White Heat (12 page)

Griffin felt each of those words of responsibility like individual gunshots to his gut. “I will.”

“I’m not Griffin’s responsibility,” Lyndie said. “He’s mine.”

Griffin snorted. “I take care of myself—”

“Uh huh.” She grabbed another chorizo, the last one, and he stared at the plate in regret because though he hadn’t thought himself hungry, it turned out he was.

Her eyes on his, Lyndie fed it to him, her finger touching his lips, making him stare at her as all sorts of interesting reactions occurred within his body.

Tom watched all this and chuckled. “You can take care of each other,” he decided, looking pleased as he once again turned his charm on Rosa. “So are you going to make some of that magical, soul-enriching coffee this morning?”

Still holding Tallulah, she gave him a sideways glance. “Are you trying to charm me because you are too lazy to make your own coffee?”

“Why…is it working?” Reaching out, he pet the dog, who panted happily.

“Not so much.”

“No? Ouch, then.”

Rosa let out a slow, indulgent smile. “You silly man.” She touched his jaw. “You know I always have coffee for you.”

Tom’s return smile was slow and sweet. He started back in the house, then glanced at Griffin. “Oh, and I located another tractor for you. It’ll be up there sometime this morning, after I make the rounds. I’ll come up, too, and lend a hand, or whatever it is I can do to help.”

“Bring the latest weather report.”

“Will do.” He turned back to Rosa, smiled into her eyes. “You take care of yourself.”

“I always do.”

And then he was gone. Rosa went inside, too, leaving Griffin with Lyndie. Alone.

Not a state that he felt comfortable with. “Let’s do this,” he said, and drew in a deep, fortifying breath.

Y
ou okay?” Lyndie stared down at Griffin.

He looked down at the food on the plate and his stomach turned. “As okay as I’ll get.” He had the most inexplicable urge to tug her back down next to him, slide his arms around her and hold on as dawn continued its rise. Always, he’d loved a woman’s touch.

Until this last year, when he’d felt dead inside.

Now he was slowly coming back to life, thanks to Brody’s meddling, and also thanks to his body’s reaction to this woman. She was hot, sexy, smart, tough, independent…the whole package.

Truth was, he was slowly getting used to the idea of being alive when his friends weren’t, and painful as that felt, he couldn’t deny it. He looked into Lyndie’s eyes. Strong and sure and courageous as anyone he’d ever met, she wasn’t anything like anyone he’d ever been with.

And yet, right at this moment, it was Lyndie he wanted, with all his heart.

Her arm and thigh brushed his. Her hair, still damp and spiky in that cut that should have been too masculine but instead seemed so soft and feminine he wanted to sink his fingers into it.

The wanting became an ache, a physical ache…to touch her, kiss her, to have her touch him back, kiss him back…to obliterate anything else churning inside him.

She was so close he could see himself reflected in her green eyes. He could lean in if he wanted, and rub his jaw to hers. He could put his mouth right on the corner of those strawberry glossed lips and start in, nibbling to his heart’s content.

As if suddenly just a little nervous, she tossed the keys to the Jeep up and down in her hand. “You ready or what?”

Was he?

Loaded question if he’d ever heard one. Was he ready to be far, far away? Oh, yeah.

Was he ready to nibble off that distracting gloss? A double resounding oh, yeah. Ready to get in that Jeep and go to the fire? Hell, no.

But neither was he ready to admit it, so he set the plate aside and got to his feet, snatching the keys from her in midair as he did.

“Hey!”

With a little smile on his lips, he headed toward the Jeep, the ground crunching beneath his feet, pretending they didn’t feel like two leaden weights. Already the day was warm moving toward hot, which wasn’t going to help them any. He started the engine, revved it until Lyndie planted herself in the passenger seat. She’d barely shut the door before he hit the gas.

He was sure she made a comment as her spine hit the back of the seat. He saw her lips moving, but the tires spinning kept him from hearing her.

No doubt, that was just as well.

She waited until they were out of the driveway and on the road. “So today you’re in a hurry. Interesting.”

