Wildfire on the Skagit (Firehawks Book 9) (10 page)

She fell about ten feet before her harness yanked at her and stopped her fall like a dangling puppet. But the top of the harness was on a zip line that sent her shooting forward at about half of normal parachute landing speed so that there’d be almost no risk of injury.

He watched closely while listening to the delighted scream as she flew across the training area. With decent form, she hit feet first then tucked her arms in and let her momentum roll her onto her knee, hip, and—with a well-timed twist—onto her shoulder and back.

They’d spent an hour jumping off a block and into the sawdust pit practicing that landing. It wasn’t something you learned immediately—it was unnatural to not fight the fall as you crashed into the ground, but most got it at least well enough that they weren’t going to hurt themselves on the training setup.

Like so many of the others, Callie popped back to her feet and began dancing about as the adrenaline roared through her seeking some outlet.

He heard distant shouts of, “That totally rocked!” She wrapped Krista in a bear hug about her waist when Krista moved forward to free her from the harness. An embrace that left them both laughing.

It was the last afternoon of the camp and he was going to miss it. Yesterday they’d followed an easy, though somewhat longer, trail from the falls back to the campsite and had another nighttime campfire. The girls had been at ease, comfortable with him despite his being male. Krista had sat close, but they didn’t make any “thing” of it and that had been good as well.

The hike back out this morning had been a merry affair despite the addition of empty coolers and a couple trash bags to their loads. He and Krista had toted out the saws, laying the blade on their shoulders and flopping a hand over the tip to balance the heavier engine dangling behind their shoulder. Laura had only brought out two small saws, so they hardly weighed anything. After their return to camp and another of Betsy’s lunches, Krista had led them to jump training.

There’d been a fire call, but only about half the smokies had been needed. Most of the others were still sacked out or working over the gear, but Ant-man and Ox, who had been instructors in the prior years, came over to help out and cheer the girls on.

Still in the harness, Callie started an impromptu dance in the middle of the sawdust pit and the others began joining in.

Evan saw that they were missing one. Without even thinking about it, he knew who wasn’t there; who hadn’t jumped yet.

He turned and there, sitting in the far corner of the jump platform, was Mallory.

“I’ve been watching you.”

“I might have noticed that,” he admitted doing his best to sound casual. A quick glance revealed that Krista hadn’t separated Callie and the harness yet.

“You always answer with truth when it matters.”

Did he? “I’ll try to cut down on that.” But he knew he wouldn’t. He also knew that was a dumb thing to say at the moment.

She waited with a maturity that wasn’t supposed to happen to pretty eighteen-year-old girls. They weren’t supposed to have things happen to them that forced them to grow up so fast. That was half the reason he’d gone to war in the first place, was to keep his sister from having to—
Shit!
He bit back against the pain.

“Sorry,” he told her. “Bad joke. What’s your question?”

“My brother was killed by a suicide bomber in Kabul. Did he die in vain?” Her voice was chill, emotionless. As flat and blunt as her question.

Evan wished he could see her better; she was hidden by all the jump gear that practically overwhelmed her slim body. The helmet wrapped around leaving only her face peeking out below the shadows cast by the raised mesh face screen.

He wished he could give her a hug and tell her a lie that somehow it would all be okay.

But even shadowed, her eyes said she knew better. That, Evan finally realized, was what made Mallory’s beauty so shocking and so much richer than her classmates—those painfully aware, very adult eyes.

“I wish I could answer that,” he scrubbed at his face seeking something wise to say. “All I know is that I stood beside some incredible soldiers and that we helped a lot of people. I honestly think they are better off for our having been there, but I don’t know.”

Her silence, her pain demanded truth—wise or not.

“I don’t have any answers, Mallory. I swear to god that if I did, I’d give them to you. I wish I could answer why I survived six years in some other country’s hell and my sister killed herself in Boise. I’d have given those answers to Francine if I had them. If I could bring her back for just ten seconds I’d tell her how god-awful sorry I am that I wasn’t good enough to save her. Wasn’t
there
enough to save her.” He looked away and tried to pull himself together, tried to stop himself before he really began to scare the poor girl.

“Maybe,” he managed a choking breath, “maybe your brother thought he was keeping you safe. Maybe he thought it was worth going there and risking himself for that. If I could have done that, saved Francine, I know that I would have thought it was worth any price. Including my life.”

Mallory didn’t say a word.

Evan stayed focused on Krista and when she signaled that the harness was clear, he pulled it back up the zip line using the thin tag line attached to the harness for that purpose.

Once he had it back up to the airplane “door,” Mallory slipped forward and sat in the position safely inside the door where he’d attached the harness to nineteen other girls.

