Slow Burn (Smoke Jumpers)

by Anne Marsh

  Hitting just broke things more.

  After a few minutes, Jack got up and did his thing. He kept it short and sweet. “Okay,” he said. “Thank you all for coming in. I have a couple of things that need saying. You know Ben.” He gestured toward the other man, who nodded. “Ben’s with me on this one.”

  Behind him, Ben got up, looking grim. He was taking the got-your-back thing literally.

  “We’ve had a pretty active fire season so far.” That drew hoots and hollers from some of the assembled firefighters, the ones who hadn’t picked up on Jack’s tone yet. This wasn’t a celebratory meet-and-greet, and Jack was plenty pissed off.

  “Yeah. Some of these fires were an act of God—”

  “We’re the right hand of God,” Mack hollered.

  Jack shook his head. “You’ve got to look before you leap, Mack.” More good-natured ribbing followed, and for a moment their meeting went right off the goddamn tracks. Before too long, however, Jack was steering them back to business.

  “Last month, we had that big burn-up.” There was a moment of respectful silence for that one. Jack had come about as close to dying there as you could and still walk away. He’d gone after the arsonist who’d kidnapped Lily Cortez and taken her up into the mountains, where he’d upped the stakes by setting a forest fire of epic proportions. “That blaze took our entire crew two days to extinguish, and we lost three hundred acres.”

  “But we got her out.” Those words came from one of the firefighters at the back of the room.

  “Yeah. But here’s the thing. That fire shouldn’t have happened. It was set. We all know the dangers of setting fires. Even controlled burns can be dangerous. Sometimes there’s no predicting how fast the fuel will take or when the wind will shift.” He turned to look at Ben. “You’ve set a few training fires in your day. You ever had one cross the line?”

  Hooking his thumbs in his belt loops, Ben took a long look around the room. “No. But it’s come close a time or two. And those were controlled burns with engines standing by. The minute things even looked like they might get out of hand, we had the hoses—and the fire—out. Thing is, there’s nothing like a real fire to get your hands-on learning, but it’s still a fire. It can surprise you—and then your shit’s hitting the fan.”

  The room didn’t stay quiet, but you didn’t pack a room with firefighters and expect Carnegie Hall. The volume kicked up with a round of low curses followed by the buzz of men swapping their own war stories. Even if they hadn’t been out there on the mountain with Jack that day, they’d all had close calls of their own.

  “Training fires,” Jack emphasized, “are run by the department only. You don’t take it on yourself to run a training op, because that’s a one-way ticket to trouble. That would be like taking on a house fire by yourself or doing a one-man jump from the plane. You can’t be both pilot and jumper. No one can.”

  “Fucking true,” Rio muttered.

  “Maybe,” Jack continued, his voice ruthlessly cutting through the buzz, “you get out of the plane and down to the ground, but now you’re out a plane, because that baby’s not flying by herself. Instead, she’s crash-landing, and you’ve likely got two fires. Twice the trouble, and you’re still just one guy.”

  “Time to start running,” someone called out.

  “All the way to the border,” Mack added.

  “Same thing goes for setting a small practice fire. Don’t do it. Setting fires is not a fucking training exercise. Setting fires is not the way you deal with a case of the boreds.”

  Evan let his brother’s words wash over him, while he scanned the faces of their team. It didn’t seem likely that their boy was going to flash a blinking neon sign on his forehead, but watching felt like the thing to do. While he watched, he formulated a plan, running through a mental checklist.

  Jack looked over the assembled team. “What I’m trying to say here is, if I catch any member of my team setting fires, for any reason, I’ll have your ass. Then law enforcement gets what’s left. Are we perfectly clear?”

  Mack stood up. There was no missing the hostility in that legs-apart stance or the curled-up fists on those denim-covered thighs. “Yeah. I think we got it. There a reason we’re having this little heart-to-heart?”

