Heat baked in from three sides, causing her to sweat badly enough for her feet to slide around in boots just a touch too big for her.
She needed to move. Her suit wasn’t the kind of gear made for facing a fire. They had to jump as light as they could, carrying only meager survival packs, with the expectation they’d regroup at the dropped supplies. That’s what she should be doing.
Instead, she was surrounded by fire, and had just noticed her right shoulder throbbed in a way she could only think meant damage. Her heart slammed so hard and fast it might wear out at any second. So hard she couldn’t hear anything but her heart beating in her ears. Was her comm even working? Were they coming for her? Did she even want them to do that?
North looked open. She began scrambling up the only bare spot of slope she’d been able to reach with her bad drop zone. The peak wasn’t far. Then she’d be able to see what she was up against. She didn’t know how far the non-burning patch of earth continued. It could be that just over the rise she’d find another firewall.
What had she seen on the way down?
Fire.
Lots of freaking fire.
She’d been blinded to anything else—just the fire and her efforts to steer her chute away from it.
If she didn’t get better at this job fast, she might as well quit when she got out. If she got out.
The earpiece in her ear squawked suddenly, cutting through the swishing, pounding awfulness in her ears, then nothing. No time to stop and check it, she kept going.
Gasping from some motivating cocktail of heat, effort, fear, and pain, she made it to a clear spot at the top and the downslope spread out before her, a large valley of green. Not leaping red, orange, and yellow. Not burning. The fire blanketed the south behind her, and stretched out east and west, but north was clear. For now. Who knew how fast the fire was moving?
Go north. Get out of the oven. She’d be okay.
Get to the bottom of the valley, then stop to get directions and to see if her comm could be repaired.
“You can do this. It’s just a hike. A vigorous, terrifying hike. Downhill. See? That’s perfect. Downhill is awesome. It’ll be fast.” Sometimes an internal pep talk wasn’t enough. Sometimes the words needed to be said out loud to drown out that damned internal voice of criticism she was so prone to hearing. The words even made it over the pounding in her ears while the roar and crackling of fire and trees splitting she should be hearing didn’t.
Probably some kind of delusion.
Halfway down the slope, when the ground became a gentler incline, she plucked the earpiece out, found the wires apparently intact, but tugged on them a little bit to test the connection anyway. Looked right. She put it back in, tugged at the base of the wires, then slapped the box a couple of times. Nothing happened. As if banging broken electronics ever fixed them.
Should she turn it off and turn it on? Pop the batteries? Lord, she didn’t know how to fix things. Why didn’t she know how to fix things?
More importantly, why had she jumped?
Just thinking of the leap summoned the sensation of free fall, those seconds before her chute had jerked her up clung to her, and got worse when she started berating herself for this failure. Another failure.
Why had she even gone up? She should’ve told them. She should’ve just told them. Confessed her error. It was an error, not made with malicious intent. Just an error that fear had exacerbated.
If she’d told them, at least then she would’ve scratched out of training because of her stupid application miscalculation, but at least she’d be alive for her family to give her hell over it.
* * *
Beck made it back to camp with daylight still lighting the skies, but came into an empty cabin.
Lauren wasn’t back yet.
She’d had to hike out by herself because of him, and he still didn’t know if she’d been retrieved or if she was still in the woods.
He slammed into the cabin, then straight on to the shower. He’d ridden a spike of terror all day, and stank of it.
There was nothing to do but keep busy. Keep busy and do the things that needed doing. Clean up. Get dinner. Get two dinners, so if she got back after they closed up evening chow she could still eat something. Something besides an MRE, because, God knew, those were awful.
The thought of food ration packs conjured the chemical taste he always had to fight to ignore when choking them down. But standing in the shower, he let himself consider every aspect of that fake, preservative-laden bite. It was better than the thoughts that had been consuming him since he’d seen her parachute drifting toward the flames.
Lauren burning. Fire eating through the suit she’d jumped in, turning her golden, beautiful skin to char. Her long caramel hair gone. Skin cracking.
He’d never actually seen someone burn, and he’d avoided movies with those kinds of special effects, but he knew what fire did. He knew the sound of bacon popping on the griddle. He knew what a forest looked like after a wildfire had consumed it. Even wood blistered and cracked in that kind of heat. Skin was nothing by comparison. He could picture it. Had been picturing it in ever increasing detail since he was a child, when his mind had been without the knowledge required to summon nightmarish levels of detail. Like it could now.
MREs and their cocktail of chemical flavors were heaven to think of by comparison.
Fake butter flavor.
The metallic taste of tomato sauces when the chemical heat was applied.
He made it through the shower, dried, dressed, and went on to the next task. Always the next task. He checked in with the office for word, learned she’d been picked up, sore and slightly injured. Went to get dinners.
Picked pine needles and tied them up in a cloth, getting salts ready for the soaking bath she’d probably need if she’d landed hard enough to kill her comm.
Then he sat on the front stoop of the small cabin and waited. Waited and tried to listen to the frogs singing in the woods behind.
