Flame (Firefighters of Montana Book 5)

by Victoria Purman

  He’d decided not to go to The Drop Zone for a beer with the other guys from his crew. Tonight, the place would be filled with the memories he’d wanted to forget.

  *

  “Uncle Dex!”

  Dex had barely cut the engine of his truck before he spotted his eight-year-old niece Lila running towards him across the big lawns out front of the McCoy family home at North Fork. He had to stop the shot of grief he felt every time he saw her pronounced limp, the way her right arm always kinked up tightly, and he quickly replaced it with the genuine joy he felt when he saw her.

  He met her halfway and swept her up into his arms, hugging her tight, loving the soap smell of her hair, the softness of her arms around his neck. “What’s going on with you, Miss Lila?”

  “Lots and lots. Mommy says maybe I can get a puppy and Daddy still says no, but I think mommy and me are winning. Do you think I should have a puppy?”

  Dex carried Lila the rest of the way to the house, across the gravel driveway, up the ramp to the front porch and inside the large open plan living area and kitchen that Mitch and Sarah had recently had modified for Lila, with his financial help.

  “Having a puppy is a lot of responsibility, kid.”

  “I’m good at responsibility,” Lila told him with a determined set in her jaw.

  It was a look he recognized—Sarah had worn the same look every day of the eighteen months since Lila’s accident.

  “I’m sure you are.” Dex put Lila down and she went to the kitchen table, where her school books and text books had a permanent place.

  “Hey, Dex.” Sarah went to him, hugged him tight.

  Every time Dex saw his sister-in-law, there were a few more grey hairs, more little lines around her eyes. It was no surprise, after what they’d been through. When Lila was just seven years old, and with a head full of golden ringlets and the cutest damn dimples Dex had ever seen, Lila had climbed up on a gate leading to one of the paddocks on the ranch, and when she’d raised her hands to wave to her daddy, she’d forgotten to hold on, too, and she’d fallen backwards on her head.

  It had only been four feet to the ground but it was enough to leave her with a lasting brain injury that, if she’d been seventy-three-years-old instead of a little kid, people might assume was a stroke. Everything the McCoy family had lived through—their mother’s death, lean times on the ranch and threats of foreclosure, their father’s slow decline into debilitating ill-health, were nothing compared with this.

  Dex felt it as hard as anyone. He quit a job in Oregon as soon as he’d got the call from Mitch and he’d come home. He was with Mitch and Sarah through all those terrifying days of waiting, hours and weeks filled with fear, then hope, then dreams dashed and new ones imagined. They had all been pushed almost to breaking point. For Mitch and Sarah, time stood still while they grieved and prayed. For Dex and Mitch’s father, the guilt that his only grandchild should have been hurt so badly on his ranch, cut him deeply. And for Dex, Lila’s accident was a wake-up call. All at once it put everything in perspective. He was a man with two hands, two arms, and two legs, all of them in perfect working order. His niece was the light of his life and, as she improved, as her speech and language returned, he vowed to do whatever he could to make her life as good as it could be. And that meant no more drifting. It meant he would come back for good. It meant he would do whatever he could to support North Fork, and Mitch and Sarah, in any way he could. He sold his fancy new truck and ploughed the money into Lila’s rehab. Every spare dollar he had saved was spent on her physical and speech therapy.

  Everything he did was for his family. Becoming a smokejumper was about coming home, about putting down roots again, about having a decent, permanent job, and about being the best uncle he could be to a little girl who had already faced challenges in life he couldn’t imagine. That was why he lived in a small apartment. That was why he didn’t have a big house filled with expensive boy toys. If he wanted to watch the game, he went to The Drop Zone. If he wanted to read the latest crime thriller, he went to the library. He drove a thirty-year-old truck now, one he’d rescued from the ranch. It chugged like a son of a bitch, hated cold mornings, but it got him where he needed to go.

  It was a simple life.

  “Hey, Sarah. Where’s Mitch?”

  “He’s on his way back from the north paddock. You staying for dinner?”

