Slow Burn (Smoke Jumpers)

by Anne Marsh

  “Okay,” he said. “That sounds good to me, Mary Ellen.”

  She should lay down more ground rules, but dancing cheek to chest with him made her forget all about the shoulds in favor of the coulds. Instead of talking, she could listen to that steady heartbeat of his. Never mind that the band had started ripping out some marching tune that had sent America’s boys overseas more times than she cared to remember. The lights were out now over at the firehouse, and maybe that was one fewer boy for her to worry over.

  Jack was settled. Evan was on his way. That left Rio.

  And her.

  Ben’s hands locked around her waist, pulling her close right there on the porch for all of Strong to see.

  Tonight was her turn.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Outside the hangar in the late-afternoon sun, the crickets sent up a powerful whine, singing a mating song despite the brightness. It was a pretty time of day. Still hotter than Hades but with a promise of coolness later.

  Looking at the man sprawled in the dilapidated deck chair beside hers, Faye knew. Evan Donovan was a damn fine man. Last night, she’d admitted to herself that she was more than half in love with him, which meant she had some choosing to do. She sure didn’t want to love him, but there she was. Halfway to headlong in love. Strong could be a second chance, and, if the universe was passing those out, she’d grasp hers with both hands. No more regrets. No more holding back.

  She could take Evan back to the firehouse and try out that bunk bed again. She could tell him how she felt. Why not?

  Right now, though, she had a ringside seat to his childhood in Strong. She’d borrowed several photo albums from Nonna. The older woman had stuck the pictures in carefully with paste corners and meticulous labeling. Nonna had a whole shelf of them in her house, and Faye hadn’t been able to resist the invitation to pick one or two to borrow. Sharing embarrassing photos was a future-family thing, and she suspected Nonna knew that.

  With each page, she saw who Evan had been. He hadn’t come to Nonna until he was ten, so there was a sad absence of naked baby and embarrassing-moment pictures. Maybe someone else had those, but her heart said probably not. Anyone who would let a child wander off and not instigate a statewide search wasn’t collecting Kodak moments. Still, the album was a gold mine, with pictures of him with his adoptive brothers at Nonna’s, at birthday parties, at middle and high school graduations, and in his Marines uniform. Five years of service followed by five building Donovan Brothers. College at night and on the weekends studying fire management. There was even a handful of pictures of the brothers hobnobbing with politicians at fund-raisers.

  “You going to return the favor? Let me see your pictures?” he asked.

  She turned another page. “I’m busy here.”

  His laugh was indulgent. “Busy spying. But I took all the juicy ones out already, darlin’.”

  He hadn’t, she knew. The man she saw in the pictures was comfortable with who he was, with where he’d been and what he’d done. The other people in these photos would definitely notice if he took off, and, she was willing to bet, they’d hunt him down and bring him back.

  She took a long drink of sweet tea—so full of sugar she could hear her fillings protest—and flipped a page. There was Evan in uniform ten years ago, getting ready to deploy. Jack was right beside him, the pair of them hauling gear and flashing exuberantly youthful grins.

  “You liked the military.” She looked up, and, sure enough, he was watching her.

  “The military was good for me. Yeah. Plenty of opportunities to fight and earn an atta-boy.”

  Someone in his unit had been camera happy, filling whole pages with the same group of soldiers doing all the usual things. Training and relaxing and pranking each other while they hammed it up for the camera. Those faces were so young to be doing what they did. Keeping people like her safe. Keeping whole countries safe by putting their lives on the line.

  “Let me know when you hit the end, okay?” Evan kicked back, half napping in his chair. He was humoring her, but that was okay. She liked what they were doing just fine. It didn’t always have to be one-hundred-percent-pure adrenaline rush.

  Humming, she turned the page—and there was Mike’s face staring up at her. The world slowed to a stop around her. The day was like a hundred other hot summer days, and the ice was melting inside her glass, sending streaks of moisture down the sides, but her whole body was cold, cold, cold. She should tell herself this was a coincidence, but there Mike was. She knew that face, knew he’d spent a couple of years in the Marines before he’d decided against re-upping and come back to L.A. and the fire department.

