Sunday night, end of the weekend, she went to lie on the couch when the first bit of want seeped into her brain. She didn’t care about the sex one way or the other, but it would be nice to be held. What was more, it would be nice to be held by Randall. Somehow all the care she had to take to not be offensive to civilians didn’t matter around him.
For once not thinking deeply, she turned aside and followed him through his bedroom door. She’d checked out the place the first day, had the layout clear in her head (including all exits), and could walk right to the bed in the pitch dark.
When she slipped under the covers, it earned her a grunt of surprise, but no more. She lay against him. For a long frozen moment he lay perfectly still unsure what to do next—it was a moment she knew well. He didn’t paw at her or jump her, both of which she was ready for; just part of the price.
Instead, he pulled her in and held on tight.
Somehow he knew that this was what she wanted. No, he wasn’t some freaking telepath like those damned Army psychs thought they were. Randall waited while she figured out what she wanted. For a long time, it was exactly what he was giving her.
When she decided it was more, he seemed pretty okay with that as well.
7
Randall knew he was dreaming, but four weeks hadn’t been enough to wake him up so far and he was starting to hope it never would. Just as she had that first night, Sheila had started on the periphery, staying in town when he went to work on the Monday after Thanksgiving. That had lasted her active nature about two days.
By the end of the week she had fully integrated into the small business that he and Patsy had set up with Jess and Jill. WUI Cleaners—the name made them laugh even if no one else seemed to get the joke. They specialized in cleaning up the Wildland-Urban Interface around homes, securing them as well as possible against the dangers of wildfire. They dropped dead trees, or ones too close to a house. Around homes pushed into thickly wooded areas, they trimmed off all of the dead lower branches that could act as ladder fuels to take a fire from ground to crown. They’d recently expanded from burn piles into prescribed burns, clearing brush and deadwood from the forest floor with carefully controlled small fires.
Sheila—still oblivious to the cold—started out dragging branches and tending burn piles. It wasn’t long before she picked up saw work and finally harness work climbing in the trees. The general lack of snow let them keep busy in Leavenworth, only occasionally shifting down the dry eastern slopes of the Cascades to Cashmere or Wenatchee.
She didn’t really open up around the others, but her hesitations shortened over time. They’d talked about the whole TBI thing, looked up the symptoms together, and it didn’t quite fit.
“As you just demonstrated, it’s not that you think any slower than I do,” Randall observed one night as they lay exhausted together. A good work day around the Kitchner farm, followed by an equally thorough workout with only a short break for delivery pizza in bed. Slow thinking was one of the main signs of a traumatic brain injury and Sheila had shifted over the month from an active lover to an immensely creative one. Combined with her magnificent body, he was a complete goner.
Her silence was her usual answer but he could feel her listening. She was like that when they were making love as well, completely silent but gloriously present.
“It’s more like we’re all speaking a foreign language and you need time to translate it.”
She buried her face against his shoulder for a while before finally responding, “God, I hope you’re right. It feels that way. Even as familiar as you feel, there’s a strangeness I can’t seem to get around.”
“Familiar, huh?”
8
Sheila could hear the tease, but she could feel the pain.
Randall felt so much more than “familiar” but she didn’t know how to say it. He had welcomed her into his world with no questions asked. A dinner, his couch, his bed, his job, his life.
And what had she offered in return? Her body. There should be more than that.
She considered using it to demonstrate quite how much more than familiar he felt. But it wasn’t that simple or that crass…because it was more than that.
“You feel…”
And he waited while she searched for the word. It wasn’t that sluggish feeling she’d felt back when the Army was giving her the medical discharge. It wasn’t even the foreignness issue, though that was the best explanation she’d heard of it.
“I feel…” That was the real problem. Her feelings—other than anger at what had happened, at the raghead who’d blown up her truck, with her inability to say what she meant—were distant, almost vague. She didn’t know what she felt and had no idea how to put words to that.
So, she fell back on showing it with her body. But it wasn’t merely great sex this time. It was more. It was deeper. She groaned aloud as the layers of defense broke loose inside her. Randall eased his way past more than the barricades of the flesh, he also shattered the massive walls she’d built around her own emotions without realizing.
This time, as her body shuddered with pleasure, it wasn’t a release. It was a cleansing.
9
The fire hit and it hit hard. December had been unseasonably dry, less than a foot of snow and a series of warm afternoons that had melted what little fell. The town had brought in snowmaking machines so that they could have a white Christmas.
Patsy’s call wrenched them out of deep sleep. Just breaking dawn outside the window.
“We’re activated. Move!” And she was gone. Hotshot teams were never mobilized in mid-winter.
He punched Tori’s number, remembered that she was wintering with her famous writer husband in Seattle, mumbled an apology for waking her, and hung up. Next on his leg of the phone tree…nobody who was still in town.
Time to move.
He was pulling on his cotton long johns as Sheila stripped off her t-shirt and began doing the same.