  “If I’m invited. Am I invited, Lila?”

  She squealed and clapped her hands together in joyous delight. “Come sit here, Uncle Dex. I’ve got a new coloring book.”

  He chuckled at Sarah, who rolled her eyes at him. “You don’t know what you’re in for.”

  “Yes, I do,” he said. “And I wouldn’t change a thing.”

  *

  After dinner, Sarah took Lila off for a bath and a bedtime story, and after they’d cleaned up and stacked the dishwasher, the two brothers shared a brew at the kitchen table.

  “She’s doing great,” Dex said, looking down at the coloring they’d done together. Damn, hers was neater than his and she only had one functioning hand.

  “Lila or Sarah?” Mitch asked, and sadness flashed across his face. He looked down at his beer and slowly started picking at the label.

  Dex leaned in. “I meant Lila. But what’s up with Sarah? Is she okay?”

  Mitch waited, picked a little more at the beer label. Dex didn’t rush him. He’d never been a big talker but, since Lila’s accident, he’d opened up more. It was the only way to get through the hand they’d been dealt.

  “She’s been down lately. Tired all the time. I keep talking to her about letting Lila go to school but she’s scared, and that turns into no and then an argument. It’s not about her helping out here on the ranch, although she can do that with her eyes shut, I just think she needs a break. With the homeschooling, and the therapy and everything else, she never stops.”

  “Man, you never stop, either.”

  Mitch finally looked up. “You know? I think it’s finally hit her that Lila’s disability is permanent. And she’s scared as hell about how out little girl’s going to be treated by other people out there in the big, wide world. Hell, so am I.”

  Since the accident, Mitch and Sarah had kept Lila’s condition close. It wasn’t that they were embarrassed for her or for themselves—Dex had never seen two prouder parents—but he knew they worried about how Lila would be treated. Teased. Harassed. Discriminated against. When she was finally out of the hospital, she’d missed so much school they decided to homeschool her, so she could rest during the day when she got tired and be near them for anything else she needed. Until she grew and they were able to determine how serious her disability was, and how she was able to cope with it, they wanted to protect their daughter from stares and judgment and well-meant but ignorant advice.

  Dex understood that. He wanted to tell Mitch that Lila would be fine because she was a great kid and she was smart as a whip, but he knew the world didn’t work that way. People could be cruel and vicious and mean. He didn’t even want to think about what the anonymity of social media might mean for a girl like Lila. Something burned inside him at the thought of her being hurt.

  “Problem is, Mitch, you can’t keep her out here at North Fork forever like some princess in a castle. Soon she’s going to get pretty damn bored with coloring with her uncle and she’ll want kids her own age to play with. She’s eight-years-old, but one day she’ll be fourteen and then eighteen. She’ll resent the hell out of you both if she feels like a prisoner here. As beautiful as this place is, as much as we love it, she’s going to want to leave one day and make her own way in the world.” Dex had the distinct feeling that Lila had the McCoy wandering spirit, just like her uncle.

  “I know it. It’s just that we want to wrap her up in cotton wool, protect her.”

  Dex could hear the pain and love in his brother’s voice. “I get it.”

  A moment later, Sarah came back into the room. “How about one of those for me?”

&
nbsp; Dex jumped up before Mitch could and grabbed Sarah a beer from the fridge. She twisted the top off, sat back, and took a good long swig. She looked over at the coloring book.

  “Not bad at all, Dex. Ever thought of changing careers?” She smiled, the little lines around her eyes creasing in exhaustion.

  “Nope. Perfectly happy being a smokejumper, thank you very much.”

  Dex glanced at his brother. Mitch looked back at him.

  “Hey, Sarah, I’ve got an idea. How would Lila like to go on a date with her uncle to this amazing bakery in Glacier Creek?”

  Sarah stilled. She looked from brother to brother. “I don’t know.”

  Dex leaned across the table, covered Sarah’s hand with his. “Let me take her for an afternoon. One Saturday, I’ll come pick her up; we’ll go for a drive and have a hot chocolate and a cupcake at Cady’s.”

