Where There's Smoke: inspirational romantic suspense (Montana Fire Book 1) (9 page)

Not for him.

He pocketed the keys, headed up the driveway. Clearly his roommate, Reuben had returned. With company. Conner’s black Ford 150 sat next to Reuben’s Silverado.

The absence of Pete’s Charger only slightly niggled at him.

“You know, Pete Brooks said that he was in love with me.”

He strode up the walk and banged open his door a little harder than he intended.

Stifled a curse.

Reuben and Conner stood in the middle of his living room—his
empty
living room—holding his Wii controllers like golf clubs. A game of Wii Sports-Golf flashed on his new flat screen.

His other furniture, however, hadn’t simply been pushed out of the way. Oh no, like a good hand-crew, Conner and Rube had completely emptied the room of anything that could cause trouble, like they might if they were digging a fire line right down to the mineral soil.

“Where is my sofa?” Jed asked just as Reuben took his swing.

“Ah! Crap. It went wide.” He turned to Jed. “Really? Don’t you know the rules of golf? No talking while someone is taking a shot.”

Jed glared at the six-foot-two bull rider. “My end table? My coffee table? My recliner?”

Conner slid off his perch on the dining room table, stepped up for his swing. “We moved them.”

“I see that. Where?”

“Pete’s room. They’re stacked on his bed.”

“Stacked...”

Conner lifted a shoulder, along with the hint of a grin. “His fault for trying to come onto Gilly tonight.” He glanced at Reuben who nodded, didn’t smile.

Ah. Right. Still...

Jed turned, walked down the hall past Reuben’s room to Pete’s, the larger one with the king bed. Sure enough—the sofa, recliner, and coffee table lay on the bed, as if exhausted from their labor in the family room. The end table perched on Pete’s dresser.

Jed stood there, picturing the ensuing battle between Pete and Reuben. “I’m not amused!”

Nothing.

He returned to the family room where Reuben stepped up for his next shot, his stance wide, holding the controller like a driver.

Jed leaned on the door frame, shook his head. “Tell me again why I agreed to rent you a room?”

Reuben looked up, glanced at Jed, raised an eyebrow. “Quiet on the green.”

Jed launched himself at him.

Reuben’s shot went off the screen as he threw up a hand to ward off Jed’s tackle.

They landed with a thump near the dining room table. Conner moved out of the way, watching.

“Yo! Bro—!” Reuben hooked his leg around Jed’s leg as Jed grabbed his arms, yanked them back. “What’s your deal?” He wiggled one arm free and jammed his elbow hard into Jed’s ribs.

Jed kneed him in the back. “I like my house the way it is!”

Reuben rolled, caught Jed’s fist, but missed the other arm grabbing him in a headlock.

Jed felt the man’s fists pummeling his ribs and relished it, fueling the adrenaline. He needed this, something to burn off the heat of his fight with Kate.

Reuben head-butted him hard, and Jed’s nose bloomed pain. He let go, howling.

Reuben got up, rasping, wiping his face. He bore a scrape on his cheek.

Jed lay there, his eyes watering, just staring up at his two teammates, who peered over at him.

No one said anything.

Then Reuben held out his hand to Jed, who grasped it. As he pulled Jed to his feet, he turned to Conner. “Your shot.”

A beat, a glance at Jed, then Conner walked over, reactivated the waiting game.

Jed picked up a chair he’d knocked over from the table and sank into it. Felt his nose. Didn’t feel broken. He ran his knuckle under it, just in case, and came away with a trickle of blood. Super. He fished out a bandanna and sat with it pressed against the burn.

Conner’s shot landed on the green to cheering from the Wii crowd.

“Wanna play?” Reuben said.

Jed shook his head.

“Wanna hit me again?”

“Maybe.”

Conner leaned against the table. “Kate has that effect on people,” he said, not looking at Jed.

But Jed looked up at him. “How do you know? You worked out of the Boise base—you two didn’t—”

“Chill. Not even close. Kate has a strict no-dating-firefighters policy. But I do remember a few squad bosses who looked like they wanted to drop her out of a plane without a chute.”

No dating firefighters, huh? Did that mean she’d dated...others?

And why not? It had been seven years. He shouldn’t expect her to pine for him.

Not like he had for her, at least.

Jed checked the blood, found it had already stopped. “If I could, I’d take her wings from her, ground her permanently.”

