove near room one. That was the best I could do.”

  Unwilling—ever—to look down on the family, Emmy sought out David’s mother and knelt to take the woman’s hands. “Mrs. Hernandez?”

  “Si. Yes.” The words came out on a moan of pain.

  The man beside her said, “I’m Manuel Hernandez, David’s father. My son, he will be okay?”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Hernandez”—Emmy looked directly into their faces—“we did everything we could, but David’s injuries were too severe. He died.”

  The woman’s grip on Emmy’s hands was downright painful, but she didn’t flinch. The pain was the least she could bear when these people had just lost their son. When Mrs. Hernandez finally released her and collapsed against her husband, Emmy rose and said, “I’m so very sorry.”

  She rounded the corner out of their sight and used the wall to brace her body as she closed her eyes. Just a quick second. She could allow herself that.

  “You should never say ‘I’m sorry’ to the family.” The sound of Oliver’s faint Boston Brahmin accent made Emmy’s back tense. “It implies fault.”

  She opened her eyes to face him. Somehow, his dark good looks and lean body always took her by surprise. Handsome was too pedestrian a description for Dr. Oliver Amory. He looked as if he’d just stepped off a runway showcasing the newest in medical fashion. Crisp white coat, glossy black loafers, and a Burberry plaid tie secured with a double Windsor knot. Never a single because that would’ve thrown off the symmetrical perfection that was Oliver.

  “No, it implies empathy,” she tried to say without injecting her tone with a sharpness that would spur a debate. “What brings you to the hospital this time of night?” As the hospital’s chief of staff, he kept fairly normal hours. And she knew for a fact that he wasn’t on call.

  Oliver’s flash of a smile should’ve revved up Emmy’s hormones, her heart. After all, he was the man she shared a bed with, at least when their schedules lined up. But tonight, his polished self-confidence did nothing to alleviate the churn in her stomach or the regret in her soul. “I came to see you, of course.”

  “Oliver, we’re slammed. Have been all night even before the Hernandez boy, and I’m buried under a stack of paperwork.”

  His smile didn’t waver as he took her elbow and led her into the center of the ER where the staff computers and long community desks sat. “Don’t worry. This won’t take long, and then you can get back to things.” He waved an arm and called out to the staff within hearing distance, “Everyone over here. I need your attention for a few minutes, people.”

  As usual, they heeded the self-assured tone in Oliver’s voice and gathered around the counter Emmy and Oliver were standing behind. Once they were obediently lined up, Oliver reached into the pocket of his monogrammed lab coat and withdrew a box.

  A blue box. One that had Tiffany & Co. printed in black across the top.

  What felt like glass shards pierced Emmy’s already shredded stomach. That wasn’t… He wasn’t… He couldn’t be…

  But Oliver pulled a black box from inside the blue one, lifted the lid, and said, “Emerson Louise McKay, be my wife.”

  No bended knee. No flowery words. No declaration of love. Hell, it wasn’t even a question.

  Just a statement that he expected her to obey like the ER staff who had unquestioningly listened to him.

  As Emmy stared at the six-pronged platinum solitaire, no words came to her. Her mind was a void.

  Until it filled with pictures of the past.

  Another ring. Another time. Another man.

  When Cash Kingston had asked her to marry him, he’d only been eighteen, but he’d been everything Emmy had ever wanted in a man. Except he’d lacked one thing. One very important quality. Motivation. A hunger for more.

  A crowd—a hundred times the size of this one—had gathered around. After all, the Mountain Springfest was one of the biggest events in Western North Carolina. That day, Cash was wearing a smile and the Levi’s she’d saved up for to give him for Christmas. He certainly didn’t lack for an audience. He tugged her up on the temporary stage, dropped dramatically to one knee, and offered her forever.

  And she just stood there, the yes she wanted to say held back by the no she needed to say. The reality of her rejection slowly seeped into Cash’s beautiful brown eyes and they turned muddy with sorrow and betrayal. The onlookers grew restless and uncomfortable, their whispers and speculations whipping through the gathering like a sudden wind.

  Cash was nothing if not proud, and he came to his feet with a self-confidence that few young men could’ve pulled off. He flashed a smile at the crowd. No one but Emmy seemed to realize it wasn’t real. Cash’s genuine smile always brought out the sexy groove in his left cheek.

  And he said, “It was just a joke, y’all. Remember, this is April Fool’s Day. And this ring, it’s just a piece of crap I got from a machine at Hoffman’s Grocery.”

  He tossed it in the air, but Emmy caught it before it could fall to the stage floor. She squeezed it tightly enough to leave a circle embossed on her palm.

  Cash hopped off the platform and into the crowd. Still playing a part, he turned to reach for Emmy’s hand as if to help her off the stage, but she slowly shook her head and stumbled away to trip down the rickety stairs at the back.

  By the time she’d gotten her breath and composure back enough to look for him, he’d disappeared. The next day, she went to his house, only to be informed by his younger brother Shep that “Cash doesn’t want that cheap piece of shit and said to keep the damn ring.”

  At home, she’d carefully placed the white gold circlet inset with a trio of diamond chips into the shoe box filled with her silver high heels, the ones she’d worked so hard to afford. The ones she was supposed to we
ar to the senior prom. Only now she had no date, and when prom night came, apparently Cash was out partying down at Deadman’s Creek with some of his buddies.

  And when she heard he was so hungover the next day that he’d blown off the SAT test, she knew she’d made the right call.

  Cash Kingston had no drive to be anything but a small-town boy. And Emerson McKay wanted the world.