Their release wasn’t some huge blast of power. Tim could feel the potential for that, knew they could go there easily, so easily. Could taste how Macy’s scent would change as she bucked and flailed in orgasm. But not this first time, it was too precious.
Instead it was a blooming of heat that washed over him in ocean-wave surges. The motion washed back and forth between them until the tide peaked and, leaving behind waves of even more pleasure, receded until the two of them lay spent on the sheets.
He cradled Macy against his chest. He’d been with a lot of women in his smokejumper years, but—and he tried to send an apology out with his thought—none of them had made him feel like this.
Tim felt no urge to tease, talk, check in to make sure it had been good for the woman as well. There was no need to check in with Macy, the way she held onto him told him all he needed to know.
What was surprising was the way he held onto her. It wasn’t because he knew that to a woman, being held after sex was almost as important as the sex itself, maybe even more so. It wasn’t because it felt so good, though it did.
Tim held onto Macy because he never wanted to let her go.
He kissed her on top of the head, and felt tears wet his chest.
“Shh,” he stroked a hand over her hair and down her back. “We’ll figure this out.”
That was another thing he’d never said after sex, because there’d never been anything to figure out. He once again knew exactly what Macy was feeling as she continued to silently weep.
Was this what Akbar felt when he was with Laura? Gods but he hoped so for his friend’s sake. It would certainly explain the changes in Akbar the Great.
Though if Tim was feeling it…
A weekend fling didn’t need to be concerned about living and working in different parts of the continent. In this single act there had been no question, they hadn’t been making fling, they’d been making love even this first time. That meant…
“Oh shit!” he whispered into her hair.
Macy’s nod acknowledged that he’d finally caught up with why she was crying.
Chapter 10
Lovers were supposed to look different in morning’s light. Weren’t they?
Tim still looked…wonderful.
None of the shine had come off him as they had a midnight breakfast in a house lit only by the Alaskan mid-summer twilight.
His eyes had practically glowed with heat the moment before he’d dragged her from the table, dropped his briefs, lifted the lower edge of her long Keep Calm, I’m a Helicopter Pilot t-shirt, and taken her with desperate need and suddenness against the refrigerator—bottles and jars rattling together inside as she’d struggled to survive the emotions and needs doing the same within her.
They’d both collapsed back into bed after the most erotic shower of Macy’s entire life. And when she awoke with his fingers stroking her, she rolled to open to his touch and ride high once more.
After she returned the favor and Tim collapsed back into a truly deep sleep, she lay there admiring him for a while.
Her lover. However briefly, there was no longer any question in her mind that he was hers or that lover was the operative word. This hadn’t been about sex. It had been about glorious sex. The kind that could only occur when you cared about someone as much as they each did.
It was as if she was trying to pack in as much experience as she could as fast as she could. Like an Alaskan ground squirrel storing away pine nuts against the long winter.
Was she in love with Tim Harada?
She had been her whole life. But now he was suddenly so real, it was as if she was only just getting to know him as well.
Macy finally tore herself away and tucked the sheets up around him. She had a scheduled flight this morning to pick up some fishermen she’d dropped at a lake well in-country a week ago. They had flights back to the Lower Forty-eight this afternoon. She wouldn’t think about Tim having one in a few days more. She simply wouldn’t.
The blackout curtains drawn, a note on the table, and she and Baxter headed out into the shining sun of the most beautiful day she’d seen all summer.
# # #
Tim woke slowly. And alone.
No question.
The house simply wouldn’t be this quiet if Macy were around. He’d feel her vibrant energy shining like a spotlight from even the farthest corner.
He reached out to twitch one of the blackout curtains aside and let the sunlight stream into the room and received a shock. He hadn’t yet seen the room in daylight and what he saw he couldn’t equate with Macy Tyler, at least not the one he’d thought he knew before this trip to Alaska.
Macy had always been a slob. “A studied slob” he’d always called her, because she was so good at it that she must have practiced. Her room had always been a “no-fly zone” for Tim when they were younger. Which had made Tim honor bound to invade the inner sanctum of the disaster area as often as possible and harass her about it. Clothes, books, snow gear: all in haphazard piles on the floor. Even the posters of pop stars were crooked, overlapped, and often torn. Any furniture looked as if going through a wildfire would be an improvement.
It wasn’t that the Tyler’s were poor, it was that Macy was hard on everything and everyone around her.
Yet her present bedroom was neat and bright with colorful paint. There weren’t any touches that he could pin down as feminine, but there was no question about the gender of the person who had designed the room. They had been sleeping and making love beneath a gorgeous quilt, clearly Ma King’s work. Nobody in town had a hand like hers and this one was a gorgeous piece of local art.
Window pane, he recognized the general pattern. The whole quilt was sectioned into foot-square panes by dark strips the color of fir trees in deep summer. Each “window” was a view of Larch Creek done in multi-layered fabrics—applied, applicant, something like that. Appliqué. The river, the town, French Pete’s, Denali, a group of children with a dog and a Frisbee flying so high aloft it might have been a bird. It was the story of the town he and Macy had grown up in. Even the sheets on the bed were not plain cotton, but instead a rather a rich brown flannel spangled with white snowflakes.
