Hidden Heart

by Amy Lane

  Table of Contents

  Sneak Peek

  Blurb

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  Rescuer

  Rescue-ee

  That’s Not How This Works

  New Skills

  Up a Lazy River

  Like Fungus

  Tempting Fate

  Stupid

  Other People’s Stories

  Surprises and Shockers

  The Details of Home

  Jailbroken

  Reaching

  Catch a Falling Pilot

  Sunsets and Beer

  Rescue

  By Amy Lane

  Now Available

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  Visit Dreamspinner Press

  Copyright

  Spencer raised his hand to the back of Theo’s head and held him, taking over the kiss, plundering, drinking, like the month in the hospital had sapped his strength, his fire, and Theo was feeding him—water, flame, and blood.

  Hidden Heart

  By Amy Lane

  Search and Rescue: Book Four

  Search-and-rescue worker Spencer Helmsley has everything he needs: a job he loves, a flight partner he’d die for, and an amazing dog.

  Then he flings himself out of a helicopter to rescue Theo Wainscott.

  Stuck on a raft in the middle of a flood with the most stubborn, argumentative man in the world, Spencer soon finds himself asking not how they’ll survive but what’ll kill them first—the water, each other… or the sexual tension.

  While Theo and Spencer are trying to beat the odds, Theo is also trying to beat some sense into his rescuer. Spencer seems to have no regard for his own safety, and that’s a problem for Theo. Maybe he’s never seen another gay man in the wild, but it doesn’t take him long to recognize that he’d like to get to know this one better.

  If they make it out alive, Theo will have his work cut out for him convincing Spencer to risk his heart instead of his life….

  Always to Mate and Mary. Can I dedicate one to my dogs? I think this one needs to be dedicated to my dogs. Like Colonel did Spencer, they have kept me out of a very dark place.

  Acknowledgments

  JOHNNIE and Geoffie. Every day.

  Author’s Note

  ONCE again I have created a mythological place for my geopolitical needs. Being a petty goddess is pretty awesome, yeah?

  Rescuer

  “SPENCER, my darling,” Elsie said, both of them fighting for control of the reconditioned Black Hawk they were currently flying at nearly five-hundred feet above the flooded valley in the heart of the Oregon wilderness.

  “Yes, Elsie, my love?” Spencer’s biceps ached from fighting with the fucking stick. God, the storm that had started this mess was fierce, and something about the water pouring from the reservoir up in the mountains through a cracked dam into this formerly happy little valley was stirring up air currents like Niagara fucking falls.

  “Next time Glen says, ‘Hey, we should maybe throw ourselves into danger to help people who are too stupid to live somewhere civilized,’ what are we going to say?”

  Spencer grunted and yanked the helicopter a little lower. Yes, lower. They’d answered a radio call for a group of teenagers who’d been delivering supplies to people without power in the Oregon woods when the storm hit. All it had taken was a tree forcing a semi off the road, and the dam that protected the little valley had been wrecked enough to flood the already saturated area in record time.

  Spencer wasn’t sure what shape the group had been in when Glen had relayed the distress call, saying the youth group was out there and needed help. By the time Spencer and Elsie had arrived at the area Glen had indicated, most of the land was underwater—and so were any houses and SUVs they might have passed as they flew. Essentially, they were looking for a group of people with the brains to get somewhere high and the balls to climb on top of a roof.

  And they were hoping—hoping mightily—that everybody was all right.

  “I don’t know, Else,” Spencer muttered, keeping his eyes on his gauges. The storm that had saturated the ground and filled the dam and knocked down the tree was still raging. If the wind got any worse, they were going to have to pack it in. “What are we going to say the next time Glen asks us to help in a search and rescue, when that is technically part of our job description?”

  “We’re going to say hell yeah, ’cause there they are!” Elsie crowed.

  Spencer stared in horror. “That is not the roof of a house!”

  “Yeah, well, whatever it is, you need to hover the copter, buddy boy. I need to lower the rope.”

  Balls and brains indeed. Whomever it was—teenagers mostly, from what Glen had told them—they’d found a large wooden platform of some sort. It could have been a porch, perhaps? Whatever it was, it was currently tethered to one of the many, many trees in the woods by what appeared to be a garden hose. The tree, which was an oak of some sort, not one of the taller pine or redwood trees, was going to be under the waterline soon, the raft would either be adrift or submerged, and the little party of people standing on top of it, waving their arms at the helicopter, might be lost.

  “Check to see if they need a basket,” Spencer told her, shouting to be heard over the buffeting of the howling winds and the blades of the chopper. They both had headsets and helmets on—you didn’t take off in conditions like these and not gear up completely—but the background sound was still fierce. “And goddammit, Colonel, you don’t get to go!”

  Colonel whined, straining against the short lead that Spencer had clipped in the space between his and Elsie’s seats. Glen had given his permission for a lead ring to be bolted to the floor of his precious helicopter just for Colonel. Once Spencer had found a place to live that let him keep dogs, he and the giant German shepherd mix weren’t separated often, and Glen Echo, one of the two men behind Gecko Inc., an airfreight/search-and-rescue firm, seemed to recognize that.

