Jumping Feet First
A Highland County Heroes Novel
Melissa Stevens
Copyright © 2019 by Melissa Stevens
Editing provided by Elizabeth A. Lance
Cover design by Sweet ’n’ Spicy Designs
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 1
Smoke filling the air made it hard to breathe. Ally coughed as she tried to get the last baby goat herded into the pen without letting any of the others escape. Goats were non-compliant on a good day, panic caused by the scent of the approaching fire only made things worse. Finally giving up on the gate, Ally picked the kid up and set him over the fence where he could huddle against his mother while she went in search of two missing sheep.
Not for the first time in the last two days, Ally wondered what had possessed her to invest every penny she had and some she didn’t, to buy a piece of property outside the tiny New Mexico town of Garrett and start her own little ranch. Unlike most ranches in the area, she didn’t own a single head of cattle and not a single horse. No, she’d had the brilliant idea to invest in goats and sheep. They were animals that would pay off two-fold without having to kill her babies. Each of her animals was a breed she could harvest their coats, angora goats, merino sheep and more. In addition to harvesting the fibers she milked the nannies and ewes, making goat and sheep cheese as well as some soap products. She sold those at farmers’ markets and online. It wasn’t the easiest living, but it was work she loved and that made all the difference.
What she didn’t love though was people coming around and telling her she had to leave. Abandon her home and all these animals that counted on her because of the wildfire started by some moron who walked away from a hot campfire. The sheriff had been out here twice and the last time she’d told him exactly where he could shove his evacuation order. There was no way she was going to leave her animals here to die without doing everything she could to save them.
She’d gathered them all up and penned them near the barn, where she’d stretched every hose she could find up to the roof so if the fire got close enough that embers might spark it, she could turn the water on. She’d cut every bit of vegetation for more than fifty feet at the edge of her clearing. She wished she had access to a backhoe or dozer, so she could build fire breaks, but she didn’t know anyone who had one that wasn’t already put to use on the fire line. She’d just have to do the best she could with what she had.
The only thing missing was a single ewe and her lamb. Ally had counted them the day before and now the pair was missing. But she knew where they liked to hang out so she headed out to the little pond on the far end of the pasture, hoping they were hiding in the hollow just beyond it, and wishing, not for the first time, she’d had the money to invest in a good sheep dog when she’d gotten started. A well-trained dog would have helped so much as she’d gathered the animals over the last couple days.
Chapter 2
Sweat dripped into her eyes as she carried the lamb, knowing the ewe would follow her baby’s unhappy bleating. Sure enough, the pair had been in the hollow, but they’d refused to be herded out, so Ally was forced to find another way. By the time she reached the pen and got the mother and baby safely inside, she was breathing hard and coughing from the thickening smoke.
Looking up at the sky, with the dark smoke making it look like a storm was moving in, she wondered how close the fire was now. This morning it had been a few miles away and headed her way. A cloud of dust raising off the road alerted her to the arrival of a visitor. Probably the sheriff again or maybe one of the Rangers coming out to try again to get her to leave. She sighed and turned away. She didn’t have time for this and neither did they. It was a waste of time. She wasn’t going anywhere. If she had to, she’d turn on the water hoses. She had sprinklers on the roof, and hoped they would soak the roof and the water would run down the walls of the barn. She’d open the doors and let all the animals in, and hide out in there with them until the fire passed. It was her only hope if the flames made it this far. The danger there was if the electricity powering the pump went out. That happened occasionally during the winters, so she had a backup generator in there, set up to automatically start should the power cut off. She’d filled it with fuel this morning.
Ally scanned the area, trying to think if she’d missed anything. If there was anything else she could do to protect her home. The ranch and these animals were all she had and there was no way she was going to leave it to vanish in a cloud of smoke. Not without one hell of a fight.
A large pickup she’d never seen before pulled into the driveway. She ignored it as she ran through the mental check list of things to get done. She was visible, whoever it was could come to her if they wanted to talk. She’d cleared the ground, gotten rid of everything flammable, at least that she could find, and protected as much as she could. But she was missing something. She didn’t know what, just had that nagging feeling that there was something more.
“Ma’am?” a voice interrupted her thoughts.
She glanced at her visitor, he was tall and muscular, but that didn’t matter, not now. She looked away, trying to figure out what she was missing.
“Ma’am.” He just wasn’t going to take a hint, was he?
“I’m a little busy here, what do you need?” She didn’t glance at him again, instead letting her eyes move from one thing to another as she ticked off her list of chores in her head.
