Scorch (2 page)

Seriously, Vin was
so
hot.

And so familiar in a million ways she wanted to cry all over again.

He swung his shirt around her and hung it off her shoulders. It was warm and held the smell of clean laundry and Montana spring and man deodorant along with the scent she’d already picked up as foreign.
Not
the man she slept with.

Used
to sleep with.

She pushed her arms into the sleeves, blushing a little, liking how it made her feel like he was still hugging her. “You’re the best, Vin.”

“I hear that a lot,” he said with a wink, then nodded at the carousel. “That your bag?”

*

Vin wanted to
take back the wink. What the hell was he doing? There was no flirting with the widow of your best friend. Jesus.

He retrieved Jac’s bag and said, “Is this it? You don’t pack like any woman I know.” He gave it a few pumps like a free weight, judging it to be under thirty pounds.

“I didn’t take much with me and mostly brought that one back so I’d have something to pack for the return.” She frowned at the bag, mouth pursing in dark thought. “But I can carry the small one.”

He gave her a look, not bothering to spell out that he regularly shouldered gear that weighed more than she did and carried it for miles over hilly terrain. She knew.

She even rolled her eyes a little as she met his disparaging look. “Always so macho.” She teased as they started toward the exit.

“Gotta stay in shape in the off season.”

“Yeah, you guys. Married to your muscles. I miss real men, you know. There are tons of ripped guys in Florida, but they don’t
do
anything with it except strut around the beach kissing themselves. Oh!”

She stopped as they exited the airport. The biting wind off the glaciers hit them in the face like a mean slap.

“Yeah, that feels like home,” she said in a strained voice. “Sometimes I think April is the coldest month here, because of that wind. Ugh.”

They hurried through the crosswalk, heads down, while the cars were stopped. “Where—?”

He pointed his key fob at short term parking where his blue pickup sat. When he pressed the button so the lights blinked, the click stirred Muttley. He jerked to his feet and paced in a ripple of shadow behind the reflection on the windshield.

“Vin! Did you bring—?” She ran toward the truck and jerked the driver’s door open. “Mutt!”

Her dog proceeded to go bananas, moaning and whimpering and licking Jac’s face while she laughed and probably cried. Happy tears this time, but still.

Vin cared that she cried. Her saying he didn’t bothered him. He knew he was reticent with his own emotions, but he felt hers. Her grief broke his heart. She and Russ had been his icon, the couple he aspired to be. His own marriage had fallen apart not even two years in, but that was because he wasn’t meant to have the happily ever after family that most people had. All those people in the airport, the Jacs and Russes of the world… They were born for that kind of happiness.

He was made for fighting fires. It was cellular, DNA level stuff.

But losing Russ had undermined Vin’s sense of how the world worked.

And Vin’s career, the family he’d made with the smokejumpers, was supposed to be inviolate. After Tori had kicked him out—for being away fighting fires too much—he had made a deal with the fire gods that he wouldn’t chase the picket-fence dream again. The men and women who cut line beside him were his brothers and sisters and that was enough.

But with Russ’s death, he’d been brutally schooled that even his best friends were temporary and could be taken away.

Their work was dangerous. Everyone knew death could happen, but it was supposed to happen to
him
. Vin. He wouldn’t be missed. Losing Russ? It had shaken the whole town.

It had leveled Vin. He didn’t know what he was supposed to believe anymore. Life didn’t have any meaning at all.

They got themselves settled in the truck. Muttley was way too big to be a lap dog, but he was trying to curl up his mass of yellow fur on Jac’s thighs, black muzzle lifting to keep up with giving her kisses, his tail thumping madly.

She hugged the goofy rescue. “Thank you so much for bringing him.”

“I had to. He’s been excited to see you. It’s all he’s talked about for days.”

“Really? Been counting sleeps, have you?”

She was continuing the silliness Vin has started, but Vin
had
been counting the days, he realized uncomfortably. He told himself he was merely eager to settle the house purchase and feel like he was finally putting down roots, but he’d been keyed up for days, anxious for her arrival.

“Oh, Christmas,” Jac said on an exhale as he turned out of the airport onto the highway.

“What’s wrong?”

“What? No, I mean it looks like Christmas. I pretty much gave that holiday a miss this year. We had dinner with the neighbors. They barbecued. I was glad it didn’t feel real. But now, here it is. So pretty.”

She brightened as she waved at the trees that were already losing the sparkle of this morning’s late-season flurry. The roads were clear and the snow mostly reduced to patches on shady lawns and piles in grocery store parking lots.

“Are we heading straight to the house or do you need to make some stops?” he asked.

She was quiet for a long moment, hand stroking the dog’s head.

“I think, since we’re driving right by…” She sent him an apprehensive look. “Can we stop at the base?”

“I
should”—warn?—“prepare you,”
Vin said. “We hung Russ’s chute on the loft.” Vin had mended it himself and paid to have it embroidered with Russ’s name and the date he passed.

Silence. Jacqui only leaned forward to hug Muttley, burying her face in the dog’s neck.

Oh, shit.

After a mile or two, she sat up. “What made you become a firefighter? I don’t think I’ve ever asked.”

