by Jill Shalvis
The air was laced with the burning heat of the flames, with the putrid smoke, tasting thick and acrid in his mouth, stinging his eyes. Just like old times.
Wanting to curse his brother, wanting to curse Lyndie, wanting to curse every damn thing, Griffin got out, too. He reached into the back of the Jeep for his gear, and then with one deep breath full of smoke and remembered horrors, he followed her, right into hell.
5
As Lyndie walked toward the waiting men, she wondered what Griffin would do. Would he freeze again? She hoped not, as she really had no idea what to do with that.
But his long legs quickly caught up with her much shorter ones, striding along at her side. When they reached the men again, he dropped his pack, put his hands on his hips, and drew a deep, ragged breath. “Okay.”
God, it looked sober from here. The charred ranch house, the fields and mountains ablaze…terrifying. But Griffin stood there, tall and strong, thankfully, and she had the urge to put her hand on his big, tough shoulder. Since that made no sense, she gave him a long, even look. “What’s first?”
He gave her the long, even look right back. “Ask them what the coverage is, and how many people they have?”
Turning, she translated his questions, and the laborers’ subsequent answers, which were simple. Incident base had been forced westward, past the ranch’s boundaries. Everything else…they didn’t know.
The knowledge, or lack of it, didn’t hearten Griffin, by the look of him. He dropped to his knees and started pulling things out of his bag. Hard hat, canteen, fire shelter, headlight for the hard hat, radio, extra batteries. He handed her up a radio. “My King,” he said. “It’s the common name of our standard issue radio. Do they have these?”
She turned to ask, but the men were nodding. They gave her the frequency, and she went to hand it back to Griffin but he shook his head. “You keep it. You’ll be the one talking into it.” He pulled out a compass, and a…
“Weather kit,” he said. He lifted what looked like a torch next, silently questioning the men.
They both nodded. “Si, si.”
“Okay, they either already have these fuses to help burn lines or they know what it is,” he muttered. “That’s something.”
In return, the men showed them a piece of equipment they had, an agave stalk topped with strips of rubber from inner tubes.
“Fire swatter,” Griffin said, nodding. “Good. Are they clearing, too?”
Jose told her people were clearing, but there didn’t seem to be much in the way of organization. Lyndie looked at Griffin, silently willing him to fix that.
“Map,” Griffin said. “We need to start with a map. I need to drive around as much of the perimeter of the fire as I can to see what we’re dealing with.” He shouldered his pack and started walking back toward the Jeep. “Keys?”
Apparently, he’d not only found his sea legs, but was as naturally bossy as…well, as herself.
His shoulders were stiff with impatience, his body long and lean in his dark green regulation firefighter pants that seemed made for him, moving with quick determination.
So he’d put away whatever his problems were in order to deal with this situation the way it needed to be dealt with. She was glad of that, and for a moment she just watched him, because damn, there was something incredibly sexy about a man in his element, especially when that element was saving something important, like this land. It left her unsettled, and a little confused.
“Let’s go.” Griffin opened the driver’s side door of the Jeep, wriggling his fingers for the keys.
She liked to drive, and debated arguing with him, but he stood there so unexpectedly authoritative, she actually dropped the keys into his hand and stalked around to the other side. “If you damage it, you tell Tom.”
“Damage it?” He eyed the beat-up old Jeep. “You’ve got to be kidding me. A bomb couldn’t damage this heap.” He hopped in, shot her a long look. “You’re coming?”
“Of course.”
“Then hang on.” His smile was bleak but resolute. “It’s going to be a bumpy ride.”
He wasn’t kidding. Face intent, his hands handling the Jeep in a sure, confident way up the narrow trail in the lowest gear it had, he handled the northbound road better than she could have.
Not that she’d admit it.
The trees were tight together now, the growth beneath thick and dry. A tinderbox. In the open Jeep she felt like a sitting duck.
The wind whipped their faces hard, and a flying ember landed at her feet. “Stomp on it,” he demanded, reaching out to air-swat away another flying ember from near her face. “Damn it, you’re not dressed for this!”
In the air she’d been in her element. Not here, not now, and she hugged herself, looking over when he touched her shoulder. “I’m okay.”
“Stay that way,” he said, and in less than two minutes they came to the end of the road. It was another clearing, with two old military trucks, each with a large tank in the back. Beyond them, beyond the clearing, the low bush surrounding the area was completely ablaze. The flames seemed small and manageable, but she knew that it was deceiving, especially since the flames danced in the trees just beyond the bush, vanishing over the top of the hill.
There were men here, working at the two trucks, laying out hoses and creating firebreaks with rakes, machetes, their bare hands…whatever they had. Lyndie translated the introductions, and here they found Sergio, a local rancher with limited fire experience. He was running the show the best he could, though he seemed a little baffled by the whole thing, and the fact that a slash-and-burn ranch fire had grown so out of control.
In rapid-fire Spanish, along with lots of hand gestures, Sergio told them they had six men on the two fire trucks. They had about thirty more clearing fire lines at various points on the perimeter, but the fire just kept jumping them. They’d lost three ranches to date, and were about to abandon this clearing for fear of being surrounded by the flames.
