Playing With Fire: inspirational romantic suspense (Montana Fire Book 2) (21 page)

So much for keeping promises to Shep.

“Do you think the bear will find us?”

“I don’t think so,” Conner said, not looking at her.

She’d hoped for something more reassuring.

“If it’s tracking us, it would have lost our scent when we went in the river,” he added, as if reading her mind.

He stopped, let go of her hand and parked her at the edge of a small clearing. The starlight reflected off the river, adding texture and faint illumination to the night. From what she could see, he’d found them a small alcove in the forest, surrounded by aspen and scraggly pines.

Walking into the middle of the clearing, about fifteen feet of inlet space, he seemed satisfied and began to clear away the earth. He kicked away duff with his boot, scattering twigs and rocks before he bent to root out the spot with his hands.

“What are you doing?”

“We can’t bushwhack out of here in the dark—and we’re still pretty shaken up. Best to make camp and figure out what to do in the morning. I know it was hot out today, but the mountains cool down quickly at night, and I don’t want us to get hypothermia.”

He scraped out a small rectangle and rolled stones in two lines, bracketing the patch of earth.

“Are you making a
fire
?”

He was squatting, putting the final stone into place, adding it to one end. “Yep.”

With what? Except, yes, he’d been Special Forces—a Green Beret. Of course he knew how to build a fire with his bare hands.

What
couldn’t
the man do? He’d saved her from a bear, rescued her from a waterfall...

He could also probably make her forget her promise not to fall for him.

She could still feel his kiss on her mouth, the overwhelming urge to cling to him. In one life-altering moment, he could stop the world, turn her to fire, and make her believe that everything would work out.

They would survive. And find Esther.

She didn’t have a prayer of emerging from this with her heart intact.

“What can I do?”

“How about find some kindling? Small twigs, pine cones, and needles. You might find some old wood—anything dry, although right now the entire forest is flammable, so it shouldn’t be too hard.”

He had his knife out—she hadn’t even noticed that he still wore it on his belt—and was using it to cut birch peels from a nearby tree.

She stepped into the forested area and hit her knees, feeling the forest floor for anything on his list. Her hands closed around a nest of pine cones, and she gathered them into her shirt.

He’d created a small pile of kindling and she dumped her cones next to them, then went in search of twigs.

“Look for squaw wood—the branches on the bottom of coniferous trees. They’re usually dead, and you can break them off.”

She followed his suggestion, found a shaggy pine, and easily broke off an armful of branches.

When she returned, he was shaving birch fiber from a peeled section of bark. Then he took out a metal bar.

She crouched next to him. “What’s that?”

“Fire steel. It’s part of my knife sheath—a survival kit from the military.” He scoured his knife down the edge of the steel, and sparks shot into the birch shavings. In a second, a tiny flame flickered. He set the shavings in the middle of the fire pit and added a handful of peels.

The fire caught, consuming the birch.

“Pine cones?”

She scraped up her pile and dropped them in. They sparked, flamed.

“Pine cones are fantastic fuels,” he said, the light flickering across the planes of his face. His hair had dried to a mop of tangles, and his late-afternoon grizzle turned him rough-edged and dangerous. At least to the predators who might want to hurt them. As Liza handed him her offering of sticks, their hands touched, and a wave of emotion swept over her—part gratitude, part relief.

Way too much longing.

“I’ll get some bigger branches.” With the fire adding illumination to the night, she could pick her way into the folds of the forest, find some dead branches, maybe some downed trees.

“Stay close.”

His warning tone raised a shiver. She glanced at him, and he lifted a shoulder, offered a hint of a smile. “I just don’t want to lose you.”

Huh.

She headed into the woods, the forest undulating under the flickering light. Tripping over a log, she followed it with her hands, found bigger branches, which she broke off and hauled back to the camp.

He had built a firebreak with rocks on one side of the fire. On top of the fire, he’d created a pyramid of sticks and logs, building it up with crisscrossing sections.

He took the branches from her and began to break them with his feet.

“You’re a regular MacGyver,” she said.

“Six years in Special Forces.”

He brought the wood over, finished making the pyramid. “Come closer—we need to get you dried off and raise your core temperature.”

Oh, no problem there. But as she crouched near the fire gnawing away at the wood, the heat poured into her hands, her chest. She was colder than she’d thought.

“I’m going to build us a shelter,” he said after a moment.

“I can help.”

He didn’t argue with her, just stood up and motioned to a stand of trees. “We’ll use these as our shelter braces. If you can find a suitable ridgepole or cross section to brace the logs, I’ll find some spruce roots to lash it to the trees. Then we’ll lean trees and brush against it to make a roof thatch. That’ll at least give us some shelter.”

Nope, Daniel Boone had nothing on Conner Young.

Liza measured out the length between the stand of trees and cast about for something that might serve as a ridgepole—a downed tree, a long branch. Meanwhile, Conner hiked into the woods. She could hear him breaking branches, snapping roots.

Twenty feet from the edge of the forest, she found a poplar as big around as her arm, the casualty of a downed pine. Kicking it, she freed it from the earth and hauled it back to the camp.

Conner held a coil of roots in his grip. “Nice ridgepole.”

A crazy pride bloomed inside her.

She held the branch up to the tree about waist high as he looped a root around one side, securing it, then moved over to the other.

“I know you’re getting tired, but if we can find some more branches, we can cut off the boughs and make a quick shelter. I think we’ll feel safer inside a lean-to.”

He didn’t allude to the bear, and she didn’t follow up. Instead, she followed him into the forest.

