wanted to wrap his arms around her and make everything that was hurting her better? He didn’t dare do it, but oh, how he wanted to.
The radio came to life with a query from his brother Wade. “How long are we going to look?”
His brother Will said, “I was just at the firehouse. The parents are hysterical. All they could talk about was how they’re good kids—on the honor roll, varsity athletes. We gotta keep going.”
Landon had known someone was going to say it. They never gave up before they found the people they were looking for. Most of the time, they were alive, if half frozen and suffering from exposure. It’d been a few years since they lost someone on the mountain. He’d like to keep that record intact and knew his brothers, cousins and friends felt the same way.
The kids they were looking for were someone’s sons, grandsons, brothers, friends. Whenever they looked for missing people, Landon tried to imagine it was one of his siblings or cousins, and he tried to give strangers the same effort he’d give his own family.
He continued on, powering through the wet, heavy mud as he blazed a trail in the direction where the teens were last seen. No one knew how far they could’ve gotten before the storm intensified, so they were basically looking for needles in the proverbial haystack.
“Connor! Jeremy! Michael!”
He’d called for them so many times by now, his voice was nearly shot. But he kept going, kept yelling out the names every few feet, while trying not to think about the situation at home. Easier said than done. He liked thinking about her, loved having her living in his cabin, even though he hated the reason she needed shelter, and was upset to see her so undone for days now. Landon wouldn’t wish getting caught in a fire on anyone. It was terrifying, even when you were wearing fire-retardant equipment and equipped with oxygen.
He wouldn’t soon forget realizing the roof had fallen in on the room where Lucas had gone to rescue Amanda. Knowing two people he cared about were in mortal danger had been one of the most frightening experiences of Landon’s life.
His identical twin was his best friend. The thought of even a day without Lucas was unfathomable. A week after the fire, Landon still felt sick when he considered the magnitude of what he’d nearly lost that night, especially since things between him and Lucas had been tense after they both went out with Amanda.
She’d tried to be nice to them when they’d asked her out at the same time, but had ended up in a bad situation when both brothers had a great time with her.
Lucas had been so upset about the situation with Amanda, he’d left town to get away from it all. On that trip, he’d rescued Dani and her baby girl, Savannah, and had fallen for both of them.
With Lucas now out of the Amanda picture, Landon had been trying to figure out his next move, while also trying to get a read on her and whether she wanted to hang out again as more than just platonic roommates.
Before the fire, Amanda had stayed in Butler to work on a rewrite of her company’s catalog. Lucas had pointed out that she could’ve done that anywhere and had made the choice to stay in Butler, probably because of Landon.
Landon had been skeptical about that and had planned to talk to her about what, if anything, was going on between them, but then the fire had happened, and they’d had far bigger things to worry about ever since. So he still had no clue what she was thinking where he was concerned, but she was staying in his cabin, so that gave him an advantage he hadn’t had before.
For all the good that’d done him. In between her bouts of weeping, they’d barely exchanged more than ten sentences per day as they discussed what they wanted to heat up for dinner from the ton of food his family had made for them.
With her feeling so fragile, this was no time to push her in any direction. However, he was miserable from wanting something more substantial with a woman for the first time in his adult life and having no earthly idea how to make it happen.
He was jolted out of his thoughts by a noise that had him stopping to listen more closely. When he didn’t hear anything, he called out again for