“What are you doing?” Other than escalating the hell out of his pulse rate. Not in a hundred years could he get used to the look of her.
“There’s a fire.” No hesitation at all. No question either.
“You’re not…”
He stopped when he saw her baleful gaze.
…a firefighter. Though he’d trained her in all he could and she’d learned fast, she wasn’t trained for wildfire—didn’t have her Incident Qualification System “red card.” However, he’d long since learned that changing Sheila Williams’ mind once she set it was not something that mortal men should attempt. There was no hesitation when she was in work mode. The same thing had happened when they were working for WUI Cleaners. When there was action, Sheila didn’t pause for a microsecond. No more wrong with her brain than her stunning body.
Fine. Let Candace try to face her down about the “official” certification.
He watched her pulling on the Nomex fire retardant gear he’d given her as a gift when she’d proved she was going to stick with WUI for a while. A powerful woman climbing into firefighting gear. And not just any woman, but Sheila Williams.
Randall knew what he wanted to see for the rest of his days, and he was looking right at it.
“You’re still naked,” she said without looking up from lacing her boots.
“Shit!” He finished dressing at firefighter speed.
When they arrived at the station, Candace took one look at Sheila and growled, “I don’t have time to argue this shit. Fine. You’re attached to Randall’s hip. I find you more than ten feet apart, I’m gonna kick your ass off the fire and out of this town.”
Then she turned to him, “She dies, it’s totally on you.” Then she rushed off to ream someone else’s ass about something.
“Wipe the surprise off your face, Randall.” Sheila gave him a gentle shove to get him into motion. “Let’s go.”
He led her to the type 3 wildfire engine that hadn’t seen a job since October. Built on a truck frame, it carried five people, five hundre
d gallons of water, and could blast a hundred-and-fifty gallons per minute out of fifteen-hundred feet of hose. The big diesel, rear dualies, and four-wheel drive also meant it could cross over seriously rough terrain.
Sheila went for the driver’s door, then stopped with her hand on the handle. “Sorry, old habits.” She circled to the passenger side.
Randall had learned that it was easier to just let her drive the work truck, but there were special insurance issues here and he was glad that he didn’t have to force it.
Captain Cantrell came by and slapped an address in his hand. “Remote as hell. None of my engines can make it up there. It’s up to your team to lead. My men are right behind you.”
Randall could see teams of firefighters loading the backs of their four-wheel drive personal vehicles with fire gear and piling aboard. Jess, Candace, and Patsy slid into the back seat of his truck’s cab. It was odd having Sheila in Tori’s usual seat beside him, not that he was complaining.
Jill actually chirped the tires on the other wildland engine as she pulled out ahead of him along with the rest of the Leavenworth Hotshots wintering in Leavenworth. Ten people. Half their normal crew. They’d need Cantrell’s people fast. The problem was that though they were good guys, they were volunteers and would need to be watched like hawks. Along with Sheila…though he’d never found watching her to be a burden.
Together, he and Jill raced the big engines down Highway 2 toward the small town of Dryden.
10
Sheila wasn’t ready for the scale of a wildfire or the scale of the change that washed over her easy-going and affable lover. She barely recognized him. Deep in a valley beyond Dryden, a fire was ripping apart the landscape.
“Goddamn winter hunters,” his unexpected snarl came from deep in his chest.
“What’s wrong with hunters?”
“They’re big on exploding targets. Doesn’t matter that the damned things are outlawed on state forest land; they love seeing the flash and bang during target practice. Then, if they start a fire, the hunters scram so that they don’t get caught and have to pay for the firefight. Not the primary cause of our manmade fires, but it’s climbing.”
“What are the primaries?”
“Campfires and arsonists. But there aren’t any hiking trails back here and arsonists like showier fires than the back hill country. There also hasn’t been any lightning lately, which says numbskull hunters. They were probably bored because the elk are staying in the higher pastures due to the mildness of the season.” Randall sounded seriously pissed. Army-style pissed, something Sheila didn’t know he had in him.
She was already discovering a soft-spot in her head for Randall Jones; this just amped up the developing pile of mush that was her brain. She’d never been mushy about a man or anything else before—except maybe her truck before the roadside bomb dismembered it. Actually, she cared more about him than anything before which was a surprise. If you’d asked her a month ago, she’d have said she was past caring about anything ever again.
They swooped off the end of the gravel road they’d been following into the backcountry and the big truck jounced and jostled as he headed into an area that was a combination of meadow and trees. All conifers—mostly scattered—except low in the valley, where the water would accumulate. They made thick clumps down there. Higher on the dry slopes they spread out, and the brown grasses dominated. The fire was climbing both valley walls simultaneously and sending a plume of smoke soaring upward like a line of JDAM bombs. She kept expecting to feel the shockwave slam into the truck. But the smoke just kept rolling upward in a continuous gray sheet, dark with ash above and bright with flames below.
“Flanks first,” Candace called from the back of the truck as Randall slammed it to a halt over two hundred yards away from the fire. Everyone piled out of the back.