  “You served with a lot of firefighters in the military?”

  “Yeah.” He turned his head toward her, lazy and relaxed. “You heard the story at Ma’s. We were CFR crew for the Marines. The best.” He winked. “Firefighting wasn’t just an Air Force thing.”

  Maybe that one photo was a coincidence.

  Maybe Evan and Mike had somehow briefly crossed paths in their military past.

  She turned the next page and the next. God. Were there more pics of Mike lurking in there, waiting to pop out at her? She hated the way that made her feel, scouting each group photo to see if her nemesis was present. Did it really matter if he’d been there? What did she think had happened?

  And there Mike was again, standing in front of an open plane bay, a dark green duffel at his feet. Evan. Jack. Mike. Three guys between them, but a CFR team wasn’t large to begin with, and a football field wouldn’t have been enough space for her. She opened her mouth to start asking questions, but all that came out was, “You talk to these guys still?”

  He cracked an eye open. “We got shot at together. Yeah, I still talk to them.”

  “All of them?” Her voice sounded shrill and stressed, even to her own ears.

  “Why? You want to do a meet-and-greet?” He paused, his gaze going to the book on her lap and the sea of khakis there. He sat up fast. “Damn.”

  “When were you going to tell me you knew Mike?”

  “When I got the chance, and that’s the truth.”

  “There has been no opportunity to mention that, oh, yeah, you and my ex-husband spent a couple of years serving together in the military? What would have come next? A line about how it was no big deal?”

  “It was a big deal.” He held out a hand. “You want to give me the book?”

  “No.” She started turning pages, scanning. “Were you close?”

  “Like every other guy there, he had my back. I had his.”

  “When was the last time you spoke with him?”

  She counted to three before he answered slowly. “I talked with Mike a few days ago.”

  This wasn’t happening. She was being paranoid. She was reading a conspiracy into coincidence. Wasn’t she? “Was this a lightning-bolt-out-of-the-blue kind of a conversation?”

  “It had been a while,” he said, cautious now. “We hadn’t talked in a couple of years. I knew he was down there in L.A., working a firehouse. I was running around Northern California and Nevada, getting Donovan Brothers off the ground.”

  “What did he want?” She snapped the album shut. The fun was all gone.

  “He called the day you hit Strong. He wanted to make sure you were going to be okay.”

  “And you came looking for me.” God. Their first meeting looped through her head, over and over. Evan coming through Ma’s doors and making a beeline straight for her. Had he called her by name even before he’d introduced himself? Maybe if she hadn’t knocked back all that rum punch, she’d have recognized what that deliberate approach meant. He hadn’t been a man smitten. He’d been a man on a rescue mission. For his friend. His buddy.

  “Is that what all this has been? A rescue operation?” She cut him off before he could answer. “Is this the part where I look gratefully up at my big, strong hero and thank him? Because, right now, I don’t feel grateful. I feel mad. You came charging into Ma’s the night
I got here, and, it appears”—she tossed the photo album at him—“you’ve been riding to the rescue ever since. I’m not a fire. And I’m not your job.”

  Evan had been the perfect summertime romance—with the possibility of something more. She’d believed Evan was her choice. Instead, she was being managed. He hadn’t even chosen her. He’d fulfilled an obligation to “one of the boys.” And wasn’t that Mike Thomas all over again?

  She’d shut up before. She’d sucked it up, and she’d bought into that code that said the firehouse and the job came first—and she came a distant second. Fighting fire was important, but so was she. She needed a man who had room for both in his life. And who put her first sometimes.

  Right now, she wanted to kick Evan’s ass.

  “You’re mad,” he said.

  “You bet.” She stood up and paced toward the runway. “You need to work on this communication thing. That was need-to-know information, and you sat on it way too long.”

  “I’m sorry.” He stood up, too, as if maybe he wanted to come after her. Wanted to take her into his arms. “Give me a chance to fix this.”