The walls were covered with pictures. Denali as only a pilot would see it. There were pictures of her family, including Stephen. But it wasn’t a memorial, rather a celebration. Tim showed up in a number of the pictures as well, though, he was amused to notice, never once with Sally Kirkman at his side. Her hand or sneaker might be in a photo, but never the girl he’d been constantly beside in high school. Some of the pictures had obviously been cut, by there unusual narrowness.
The thing that was missing to mark it as a “girly” room was no small table with a mirror. Instead there was an old roll-top desk that could have easily dated back to French Pete himself. It was a beautiful piece and added to the richness of the room. The laptop at its center and the exercise ball rolled underneath broke the room’s motif, but made it more likely that this was Macy’s room.
He was oddly comforted by the absolute disaster that was going on inside the desk or he might have despaired of quite who he’d been making love to.
Tim padded out into the kitchen wearing his briefs and t-shirt. There he found the note that said Macy wouldn’t be back for hours. This would be a good chance to catch up with his folks and see who was still around town. Because if Macy was here, he’d be wanting her all to himself.
He checked himself in the bathroom mirror as he used her toothbrush—after all any germs they’d owned separately last night were community property now. He didn’t look like the sort of guy who would only be interested in one woman. Did he? But neither could he imagine himself in anyone else’s bathroom using their toothbrush…ever again.
It was a very strange place to be in his late twenties. Maybe this was a Strange Day to make up for his Stupid Day yesterday. He now
got that Macy Tyler was a woman. A woman who somehow made perfect sense in the world, flying off with her faithful dog to face the vagaries of the Alaskan wilderness and fetch outdoorsman to airports and mail bags to remote villages.
He was the one who wasn’t making any sense.
Well, he’d made it through Stupid Day with life and limb intact despite jumping a fire. Then had a night of mind-altering sex. So, he’d just forge ahead and see what this day brought.
Minutes later he was still in his underwear and deciding that strange didn’t begin to cover this day.
The jump gear and long johns that he’d spotted out on the clothesline when they’d had breakfast together were gone. Macy had probably grabbed them to return them to the BLM hangar.
His clothes were…in a locker at the Bureau of Land Management’s offices at Ladd Airfield.
Nothing in Macy’s closet was going to come even close.
The Harada household was on the far side of town.
Tim considered his options and discovered a variety of ways he could deeply embarrass himself, jogging across town barefoot in his underwear only one of the many unattractive options. He went for the least painful one and sighed. It still wasn’t a good choice, but other than remaining a prisoner in Macy’s house, he didn’t see anything else he was willing to do.
Even if he did wait, the options weren’t going to improve. When Macy returned the jump gear, she wouldn’t know to empty out his locker. There was only one place in Larch Creek that had clothes that would fit him.
He found his phone on the kitchen counter and called his mother.
When he explained his problem, she giggled at him. Mom actually giggling.
It wasn’t until after he hung up that he realized quite why.
This scene was bound to end up in her next book.
Chapter 11
Macy’s helo still reeked of under-washed fishermen. Why did guys think that “living wild” for a week meant they had to come back stinking worse than a skunk? She’d have to ask Tim, because she sure didn’t understand.
She was most of the way back to Larch Creek before she remembered Tim’s smokejumper gear that she’d stashed in the LongRanger’s baggage compartment to return. She had rather counted on tracking down his clothes while she was at the jumper base.
By the time she’d dithered about whether or not to circle back, she was over Liga Pass. The magnetic draw of her need for Tim made her decide to continue for home, she could dump the gear at any time…and his clothes? Well, maybe he simply wouldn’t need them for a while.
She landed her LongRanger and tried not to smile at the idea of Tim trapped at her place, held prisoner by lack of any clothing that would fit.
That would only last so long. The only solution Macy could see was…
Eva Harada would simply die laughing if Macy showed up and asked for clothes for her son. This time of year there wouldn’t be any convenient “dead of night” in which she could smuggle Tim sight unseen across town and into his own house. Besides, she hoped that he’d want to be with her tonight.
She wanted to head straight to Tim, instead she gritted her teeth and turned for the Harada household.
# # #
Frank Harada answered the door.
“Is it you are looking for my son?” he asked in a thick Québécois accent that she knew he only affected when he was being too pleased with himself. “Or is it perhaps his clothes you are seeking?” he shot a wicked grin at her before squatting down to greet Baxter.
Macy leaned her forehead against the doorjamb and sighed, “Either one would be a help, Mr. Harada.”
“How about I lead you to both? He’s here and he’s not running around naked. Eva would never tolerate such a thing unless it was us doing it.”
Macy’s cheeks flamed hotter at the image. The tiny novelist and the tall man who managed her business, running around the house naked together. Parents weren’t supposed do such things.
He waved both her and Baxter in. But after he closed the door he pulled her into a hug and held her for a long moment. It was unusual for him.
