Wildfire on the Skagit (Firehawks Book 9)

by M. L. Buchman

  In seconds he was at the base of the cliff having only touched it three times, including the top. There was a stunned silence as he unknotted one of the ropes and tugged on the other until the free end of the line had passed around the tree at the top of the cliff and snaked down into a pile in the grass at his feet.

  He finally heard a soft, “Holy shit!” from one of the girls. Neither of the chaperones made any attempt to hush her.

  As he coiled the rope, he turned to face them. “That is a seriously advanced technique. Took me a long time to get it right with some of the best trainers in any military. But I just wanted to show you that there are whole different levels to each of these skills we’re showing you.”

  “Right,” Callie drawled it out. “Like they’d ever let a girl do that.”

  “Our senior pilot,” Krista spoke up, “flew a Black Hawk helicopter with the Army’s SOAR. They’re the very best pilots; the same people who flew into bin Laden’s compound. Annapolis, West Point, and the Air Force Academy are running fifteen to twenty percent women in every class now. Many Hotshot fire crews are a quarter women now. Smokies like me are still rare, but being a smokie is tough.”

  “There’s a reason they call it the Special Forces of the firefighting,” Evan acknowledged. “But we had three out of eighty in the Zulies.” The look of determination that rippled through the group of girls was one of the best things he’d ever seen. The world had just opened for these young women. No small town would ever hold one of these back from anything she wanted to do.

  He looked to Krista and knew this was the moment she’d been waiting for, this is why she had started this. Her face simply glowed with joy.

  That.

  That was what captivated him about her, the way her heart simply shone from her face.

  He wondered at her strength that she’d found a way to climb to smokie on her own, and loved that she cared this deeply about helping others up by simply showing them what was possible.

  “You want a model for all you can be?” He addressed the girls. Then he just pointed at Krista and all their faces turned to her.

  She actually blushed and looked down, which was awfully cute on her.

  And Evan wished he’d met more women like her over the years. Not just powerful in body and form, but independent and confident in who they were. Maybe meeting one was enough. Perhaps that was all any man was gifted, the chance to meet one woman who was so incredible.

  He almost laughed. They’d humped each other’s brains out only two or three times, managed to sleep together one single night, and fought a dozen different fires in three different states across four weeks, and here he was ready to sign up for a full-on relationship with her.

  This isn’t some Army enrollment, he warned himself. Though in retrospect he’d given that less thought at seventeen than he was giving Krista now at thirty-two. But it wasn’t just some girlfriend or casual fuck either. He cared about her, deeply.

  De oppresso liber indeed. The Green Berets read their Latin motto as “to free from oppression.” But the actual translation was “from being an oppressed man, to being a free one.”

  Krista had broken with whatever her mysterious past was.

  These girls were breaking free even as he watched them.

  He couldn’t wish for anything greater for them.

  Too bad he couldn’t wish it for himself.

  # # #

  The afternoon passed in a blur.

  Krista was still trying to adjust to how Evan saw her. It was no longer a surprise that a man as handsome as him found her physically attractive; he’d proven that beyond any possibility of doubt.

  It was that he also saw her as…an ideal others could strive for? She’d never been a model for anything except how to be a royal pain in the ass to every smokie who slacked for even a second. Yet he had made the young women of Hood River High School look at her like she wasn’t just someone special, she was also who they should try to be.

  The girls had actually gotten a little shy around her, which she’d pretty much cleared up by nearly falling into the rushing river that was at the bottom of the valley they’d rappelled into. It wasn’t that she was fooling around or being clumsy, it was just that she’d suddenly noticed that she and Evan were walking along the trail beside the river holding hands.

  Right in front of everyone!

  When had that happened?

  And then she’d walked right off the edge of the trail and would have gone into the river if they hadn’t been holding hands.

  Once she recovered, she looked at him in some alarm. His smile was entirely too pleased with itself. She was half tempted to spin around and send him off into the river instead.

  Two things stopped her.

  One, it felt so damn good.

  Two, the girls weren’t reacting to it much at all. She didn’t see coy whispers or sideways glances. Krista did notice several sighs as Evan made sure she was steady on her feet before they continued ahead.