“A hurry to get it over with. If you’d moved any slower getting in, I’d have left without you.”

A laugh choked out of her as she clicked in her seat belt. “Well, I suppose I’d feel the same way. Not sure I’d have admitted it to you though.”

“Yeah, you would have. You’re the most brutally honest person I’ve ever met.”

“Is that right?” She leaned back, made herself far more comfortable than he could have if he’d been the passenger. “Yeah, I guess I am. I’d sure have told you what was freaking me out by now.”

“I’m not freaking out.”

“Uh huh.” Completely relaxed, she stretched out, hair whipping in the wind. “Whatever you say, Ace.”

He decided he liked her quiet best. Real quiet. “I’m not freaking out,” he repeated.

“So you said.”

They drove in silence through the town, squinting through the smoke and falling ash, over rough cobblestone streets and past centuries-old architecture.

Griffin had checked the weather meticulously before he’d left the house, with Rosa helping translate the radio news. The high today was going to be ninety, with forty percent humidity. Not great—rain would be the only great thing in this situation—but it wasn’t so bad either. Physically, he was as ready as he could be, which wasn’t saying much.

Mentally…he had no idea. And suddenly he did need to tell someone, to confide in what he’d faced last year, what he was still facing. And not just anyone, but Lyndie. He wanted her to know everything. “Lyndie.”

She had her right arm resting on the door as they began the climb above town, fingers tapping to some tune only she could hear. Her hair blew wildly around her face in the wind. She’d been watching the landscape go by, and when he said her name, her fingers stopped tapping.

“About that freaking-out thing…”

She turned her head to face him.

Shifting into a lower gear for the hill, Griffin concentrated on the road for a moment, which was lined on one side with a rock wall, the other a sheer drop-off back to town the hard way. “The last time I fought a fire…” He drew in a deep breath and kept driving. “It all went bad.”

Everything about her softened. “How bad?”

“Pretty damn bad. People got hurt. People…died—”

“Look out!”
she cried, just as a coyote darted out in front of them, followed by another. “Don’t hit them!”

He hit the brakes, hoping like hell the coyotes moved in time because he wasn’t willing to die for this.

They turned sideways, and began a slide.

Teeth gritted tight, Griffin eyed the jutting rocks on their left, the sheer drop-off on their right. Some choice, but he’d take the jutting rocks over a fall off the cliff any day.

They spun toward the cliff.

Lyndie gripped the dash for all she was worth and remained utterly silent as the coyotes leapt toward the jutting rocks, vanishing out of sight.

The Jeep continued to slip toward a definite messy outcome.

“Griffin—”

Yeah, he knew, he saw. Desperately he worked the wheel, steering into the slide, letting off the brakes, and finally,
finally,
the Jeep responded to the gentler touch, swerving away from the drop-off, toward the rocks, before slowly righting itself.

Then they came to a dead stop, facing forward as if nothing had happened. Silence reigned. Slowly the dust settled; not a coyote in sight.

Griffin let out a long breath, then looked over at Lyndie. “That was fun.” When she didn’t say a word, just gripped the dashboard for all she was worth, he frowned. “You okay?”

“Dandy.”

He studied her frozen posture for a moment as his heart began to settle. “Because heaven forbid you admit something scared you, right?”

“Plenty of things scare me. Your driving, for one.”

“You’re the one who said not to hit them.”

“Well you shouldn’t listen to me!”

He stared at her, then laughed. “You’re not going to admit to being ruffled, are you? How about if we’d gone over the cliff, would you have admitted it then?”

“Just because I maintain my cool, doesn’t mean I don’t ever get ruffled. I get ruffled. I get plenty ruffled.”

“Well, let me know when, because that I’d like to see.” He shoved the Jeep back into first gear and started again, slower now.

“Griffin—”

“Not now,” he said, scanning the road for more animal life as they moved over the first hill and into the burning landscape. He knew what she wanted, to talk about the Idaho fire he’d started to tell her about. “Apparently I can’t multitask. I’m incapable of driving and angsting at the same time.” And he drove on. Right into the heart of this fire, the one place on earth he didn’t want to be.

