Hot Point (21 page)

After a long time, probably well past any apocryphal hundred strokes, he put down the hairbrush and began brushing at her face with gentle fingertips. He slowly shifted their position until she lay on her back beside him. His touch following the lines of eyebrows, cheekbones, chin. When they traced her lips, she kissed them, feeling too mellow to do more.

Inch by inch, he covered her with his caresses, by touch and by taste. Their sex had always occurred in stolen moments: from their first frantic encounters at Buck Lake, through the desperate need aboard the Bell 47, and even the ever-so-quiet love they had made that very morning in his bedroom, knowing his mother was down the hall. There had always been an urgency.

There was no haste to Vern's actions now. He slowly unwrapped her from her clothing, as if she were a precious gift, until she lay naked beside him. There was no covering over her, neither flannel sheet nor self-consciousness.

A lethargy had taken her, leaving her open to him, wholly vulnerable and feeling utterly safe. Her sole action was to allow her hands to brush over him; to cradle his head against her breast when he laid it there and listened to her heart for so long; to dig her fingers into his hair as he brushed his lips and tongue over her until the heat pulsed through her in cascading waves. These weren't the hard shock waves of abrupt peak and release. They were a gliding upward until she was so high that she could tumble and tumble with no fear of ever hitting the ground.

The candles were long gone and had been replaced by others before he finally entered her. This time they flew upward together.

Never in her life had she flown so high.

Never in her life had she not worried about the fall.

Here there was only the glory of a man proving how he loved her. A man who she loved back with all her heart.

“Did either of you sleep?”

“Shut up, Mark.” Vern wanted to jab the man in the ribs.

Mount Hood Aviation's base camp was very different today than when they'd left it. High noon, there should have been choppers coming in from fires, lunch served, service crews doing maintenance during the pilots' brief breaks—the mayhem of a typical day.

Instead there was a fall chill on the silent air. The three Firehawks, the drone launch trailer, and Denise's service box were the only objects left in the whole camp. The rest of it was empty. The Down Under crew was already gone, taking the four smaller choppers with them. The guide and jump planes were down in a hangar at the airport in Hood River because this camp would soon be covered in snow. They'd dropped their cars off at a garage in town and been shuttled up here. Even the parking lot was empty.

“Yep, we didn't sleep either.” Mark winked at him. “Except for the kid who made it through the night without a peep. Our one chance to catch up on our sleep and…” He offered a friendly shrug.

He and Denise had slept…at some point. Watching Denise unravel in the soft, flickering candlelight had been like nothing he'd ever done with or for a lover. She had soared and bloomed, grown and shone until he felt both all-powerful and humbled at the same time. The former because he'd been able to take her to such a place and keep her there for so long; the latter because such an incredible woman could choose to be with him.

But if they
had
slept, it hadn't been for long. He'd dozed off while watching her sleeping face as the candles guttered out. He'd woken to Denise's mane of hair sliding down the length of his body and back so slowly that he couldn't even tell the location of the transition zone where contact and the memory of it met and transformed into shivers of pure fire.

As much of a study of her body as he'd made in the light, she'd made of his in the dark. Using the lack of light to surprise, tease, and taste him, until his release had shattered him and left him gasping for both air and sanity, her hair lying like a smooth, soothing blanket from where she lay, then up over his stomach and chest.

And then later, she'd…

He blinked, trying to refocus. Denise the sexual goddess was gone, and like a cloak of invisibility once more completely intact, the mechanic now covered her as she stood in front of him in the middle of the MHA airfield. Well, there were some holes in the cloak, places where her shy smile shone through with a message especially for him.

“You're looking a bit goofy with that smile on your face, Slick.”

“You should know, Wrench, since you're the one who put it there.”

Her blush was pure girl, and her response to his hug was pure lover.

In easy harmony they began prepping Firehawk Oh-Three for the hour-long flight to Lewis-McChord and the long flight to Honduras in the belly of an Army C-17 Globemaster III transport jet.

* * *

Hot!
was Vern Taylor's first thought, and his second and third as he waited for the rear cargo door of the C-17 to open. He'd been mentally steeling himself throughout the flight. Actually, he'd slept like the dead across four of the fold-down chairs along the side of the transport's cargo bay. The deafening roar of the four jet engines, each almost as big as his helicopter, had been no more than a distant lullaby.

So he was trying to make up for it now.

“Hot,” he warned his body. He'd changed into shorts and a T-shirt before they landed.

After triggering a warning buzz, the loadmaster hit the switch. The rear of the cargo bay cracked in half. The upper part of the rear hatch lifted up into the ceiling of the cargo bay; the lower half descended to turn into the loading ramp.

A chill breeze slid out of the night and into the transport, wrapped itself about his legs, and sent a goose bump–laden shiver up his spine. It was laced with pine and tropical flowers so dense with scent that it would have been cloying if the air had been anywhere near warm.