“What are they…” Then Sheila stopped asking. Stay in the truck. Watch and learn, just like in the Army.
The firefighters who piled out of the two trucks spread out in a short line. In moments they were swinging their Pulaski fire axes, digging a line across the meadow. Great clumps of grass and dirt were peeled up. They moved in a fast, coordinated action.
The townie firefighters drove up and were soon put to the same task with varying degrees of effectiveness. Just like a fresh shipment of boot camp privates arriving on the line, the main thing they did was make it really clear how skilled the hotshots were at what they did.
Randall dropped the wildland engine into four-wheel low and continued toward the fire until she thought he was going to drive straight into it. She could see Jill in the other engine driving down into the valley ahead of the fire and climbing back up the other side.
The smoke was thicker here. They were close enough that she could see the fire crawling up the trees like a living thing. It crept through the grass beneath the trees, like an orange serpent until it reached the next tree and then raced upward: a flicker and a snap at first, but soon a rush high into the boughs. He drove along the front as if it was no more than a guardrail on the highway. At the end, he turned along the flank, the truck tipping ten degrees sideways due to the grade.
“Here. Take over the wheel.” Randall slid out the uphill-side door and closed it, even though the truck was still idling forward. By the time she slid across, he had fifty feet of one-inch hose pulled off the back and connected to the on-board pump.
“Just roll ahead slow,” he spoke calmly over the radio.
“Sheila better not be driving my truck,” Candace called back in response from her position on the front line.
Randall shot her a grin and Sheila decided that they’d both ignore her.
Sheila had to flex her hands a few times before she could bring herself to grab onto the steering wheel. Randall walked up to the fire, the flames off the deep grass were as tall as he was. With a casual flick of his wrist, he opened the nozzle and began spraying the fire down.
She was surprised at how easily the flames died. It took her a while to see why. Randall ignored the black area that had already been burned. He concentrated only on the burning line which was truly not very wide. Whenever he reached a tree burning along the line, he’d spray it for an extra moment to kill the fire, but never slowed.
As she became oriented to his world, she learned more of what to watch. In the rearview mirror, she saw a patch still smoking. She tapped the horn and pointed back when Randall looked at her. He slashed the spray at the smoke, thoroughly inundating it, then continued ahead without breaking stride.
He was so clearly in his element. She appreciated the casual skill with which he and the others of WUI had dealt with everything. But watching him have the same attitude toward an active fire was a real sight to see. He might not be Army, but that didn’t stop her from feeling better just for being in his presence.
Over the next hour they traveled a couple of times down to the stream at the bottom of the valley and pumped aboard another five-hundred gallons.
“It’s a surreal place. We call it The Black,” Randall explained as he rode easily in the passenger seat while she climbed the engine back up the slope through the burned-out char to the fire line. “Part of the natural life cycle in this kind of environment. The grass and the trees know what to do; we’re the problem. There are power lines over that ridge,” he pointed one way. “And homes over that one,” he pointed the other. “So we have to kill it off even though it’s just a baby fire.”
“Just a baby?”
“I half think the Captain must have been bored to call us out on this one. Maybe he knew Candace was getting antsy; she’s always happiest when she’s fighting a fire. Doesn’t matter. We’ll kill it in plenty of time for dinner.”
11
Once they had the flanks doused, Randall drove the truck around to the head, trading with Sheila because he figured he shouldn’t flaunt in Candace’s face who’d actually been driving all morning.
The crew had been busy and had a long line sliced through th
e soil. The trench ran twenty feet wide and from his flank, all the way down to the creek, and well up the other side.
“Spray the line behind us,” Candace instructed when he pulled up. The look she gave him said that switching drivers hadn’t fooled her for a second no matter how hard Sheila tried to look innocent in the passenger seat.
“Sure,” Randall eyed the grassy slope beyond the trench. “Just as soon as you get these amateurs to move their vehicles.”
Candace looked over her shoulder and swore. His path was blocked by a tangled array of the volunteer firefighters parked far too close to the line. It only took moments before she had firefighters racing off the line to move their vehicles. Totally overestimating the danger, the volunteers then drove five-hundred yards away. It would take them a while to trudge their way back.
“Better light the backfire soon,” he nodded toward the nearly empty line now manned by only a half dozen hotshots along its half-mile length.
The fire head wasn’t more than a few hundred feet away and was going to arrive at the line before the stray volunteers did.
A backfire had to be lit right now on the fire-side of the trench they’d cut. Unable to cross the trench, it would slowly burn up the fuels back toward the main fire, robbing it of heat before it hit the line.
“Shit!” Candace got on the radio to the other hotshots and raced off to start the fire.
“Darn it!” Jill’s voice came over the radio. She really was too sweet, though with Sheila beside him he was no longer wishing she had a twin sister.
“What?” Candace’s voice was harsh, in no mood for additional problems as she sprinted to gather up her own fire torch to ignite the line.
A Hotshot Christmas Page 2
