Pure Heat (5 page)

Steve knocked back a mouthful and decided this was near perfection. A small fire quickly beaten. Busy helibase going on behind him. A new friend sitting beside him. A stunning woman settling to sit on the bench at the next picnic table over. Sitting facing them so that he could really enjoy the view.

Damn, she really was perfect. Well-worn boots attached to the longest damn legs he'd seen in a long time wrapped in jeans that showed she worked for a living. All those slipstream curves and a crystalline-blue glare that threatened to strike him out before he even got to the on-deck circle, never mind the batter's box.

The best thing about the day, though, was that he'd been in the field again.

Definitely the best part.

Knowing that his nerve had stood the test of time when it came down to it. When life was on the line, he'd managed to face the fire demon again. Hadn't even thought of it, even after months in bed and physical therapy with far too much time to wonder if he'd lost the edge or not.

That would be “not.” Steve felt as if he could breathe for the first time in months, in a year. Then he looked over at the angel as she mellowed a little, as if the beer had soothed a throat gone too dry. Okay, still having his nerve was the best part of this day, but she was a damn close second.

Mark took a small taste of his beer, then stood from squatting over TJ's ankle and stretched out his legs. A bit over Steve's six feet and seriously fit. “Still not used to the fact that it's okay to take a drink.”

“Why not?”

The ICA settled on the bench next to Carly. Steve almost managed not to envy him the position, but he did. Though the view was better from where he sat two whole feet farther away.

She shifted down the bench from Henderson, making it clear she wasn't done lambasting the ICA yet.

“We lived on twenty-four-hour call for months at a time. And with twenty-four hours from bottle to throttle, it didn't leave a lot of opportunity to just enjoy a beer.”

“The FAA rule is eight hours between your last drink and when you can fly.”

Mark tipped his bottle in acknowledgment. “Spoken like a civilian pilot.”

“Are you SOAR, too?” Carly's voice changed. No note of derision now, her anger washed away with the simple question.

“Major Mark Henderson, retired, at your service.” He bowed his head politely.

Steve wondered about the attitude change. Army guy. So? Tons of Army guys flew helitack when they were done with their tours.

“Then you and Emily…” She nodded toward the main building.

A beatific smile lit his features. “Oh yeah. Definitely.”

Carly glanced back and forth between them and then lowered her voice. “She's kind of scary, if you don't mind me saying.”

“No kidding.” Steve couldn't agree more.

Henderson's smile grew. “In all the best ways.”

Steve laughed because the man was just too happy. “What's SOAR?”

Carly opened her mouth, but the Major cut her off, not hard, just not interested in the topic.

“Story for another time.”

Steve had been hoping to draw Carly into conversation. So with that avenue closed, he sought another opening. He leaned toward the man slouching at ease beside him.

“So, TJ, any other daughters or sons in the service?”

It was as if he'd dumped a half ton of icy, mountain-lake water on the group.

Carly scowled at him, and Steve was suddenly glad that looks couldn't kill. Then she exploded to her feet, leaving her beer behind as she headed toward the barracks.

He almost went after her. Would have, if his knee hadn't frozen up with sitting still after the hardest day in a year. Still, he'd have struggled upright but for the slight shake of TJ's head.

TJ was inspecting his beer carefully. Rolled the bottle briefly between his palms.

A quick glance at the ICA showed that Henderson didn't know what had just happened either.

TJ rolled the bottle back and forth once more.

He clambered to his feet, Steve helping him and Henderson offering him the crutches.

Having no way to carry the bottle, TJ drained it and handed the empty back to Steve before turning away. He stopped with his back turned before taking the first step.

“I don't have any kids in the service, thank God.” TJ remained staring at the ground in front of him. “And I don't have the privilege of calling her mine.” And then he headed off without looking back.

Steve and Henderson watched him hobble out of sight.

The ICA then rose and patted Steve's shoulder before heading over to the main building and the woman nursing a baby outside the back door with a towel over her chest and the baby's head.

Steve was left alone to await the return of the crews.

Talk about throwing a pitch in the dirt. What the hell had he just stepped in?

Carly sat by her uncle at dinner.

TJ was holding court at the head of a picnic table, his foot propped up on a five-gallon plastic bucket of foam mix that had been dragged over. It was a fine evening, warm but no longer hot. Twenty or so people ranged around the half-dozen tables. The blue sky and dry air said that the arrows on the roadside fire-danger-level signs weren't going to be moved down from red anytime soon.