T
hey made the rest of the drive into the harsh smoke and falling ash in silence. The flames flickered on either side of them now. The air was hot; Lyndie’s mood somber. She was sure Griffin felt just as somber.

Despite the coyote incident, he had one hand sure and easy on the wheel, the other on the gearshift, and used both with a confidence and skill she could admire.

Given how distraught he’d been yesterday, he seemed to be holding up just fine now as they drove into the fire. That is if she didn’t acknowledge the way his jaw kept bunching, or how his tan seemed faded the closer they got. But then again, she already knew he was tough, and a true survivor.

She imagined his training had had a good deal to do with that, and his character, as well. He was a save-the-world sort of guy…which meant his terrible losses, the ones he’d started to tell her about, would have been taken doubly as hard.

She’d known he’d dealt with something big, something horrific in his past, but she hadn’t imagined the truth, that people had died,
his
people. The raw emotion she’d glimpsed in his eyes when he’d said that would have brought her to her knees if she’d been standing.

Is that what made him so serious? So intense? Is that what made him fight the attraction between them, what made him want to push her away at every turn? In that case, on a much different scale, she supposed she understood. She’d lost people in her life, too.

They were nearly there, surrounded by fire when her cell phone vibrated in her pocket.
Sam.
“Yes,” she said when she answered. “I’m still on the clock.
Your
clock.”

“So you did stay to translate.” There was a smile in Sam Logan’s voice. There was always a smile in Sam’s voice.

“Nina wasn’t up for it.” She squinted into the smoke. “If I hadn’t stayed, your man here would have been pretty much stuck.”

“And so you jumped right in. You keep trying to tell me this is just a job for you, Lyndie, and you know what? I don’t buy it.”

“It’s the bottom line. Don’t forget, you’re paying me by the hour while I’m here dreaming of a fun, easy flight to Catalina, and I’m not as cheap as Nina.”

He laughed. “Bill me.”

“I always do, Sam, I always do.”

“Yeah, just come back in one piece.”

She knew Sam Logan ran Hope International on pure adrenaline and love. He paid his pilots, but the various experts they flew all volunteered their time and went unpaid. Sam felt they made enough money on their own time, and mostly, he was right.

What he wasn’t quite right about, however, was that while
his
heart might be big enough for the entire world, not everyone felt the same excitement for their job as he did.

Because for some, like Lyndie, this was just a job.

Yes, she got to help people, and that made her feel good, but she also got to fly for a living, and pretty much picked when and where she went.

Not many had that freedom, and she was grateful, but at the moment, she was also just a little resentful at having to stay when she’d wanted, needed, to be alone. Resentful at all the feelings that surfaced when she thought about possibly losing San Puebla, or the feelings that Griffin seemed to cause within her.

“Take good care of that firefighter, too,” Sam said. “Maybe we can get him back sometime.”

Lyndie glanced at Griffin. His body was tense, his expression growing more and more unnerved as they pulled off the main road. The fire had progressed even farther toward town than she’d imagined.

Would this weekend help him forget…or remember? “I don’t know about a repeat on this one, Sam.”

“Hey, once they get a taste of the philanthropist lifestyle, they love it. We don’t have anyone as skilled as he in what he does. You can talk him into it.”

Griffin turned his head toward her.

She met his eyes and thought…no one talked this man into anything he didn’t want to do.

And yet his brother had. “Prepare yourself for a very large bill from me. Bye, Sam.” She disconnected while he was still chuckling.

“Your boss?”

She shoved her hair out of her face, only to have it fly right back in it. “He wants me to talk you into doing this again sometime.”

The sound that escaped him might have been a laugh, or a tortured groan.

“That’s what I thought,” she said.

“Hey, you’re no more thrilled to be here than I am.”

“I just wanted some alone time.”

“You like that? Being alone?”

It was what she was used to. “Doesn’t everyone?”

He considered that. “It’s new for me. But being alone right now would be better than…”

“Being here?”

“Yeah.”

She’d gotten that loud and clear from him, so why it felt just a little bit hurtful to hear made no sense at all. The engine roared up the road, as did a sudden wind, and the noise of that and of the fire seemed as loud as thunder.