  Jack wasn’t backing down, though, matching Mack stare for stare. “I hope not, but we’ve had ourselves a veritable shit-storm of nuisance fires. Maybe that’s an unhappy little coincidence. If it’s not, and anyone thinks he’s simply doing his part to make the summer fly by a little faster, I’m telling him right now that he’s not. This stops now.”

  Mack jammed his hands into his pockets. “Got it. For the record, though, I don’t start fires. You’ve jumped with us for years. Now we’re potential screw-ups?”

  Jack plowed ahead, because what did you tell a man you’d fought with in the desert and jumped from planes with? That all the times he’d pulled your ass from the fire didn’t count? Didn’t count enough? “You see something, you let me or Jack or Evan know. You’ve got concerns? Bring them to us. We clear enough?”

  Mack flipped him a mock salute, and then a rumble of conversation broke out.

  Jack approached his brothers as the guys streamed toward the exit, yakking it up. “You think that took?”

  Rio’s short laugh said it all. “When you leave, watch out for Mack. You’ve pissed him off. You do two military tours with a guy and then jump with him regularly, he won’t appreciate an accusation of arson.”

  “He doesn’t have to like it. I can’t stand up there, though, and exempt the jump team from any hassle I’m going to hand the ground crew. That’s going to go down even worse.”

  Fair enough. If Jack’s motivational speech did the job, that was fine, but Evan wasn’t holding his breath. Their problem firefighter clearly didn’t listen to the do’s and don’ts, or he wouldn’t have been lighting up Strong. So, no, he didn’t expect a group heart-to-heart to fix things here.

  And, fix it or not, the bottom line was, Donovan Brothers had a zero-tolerance policy on this kind of shit. You saw it, you called it out. Keeping your mouth shut was all kinds of wrong. Evan’s job was to keep his team safe. If the fire setter continued down this path, someone was going to get hurt. So he needed a name, and he needed enough evidence for prosecution. The fire setter would make a move eventually, and Evan would be waiting for him.

  Jack dropped onto the seat beside him. “Faye Duncan is here as a photojournalist. No matter where she spends the night, she has a job to do. We need time to investigate, and yet here she is, ready and willing to tell the world anything and everything she knows right now.”

  Jack didn’t have to say more in the awkward pause that followed. Journalists tended to lock on to whatever story seemed most newsworthy, and even just the possibility of a serial arsonist was Christmas come early. Jack knew—they all knew—she’d want to unwrap that present.

  “I have a plan,” Evan offered. And he hoped that that plan sounded smarter than it felt right now.

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “Faye’s willing to hold off on submitting her photos. A temporary pause,” he added. “For two weeks.”

  Jack whistled. “How’d you convince her to wait?”

  Evan met his brother’s eyes and tried not to think about exactly how he’d bargained for time. He’d done what he needed to do. That was all. The firehouse meant the world to Jack. It was a dream and a challenge and maybe the first place, other than in Lily Cortez’s arms, that his brother had truly belonged. So Evan wasn’t letting any firefighter with the arson bug do his brother out of his dream. That simply wasn’t happening on Evan’s watch. Instead, he eyed the last few men trailing out of the hangar before he spoke. “She and I have an understanding.”

  “Is that code for something?” Rio’s wicked grin said it all. “Because if it is, you let me know how I can help. Okay?”

  Unfortunately, it was all too easy to imagine Rio with Faye. Hell, Rio would be a good match for her. He liked
to laugh, and he lived for adventure. She could do far worse than his brother. Evan hated the idea.

  “We’re going to show her a fun time,” he said. “Real fun. Tomorrow we have a training jump scheduled for the team—I’ll pick her up and take her with us. Keep her so busy, she won’t have time to be working.”

  The plane shuddered around Faye, and the pilot banked hard, coming around for a closer look at the mountains east of Strong. Her ass was planted on the floor because the Donovans’ crew had ripped the seats out to make room for more gear, and she was currently 7,500 feet above ground.

  She was crazy.

  She curled her fingers into the webbing hanging from the side of the plane. The straps seemed secure enough, but who really knew? Maybe she needed to rethink her definition of adventure, because this felt dangerous as hell.

