Pure Heat (15 page)

Carly smiled down at her beautiful trout.
Let's see Henderson top that.

Then she looked up at Steve. Net in one hand, frying pan in the other. He was so damn cute she couldn't stand it.

She kissed him hard.

For a moment he didn't respond.

Then he wrapped an arm about her so fiercely that he almost knocked the breath out of her.

She pulled back enough to mumble, “You lose that fish and you're a dead man.”

With one hand, he pressed his fist wrapped around the handle of the net into her butt.

Then he was devouring her.

The heavy frying pan splashed into the water and clunked down on the rocky riverbed. That freed a magnificently strong arm to wrap around her shoulders. He held her so tightly that she couldn't have escaped if she wanted to.

And she definitely didn't want to.

She didn't care if they were putting on a show. It didn't matter what TJ or anyone else thought. All she wanted was to let the wild current carry her away. His lips and morning stubble were like a fire along her neck until she threw her head back and stared at the sky just to revel in the wonder of it. That unexplained wild man that lived somewhere deep beneath Steve's skin.

She'd shout to the heavens and make a complete fool of herself if his mouth wasn't back on hers, if their tongues weren't warring, caressing, tasting.

He stopped, pulled back sharply as if in sudden awareness of what he'd been doing. Whether it was that he was ravaging her or that he was doing it in front of a guaranteed audience, she didn't know or care.

She trapped his head with her arms wrapped around his neck, the pole slapping against his back.

“I…” he whispered.

“…don't want you to stop,” she finished for him.

Those dark eyes inspected her carefully.

She faced him back, let him read the truth in her eyes that he wasn't doing a single thing wrong in her book. In fact, he was doing a whole lot of things right.

He leaned back in and kissed her so gently it hit her heart like a hammer, far harder than if he'd returned to his frenzied and welcome attack. Rather than clamping their bodies painfully together, his hand slipped into her hair to cradle her head.

When at last he stopped, she knew she had never in her life been so thoroughly kissed. Not upright, not horizontal, not in the throes of passion.

No. The best kiss of her life had been standing knee-deep in water so cold that it put goose bumps on her legs, with a netted fish flopping against the back of her ankles.

Steve left her weaving for balance when he stooped to retrieve the pan from underwater.

She tasted her swollen lips, tasted Steve on them.

She did her best to merely smile at him as he stood back up.

It was either smile at him or drag him down into the cold water and rocky-bottomed river right now and see just what he'd do to the rest of her, audience or no.

Carly's and Betsy's fish each outweighed either of Henderson's.

He looked actively offended when Carly told him she'd used an off-the-shelf Adams. He'd custom-designed and made his fly that morning before anyone was up because the hole below the larch definitely need a streamer, but not a bunny streamer, and he'd…

She'd merely shrugged as his explanations quickly dove into some netherworld. He was one of “those” fisherman, off-the-deep-end passionate about it. She and her father had just fished. He'd taught her that the fun was the important part of the whole process.

Henderson tried to argue that his pair of trout combined at least weighed more than Betsy's, even if not as much as Carly's.

She simply linked her arm through Betsy's and offered Henderson a cocky two-fingered salute, much as he'd offered her this morning.

“All yours, hombre!” She led Betsy off, leaving him with cleaning duty for all four fish.

Akbar finally showed up too late to fish for breakfast, but not too late to fry it up. Tori tried to help, but Aunt Margaret and Betsy pulled her out of the fray. In minutes, every guy in the group was giving Akbar conflicting culinary advice, and the women left them to it.

For some reason Chutes kept harassing Steve about how he really wanted bacon and eggs instead. Steve was studiously ignoring him.

No one commented on the kiss made on full display before them all. What was there really to say? It melted her bones just thinking about it. They'd fired off enough sparks that it definitely changed how some of the couples were looking at each other. As if she and Steve had heightened their awareness of each other.

What Carly needed, really needed, was—she debated simply dragging Steve off behind the nearest rock or tree but discarded the idea—a little distance. Because, if she didn't get some, her body might spontaneously combust, and even a dousing in the river wouldn't put her out.

She took a fresh mug of coffee and returned to the river. Wading out to midstream, she sat on top of her rock. Right below her dangling feet swirled the eddy current where her beautiful four-pounder had indeed been hiding.

Here, with the current so noisy, she could pretend she was somewhere else. Some time else.

In her peripheral vision she saw someone moving toward her through the water. A quick glance showed she was safe.

“I was afraid you might be Steve. Don't know if I could handle that right now. My nerve endings are still sparking.”

Emily smiled. “Can't say that my nerve endings are in much better shape. And I was merely an observer.”