“Where are we again?” he asked Mark, who stood beside him in jeans, a denim shirt, and a light jacket.

“Palmerola Air Base, also called Soto Cano Air Base.”

“Which tells me nothing.” Vern tried to suppress a shiver that just launched five more. “It's feels like fifty degrees. We're south. South is supposed to be warmer.”

“You're also two thousand feet up in the mountains.” Mark made a show of peering out into the darkness beyond the intermittently lit airfield. “Does feel kinda cooler tonight than usual.”

“You could have warned me.” As soon as they reached the bottom of the ramp to get out of the loadmasters' way, Vern shuffled off to the side and began digging frantically through his pack. He salvaged a jacket, pulling it on first, and then stripped to his underwear as the others hooted and hollered at him. He found long pants and pulled those on.

“Could have warned you,” Mark acknowledged in a dry tone, saying that he'd known exactly what was going to happen.

Looking up, Vern saw Denise standing with the others in the group, wearing a big smile and a warm jacket.

“I asked.” She tipped her head toward Jeannie, who in turn nodded to Emily. Thick as thieves, these three women. Four women. Carly walked up in a leather bomber jacket that would look damn good on Denise; he'd have to get her one.

He suppressed another shiver and did his best not to feel put upon. Everyone in the crew was appropriately dressed for a cool evening, except him. “Fine,” he muttered to himself, then looked around to see what he'd traded a trip to Australia for.

The airstrip was long and in moderately good shape; about half of the runway lights were working. They were at the far south end. Down the west side of the strip appeared to be open fields and a few low trees. On the east side were scattered low buildings and the occasional hangar.

“There's supposed to be an airline terminal midfield,” Mark told the group, “not a row of huts. The corruption and graft on the contract was apparently too blatant for even the Honduran government to accept it. U.S. Joint Task Force Bravo has the use of this building here, mostly medical and rescue, some security work, firefighting when it really hits the fan but it's not their specialty. The First Battalion of the 228th Aviation Regiment flies the Chinooks and Black Hawks you see parked here. We get the last row to the far south.”

Vern counted a half-dozen choppers parked in an area designed to hold twenty birds.

“They need to think we're a bunch of firefighter yahoos. No mention of Emily or my background in SOAR, nor yours in the Coast Guard, Vern. We do our work and stay out of trouble.”

“Is there a particular reason that we're here?” Denise spoke up before Vern could voice the question.

“If there is, they didn't tell me. So, business as usual. Fly safe and kill fires.”

Vern watched the loadmasters rolling the first Firehawk down the ramp and felt a shiver up his back. Last time MHA had flown one of these contracts, they'd come home in one piece, but one of their helicopters hadn't.

What was going to happen this time?

Denise could only stare out the windscreen and marvel at her new life. Even after a month it was astonishing. The lush, tropical mountain slopes of Honduras rolled beneath their chopper.

Vern hadn't been particularly interested—“they burn about the same”—but she'd learned to identify the types of trees from the air.
Swietenia
big-leaf mahogany punched up through the jungle canopy, over seventy meters tall with crowns forty meters across. The lower rosewoods contrasted sharply with the dark pines and the bright, cheery green of maples.

Almost the whole center of Honduras was tree-covered mountains with low-lying coastal plains on the long Caribbean coast to the north and around the tiny Gulf of Fonseca against the Pacific. Much of the jungle was a cloud forest, like the big California redwoods. Most of the trees were wholly dependent on the damp, heavy fogs for moisture.

It made firefighting in the country's west a real challenge. Over a week, the skies were wholly clear only two or three scattered days. The rest of the time they were dodging fog banks and coastal rainstorms.

“At least it's the dry season.”

Vern grunted. “November. The time of year when it's finally dry enough for families to gather together to burn some rain forest.”

It was the major cause of fires that they fought. Clear-cutting rosewood and mahogany was illegal, but that didn't matter because the wood brought a good price on the black market and put food on the table. Then the locals would farm the jungle soil for a year or so until it was desperately depleted, then clear-cut another section.

The problem came when they were burning the slash. A five- or ten-acre slash fire didn't know it was supposed to stay at five or ten acres. The MHA team would get the call, usually because Steve had his drone up on daily patrol and not because there was any particularly organized fire-spotting service. And it would be up to MHA to douse the fires.

“Sorry,” Vern apologized. “Fifth fire of the day. At least we're getting better at catching them small. Though I may start targeting the illegal harvesters and not the fires if they aren't careful.”

Denise let it roll off her. Vern was usually only grumpy in the last hour of the day or if he missed his morning coffee.

Whereas she still felt too much like a schoolgirl on holiday. She was able to fly with Vern almost every day. The maintenance of the Firehawks had turned out to be straightforward. Part of that was because they weren't often flying against big, mature, ash-laden fires that were heaving great masses of char and smoke into the sky. Less carbon in the air meant less wear and tear on her equipment.

