Because of Our Child

by Margot Early

  “What are you thinking?”

  Would it be the mature thing to tell him the truth?

  But what did she want now, and how would telling him the truth impact her goals?

  A voice within her whispered that she wanted Max Rickman’s love. Not because she loved him but because he hadn’t loved her when Elena was conceived. And that was a completely childish desire.

  “I was thinking about…what happened between us. After the fire,” she admitted. “I keep blaming you, and it’s not fair because I knew your girlfriend had just died. I took advantage of you as much as you did of me.”

  Max raised his eyebrows. “That’s a new and interesting take on it.”

  “Isn’t it,” she agreed.

  “I’d been attracted to you,” he said, “before Salma died. To be honest, I’m attracted now.”

  Dear Reader,

  Of all traditional romance plots, I’ve always been most mystified by “secret baby” stories. I’ve been told by counselors that it does happen—for one reason or another, a pregnant woman decides not to tell the father of her child about their baby. Part of writing stories is learning what motivates people. I enjoyed writing Because of Our Child and getting to understand both the mother and father of this child, Elena, but especially Elena herself.

  I’ve heard friends speak with lingering resentment of being denied time with a father because of bitterness between divorced parents. I’ve seen the pain of children denied time with a parent for the same reason.

  This book is a wish for peace and mutual respect between parents at war and for children who find themselves in the midst of such conflict. It is an acknowledgment of the crucial place of his or her father in the life of every child.

  Wishing you all good things always…

  Sincerely,

  Margot Early

  BECAUSE OF OUR CHILD

  Margot Early

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Margot Early is the author of fourteen novels and three novellas. She lives high in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado with two German shepherds and several other pets. When she’s not writing, she is outdoors in all seasons, often training her dogs in obedience. She enjoys spinning and belly dance.

  Books by Margot Early

  HARLEQUIN SUPERROMANCE

  625—THE THIRD CHRISTMAS

  668—THE KEEPER

  694—WAITING FOR YOU

  711—MR. FAMILY

  724—NICK’S KIND OF WOMAN

  743—THE TRUTH ABOUT COWBOYS

  766—WHO’S AFRAID OF THE MISTLETOE?

  802—YOU WERE ON MY MIND*

  855—TALKING ABOUT MY BABY*

  878—THERE IS A SEASON*

  912—FOREVER AND A BABY

  1333—HOW TO GET MARRIED

  1357—FAMILY RESEMBLANCE

  1376—WHERE WE WERE BORN

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  PROLOGUE

  July 23

  Thirteen years ago

  Makal Canyon, California

  THEY HAD NO TIME. The screaming roar blasted its heat at their backs, and the ridge where they’d thought they could deploy their fire shelters was too far away. Jen had already dropped her pack and everything but her Pulaski—the unique fire-fighting tool that was a cross between a pickax and an ax—her canteen and her shelter. She’d removed the last from its case and had partially unfolded it. Behind her, abandoned gas cans exploded and tree limbs cracked and blew apart.

  It would be quick, Jen knew—she would inhale flames and asphyxiate. She could lie down now, and soon it would be over.

  No, not lie down. There would be better air near the ground. If she lay down, the fire might skip over, burning her, and then the end would be slow and painful.

  In any case, it wasn’t an option now, because Max was dragging her on. Max Rickman, the squad boss, worked with the Santa Inez Hotshots to pay for graduate school. One of the other hotshots, Salma Garcia, who was also a grad student, had just become Max’s fiancée. For Jen and her sister, Teresa, as for Max and his fiancée, fighting fires provided money for school. Jen was an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, headed for a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies, combining dance, communications and film studies; and Teresa was saving for medical school, which she planned to begin that fall.

  They were close, all the Santa Inez Hotshots, most of them living next door to each other in two households during the off-season and so much like a family that Jen found it amazing to think that Max and Salma had managed a romance.

  Though Max Rickman probably could make any woman, other than a dead one, consider marriage.

  Max had a fusee, a fire-starting device, in his hand, and Jen watched him light a blaze upwind of them. The grass ignited, seemed to explode, and then he dragged Jen on, into the area he’d burned ahead of them. She felt the soles of her boots separate from the uppers as she heard Max shout, “Deploy!”

  She understood what he’d done—creating a safe black zone. Her fear seemed to make all the heat one, all the flames one. As she dropped her Pulaski, the wind tore her shelter from her hands.

  Now I’m going to die.

  Max had already shaken out his shelter, two paces ahead of her; Jen sensed others following. Shelters appeared around her as branches blew through the air.

  Where was Teresa? With the other group, just as Salma was, cutting fire line to the east. They would be safe. They had to be.