Griffin parked next to the water trucks and tossed her a bandana. “Tie it over your mouth.” He turned off the engine. “You have your inhaler?”

“And a spare.”

They got out of the Jeep, with Griffin looking more and more distant as they moved toward a group of men who had just gotten there themselves. They all greeted each other somberly, and Griffin pulled out his PDA, bringing up the screen of the map. He pointed to the lines he’d drawn in yesterday, indicating the fire’s perimeter.

Two men came forward, and pointed to where they were now, indicating how much the fire had grown.

Griffin let out a long breath, then made adjustments to the map accordingly. He looked at his weather kit, then started talking. He talked slowly and clearly, and always waited for Lyndie to translate before moving on to the next point in his plan of action.

And he did have a plan of action, one that he’d clearly thought out meticulously and precisely.

“As yesterday, we’ll use the river as one line of defense,” he said pointing to the water line. “The sheer rock wall as a second. But we’ll have to start digging new lines, from here.” He pointed to the area just south of them, above the town. “The fire is strong here.”

Everyone nodded. They understood.

“Long, hot, hard day,” he said quietly to Lyndie. “I had Tom load the back of the Jeep with gallons of drinking water, along with more shovels and gear. He’s also hunting up more men. Now that they know what I need, we can make do if you want to go back.”

“Go back?”

“Seriously, Lyndie. This is incredibly exhausting work. Almost all of it will be manual labor clearing lines. You don’t want to do that again.”

She hadn’t met many men as tough and rugged as this man, who was also gallant. Why that felt like a plus, she had no idea. She didn’t want a tough and rugged and gallant man in her life.

She didn’t want
any
man in her life, at least not for more than a night, maybe two. And she especially didn’t want one who thought he knew what was best for her. “How do you know what I want?”

He stared at her, let his broad shoulders sag as he let out a long breath. “This is not a good time to go all stubborn on me.”

“Because you know best?”

A gust of wind hit them, plastering his shirt to his torso, emphasizing hard muscle. He was big, solid, and quickly becoming far too familiar. She pulled him around the side of the first truck, away from the eyes of the others. “Look, I know this is just some misguided sense of responsibility. You’re afraid I’m going to get hurt.”

“Hell, yeah, I’m afraid you’re going to get hurt.” He gently touched a bruise on her jaw, courtesy of their fall from yesterday. “I’m afraid you’re going to get
dead.
Can’t you just listen to me and go the hell away?”

She was pretty much a stranger to him, and yet he cared, deeply. Not many felt that way about a person they didn’t know, but he did. Another plus about him, if she’d been counting pluses. She hadn’t.

She’d been counting minuses and she would continue to do so. One, he was pigheaded. Two, he was single-minded to the point of making her blood boil, and three—the biggest minus of all—he apparently wasn’t capable of mindless sex. Damn him.

Then, totally disarming all her thoughts, he gripped one of her hips in his hand. The other cupped her face, stroking her skin with his thumb, the look in his eyes haunting and melting all at once. “Please, Lyndie. Go back.”

She covered his hand with her own. She understood he needed her to go, but she couldn’t. “I’m sorry.”

He stared at her, then dropped his hands from her. “You’re not going to listen to me.”

“No. But hopefully you’ll listen to me, because I’m only going to have this out with you once. I’m not going back. I’m not going anywhere but up that hill with a shovel in my hand.”

“You aren’t trained.”

“And neither are more than half the men waiting for you to help them fight this fire. You know that from yesterday, I’m here, I’m staying. So…” She gave him her toughest smile. “Lead the way, boss. Let’s do this.”

Turning his head, he studied the trail they were going to take, the men waiting for him to lead, and closed his eyes for a moment. Then he opened them, kissed her once, hard, and nodded grimly. “Just stay safe.”

“I intend to.”

“Okay. Let’s do this.”

No reason to point out that he looked as if he’d rather face an execution squad, and when he didn’t move, she merely gently nudged him along to face the day ahead.

