Free Fahrenheit by Capri Montgomery Page A

to do to beautify the area once again.”
    “Well you see it’s like this;” Mayor Townsend leaned forward. “We thought we were going to get a direct hit with that hurricane and we didn’t. The rain we managed to get didn’t fully take us out of the danger zone for wild fires. We managed to go from level alert of Extreme to Very High. That does not make for easy breathing right now. If the wind picks up that fire could reignite to something bigger. Not to mention the fact that we still have a few other smaller fires that we want to get contained as soon as possible. The last thing we need is for one of them to jump the fire line or the highway and cause even bigger threats to homes and lives.”
    Eve kept the smile from gracing her lips. Mayor Townsend kept including himself as if he were the one out there on the front line fighting the fires. Of course he would. He wanted favorable press and there was nothing more favorable than having the spotlight on him and not the firefighters actually out there doing the work. This was all show for him. It was why he insisted she photograph him from his right side and not his left. She had to be sure to use the natural lighting coming in through his sparkling clear glass windows, no flash photography was allowed. She didn’t use flash often because she hated the look herself, but the mayor’s obsession with looking good on camera was getting a little tedious. If he told her one more time to shoot only from the right, and only from a lower angle, she was going to do something she never did—she was going to shoot in the least favorable position she could and then give the picture to Mitch as the lead photo. Mitch would use it too, because Mitch was more concerned with pushing buttons than making friends.
    Eve knew Mayor Townsend wanted a lower angle because it made him appear taller and more in power. Basically, it made him seem like he was larger than life. He was five foot eleven inches so height really wasn’t an issue. It wasn’t as if anybody looked at him and thought, “short guy,” but the mayor wanted to be larger than everybody and since he wasn’t, making himself appear as such on photos was of high importance to him.
    She listened to more chatter about how he was doing everything he could to make sure these fires were extinguished before the damage spread much farther. She wondered just what exactly was it that he was doing, other than sitting behind his desk in his nice air conditioned office while the other men and women were out there with the heat from blazing flames scorching them. She had been on those fire lines and she had seen the hard work, the backbreaking, sweat inducing work that these firefighters worked through—the burden they carried knowing if they didn’t do the job perfectly, if they didn’t put the fire out, then that fire could jump the highway, jump the line, and consume homes, schools, businesses—and if that happened then the loss of human life would increase one hundred percent from where it was now. They carried that burden everyday while the mayor tried to get his photo in the paper.
    “I saw the paper this morning,” Mayor Townsend looked at Eve. “It would appear you decided to focus on the firefighter and not the fire. I think the containment is a bigger story than this kid.”
    “I picked the photo,” Mitch added with measured hostility.
    “She took it.”
    Yes, she had taken the photo. If she did say so herself, Adam was looking mighty fine in his getup, working hard, sweating hard, gorgeous, sexy, hot…she couldn’t look at the photo without thinking about him. Of course she wasn’t sure just where they stood after last night. He had said he wanted to go out again. He had planned a date for later today actually, but then this morning he called her to cancel. Cancellation wasn’t good; at least she didn’t think it was. He left a message, but he didn’t say exactly why he was cancelling, just that he would call