He wasn’t sure why he said it, but it came out low, a growl of frustration.

“Seriously? C’mon, Boss, she’s awesome.” This from Reuben, who’d finally managed par. “I fought a couple fires with her, when she jumped with the Boise team. I’ve never known anyone who could handle themself in a crisis like Kate. And she has uncanny fire instincts, just like her old man.”

“Her old man got half his crew killed. He should have listened to Overhead.”

Silence, and Jed closed his eyes. He had deliberately vowed not to talk about this, especially with Conner and Reuben.

Mostly because they still hadn’t forgiven themselves for letting Jock run back into the fire. Reuben especially couldn’t seem to square himself with it—he heard the guy occasionally wrestling with Jock in his sleep.

“Come again?” Conner said quietly, and Jed knew he might now have a real brawl brewing.

He held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “It’s just that I was there that day. I heard the hotshot super tell them where to go. Jock ignored it.”

Reuben put the controller down carefully on the windowsill. Shoved his hands into his pockets, kept his voice schooled. “Jock didn’t ignore it. He just knew better.”

Jed stared at the men—he knew them, knew they loved Jock. Still, something about their voices... “Okay, what am I missing here?”

Conner shrugged. “I don’t know. You read the report. The hotshot team was deployed over the face of Eureka Pass, cutting perpendicular to the fire, getting ready to do a back burn. Jock’s team hooked up with the shots, and that’s when Jock and Otis had words.”

Otis Flannery, former JCHS Superintendent, now working out of Missoula.

Conner continued, his voice even, as if he might be being debriefed. “Otis thought we needed to spread out more, split our teams into three to finish digging out the line for the burn. Jock didn’t like it. He said that we’d get cut off from communication and lose our eyes on the fire. Otis was listening to Overhead, though, and he ranked higher than Jock, so Jock fell back to the far end of the line with me, Rube, and Pete. He told Browning, Nutter, Deke, Suds, and Weiner to work the middle and connect the line with the shots higher up the mountain.”

“Jim Winner,” Reuben corrected. “And Anthony Sutton, both from South Dakota.”

Right. Jed knew them all.

Nutter—Doug Turnquist—age thirty, father to a son he never met.

Tom Browning, twenty-four-years-old and son of their small-aircraft mechanic on base.

Deke Johnson, out of Minnesota, age twenty-five, kid brother to a seasoned shot Conner had trained.

Bo Renner, rookie, former running back for the Ember Flames, and town darling.

And, of course, Jock.

Conner folded his hands over his chest, looked away.

Reuben picked up the story then. “We constructed our line, and Jock was ready to start the burn, so we all went to finish hooking the lines together when we heard the shout. The fire was making a run up the middle, coming in fast. They hadn’t yet connected the lines above us, so a burnout wasn’t possible. Then Otis came over the radio and told us to run toward the safety zone he’d found—up the mountain. But Jock turned to us—and told us to run back, toward the cool black area—already burned over. It was about the size of a football field, and he said if we had to deploy our shelters there, we had enough distance to survive the radial heat. The fire was going to run over us either way, but he calculated the distance to safety and realized level ground would get us there faster.”

“Except Otis’s route had them going half the distance,” Jed said quietly.

“Uphill.”

Reuben slid down, his back to the wall. “Jock knew that Nutter and the guys would never make it up the hill. He told them to drop their tools and run to us, but Otis came on the line and ordered them to him.”

A heartbeat, then Jed filled in the rest. “Jock ran back into the fire to stop them, try and save them, bring them back down”

“The shots on Otis’s crew, the ones working the far edge, ran up the trail,” Conner said.

“They had to deploy their shelters,” Reuben said. “Four are still suffering from burns, but they lived.”

“But the guys caught in the middle—Browning, Nutter, Suds, Deke, Renner, Winner and Jock...well, they simply couldn’t outrun it.”

“If they’d obeyed Jock instead of Otis, they might have made it.”

“And if we’d gone Otis’ direction, we would have died, too,” Conner said. “But because Jock defied orders, he’s the bad guy. Some of the shots claimed that while he was arguing with Otis, the guys could have been fleeing to higher ground, but I’m telling you, Jed, Rube and I hiked that pass, and there was no way to outrun that fire uphill. We lived because Jock followed his gut. And if the guys had listened to Jock, they’d still be alive, too.”

