There is nothing hotter than a sexy single fireman, as author Jennifer Bernard so ably proves with her Bachelor Firemen of San Gabriel contemporary romance novels. Following Bernard’s sizzling series debut, The Fireman Who Loved Me, her second scorcher, Hot for Fireman, is just the thing to fire up fans of Kristin Higgins, Susan Elizabeth Phillips, and Jo Davis’s popular stories of firehouse affairs. Return to steamy San Gabriel, California, where a sexy suspended firefighter, hoping to get back on duty at Station 52, is tending bar at a local dive in the interim…even as the bar’s lovely, desperate owner is contemplating burning the money pit to the ground.

It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation.

Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocence and enthusiasm, they traversed the city from Coney Island to Forty-second Street, and eventually to the celebrated round table of Max's Kansas City, where the Andy Warhol contingent held court. In 1969, the pair set up camp at the Hotel Chelsea and soon entered a community of the famous and infamous--the influential artists of the day and the colorful fringe. It was a time of heightened awareness, when the worlds of poetry, rock and roll, art, and sexual politics were colliding and exploding. In this milieu, two kids made a pact to take care of each other. Scrappy, romantic, committed to create, and fueled by their mutual dreams and drives, they would prod and provide for one another during the hungry years.

"Just Kids" begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late sixties and seventies and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. A true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists' ascent, a prelude to fame.