Where There's Smoke: inspirational romantic suspense (Montana Fire Book 1) (11 page)

The smoke settled low into the valley. Behind them, the fire gnawed at trees, and in the distance the roar of Reuben’s chainsaw lifted, evidence they’d begun attacking the tail as he cut apart smoldering snags and tore apart widow makers.

Pete was breathing hard beside her.

“You and the boss work it out yesterday?” Pete said in between swings.

Kate didn’t look at him, unsure how to respond.

“Because I’ve never seen him bend to an idea not his own quite so fast.”

She kept digging, rolling his words through her head. They reached the logging road, and she pulled her radio from her holster. “Burns, Ransom.”

Jed’s voice crackled over the radio. “Ransom, Burns. You ready to light it up?”

“Affirmative.”

“I’m heading down. Keep your pumps out.”

The water pumps, five-gallon bladders that they wore like backpacks, could keep a backlit fire behaving, running the right direction. They had nothing against a serious blaze, however.

She took out her lighter in lieu of a drip can. “Don’t let it jump the line.” As she walked down the cut line, the fire crackled as the grasses lit. Pete walked along, armed with his water can in case anything beyond the line ignited, but they’d scraped out a chunk of earth down to the barest soil.

Footsteps thundered along the path, and Kate looked up to see Jed running down the line. “We’ve got a drop coming in, ETA seven minutes.”

“Just make sure they don’t drop it on my fire,” Kate said. “Just make sure they don’t drop it on my fire before it burns all the way to the forest edge.”

Jed had the radio to his mouth, communicating with the air tanker.

The meadow flashed over in a sea of flame, the blaze churning black smoke into the already hazy air. Jed stood a few feet away, his radio to his mouth, looking strong and capable in his green pants and that yellow shirt that clung to his body in a way that outlined everything she remembered about him.

A man unafraid of danger.

Well, most danger.

Then the sky rumbled with the engine sound of a Tanker 38 thundering in from the southeast, the Ember base.

Kate turned, lifted her eyes to the heavens, and spotted the giant Lockheed Hercules 130 with the 3600-gallon fire retardant tank. Still flying high, the retardant pilot was probably making a reconnaissance sweep. The bigger fires used an Air Attack—a smaller plane to guide in the big tankers—but on a blaze this size, the pilot could drop the entire load on the flank without help.

She turned back to the fire.

“Get down!”

She heard the voice a second before she latched onto the source—Jed, flying toward her, his arms spread.

She didn’t have time to blink, let alone brace herself before he took her down. He rolled her off the road into the meager protection of the forest as three thousand pounds of slushy retardant rained down from the sky. The 130-mile-an-hour jettison could decimate saplings like matchsticks and rip through tundra down to the permafrost.

Kate screamed and curled into a ball.
J
ed braced himself over her, tented his arms over their heads, and pressed his lips close to her ear. Deep baritone, solid, calm.

“Close your eyes and don’t move.”

Jed just knew Kate’s luck would run out on his watch.

He layered another splice of oak into the fire, the flames curling around the log like tongues, sparks flickering into the swaddle of night. Cicadas had come to life from the nearby river, hushing over the rocks, silver under the fading moonlight.

He took another sip of coffee, black, too strong, but enough to keep him awake long enough for his team to get some shut-eye and for him to figure out why fate hated him.

He’d given into Kate’s plan for the burnout because—so shoot him—he looked at the fire and decided that putting her on the burn line might be the safest possible place.

Instead, he’d put her in the path of a near-deadly slurry drop.

Proving once again that you only had to be unlucky once.

Nice, Jed.

To make matters worse, Kate had barely spoken three words to him all day since his gallant all-out tackle. He’d find bruises tomorrow, and his bones ached from the miscalculated drop from the rookie air-tanker pilot, a mistake that still had him picking mud from his hair and turning his skin red.

And he’d do it all again, without a second thought.