Carly scooted to the edge of the rock so that Emily could sit beside her with Tessa in a deep, post-meal sleep in her arms, one tiny hand firmly clamped about a lock of Emily's hair. Together they watched the water flow, tumbling loudly enough over the stones and boulders to conveniently mask the debates among the male chefs. Only TJ's laughter cut through the river's sound clearly, again and again.

“TJ certainly enjoys himself.”

“He does,” Carly acknowledged. “You should have heard them when he and my dad were together. You needed earplugs. Dad died when I was eighteen, my first official season working hotshot. TJ tried to take over for him. Tried to be an even better man than he already was. He made me finish college and got me training as a spotter so that I'd get out of the fire.”

Emily rocked her sleeping daughter.

“Makes my husband crazy that you outfished him with a standard fly. He's rather rabid.”

“I'll admit I noticed.”

“I didn't realize. There wasn't much in the way of rivers and lakes where we were flying when we met, and none that were sanitary or safe.”

“Safe like in bad stuff in the water or safe like, uh, bad guys with guns and stuff?”

“Yes,” was all Beale answered.

“Oh. Uh, okay.” Carly tried to imagine someone squatting in the woods across the Rogue just waiting for a chance to shoot them all. It sent a shiver up her spine. She tried to imagine a world where death could be behind any tree just a dozen yards away. That in a moment they could all be dead, slaughtered. Even thinking about it seemed to make Carly's world grow dark.

“You and Mark lived with that?”

A shrug was the only response Emily offered and clearly all she had to say on the topic.

“I was a city girl. It wasn't until our honeymoon that I learned I had better get to enjoy fishing, or at least camping along rivers and lakes.”

Carly studied the stretch of river. “My dad and I fished a hundred streams like this. All over the Northwest. I'd fly in the spotter plane to every call, just like Tessa does. Every time he got a break from the smoke, we went out. This is where I'm happiest.”

“Couldn't help noticing.” Emily opened Tessa's blanket to the spangled sunlight filtering down through the trees.

Carly knew that they'd just arrived at the heart of the matter, why the pilot had followed her into the middle of the river.

“You're a real no-nonsense kind of lady, aren't you?”

Emily shrugged and didn't need to look up from cooing at Tessa to make her point.

Carly had never in her life felt as incredible as Steve had made her feel. Ravaged and alive and so desired.

“I know I look pretty good.” Men's reactions told her that even if she didn't always agree with them.

Her companion didn't even deign to answer that one.

“Obviously not what Steve is about.”

Again, the confirming lack of response.

Right. Sure, he'd been gob-smacked at the beginning. But since then, he'd stood through her anger and her tears. That didn't happen with a guy only interested in her body. Not the way he held her, even when she didn't want to be.

He'd forced her to face Linc's death as she hadn't in a year, simply by being strong and steady and refusing to let her run from herself.

Last night was the first time she'd told the story since the investigation closed the day after Linc's death. Panic, fatal mistake, dead, case closed. A whole life wrapped up in under twenty-four hours and a three-paragraph report. Except the wake and funeral, which had delayed the whole process by only three more days.

The report didn't question Linc's lack of skill. Firefighters were drawn to the battle. Wildfire drew those with a deep connection to the land and trees. Linc would have been happier in an office somewhere, but that wasn't a place where Carly would survive.

So, Linc had learned the techniques of wildland firefighting. But he didn't have that sixth sense of other smokies. That extra sense that always told them their way out, always had them tracking their back door, the fire, the fuel, the winds, and a dozen other interacting factors.

He'd also never learned that sometimes the right thing to do in an emergency was to move slowly. It was the hurried panic that had caused him to shred his shelter.

She didn't want to tell that story ever again. It took too much out of her, filled her head again with Linc's screams. But she no longer wanted to shut down at the merest memory. That was a change.

“He helped. Steve. He helped.”

Emily didn't ask about what, or how. She simply nodded and they sat together watching the river flow into ripples around the rocks.

The occasional fish jumped for a fly. A bird circled close to inspect the intruders in the middle of the stream.

After far longer than it should take to cook a couple of fish, a shout from shore announced breakfast was ready.

Emily climbed off the rock and stood upstream of it for a moment.

“The good ones help. That's how you know they're the good ones.”

And again Carly sat alone in the middle of the rushing stream.

It was a lazy morning. After the fish fry, so casually that Steve barely noticed the transition, TJ, Chutes, and Akbar began quizzing the new members of MHA's Goonies.

Steve was in good as soon as they found out he'd been the lead jumper out of Sacramento. Everyone knew California was a hard post for a smokie—the entire southern half of the state was a tinderbox, and the northern half wasn't all that much better. They also knew that you had to be crazy and passionate about the wildfire fight to work all the way up to leading the first stick.

Then it was Henderson who came under scrutiny, as no one seemed to want to mess with Emily Beale. By some unspoken agreement, they focused on her husband.