Betsy had served up her famous baked potato bar, being loud and flirty the whole time, a skill Carly had never acquired. She shouldn't have tromped on the new guy so hard. After all, he rappelled down to save her uncle, not reluctantly but rather demanding to be lowered immediately. That he kept looking at her as if she were some pinup girl had ticked her off, though. That and her nerves over TJ.

The potato bar selections included so many awesome toppings that it always took a while to dig down to the potato itself. Carly had gone light tonight with roasted cauliflower and a pesto salmon sauce to die for, so rich and aromatic she hadn't been able to pass it up. Still, she'd had trouble getting it to settle in her stomach. She'd brought TJ his favorite shredded steak and a fried-egg topper rather than what he should be eating. But he'd earned it tonight. Earned it for scaring her half to death.

The hotshots were still out on the site, chasing old embers and dousing smoldering areas, but the smokejumpers were all back. The pilots were all in, as well. The sun was setting, and Forest Service shut down all non-night-equipped flights a half hour before sunset.

All of the senior jump crew had gathered at the head table with her and TJ. Their stated intent: to harass the old man for his injury. But the relief shone bright and clear across all of their features. They were really gathered to prove to themselves he was okay. He'd been jumping since the beginning, the first one signed on to MHA. He'd helped to form the Goonies. Ever since her father—

Carly doused that thought, hard, before it could start to burn yet again.

“We're gonna have to change your para-cargo, TJ.”

“Why's that?” He aimed a smile down the table at Chutes McGee, their loadmaster. He was responsible for what was in each cargo load parachuted down to the smokejumpers once they were on site, making the nickname fairly obvious. Pumps, hose, food, tents, and sleeping bags for the long fires. All of the Goonies' para-cargo passed through Chutes's gnarled hands.

“Next dump, I'm gonna load in a wheelchair so you can get up and down the ridge safe.”

“Still faster than you, Chutes, even with the crutches.”

Laughter circulated around the table. It was good laughter and Carly did her best to join in. Chutes had been an all-state cross-country runner when he was in college and still ran in the woods every morning they weren't attacking a fire.

Uncle TJ and Chutes were the two senior guys. Chutes on the wrong side of fifty to be loading and humping pallets and parachutes all season, and TJ was on the wrong side of forty to be smokejumping, even if he kept acting as if he was on the right side of thirty.

Someone else was razzing TJ about not knowing smokejumping from tree-jumping, and when the hell was he going to get halfway decent at either one?

TJ patted her leg out of sight below the table as he leaned over to whisper to her, “It was just a tree, honey. Caught by a bad fall. I'd have gotten out. Maybe not so well if your young man hadn't come along, but I'm fine.”

She took his hand and held it tightly, feeling the heavy calluses. Squeezing it hard to prove to herself he really was okay here beside her.

“Hold it!” The words registered. “My young what?”

TJ nodded casually across the way. “That love-struck mooncalf who can't stop staring at you. Or maybe it's me. I'm pretty damned good-looking for my age, you know. Women keep telling me so.”

“As long as those women are all named Aunt Margaret, we'll be okay.”

TJ squeezed her hand and faced down the table, raising his voice back to normal without releasing his grip. “Well, all of you had gone tree-jumping down the hill. Knew you were too lazy to climb back to me, so I just waited for my buddy Merks over there.”

Everyone turned to look at the new guy.

Carly couldn't stop herself from turning with the others. Handsome. Not gorgeous, like that new Incident Commander—Air Major Henderson, retired, who she still had to straighten out. But more handsome, as if he'd traveled a hard road yet still found some bright lights. A really good smile there, despite suddenly being the center of attention. For all of it, he didn't appear to be playing games. A friendly wave that engaged and welcomed. Almost as if he'd become everyone's best friend all of a sudden.

And in a way he had. He'd rescued TJ and now been thanked for that act in front of all. Some might be angry that they hadn't been there. Angry at themselves for not being right there, for not having TJ's back. His fire partner, Akbar, had thought TJ was just a yard or two behind him until the falling tree had cut him off with a wall of fire.

In the end, all that mattered was the moment when TJ and Steve had both been lifted clear of the flames, waving to the cheering crew below.

Then she saw Mercer's gaze shift to where she and TJ sat, and his face shuttered like a hard-doused fire. He looked down, but not fast enough to hide a sour grimace. One that didn't appear to be assuaged by a hard slug of beer or a fierce stab of his fork into dinner. A stab that drew nothing to his mouth but empty air. He didn't pay any more attention to his food or even try again with his fork. Whatever he was paying attention to, it wasn't his food.