  Of course, Glen’s brother had been the one to give Spencer the dog, so maybe he felt a tad responsible for the giant pain in the ass being part of Spencer’s entourage now.

  Elsie patted Colonel on her way to the cargo/passenger compartment. She clipped her safety harness to a carabiner on the frame of the helicopter before she opened the side door and lowered the cable with the rescue harness to the group of people on the makeshift platform. The water was still rising, and the tree was a leaf and a branch from going all the way under and taking the brave little raft with it. Shit was getting dire.

  This was normally a four-person job: one person to operate the crane, two people to help the rescues into the helicopter, and one person to keep the bird in the air. Elsie was going to do the job of three workers, and Spencer had one job to do while she was operating the powerful little crane—keep their bird from getting blown out of the sky.

  It was harder than it should have been.

  They were supposed to be in the safety zone, far away from winds blasting stronger than forty knots, but what was hitting them now—and hitting them hard—had to be well above fifty.

  “Fuck!” Elsie shouted as a particularly hard gust shook the aircraft. “Spence, you gotta hold tight. I got a guy coming up.”

  Glen and Damien had warned them they’d be undermanned. Had asked, seriously, if they wanted to wait for another chopper, because this was dangerous and ill-advised. But the nearest search-and-rescue chopper with a full complement of crew was a good three hours out, and judging by the way the water levels in the valley were rising, anyone stuck on the roof of a house did not have that long.

  The storms that had hit this heavily wooded area off the Oregon coast had come back-to-back, but the second one had been expected to ride a wave of high pressure to
Washington and not hit land here. Gecko Inc. had been hired by a local businessman to fly supplies in to the locals and assist any way they could. Glen and Damien had flown in using one of the firm’s cargo planes and landed just outside of Portland on a tiny private airstrip. While they’d been distributing much-needed supplies, the next storm had blown in with stunning ferocity, and then the semi had hit the tree and the shit had hit the fan.

  Glen and Damien—up to their eyeballs in bailing people out of flooded houses in a borrowed skiff—had radioed Spencer and Elsie, who had finished their own delivery to a similarly flooded area a little north. The Black Hawk was more maneuverable, and it had the crane and the rescue harness and basket. Spencer and Elsie had been on for getting people unstuck from high places, and this was their absolutely last rescue before they had to go back and refuel.

  But it wasn’t looking good. The dam must have crumbled in its entirety because the water was still rising, dwarfing whatever course the river through the valley provided, and this little valley was about to be a lake of its own.

  But those people—Spencer counted five—did not have help coming from any other quarter.

  “How’s it going?” he hollered.

  “We got one!” Elsie cried, and Spencer felt the slight pull as the newcomer was hoisted up on the electric crane. The thing had a lot of torque—it had to, in order to haul full-grown humans, sometimes two at a time, into the passenger space of the helicopter—but God, it went slow.

  “Hopefully he’ll give you some help when he gets up.”

  Elsie grunted. “Uhm, I don’t think so.”

  A moment later, Spencer heard Elsie talking sweetly to someone as she unhooked the harness and got their evacuee settled on one of the lush seats in the adapted Black Hawk. Her words had a lot of soft sounds and the words, “You’re fine, dear,” so Spencer assumed the first person she’d rescued had been someone’s grandmother.

  Awesome.

  The next two people up—one at a time—were two kids who looked about twelve to Spencer but were probably fourteen or so, and while they were both Elsie’s height, she could probably have bench-pressed both of them together. She got them both into the copter, but she was tired; he could hear it.

  “Spence,” she muttered, setting the crane to lower the harness and stepping over Colonel to sit in the cockpit, “I’m done. I about blew out my back helping that last kid in. It’s your turn.”

  She buckled herself into the copilot’s seat and took over the controls while Spencer unhooked all his stuff and went to man the crane to pull the next person up. As he left the cockpit, Colonel whined, and Spencer unhooked his lead.

  “Colonel, stay,” he ordered, putting him next to one of the boys and hooking his lead to the seat. He took stock of the kid—probably 100 pounds soaking wet and looking like a drowned chicken with ice-white skin and improbable ears—and said, “Pet him. It’s your job.”

  The kid didn’t even look at Spencer, just dug his shaking hands into the ruff of fur and started a dog massage that probably went down in the top ten of all dog massages. The kid across from him—dark skin, giant eyes, same drowned-chicken body and improbable ears—leaned forward and started to love on Colonel too, and Spencer left them to it.

  He’d hooked his carabiner to the safety bar when he realized the rope was still slack. He leaned over the edge of the copter and took stock.

  The harness had gotten down there, but what looked like another drowned-chicken kid, this one a girl with more hair than shoulders, was balking at putting it on.

  Spencer didn’t hear what she was screaming about, and he didn’t care.

  “Put it on!” he barked. “Fucking now!”

  He knew his voice carried because the girl stared at him with giant eyes he could see from fifty feet away.

  “Now!” he re-emphasized, and the adult with her, a man too young to be her father and too old to be another waterlogged hen, gave her a firm little shake on the arm and started helping her hook the harness up again.