  Not tonight. This wasn’t something more conversation or more sex could fix.

  Because Evan was too much like Mike, after all. Both of them were big, silent, strong men. Mike had stayed all alone in there, inside his head and his heart, where she was supposed to have filled up those empty spaces for him. But she hadn’t. And, apparently, she hadn’t done much for Evan on her own, either.

  “I don’t need you to fix anything. I can do my own fixing. Maybe what I thought I needed was to hear how you were feeling. Right now, though, I need to turn my piece in. I have a deadline.”

  “You promised me fourteen days. You still giving me that time?”

  “I’ll give you as much time as I can.” She turned away. “I won’t mention your arsonist yet. You want time, I’ll still give you what I can, but I have to give my editor something. He’s working with white space right now, and he’s practically pissing himself. I don’t give him content, he’s up shit creek.”

  “Then give him something.”

  “Just not the real story.”

  “I’m not asking you to conceal anything. I don’t want lies.” He ran his hand over his head. “You have to believe me on that one.”

  “No, but you don’t want the whole truth out there yet, either, do you?”

  “I don’t know what’s true. I need facts, Faye. Proof.” He was all-facts now. He wanted proof, wanted everything black-and-white, but—news flash—sometimes that wasn’t possible with emotions.

  “So get them.” She shrugged. “Don’t get them. But do it now, Evan, because I’m out of time.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  That was one hell of a fight Evan and Faye were having outside the hangar. Rio squinted at the pair. Okay, Faye was fighting, slinging angry words around. Evan was sitting there, doing his big, silent enforcer impression. Occasionally he nodded, but he wasn’t volunteering too many words of his own. Fuck. His brother needed to learn how to open up some. Looking at Faye’s face, it didn’t take rocket science to figure out she was more hurt than mad. Whatever Evan had done, he needed to undo it. Fast. Before he lost a good woman.

  The dispatch phone rang loudly, demanding attention.

  “Heads,” Jack called lazily. Coin went up and down before the second ring. Tails, so Rio grabbed the phone. Ben’s firehouse was strictly volunteer, with Ben as the only exception. It was easy enough to reroute calls, so Donovan Brothers lent a hand and manned the line during downtime.

  The operator informed him the center was transferring a call box call, and Rio got ready to roll. “Strong 911. Where’s your emergency?”

  “I got me a fire out here.” The man’s voice on the other end was strangely distorted. Rio had fielded his share of prank calls, where jumped-up kids spoke through mouthfuls of potato chips or crumpled paper, but this was something else. Probably someone deliberately using a voice-distortion cell phone app.

  He put the call on speaker, silently gesturing a heads-up to Jack.

  “I got you. Where’s your fire? Can you give me your exact location?” The script called for a whole lot of ma’am-ing and sir-ing, but that wasn’t Rio’s game. Never had been. Instead, his fingers hit the keyboard as he waited for intel.

  “I’m at the call box. Route 49. Mile 34.5.” Mystery caller didn’t hesitate as he decoded the string of numbers on the sign identifying call box 49-345.

  Repeating the route and mile numbers aloud, Rio ran the next steps in his head. Sure, there were truck drivers who knew how to read the blue-and-whites, but how many of them requested Strong’s team by name—instead of asking for the generic 911 assist?

  To test his theory, he pushed back some. If this truly was a citizen do-gooder, the guy would answer, and he wouldn’t see the stupid in Rio’s question. “Okay . . . yeah . . . I copy that. You got a building on fire?”

  Right on cue, the caller snorted, as if he knew dumb when he heard it. “It’s a brush fire. Nothing but fucking highway and trees out here.”

  “Copy you there.” He switched over, calling the firehouse on the second line. “Firehouse, jump base standing by. We’ve got a brush fire.”

  Quickly, he provided the when, where, and what. In the background, he could hear Ben blasting the info out to his crew and sounding the alarm. “I have one unit to respond. One engine for a brush fire on Highway 49 at the 34.5 mile marker. Time is 4:07,” Ben reported. As the engine roared to life and guys hollered, Ben signed off, promising a situation report as soon as he hit the scene.

