Her Wild Hero - Paige Tyler
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2015 by Paige Tyler
Cover and internal design 2015 by Sourcebooks, Inc.
Cover design by Dawn Adams
Cover art by Craig White
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.
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Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Prologue
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
Epilogue
A sneak peek at book four in the X-Ops series
A sneak peek at Wolf Trouble
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Cover
With special thanks to my extremely patient and understanding husband. Without your help and support, I couldn’t have pursued my dream job of becoming a writer. You’re my sounding board, my idea man, my critique partner, and the absolute best research assistant any girl could ask for.
Love you!
Prologue
Silver Butte Lookout Tower, Douglas County, Oregon, 2007
Declan MacBride gazed through his binoculars at the rolling mountains stretching in every direction around him. Nothing out there but fresh air, wild animals, trees, and solitude—make that lots of trees and lots of solitude. And that was exactly the way he liked it.
When he’d told his boss at the regional U.S. Forest Service office in Portland he was fine with a full-time post out here, the guy had looked at him like he was insane. Silver Butte was the most isolated fire tower in the area—no one wanted to get assigned here. There weren’t any trails nearby, so you could easily go days without seeing another human being. It was also too far from civilization for the ranger on duty to go home between shifts, which meant you had to stay out here for the entire tour of duty—usually a week at a time. Put those two things together and it was a tough place to keep manned, even during the critical days of fire season. The only forest rangers who got sent here were the newbies and the screwups.
Volunteering to stay at the tower for the rest of the summer had confused the hell out of Declan’s boss. But the man wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. As soon as Chet made sure Declan knew he wasn’t going to get any bonus pay, he’d given the okay. The other rangers thought he was nuts, too. They couldn’t understand why anyone would willingly isolate themselves from human contact. But Declan had his reasons, and he didn’t care to go into them.
Declan moved around the interior of the tower, scanning in all directions for any sign of trouble. Fire was the big concern at this time of year, but he was looking for anything out of the ordinary: poachers, circling buzzards, campers in distress.
He’d just set down his binoculars and grabbed his book when he picked up the sound of footsteps approaching the tower. He sniffed the air before he could stop himself, then bit back a growl. He rarely relied on his sense of smell. It was better than a normal person’s—way better—but he went out of his way to ignore what his nose told him. He didn’t feel comfortable experiencing the world that way. It made him feel too much like an animal.
Fortunately, his sense of hearing—which seemed far more acceptable to depend on—was good enough to compensate for refusing to use his nose. And right now, his ears were telling him there was someone about five hundred feet to the north of the tower and moving this way.
Declan sat down and went back to his book. It was probably just an adventurous hiker who’d wandered off the trail. Once the guy saw the chain across the bottom of the stairs with a sign saying the tower was off limits to the public, he’d go on his way.
A few moments later, boots were pounding up