“I need you to come with me.”
“Not going to happen.”
“Ma’am, the fire’s only a few miles away, it’s time to get out.”
“Unless we can load up my herd and take them with me, I’m staying.”
“I can’t do that.”
She was done arguing. Ally turned and went into the barn, not caring if the visitor followed or left. She didn’t have time to cater to him, especially if the fire was as close as he said. In the barn she checked the tack room where she stored feed, making sure she had enough to last at least a week and that everything she might need was in place, including emergency food and drinking water for her. She’d stocked the emergency food and water out here during the winter when a big storm had hit and she’d spent two days straight dealing with sick animals.
She’d thought then her little ranch was in danger, but that was nothing like now.
Feed checked, she made sure everything she thought she might need was in place in the barn, then climbed the stairs to the loft, her visitor right behind her, trying to talk her into leaving. She didn’t pay any attention to the words as she let them go in one ear and out the other while she went about making sure she was as prepared as she could be.
In the loft she had clothes and bedd
ing for herself, all carefully covered in plastic in case the roof leaked. She hoped she’d never need to use them but better prepared and not need it than wish she’d done some thing too late. Her check of the barn loft complete she turned back to the ladder to descend and found the man standing in her way.
“Excuse me.” She tried to step around him, but he sidestepped, blocking her again. She looked up at his face and met his gaze for the first time. “I need to get by, please move.”
“Not until you listen to me.” His chocolate eyes glinted with what she was sure was anger. “I’ve been telling you it’s not safe to stay, the fire is headed this way, but you’ve been ignoring me.”
“I know the fire is headed this way. I can smell it. I don’t have time to listen to you tell me what I already know when there’s so much that needs to get done.”
“Get done? The only thing you need to do is get in your car and leave.”
“If I leave, my livestock will all die. If my livestock dies, I lose everything.”
“It’s not that bad. You can rebuild.”
Ally shook her head. He didn’t understand, no one did. This place was everything. Her animals were more pets than livestock there was no way she could leave them here to die.
“Look, I don’t know why they keep sending people out here. I’ve told the sheriff twice and the ranger once, now they’ve sent you to try to convince me to leave. I’m not going anywhere. What happens to my animals happens to me.”
He blinked and stared at her a moment, his mouth hanging open. Ally took advantage of his shock to step around him and climbed down the ladder. On the ground she went back to checking things.
“I’m not here to try to convince you to leave, ma’am.”
Damn, he’d followed her again. She really wished he’d give up and go away like the sheriff had this morning.
“Then why are you here?” she asked but she wasn’t paying attention. She didn’t really care why he was here and as long as he didn’t keep her from getting things done, he could follow her around all afternoon. Though if he hung around much longer she was going to put him to work.
“It’s my job to make sure you leave. Sheriff O’Brian said you’re being stubborn.”
“Stubborn? If I were a man you’d call me determined and leave me to do what I’m going to do, but because I’m a woman and a fairly young one at that, I’m stubborn and I need to be forced to leave.”
“No, ma’am. We were given a list of residents who refused to leave, and each assigned one. There’s someone called Old Man Gibson on the list, so it’s not because of your age or sex. We’re clearing everyone out.”
“I don’t care what you’re doing. I’m not going anywhere.”
He finally took his eyes off her and scanned the property like she was. “Who did all this?”
“All what?” She wasn’t paying much attention to him.
“Cleared the grass, penned the animals, scraped it to the dirt along the edge of the pasture.”
“I did.”
He turned back to her with a new look in his eyes. “How do you plan to keep the buildings from catching from floating embers?”
She told him about the hoses on the barn and the backup generator on the pump at the well.
“What about the house?”
Ally shook her head as she glanced over at the old house she’d lived in for the last two years while she’d gotten the little ranch established. “I don’t have any hoses to spare. The barn’s more important. I can shelter all the livestock in there and it’s got all my business equipment. If I lose the house it will hurt, but if I lose the barn or the animals, I lose it all.”
Chapter 3
James looked around the farm he’d been assigned to. He was here to enforce a mandatory evacuation. Sheriff O’Brian had told him this was a small hippy-dippy sheep farm where they made new age cheese and soaps. James had assumed it would be a fairly easy job, come out and convince the city girl who’d ran the place how dangerous things were getting and get her to load up and leave. The job was proving to be more difficult than he’d anticipated. And the woman, a Miss Allison Keeting according to the paperwork he was given, was both stubborn and smarter than he’d given her credit for.
