Scorch (12 page)

She swallowed, instantly affected. Involuntarily, she searched his expression, longing for him to return this spark of desire. She wanted this chemistry to be mutual.

She wanted him to want her the way she wanted him.

He hissed in a breath, mouth tightening, shoulders tensing as he recoiled a half step, muttering a curse under his breath.

She looked away, crushed, unwilling to watch his expression turn to rejection.
Would she never learn?

“We’re fine.” She swallowed a lump that seemed to lodge in her chest like a sharp rock, jagged point pressing into her heart. “It’s fine if you don’t feel the same.”

From the corner of her eye, she could see his hand gripping the doorjamb.

She set a toilet roll on end and tried to sound blasé, but she was incinerating with embarrassment, heart scorched. “Really. I’ve been this route before. I’ll survive.”

“Jacqui.” His tone was so hard yet helpless she had to look at him. He took up all the space in the doorway, like he was holding himself back from plunging into the closet after her. “Don’t think I’m not tempted. We can’t. That’s all I was saying the other night.
We can’t
.”

Tingles of preternatural reaction washed over her. Her breathing changed and she tightened her hand on whatever she was holding, but she’d forgotten what it was. She strained her ears, praying no one would suddenly decide to head for a coffee and overhear them.

Because she was about to be very stupid and put herself out there. She needed him to know.

“You’re wrong about this being seasonal. I’m not…” She flicked her hand to indicate the building beyond this dimly lit room. “I don’t feel like this about anyone else.”

She might as well have stood there naked before his raking, disbelieving gaze.

She had lied to him. She might not survive this. The first time she had set her feelings on display, she’d been young and romantic enough to invent the return of regard. Now she was an adult with a far better ability to see reality.

She did not read receptiveness in him.

Please don’t reject me
.

“Don’t,” he muttered. “Don’t make me think—”

“Kingston.” Sam’s voice from across the far side of the common room made her startle violently.

Her pen clattered to the floor and she bent to retrieve it.

Vin turned his back on her and said, “Right here.”

“Timber company is asking if we can throw a helipad together today. It’d be a good exercise for some rookies. Wings in, boots out. Two nights, maybe three.”

“I’ll tell ’em to suit up.”

Vin disappeared into Sam’s office for the details while she stood there forcing herself to breathe evenly, gathering her composure.

Don’t make me think
…what? He’d looked like he was being drawn and quartered.

With a compression in her heart, she headed back to her desk as Vin left Sam’s office without glancing back.

Sam met her at her desk. He was no dummy. The weight of his gaze was waiting for hers when she came back from gazing after Vin. His eyes were filled with knowledge.

Kill. Me. Now
.

“Who is he taking?” she asked, trying to act as normal as possible. “How am I coding their hours?” She reached for her sticky pad, peeled off a sheet, then set the pad back on the rim of her coffee cup.

“Why do you always do that?” Sam pointed his pen at her coffee. “Leave the pad on your cup like that?”

“Do I?” She looked at the cup with its little yellow square topper and chuckled weakly. “I didn’t even realize. Russ used to steal my coffee. He’d steal anyone’s. Not on purpose, just picking it up absentmindedly while he was talking, thinking it was his. I got used to doing that so he wouldn’t take mine.”

Sam’s expression twisted like he understood all too well how those old reminders could ambush you. She genuinely couldn’t have a more understanding boss. Sam was reticent about his own grief, but he was patient and always willing to hear her out if he was making a change, but she wanted to explain first the rationale behind why Russ or Hugh had done things a certain way. If he caught her blowing her nose, he always veered away and gave her a few minutes before coming back to talk about whatever work item was on his mind.

“How are you doing with all this?” he asked now. His gaze went upward to the ’chute lightly inflating and deflating with the soft breeze. Russ, breathing peacefully.

“Oh, you know,” she said, casual and self-deprecating, because he did know.

“I mean, are you going to be…anxious? As the season progresses?”

About Vin, he meant.

He wasn’t being unkind, but the intrusion annoyed her. She would
not
be a source of entertainment again.

“Russ’s sister said something funny to me.” Ire stung her cheeks, but she ignored it as she deliberately removed the pad from her coffee cup and set it in the top drawer of her desk. “She said her parents wouldn’t look for a new son and she wouldn’t audition a new brother, but a wife is expected to eventually find a new husband. She’s never going to worry about Russ again, but you and I will wind up worrying about new people, won’t we?”

She lifted her gaze to his.
I know there’s something between you and Laurel
, she silently telegraphed.

He backed up a step as though she’d stood on his toe.

“That is a strange thing to say,” he said in a cool voice. “Do you have a copy of the charge codes handy? Or should I get my list from my office?”

Yeah. That was what she had thought. She handed him the sheet and scribbled out the names he gave her of the four men Vin was taking.

Sam walked away and she reached under her desk to give Muttley’s ear a scrub, heart feeling like a balled up wad of gum.

*

The king of
compartmentalization was losing his touch.

Vin couldn’t stop thinking about Jacqui as they flew to the jump spot. He made himself take a visual inventory of his crew, seeing nervous excitement in the newest faces, but it only made him more aware of the emotions swirling in him.