  “We’re running some practice jumps today,” Evan had explained when she’d answered the knock on the firehouse door that morning. He’d braced one hand on the side of the door and looked down at her. “You want to come along and jump? Let me keep my end of our bargain?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Jump,” he’d repeated patiently. “You said you wanted adventure. I’m asking if you want to jump today.”

  “I don’t know how.” The thought of jumping, though, had that secret thrill snaking through her belly in an almost sensual jolt, part adrenaline and part anticipation. This was what she wanted, what she needed.

  “No problem.” He shrugged. “You can jump with me. Tandem.”

  She recognized opportunity when it came knocking—and right now opportunity was hammering on the door. So why not? “You promise this isn’t an excuse to throw me out of the plane?”

  “Promise,” he drawled. “I’ll be with you all the way down.”

  He’d offered, she’d accepted, and now, two hours later, here she was.

  Having some serious second thoughts.

  How could someone as large as Evan jump, anyhow, and not plummet like a rock? She’d asked him that very question as they’d walked out to the plane, and he’d told her he was right at the maximum weight for a jumper. He ran daily to stay lean and to keep his weight at the magic two hundred. The day his weight nudged over that number was the last day he jumped.

  From her point of view, following his fine ass as he inched over to the doorway, Evan Donovan was six feet two inches of pure brawn. Watching those confident hands checking straps and buckles, she felt safe, and that was even crazier, because she was five minutes away from letting him throw her ass out of a plane. She barely knew him, and that was only partly because he didn’t make getting-to-know-you easy.

  “We’re coming around,” the pilot hollered, and the spotter waved Evan over. Clipping his safety harness to the webbing by the door, Evan leaned out for a closer look. Whatever he saw worked for him, because he took a couple of steps backward and gestured for her to join him.

  Oh, God. This was crazy.

  She cursed and went, sliding her feet over the vibrating floor of the plane. Not my best idea. It got worse, too, when she got her first look at the mountains underneath them and the small dot that was Strong. The wind roared like a freight train through the empty space where the door should have been, and that absence struck her as all wrong. The spotter was flat on his belly, inching forward for a closer look at that empty blue. Mack. She’d been introduced to him yesterday and the pilot, Spotted Dick, who was nothing more than a helmet and a pair of broad, uniformed shoulders right now. The other jumpers sitting on the floor waiting for their turn to go out the door probably should have been familiar faces, too, but right now her head couldn’t get past the freak-out factor here. She was jumping.

  “You still good?” Mack yelled over the noise.

  “She’s good.” Evan held out a gloved hand. “Aren’t you, darlin’?”

  “’Cause we’ve got ourselves a betting pool on whether or not she clears the door.” A quick smile flashed over the other man’s face. “I’m hoping she makes me some money.”

  Evan didn’t look once at Mack. Instead, he kept his eyes on her, as if he knew what she was thinking. Maybe if she waffled long enough, he’d tell her everything was going to be fine. That they’d work out an exit plan that didn’t involve jumping into empty space four thousand feet above the ground.

  Evan simply watched her, but she saw the satisfaction in his eyes. He thought she had this. “If she’s got nerves, she’ll work through them. Everyone thinks twice before going out that door the first time. That’s what makes us smart.”

  He wiggled his fingers. That had to be her cue. Adventure was suddenly a whole lot more real—and higher—than she’d anticipated. Screw it. She wasn’t a passenger here. She’d come up to jump, so she’d jump. Before she could chicken out, she put her hand in his, and his fingers closed around hers. She swore she saw sparks.

  “How many times have you done this?”

  “I’ve got over a thousand jumps, darlin’. I haven’t lost anyone yet.”

  “Hung up a time or two.” Mack laughed.

  “And I’ve got my backup plan right here.” Evan patted his leg, where a big-ass blade was strapped. “We land in a tree down there, we’re going to do fine.”

  “As long as you watch out for the splinters.” Mack mimed plucking splinters from his posterior.