He looked around the small ranch and found that she’d already taken many steps his unit would have when trying to protect her property. It would make their job easier should the fire make it this far.
James had not been entirely honest with her. The fire was only a few miles away, but at the moment it wasn’t headed in this direction. That could change any minute though. All it would take was a shift in the wind, that regularly shifted, and she’d be right back in immediate danger again.
He hated this part of the job. The dealing with civilians, trying to convince them to get the hell out of the way so he and his buddies could get in and do their job. Get the fire put out, saving as many homes as possible in the process. He’d much rather be jumping out of a plane, landing in some hard to reach area and battling smoke and flame. Those he understood more than people. Especially some people.
Why on earth were these animals, that building, so important? They could be replaced, and they certainly weren’t worth her life.
“How’d you know what to do?” He scanned the property again, noting several things he and his unit would do, but it all took special equipment or more man power than a lone woman with no large equipment could manage.
“I did some research, found out the best ways to prevent a fire from spreading and did what I could.” She sighed. “I cleared as much of the undergrowth as I could over the winter.” She pointed to the tree line across the pasture. “I started over there, and it’s pretty clear a good fifty feet, maybe a little more, back from that edge, to the far side of the pond.” She pointed to the shallow water pool several hundred yards away. “I hadn’t gotten to this side yet.” She motioned around behind them.
“Why bother? Most people don’t.”
“After last year’s fires I figured it was only a matter of time until one got close to me here. It’s better to be proactive than reactive so I got busy.”
“I’m impressed at what you’ve done here, but that doesn’t mean you can stay.”
She shot him a look it would have been hard to mistake. It was a look he’d seen many times in the five years he’d been part of the wildland fire crew. Though usually not from such pretty women not so far from his age. Usually when he was given the look that said go to hell and get off my property, it was either from an older person, man or woman didn’t matter, they’d both given him the look about equally. They were the worst kind. They’d usually been on the property for several decades and believed they could handle whatever came. He’d yet to see one as prepared as Miss Keeting.
The other kind who gave him the look were the new to mountain life city folk. He’d figured out with the second kind, all he had to do was show them how dangerous it would be to stay, get them to see the fire was coming their way and they would get hurt if they stayed. That typically got them to flee.
Some never bothered to return. James thought it was no big loss when they didn’t. Left the land for someone who would have a better idea of what they were getting into.
Keeting was proving to be more difficult than either of the two. She was smarter than either of them too, at least about what needed to be done, it still didn’t mean she could stay. It was his job to get her to leave and he was going to do it.
“The only way you’re going to get me off this property is in a body bag.”
Shit. It wasn’t the first time James had been told that, but somehow, he suspected she wasn’t any less determined than the last one. He’d had to call the sheriff out to arrest the man who’d told him that.
It hadn’t been here, not in this area, nor this year. Another fire, another mountain range, another time. James hated admitting defeat, so he tried one last time.
“Look, Miss Keeting, the fire’s going to come through in a matte
r of hours. If it even takes that long. If we can get in and get to work soon, we might be able to save your place, but we can’t do it while you’re here.”
“Why not?” She set her fists on her hips as she finally gave him her full attention.
“Ma’am, you’re a liability. We don’t want you getting hurt or in the way so one of us gets hurt.”
“I won’t get in the way. Get your crew in here and I’ll stay out of the way, take care of my animals and let you do your jobs, but I’m not going anywhere.”
“I can’t let you stay.”
“Unless you’re prepared to physically remove me, I think we’ve come to an impasse.” She dropped her hands to her sides, turned and walked away.
James stood for a moment unable to believe the pretty woman who lived out here all alone was not just willing to stay after he’d explained the danger, but was demanding to. For a moment, he watched her walk away. The last thing he wanted to have to do was admit he’d failed at an assignment, any assignment. But convincing a city girl to get out of the path of a raging forest fire? That was one job he wasn’t going to fail. He took a deep breath and let it out with in a rush as he followed her again.
She went to a small square brick building topped with a corrugated steel roof. The small building was odd in itself, not more than eight feet on any side, but it was the roof that caught his attention. At the peak was an extra piece of roofing that folded over and straddled the roofline, a large steel eye sat on top.
Not sure what the building was, he followed her inside. He was surprised to find a well head inside, a large metal tank nearly as tall as he was to one side and an old generator to the other. A single pipe came up out of the ground but split and had several gate valves before the pipes disappeared into the ground. Miss Keeting opened a couple valves, a soft click sounded, and she turned to leave.
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