Where There's Smoke: inspirational romantic suspense (Montana Fire Book 1) (13 page)

Chapter 6

Kate blamed Jed that the nightmare had found her. If he hadn’t tackled her, hadn’t held her in his arms, the demons would have stayed safely locked away.

She stirred the last of the coals of the campfire, now swimming with river water, the charred wood soggy and impotent. The dawn rippled pink just above the horizon, bleeding into the pewter gray of the night.

Behind her, the guys packed up the last of the tents, the sleeping bags, their gear. Nearby, Jed stalked through their camp, the radio to his mouth, calling in their status.

The redolence of ash, smoke, and the dying cinders of the fire haunted the air, but a febrile peace had settled upon the charred, whitened forest, resetting the forests back to seedling. An occasional burn did a forest good—especially one littered with logging slash, dark and seedless. A cluttered forest rotted, grew up, and ached for a cleansing fire, a restart.

Exactly like she’d had with Jed, last night. She couldn’t believe she’d awakened, thrashing, sweating, crying, out of the dream of being cooked alive to the rush of being locked in Jed’s arms. She’d clung to him, desperate, losing herself into something greater, the longing that still flamed inside.

Almost as if the dream had continued, turning from nightmare into her wildest, forbidden fantasy.

“Conner, radio in when you get to the head, tell me what you see.” Jed, over the radio, on his way into the day. She glanced at him in his grimy clothes, a layer of whiskers on his chin, looking dangerously heroic, devastatingly competent.

The urge to trust him stirred inside her.

Almost absently she touched her lips, tasting his mouth on hers, feeling his hand around her neck, the urgency as he kissed her, his touch molten.

So she’d kissed him back, forgetting herself, the fire line, and even the fact that she’d vowed to never—ever—kiss Jed Ransom again.

His skin had been cool and fresh, his hair wet, and she’d wrapped her hands around those amazing arms, holding on.

Until, of course, he came to his senses. And she reluctantly took a grip on hers.

She’d stared at him in the flicker of firelight, fighting to still her racing heart, hating how she longed to reach for him again. Safe. Solid. Strong.

What she’d so needed two years ago, when everything turned to ash in her life.

She knew, when he’d tackled her, protecting her, that the smart, independent Kate should push him away. But the Kate that still apparently lurked inside had reached out, surrendering to the memory of just how amazing it felt to be in the arms of Jed Ransom.

That scared her most of all. Because in her nightmares, she’d returned—not to the Porcupine River fire but to the one that had truly sidelined her, turned her into a mess of frayed nerves, stolen her wings, and grounded her.

And the minute Jed stepped into her tent and woke her up, catching her in his arms, the shaking, the roiling in her gut, the sense that at any minute she might come unglued—it all vanished.

Jed Ransom, once again, holding her together. Which meant that no matter how far she ran, how many times she jumped, how long she tried to deny it, she still needed him.

He was bending down, packing his bag now, his strong, wide shoulders pulling at his shirt.
Do you want to talk about it?

His words lodged in her heart, rooting around all night.

It.
Their
fire.

The two hours of hell, huddled together, holding down the fire shelter. Him trembling with the pain of his hands, finally surrendering to whimpers and then gritted screams as the blaze scorched his skin.

Her, reaching for the edges of the shelter to relieve him, his skin peeling off against the searing fabric of the tent.

She’d hadn’t yet escaped the dichotomy of being roasted alive set against the calming presence of Jed’s embrace, his moist breath on her neck, his low voice telling her to hold on, that they would live.

Across the campsite, Jed clipped his walkie onto his belt and pulled his gloves over those wrinkled hands. When he looked over at her, she glanced away.

They’d never talked about what happened next. How, after the fire had passed, turned to crackling and embers around them, she felt his skin turn cold, his breathing hiccupping, suddenly erratic.

“Conner has already walked the perimeter of the fire, says there’s no spotting, so we’ll start mop-up. Then I’m going to see if I can pinpoint the source and confirm what sparked this.”

She would never forget his whitened expression as he slid into a full-out delusional panic. Nor how he’d ripped himself free of the Kevlar cocoon, angry, afraid, leaping up into the blackened moonscape of the Porcupine forest.