Sergio didn’t know what more to do, and couldn’t hand this over to Griffin fast enough.
On all of their faces was worry and fear. These strong, resilient people didn’t fear often, but they were afraid now, afraid for their homeland.
It seeped into Lyndie’s bones, as well. Homeland. Not a term she personally grasped, not with the nomadic way she’d grown up, changing addresses like others changed hats. In her own travels, and even before that with her grandfather, she’d seen just about every corner of the planet. In all that time, she’d loved many, many places, but had always been fine leaving them when the time came. She was good at leaving, real good. Almost as good as how she never attached to anything.
Other than her plane, that is. Now, that beautiful hunk of steel, she was quite attached to.
Maybe that’s why this place scared her to the bone. Like San Diego—a place that had a part of her heart only because she felt close to her parents there, this place felt like a good fit.
Even if she didn’t know what to do with that fit.
“Ask him if he has a map,” Griffin said.
She turned to Sergio. “Tienes una mapa?”
He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket, smoothing it out, revealing a crude drawing of the landscape, and a line of fire, which even Lyndie could see had been drawn before the flames had moved to nearly on top of them.
“Christ.” Griffin took a deep breath and looked at the men working hard to clear a fire path. “It’s not wide enough.” He shook his head. “And there’s not enough of them.” He took in the mountain above them, thick with dried out vegetation, then went through his pack and pulled out a palm held digital unit.
“What do we do?” Lyndie asked.
He looked up. “We?”
“I’m your translator, remember?”
“The reluctant translator.”
“But I’m here.”
He eyed her with an expression that might have been admiration. “Okay, we then. Without air support, and without a
way for the Jeep to go any farther, I’m hiking the rest of the perimeter, or at least going high enough to see how much is burning. While up there, I can create a good map on this.” He lifted out his palm-held digital device. “It’s got a GPS and an onscreen map, though it would help if someone had a computer I could download to so that all the men could see, too.”
“Maybe we can come up with one tonight.”
“Okay.” He glanced at the fire lines being cleared, his face tight and unhappy. “Tell them the lines need to be wider. At least three to five feet. They should use their fuses, too, burning the vegetation between them and the fire, getting down to good black.”
“Good black?”
“Completely scraping the earth clean of needles, branches, everything, to rob the fire of fuel. Do they have any other gear?”
“Like…what?”
“Fire shelters. Or, as we call them in the field, Shake and Bakes.”
She blinked, waited for him to smile, but apparently he wasn’t kidding. “Sounds macabre.”
“It’s meant to be. Getting caught by a fire and needing to deploy a fire shelter means you’re out of hope.”
She turned to the men and asked about additional equipment. But other than hard hats and gloves, they were out of luck. She told them about creating wider fire lines, then turned back to Griffin. “Let’s start hiking.”
“Again with the ‘let’s,’” he murmured, and snagged her arm when she would have started walking. It wasn’t the first time he’d touched her, he seemed to do that a lot. In other times, she hadn’t had any reaction other than wanting to make sure he was okay, or wanting to be okay herself.
Now she waited for one of two reactions: either the urge to slug him, or the letting loose of a smile that would later lead them to the bedroom.
But this time her reaction came from somewhere far deeper than either simple anger or simple lust, and that confusion settled over her again.
“This is going to be damn hard, hot work,” he said, his eyes dark and on hers. “Not to mention dangerous as hell.”
“So?”
“So I’m used to it. You’re not. You don’t have to be.”
He was worried about her. That probably shouldn’t have moved her, or deepened the confusion. “I’ve been in worse situations, believe me. I can put in the time. Tom is expecting me to.”
“I’m in charge here now, Lyndie, and—”
She laughed good and hard over that. “A few minutes ago you were ready to throw up on your boots, Ace, so don’t talk about who’s in charge here. You want to see the perimeters? Great, let’s go. I’d fly you, but as we discovered on the way in here, we’d have no visibility anyway. So…lead the way.”
He stared her down for a long moment, but when she didn’t budge, he shrugged, then donned his pack. “Have Sergio radio us when Tom gets here with the tractor and latest weather report.”
“Fine.” She translated the request, then followed him.
It was rough going. They didn’t waste energy talking, but kept to the perimeter of the fire, climbing upward as they went. With the sun blocked, the day looked like dusk, adding even more spookiness to it.
In excellent shape, she shouldn’t have had a problem, but she was in tennis shoes, not boots, and the smoke was getting to her. The going was steep, and almost overwhelmingly dusty. Slippery beneath her rubber soles. She climbed, extremely aware of her rough breathing, of the man at her side, and maybe it was that awareness that made her slip and fall hard to her knees. “Damn it.”
An arm slipped around her waist, lifted her up. Snug to Griffin’s side, she blinked at him. “I’m fine.”
“Your knees okay?”
“I just said I was fine.”
Running a hand down her thigh to the new hole in her pants, he pulled the material aside to reveal a bloody knee. “I have a first aid kit in my pack.”
Since his touch eased her pain, she scoffed. “This doesn’t even warrant a Band-Aid.”
With a shake of his head, he lifted his hands from her in a surrendering gesture.
