Alaskan Fire (3 page)

Jack raised an eyebrow in a
manner that suggested she had just asked a stupid question.  “He’s gotta go
take off on the river.  Not enough space to take off on the lake.”  He gestured
at the 4-wheeler.  “Wanna drive?”

Blaze, soaked and still feeling
sick with humiliation, shook her head.  All she wanted to do was get home and
get changed.

Jack chuckled, green eyes
twinkling.  “Wanna get rid of the evidence, huh?”

Blaze peered at him.  “What?”

He gestured at her soggy clothes. 
“Evidence.”  When she just stared at him, he offered, “That you’re a dumbshit
city-slicker.”  The way he said it, it was the most obvious thing in the world.

Blaze’s mouth fell open, and
again the words, “You’re fired, asshole,” tried to tumble forth.  Instead, in
her horror, she managed to clamp her throat shut and only a strangled garble
came out.

If Jack noticed or cared, he
didn’t show it.  Chuckling, he threw a leg over the 4-wheeler, once again
exposing her to his tightly-muscled posterior, started the engine, and did a
tight U-turn on the muddy gravel lakebed and started them back up the hill,
Blaze clinging to the back end of the trailer as the bounces and jolts tried to
throw her off into the dirt.

When they crested the hill, Jack
slowed and glanced behind him.  “Still back there, Boss?”

“My name’s Blaze,” she gritted,
still fighting the urge to say something unkind.

He grinned, and she saw that
sparkle in his green eyes again.  “Okay, Boss.”  He turned back to the trail
and gunned the 4-wheeler again, weaving them back and forth on a long, yet much
more gradual, upward climb.  Birch, spruce, alder, and willow trees blocked her
view of the lodge through the woods, and she got only glimpses here and there of
a log structure before it disappeared again.

Even on the back of the trailer,
the bugs were bad.  Blaze had to cough and swat them away, despite being
drenched with bug dope.  Completely unfazed, a swarm of mosquitoes and tiny
black, stripe-legged flies landed on her skin and started biting her arms and
legs, sometimes even drilling her through the cloth of her shirt.

Jack glanced back at her as Blaze
killed half a dozen on an OFF-soaked forearm.  He grinned.  “Around here,” he called
over the engine, “We wear layers.”  He grabbed the brim of his green boonie-cap
between gloved fingers.  “And hats.  Keeps the bugs off.”  He slowed down to give
her a quick perusal.  “You might wanna find a long-sleeved shirt and some
workpants…loose-fitting.  Lots of city-slickers come out here without good
pants.  Bugs bite right through tight shit.”

Blaze felt another stab of shame
worming through her stomach.  She was dressed in fancy jeans and a T-shirt, no
hat, no gloves, and—because it had been such a beautiful day on takeoff—her
jacket was stuffed in her duffel bags.

Jack apparently mistook her shame
for admission to being a city-slicker.  He nodded.  “Gal next door, Jennie Mae,
should have something that fits.  Her husband’s about your size.  Real big
guy.  Built like a brick shithouse.”

Blaze narrowed her eyes.  “Brick
shithouse
?”
 But Jack was already turning back to the overgrown dirt track leading to the
lodge, and either didn’t hear her over the rattle of the trailer, or didn’t
care.  Glaring at his broad back, Blaze began to plot out exactly how she was
going to bring up Jack’s obvious lack of people skills without getting herself
re-introduced to Lake Ebony a few times for being a snooty city-slicker.  Some
of Lance’s stories had been…eye-opening.

When they finally broke through
the trees, however, Blaze’s breath caught and she forgot about uncouth cads and
brick shithouses.  The ten-thousand-square-foot fishing lodge was
not
what she had been expecting.  The grounds were unkempt and overgrown, its
paneling was much more weathered and gray than she had noticed in the pictures,
and the big windows were boarded up, rather than open and inviting as she had
been led to believe.

“What
happened
to it?” she
blurted, when Jack drove them around back of the massive structure, exposing
more ancient buildings in bad need of love and new paint.  The driveway to the
back was completely overgrown with yarrow and grass, the lawn speckled with
baby cottonwood trees.

“Owners abandoned it four years
ago,” Jack said, once again presenting her with an extremely interesting view
as he dismounted.  He reached into the flatbed beside her to grab a couple of
her duffel bags.  Hefting them each over a broad shoulder, he eyed the massive
building and shrugged.  “Just boarded it up and left.”