Because for a moment, Kate had turned in his arms, and the wall between them shattered. He’d tucked his head in over hers, rounded his shoulders, and took the onslaught of slurry while she fisted her hands in his shirt, letting him protect her, at least for thirty wet, grimy seconds.

Finally.

Now, caked with mud, soot, dirt, and smoke, he was debating stripping down and wading naked into the river to lather up. Under cover of night, the sky still foggy with the dying fire, he might get away with it.

Especially since Kate curled in a slumbering ball in her sleeping bag in her tent, just on the edge of the assembly. She’d hiked up from the river, the grime washed off her hands and face, grabbed a granola bar and headed to her tent.

After the first botched run, which landed half the retardant inside the line and half out and completely destroyed Kate’s plan, they’d had to regroup. With only two rounds of slurry left, Jed had opted to reinforce the tail, direct the fire north, then drop the final load onto the head. As evening settled in, the fire calmed and began to lie down at the birch grove, just as Kate had predicted.

After eighteen hours of fighting, they’d managed to pump water from the river around the entire perimeter, leaving the core to burn itself down to ash.

Jed had finally called it around midnight, and they made camp near the river, past the fire line, in a grove to the south that still stood green. While Pete and Reuben set up the tents, he’d pulled out the fixin’s for dinner, boiled water for the MREs, made coffee, finished off a can of fruit cocktail, and finally served re-hydrated beefy macaroni to his exhausted crew.

Reuben wolfed his dinner down, then he and Pete disappeared to the river. They returned twenty minutes later, drenched, hair washed, most of the soot cleansed from their faces, both wearing nothing but their shorts and boots. They toed off their boots and climbed into their tents.

Conner had also disappeared to the river but returned earlier, not quite as clean, fully dressed. He’d hunkered down beside Jed. “You want first watch, or should I?”

The fire could still spot, and Watchout Situation Number 18 said no sleeping near the fire line. In this case, with the fire bedded down for the night and their camp a good two hundred yards from the tail end of the fire, Jed counted it safe enough. Still, “I’ll take first watch,” he’d said.

Conner had eyed him. “Don’t get heroic. You need your sleep too.”

Jed had hung a bear pack in case one of the back country animals got ambitious, then hiked back to camp, his mind on Kate.

Something about her silence felt...off.

He probably shouldn’t have panicked when Tanker 38 announced the drop. They’d all lived through the accidental dump of a load of slurry.

Pure instinct turned him toward Kate.

What shook him more, however, was the way she’d held onto him. Trembled. Even whimpered as if...

Since the Porcupine River fire, he hadn’t known Kate Burns to be afraid of anything. Frankly, that was the problem.

He stilled, his coffee cup halfway to his mouth and cast a look at her tucked in her sleeping bag, her tent flap open, her body illuminated in the glow of the fire. The memory of the afternoon—his body braced over her, muck and slush raining down on him—rushed back.

And Kate curled up beneath him.

He couldn’t flush away the expression in her eyes. Fear. White-faced, shocked, overwhelming terror.

He stood up, needing to shake away the sense of it, the deeper memory of having seen that expression before.

We’re not going to make it!

His voice, maybe, although he couldn’t remember who said it first.

Jed walked over to the silver edge of the river, watching the moonlight run a finger across the boulders, tip the moss with starlight. The lacy wisp of smoke turned the air pungent as it caught in the cooler wind pockets of the night.

Kate, if you don’t deploy right now, you’re going to die!

He leaned a shoulder against a trio of paper birch, seeing the Porcupine River fire roaring behind her, flaming tongues chewing up trees, thundering, a tornado of fiery destruction.

He had grabbed his own shelter, wrung it out, the agony from his broken leg and the fact that he’d dropped his gloves forgotten in the roust of the wind—

When he’d looked up, he found her just standing there, frozen. White-faced, trembling. “Kate!” He’d grabbed her arm, shook her, and when she didn’t respond, he pushed her down, practically tackling her. She came to life then, struggling, thrashing.

He grabbed her helmet. Found her eyes. “Get your shelter on!” Then, because he didn’t know what else to do, he tucked his shelter over her, grabbing hers out for himself.