Steve had sat through a hundred sessions like this one. On one side of the great divide, rookies who'd signed on for the romance of the wildfire fight. It looked good in the movies, but it was some of the hardest and most dangerous work on the planet. Across the divide, career wildfire fighters felt honor bound to weed out the chaff, sometimes before they even got their ears wet.

But Henderson understood.

He didn't talk about fire, a common enough trap. He talked about watching the blooms come after the snow on his parents' Montana ranch. He painted a picture of the waving grass and the tall horses his father and mother had loved almost as much as their only child. And he talked about his favorite trout stream and fighting the cutties to the net.

It soon became clear that his fishing this morning wasn't an affectation, but came from the core of the man.

Steve had kept it to himself, but he wondered at the contrast of the man who loved fishing almost as much as his wife and who flew Special Forces helicopters into the darkest combat.

It was connection to the land that made the wildfire fighter, not whether he carried a Pulaski or a smartphone and tablet. Steve would have to think about that one later.

Again, everyone's attention drifted to Beale and her sleeping child and then drifted right on by.

Perhaps it was her mirrored shades and just the hint of a smile that even seasoned Goonies couldn't get past.

“I remember this time…” TJ started the story as if nothing had happened. It was the clearest acknowledgment that Henderson had been accepted and that Beale had been declared okay as well.

Henderson didn't react or gloat. All he did was lean in a little to refill his coffee mug and get ready for TJ's story.

“Ham, Chutes, and I were out chasing some blaze or other. What was it, Chutes? Black Canyon?”

“Big Polka-Dot Rock-Candy Mountain? How the hell should I know, old man? It's your damn story.”

“You're older than I am, old man.”

“So I have an excuse for forgetting.” The affection between the men couldn't have been clearer.

Steve could imagine Ham sitting just between Carly and Betsy, tossing in a joke of his own.

“Maybe it was the giant campfire of 1835,” Steve offered in his absence.

Carly laughed and looked over. She opened her mouth and then closed it, the smile wiped abruptly from her face. Then it returned, a little tentative but there. Maybe he'd struck a little too close to home.

“Hush,” TJ went on, not missing a beat. “This is my story. So the three of us were out on this ugly, damned blaze. We stumbled on this little cluster of cabins that was out there, and I mean way the hell out there.”

“They were totally cut off from—”

“Shut up, Chutes. You missed your chance to tell it by sassin' me.” TJ was clearly just warming up.

“There were about ten guys, about as many women, and a passel of kids. They had a sweet setup—running stream, drying elk meat, the whole shebang. But when we tried to tell them there was a fire coming, we discovered they couldn't speak a single word of English. It wasn't until later we figured out they were Bulgarians who'd emigrated or escaped back before the Berlin Wall went down and had decided that the Oregon wilderness was their idea of heaven.”

Chutes took over the story from there anyway. “Problem was, we had no way to tell them to run. When we tried to drag them off, they dug in their heels. Together, we did save their little community. These guys pitched right in. They were naturals. Took a while to catch on, but we'd saved a whole clan of Bulgarian wildfire fighters living fat off the American land.”

That got a good laugh.

Steve told the one about the guy who'd been more concerned with his art collection than his family. They'd finally had to get the cops to tow him away just minutes before his house burned. His wife had divorced him very publicly right after, getting the kids and the rights to all of the art he had saved. The film crew hadn't evacuated yet and the TV
News
at
5
became the centerpiece of her case.

“There was a little girl,” Emily Beale spoke. She looked down at the bundle sleeping in her lap and brushed a finger along its cheek. “Mostly starved and an orphan by the time we picked her up.”

Steve wondered about her. These were supposed to be the funny or touching moments.

“We were in the middle of a mountain range dozens of miles from anywhere and filled with hostiles. My crew chief spotted her, hiding on the ground near a hostile target we'd just removed. There were exploding ordnance and burning vehicles not twenty feet from her.”

Emily stared down at the coals in the campfire but Steve wondered what she saw.

“We'd thought she was a burden at first, but then she became a sort of company mascot. Two of the best people I know fell in love because of her and adopted her in the bargain.”

She turned to look at her husband who'd gone all quiet.

“That's the moment I decided I wanted to have your child. I'm always amazed at what was born from that firefight.”

Mark sat up and kissed his wife tenderly.

Carly had rested her hand over her heart.

Steve wanted to feel that. Truly he did. There was a family he'd lost and could never get back. But he wanted to love someone so much that they'd want to have a family of their own.

“What she's not telling you”—Henderson's easy and deep voice was a sharp contrast with his wife's—“is that the young scamp has become a good friend of the President. Yes, that one. Hangs out in Oval Office every chance she gets and teaches him the wisdom according to J.K. Rowling.”