“I’m so happy for the two of you,” then he kissed her on top of the head.
Oh god, now she was feeling all sniffly and that would never do.
“I’m feeling pretty happy for us as well. Confused as all get out, but I can’t stop smiling.”
“That’s on track. A good place to begin, being happy. That is what his mother does for me, she always makes me smile.” He kept an arm around her shoulders as they headed back to the kitchen.
Macy had always liked the Harada household, even when the air wasn’t thick with one of Mr. Harada’s amazing soups. She sniffed and guessed minestrone. Maybe “Vegetable Barely” as he called his meatier soups, but she didn’t think so.
The ground floor made no pretentions about how a house “ought” to be. The entry from the front walk led through a mudroom, then a narrow hall with a storeroom to one side and a bathroom to the other. Then it opened into a single room that crossed the entire back of the house and took in one of the best views of the valley.
Through the large windows Denali rose majestically, commanding the eye every time. Macy had always loved coming here to watch when the winter storms ripped at the mountain. It was incredible and terrifying at the same time.
The Tyler house only had a peek-a-boo view of Denali around the edge of the McPherson’s. There had been a terrible row when Mac had wanted to add an office on their side to write and print the Lurching Larch weekly paper. He’d finally added the office on the far side of his house but had never spoken civilly to her parents again, except when they were inside of French Pete’s.
The tale went that Hilma, after chucking a pair of drunk loggers out into the snow to cool off—Hilma may have been a small woman, but no one messed with her—carved the sign over the door: Leave your shit outside. Ever since, French Pete’s had been a haven against conflict. Except, of course, during certain sporting matches.
The Harada’s great room layout was office, living room, dining, and kitchen all in a sweeping sprawl of fine woods and good taste. But it wasn’t a showpiece either.
If you knew where to look, and Macy still did, the big comfortable couch had the faded stains from a blackberry ice cream fight she, Tim, and Stephen had once had. Perhaps more accurately it was a fight that she’d had when she was eight, and Tim and Stephen had survived only by intense retaliation. She could still see the spot where they’d finally managed to pin her to the couch and scrub an entire scoop of freezing cold ice cream into her hair until it might as well have been a mud pack, a frozen one.
The dining table showed the marks of a thousand school projects and she could still hear the laughter of so many meals there.
“I was just making lunch if you want to join us,” Frank Harada returned to the kitchen counter.
Macy tried to speak, but couldn’t as Tim stepped in the back door and stumbled to a halt of surprise and cautious wariness. At least that’s what she’d expected him to do.
Instead he banged in the back door as if he were seventeen and not twenty-seven. When he spotted her, he moved straight across the room, gathered her into his arms, and kissed her. Not hard. Not with the brutal need or surprising tenderness of last night. Rather as if he simply couldn’t wait to greet her.
She wanted to shove him away; she so was not ready to be kissed in this room so cluttered with childhood memories and Tim’s father. And she wanted to drag him down on that couch and to hell with Frank Harada grinning to himself over hot soup and cold cut sandwiches.
Instead, when the kiss broke she managed a lame, “Hi.” Deciding that it would never do to let Tim think that he so overwhelmed her senses that she couldn’t function around him, she plucked at the fresh t-shirt he wore.
“So, my tactics to keep you prisoner failed. I’ll have to try
harder next time.”
He laughed and beeped his finger on her nose just like when they were kids…and then he kissed her there.
What was a girl supposed to do with that? He wasn’t upset with her for being dumb. He was amused.
She was considering how best to make him pay for that amusement—maybe there was some more blackberry ice cream in the Harada’s freezer—when a ringing bell had her nearly leaping out of her skin.
“Sorry,” Frank apologized.
“It’s okay,” Macy managed despite her pounding heart. She’d forgotten about the old tradition. When Eva Harada was writing, mealtime was announced with the clang of an old brass ship’s bell that was mounted on the wall right below Eva’s writing office. If she was somewhere she could stop, she’d come to the meal.
They all waited in silence for a few seconds, but there was no sound of feet moving across the upstairs office floor.
“She’s in it,” Frank said. “I’ll make her a tray.”
“No, let me.” For some reason, Macy wanted to be the one to do it. When Eva had been engulfed in writing her murder mysteries, it had always fallen to one of the kids to make a meal tray and carry it up to her.
It had been most of a decade since the last time, but Macy still remembered where the cookie sheets were stowed. She spread a pretty tea towel over it. Set it with a napkin, and an unopened diet Coke with a glass of ice cubes. Frank set down a small plate with half of a roast beef sandwich and a pile of chips. Tim set a big mug of minestrone soup beside it. Macy dug a couple of chocolate chip cookies out of the jar and then bit into one of her own.
Tim leaned over and bit off the half that still stuck out of her mouth. His grin was electric and made her tingle all over as if she’d just been shocked. Tim Harada, human Taser to one Macy Tyler’s nerves and emotions.
She mumbled around her half as she chewed, “You owe me a cookie, Harada.”
Wildfire at Larch Creek Page 10
