Two Crazy, One Wild

by Shaye Marlow

  “It’s no prob. Here.” Then Lance ducked the right wingtip down, giving Blaze a better view of the ground.

  Shrieking in glee, she plastered herself to the window again.

  When Lance put the aircraft back onto a level plane, he was grinning at her. “You remind me of me, when I was a kid. You ever wanna learn to fly? I also teach classes when I’m bored.”

  “I would love to,” Blaze blurted, ecstatic. Then winced as reality kicked in. “Well, I’ve gotta get things at the Sleeping Lady under control first, but yeah. Maybe next year?”

  “Sure, sure.” Lance glanced out at the twisted array of silty gray rivers and hundreds upon thousands of lakes and ponds that made up the Matanuska-Susitna Valley. “So my brother made me promise to tell you about the kinds of guys that live out here. Most of ‘em are out here for a reason, you know what I mean?”

  Blaze tried not to groan. She had heard this rant before, from Candy, from her mom, her Econ professor, and just about every other woman who’d ever spent any amount of time out in the Bush. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “Hell, any idiot decides to get frisky, I could probably just bench-press him and he’ll back off.” Not exactly the happiest truth of her existence, but by sheer luck of the draw, Blaze was more ‘manly’ than most of the nerdy men she’d shared her Business classes with.

  Lance chuckled. “Okay, sure. But just watch out for the crazies.”

  “What kind of crazies?” Blaze asked, frowning.

  Lance shrugged. “I dunno. Bruce wanted me to say that. Made me promise to say, ‘Just watch out for the crazies.’ I think he was on NyQuil or something.” He yawned and checked his watch. “Man, you never really appreciate how much sunlight Alaska’s got in the summer ‘til you gotta fly to the Lower 48 a few times a week. Really puts things into perspective.”

  “Crazies?” Blaze insisted. “Have there been burglaries or something?”

  Lance laughed. “In the Bush? Hell, they all leave their keys in their 4-wheelers out there. Most places don’t even have locks. Who’s gonna burgle them? The moose?” he chuckled, shaking his head. “Nah, I think he was talking more about one guy in particular, but I’m not gonna name names.”

  “Who is it?” Blaze demanded.

  “Jack Thornton,” Lance said. “But I heard you hired the guy as your handyman, so you’re kinda screwed.”

  Blaze felt a spasm of panic, since most of her long-term goals depended on Jack Thornton not being crazy. “What’s wrong with Jack?”

  Lance laughed again. “Oh, well, you mean aside from a really bad attitude?” He turned and grinned at her, paying absolutely no attention to the air in front of him. “Well, on one of those stops for coffee at the Sleeping Lady, Jack swam out to our plane, grabbed Brucey by the back of the head and dunked him under the lake a few times. Called him a ‘prissy flyboy’ or something like that. Bruce kinda still remembers it. Brucey’s big, but he said the guy’s got gorilla-strength.”

  Blaze’s mouth fell open. All she could say was, “What?”

  Lance shrugged. “You want my opinion, this was back when Bruce had just got his wings and was still being a cocky asshole to everyone. Jack was out fishing and Bruce parked on his hole. On purpose. Then demanded to know what Jack was gonna do about it. So yeah. I think Brucey had it coming.”

  “How long ago was that?” Blaze demanded, pretty sure that her guests would take umbrage to being dunked in a lake.

  “Oh, at least ten years,” Lance said. “It was before I had my license. Brucey was flying me out for a fishing trip, all proud of himself. You ask me, I think that dunking did a hell of a lot for Brucey’s attitude. He used to be such a prick. Mellowed him out something fierce.”

  “That is not acceptable adult behavior,” Blaze managed.

  Lance only laughed. “Oh yeah? Try telling Thornton that.”

  “You bet your ass I will. It’s my lodge, my rules.” In fact, with just that little morsel of information as a guide, Blaze would have a long discussion with her handyman about the proper rules of decorum when potential clientele, paying guests, and lawyers were concerned.

  She and Lance chatted for a few more minutes about some of the eye-opening things that her only employee had done in the last ten years he’d done business with the Rogers’ family, and then Lance sat up in his chair to peer over the dash and said, “There we go. Lake Ebony. There’s your baby, up on the hill.”

  Blaze, whose mind had been shocked into stunned overdrive somewhere between ‘assault’ and ‘destruction of personal property’ nevertheless had all her worries vanish in a wash of bliss the moment she saw the huge green roof of the Sleeping Lady slide into view between the spruce trees on the crest above the lake. Immediately, she found herself having trouble breathing.

  Her dream. Everything she’d ever wanted in her entire life was wrapped up in that big green roof and its half-dozen outbuildings. Bought and paid for, sight unseen. Six hundred thousand dollars for ten thousand square feet, thirty acres, and all the machinery and equipment to run it as a fishing lodge. Every penny of her inheritance, gone, and then some.

  Then Lance pulled the flaps and the pitch of the engine changed as the small aircraft began its descent, aiming for the deep black waters of Lake Ebony.

  I’m here. Oh God, I’m here… Blaze’s heart was pounding, somewhere between elation and absolute Oh-My-Shit-What-Have-I-Done terror as she watched the last of the spring-budding treetops slip under the plane’s big floats. Hers. The Sleeping Lady was hers. It was her dream come true, and it was only a lake’s-length away.

  The landing was surprisingly gentle, and once they had come to a relative stop in the middle of the lake, Lance revved the engine again and got them moving towards shore.