  She felt a sigh herself. She was good with ropes, but she’d never seen anything like the flying descent that Evan had done. While aided climbing and descending was a skill that smokies used, it was obviously one that Green Berets lived by. Knowledge of that hadn’t made it one bit less dramatic. When he did that first kick and fall, her heart had choked her by the throat to think how much she could lose in that instant. Then he’d arrested, bounced off the cliff face with the perfect ease of a top-level hopscotch player working her way down a chalked sidewalk, and dropped another dozen meters.

  And then he’d turned it around as a lesson to inspire young women…and now she was right back to where she’d started, with the day blurring behind her. The sole reality was Evan’s hand anchoring her to the earth so that she didn’t fly away.

  They finally reached the ultimate destination she’d planned as a treat for the outing, the Tamanawas Falls. Forty feet wide, the hundred-foot falls hammered down into a rocky landing pool in a smooth curtain, throwing up a cloud of mist that softened and cooled the hot summer day. There was a big cave back behind the falls and soon the girls were off exploring.

  Yet rather than joining them, she and Evan perched on a rock that offered a spectacular view, and also allowed them to keep an eye on the whole area.

  “What’s with…” she flexed her fingers in his but didn’t let go.

  He shrugged. “Seemed like a good idea at the time. I was standing there telling them all how wonderful you are, then it sunk in finally how wonderful you are.”

  “I don’t know. Sounds like lust to me.” Didn’t sound anything at all like lust. Though she’d feel far more comfortable if it did.

  “There’s that, too,” Evan agreed amiably.

  She noticed that he was scanning the green bowl of the waterfall from behind his dark sunglasses, constantly on the lookout for the girls’ safety; which was good because she couldn’t focus for crap at the moment.

  The area was thick with ferns and moss. The mist-slick, hard rock kept most of the trees small. It was a truly beautiful spot, one of her favorites in the entire National Forest. But she’d never been here with a man before. Not a man she was willing to hold hands with in public anyway. She tried to remember if there had ever been one of those before, but couldn’t think of one.

  “But there’s also what you are doing for these girls,” he continued in the same voice as if that didn’t turn her world completely over.

  In prior seasons, the smokies who’d helped out had gotten into the fun of it. Made sure the groups had a good and safe time. Without any prompting on her part, Evan had gone beyond and helped make it a life-changing event.

  And based on how she was feeling, it wasn’t only girls whose life was being changed. Even if he walked away tomorrow, he’d given her an image of herself that she’d never lose. She pounded it into her memory so that it would be anchored
there for when this ended.

  In this one instant she felt competent and desirable. She felt as if she’d actually become what she’d always strived to be and knew she could never be. Probably never would be again except for this moment.

  Herself.

  So she wrapped that up especially carefully and tucked it deep inside.

  But there was even more.

  She’d never given much thought about the man she’d want to be with for more than a fling. Most guys were just such…guys. Many of them good and decent, some total jerks, but all still just guys. She’d wanted something more, but had never been able to quantify what that meant.

  More often than not Krista pictured herself as the rasty old smokejumper, maybe sent to the parachute loft after her knees gave out, smoking cigarettes (though she didn’t smoke), and with a whiskey-rough voice (though she only drank the occasional beer). Her pastimes would be telling stories of “how it once was when there were real fires” and generally giving the rookies shit.

  Now that Evan Greene sat beside her, still—unbelievably—holding her hand, she found it easy to quantify what she wanted in a man. There was the whole list sitting right beside her.

  # # #

  “Ready?” Evan checked Callie’s harness. He’d already made sure she had on the heavily padded jumpsuit and that her helmet with the wire mesh face protection was securely in place.

  “Ready,” she acknowledged with the mix of fear and excitement that most of the girls had expressed the moment before the first jump.

  Just like a spotter would, Evan leaned out the door and made sure the area was clear. Krista flagged him from the sawdust pit drop zone that she was ready.

  He pulled his head back in, checked Callie once more through the mesh to make sure she wasn’t hyperventilating, then slapped her on the shoulder and shouted, “Go! Go! Go!”

  Without hesitation, Callie yanked herself out the door of the forty-foot jump tower. It was just a weather-weary platform with a safety railing on three sides. The fourth had a short wall with a jump door framed into it, so that it would feel more realistic.

  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.