The Complete Hotshots

by M. L. Buchman

  “That’s your idea of being helpful?” she grumbled from where she lay beneath him in the dark.

  “Ginger, this is Candace,” the radio squawked loudly in his ear. “Are we looking at an individual or a community? I don’t show anything on the map.”

  He tried to roll off her, but the big zucchini bush stopped him. When he shifted the other direction, he partly rolled onto her fireaxe.

  “Hey Candace. I can confirm an individual. Clumsy, but cute.”

  “I’m not—” Well, maybe he was being a klutz. But he hadn’t exactly been prepared for a female firefighter lying on the dirt in his garden.

  “Ginger!” The woman on the radio was sounding irritated.

  “Hang on.” Then Ginger reached up to assist him in getting off her, and clipped him fairly solidly on the jaw with a leather-gloved fist.

  He tumbled into the vines.

  “Oh crap. I’m sorry.” She giggled again even as she groped around in the darkness, grabbed his arm for support, which pulled him back atop her with surprising strength. “Well, isn’t that interesting.”

  This time when he tried to pull himself free, she pulled him down and kissed him. Hard.

  3

  What was she doing? Tori was deep in the kiss before any part of her brain woke up enough to be rational. The mostly unclad Colin was lying full upon her and, after a brief hesitation, was proving he was an exceptional kisser.

  After enjoying the situation for several more moments, she managed a “Whoa.” Then she pushed against his shoulders to shift him up and far enough away for her head to stop having ideas about where to go next with this mostly naked man. He tasted deliciously of male and toothpaste—a welcome relief from her own salt sweat and char—but it was dumb as could be for her to randomly kiss a total stranger.

  Colin didn’t resist as she pushed him back. Kept going until he was kneeling between her legs.

  “Um,” she had nothing to add to that. And she was almost tired enough to drag him back down on her.

  “Ginger!”

  “Spoilsport,” she told the radio without keying the transmit key.

  “She’s persistent,” Colin observed from nearby in the darkness. Her eyes had recovered enough to make out his outline against the stars.

  “You have no idea. She needs to know…” something.

  “I live alone here. Solo cabin. Is the fire coming my way?”

  “Candace,” somehow Tori had held onto the radio during the kiss. “It’s a solo cabin of a man who tastes like mountain spring water.”

  “You kissed him?”

  “Either I did or he did. I’m a little fuzzy on the details.”

  “Uh-huh,” Candace wasn’t buying it. “I’ll send Luke up with a couple saws. Make sure the site is prepped for best defense. The fire has slowed and will be good until dawn. We’ll get air attack to lay down a perimeter as soon as the helos are back aloft with the sunrise. Take an hour break.”

  “Roger that.”

  Now the question was, what to do with an hour?

  4

  On the gas camping stove, Colin had heated up the leftover chili he’d been planning to have for lunch tomorrow. The woman across the table was wolfing it down while it was still scalding hot as if she hadn’t eaten in a week.

  “Don’t they feed you?”

  “Only between fires. No time during a burn. You cook this?” She mumbled around a mouthful, halfway through the bowl.

  “Yes, my chef is off this week.”

  “It’s good,” she drank back a glass of water in a single gulp. “Really good.” She slowed down and began looking around the candlelit cabin. “I see the butler is off this week too.”

  He looked around and grimaced. “I’m not generally this messy.” He was ten miles up a dead-end road and an hour-long hike on a steep trail past that. He hadn’t exactly prepared for visitors. And it wasn’t that bad. His sheets were still spread on the couch, his clothes piled on the chair, and the floor hadn’t been swept in a while. But the dishes were clean and the food all stowed. His desk was a train wreck, but that was always the case when he was in the middle of writing a novel.

  At least he’d taken a wash in the stream recently. Colin rubbed at his chin. Okay, should have shaved somewhere in the last few days, but how was he supposed to have known that he was going to have his first-ever visitor in five summers.

  “You’re not exactly all spic-and-span yourself,” he told her.

  She’d staggered into his cabin, dumping hardhat, jacket, and axe across the threshold. The cotton shirt she wore underneath was both sweat- and soot-stained. But it clung to her in amazing ways. The easy strength she’d revealed in the vegetable garden was evident in her athlete’s shoulders. Her curves were feminine and sleek; as unlike his ex-wife as could be.

  Mirella had been voluptuous…and needy as hell. The latter had made him feel the powerful protector at first, but what had started out as charming had become a cloying emptiness in the woman that could never be assuaged. He’d been on the verge of running and damn the expenses, when she’d decided to fill that emptiness with another man. He was still smarting from the whole mess—despite his lucky escape—and was not looking for another woman.

  But looking at the woman before him was proving to be a pleasure.

  “You’re staring.”

  He was. “I am,” he shrugged an apology. “You offer a lot to look at, Ginger.” Her fitness, her curves, the face that would have looked merely nice on any lesser woman. Ginger’s face was alive with emotion; smile or sarcasm, her feelings showed easily past the deep exhaustion.

  “That’s not my name.”

  “But on the radio…” he trailed off at her self-deprecating smile.

