Emma waved her hand, and two windows flew open. A third groaned, its complaint vibrating up when it hit the top position. It sagged in the corner with an anthropomorphic middle finger to the witch. Smoke circled the ceiling of the room in a hurricane motion.

“Oh, no. Don’t you dare set off the smoke detector. Not again.” She jumped up, frantically waving her arms around the smoke. She needed to save her powers if she had any hope of pulling a vision out of the meditation well today, but she also needed a spell to suck the smoke out of the room.

The decision was taken away by her indecisiveness. The smoke alarm roared to life. It blared loud enough to be heard two counties over.

Heck, they could probably hear it in Pittsburgh. Emma stumbled out of her new empty white room—“her magical corner office,” she jokingly called it to her mother.

Shoot. Her socks slid on the newly waxed hallway floor. The meditation well sat in one of two rooms in the old school remodeled for the new business. A very secret business. Her pulse hammered in time with the blaring alarm. Her boss had told her they had two minutes before the system called the fire department. Aka the building next door. It was Saturday afternoon, and none of the people who normally helped her turn it off were around. The last four times she’d set the smoke alarm off, Carter, her boss, had come running and done something with the circuit breaker box in the hall, silencing it before Emma even untangled her limbs from sitting crisscross on the floor next to the meditation well. This time, it was up to her. Because the good people of Hundsburg didn’t need to know what was going on inside their old school building.

The gray panel dominated the dingy concrete blocks of the corridor. She flipped open the panel and stared at the breakers. “I’ve got this—I’ve got this.”

There were a lot of switches, none labeled with anything she could understand, like hallway, office, or classroom. Nope, nothing. Carter said once they had things up and running, he’d invest more capital into the building. Until then, they got what they got.

The alarm wailed at her, taunted her. She flipped the first breaker. Nothing. The racket continued. She flipped the second. The lights went out in the room behind her, but the detector still screamed, so she flipped it back on. Nothing. Third one? Nothing. Fourth, nothing. The breakers had numbers but no names. All fifty-five of them. Goddess. She’d gotten to the twentieth when the whine of a fire truck siren pulled into the parking lot, its screaming alarm competing with the smoke detector. She held her thumbs and forefingers together to form a rectangle and did a quick glance down the long hallway. Crap on a cracker, she’d forgotten to reset the wards after she’d come into work today.

Panic pulsed through her. She needed the alarm off. And off now. She flipped faster, no longer waiting the half minute between flips to see if they did anything. Number thirty-two shut the alarm off at the same time the door at the end of the hall flew open—a door she had never seen open—and a firefighter stepped through.

The male silhouette in the doorway filled the frame. “Where’s the fire?” He had a radio in his hand. And when he turned to the side, she could see several more men behind him.

“Oh, no, oh, no. No. No.” She had taken her shoes off to focus. Because only crazy people could focus with shoes on. One step, two. She darted for the door, waving her hands over her head. “It’s fine. It’s fine. There’s nothing wrong. No fire, no fire. It’s all fine.” Don’t let them in.

The glare from the recent snowfall outside shone down the narrow hallway like a flashlight, the doors to the former classrooms closed and empty. Panic rose in her throat. Carter’s direct order was “no one is to come into the building.” No one. And the firefighters were coming in. A lot of them. A lot of super, super tall, fully equipped firefighters. And the first was scowling at her from under his large yellow hat with the fancy badge on the front.

“Sorry.” Emma skidded down the hall. Her right sock hit a polished spot on the floor while her left did not, and she turned to see what was happening. Time slowed, and not magically. Regular humiliation slowed time—it grabbed her by her big girl pants and gave her a hearty shake as she launched into the air.

The second firefighter’s colossal frame took up most of the door. Emma had already slid by the first one. She’d tried to stop, really, she had. The air churned. And she rapidly rejected multiple ways of using magic to stop, but not fast enough for her to change her sliding feet. If her arms hadn’t been windmilling around, the second firefighter would have caught her. But nope. His hands grasped at air as she flashed by him.

The third khaki-coated, yellow-hat-wearing firefighter wasn’t as lucky. Not at all. Nope.

Her elbows locked her arms straight out in front of her, and her hands landed on the chest of the third, extraordinarily unfortunate soul. And he flew backwards. They flew backwards. Her magic engaged, and blue flames flickered up her arms. Her power reached for release, a conduit to escape her frantic pulse. She reminded herself over and over to not let the good steaming hot firefighters of Hundsburg in on the secret of her witchness. But not soon enough.

Emma and the male flew backwards. His hands surrounded her waist, and her head landed under his chin. He bounced once on the pavement, and they landed in a dirty snowbank on the edge of the unshoveled sidewalk.

“Fudge rockets,” she muttered.

His brown eyes locked with hers, and Emma lost the ability to rub two thoughts together. She wanted to rub other things together. Preferably with a lot less clothing on. Thoughts of the two of them doing the horizontal tango bombarded her. What the heck? Her magical energy wasn’t bouncing off of him like it did all humans and shifters. Nope. It was sinking in. Into his scruffy face, with his irresistible square jawline.

“You okay?” The rumble of his voice vibrated through her, and her thoughts were returning to . . .

“Larsen. Ask her where the smoke is coming from, or at least ask her if she’s okay,” a commanding voice from the side of the building growled at them. “Then get off your ass and help.”