Shock—she’d recognized it from their EMT training and knew that the fire could still kill him. The memory of him shaky on his feet, his eyes wild, could still send a tremor of cold panic through her.

“Kate?”

She looked up at him.

Jed was holding the map open and now frowned at her. “You okay?”

She nodded, but her gaze fell to his hands, hearing now his voice, his groan of horror as he’d looked at them, moaning as he’d dropped to his knees, his face crumpling.

She distinctly remembered her heart stopping at his gut-wrenching cry. Then his blood pressure dropped, and he’d faded away into blessed unconsciousness.

“I’m just...I just—yeah. I’d like to see where the fire started, too.” She picked up her helmet, her Pulaski, her pack, and headed toward the fire line, the memories grinding up to press moisture into her burning eyes.

Kate, don’t leave me. I need you.

The last thing she wanted was him knowing that somehow, despite herself...she’d never gotten over him.

“Let’s separate into sectors, we’ll get this thing mopped up faster.” Jed motioned to his crew, indicating on the map where they should begin work.

Conner headed out with Kate along the tail, through the burn area, toward the center. While he felled snags and cut apart burning stumps with his chainsaw, she used her Pulaski to turn over piles of white ash and rake through coals. Then she applied water from her pump and scattered the fuels.

The buzz of saws hummed in the air, the work dirty. Her eyes teared, and her nose was thick with snot, her mouth sawdust dry as the sun burned down on her neck.

She and Conner finally made it to the river, and she used her bandanna to cool her neck as she sat on a rock and took a long swig of now-tepid water.

“You do the work of two men, Kate,” Conner said, wiping his face.

“Thanks.”

“Nice to be back in the fight?” He uncapped his water bottle.

She glanced at him. “I guess, yeah.” She lifted a shoulder, watching him as he ran his shirtsleeve against the moisture on his forehead.

“I have to admit, I was surprised to see you show up in Ember. I mean, after the Buttercup Rim fire I thought I’d never see you again.”

She froze then, studying him, but he seemed to not have a clue that he’d unseated her. “What?”

He pulled out a granola bar, offered her a bite. She shook her head.

“I was on the mop-up crew. We heard all about the blowup, how you got trapped. Pretty tough stuff.”

She fought to keep her voice easy, her breathing metered. “Yep.”

“They said you were in the shelter for nearly two hours.”

She nodded. “It wasn’t that hot, just long burning. And in the low area I got trapped in, I thought maybe the air would be toxic.”

No one had to know that, actually, she had followed exactly in Jed’s footsteps and gone into shock.

And he hadn’t been there to keep her warm, calm, or hike her out to help. Oh no, she’d unraveled completely on her own, nearly incoherent when her team finally found her and airlifted her out.

Now, she leaned over, filled her water bottle in the river, and didn’t look at Conner, keeping her voice even, cool. “I hadn’t realized the word got out.”

“It didn’t, really. I was just there. And the Buttercup range is notorious. I think they’ve had like two hundred and thirty entrapments in the last ten years. That’s a lot.”

“It was my fault. I was separated from the crew, on lookout, and waited too long to evacuate.”
God isn’t a parachute, and someday you’re going to find yourself in over your head.

Her dad’s prophecy finally came true as the flames licked the edges of her shelter.

She shook her hand to free the tremor, capped the bottle, then tightened it, and clipped it to her belt. “It’s no big deal.” She stood up, wondering if the question lingered on her face. Did Jed know? Had he discovered she’d spent the past two years in counseling, working the desk at the National Fire Agency in Boise, wrestling her fear into submission?

Suddenly his protectiveness made perfect sense.

What a joke—she was a legendary, hotshot smokejumper deathly afraid of fire.

She tied her wet bandanna around her neck. “Ready to get at it?”

But Conner wasn’t moving. He stared out, away from her, up the river. “I’m pretty impressed that you went through another fire alone—and came out unscathed.”

She gave a wry chuckle, lifted a shoulder as if his words weren’t lethal.

But he stood up, met her eyes. “Or
did
you come out unscathed, Kate?”

Her mouth opened. “I—”

“It
is
a big deal,” he said softly.