“You ready?” he kept his voice calm and professional.

She nodded.

Mallory didn’t say a word as he buckled on the harness, double-checked the safety line that led up to a sliding metal loop on a second wire beside the zip line.

He went through the instructions by rote, making sure she acknowledged each step. It was as if he was putting both of them back together one strap, one buckle at a time—tying off their conversation so that they could both lock it safely away.

As he reached for her face mask, ready to seal off the last of it, she raised a hand to stop him. She looked up at him with tears in her eyes.

“I was so angry he left me. I couldn’t even cry for him,” she touched her hand to her wet cheeks and looked at them in surprise.

She brushed her fingertips and her tears on his cheek in a gentle gesture of thanks.

Then she moved forward into the door.

“Ready?” he asked. His tone neutral. His voice so rough it hurt.

“Ready,” her voice was steady.

He stuck his head into the door frame and saw that the pit was clear and Krista was in position to help her land if there was a problem.

Instead of slapping her shoulder and yelling “Go! Go! Go!,” he rested his hand on her shoulder and said, “You’ll be great!”

She nodded and launched herself into space.

Mallory dropped down, slammed against the end of harness just like a real chute would grab at you when it opened, and then flew ahead. It felt as if she had left so many bad things behind.

Perhaps it was time he started doing the same.

# # #

Krista made sure that she was close, but Mallory landed clean. Actually almost perfectly, better than a smokie who’d had a season off and didn’t have his jump legs back under him yet.

She didn’t dance like Callie. Or scream or cheer. She simply flew. Mallory let Krista help her to her feet, but stripped the harness and the helmet herself.

Krista could see her tears that were more than the wind’s passage but also the smile that hadn’t shown much during the entire camp. Mallory simply stepped into her arms and held on tight. Krista hugged her back and looked up at the jump tower over Mallory’s shoulder.

Evan sat there, legs dangling out the door, watching the two of them. She wished he was closer so that she could read his expression, but the tower was a hundred yards away and a dozen yards up.

Whatever Evan might be feeling, she knew she was looking at the best man she’d ever met.

And maybe, just maybe, Krista Thorson deserved such a man.

Chapter 9

Once the girls had
a safety introduction by Denise the Firehawk mechanic and had their helicopter ride with Emily and Jeannie around the flanks of Mt. Hood, they climbed aboard their buses and were gone.

Watching twenty teenage girls group-hugging Evan had been a crackup.

Watching the gentle hug he’d given to Mallory had almost ripped out Krista’s heart. Or perhaps it had healed it. She didn’t even know anymore.

The camp felt unexpectedly quiet without them.

Krista went in search of Evan. Not in the showers, not in his bunk, not in the equipment sheds. She raided Betsy’s kitchen for a couple of roast beef sandwiches and sodas, grabbed a pair of sleeping bags and headed out across the gravel parking lot.

She found him in the only logical place, sitting on “their” fallen Doug fir well into the woods, staring at the running stream.

Once again, she sat on the log close beside him.

She handed him a sandwich and a soda, “Thought we should get our calories first this time.”

“Thanks.” No smile, no tease, and no kiss. But if she was reading him right, also no dark-and-foul-mood either. He bit down on the sandwich and watched the forest.

“You were amazing with the girls, especially Mallory, but amazing with all of them.” She wanted to ask what had happened between him and Mallory. What had they spoken of in that mere minute or two of privacy that had so changed the girl? Krista hadn’t even seen the pain in her until Evan had somehow brushed it aside. But now it was as if something had been washed away and the true woman shone through.

“I’ll be back for next season’s tryouts,” Mallory had informed her when they hugged goodbye. Krista just might have to talk to Akbar about considering letting a true rookie onto the team, for she had no question about Mallory’s determination. She’d shifted from being driven away to being driven ahead. It was the same pain, just somehow…converted.

And most of all had been the look in her eye and the tone in her voice. Mallory had what it took to be a smokie.

Even trying to think about it made Krista’s head hurt. She didn’t have a lot of experience with those kinds of things. Though she suspected that Evan did and that’s why his bouts of darkness had been so confusing to her.

Krista had a past that was both spectacularly good with her father and a major pain in the ass with school and men in general. Evan and Mallory had made trips to some other land she didn’t begin to understand.

“Are you going to be explaining yourself anytime soon?” she asked before biting into her own tasteless sandwich.

“Huh?”

“
Huh,
he says. Yeah, that’s a way to get between this girl’s legs.”

“Say what?” Finally, he turned to look at her. Then he looked down at his half eaten sandwich and back at her. “Wow! Why am I thinking I just missed something really important?”

“Because you may be dense, but you aren’t stupid, Rook. Which part of your brain am I talking to now?”

