Wild Fire

by M. L. Buchman

  She sighed when it drifted to an end, an almost indistinguishable moment.

  “That,” Gordon declared, “was seriously nice.”

  It was. Two such fantastic yet totally different kisses should not be possible from the same man. Which Ripley figured meant that, in her own way, she was in as deep trouble as Vanessa, whatever her problem might be.

  Chapter Seven

  Aboard their Antonov, almost everyone slept on the first leg from Portland to Hawaii—everyone except Gordon.

  The Antonov had two pressurized cabins tucked high in the fuselage. A small one forward of the wings for the pilots and the larger passenger cabin aft of the wing.

  The latter was split into two sections. The forward part, probably for the stewardesses when there were any, had two sets of three lumpy seats facing either side of a small table, making it impossible to stretch out your legs without tangling with someone else’s. The only saving grace on the long flight was that there were two of these booth setups and they only had seven people on this plane. The aft part was a long section of regular airplane seating that could take eighty people. However, any padding in the too-close-together chairs had been flattened out long ago and Gordon couldn’t get comfortable anywhere.

  They’d started the day with losing their home and fighting a fire. And they’d finished it with flying half an hour to Portland and loading onto the planes. So everyone was sufficiently exhausted to sleep, except him.

  Vanessa had found a spot by the hull, pulled a blanket over herself, and leaned into the heavy white sound insulation that had been taped on the walls and ceiling. It was like the cabin was a white, Quonset hut-shaped tent that had seen a hundred too many camping trips.

  “Perfect! A padded cell at last,” he muttered to no one at all.

  Vanessa had gone to sleep faster than was possible, either hiding or emotionally exhausted, and Gordon couldn’t tell which. Denise and Vern, Brad and Janet, Ripley and himself made up the rest of the flight. The Ukrainian crew were in the cockpit and forward flight crew area, separated from the passenger cabin by an unpressurized void. Everyone else was in the other aircraft. He knew that Robin, Mickey, and Mark would be playing poker—probably for the entire flight if past experience was anything to go by—so Gordon was just as glad he wasn’t over there. It would be fun, but they were all much better players than he was and being here saved him a lot of money. It made this plane a very quiet place to be. Which was okay with him.

  He raided the cooler—the sum total of in-flight service. There was a kitchen, but the pilots had warned them that none of it was working right now. The An-124 was built almost entirely of Russian parts. However, Russia and the Ukraine were now on terrible terms, so keeping the planes flying was more and more of a challenge. Even aside from that, the refrigerator was low on the list of essential maintenance. Gordon found a ham sandwich on whole wheat and what he hoped was a Coke despite the Cyrillic writing. Sitting down and thinking things out wasn’t his usual style, but it had been a busy day filled with changes.

  Not being fired and shipped back to the family ranch was a blessing of such magnitude that he couldn’t quite wrap his head around it. He had been so certain that he’d be homeless… He laughed softly. He’d been right, just not in the way he’d expected. Almost to the minute of when he thought he’d be shown the door, they’d all become homeless.

  And the wonder of Ripley’s kiss—even Vanessa had never kissed him so tenderly. Ripley’s kiss had left a trail of fire that still lurked somewhere inside him like a burn gone deep into the soil.

  He no longer served a purpose at MHA that he could see, even with Emily staying behind. Surprising everyone—except her husband—she had begged off in Portland at the last moment, going to join their two children up at Mark’s parents’ ranch in Montana.

  “Australia and other places,” that Emily carefully hadn’t named, “are too rough for a three-year-old and a five-month-old, even with a nanny’s help.” But that hadn’t been all of it. The children had left for the ranch in the nanny’s care two days before the fire, as if Emily had been planning on leaving the MHA team all along.

  She’d been at the airfield, but it had been strange to watch the massive cargo doors close and leave her on the outside. Emily Beale had hired him three years before. He didn’t like this change. He didn’t like it one bit.