He kept seeing that naked look on Jacqui’s face as she had said,
“I don’t feel like this about anyone else.”
She had looked like she knew she’d get burned and wanted to run straight into the flames anyway.

His freaking heart had nearly exploded. His dick had given a hard pull of excitement and a tingle that was pure animalistic desire to mate had lifted all the hairs on his body.

Don’t take it personal. It’s just sex
. Jacqui wasn’t a woman who catted around. Lots of people needed an emotional connection before they could have sex. He understood why she might have singled him out unconsciously. They were already close. She trusted him.

It was still just sex.

His history of disillusionment had him tamping down on any sort of optimism that it could be more than that. He wasn’t sure if he even wanted it to be. He’d pretty much resigned himself to never having that nuclear family he’d aspired to most of his life. Even she had found it hadn’t lived up to the hype.

But she had been happy with Russ and Vin couldn’t shake the feeling of being a placeholder. Secondhand and second best. To say Jacqui’s love for Russ had been obvious was to downplay it. It wasn’t like she was divorced. Her first husband
died
. That was the only reason she wasn’t still with Russ. He had to still occupy a huge chunk of her heart.

Damn it, he wished Jacqui hadn’t put ideas into his head. It didn’t matter if she was looking for sex or something more, he had been dead serious. Nothing could happen between them. It would be career suicide, not to mention how it would impact their friendship.

It was already impacting their friendship. He didn’t know how to talk to her anymore.

Maybe it would be actual suicide, he thought as Doster Cohen, one of the new spotters, called his name, snapping him back to where he was. Cohen was ex-military, like Sam, and easy enough to get along with, but he took his job damned seriously.

“You awake?” Cohen barked.

Get your head in the game, Kingston
.

“You bet.” He moved into the doorway of the aircraft, readying himself to jump, reluctant for once to let go of the thoughts in his mind when that was usually the easy part.

He had to, though. His survival depended on it.

He felt the slap on his back and leapt.

*

“Forest service,” Jacqui
said as she picked up the ringing phone.

In her periphery, Sam went behind her desk to open the file cabinet.

“Hi, Jacqui, it’s Tori,” Vin’s ex-wife said in her ear. “How are you?”

“I’m good,” Jacqui said with surprise, nodding acknowledgment as Sam showed her the file he was taking back to his office.

Other than tagging each other’s posts with occasional ‘likes,’ she and Tori hadn’t been in contact much over the last year, especially once Tori and Vin had officially split. They didn’t have much in common.

Still, Jacqui tried to sound friendly. “I’ve been thinking of coming by The Drop Zone to say hello to everyone, but you know what this time of year is like. Plus there’s been a lot to do at the house.” Like binge-watching British serials while baking cookies. Super-serious, time-consuming stuff. “How are you?”

“Until today, I was great. Too bad you weren’t back a month ago. You missed a kick-ass divorce party.”

Jacqui paused in hunting for the email she needed to print, offering a belated, “I saw the photos.” It came out a little flat, but she wasn’t that into parties since, you know,
her husband died
.

Jacqui had thought it pretty tasteless of Tori to hold the party at The Drop Zone anyway, seeing as she’d deliberately left Vin off the invite list. If it had been something the couple had planned together, Jacqui would have seen the funny side of something like that, but Tori’s celebrating her freedom from Vin as if he was a communicable disease had struck Jacqui as pure bitchery.

Vin hadn’t cared—or let on that he cared. That night had turned into one of their longest remote conversations, when they’d had that extra glass of wine and bottle of beer, talking about everything and nothing. He’d asked her about growing up in Glacier Creek, she’d learned what his favorite cartoons were as a kid, and that he had shoplifted once.
Once
, he had stressed. It had been a baseball cap, the kind all the kids were wearing, and it had promptly been nicked from his gym locker.

He had figured he deserved it and wound up going back to the store a year later and overpaying for something else to get it off his conscience.

“I’ve never told anyone that,”
he’d admitted sheepishly.

“Not even Tori?”
It had been Jacqui’s first gentle pry into what had gone wrong with their relationship.

“She would have told me I was stupid to go back and pay,”
he’d said with a shrug.

Tori was the stupid one, Jacqui had thought then and thought it again now.

But in a close community like this, she kept such opinions to herself and stayed polite for the betterment of all.

“What happened today?” Jacqui prompted mildly.

“The house sale fell through,” Tori said on an agonized groan. “I tried Vin’s cell a couple of times, but it’s going to voicemail. Is he there?”

“No, he’s been out all week.”
Oh Vin
.

Jacqui had been spending the time while he was absent trying to process that he’d said he was “tempted,” but had still rebuffed her. She understood that politics around here would affect him more than her. She definitely saw how pushing romance into the equation had affected their friendship, but she didn’t think that was a valid reason to ignore the potential between them.

Their friendship meant so much to her, though.

And now she worried how this news would affect him. The more time she spent in the house, the more she could see all the little touches he’d put in that showed his growing attachment to it.

“His phone’s probably in his locker,” Jacqui said. “They were getting picked up a few hours ago. He should be back soon.”

“Can I leave it with you to tell him? He’s going to be so pissed. I’d really rather not be the one to catch the blowback.”