“I don’t have multiple personality disorder,” he bit down into the second half of his sandwich, but appeared to be aware of what he was doing for the first time.

“No? Let me count them for you. One, Special Forces Green Beret dude who can do some really amazing shit. Two, one of the best smokejumpers to ever join MHA. Three, Mr. Dark and Moody—who is very mystical and enticing, by the way. Kind of like a rattlesnake a person just can’t seem to stop poking a stick at. Four, five, and six, a guy who can help a lost young woman find a center, utterly charm and inspire a whole troop of eighteen year old girls, and do the same to a twenty-eight year old one as well.” She tapped her own chest and realized that “utterly charm” didn’t begin to cover it.

“That’s quite a list,” he nodded as if they could all somehow be the same person. “Though I think most of that ‘inspiring a whole troop’ goes more to you than me. Anything else?”

“Seven, the best lover I’ve ever had.”

“I admit,” he finished his sandwich and reach for a soda. “I do like the sound of that last one. Would you like me to elaborate on that last attribute?”

“Soon, Rook, real soon.”

She really wanted him to, but she had to make some sense of all of those conflicting men that were embodied in the man beside her.

“Tell me about your sister.”

# # #

Evan had known that was coming, nodded that it was a fair question, but had to look away again. Had to turn away from Krista and look into a past far darker than the evening shadows around him. But, like the forest, there were also sun dapples of brightness in his memories that he’d forgotten—lost—until he spent three days with a group of young women with so much life in them.

“Twenty-eight. Francine would be your age if she’d lived, instead she was dead when she was the same age as Mallory. My kid sister, a total pain in the ass. Too damn smart, I guess, hell of a lot smarter than me anyway. She saw everything so clearly.”

Evan looked out into the shadows beneath the trees but could see her fading memory no more clearly for all his searching.

“She saw people and would tell me about them.” He could almost see Francine sitting by the stream giving him her
you doofus
look.

“I mean, she really saw them, in here,” he thumped a hand against his chest. “The shit Mom and Dad pulled when we kids didn’t meet their social agenda. It thought they were just weird. She’s the one who pointed out they were near psychotic, alcoholic assholes who only cared about themselves. The girls and guys at school, the nasty ones with so little going for them that their egos were the only thing they could bring to the game.”

Krista was holding his hand, but he couldn’t turn to look at her.

“She was also naïve, a real sweet kid. Kept trying to help people. But if you want to help someone, you teach them how to be better at what they’re good at. Green Berets taught me that. Francine kept pointing out what people were bad at, couldn’t help herself any more than your poor stick-poked rattlesnake.”

He took a deep breath, he had to finish the thought he’d spent a decade dodging. The forest was in the dead silence that came after the day-critters had roosted or burrowed, but the night ones hadn’t yet come forth.

“I told Mallory that maybe I went Special Forces to defend my sister, and maybe that’s why Mallory’s brother went and died. To defend her.”

Krista hissed in a sharp breath of sympathetic pain.

“I wish that really had been me. The truth is that I went in because I couldn’t help Francine. No matter what I did, it just got worse. I should have gotten her a therapist, drugs, committed her under a suicide watch, something. But what did I know. I was going to be a soldier. That was my ticket out of our screwed up family and I took it.”

The pain was too much, too deep, and the tears came though he fought against them; a battle he’d won for years now lost.

“Didn’t know,” he talked through the roughness in his throat, “that I was kicking out the last peg that was propping her up.”

Krista folded him against her and he let her.

He’d thought by coming into the woods, he was buying time to get his act together after the crap he’d churned up inside himself while helping Mallory. So why had he come to the only special spot he and Krista had to call theirs if he was trying to avoid her?

She brushed her hands over him, kissed him atop the head as he lay against her, and murmured words he couldn’t hear but could feel washing over him like the cool evening air.

The agony that had been burning in him was abating, retreating before Krista’s instinctive acceptance and kindness, quenched against a past he couldn’t fix. He’d been twenty-two, fresh out of college, and ready to take on the world. What did he know about pain yet? He could fix it for his sister, but maybe he could repay it in her name.

He pulled himself back from Krista. Pulled back until he could see her in the fading light of the sun gone behind Mount Hood, but not yet set.

“You do this next year, I’ll be there. Don’t care where I have to come from, even the goddamn grave. I’ll be there. If I can save even one of them…” and his voice choked off, he couldn’t continue.

# # #

Krista kissed him. What choice did she have?

She expected the attack, his need to purge the impossible pain he carried inside him. To lose himself in the act of sex. She would give that to him, whatever release he needed.