  Her and Mark’s parting had been almost painful to watch. Enough so that Gordon wondered that Mark hadn’t stepped off the plane at the last moment.

  Gordon went to the airtight pressure hatch and stared out through the round glass portal that looked down on the cargo bay. There was little to see. It was night out over the Pacific and there were no lights in the cargo area. The helicopters slept in the darkness little knowing that they’d be waking up tomorrow and going to work on another continent in another hemisphere.

  The odd thing about that was—“Hey!” He’d heard that—

  “What?” Ripley asked from close by his elbow.

  Gordon almost jumped through the glass portal in shock. “What the hell? Thought you were asleep.” He managed to keep it down to a whisper as a glance showed that they were the only ones awake in the cabin. Which gave him some other ideas as well.

  “Gordon.” He could hear the eye roll in her voice as if she too could hear the sudden change in his thinking.

  Yeah, being this close and looking into those dark eyes gave him lots of ideas. Being in a small white cabin at thirty-five thousand feet with five other fliers…not so much.

  He leaned back. Except the passenger cabin was inside the top curve of the massive round hull, giving it a steep curve outward. He hit his head, then shoulders against the padding, but there was no wall to support him. It surprised him enough that he sat abruptly and landed on the foot of a bench seat wide enough to double as a bunk on what looked like a pile of some pilot’s laundry. When he tried to stand up again, he was too far back under the curve of the hull and merely rammed his head into the padding, which dropped him back on his butt again.

  He stayed where he was.

  Ripley leaned casually against the hatchway door, her arms folded beneath her breasts, and smiled at him in amusement.

  He always wanted to correct women who stood with their arms crossed that way. It might feel like closed-off body language to them, but to a guy it mostly emphasized the curves of their breasts above their folded arms, making it even harder not to stare. Especially when they were as nice as Ripley’s.

  He did manage to keep his eyes on hers, which wasn’t as hard as it might be on another woman. There was a dark depth to Ripley’s eyes that a man could easily tumble into and be lost.

  “So,” Ripley’s lips moved like…

  Gordon shook his head a little to clear it and pay attention to her words. What was going on? He was never like this around a woman.

  “What cat crawled up your behind?”

  “What?”

  “Your face,” she pointed at it, “isn’t very good at hiding what you’re thinking.”

  Gordon reached up to try and wipe whatever expression it was off his face because what he was thinking had far more to do with getting Ripley undressed than with what he’d been thinking the moment before she arrived. But as he raised his arm, he jammed an elbow against one of the door latches. He clutched his elbow and tried speaking without moving.

  Ripley waited with a soft smile that must be her idea of being maddening.

  “I just remembered that Australia was predicting a below-average fire season.”

  “I heard that too,” Ripley shrugged in a very nice way. “We’re just the first wave of protection in case it goes bad fast.” The movement caused her bra to lift and define how—

  “No,” he focused on her narrowing eyes again. “We aren’t. I’ve been slowly connecting the pieces. It’s usually your outfit, Erickson, that sends the Aircranes Down Under.” He pointed through the darkened portal. “Why is MHA renting an Aircrane, a seriously expensive aircr
aft, and then taking it there ourselves? Someone knew this was happening, whatever this is. The Antonovs are very spendy aircraft too, especially to move us around with the Erickson. We can slip our whole outfit into a single C-17, but not your aircraft. Two Antonovs makes this a million-dollar flight. Whatever justifies that is way bigger than a fire.”

  Ripley’s look of concern had grown as he spoke until it furrowed her brow. “The way I see it…”

  Ripley kept her arms clenched tight around her waist because the way she was seeing things was utterly ridiculous and she had to find some way to hold herself together. At the moment, the Antonov’s doorframe was the only thing keeping her upright.

  “You’re right, of course.” There was something going on. And it was in grave danger of upsetting her entire system.

  What sort of a guy kissed her the way he did and then didn’t follow up on it when they were the only two awake? And why had his report of kissing Vanessa, and it being somehow wrong, made her suddenly all weak in the knees for him? Ripley Vaughan didn’t get weak in the knees for any man.