  The squad boss pushed her into his shelter, against its interior, pressing himself against her and securing the left strap with his left arm. With gloved hands, Jen helped push out the walls, knowing that Max Rickman had just increased his own odds of dying or being burned. She felt Max check that her long braid was inside her clothing, and then he covered the back of her head and the back of his. Faces down, heads together and farthest away from the approaching flames, hard hats banging, they waited, and then there was no time to wait.

  We’re dying, anyhow.

  It was as if she’d stuck her head inside a jet engine. No, her whole body, because the wind ripped at the shelter, trying to yank it away as she tried to hold down her side. She realized that Max didn’t trust her completely and was taking care of that for himself.

  “Keep away from the edges!”

  Did she imagine his voice, that baritone? She tried to make herself small, to give them both more air and hence more insulation. But it all seemed absurd, unreal. It was too hot. She was burning. She heard screaming. Then, someone praying. One of the guys. Loud, low.

  I’m supposed to breathe or meditate or think of some religious image…

  It was not difficult to believe in God, because it had to be something divine to be so powerful. The fire was the universe’s loudest voice, she thought, pointing out that she was nothing and that whether she lived or died, her soul was owned and owing.

  And then, when the noise lessened and when the shelter, their dark pod, had stopped shaking and screaming around them, she heard people talking—and one of them was Max. “Everyone, resist the urge to find out if it’s any better outside. I guarantee it’s not.”

  Some light had begun to filter through their shelter.

  “Where are the other guys?” someone asked. “Di
d it go up the east side?”

  Where Salma and Teresa were.

  “I’m definitely burned,” another hotshot said.

  Jen thought she was, too, on the backs of her calves, but she wasn’t certain. The fire had shot small holes through the shelter, and it felt as though pinpoint embers were singeing her, stinging her with sharp points of intense heat. She didn’t make a sound, because she was a person who dealt with pain internally. Her burns, she thought, could not be bad.

  “You burned, Max?” she said.

  “Oh, maybe a bit.”

  “Where’s Jen? Her shelter blew away.”

  That was Frey, one of their sawyers.

  “She’s right here with me,” Max said.

  “Max, you dog.”

  And someone said, “The gulch was too steep. Everything was too steep.”

  LuAnn, a Texas native, said, “I’m gonna pray, you guys.” She began the Lord’s Prayer and she knew all the words, and Jen said them in her head, too, thinking that Teresa might be dead and Salma might be dead and Salma’s fiancée had just risked his life to save her, Jen Delazzeri.

  But the others had been in a better spot, closer to a safety zone, closer to good black.

  “It’s always handy,” Max said, after the amen, “when someone knows their prayers.”

  It had to be a hundred and twenty degrees inside the shelter. Jen reached her canteen, took a sip, and shared the remaining water with Max. It had begun to lighten outside, and now she saw his long dark lashes and brown eyes, so dramatic and unusual against his white-blond hair, now covered in soot and ash.

  Jen said, “Do you believe in God?”

  “Ask me later.”

  And she knew that he was thinking of his lover. Of Salma.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Silver Jack Ridge

  Colorado

  June

  JEN DELAZZERI DID NOT WANT to cover fires for Channel 4. Any of the fires. And this year there were many.

  Fires were the story of the summer, but so far she’d managed to get away with simply interviewing fire managers from time to time. The smell of the smoke and the haze in the air were the same smoke and haze experienced by everyone else in Colorado in that summer of fire and drought—everyone else, that is, who wasn’t close to a blaze. The fire situation in the Front Range, around Denver, had been less extreme than that in the western part of the state. It had seemed likely that Jen could live out the summer reporting water rationing and the effect of smoky air on historical monuments and on people with compromised respiratory systems.

  But suddenly her reprieve was over.

  On Silver Jack Ridge, two smoke jumpers had been entrapped and had died. Today, the following day, the fire continued to burn out of control, covering almost two thousand acres. Now, outfitted in green fire-retardant pants and a yellow fire shirt like the firefighters, Jen sat aboard a helicopter. For the camera, she let her long hair, thick, dark and curly, spill down her back, though she’d already told the camera crew she was getting that hair inside her clothing at the first sign of a spark. Like the firefighters, she also wore a hard hat, and on her feet were leather boots for the helicopter ride toward Silver Jack Lake and Silver Jack Ridge, in an area called the Sawtooth Range.

  For Channel 4—and for a chance at a spot on network television—Jen had agreed to do this, to land in the thick of the danger. Her first jobs in television had been with small local stations. She’d had to lug camera equipment, everything, herself. In Colorado, that had often meant driving to obscure locations to interview, well, eccentric characters.

  And she was making decent money, now. Not great, but enough.

  But not enough for this. She didn’t want to ask any of the questions that needed to be asked. Because if she asked the questions, she’d become angry. Angry at fire supervisors who had let the situation develop. Angry at herself for asking firefighters questions they shouldn’t have to answer, for voicing criticism they should never have to hear.