  He idled them over to the far bank of the lake, beneath the crest where the Sleeping Lady sat like a mistress of its domain, surveying the lands around it. As they neared the shore, Blaze lost sight of the lodge through the hillside of birch and spruce trees.

  When the Cessna’s floats slid into the gravelly mud of the narrow beach, Blaze was close to hyperventilating. She was here. She was either going to sink or swim, and had nobody to blame for it except herself.

  …And she was already in debt up to her eyeballs, just getting here. She’d been wanting a lodge her whole life, but now she had it, and was in debt for it, and she already almost felt like puking with nerves. Her hands were shaking as Lance unstrapped himself and crawled out onto the plane’s left float. “Well,” he said, “here we are. Lake Ebony.” He pushed the pilot’s seat out of the way and gestured for Blaze, who was still staring at the woods in front of the propeller in shock, to climb out after him. “You got a ride up to the shop, or should I just pile the stuff on the beach?”

  Jerked out of her stunned silence, Blaze climbed down onto the float and stood there, gripping the wing strut with white knuckles, as she stared up at the woods shielding her new home from view, trying frantically to tell herself she was not making the biggest mistake of her life.

  Lance gave her an empathetic grin. “Excited?”

  Swallowing, Blaze nodded down at him. This close, sharing space on the float, there really wasn’t any way for Blaze to back up and give him space—and thereby the illusion of a lesser disparity in height. Even now, she could see the little gears turning in Lance’s head as he realized just how big she was. At six-foot, Lance really shouldn’t have had to look up at her. Unfortunately, Blaze was about twelve inches and eighty pounds off of average, and every checkout cashier and bank teller in the world had let her know it. Some gigantic Amazon somewhere had birthed Blaze, and, once Blaze had passed between her massive thighs, the woman had left her in an alder thicket on the mountain behind her father’s house. And, having just lost their baby due to a miscarriage, her parents had taken her in, quietly raised her on their own, and could probably be sent to jail for life for not turning her over to the authorities, if they weren’t both already dead.

  That was one of the many unhappy su
rprises that Blaze had discovered in the lawyer’s office four months ago. Adopted. It still hit like a freight train, every time she thought of it.

  Then she realized Lance was still looking up at her, waiting for her answer.

  “So excited I think I’m gonna puke,” Blaze managed, still trying to focus all of her attention on the textured aluminum plating between her men’s Size 11 hiking boots, attempting to force her stomach into submission.

  “Well,” Lance said, “If you wanna go sit down, I’ll unload for you.”

  Blaze automatically felt herself prickling at how quickly he offered to do her work for her. “I’ll be fine,” she said. She ducked her head through the door and grabbed a load of groceries from behind the pilot’s seat, not waiting for Lance to unlatch the back compartment. She normally tried not to make a big deal of it, but she wasn’t stupid—she knew that the Alaskan Bush was a man’s world, and that if she didn’t want to start a precedent of Let’s All Take Care Of The Poor Helpless Woman, she needed to start proving her competence the moment she stepped off of the plane. First impressions, her mother had taught her, were everything. If Blaze showed every man she met on the river that she was smart, capable, and willing to work, they wouldn’t patronize her, and those that did, she could simply tell them to get screwed.

  Blaze had been raised by the epitome of an Independent Woman—her mother, who had made her millions in real estate, had insisted on keeping separate finances despite her father’s greater wealth—and after earning her way through her Business degree, Blaze was not going to allow a bunch of scruffy, rugged, largely-unemployed men to treat her like a second-class citizen because she had a couple of A-cups and internal plumbing. Groceries retrieved, Blaze gingerly started towards the shore, picking her way across the wet aluminum float. Out in the woods, she heard the sound of an engine and looked up.

  A stout-looking man was driving a blue 4-wheeler down a winding dirt track, pulling a flatbed trailer behind him. It rattled and bounced as it jumped over roots and stones, making a ruckus as it worked its way down the hill to her. Blaze watched it approach as Lance worked his way around to the other float and began opening the back compartment of the airplane to access her luggage.

  When he came fully into view, the man driving the 4-wheeler looked nothing like what Blaze had envisioned over the phone. Instead of the hairy, dirty, graying, plaid-covered Bushrat she had been expecting after exchanging instructions with his gruff voice over the phone, he was clean-shaven, with jet-black hair, relatively tidy, and wearing tight blue jeans and green flannel shirt. A well-worn Carhartt jacket was slung over his shoulders, zipper open, exposing a broad chest beneath. And he looked young, which was completely at odds with how long she’d heard he’d been skulking around this part of the Yentna.

  Hell, from the way some people told it, he’d been living in the same damned cabin since the Gold Rush, so Blaze had hired him fully expecting a wrinkled old fart who had to grab his reading glasses to figure out which nut went on which bolt.

  But to her shock, even from this distance, Blaze could see that Jack Thornton was built like a Greek god. Pecs that strained against his shirt. Shoulders that made divots in his jacket. Legs that looked like they could crush the 4-wheeler like a used soda can. When Jack slowed the vehicle and the deepest green eyes that Blaze had ever seen met hers, however, Blaze felt her heart give an extra thud. Then she watched his muscular ass stretch against the jeans as he dismounted…

  …and her elephantine foot slipped out from under her, and she went crashing backwards into the frigid waters of Lake Ebony.

  Cold and humiliation washed over her like a wet blanket from God, putting out her idle fantasies as quickly as if she’d been dunked in liquid nitrogen. Blaze sputtered to the surface, gasping, blinking up at the horrified face of the pilot, who was kneeling on a float, offering a hand to help her, and then her very first employee, who was smirking.

  …smirking?

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