Right. Emma had gotten distracted from, well, everything. Noise clattered behind her. She tried to turn, but his hands gripped onto her waist.

“I’m assessing, Beck,” he growled. “Are you okay?” He removed his hands, giving her the unfortunate ability to get up.

“Yeah, I’m fine. I’m really sorry.” She tried to wiggle off him, but her knee slipped and landed in his groin. Her socks landed in a pile of slush next to his boot. The cold water splashed up her jeans.

He grunted, his eyes instantly watering.

“Oh Goddess. I’m sorry.” She looked at him and back at the door of the building. There was a lot she couldn’t let him see. “I’m so sorry.” She rushed to the door, leaving the brown-eyed Adonis hunched over the side of the snowbank.

Her mistakes weren’t going to lead her to the hunk of her dreams. She didn’t need men in her life. Other than her friends’ mates and their kids. Nope. Her heart skidded up her throat as she ran into the building without glancing back at him. There were at least three firefighters in the building.

“Hey. . .” She waved her hand to the open door. “There’s no fire. You don’t need to go in there. Everything is fine.” She chased after them. They’d opened the first two classroom doors.

Emma ducked her head into the first door. They hadn’t done anything to them yet. It was going to be a reception room when they got it set up. Boxes lined the wall, but there wasn’t anyone in the room.

“Hey,” she hollered down the hallway. “Hey. Where did you go?” She needed to keep them out of the room with her meditation well. How could she explain a pristine white room with only a yellow dot in the middle of the floor? She ran faster than her legs knew how to go, past another open door. But the others had seemingly vanished.

She needed a time spell, but she had to have the firefighters in her sights to do one. And they weren’t anywhere.

“Hello?” She ran past a series of empty rooms, including her own. At the end of the hall, she heard them laughing. In the workshop space Carter rented out. They were laughing?

Emma pushed through the double doors of the former gymnasium. The light scent of pine dust hit her nose. Four firefighters stood in the middle of Jack’s workshop. They were walking around like they’d stumbled into the Carnegie Art Museum. But Jack’s workshop wasn’t far from being art.

“Holy hell.” One of them had ducked his head into the Goldilocks playhouse Jack had been working on all week. It had a thatched roof, a rounded Dutch door with inset windows, rough sawn shutters that opened and closed, and the whole thing was half-size. The giant firefighter teetered on his knees with his full gear on his back, his head stuck into the play structure.

“Maddox, there’s no fire coming out of that chimney,” said the first one she had slid by. “Get the hell out of there.”

Emma glanced at him, or rather at the immaculate full brown mustache under his visor.

“Yes, chief.” Maddox pulled his shoulders out of the play structure.

“There’s no fire. I . . . I set off the alarm by . . . overheating my lunch.” Emma bounced side to side on her wet socks. She stunk at lying. Her stories crumbled like a sandcastle in the tide.

The chief stared at her, and she panicked. “What did you have for lunch?” he said slowly, like you would for a little child. When you didn’t know children and thought they weren’t bright. Two years ago, Emma had worked as a daycare worker for six months, one that specialized in young witches. She knew exactly how smart kids were, how quick, crafty, and clever kids were. Which was exactly why Emma didn’t work there anymore—because kids with magical powers added in were ruthless.

But Emma didn’t have an answer for his question. Slow or fast.

He’d asked a simple question, one she should be able to answer easily. So easily. She’d eaten lunch. She didn’t even have to lie, to come up with something. Granted, she’d had a cheese and lettuce sandwich, which would be an odd thing to heat up in the microwave, but not impossible. If there was a microwave in the building. Right now, there were only two people who worked in the building. And while there was a coffee pot, it was in a room not visible to non-witches. One she wasn’t going to point out to them.

Emma worked for tech mogul Carter Williams in his newest business, and she was supposed to be making something of it for him. Her. Everything landed on her. His computer programmers and data analysts couldn’t analyze if she didn’t give him the data. For now, she was working on her own. And in the meantime, one of her best friends on earth’s bear shifter husband was renting the wood shop and now gymnasium for his play-structure business. And normally he was here. But it was Saturday, and he and the guys who were working for him didn’t work.

The chief cleared his throat. “Lunch, miss. What did you have for lunch? Or rather, where is the stove?”

Emma blinked at him, swallowing hard. “Stove?”

“Did you set off the alarm with a microwave?” He tried to smile. She picked up on it, how the corner of his lip threatened to tip up. He was handsome too. In a rugged, older, fit professor way. Like he might teach Shakespeare or Yeats while making you do a ropes course. The wounded mattress that she’d kneed in the groin out front was hot in a different way altogether. Chief-professor Hot waved his hand in front of Emma’s face. “Maddox, check the carbon dioxide monitor.”

“It’s fine, chief.” The disembodied voice of Maddox carried over the top of the storybook cottage. “Nothing on the meter at all in here,” he said as he rounded the corner.

The three of them waited for her response.

“Do you want to show us to the kitchen area, miss?” the chief asked.

“The kitchen used to be over there behind where the Rapunzel tower is, Chief. At least, that’s where it was when I was in sixth grade. The last time I was in the building.” Beck nodded his head.

The chief tossed his hand up in the air. “I know that. I went here, too.”