Stopping Lauren from going up this morning when he could see how it unnerved her would’ve really pissed her off, but it would’ve been for her own good. Making her take time off now that she was injured would also be for her own good. Was she hurt badly enough to bow out until next year? God help the man who suggested such a thing to her.
He didn’t see her small frame slogging across the dark field until she was almost on him, and it took every ounce of willpower not to rush over and scoop her up, frisk her for injuries, shout at her, shake her...kiss her.
Lauren stopped in her tracks, looking at him like he was everything wrong in her life.
“Are you hurt?” he asked, trying to play it cool as he rose from the cabin steps.
In answer, she walked forward, then turned sideways to get past him and up the few steps into the cabin.
There was nothing to do but follow.
And, because he could feel big emotions weighting the air like a summer storm, he closed the door behind him.
“You didn’t answer.” He reached to take her shoulder to spin her and look for injuries, but at the first touch she ducked and turned, smacking his hands away. In the low light of the cabin her scowl was unmistakable.
And she was hurt, he realized dully. She was right-handed, and had smacked at him with her left hand, her right arm held close to her body.
“Let me see.”
“Shut up. You left me on the plane. You jumped without me!”
“I know...” He didn’t reach for her again. Not yet, but the desire still lit him and his hand hovered between them, as far from his body as it was close to hers. “Let me see your arm. How did you hurt it? Is it broken?”
“It’s bruised,” she grunted, and shoved at his hand again with her left hand. “You’re an awful partner, you know that, right?”
“I do.” He tugged his hair back from hi
s face, trying to stretch his scalp and defuse the tension headache he’d been nursing.
“Why did you just jump like that? Why didn’t you say something to me? Ask what was wrong? Maybe there was some reason I didn’t jump.”
Her equipment had been checked before they’d boarded the plane, that was something Kolinski had been adamant about—checking the rookies’ equipment. He’d known there hadn’t been anything wrong with her pack. It had been inside, and he’d seen it before they’d even gotten on the bus to go to the hangar.
“You panicked.”
She flung that one good arm up and in the very next second her eyes were wet and every ounce of angry color lurking behind her dirty cheeks drained away. “I know!”
“It’s okay. It happens...”
“No, it’s not okay. It doesn’t happen to people who’ve...been...who’ve...” She stopped and shook her head, then started jerking at the flight suit’s zip, wrestling it down so clumsily that he felt compelled to step closer and help with that, but did it with slow, open-palmed motions that let her know he wasn’t going to do anything bad, just help.
Maybe taking care of that physical stuff would let her mouth take care of whatever wanted to come out. “People who’ve jumped into wildfires?”
The zipper eased down with her not jerking on it. He watched the slow descent, opening to the strong, supple body he knew he’d find beneath. She was dressed in shorts and a top, nothing too revealing, but a surge of heat still hit his middle and he had to step away, especially as her scent hit him.
“People who have jumped from a plane before.” She whispered the words, pulling his gaze back to hers.
Even whispered, the words jarred. “What?”
“I never jumped before,” she said, a little more firmly.
“Low altitude?”
“No altitude!” Her voice started to rise again, panic coming out despite the fact that her feet were firmly on the ground now.
“Why did you say you had?”
She’d lied her way into the air?
If he’d known earlier... Holy, blessed nature, he’d have hog-tied her to keep her off the plane.
The look of unconcealed helplessness she gave him made him want to shake her again.
He hadn’t known her long, not really, but he knew that she faked confidence when she didn’t feel it. She’d done that this morning. And every day this week.
Right now, she was upset, scared, and either too overwhelmed to hide it or just didn’t care enough to hide it anymore. Neither sounded good.
He should’ve figured it out by now, after all the signs today. That hint of fear at being told about the tower had made her go white. So had word they were going up. Then her inability to jump, and the god-awful landing. Landings were hard at first, and landing in a small patch of earth surrounded by fire without smashing into trees? It was a miracle she wasn’t dead.
“Why the hell didn’t you say something?” he asked, curling his fingers into his palms so he didn’t shake her as she was already injured.
“I panicked! I panicked because I’m in totally over my head. Everything Dad said was right. I didn’t mean for this to happen. I just... Things happened and everything snowballed and I didn’t know how to get out of it. And now I’m done. They’re going to come and ask what happened, and I’m going to have to tell them and they’re going to boot me out for lying on my application. Before I get myself killed, or worse, get someone else killed. I should’ve been able to do it. I should be able to do it. It’s in my freaking DNA! Unless it’s carried on the Y chromosome, hah!” The short, barked laugh hit like a slap. “He was right. He was right and I’m... I should just go be a baker or something.”
The long self-berating babble stopped his anger cold.
Her left hand flew all over, gesturing, ranting, but she kept that right one to her chest.
He wasn’t sure where this was going but, knowing she dealt with sexism in regard to the job, felt the need to point out, “I don’t think being a woman has anything to do with you screwing this up.”