The realtor had told her
something about the aging husband having a heart attack, and the couple having
to pack up and move back to town.  With the economy as bad as it had been,
they’d been looking unsuccessfully for a buyer for many years—part of the reason
why Blaze had managed to get a ten-thousand-square-foot lodge, six
outbuildings, thirty acres, and all the machinery to run the place for only six
hundred thousand dollars.

Blaze jumped off the trailer and took
one of her bags—he’d left her the lightest, she realized, with irritation—and
struggled to lift it out of the bed.  Her eyes narrowed as she watched Jack’s
broad back swagger away, a bag slung easily over each shoulder.

All the height, none of the
brawn,
she thought, disgusted.  Viking warrior-woman she might look, Amazon
she was not. 

Gritting her teeth against that
irritation, she grabbed her duffel with both hands and lugged it to the back
porch, where Jack had set the bags down and was digging in his pocket.  “You
wanna do the honors?” he asked, dragging out a keychain and holding it up to
her.

Blaze’s heart gave a flutter when
she realized, for the first time in her life, she was standing on her own
property, about to enter her very own home.  A place that would, hopefully,
become her primary source of income until her death.

Tentatively, Blaze lowered the
bag to the creaky wooden porch and held her breath as she reached out to take
the keys to her dream-home.

Jack dropped the keys away and
held out his hand.  “I’m Jack Thornton.”

Blaze’s eyes were fixed on the
keys that now dangled at his side.  “Blaze MacKenzie,” she growled, ignoring
his proffered palm.   

“Blaze, huh?” Jack said, peering
up at her like an interested ferret.  “Why you called that?”  What he didn’t
add, but Blaze could feel hanging in the air between them, was,
…when you’re
the size of a gorilla?

“I don’t get cold,” Blaze
growled.

“Oh yeah?”  He kind of sniffed
the air, at that, like a dog sniffing out a new scent.  He frowned, his green
eyes watching with a thoughtful expression.  “Huh.  All that mass helps keep
the heat in, then, eh?”  He chuckled as if he thought that was somehow funny. 
“What’s your real name, Boss?”

She felt like snatching the keys from
where they hung against his leg and stuffing them down his throat, but years of
training on how to deal with difficult people made her force a smile. 
“Technically, it’s Beatrice MacKenzie, but if I hear you use it, you’re a dead
man.”

He grinned.  “Sure Boss.  You
gonna shake my hand?”  He was still holding his palm out.

“You gonna give me my keys?”
Blaze snapped.

Jack’s voice was calm but firm
when he said, “I like to shake the hands of those people I’m going to be
working with.”  His smile remained, but there was a wary calculation there that
Blaze found irritating.

She didn’t feel like shaking his
hand, but, realizing that she probably wasn’t going to get her keys otherwise,
she did it.

And, it might have been her
imagination, but the moment Blaze’s hand came into contact with Jack’s, the
handyman stiffened, his green eyes going just a bit wide.  His nostrils flared
again, and this time he bent and blatantly sniffed at her knuckles before
jerking his head away like a startled fox.  His green eyes lifted to her face
again, and this time, there was no mistaking the wariness there.

“What…” Blaze gritted, when he
just stood there, staring at her, holding her hand, “…are you staring at?”

That seemed to break whatever
stupor that Jack had fallen into.  He shook himself and released his grip,
looking, for all the world, like a weasel that had just encountered something
new and dangerous.  She could almost
see
him brushing down his hackles
as he scratched at the back of his neck.

“Well, uh, Boss, here ya go.”  He
tossed her the keys, instead of simply handing them over.  Then he took a big
step backwards, out of arm’s-reach.

That made Blaze scowl.  Because
she had been chronically affronted by the uncouth ass since the moment she had
gotten off the plane, Blaze couldn’t keep her mouth shut.  “What,” she growled,
gesturing at him, “You afraid whatever disease I’ve got is gonna rub off,
you’ll drop your testicles and grow tits?”

For the first time, Jack flushed,
looking extremely embarrassed.  He glanced at the 4-wheeler as if he wished he
could hop aboard and speed away.  “Uh, no, Ma’am.”

“I’m a girl,” Blaze growled. 
“You don’t believe it, I’ll fucking drop my pants and prove it to you.”