Jed closed his eyes, seeing the old man, his dark hair salted with gray under a JCWF gimme cap, staring up at the mountains through his aviators. Always thinking.

“Good decision, bad outcome.” Jed glanced at Reuben, then Conner. “His luck finally ran out. It just takes once. I wish Kate would get that.”

“Like I said—she has instincts like her old man, Jed. Have a little faith in her.” Conner walked over to the Wii, turned it off. The music died. “She certainly has faith in you, dude. According to her, you saved her life a while back.”

Reuben stood up, shoved his hands in his pockets. “She told us about the fire and how you hiked out with a broken leg. That’s dope, man.”

“Yeah, well, she’s telling it backwards. I might have saved her—briefly, but it was my fault. I read the fire route wrong, and we had to deploy our shelters. She climbed into mine and held it down for me.” He held out his hands, the skin rumpled along his knuckles, still reddened. “I would have died out there if it weren’t for her.”

Another risk she’d taken to save a life.

“I can’t help but think that ever since then, it’s like she’s trying to punish me for...Oh no.”

He ran his hand across his forehead, as if pushing the truth into his head. “That’s it. That’s
exactly
it.”

Reuben frowned at him. “Huh?”

He got up and headed into the dark kitchen, opened the door to the fridge, letting the light and the cool air cascade over him. He grabbed a Diet Coke, closed the fridge.

Conner and Reuben were watching him.

He opened the pop. Took a long drink. “After we’d been rescued, they flew us to the hospital in Fairbanks. I had some pretty bad burns on my hands, and they did surgery on my leg to set it. When I came out of surgery, there she was, sitting on the end of my bed, wearing scrubs. She’d taken a shower, all the soot and grime off of her, and she looked at me with this grin, like, wow, we lived.”

More than the grin, however. The tenderness in her eyes, almost an expectation of more of what transpired between them in the shelter and afterwards. The rekindling of everything he’d ignited at Grizzly’s. And that’s what scared him the most.

“I can admit riding out the fire in the shelter just about took me apart. For the first time, maybe, I realized I wasn’t invincible.”

And neither was she. Remembering the moment when right before he pushed her to the ground to deploy her shelter, she froze, fear holding her paralyzed, could still waken him in a cold sweat.

“But it did the opposite for Kate. I looked at her in the hospital, and she had this look in her eyes—like someone who’s cheated death. We were nearly roasted. I was sitting there with bandages on my hands, my leg in a cast, still reeling from the sound of fire cooking over us, and she was standing there glowing, as if suddenly invincible.”

And he’d been too afraid to ask what that glow might be about—the danger ...or him.

He took another drink, and his gaze went to the window. The lights on the deck around the Airstream still blazed.

“I told her to stay away from me. I still can’t believe I said that.”

But for good reason. Because if he couldn’t stop her, then he couldn’t watch.

“And stay away she did,” he said quietly. “And has been punishing me for it ever since. Taking chances, proving herself...”

Conner glanced at Reuben, back to Jed.

“And it wasn’t only about me. She was punishing Jock, too. He’d heard about what happened and came to Alaska to get her. They—we—had a blistering fight. He basically told her to quit jumping, and she pretty much told him where he could put that idea. She jumped with the Alaska team for the rest of the summer. As soon as I could, I headed south, back to Ember. I quit the jump team, started heading up the Shots. And Jock and I had a back row seat watching her jump fires across North America for the last seven years.”

The lights over the Airstream finally blinked out.

“And now...lucky me, I’ve moved to a front row view.”

He drained the rest of his Diet Coke then crushed the can, turned and shot it toward the garbage can. Netted it.

“Except, I’m tired of watching. I’m tired of worrying. Kate Burns isn’t going to crash and burn on my watch.”

“How are you doing to do that? You can’t follow her from jump to jump.”

“Watch me.”

Reuben raised an eyebrow, a smirk on his face. “
Ho
-kay.”

Conner, however, drummed his fingers on his leg. “Listen, Jed. We all know she doesn’t have to prove she knows what she’s doing. She’s Jock’s daughter—and a trained fire behavior analyst. She wants to be a jump trainer—maybe it’s time to give her exactly what she wants.”

“What?”

“You’re so freaked out about her getting hurt. However, she’s never trained anyone, never had anyone she’s responsible for. Having someone you care about makes you safer, makes you take fewer risks, right?”