And, at least at the moment, it wasn't her.

If it was just them, she'd go and ask, even though he was a newbie. But her uncle's hand and her weak knees at his close call were enough to stop her.

***

Steve's knee hurt like hell.

He half wished he still had the damn cane. Then he'd look like the cripple he really was. For a moment there, one brief moment, he'd been part of the crew. Backslaps and raised beer salutes from other tables.

Then he'd looked at TJ. Twenty years older than Steve and almost three decades of fighting fire. People here worshipped him. Chutes, the jumpers at the next table, and the pilots and maintenance crew who shared Steve's table. All of them affirming that's what a man should be.

And there, shining beside TJ like a golden light, a woman he didn't know, but who sure as hell wouldn't want a cripple. And the doctors had assured him he'd always be just that. Too much tissue loss, too many staples and screws and plates. “At least you kept the leg,” they kept telling him. About the only good point, and he'd had to fight with them about that even as they were putting him under.

As soon as he tactfully could, he withdrew. Steve dumped the rest of his dinner in the garbage and tried not to limp as he delivered the tray to the kitchen cleanup bucket, then headed around the end of the kitchen building.

Pretty
damned
morose, Merks
—he tipped the beer bottle up to check it in the fading evening light—
especially
on
half
a
beer.
He'd never really started the first one that afternoon. It had long gone warm and flat before he'd left the table to find his quarters and move in. A duffel bag shoved onto a shelf in a room made cramped by a pair of bunk beds, cramped even without anyone else in the room. He hadn't met his bunkmates yet; they must still be out on the fire. Another damned reminder of where he wasn't.

He dumped his beer on the ground and tossed the bottle into recycling as he passed it. A casual glance showed that though he was in plain view, no one was watching him, no one except Carly. Her face was turned just a little more than necessary if she was merely talking to Chutes, the loadmaster.

Gods, it used to be so easy. A woman who looked like that… That wasn't even it. A woman so convinced of her own abilities that she'd face down someone like Henderson. That was the kind of a woman he would have just walked up to, maybe even spent some time getting to know rather than just targeting her. Back when he was a whole man. Back when he could walk.

Steve got around the corner and out of sight walking tall and easy.

Then he let go of his control. The left knee buckled, and he collapsed. His back slammed against the back of the building, then he slid downward until his butt landed hard on the ground. All he could do was lie there and massage the screaming muscles and stare up at the mountain. The only places the sun still hit were the shining glaciers atop Mount Hood. A beacon in the evening light.

If the thing were a goddamn beacon, shouldn't it be guiding him somewhere?

The next morning, the truck with Steve's gear showed up right after breakfast. A breakfast where he'd carefully sat with his back to the angel. The truck was the smallest field version SkyHi made, assembled on the frame of a small apartment-sized moving truck, a twelve-foot-long box, and a low, ten-foot trailer on the hitch. The trailer consisted of a hitch, two wheels, and a small catapult launch for the drones. The whole thing didn't look all that different from a snowmobile on a trailer with just a few more jacks and features.

The truck itself was the most basic rig, but with dualies on the back. All of the gear inside the truck's cargo bay couldn't weigh more than a couple hundred pounds, so the dual tires on the drive axle would allow him better traction if he ever had to haul up a logging road. That was nice.

It was painted jet black. The manufacturer's bright yellow SkyHi logo and, below it, the red-and-orange flame-licked MHA logo of Mount Hood Aviation made it look sharp and dangerous. He liked that. On top of a good night's sleep that had eased his muscles, the sight of that truck did a good job of clearing out last night's attitude.

Steve had the delivery guy bring the rig past the parking lot, slip it between the buildings, and park it just beyond the parachute loft. On the blank side of the farthest building of the camp. Good for clearance is what he'd tell everyone, and it was.

Also, it maximized his privacy once people got used to him. He was in a mood to have a minimum of witnesses watching him limp around all summer.

“Need a hand setting up?” The driver tossed Steve the keys as he climbed out of the cab.

“No thanks. I've got it.” Steve had to prove he was still good for some damn thing. As soon as he said it, he knew he'd be sorry. His knee was better, but it still throbbed from yesterday's overuse and wouldn't be getting any better from all the labor needed to set up his gear. The work wasn't stressful, but it would keep him on his feet for much of the day.

He considered calling the driver back. Then the angel wandered over, and he couldn't take back his words in front of Carly.