They moved on, with Lyndie’s knees screaming in protest. But she figured she’d fall off a cliff before admitting such a thing. The man hadn’t been kidding; it was hard, hot work, made more time consuming by the fact he was creating a map as they went. At five foot three, she had trouble keeping up with his long stride and had to really kick it in gear to keep him in sight, and that annoyed her. She’d slacked off with her running lately. She decided she’d have to add a mile to her regimen. Already her lungs felt like she had a vise on them from inhaling the bad air.
They kept going, up the next hill, the whole time keeping the fire at their right. She was stunned and dismayed at the extent of it, and startled at how she now felt like she had a knife between her ribs. “This has to be bad for us.”
“Yeah.” But he wasn’t even breathing hard. “You okay?”
Hell if she’d say otherwise. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I don’t know, maybe because your knees are bleeding. Maybe because the flames are licking at us no matter how fast we move ahead of them. Maybe because it’s hot and smoky, and we’re climbing hard and fast, and you’re breathing pretty hard?”
Damn it. She was not. “Are you fine?”
“Yes.”
“Well then, I am, too.”
When he gave her only a long glance, she sighed. “You just worry about yourself, Ace.”
And yet he still looked her over, slowly, from head to toe, as if he had to check for himself. “Okay,” he finally agreed. “You’re fine.” His eyes were back on her now, but with an awareness in them that seemed strange and different from the usual sexual spark, because he clearly felt a reluctance to feel that spark.
Well, that was mutual, she thought grimly, with little satisfaction. She didn’t want any sparks either.
They came to the base of a craggily steep-looking, unwelcoming mountain. The flames were still uncomfortably close to their right, steadily eating their way north and southbound. Fire central was also south of them about a mile or so she figured, but they still couldn’t see the end of the northbound flames.
How much farther could this thing go?
Griffin craned his neck. “Up.”
She sucked in air, which she couldn’t get enough of into her asthma-tortured lungs. The sky was red, the heat unbearable, with the smoke so thick she wanted to part the curtains to see. “Right behind you.”
Nodding, he turned and began to climb. She whipped out her inhaler, hating the weakness, taking as deep a breath as she could. Holding, counting, she kept her eyes on Griffin’s back in front of her.
He kept going.
Kick ass, she told herself, and feeling slightly better, she pocketed the inhaler and followed him.
* * *
Griffin glanced at the sun, then back at his compass. They stood just east of the fire, surrounded by towering pines lining the mountain in a blanket of dark green. Deep gorges, high rock-lined peaks…Lyndie had told him there were villages scattered extremely sparsely throughout this region, most of them completely self-contained and so isolated people were born, bred, and died all within the same few square miles.
Amazing country. “We still have a few hours left before nightfall,” he said, still unable to believe how primitive a fight this was going to be. No air support. No smoke jumpers. No hotshot team. Hell, what was he saying? He didn’t even have a trained crew. They weren’t that far from the States, but they might as well have been on another planet.
Or another century.
Lyndie had matched him pace for pace, assuring him the pilot was in better than just decent shape, though he had already seen that just by looking at her tight, compact yet curvy body. He’d never met anyone like her, which didn’t explain why his eyes kept getting drawn back to her time and time again. He was worried about her, as he would have been with anyone without training, and yet somehow it went deeper.
“What does your weather
kit say?” she asked.
“Sometimes you have to go by instincts.” Something he hadn’t done on that long-ago day in Idaho, something he’d regret for the rest of his life.
She put her hands on her hips, breathing hard but evenly enough. “Well, what do your instincts say, then?”
That they were screwed. The fire had taken root in the dry timber, going both north and southward, eating up everything in its path, and they still hadn’t gotten to the end of it. “They say we have a lot of work ahead of us, but everything will be okay.”
She stared at him for a beat. “Now say that again without the bullshit factor.”
She was right, he’d automatically added in words of comfort to ease her mind. He was used to coddling the women in his life but it felt startlingly refreshing not to have it expected of him, even if he still wanted to tuck her away somewhere, safe and sound, and far away from this fire. “All right. We’re in trouble.”
Her gaze somber but calm, she nodded. “Tell me.”
She could have no idea how amazing it was not to have to be careful with her. She wasn’t fragile; hell, she was stronger than he was. He gestured with his head southward, down the hill toward the direction of town. “That’s where we should be concentrating our efforts. To save the village from the flames.”
“Right. But…”
“But the fire is racing uphill, as it always will, toward the wild, open wilderness. We need to get ahead of it. But we don’t have enough men or resources to divide our efforts.”
Lyndie drew in a shaky, shuddery breath. “Yeah. We’re in trouble—hey.” She cocked her head. “Hear that?”
He did. Running water. Wishing for a little luck had seemed too much to hope for, especially since he had no luck left and hadn’t for some time, but he heard what he heard. “Come on.”
“Coming on.”
Her echoing words had been uttered innocently enough, but for some reason his mind played with them, turning them into something else. Coming on. Coming…He had to be crazy to have any brain power left for sexual thoughts, especially given that he’d not felt anything in that department for a year, but when he looked at her, she looked at him right back.