To her surprise he reached out and took her hand. Warmth radiated up her arm, back down to her core. She probably didn’t need a lean-to to feel safe.

He found branches from a shaggy white pine and cut off the boughs, leaving only the bare poles, and angled them onto the ridgepole, lashing them with more spruce roots. Then he piled on the boughs to make a bushy layer of thatch.

“If we had more light, I’d spread down a layer of moss, then the boughs,” he said in a weird sort of apology.

“That’ll do, pig,” she said quietly.

He looked at her, frowning.

“It’s a movie reference.”

“I know.
Babe
,” he said, and walked over to the fire. “My kid brother loved that movie.” He sat down, held his hands out.

For a moment, as the fire flickered against his face, it grooved out lines of fatigue, the wear of fighting for their lives, the sense that so much hung on his shoulders.

Somehow, despite the fact that they’d crash-landed, without food, water, or supplies, on some remote outlet of river in the massive, overgrown Kootenai forest, he’d crafted them a snug, warm homestead.

And she’d nearly forgotten about the bear.

She sat down next to him, her leg bumping against his strong thigh, his shoulder against hers. “Can I borrow your knife?”

He unsheathed the knife and handed it over.

She got up, went over to a nearby birch tree, and cut away another swath of birch bark.

Then she returned to sit beside him, spread out the birch bark, and began to carve away the thin top layer of white.

“What are you doing?”

“I don’t only make pots from clay,” she said. “My mom was a folk artist—she used to work with birch bark. It was one of the first skills I learned.” After removing the top layer, she flattened it on the rock and traced out a pattern with the tip of his knife.

“Birch bark is a bit like leather,” she said. “And it’s waterproof.” She began cutting out the pattern—round in the center, with a T-flap on the top and the bottom.

Conner watched her work in silence.

“Do you have spruce root left?”

He retrieved a small coil.

“Clean it off for me.”

He used his fingers to smooth off the length.

She folded the top and bottom of the T together and used the knife to cut a hole through both ends, then she cut holes all the way down. She twined the spruce root through the holes, sewing it together, then folded the rounded edge inside at the bottom and sewed that shut.

She repeated the work on the other side.

It made a sort of flat-bottomed, part-rectangular, part-oval basket.

“Can you cut me a sapling about the size of your finger?”

He regarded her with a strange, enigmatic look, then got up. A few moments later, he returned and she sewed the sapling along the rim of the basket to give it structure.

“You amaze me.”

Liza looked up, saw him sitting across from her, his eyes shining. “I can make a fire, but you made us dishes.”

She grinned at that. “Now if only we had food. Or water.”

“Food I can’t do, yet...but water?” He took the container and went over to the river, set the container in to soak. Then he walked past her, into the forest, and in a few moments returned with a handful of rocks. He washed them in the river and set them in the fire. “We’ll get the bowl wet, fill it with water, and then add the coals, bring the water to a boil, and it’ll be safe to drink.”

“With amenities like this, I’ll never go home.”

She drew up her knees, wrapping her arms around them.

The forest was alive around them, the wind washing through the trees, carrying with it the hoot of an owl, the river at a hush just beyond their alcove. She sat under the cover of the lean-to, her clothing nearly dry.

Finally Liza let her brain settle into the reason they were here. “Do you think Esther survived the falls?”

Conner sat down next to her. He held a stick in his hand, broke it in half. “I don’t know, but I think we probably need to head back to camp tomorrow. We’re in no shape to keep looking for her, and hopefully Pete will have returned with my drone. I can get a birds-eye view of the river, see if we can spot anything.”

“Is it the same drone you showed me in Arizona?”

He tossed the sticks into the fire. “An upgraded prototype, but yes. I made five of them over the past year, but they all have some sort of glitch. I’ve lost all but one—Pete’s retrieving that one. The NFS seems to think that when they crashed, they started fires, but—” He shook his head, the fire casting shadow across his face. “I don’t know.”

He leaned back on his hands, his forearms bare, sinewed. “I just know that I can’t hand over my last drone to the government...”

Something about the way he said it, an edge at the end of his tone— “You never found out what happened to your brother, did you?”

He breathed in, swallowed, and looked away from her, jaw tight. “The worst part about it is that I promised my grandfather—I gave him my word I’d find out. I had high-level security clearance, and still the government slammed the door on my face. Grandfather said it didn’t matter, but...” He sighed, ran his thumb over his cheekbone. “It mattered. I should have never promised him something I couldn’t deliver. It just got his hopes up.”

“It’s not your fault, Conner. Sometimes promises get broken. It happens, and it’s okay.”

His mouth tightened. He looked away from her, the flames flickering against his dark eyes. Then, abruptly, he got up, retrieved the pot from the river, and brought it back, dripping, filled with water. He set it down then picked out the rocks with a couple of sticks and dropped them into the water, one after another.

The water began to steam.

“That’s why you left the military, isn’t it? To find your brother’s killer.”

He picked up a stick, began to clean off the bark with his knife. “I just thought, after everything, my grandfather deserved answers. First my parents, then my brother—it just wasn’t fair to him.”

“Or to you.”

Conner glanced over at her, lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “It doesn’t matter if it’s fair—it’s what happened. If I believed in fairness, then—”

“Then you could trust God to work it out.”

He frowned at her. “No. I know God’s not fair. He’s
just
—but He’s not fair. If He were, we’d all be doomed. He wasn’t fair to Jesus to have Him die for our sins, and yet we benefit. It’s because God’s
not
fair that we have a chance at salvation.”