“No,” Jack said quickly, his face
reddening to a refreshing shade of crimson, “I know you’re a girl.  I can
smell
—” 
He stopped suddenly, hesitating, his green eyes flickering across her face before
quickly looking away.

“
Smell
?”  Blaze raised an
eyebrow, quietly wondering if Lance had been right and all those years alone in
the Alaskan Bush had been a bit too much for the poor bastard.  “Smell what?”

“Perfume,” Jack said, wrinkling
his nose in the very picture of disgust.  “City-slicker perfume.”

Blaze narrowed her eyes.  “I
don’t wear perfume.”

His mask of disgust cracked a
little, leaving what looked like nervousness and indecision in its place.   Jack
glanced again at the 4-wheeler like a man wanting to make a high-speed getaway. 
“Must be your detergent.”

Blaze crossed her arms, reveling
in his discomfort.  “I use non-scented hypoallergenic.  Better for the
environment.”

“Expensive shampoo, then,” Jack
muttered, using a scuffed work-boot to pry at a splinter in the porch.  “You
got your hair wet.”

…Which was true enough.  Even
then, she could smell the scent of Biolage mingling with the stale dirt-stink
of lakewater.

Still, Blaze scowled at him.  Something
was telling her that he wasn’t divulging the whole truth, and that bothered her. 

“So, uh,” Jack said, motioning at
the door, “You gonna open it?”  He was giving off the nervous energy of a wolf
that was just hungry enough to come sniffing at a human doorstep for its next
meal ticket, but was also ready to drop anything and bolt at the slightest
provocation.  She was pretty sure that, had Jack not needed the job, he
would’ve already been gone.

And he
had
needed the
job.  Judging by his worn clothes and the scuffed and scrapped-together look of
his four-wheeler, she was pretty sure the poor bastard was living on food
stamps.  After all, employment in the Bush was fairly limited.  This was
probably the first real job he’d had in years.

Blaze eyed him a moment longer before
turning her attention to the keys in her hand.  As soon as she started sorting
through them, Jack too-quickly ducked to grab the duffels—
all
of them,
this time—and threw them easily over his big shoulders.  He then waited
anxiously on the deck just out of reach, looking at anything but her.  Blaze
hesitated in picking through her keys, instinctively wanting to get to the root
of the matter, but her gut was telling her if she pushed the subject any
further, her handyman was going to disappear and never come back.

And she needed him.

Blaze may have known the proper
way to tally up a Balance Sheet and deliver a Quarterly Earnings Statement, but
she didn’t have the first clue how to unclog a pipe that didn’t succumb to Drāno.

Blaze found the right key and
inserted it into the lock.  She could almost feel the sigh of relief behind her
as she turned the knob and shoved the door open, revealing a darkened interior
beyond.

“I’ll start taking the plywood
off the windows tonight,” Jack said, following her inside. The place smelled of
old smoke, wood, and dust.  “Get some light in this place.”  He set the duffels
down inside the foyer, then started digging in his jacket pocket.  “Until then…” 
He fished out an LED flashlight and handed it to her.

Blaze reached for it, grateful.

Instead of handing it to her,
however, Jack flipped it on suddenly and shone it in her eyes.

“What the
hell
?!” Blaze
cried, holding up a hand against the blue glare.

Jack lowered the light,
frowning.  He started sniffing the air again, short, brief little whuffs, like
a confused bear.  “You ain’t a vampire,” he said, sounding stunned.  Just when
she was starting to blink the red dots out of her vision, he shone the light
into her eyes again.  “And you ain’t a fairy.”

Blaze snagged the LED flashlight
from his grip and yanked it away from him.  Growling, she switched it off. 
“Look, Jack,” she said, “I know you’ve been out here in the sticks a long time
on your own, buddy, thumb squarely up your hairy little ass, but you’re gonna
learn some people skills or you’re not working for me.”  She frowned when Jack simply
stared at the flashlight in her hand, seemingly caught between the urge to bolt
and the urge to snatch it back.  She switched it back on and shone it on his
face, making him start.  “You listening?”

Jack blinked up at her and
shielded his face, and she almost thought she heard a low growl rising in his
chest.

“Good,” Blaze snapped.  She
waggled the light at him.  “First rule.  I don’t care if she looks like she
belongs in steel and boiled leather, manning the helm of a Norse battleship—you
don’t call your boss a blood-sucker, and you
don’t
ask her if she’s
gay.”