Also Vern, who had much more mechanical aptitude than he'd originally admitted to, had become her assistant when they were on the ground. Between the two of them, they could get a lot done fast.

She'd only had to tap the mechanics at the 1-228th once since their arrival.

The chief had been nice, helpful, and had clearly thought he was helping out the little lady who found herself in over her head. All she really needed was his small lifting crane so that she could pull and service one of the engines, though she hadn't minded his help. It was a big job, and they'd managed it overnight between them.

For the first time in her life, she'd let the man think he was in charge and it hadn't bothered her. Vern had certainly been doing good things for her ego.

They'd set up housekeeping in the midsize, on-base studio apartment MHA had rented for them. It had a bed, a sofa, a dresser, and a television that didn't work. Everyone had the same in their quad, a single building of four units, except Jeannie and Cal's television actually worked when there was power. The one station they received clearly was in Spanish, of course, so only Steve could understand it.

Trips into town were rare. And when they went, they went in force, in a group, and stayed close together. Denise wanted to wander through the market, haggle for a fruit she didn't recognize and would never dare eat, and visit the cathedral clock said to be the oldest clock in all of the Americas, built in the 1300s and installed in 1586, decades before Jamestown or the Pilgrims. She did get to visit the clock, but she also learned that Honduras was the murder capital of the world. Every year, one in a thousand people were murdered—twenty times worse than the U.S.

“Next time, let's go somewhere we can actually visit the country.”

Vern was good with that plan.

Denise had never lived with a man before. She'd spent many nights of her relationship with Jasper at his place in town, but she'd kept the change of clothes and her toothbrush in a bag in the Fiat's trunk. He also hadn't liked that she had to leave an hour before sunrise to get to work every day. And on-season it was often every single day.

Vern was as easy to live with as he was about everything else. Slow to wake up but fast to arouse. The more time she was with him, the more female she became. It was a startling discovery in her mid-twenties. Half the time when she looked in the mirror, she didn't recognize the woman standing there.

She'd started wearing clothes not because they were the ones that were clean, but because Vern had said she looked nice in them. He held the door for her almost every time. It wasn't that he downplayed her abilities—definitely not when something was broken or needed maintenance.

For the first time in her life she felt attractive. And found that she liked feeling that way. She no longer felt out of place when she was sitting with the other women of the MHA crew with their daunting beauty, long legs, and handsome husbands. For the first time in her life, she fit in with other women. In the lazy evenings after nightfall, when it was still too early on even the most exhausting days, they'd sit and talk and trade stories.

At first it had been about fires and helicopters. But over time, the topics had drifted to old boyfriends. They'd traded stories of first meetings. Hers had been on display for the others to see, but they'd shared their stories, from Emily shooting a laptop computer to Cal nearly burning to death to shoot a photograph.

She'd also finally been told what she was sure was a very sanitized version of what had happened to the original Firehawk Oh-Two. The few details they provided were enough to turn Jeannie sheet white at a year-old memory and to make Denise glad that she didn't know more.

The quad had an
ama
, a cheery and competent woman in her forties named Rosa—how was that for a stereotype—who tended to the shopping and laundry for the whole group. She also introduced Denise's untutored palate to a wide variety of Honduran and Latin American dishes that the whole group came to look forward to. Rosa's mother-henning of them all was a great bonus because they were aloft so constantly and then doing the daily service on the choppers each evening.

One thing that Honduras had aplenty was fires.

The poorer peasants didn't care if their slash-and-burn was on a nature preserve or not. If they were chased out, they repeated their actions somewhere else. If they stayed, they had to move on soon anyway because the jungle soil could only sustain a year or two of crops before being totally depleted of nutrients. The soil had adapted for centuries to nurture slow-growing trees, not fast-growing crops. It took decades of careful husbandry to switch it over once it was clear-cut, a span of time that Honduran farmers with hungry families couldn't wait for.

At any one time, there were dozens and often hundreds of slash fires that had escaped. With the dry season now in full swing, the ones that escaped rapidly became a major problem.

MHA's job was to pound them flat as fast as they could. It was like a massive, dangerous game of Whac-A-Mole.

During the days, Vern had been teaching Denise how to fly. She'd thought herself fairly well versed in the basics; after all, she'd had her rotorcraft ticket for six years. Not even close. She could now pick up a load of water using the siphon without drifting sideways toward an inviting set of trees looming on the riverbank and waiting to eat her rotor blades. And she could hit a flame fairly cleanly, if there were no tricky drafts—though there were always tricky drafts.

The things she really learned from the lessons were twofold.