  Rio switched his attention back to his mystery caller. The guy’s patience was also more than a little suspect. As if he knew the drill. Knew exactly how long it would take Rio to dispatch the local engine and get help on the way.

  “Yeah. You should get out here. Now. The perimeter’s growing fast, and she’s going to hit the trees.” Was that fear or enthusiasm in the caller’s voice?

  Rio played along. “Okay, we’ve got an engine en route, so you take a deep breath with me, because help is coming. I’m going to have firefighters there as soon as I can.”

  Ben’s voice came in over the radio. “Strong Fire responding. We’re en route.” While the caller ran through flame height and smoke sightings, Rio punched out a text to Ben: Watch who’s there. Give me names of first responders.

  The site was only a twenty-minute drive from Strong. He scrawled a note on a scrap of paper and passed it to Jack, going all low-tech because his “spidey” senses were tingling. You thinking what I’m thinking?

  On the call box, the caller cursed. “We’ve got some wind out here. She isn’t going to stay small, Rio.”

  At that tell, Rio looked hard at Jack and nodded. Yeah. There was proof. Guy knew who the fill-in, temp dispatcher was? Rio’s mouth continued to put out the right words, acting as if all was normal, while his brain kicked into high gear. “Okay, I hear you, caller. Engine’s en route with an ETA of nineteen minutes. Right now, we’re getting you somewhere safe. That’s the important part here. You got a name for me?”

  “Sure thing.” With a muffled curse, their caller abruptly hung up. If that had been a genuine civvie, Rio would have been worried. This was no ordinary Joe, however.

  He looked over at Jack, itching to abandon the desk and tear out to Route 49. “That’s our arsonist, right there.”

  Jack nodded. “That’s no innocent John Doe.”

  Rio had coded up a software script that read the emergency calls and dispatch reports and pulled out the highlights before texting them to the guys on call. He’d turn that baby off now. The only guys in the know about this fire would be the ones already in the firehouse.

  After alerting Jack to the information black-out, he added, “Mystery caller doesn’t need or get a heads-up. Let’s see who shows up without getting his dispatch call.”

  Jack pushed to his feet. “I’ll take the truck, ride Ben’s ass out to the brush fire. If our
guy’s flicked a Bic and waited around, I’ll find him.”

  Yeah. That was a bitch, because Rio wanted to be in on the take-down, but he had desk duty. He was still nodding his agreement when the phone rang again. Time for round two. “Strong 911. Give me what you got.”

  The dispatcher on the other end started unloading deets, and Rio let his fingers fly, logging the new call. “We got incoming from the regional dispatch center as well, requesting backup.”

  Jack cursed and stopped walking toward the door. “Tell me more.”

  The nearest computer flashed an alert, scrolling details. Latitude and longitude. Elevation and a real nice description of the lay of the land.

  It was heating up to be a busy night, all right. Those coordinates put the newest fire ten miles west of the caller’s brush fire. The area was difficult territory, full of big-ass ponderosa and gullies. If the fire got in there and made a run for it, they could lose a lot of territory fast. There was a high possibility of its hitting homes, too.

  “Put a plane up?” Rio looked over at Jack for confirmation. “We got the crew we need. Joey can take over the desk here because he’s on his rest period, and I’m still good to jump. We’ve got the plane, and it’s easy enough to hover and pick out any hot spots. If we need to go in, we can, but a look-see should be enough to get the fire crew pointed in the right direction. We can play the hot-and-cold game for the guys on the ground.”

  Jack nodded slowly, thinking it through. “Small crew for this one. I want Mack, you, and Evan on the plane. Page Mack and Joey—get them in here stat.” He jerked his head toward the unhappy couple outside. “Our boy will have to sort his love life out later, because right now I need him on that plane.”

  The burst of activity on the runway screamed Time’s up, and, right on cue, Jack whistled sharply from the hangar door. “Evan, get your ass in here. We’ve got marching orders.”

  Evan glanced down at Faye. “I have to go.”