  “Nickname I earned for being as dumb as a dog. Tori Ellison,” she held out a hand and he shook it, “I never know when to quit.”

  “Easy answer, never.”

  5

  Tori looked up at Colin sharply. It was the easy answer, but no one else ever understood that.

  Hotshot crews were trained to keep going no matter what, right until the hallucinations of exhaustion set in, and she was still twenty-four hours from that state. But for everyone else, it was always a challenge to keep going. To push harder.

  Instead, Tori always saw it as never having “quit” as an option. It made all the difference in the world, but she’d never been able to explain that to anyone satisfactorily.

  “What makes you say that?” she asked carefully as she continued to eat the magnificent chili.

  Colin looked around his cabin as if he’d stored the answer to her question somewhere in the room.

  It was a sweet setup. A generous one-room; a mountain cabin without being primitive. Big windows that told of a magnificent southern view hidden by the darkness. They sat at a small table for two that might be more workbench than dining table. A hand pump at the sink spoke volumes. But there were also shelves of books, a cozy wood stove, and, perched at a desk cluttered with paper and books, sat a small laptop computer—the only sign of electricity in the whole cabin. She spotted the large battery and would bet that there was a solar panel somewhere outside that fed it. The laptop, she decided, was the focus of the room. The rest was disorganized, not because he was a slob—for the kitchen was immaculate—but because he didn’t care.

  He too had turned to the desk as if the answer was there somewhere but he couldn’t see it. No. He saw it clearly, but wasn’t sure about sharing it.

  “Writer’s cabin,” she guessed.

  He nodded, then froze like a animal wondering if it was too late to escape the fire.

  “Published.”

  A very careful nod.

  So, not a comfortable topic. Which meant he was either a total failure or a major success. If the former, the kitchen wouldn’t be so neat…or the desk so messy; a failure would fail in multiple ways. So, a success that he didn’t want to reveal, that had him living in a remote cabin with a vegetable garden.

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nbsp; She returned to her study of him rather than his cabin. Not a burden. Tori had thought he was good-looking by the light of her head lamp, but his arm had hidden his best feature. Warm brown eyes lively with a sharp brain behind them. A writer’s brain. But they were also warm with emotion, and each time they drifted down her body, more and more heat was revealed there.

  “I dated a writer once,” she said without thinking first.

  “I hate him already,” Colin offered the comment amiably.

  “He was okay. But he didn’t understand about perseverance.” Tori had learned enough while dating Andy to know that writing was all about perseverance. She could see that Colin was surprised she knew that reality.

  “You’re frustrating me at the moment,” he remarked and it sounded like a topic change, so she let it be.

  “Good. Only one thing this girl likes more than frustrating a handsome, successful man.”

  “What’s that?”

  And suddenly Tori was the one who wanted the topic change. She knew that she was far too tired if she’d let that slip out. She’d gotten into firefighting courtesy of a brief fling with a smokejumper. He’d been fun enough, but their brief foray into the wilderness had been life changing.

  Tori had always like the outdoors. She’d earned dual degrees in botany and ecology before that trip. To hang with a group of firefighters deep in the wilderness had been an option she’d never thought of until she met the smokie in a bar. He’d offered the briefest glimpse of a life in that uncontemplated world of wildland firefighting.

  She’d even found it easy to fall in with the typical firefighter talk once she became one. But there was still a woman with a dream who’d been born on that trip.

  The smokie’s bosses had been along on the trip, a pair of heli-aviation pilots. A man and woman and their little daughter. Neither spoke much, but their unity—their perfect togetherness—had been such a daunting vision, that it had set the bar impossibly high. She wanted what they had.

  Candace and Luke were another couple that felt that way—the only other example she’d ever met.

  So, she trained and became a hotshot. On the teams she laughed and teased, and occasionally played the “I fight wildfires for a living” card to pick up a handsome man in a bar. But there was a part of her that dreamed of finding that “right man” someday.

  That was the thing that this girl wanted more than frustrating a handsome, successful man.

  Not a chance she’d be admitting that out loud though.

  6

  Colin watched her sleep.

  He’d offered the couch, but she didn’t want to mess it up with her soot-stained clothes. Instead, she landed in his back-porch hammock and was out in seconds. He parked himself in an Adirondack chair on the back porch and again took in the night.

  The stars that he’d been watching to the east, were blocked to the west—the direction Tori had arrived from—by dark clouds. They weren’t black, as clouds usually were at night, but glowed red along the bottoms as if they still caught the last of the long-past sunset.

  Fire. They glowed red with fire. The hints of wood smoke from this morning were more constant, though still swirled aside by the gentle night breezes. Close, but not too close. Staying far away, he hoped.

  He should go inside. Pack his notes and laptop in a bag so that he could grab it and go if he had to. But he couldn’t break the easy comfort of sitting and watching Tori sleep.

  The charge on his body guaranteed that any chance of sleep for himself lay a long way off. Pretty, motivated, tenacious, and smart were only a few of the adjectives he cataloged on her behalf. She’d synthesized what he was all about with very few clues, and then had the decency to read that he didn’t want to talk about it.