  It wasn’t an easy feat. Spencer could admit that. The young man was fighting the same winds Spencer was, and he was fighting them while standing on the equivalent of a floating garage door, trying to usher a half-grown human into equipment that probably made as much sense as macramé in the middle of all that debris.

  Spencer had to hand it to the guy.

  He was determined to get that kid up into the helicopter.

  After a final click of the harness, she was coming up too, up to the part where Spencer could see her head and torso above the deck of the copter and could tug on the super-tough nylon-wrapped steel rope to pull her in. She reached out a hand, and he grabbed it, getting most of her inside, with one foot onto the copter’s deck, when a sudden gust of wind hit them broadside.

  That moment would be forever seared into his gray matter.

  The girl, flailing, terrified, as she bobbed in and out of the helicopter’s cargo area; Colonel, barking, excited, and unhappy; and Spencer, balance wavering as he grabbed her arm and practically threw her into the bay of the Black Hawk.

  And then the terrible vertigo when he realized he couldn’t stop his momentum and haul himself back right when the aircraft pitched sideways one more time.

  Followed by a jerk at his side, where his harness was, the sound of ripping, and the awful realization that his flight suit and harness had given at the worst possible time and he was going to fall.

  “Goddammit!” he snarled as he fell. He didn’t flail, and he didn’t panic. He and Elsie had done so many fucking drills ditching into the ocean when they were in the Air Force, he would have remembered to cross his arms in front of him, duck his face against his chest, and hold on to his radio headset as he fell if he’d gone into that swirling morass of floodwater in his sleep.

  But if he had gone into that frothy contaminated sewer in his sleep, the shock of the water as he’d hit would have woken him up damned quick.

  Rescue-ee

  THEO Wainscott didn’t like to swear. As the local youth leader through the La Pierre County Parks and Rec department, he felt like it set a bad example for his charges, and it just generally made for bad habits all around.

  But his father had spent twenty years in the military before marrying his mother, and Big John Wainscott could outswear pretty much the entire US Army before he’d left. Big John had taught him many interesting words before he’d passed away of a heart attack, mad at the world for not having more time with his wife and son.

  For instance, Big John would have called this entire day a clusterfuck.

  When they’d awakened that morning to find out the first storm had petered out, leaving the main street of Sticky, Oregon, flooded, the first thing Theo had done was call the sandbag brigade at the small rec center to find out if they needed his teenagers to help make more bags.

  Imelda—queen of the local rec center—had told him that they were up on bags, but Thelma Andreas had been out in her little house in the woods without communication—or transportation—since Laurie hit. Could Theo take his youth group to go help her round up her stupid cat and get her to town until everybody had power?

  Of course, it had taken him three hours to push through the flooded roads in his SUV. The kids had to get out every fifty yards, it felt like, to drag branches out of the way so cars could pass, but since their entire reason to get out of their safe, mostly unflooded houses was to help their community, none of them complained much, not even Maisy, who would probably rather be sewing quilts with her mother’s church.

  They’d been about half a mile from Thelma’s place when Theo’s radio had squawked.

  “Imelda—”

  “Theo, the dam’s gone. Just… gone! You’ve got five minutes, maybe ten, before your truck’s a boat. Find high ground now!”

  Theo had stared at the stretch of pitted, sand-and-branch covered road in front of him, done the math, and consigned his poor vintage Chevy Tahoe to the junk pile.

  “Hold on!” he’d
barked to the kids, because although he knew they had their seat belts on, they sure as shootin’ weren’t ready for the next two minutes.

  He floored the accelerator, steered around as many obstacles as he could, and ran flat over the ones he couldn’t. He figured that if the axle broke, he and the kids would be running, but until then, the SUV would get them as far as it could go faster.

  By the time they got to Thelma’s tiny cottage with the big garden porch, the water was up to the first of the porch’s steps.

  Theo took stock as they got out of the SUV and splashed toward the house. Thelma’s son had recently rebuilt the thing—it had a fancy garden hose winder, a built-in wooden supply box for garden tools, and a sturdy guardrail all the way around it, except for the steps. The porch’s four-by-four support posts had probably been driven in pretty deep, but they were already loose in the saturated soil. The slats that made up the deck of the thing looked sturdy. Theo figured—or desperately hoped—that if they detached the porch from the house, it would float.

  And since part of Thelma’s roof had caved in during the storm, they were going to have to pray it did.

  “Errol, Skeet,” he barked, putting all the authority he could muster into his voice. “I need you two to grab the hatchet from the back and a saw from the wooden box and cut those struts—you see them? The ones that attach the porch to the house?”

  “Skeet can do that,” Errol said. “I’ll use the saw and cut the big support post—see? It’s not pulling out like the others.”

  “Shit,” Theo said, and he figured the kids should get a medal because not one of them mentioned the swear word, which was fine because he figured they were all about to say more of them.

  “What do you need me to do?” Maisy asked anxiously.

  “You know the ice chest with all our emergency supplies in it and the bungee cord?” he asked, thinking as quickly as he could.