The guy waved and climbed into a yellow-logoed black SUV that had followed him into camp. He could have had two helpers. Crap. In moments they were gone and he was left holding the keys. Literally.

“Pilot.”

Steve turned to see Carly standing close beside him, looking at the logo on the truck. Her arms crossed over her chest. Not aggressively clasped, just comfortable being a little closed off from those around her. Looking as good as she did, it was easy to understand why that might be her default at-bat stance.

Her profile figure was perfectly outlined in a black T-shirt, which he now knew said “MHA Goonies” across the back in large red letters. And she still wore his baseball cap. Her long ponytail of hair, so light it was almost the color of the sun, pulled through the back loop. No way was he going to ask for his hat back.

“You said you were a pilot, but you didn't say what kind.”

“Actually ICA Henderson said I was.” And what idiot part of him had decided that the way to charm a woman was to correct her on trivia that didn't matter? The idiot part of him that gave up last night because there just wasn't a chance.
Turn
it
around, Mercer. At least be civil.

“But, yes, I'm a pilot. A drone pilot.” Didn't sound the least bit sexy, no matter how he said it. Helicopter pilot would have been cool, wildfire helitack pilot even better, but even if his injury compensation had covered the stiff costs of chopper pilot training, which it hadn't, the docs had insisted his new knee couldn't take the constant strain that the pedals would require anyway.

He'd doubted them until last night. After lying against a building until long after sunset because he couldn't even face the pain of standing up again, maybe he'd believe them a little. Of course, he'd already proved them wrong by standing and walking on his own two legs. That had also been a never-again, so screw them.

So now he flew SkyHi surveillance drones. They looked like the model airplanes he used to fly around the backyard as a kid, but on steroids. Instead of weighing a couple pounds, having a two-foot wingspan, and costing about thirty bucks, the drone weighed fifty pounds, had a ten-foot wingspan, and cost about a hundred thousand. But it was a long damn way from walking a fire.

“What can this do that I can't?” Carly wasn't looking at him but continued to focus her attention on the truck. Maybe it wasn't him she was crossing her arms at.

“Hard to answer, because I don't know what you can do.” With any other woman, that would have come out smooth and easy, a flirty, teasing pickup line.

With Carly Thomas, it came out of his mouth a bit awkwardly and as a strictly factual statement, which made it sound even worse.

Her glare shifted from the truck to him, showing that she'd picked up the connotation even if he hadn't managed to give voice to it.

He shrugged it off and moved toward the truck. He did have a purpose here. He did have a way to join the firefight, at least peripherally.

“It can see in infrared, would have found TJ faster than I did. It also can remain on-site while other craft can't. The drone can stay aloft for twenty hours without refueling. We could have seen that the ground crew was headed the wrong way and warned them just that much sooner that the ridge behind them was a false retreat. It can…”

“Whoa. I get the idea already.”

Okay, he had been sounding a bit defensive, but it was all he had left. Flying a drone. Pathetic.

He unlocked the padlock on the truck's rear door. Pulling up sharply on the handle, he nearly dislocated his shoulder when the door didn't move. He must be more frustrated than he'd thought and shook out the hand that he'd scraped up on the unmoving handle. He tugged again, more gingerly, but it didn't budge in the slightest.

A quick inspection revealed a keypad on the side of the truck. They'd never told him about a key code. But he did have his user-level password that was registered in the SkyHi system. He tried that, rather than having to look stupid and call support just to open the damned door.

The door rolled upward on quiet electric motors. They'd programmed the truck just for him. That was unusual. It hadn't been that way on any of the training vehicles.

Carly moved to stand beside him as the truck's contents were revealed. One side was a long service bench where he could perform all except the most advanced maintenance. These drones were almost completely modular. If a part broke, all he had to do was insert a spare and send the original back to the factory for service. A clear space on the bench at the end closest to the door allowed for setup of a flight control console.

On the other side, a tall rack of cases was revealed row by row as the door rose. Two shelves for the birds in heavy, gray plastic boxes a foot high, two feet wide, and about six feet long. Two smaller cases fit together on the next shelf; they'd have the command consoles. The antenna rig on the next. Just what he'd expected.

What he didn't expect were the two large black cases at the top of the stack. The birds and gear were always packed in gray.

Except once. His last day at SkyHi for training, he'd seen black-encased birds.