  That was a hard-learned lesson. There was something about her that didn’t attract trustworthy men. She should have known that about Chief Petty Officer Weasel Williams before she left the Navy to marry him. Troll Boy in high school. Idiot Instructor at Annapolis, and all of the other anti-superheroes of her life: Twisted Tommy, Needy Nick, and Poor Paul—secretly voted the worst kisser in Muskogee High despite being a truly decent guy.

  Gordon was still nursing his banged elbow, sitting on the foot of the narrow bunk he’d collapsed backward on.

  Ripley’s blindness to relationships was worse than Juliet not seeing disaster climbing over her balcony railing in the handsome Romeo. She never saw the male-shaped disasters coming, always found herself in the middle of them, and was the last one aware of the total train wreck of the looming end-of-line, until the dagger had been driven in deep or the train derailed or wherever the metaphor had gone to. Her mother would be horrified.

  Yet Ripley saw Gordon. She saw his attraction. She saw the conflicted man, caught between being decent and then morphing one moment to the next into a strong, splendidly needy male. She tried to decide which one she liked better and decided that it was a toss-up; they both had their place.

  But, Rip, you like both of him.

  Huh!

  She did.

  A glance back showed that the line of sight was such that, of the sleepers, she could see only feet and someone’s knee from her current position.

  Watching herself from a detached distance, Ripley pushed off the door hatch and stepped over to the still-seated Gordon. He continued talking about the Australian fire season as she straddled him to sit in his lap. The wide bench forced her legs to slide up around his waist. The seat was low enough that his knees were higher than his lap and she slid down them, abruptly achieving much more intimacy than she’d intended.

  So abruptly that she tried to apologize…

  But the other Gordon suddenly appeared. He stopped awkwardly in the middle of the word “bushfire” as wildfires were called in Australia.

  His eyes questioned her action even as his arms slid around her waist and pulled her in tightly.

  Ripley didn’t like that question. Didn’t want to try to answer it. Two days ago she’d been in her normal space: mostly alone for three years and happily reviewing a new contract. Now she was gearing up to sleep with a guy she barely knew.

  Well, not sleep with him, there wasn’t that much privacy here but…

  His kiss cut off the runaway cascade of her thoughts. It started as the pleasant testing man, and rapidly escalated. One firefighter-strong hand had snaked into the back pocket of her jeans to pull her hard against him. His other hand scooped up to her breast.

  She braced herself for the inevitable pinch of pain, but instead, it was a cup and caress completely at odds with the escalating force of the kiss itself. The contrast further emphasized both the intensity and the gentleness.

  One of them groaned into the kiss, and she was fairly sure that it wasn’t her. She wasn’t a moaner…and her voice was much higher.

  He shifted down to nuzzle her neck and she ran her hands into his blond hair. It was so fine that it almost wasn’t there, a caress against her palms. Had she ever had a blond lover? At the moment, as Gordon continued to investigate her neck with nose and tongue, she couldn’t even picture any of her prior lovers.

  Lovers.

  She and Gordon were going to be lovers. Not now. Not in this crowded noisy aircraft cabin over the deep Pacific Ocean, despite his hand somehow now being inside her shirt and teasing along the edges of her bra. But they would be. She wasn’t comfortable with that bit of knowledge…but she was really, really looking forward to it anyway.

  “It had better be soon,” she managed in a voice so husky with need that she barely recognized it as her own. His fingertips were driving her crazy. No matter how she arched her chest against them, he kept the pressure light and gentle.

  “Oh please, yes,” Gordon whispered into the ear he was nibbling on as if he knew exactly what she was talking about.

  Never in his life had Gordon needed someone the way he needed Ripley Vaughan. With her breast cupped against his palm, he could do anything.