  Mirella, despite being the one who’d cheated on him, had wanted a big piece of who he was when she left. She wanted rights to any books he’d written while they were together and any number of other things that his attorney had refused to give up. By the time the acrimonious battle was complete, Colin had paid her nothing and she had convinced him that the only reason she’d ever been with him had been avarice. He liked to think that hadn’t been the case. But however it had started, it had nothing to do with love.

  He wondered what Tori was like when she wasn’t drugged with exhaustion. Still beautiful. Still thoughtful. Still tenacious. He was surprised that he’d very much like to discover more despite swearing off women.

  Colin knew too little to make conjectures, but he had enjoyed every waking moment they’d had together, at the table and even lying in the garden’s dirt.

  That kiss. That brief, spectacular kiss. That had been one thing about Mirella, the sex with her was always fantastic. She might have needed something he couldn’t supply to send her seeking another man’s bed, but the woman had been built hot and made to last.

  He’d kissed Tori for approximately three seconds, and it washed any lingering, lonely-night fantasies of Mirella right out of his mind. If kissing Tori was that good, what would the rest of it be like?

  “Been alone in the woods too long,” he told the night quietly.

  Colin came to the mountain cabin to write. To get away from people and the city and the distractions. He’d been seriously considering wintering over this year despite the harsh winters that sometimes swept the heights of the Cascades. Mirella had come to the cabin once, and departed rapidly. He’d guess that if he chose to winter over, Tori would be right there with him. And loving it.

  He watched over her until a small light came bobbing toward him through the darkness. A tall man wearing a headlamp came up to the porch, flashed his light on Tori’s sleeping face and then a quick scan around—without blinding Colin—before dousing the light.

  “Name’s Luke,” the man stepped forward and offered a hand. His shake was strong, firefighter strong.

  “Colin.”

  “She actually looks sweet when she’s asleep,” Luke commented.

  “How about when she’s awake?”

  “Still sweet,” Luke chuckled. “Telling you, something’s gotta be wrong with the woman to be so consistently pleasant and cheery, but I haven’t found it yet. She’s a born firefighter. Thanks for watching over her, not that this one needs it.”

  “What does she need?”

  7

  Tori would have to pay Luke back for the “sweet” wisecrack.

  “Don’t think it’s my place to be giving away any of the lady’s secrets,” Luke was telling Colin. “Why? You got an interest?”

  Tori lay very still and awaited the answer.

  “Might.”

  Colin might have an interest? All she’d done was punched him, kissed him…spectacularly, eaten his chili, and passed out in his hammock for an hour. She was about to rouse herself, despite how comfortable she was feeling, and give these two a quick whack with an axe handle just for being so male, when Luke finally replied.

  “If you want to find a better person than Victoria Ellison, you’re too late; I already married her. My Candace.” Then Luke slapped her on the calf. “Rise and shine, Ginger. We’ve got some trees to trim. You’re first up swamping.”

  Tori made a groan for Luke’s benefit. When cutting line, one person was the sawyer, and the other hauled everything they cut as far from the fire line as possible. They’d switch off after every tank of fuel, but going from nice soft hammock to swamping was a rude awakening.

  But Luke’s compliment was high praise indeed; he was crazy about Candace and deservedly so. She didn’t know that Luke thought that highly of her as well.

  Luke tramped off toward the trees.

  Tori waited a moment by Colin, wishing she could see him better.

  “Thanks for taking me in,” she didn’t know what else to say.

  “You’re welcome any time,” he sounded surprised at this own words.

  Whether she was unwilling to risk another supercharged, mega-turbo kiss, or the hour’s sleep had been sufficient for her common sense to return,
she merely shook his hand and turned for the trees.

  He might have an interest?

  It was stupid. It was based on nothing at all.

  The only problem she could think of was that she might be having an interest as well.

  8

  Colin brewed coffee, pulled on boots and work clothes, and headed up the slope to join them. He did pack his grab bag and leave it inside the door just in case.

  The coffee was taken, appreciated, and drunk while still too hot.

  Tori, who was running the chain saw by the time he arrived, didn’t even shut off the saw when she knocked her coffee back like a drug, then returned the mug with the briefest of nods. He almost didn’t recognize her in the soft pre-dawn light. For one thing, she was back in her full helmet and gear. But also, she was in Ginger-mode. She was moving full tilt and nothing was going to break her focus. He knew that feeling and did his best not to feel rejected by her lack of acknowledgement.

  She had cleats on her boots and a heavy belt that wrapped around the fir. She scaled up the tree to the lowest dead branches, then nipped them off with the saw. Moving the belt higher, the next dead branches dropped to the ground. In moments she was fifty feet in the air and a thick pile of dead branches had accumulated around the base of the tree.

  Luke was at the prior tree, gathering up the dead branches and dragging them in the direction of the cabin. Douglas firs grew tall, and the lower branches often died off, yet still hung on for years.

  Colin grabbed a bundle of branches and followed Luke. Luke had found the cliff edge below the cabin and dumped the branches over which then tumbled to the bottom. Even if they somehow caught fire there, all they’d do was scorch some rock. Colin pitched his load over and they walked back together.