***

As the late morning warmed the air, some napped. Some lay out in the broken sunlight with a novel. Akbar and Tori set off on a hike downstream, two insanely fit individuals going exploring for the fun of it.

Steve wished he could do that. His leg hurt too much, though it wasn't necessarily a bad hurt. The shooting pains that had wracked his leg through the winter had been cured by the third surgery. It wasn't even the biting pain of just a week ago.

Now it was a muscle ache. He no longer thought about using his hand to lift the leg when he wanted to move it. He simply climbed out of the car, with only a little help from any handhold he could grab.

It also hadn't folded out from under him since that first night on base. Even if he'd never be whole, maybe he was getting better. But he still couldn't go rambling for rough miles with Akbar and Tori. Easy to picture Carly striding along with them. She belonged out here. He—

“Hey, flyboy.” He squinted up at Carly where she stood haloed by the sunlight, as if she needed the help to look magnificent. So not. Hiking boots, cut-off shorts atop those infinitely long legs. A Goonies T-shirt and his San Francisco Giants hat atop her shining hair. You couldn't make up a woman who looked this good.

“Want to go for a walk?”

He glanced downstream where Akbar and Tori had already passed out of sight and shook his head.

“I packed lunch and a blanket. It's not far.”

“What isn't?”

“Are you coming or not?” Carly held out a hand.

Well, anything had to be better than where his head was right now. He shrugged and let her help him up.

She didn't let go as she turned perpendicular to the river. In a dozen steps, they'd entered the woods hand in hand. No one watched them leave except maybe Beale, glancing over the top of her book. Beneath the tall pines, they passed through a narrow line of scrub, then walked across the upward-sloping forest floor.

It was darker here, cooler, lush with moss ranging across a hundred colors of green. Small trees stood little chance in the shadowed heart of the mature forest, leaving only obstacles of fallen giants and fern grottoes along their path. They sometimes had to duck and weave around branches, but Carly let him set the pace and he kept it slow.

A walk under the trees with a beautiful woman.

Funny, all of the ladies he'd scored runs with, both on and off the fire line, and he'd never walked in silence through a forest with one. Yet forests, or at least their fires, had been his only dream since he was knee high.

They didn't talk as they moved through the trees. Occasionally one or the other would point. A red-tailed hawk cruising through the branches on silent wings, moving as if he were crossing open sky rather than threading a thousand gaps fifty feet in the air. Squirrels chattering their alarms. A deer and her fawn, stepping silently through the brush with that strange hesitation step of wild animals even when feeling safe.

Carly lifted their clasped hands to rub the back of his hand across her cheek more than once. Steve found it easy to return the gesture.

Perhaps a mile from the river, the forest lightened ahead as they crested a rise. At the verge they had to force a path through the brush. He held several branches aside so that Carly could get through, then turned to the view.

“A burn.” The end of the forest was an abrupt shock. Looking back at the face of the forest, it was easy to see where the near sides of trees had been burned off, the damage halted even as it killed the verge. Not a clear cut, definitely a burn.

“We fought this two years ago. I spotted it on the way in. Hadn't realized back then that it was so close to the river.”

Steve looked out. A few of the charred giants still remained, but this fire had been hot and hard, nothing for the logging companies to salvage. It had scorched the soil, killing off everything in its path.

“Slow mover?”

“Old forest. Not old growth, but nearing maturity. It had lots of fuel, so it burned hot and long. We kept it ringed in, had it fully contained, but we couldn't break its back. It just burned and burned.”

That explained the soil burn-down and the generation of plant life now showing. No trees had survived. This was recovery foliage.

The hot pink carpet of fireweed spread across the rolling slopes. Sumac and low alder saplings had begun to dot the hillsides. And not much else. In five years, the alder would be a couple stories high and shade out the fireweed. Grasses would be next, but none yet.

He followed Carly to a slight rise where she swung down her pack, untied a blanket, and spread it among the flowers.

She sat and he joined her.

“Now, Mr. Mercer. I have an agenda.”

He slanted a leering grin her way. “Thought you might, Ms. Thomas. You are a particularly well-organized lady, if I may say so.”

“First, lunch.”

“Spoilsport.” He brushed a hand down her cheek and traced the line of her lovely neck.

Before he could move farther, she captured his hand by the wrist and held it disdainfully to the side, like a wet and vile rag, before letting it drop.

“Second, you and I are going to have a talk.”

Why didn't that sound good?

“Third, you and I are going to make love in the sunlight where we can actually see each other.”

That sounded very good.

“And”—she leaned in to nip his ear lightly before whispering into it—“if you don't seriously ravage me in the process, I shall be very disappointed.”

Out of the park.