One, how good a teacher Vern was. She'd worried that a teacher-student role might do a “Jasper” to their relationship, but it didn't. All she had to remember was how sweet he'd been with the kids at the Vashon Cider Fest to know her fears were unfounded.

And two, how really fantastic a pilot Vern was. She'd learned enough to be able to see what he did, even if she had no idea how he did it. She could recognize his mastery from her own ability to drive a car, but she couldn't begin to duplicate it. It was completely in his blood, hardwired right into his nervous system.

“What are you thinking about so hard there, Wrench?”

She hadn't spoken through a half-dozen trips to the latest fire in the Reserva de la Biosfera del Río Plátano. They were dipping water out of the Laguna de Warunta.

She liked using the big lagoon much better than siphoning one of the twisty island rivers. The rivers were brown with silt that was hard on the equipment. And she didn't like flying down into the narrow canyons of trees, often through an opening barely two rotors wide. Vern could fly in and out of them as if operating in an open cow pasture. But the closed-in nature of those dipping spots freaked her out even when he was at the controls.

“Thinking about you.”

“Vile, sexy thoughts, I hope.” He initiated his dump run at the coordinates Mark gave him. She now understood the information and could follow it herself.

The joy she found in Vern's body and he in hers hadn't diminished with familiarity. Instead it had increased. Vern was a terribly inventive lover. She'd been mortified when she did it, but she'd finally downloaded a few instructional texts onto her e-reader—without telling anyone, even him—and Vern had seemed very pleased with the results.

“Usually right, lover.” She liked saying that word because it meant so much between them. “But not this time.”

“Thinking about the job offer?”

“I hadn't been.” There was a sudden bitter taste in her mouth. “But I am now.”

“You've got to at some point.” He rolled a few degrees right and nosed up when she would have nosed down. He hit the release, and she leaned her head into the bubble window in the door to look down at the results.

His drop didn't go straight down. Instead, it caught in a downdraft, which shifted the water dump a half-dozen meters to the side, and the fire-generated wind dragged the water right down onto its own head. It snuffed out like a candle.

“How did you hit that downdraft so perfectly while going a hundred knots?”

“How can you think I'm going to let you change the subject that easily again?”

She sighed. The museum restoration job had been preying on her mind a lot, but she hadn't wanted to talk about it. Apparently jumping Vern whenever he brought the topic up hadn't distracted him sufficiently. And this time throwing her body at him would be a life-threatening distraction.

“Talk it out, Wrench. I'm on your side, you know.”

“I do know that.” Right down to the core like it was a part of her insides. “We've got something here—”

“Ehhhhh!” He made a harsh nasal buzzing noise over the headset as he slid to a halt back over the lagoon and hit the pump switch. Emily was a hundred yards away also loading up.

“What?”

“No way am I going to be the one holding you back from that job if you want it. I'm not going to be the reason you didn't get your life's dream.”

She folded her arms and glared at the console. Vern always slid down about two feet as four tons of water came on board. He'd arrive at eighteen feet, just low enough to sink the end of his twenty-foot siphon hose. She'd be able to tell how full the tank was by how close he came to hovering at sixteen feet.

Denise had watched the others. Jeannie always bobbed a little, the same way she flew; shifting up and down perhaps six inches as she loaded up. Emily's altitude was rock stable. She arrived at eighteen feet, loaded at eighteen feet, and left from eighteen feet—no indicators from the outside as to how full her belly tank was. She peeled away. Ten seconds later so did Vern.

“Damn you.”

Vern laughed. She cursed so rarely that he laughed every time she did so aloud—which discouraged her from doing it more often.

“I curse you, evil man.”

“So much for the easy way out. Now, Wrench, what's the real reason you didn't leap up and wave both hands over your head the way your dad and Huey were expecting?”

For two more laps of a thousand gallons each, she tried to answer the question to her own satisfaction.

Then for three.

Then she gave in.

“I don't know.”

“You don't know?” He did it in one of those I'm-too-cool-and-funny tones, and it set her off.

“No! I don't, Mr. Smarty-pants Pilot.” Denise could feel her voice rising but didn't know how to stop it. “Are you happy now? I've spent a month with that question stuck in the back of my brain. I go to sleep with it and wake up with it. I'm sick to death of it. I want this decision to be over so badly that I feel like I'm going to be sick even thinking about it.”

“Take it easy, Wrench.”

“Go to hell, Slick!”

At least there was no laugh this time.

* * *

Vern transported the next few thousand gallons in silence except to respond to Mark's directions from where he and his daughter circled high overhead in a spotter plane.

Okay, he'd deserved that slap-down. It was hard to gauge what to do when a woman was as mild-mannered as Denise. Her idea of a major curse for severely barked knuckles or a banged shin rarely passed beyond a “Darn.”

But this was different. There was deep emotional upset here, and he hadn't seen it. Had no idea it had been hiding in there, behind some shield he hadn't even known existed.