  For instance, she would have to mention Storm King Mountain, the South Canyon fire of 1994, in which fourteen firefighters had died. She would have to ask fire personnel if there were similarities between the situations; and she already knew the answer to that, had seen aerial photographs. The steep terrain, the gulleys. Mann Gulch, Storm King…Makal Canyon, though the loss of life there had been smaller. That had been eclipsed by the greater tragedy in Colorado that same summer.

  Jen wanted no part of any of it.

  In the helicopter, she peered through the glass and jotted notes on a pad. Over the years, she’d found the practice to be calming, an anchor for her in highly charged situations. Focusing on paper, forming questions, anticipating all the paths the answers might take, kept her anxiety at bay. Later she would take refuge in her own presence in front of the camera, her voice, her posture.

  Notes to herself from life outside work crowded the borders of the pad, perpendicular to her fire notes.

  Call River Spirit Dance Supply. An 800 number. That was for Elena’s new dance clothes, promised for the new school year still months away. After the inevitable dispute about how much it was reasonable to spend, and whether two crop tops were truly enough for a sixth-grader who danced every single day.

  Elena’s dancing every single day was no problem for Jen. Aside from being convenient—her daughter was occupied while she herself was at the station and on assignments—Elena had chosen an interest, no, an obsession, that Jen could understand. It was only in the years after Makal Canyon that Jen herself had moved away from dance. Her subsequent interest in martial arts had come around the time her daughter was two—a reaction to many things, not least the fire the she had survived before Elena was conceived.

  Jen had finished school not at UCSB, where she’d begun, but at UCLA, with much of her course work completed at USC. Teresa had been in medical school at UCLA, at first, so it had made sense. Jen had switched to film, then back to dance and then into journalism, floundering while giving the appearance of succeeding, maintaining a 4.0 average because she had been spared, because her life mattered and had to matter. And nothing she did would ever be enough to compensate for the fact that she had made it, that she had survived the Makal Canyon fire. That even her sanity had survived.

  Because of her experience in that long-ago California fire, she knew that there might be more value in interviewing members of the fire crew than managers, especially because now that mistakes had been made, the top brass, those known collectively as “overhead,” were no doubt rushing to cover up anything that had been done wrong.

  She was to meet with the incident commander, who’d been relieved, and his replacement. She checked her notes, to get their names right, and scanned the names of the dead and those of the jump crew who remained on the mountain, fighting without their fallen comrades.

  It was then she saw his name.

  Max Rickman.

  A survivor again.

  MAX SUCKED ON HIS CANTEEN for a brief moment before applying his Pulaski to the brush that needed to be cleared in order to create a new helicopter landing site. The original helispot was still safe, but it was too far from the jump crew and hotshots remaining on Silver Jack Ridge—as was the place he’d suggested for the second helispot. So they were here instead.

  Two Montana smoke jumpers and one from New Mexico worked with him to clear the brush. The four of them were all that remained of the first load of six who had jumped to the Silver Jack fire seventy-two hours before.

  From the moment he arrived, Max had found this terrain reminiscent of other death traps he’d known or known of. What had seemed different—and reassuring—was the fire, which was small and of a reasonable size for two teams of smoke jumpers. On the ground, however, the similarities to previous disasters became more obvious. An underqualified incident commander, and no good way to get the job done. Crews placed in what were, in hindsight, bad positions to fight the fire.

  Then, everything had gone wrong.

  Shi
fting winds.

  Safe spots that turned unsafe.

  Now, two jumpers were dead, their remains still lying where they’d fallen, pending the investigation of the fire.

  Max was alive because he had said no.

  He’d been uneasy working that far out on the ridge, in such difficult terrain with so much grass on top of it, regardless of the apparent quiet of the fire in the box canyon below. He had agreed, instead, to work with a forest service crew circling the fire below.

  The Montana jumpers, including his own jump partner Alex Tock, and John Jackson from New Mexico, had repeated Max’s protest and fallen into work with him.

  This was Max’s eighteenth season fighting fires. The Santa Inez Hotshots—seasonal firefighters, as were the smoke jumpers, with other lives and other jobs the rest of the year—had split up after the Makal Canyon blaze. As had been known to occur among other crews after similar tragedies. More than one of their number had quit the work.

  But Max had realized, for the first time, that he never wanted to quit.

  He stopped thinking, except to check the horizons for smoke and watch the progress of the fire. He swung the Pulaski in rhythm, against the sound of a chain saw operated by a forest service firefighter who’d joined them at the new helispot.

  The rotors of the arriving chopper made a thud-thud-thud that he actually felt before he first heard the higher chattering of the helicopter’s rotors. He’d tried to discern, over the years, whether he actually sensed the helicopters through his feet, if they made a vibration in the ground that could be felt before they were sensed in any other way.

  He always knew when one was coming before others heard it, and a Vietnam veteran who had become a fire supervisor had told Max he wasn’t unusual in that ability.