She half hoped for the tenderness that he’d so surprisingly given her the first time they’d made love. She wanted to try again to see what it felt like to be a woman who deserved tenderness.

She wasn’t ready for the two combined.

With an intensity that had worried Akbar on the fire enough to come and ask her opinion before he spoke to Evan, her soldier boy turned his full focus on her.

Wordlessly, because he was clearly far beyond words, he focused completely on giving her exactly what she wanted. He didn’t kiss her hard, but he did it so thoroughly that she felt as if she’d never truly been kissed before.

Evan unrolled one of the sleeping bags and eased her down onto it.

He didn’t strip and take her, he didn’t even pull off her shirt. Instead he used those big, powerful hands to stroke and mold her until she was no more than putty shaped to his pleasure.

When a fire burned, it could burn on the surface or climb up the ladder fuels—from brush to sapling to tree to the top where it formed a running crown fire that raced with the wind through the treetops independent of the fire below. Depending on the intensity of the fire, the forest’s recovery might be fast or slow.

But sometimes it burned down instead of up.

A ground fire burned down into the deep duff or peat. Hard to detect and even harder to extinguish, it killed the very soil as it progressed. Soils could take decades to recover from an intense ground fire, the forest that would eventually return would have no hint of the old but had to be created anew.

That’s the way Evan made love to her. Every move, every moment, he created such an intense heat, such an intense feeling that it burned away anything Krista had known about herself.

When he finally freed her from her clothes and she arched hard against his mouth and hands at the slightest touch, there was no room left for self doubt. There was no over-tall, big-boned, over-built smokejumper who happened to be female. All that remained behind was a woman helpless to do anything but respond to the man.

He entered her with the same gentle power, slow, tender, and wholly unstoppable. He rode her up until she knew only one thing. Until all else was erased.

Even as her body thrashed with the pleasure Evan sent scorching through her, Krista knew one clear, perfect truth.

With all his many facets, with his darkness and his passion and his joy, she was absolutely in love with him.

And that was something she wanted with no man.

# # #

Evan woke in the pre-dawn darkness to a hand stroking him.

Krista lay long and naked against him between the sleeping bags. The very first birds were singing in the trees. The brook was bubbling happily nearby.

“Wakey, wakey, Rook.”

“How can you have your hand where you do and still call me that?” He rolled his hips to gain a little more pressure against her palm. “Not that I’m complaining about your hand’s location.”

“I didn’t think you were,” she murmured softly. She sheathed him and rose above him, sweeping the sleeping bag they’d been using as a blanket, like a cape to keep her warm against the cool morning air.

She settled down over him, a perfect fit. She started with a slow rock of her hips that had him closing his eyes to relish the feeling.

“Okay, as long as you do that,” he managed to gasp out. “I don’t mind if you insist on calling me Rook.”

“Well,” she did a side to side thing that she hadn’t done before and he hoped that she did often in the future. “I can think of many things to call you, but I don’t think you’d like them to be your tag among the crew.”

“Understood. Let’s keep those…oh my god, do that again…just between us.”

“Look at me, Evan.”

After a couple of failed attempts, he opened his eyes and did.

The breaking daylight was revealing Krista a little more each moment. He pulled her face down to kiss her good morning as she continued building the rhythm between them.

“Best sight I’ve ever woken to,” he made a point of leering at her shadowed breasts. “Damn but you’re an incredible woman, Krista.”

“An incredibly large woman,” there was a tone in her voice that rang false.

“Not filing any complaints,” he tried a joke, but it didn’t work.

She kept them moving, but the feeling had changed. The motion of their bodies was no longer he and Krista, it was just their bodies.

“Stop for a second. Just stop,” he finally clamped his hands on her hips to hold her still.

She wouldn’t look at him.

“Krista, now
you
need to look at
me.”

Only after several false attempts did she look at his eyes.

“I’m not the best guy around with words, but I know one thing for certain.”

He waited until he got a soft, “What?”

“Any asshole that made you feel that you are one bit less than magnificent was an idiot. You are kind, big-hearted—”

“And I have big breasts that you are very partial to,” she added with chagrin and no matching smile.

It was hard not to acknowledge where his hands had naturally drifted. “No arguments on that point. But if you think I’m with you because of your fine breasts, then you’re even dumber than I am.”

“So why are you with me?”

Evan tipped his head from one side to the other trying to figure out how to answer that. He was past wondering why he was having this conversation at this particular moment. “I’ve never been with a woman I wanted more or made me feel so crazy good. But that doesn’t cover it.”

“Then what does?”

“What is it with women needing words?”

“Because guys are incomprehensible and women get tired of always trying to explain them to ourselves.”

Evan groaned in frustration and startled the same stupid squirrel watching them from atop the log.