Brody sat in the living room in South Carolina, where once upon a time he’d leapt from couch to couch like a wild puppy, where he’d kissed his first girl at age thirteen and had gotten caught by his grinning brother…where he’d told his parents one year ago that Griffin was gone and no one knew where.

He let out a careful breath and smiled, because, after all, today he had good news. “I found him.”

A gasp shuddered out of his mother, and she reached blindly for his father’s hand, clenching it tight. “You found—” her voice broke. “My Griffin?”

“The one and only.” His parents sat side by side, Phyllis and Ray Moore, his father in his “retired” clothes of stiff jeans and a cardigan sweater his mother had probably insisted he wear, his mother in her fashionable Capri pants and carefully ironed blouse.

They’d always looked so happy to him, so absolutely in charge of their own world. So much so it had always seemed impossible for him to even attempt to replicate it.

So he hadn’t. He hadn’t even tried. If asked, he would have said he hadn’t found his calling, but he was working on it—on the couch with his eyes closed.

But that had been before Griffin’s life began to unravel, and for once, his brother hadn’t been able to pull things back together.

For Brody, turning his back on Griffin’s troubles would have been expected. Easy.

And wrong.

Apparently he did indeed have a conscience. Damn it.

“Son, tell us.” His father stroked his mother’s hand, the one that held his so tight his skin had gone white.

“How is he?
Where
is he?” Tears swam in his mother’s eyes. “When is he coming home?”

He had to do this right—he, the son who’d majored in kidding around, the class clown, the guy who’d never successfully created a single relationship worth having except for the one he had with Griffin. “I can’t tell you where he is. I promised I wouldn’t.”

“Oh, Brody—”

“But I’m in touch with him. He’s okay.”

He hoped. God, he hoped. He was flying back to San Diego in a few hours, he wanted to be there when Griffin got back late tonight or the next morning. Not that Griffin would want him there.

“Can’t you tell us anything? What he’s been doing? Why he’s stayed away so long…
something,
Brody,” his mother whispered.
“Please.”

He looked at them, his parents who’d aged in the past year more than in any other time in their lives. “I don’t really know what he’s been doing all this time,” he said. “Just existing, I suppose. But I managed to talk him into—” He let out a mirthless laugh. “I bullied him, actually, into volunteering for Hope International. It’s a charity organization that sends out volunteers to assist in whatever their specialty is.”

His mother gasped again, her hand to her chest. “And he went on a fire?”

“He did, he went out on a wildfire in Mexico. I want to be there when he gets back.”

“Oh, my God.” His mother got up, drew him up also, and hugged him tight. “Oh, Brody. You’re such a wonderful brother.”

Brody let her squeeze him while he squeezed his eyes tight. He wasn’t a wonderful brother, he’d never been a wonderful brother. That had been Griffin.

But letting her think so felt…really good. “I’ll talk to him, try to get him to call you.”

“I love you, Brody.”

He knew that. He did. But for the first time he wanted to live up to that love.

Much later, before he left his parents’ house for the airport, still basking in that nice, warm, “wonderful brother” glow, he called his own cell phone.

He got the voice message, which had been changed.

“Brody,” Griffin’s voice said. “Don’t even think about leaving me a message and asking how I’m doing, because I’m going to tell you. Remember that time when you climbed that tree out front of Aunt Gail’s house? You slipped and fell, but a branch caught you on the way down, leaving you hanging there, upside down, bleeding and screaming for an hour before anyone rescued you. Remember that, Brody? Remember that feeling?
That’s
how I’m doing. I’m hanging in. Literally. Now go away. Go far, far away.”

“I’m sorry,” Brody said regretfully. “No cando.”

Griffin leaned on his shovel and swiped sweat off his forehead with his arm. Three times this morning alone the increasing winds had forced him to call the crew back and redirect. The only saving grace had been the river and the rock. All they had to do was use them effectively and pray the weather cooperated. If that happened, they just might get this thing contained.

The tractors were barely able to handle the mountainside, but they put them to work anyway, dragging thick, heavy railroad ties behind each machine, which effectively cleared the dead pine needles and small branches and made a damn good firebreak.