He usually managed to dodge that question when it came up. Tightening his hands on the steering wheel, he gave her his stock answer.

“Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know. I guess I started thinking about everyone at the station and why—” Her voice caught. “It’s the kind of job that you have to be passionate about because it demands sacrifice. Sometimes the ultimate sacrifice.” Her voice thinned. “That made me wonder why you do it.”

He massaged the steering wheel, wishing things hadn’t got so serious so fast.

“I was on a hotshot line in Stillwater. I wound up working alongside some smokejumpers out of Idaho. It piqued my interest. I thought I could do it so I gave it a whirl.”

“You were just challenging yourself?” she asked, glancing at him with bemusement.

“To some extent. But I liked the concept. Not so much the jumping out of planes, which is a rush, I’ll admit. But I like the approach to the work itself. It’s just as grueling as any type of firefighting, but I like getting in first, being more independent and self-reliant. Making a lot of decisions on my own. That fits my personality better.”

She studied him long enough to make him want to shift under her scrutiny.

Finally, she nodded, but then said, “I meant, how did you get into firefighting?”

The thirty miles to Glacier Creek was starting to feel like too long a stretch to be trapped in a truck.

“I, uh, told you about my parents?” He knew he had.

It was one of the many things he rarely talked about, but he distinctly remembered the day he had found her crying on the front steps of the base. Her mother had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. She had been devastated.

“I don’t know what to do,” she had said, sounding shell-shocked
.

“There’s nothing you can do,”
he had told her gently
.

“You lost your mom?”

“Both my parents. When I was four.”

She had been appalled, he’d seen it, and had braced himself for pity. Instead, she had linked her hand through his elbow and said,
“Then I should be grateful for the time I’ve had with her. The time I still have. Thanks for telling me that, Vin. You always seem to put things in perspective for me.”

He hadn’t meant to come off as scolding her and he sure as hell had never said anything profound to her or anyone else. The way she had sat there, two hands on his arm above his elbow, head tilted into his shoulder, had moved him, though. He’d felt like, in that moment, somehow he was helping her.

“I remember,” she said now, and he wondered if that old moment of shared grief had been the reason they had gravitated toward each other in the new one.

He cleared his throat. “They died in a house fire. I don’t remember much about it.” Except smoke and sirens and screaming. His mother had been pregnant. “The firefighter who carried me out came to see me in the hospital. This started out as a way to cover up burn scars.” He lifted his right arm, sleeved with ink. “He checked in on me over the years.”

Frank and his wife had wanted to adopt Vin. That had fallen through when Frank had had a stroke. He didn’t tell her that part. It was still a big what-if in his life. What if he had grown up feeling wanted? What if he’d had a proper family? Would he be a different man? Believe in different things?

Would he be in a stable relationship, raising a family of his own, instead of still searching for a way to dig in and feel he belonged?

“I just knew it was the job I would do when I grew up. I was living in Billings, did well on all my courses and had a job lined up with the local department, but at the last minute they cut the budget on new hires. I had all this training, wildfire season was starting, so I was able to hire on as a temp in Missoula.”

“And you’ve never wanted to go back to a city job?”

“I realized right away I prefer wild land.” Fewer people and politics. He had shifted constantly all his life so the frequent travel hadn’t bothered him.

He had always wished for a sense of permanence, though. An anchor. To some extent he had one now, with his full-time position at the base and buying Jacqui’s house, but he couldn’t shake a sense that it was as tenuous as a strand of a spider’s web.

“Our gain,” Jacqui said with a flash of a smile. “How is the new guy? What’s his name? Sam something? Are you going to be okay working for him instead of Russ?”

“Gaskill,” Vin supplied, letting out a subtle breath, relieved she was moving toward a less personal topic. “It’s early days, but he seems all right. He’s from Texas so he
tawks lack thi-us.
”

“Like Forest Gump?”

Vin had always enjoyed that wit of hers. It was good to see it coming back along with her smile.

“I might be exaggerating,” he admitted. “He’s ex-Army Ranger. Knows his stuff. No bullshit.” Not everyone was as accepting of Russ’s replacement, but Vin was a foster kid. He was used to change, summing up a new authority figure, doing it their way. “He, uh, lost his wife. He hasn’t said much about it, but I get the impression he pulled up stakes and is making a fresh start.”

Like you
, he was going to say, but stopped himself. It made him melancholy to think of her leaving for good. She was taking Muttley so he wouldn’t even have that excuse to talk to her anymore.

Nothing was permanent. He ought to know that by now.

But he still craved it.

Jacqui scrubbed the dog under his collar and asked, “Have you had any more rescues since I talked to you last?”

“No, the snowboarders have been staying in bounds this week. Hallelujah.”

“Been on the hills for fun?”

“Nah. Working on the house when I get the chance.”

She fell quiet again for several miles, which suited him. He was basically a loner. He had come to terms with that as his marriage had disintegrated. Making conversation wasn’t his strong suit. Although, he and Tori really hadn’t had much in common to talk
about
. He couldn’t play the victim in their breakup. They’d been mismatched from the start.

He’d probably talked more with Jacqui, about more personal things, than he had with any girlfriend or workmate he’d ever had.

He was going to miss her.

A lot.

*