“Thank you for that!” she grunted, then went right back into her self-targeted tirade. “Actually, I guess I’m selling my aunts and grandmothers short. They weren’t just people who minded the kitchen. They were reporters. People who talked about all the heroics the menfolk got up to. Scrapbooks. They all made scrapbooks with the newspaper clippings. You know half that stuff they have on the history of the department at the local history museum is from the Autry women. Those fine scrapbookers.”
Scrapbookers. Yep, she’d gone well past the point where sense was going to make a dent in this.
“Are you hungry? I brought food...”
“Man, now I feel bad because it sounds like I hate scrapbooks. I don’t hate scrapbooks. I love them. I loved looking at them and reading all of them. Even the ones I had to wear those weird white gloves to handle. I just didn’t want to make them. I don’t have that talent. Maybe I don’t have this one either. I want to be doing the things, actually help people. Is it wrong to want to do the things?”
“Stop,” he said softly, and to stop her prowling around stepped close enough to breathe her in again. The fire she’d come so close to had left a smoky hint to that honey and dirt he still smelled, and grounded him again in what had almost happened.
Her voice dropped as well, the fire going out of it. “Stop what?”
“Take a breath.” They both needed to take a breath. “Tell me what happened.”
“On my application I said I had experience because I was supposed to have gotten it by the time it became relevant. But that’s not what happened. Between all the things with my family and work, I just had no extra time. I didn’t get the experience I’d planned for.”
“Skydiving experience isn’t a requirement. They train from the beginning, you know that. You don’t move like someone without training.”
“Maybe it’s not a requirement for you!” Her volume went back up, but it was more like despair than anger pitching her words. “I didn’t have it last time, and I didn’t make it. I wanted to cover my bases. Got a trainer three times a week at the gym. Got skydiving classes and went as far as I could with them. When the application deadline came, I should’ve had time to make the jumps. I even had them scheduled and paid for when I filled out the application. But my schedule got blown up and time ran out and then they sorted us into different training level groups and I didn’t know how to backpedal the situation without completely wrecking everything.”
Despair and disgust with herself, and those beautiful eyes that searched his, as if he had any solutions. Beck did the only other thing he could think of, wrapped his arms around her and tugged enough to get her that last step to him.
She froze, stiff as an oak in his arms, and possibly stopped breathing except she whispered, “You’re hugging me...”
“Yeah...” He tilted his head to the side as she tilted hers up, dirty, pink, exhausted, and in that second devoid of all the awful emotions that had been written in capital letters on her face. “You should be warned, I’m also kind of thinking of kissing you. But that would probably be a bad idea.”
Bad, and not something he did anymore. He just preferred to live his life on his own, free of the mess that came with relationships. His celibacy had even become easy at this point. And yet, with this woman, he wanted to forget all the reasons it was a bad idea to get more involved.
She nodded in return, but not in the way of someone who believed, or even knew what she was agreeing to.
“I’m going to be kicked out anyway when I tell them the truth.”
She lifted her ranting hand and brushed the tips of her fingers down his cheek. She wanted the kiss. And if that wasn’t obvious, she stared now at his mouth like her gaze could act like a rope to pull him in closer.
It worked. Beck felt his head lowering, and her b
eautiful green eyes swiveled to his once more, wide and watchful until the first brush of his lips. The hand that had been a light, tender touch at his cheek slid back, hooking around his neck to pull him closer. The boldness he’d come to expect from her before tonight was nowhere to be found. She didn’t demand so much as plead for a firmer embrace, deeper kisses, in the way she melted into him, and the way her tiny wanting sounds tickled his lips.
CHAPTER NINE
LAUREN HAD HEARD the old adage that confession was good for the soul but had never actually believed it. Confession meant consequences. Worse, it meant you’d failed at something, and that something was your fault. She’d done both today—had failed, and it had been her fault.
But her confession had brought a reward, a bone-melting kiss that distracted her mind and knocked the charred edges off a terrible, terrifying day. If she was smart, she wouldn’t get used to it. Telling that to anyone, even this man with lips like silk, was the first brick gone in the complete dismantling of her career.
He held her close, relief pouring through her—hers, his, and built-in permission to let herself not be strong for once, to lean on him and borrow some of his strength.
He’d been worried, felt guilty, desperate. He’d cared, and his kisses were tinted with it, a shot of bitter with the sweet.
He’d had to be locked in a police cruiser to keep him from going after the fireman. Had they had to restrain him today to keep him from coming for her? Had his own actions been the lesson he’d needed to be a better team member, to not run off and abandon his team?
Was she just grasping at straws because she desperately needed a win? Maybe. But held tight against his strong frame, she let herself indulge in the fantasy that everything was fine now, and surviving was the happy ending they both needed.
His arms tightened around her waist, and she had to ease her right arm out of the space between their chests to wrap over his shoulders, needing to be closer too.
Kissing him was like an opiate. She barely felt the pain in her shoulder and the various bruises she’d yet to take inventory of. She barely felt the fear and dread of what was coming next. It was just a slow descent into honeyed warmth and blissful nothing. Supporting her weight in his arms, her toes lightly traced back and forth as he swayed with her, rocking away the horrible.
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