  The plane straightened out, dropping lower. Evan’s hands got busy pulling her closer, until her back hit his chest. With a quick, practiced gesture, he snapped their harnesses together, and there was no going back. She was latched on to him and he to her, so where one went, the other went. The harness had her butt glued to his groin, and despite the thick flight suits they both wore, she’d swear she felt heat. Lust and nerves had something in her belly doing a hot, prickly dance of awareness.

  His hands tugged her goggles down over her eyes. “This is going to be fun,” he promised.

  “That’s what I’m counting on.” That, and not dying when they landed.

  All too soon, they were in the doorway, his arms braced on either side. Mack was counting down, Evan echoing his numbers. The sharp slap of the spotter’s hand on Evan’s arm jolted through her. Before she could scream, Evan had launched them out the door: 120 miles an hour toward the ground. For a moment, she forgot how to breathe, the air ripping past her nose and mouth before she could suck it in. Oh, God. Then the drogue chute snapped out behind them, exactly like he’d promised it would. The drop slowed some, but they were still rushing through the air.

  She opened her mouth and finally remembered how to breathe. Air choked her, cold and rough, and she clutched the straps, equal parts fear and elation riding her hard. Except the solid, reassuring weight of the man behind her said it was okay to be elated. This wasn’t going to end badly. When she looked up, the plane was moving away from the jump site in a long, lazy loop. Beneath them, the ground rushed up in dizzying circles.

  There were words pouring from her mouth, she realized dimly. Some curses, some ohmygods, and other stuff she didn’t recognize. As if her brain wanted to record the free fall and didn’t know how. She was talking, talking, talking as they fell until finally Evan growled, all rough-tender, into her ear, “Faye?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Shut up, darlin’. Enjoy the ride.”

  She shut up.

  Because he was right, damn him. This was one hell of a ride, and, right at that moment, she got why he did this. Never mind that he was usually landing boots-first in a fire of titanic proportions, or that as soon as he hit ground, he was fighting to survive. This incredible, delicious, free fall through the air was worth it.

  “Jump thousand,” he said seconds later, feeding her the smoke jumper’s chant. The wind tore past them, swallowing up his words. The ground was so far beneath them, rushing toward them impossibly fast. Evan had her. She knew that. So she curled her fingers around the harness and held on the way he was holding on to her. Real tight.

  “Look thousand,” Evan commanded. Yeah. She hea
rd him, and she looked and nearly had a heart attack. Then she couldn’t stop looking. Strong and the mountains below were beautiful in a crazy way. The landscape was approaching so fast and out of whack, but those were patches of tree and field. Familiar and yet not. She’d flown any number of times in planes, but now there was literally nothing but air between her and the ground below. Everything could go wrong, and then she’d land too hard, hit too fast. Evan’s name squeaked out of her tight lips.

  “Reach thousand.” His voice was controlled. In charge. Evan Donovan had her back, literally. “You’re doing fine, darlin’,” he promised. “We’re halfway there, and you’re doing great.”

  “Oh, my God.” She wasn’t going to win any prizes for best speech delivered two thousand feet in the air, but what else could she say?

  “We’re going to touch down real soon. You okay?” He put her hand on the cord even as he spoke. “You’ve got this. Count three and pull.”

  She counted, pulled hard, and, like clockwork, the main chute deployed in a hard snap up and then down. Pride filled her. She’d done it.

  “You did good,” he said roughly. “Just like I said. Almost there.”

  All of a sudden she wasn’t ready for the jump to end, but they were coming down fast, the last few hundred yards a blur of speed as the wind pushed them left and then right and the ground swung around to meet them. Evan’s jump had them over the center of a big empty meadow, home free and clear.

  “No trees,” she whispered.

  “No. We’re good. I’m aiming for the grass,” he said, and then added, “Get your feet up, Faye.”

  Like they’d practiced before they’d gone up, she yanked her feet up and out, giving him a clear path. The ground was almost there, there. The hard shock of Evan’s steel-toes touching down reverberated through her body. Evan still had his arms up, working the toggles, and he ran into the landing. He got the run under control and sank to his knees, pulling her up and back against his chest.