  He knew that was an utterly ridiculous cause-and-effect combination, but somehow it was true. He’d never felt so powerful as he did holding Ripley. Now that he could slow down enough to appreciate her, he could feel her lithe strength. Her skin seemed warmer and richer than any other woman’s had before. The richness of coffee didn’t stop at the color of her skin; she was more powerfully female than any woman he’d ever held.

  “You know,” he had to speak, otherwise the fact that he couldn’t have her right here and now would kill him. “Wonder Woman doesn’t begin it cover it with you.”

  “Oh?” She used the pressure of his hand in her back pocket to leverage her hips more tightly against him. Maybe she really was trying to kill him. “Why is that?”

  “For one,” Gordon managed, “I’m trying to figure out what Wonder Woman sees in me.”

  “You mean you’re wondering what I see in you?”

  “Sure thing…woman.” He could feel her soft laugh ripple up the length of her body against his, but only being voiced as a happy sigh.

  “I’ll be damned if I know,” she whispered against his lips and they descended into another kiss.

  Gordon decided that his first assessment had been completely correct. She was trying to kill him.

  When they had frustrated one another past reason, they finally slid apart. There was a blanket on the narrow bunk and they lay down there together. Ripley rested her head on his chest and draped a leg over his hips, the only way the two of them would fit there.

  He brushed the smooth slickness of her shoulder-length hair with his cheek and held her as she fell asleep.

  Did every single thing with Ripley have to be new? He’d never slept with a woman without first making love to her. Despite his various forays into the wonderland of single women at The Doghouse and other firefighter bars, he typically knew something about their past. People like Mickey, before Robin, or Akbar—MHA’s lead smokejumper now temporarily assigned to Columbia Helicopters—before Laura, they swept women up just by being handsome and charming. Then they bedded them and often as not cast them aside.

  Gordon wondered if he’d talked more women into his bed or into avoiding his bed. He might spend hours in a bar chatting with a woman, thinking there was a connection building there, only to get a goodnight handshake. That’s when he often heard just how “sweet” he was. Damn word should be stricken from the English language.

  He didn’t feel that way around Ripley. He felt avaricious and that wasn’t something he recognized in himself. It made him want to swagger a little, or perhaps a lot…a mannerism that epitomized his father. Max Finchley Sr. had walked his land like he was a king, or a god. And Gordon’s two older brothers were little better.
Even Mary was often held up as an example of Gordon’s failure to qualify in his father’s eye. Of course she herself was a force to be reckoned with, riding hard on the rodeo circuit and doing well in national-level prize money. She seemed to make a point of rubbing his nose in that too at every opportunity. Gordon had always been the black sheep, content to ride his horse or fly the ranch helo.

  “Thinking awfully hard there, Gordon,” her voice was the mumble of someone only half awake.

  “Thought you were asleep,” he whispered back to Ripley.

  “Not with the way your thoughts are buzzing. Your pulse rate,” she tapped a lazy finger against his chest close by her nose, “has been climbing too.”

  Gordon blew out a long slow breath. He didn’t think about his family often, but it was never a good thing when he did. “Sorry.”

  “Anything you want to talk about?”

  “My family? No. The less said the better. What about yours?”

  “You never saw two people so close. Like Vern and Denise maybe, but they’re both gentler sorts. Mom is from Senegal, where family is the most important thing there is. Dad was a crazy mix, but he’d latched onto the one-eighth Cherokee as a cultural historian—for him, heritage adds even more to family.”

  “Then what are you doing out here in the world?”

  Ripley sighed against his chest, “Because I don’t fit in for crap. Love them to death, but they aren’t my type of people. Family isn’t for people like me. Not ever. No interest.”

  Gordon nearly cracked his nose on the top of her head when he tried to look down at where she still lay perfectly relaxed upon his chest.

  “What?” She must have felt his surprise.

  “You’re not making any sense there, Wonder Woman.”

  “She didn’t have family either. Well, except for a lot of Amazons on Paradise Island, but I’ve never been tempted to swing that way.” There was a long silence; she was most of the way back to sleep before she mumbled once more. “I like men—Diana Prince is never really clear on that point.”