The hairs on his neck singed against the heat, the fire still a hundred yards away, but closing fast. He fought the winds for the shelter, turned to tuck his feet in the pockets in the back, but the shelter unleashed into the hot current. He fell, his leg useless. Worse, he cried out, the pain crippling him.

In that moment, the thought that he would die here, clutching the tundra of an Alaskan forest, fate having finally caught him, seemed secondary to the fact that maybe he’d killed her, too.

And then, there she was. Diving in beside him. Tucking her legs to hold one side of the shelter down. He pinioned his foot into the other corner, pulled the dome over both of them, and she secured her side with her elbows.

He tucked her in under him, her helmet against his, and he wedged his bare hands into the corners, holding the shelter down over the top of them.

“Dig us a hole in the ground to breathe into,” he shouted over the rage of the fire.

And then, the heat engulfed them.

Jed leaned up from the tree, gasping, not realizing how he’d been holding his breath. Now he instinctively moved his hands, flexing them against the tight, still-red skin. Sometimes he could feel the flesh searing off against the foil of their shake-and-bake. Could hear his own whimpering in his ears.

Then Kate’s voice would return, the whisper of her lips against his cheek. “Breathe, just breathe, Jed.” He’d again feel her hand curl up around the back of his neck to force his face down to the cool, damp earth. “We’re going to live.”

Live. Yes. He threw out the coffee then struggled to the edge of the river, dipped his hand in and washed water over his face. Got on his knees and took both hands now, pulling off his helmet, his bandanna, wetting it and scrubbing away the grime, the black.

The heat.

He wrapped the bandanna around his neck and let the icy water trickle down his spine. Then he sat back on his haunches, lifted his eyes to the sky.

Breathe. Just breathe, Jed.

“You okay, bro?”

He looked up to find Conner behind him, wearing a look of concern.

Jed managed a wry smile. Shook his head, then rewrapped the wet bandanna around his grimy head. “I’m just thankful every time a fire goes our way.”

“True, that,” Conner said. “Fire’s about the most unpredictable thing out there—one minute you think you have it licked, the next you’re running for your life.”

From across camp, Jed heard a muffled groan, maybe one of the guys turning in his sleep.

“Not unlike falling in love with a woman,” Conner continued. “One minute you think you’re headed toward a happy ending, the next you’re wondering what you said.”

Jed glanced at Conner. The man had his hands in his pockets, staring away from him, as if thinking.

“I didn’t know you were dating anyone.”

“Not anymore,” Conner said, then pursed his lips and shook his head. “It’s just that sometimes it doesn’t matter what we do. Life—like fire—isn’t in our control, and all we can do is show up, armed with our best tools, and take it head on, trust that it’ll go the right direction.”

For all the time Conner had fought with him on the Jude County crew, Jed had never quite gotten to the bottom of Conner’s story. Half computer nerd, half soldier, Conner looked like a surfer in a hockey player’s body. Shoulder-length blond hair, parted seventies-style in the middle, with the aura that he could handle himself, Conner had been the one guy who seemingly hadn’t fallen apart after the tragedy. He spent most of his off time tinkering on inventions in his trailer. Or playing Wii Golf with Reuben.

Now Conner turned to Jed. “That’s what we call faith.”

More moaning from across the camp, and Jed identified it as coming from Kate’s tent. He hadn’t hurt her today, had he? Although after today’s workout, no doubt every bone in her body ached.

“I know all about faith, Conner,” Jed said quietly. “My dad had faith—or his version of it. He called it gambler’s luck and whipped it out every time he decided to bet his weekly pay, our truck, or even our house on some poker game.” He met Conner’s eyes. “You know what faith got him? His wife dead from pneumonia because he couldn’t pay the gas company, buy food, or her medicine. Him, a drunken, grief-filled couple of years that ended up with him robbing a liquor store for about forty bucks. Me and my brother shipped off to live with my uncle while my dad did his stint in Dawson County Correctional.”