He stepped up on the low bed and turned on the light inside the cargo bay to be sure. They were definitely black, not merely shadowed by the early morning light. He inspected them more closely. A glance at the codes stenciled on the side stopped him cold. Then, as casually as he could, he reached for the straps holding the antenna rig.

Steve started to loosen the shipping strap. Carly climbed up and undid the other one. As they carried the antenna out into the light, he glanced back up at the black boxes. They were definitely there.

After his training at SkyHi had finished. After they'd certified him in both flight and maintenance of the birds. After he'd received formal notice that MHA was hiring him for the fire season and he'd done all of their damned paperwork on top of SkyHi's own serious stack of forms, one of the techs had taken him aside.

Together, Steve and Carly made fast work of unfolding the antenna and hooking the sections together. Part of him paid attention as they attached the base to the socket on the outside front corner of the truck's box. He threaded the cable from the omnidirectional antenna at the top, down through the clips on the pole, and plugged it into the socket by the truck's passenger door. With the base attached, they tipped the antenna into place. Carly kept it stable while he seated it properly and secured the mounts up the front corner of the truck's box.

Now he was glad that he'd dismissed the help from the SkyHi techs. Carly was not only much easier on the eyes, but clearly good mechanically as well, bracing the antenna just right and double-checking the mounts he'd tightened down. Never hurt to have a second set of eyes on things.

The other part of him thought back to that tech on his last day at SkyHi's compound. A man he'd never met through the months of residence there had pulled him aside after breakfast. The guy had led Steve into a different building.

There he'd been trained on a different kind of bird. A drone in a black box.

At the time, he'd thought it a pretty serious breach of security. The guy had acted as if he were just showing off a cool toy. But was Steve authorized to know about this thing? Sure, they'd done some serious background checks on him. But a version of these drones was also used in the military, so he'd guessed that their tight security made sense. Even if he was just going to fly them over fires.

The black-box birds were different. These were the military's version of the drones. It had creeped him out even to see them, never mind receive twelve hours of training on the enhancements. He'd have to call SkyHi and find out what sort of a screwup had delivered two military drones to a forest fire helibase. What if it wasn't a mistake? He shook his head. That didn't make any sense.

Some mechanics teasing each other out on the airfield brought his attention back to the otherwise quiet morning.

Steve finished anchoring the antenna mounting and then moved to start setting up the trailer.

Knowing his curiosity was going to get the better of him anyway, Steve decided he'd peek in the black boxes before calling SkyHi. Though one thing for certain, he was going to be alone when he opened them.

“What's wrong with your leg?” Carly startled him with her question.

Stupid. When he wasn't paying attention, he favored it more than was really needed anymore. The consequence of remembered pain. Time to bite the bullet. And usually people didn't have the guts to ask how he'd crippled himself. They'd just give him a look of pity and step wide on the sidewalk as if a limp and a cane had made him so ungainly that he needed a six-foot-wide corridor to navigate in.

“My knee.” Why in the hell did he keep correcting her? Especially since it really was most of his leg, his knee had just been the worst part of a bad scene. “Tore it up last summer jumping the Crystal Peak fire.” He started unfolding the catcher arm on the trailer.

“You're a smokejumper?”

“Past tense.” It came out as a growl. Damn it. Maybe he should just shut up.

He unlatched the first ten-foot section of pole from the side of the trailer and held it in place while Carly bolted it to the next section in silence. He was starting to recognize that she did that. She thought about things a lot. Saw things, things that others didn't. He began to wonder just how rare it was that he'd gotten past her defenses by asking if she was TJ's daughter. Pretty damned rare would be his guess.

He pulled the wrenches out of his back pocket. He hadn't even remembered grabbing them while he was in the truck. Training paid off, made some motions automatic, even though he'd been distracted by the extra drones in the black boxes.

She tightened the bolts nicely. Really good hands. Strong, but with that impossibly feminine slenderness. Long, strong fingers. Like she'd been born to play the guitar or something. Again, he started to picture her in some rock and roll… no, country band. She'd be the quiet, total knockout of a bass player. Not the showman, or rather showgirl, that got all the attention as he'd been imagining yesterday. Even in an all-girls' country band, she'd be the one he'd be watching.

They finished assembling the drone's retrieval tower in silence, thirty feet of pipe upward and an arm sticking out ten feet to the side. He cranked it up into position until it towered three stories above them.

Just
stay
focused
on
the
job.

That was going to be his best bet.

By the way she looked at him yesterday, Carly had already made it clear that any headway he'd made rescuing TJ had been totally offset by his question about her family.