She swallowed, studied his face, and uttered her worst fears. “Does Jed know?”

Conner’s mouth tightened into a grim line, at least a little compassion in his expression. “I don’t know. He hasn’t said anything. Probably not—I didn’t see him until later that summer when I joined up with him for a Minnesota fire.”

“Please—don’t tell him. I’m fine.” Now. And she would be, if everyone just left her alone, let her do her job.

But Conner searched her eyes, as if unsure. “Just because you’re afraid doesn’t mean you’re weak, Kate. It makes you more aware of what you can lose, how fast—”

“I’m not afraid. And I don’t need you—or Jed—worrying about me.” She said this with a sharper edge than she intended, but he didn’t flinch.

“Right. Ho-
kay
.” He picked up his chainsaw. “And just because someone cares about you—even tries to protect you—doesn’t mean they don’t respect you.”

She frowned at him. “I don’t need anyone to protect me either.”

He shook his head. “You know, for someone who’s spent her life working on a team, you know nothing about what it really means.”

He shouldered the saw, headed along the shore toward the black.

Oh, yes, actually she did. Every costly, brutal, betraying nuance of it.

She followed Conner into the dying smolder.

The mop-up work burned away the rest of the day, the sun dying in a rose-gold fiery sigh beyond the Cabinet Range.

Jed caught up to them as they were hiking back to camp. “There’s a truck coming to fetch us at the campground. Conner, take the gear and meet up with him. Kate, c’mere—I want to show you something.”

Jed looked as if he’d spent the day sloshing around in ash and mud—his face flecked with dirt, smudged into his two-day beard, his hair sooty, his yellow shirt smeared, stained, and dirty beyond repair. But he hiked through the forest, energy radiating off him. “I followed the burn pattern, all the way back to the campground, and I want your opinion on something.”

He did? She trudged through the ash behind him, her boots sifting up white powder as she stepped over charred trees and scorched rocks.

“We thought, at first, that fire was started by a lightning strike. But when I got to the site this morning and saw how the fire had spread, I realized that it started here, in this campsite. Which is strange, because the area was cleared out by fishermen, free of large pines, or anything else that might act as a conductor. When I got here, I couldn’t find a tree or any other charred remains. So I started hunting around.”

They stood in a makeshift fishing campground twenty feet from the river’s edge. Kate made out a warped cooler, a blackened tent. “I certainly hope whoever was fishing got away.”

“Yeah, well, I radioed in, and no one has heard a thing about a camper, so we might actually have a fatality,” he said, walking to the campfire ring. “The fire was called in by some homesteaders who saw the smoke. I was already in the office, monitoring the lightning strikes, and by the time of dispatch the fire was probably already an acre.”

He kicked a can, blackened and charred, into the fire pit. “Let’s hope whoever camped here was long gone.” He crouched near the fire ring. “I thought the fire might have started here, from a stray spark. The valley is so dry right now it wouldn’t take much to light the entire thing. But looking at the V-shaped pattern, the fire started not here, but over there.” He pointed to an area just a few feet away where concentrated ash from a blaze which, according to the pattern indicated, had ignited a fallen oak and the brush around it.

Kate bent down, feeling through the blackness. “Look.” She pulled out a melted plastic cylinder about thirty inches long. Warped, with what looked like wings, gnarled on each side. “Is it a flare?”

He took it in his gloved hand. “No. It’s a drone—like a weather drone.” He turned it over, rubbing the surface. “Conner’s been working on something like this to help us fight fires.”

“Maybe it crashed. Does it carry enough fuel to ignite the forest?”

“Some do—depends on the drone. I’ll take it back with us.”

She got up, dusted off her hands. “Report it to Overhead. They’ll send some investigators out, take pictures, poke around.”

He dropped the drone into his pack.

She shouldered the Pulaski, turned to head back to the campsite.

“Kate, I wanted to ask you something.”

Oh.

She didn’t know why his words sent a cool finger down her spine. What if he had simply been waiting to get her alone to tell her he knew about her past? Maybe he’d been watching to see her reaction to fire—and yesterday’s panic after the slurry drop, coupled with the ensuing nightmare, only made him realize she was a hazard on the fire line.