  “You know she’d love it,” Mitch said to Sarah.

  She sighed. “I know. But…” She didn’t have to explain her reservations to these two men.

  “I’ll be with her the whole time. And if anyone tangles with her, they’ll have to deal with me.”

  Sarah searched Mitch’s face for an answer. “You think it’ll be okay?”

  “Of course I do, honey.”

  Sarah smiled nervously and nodded. “It’s probably time she… okay.”

  Dex let out a deep breath. This was a huge step for Sarah and Mitch and a huge leap for him, too. He hadn’t taken Lila out since the accident. “I’ll check my roster and let you know when my next free Saturday is. In the meantime, you can get her used to the idea,” Dex told Mitch.

  “Lila won’t need convincing.”

  Dex grinned. “I was talking about your wife.”

  Mitch and Sarah shared a knowing smile.

  “It could be a few weeks. We’ve got Russ Edwards’s commemoration ceremony next Saturday and I’ll let you know when I have a Saturday free.”

  And then the three of them sat in silence, each thinking of the night of Lila’s accident. Each pondering what the future would be like for their little girl.

  Chapter Five

  The next Saturday, the day of the commemoration service for Captain Russ Edwards at the Glacier Creek service station, Cady packed up the last of the food into boxes, ready for loading into her van. She checked her watch. Jacqui and Vin were due any minute to pick up this final load and deliver it to the station. She’d been baking all morning and still needed to shower and change, to wake herself up a little more.

  She’d had a restless night, unable to sleep, and the vivid dreams she’d fallen into every time she closed her eyes make her even more tightly wound in the morning. Every dream had featured Dex McCoy. Ever since the day he’d swung by Cady’s Cakes to pick up the trail bars for the smokejumpers, she’d dreamt she was having dirty sex with Dex.

  She dreamt a lot. Her favourite was the one in which she was flying high over Glacier Creek, gliding on the wind right up past the timber line up to the tops of the mountains, and she would always land in a clearing with a soft touch of her feet on the grass and her mom and Grandma were there and they would sip hot coffee from a thermos and eat cupcakes and look up at the sky and Cady would wake in the morning with a sense of peace and comfort.

  There was nothing comforting about the dreams she’d been having about Dex. They were hot and confusing. There was sex with Dex in the fire station, both naked and covered by a parachute. In the next one, they were in the middle of the forest on a picnic rug, and her ecstatic screams scared the birds out of the treetops. Another time, they were in his truck. And in the most recent one, they were right here in Cady’s Cakes, out back in the kitchen, and there might have been chocolate frosting involved.

  The result of all this was, she had felt tense and unfulfilled and as useless as a half-risen sponge all week.

  Today, Cady couldn’t think about being naked with Dex McCoy. She had put a sign up on the previous Monday, advising her customers the shop would be closing up early on Saturday. She didn’t have to give them a reason. Everyone knew why and there hadn’t been one complaint. The whole town had been in shock a year before when Captain Edwards had died. It had seemed as if time stood still that day. Cady remembered it so clearly. She’d just returned to Glacier Creek from California and had been painting inside the newly-leased shop that was soon to become Cady’s Cakes. When the news spread, the town stopped. People pulled over on the main street, trying to absorb the news, not trusting themselves to drive and take it all in at the same time. Phones stopped ringing. A hush blanketed every town around Flathead Lake. The news spread as fast as one of the wildfires Russ had died trying to extinguish. It brought home all too clearly the risks the smokejumpers took to protect people and property and the mountains. She didn’t have to speak to that many people in Glacier Creek to hear stories of bad fires, properties and stock destroyed, whipping winds and flames and choking smoke. Everyone, at one time or another, had looked up into that big Montana sky and seen the smoke from a fire, like evil clouds filled with ash and debris.

  Cady fought the urge to stuff a chocolate chip cupcake into her mouth while she waited for Jacqui and Vin. Thinking about smokejumpers made her think about Dex McCoy again and thinking about Dex McCoy made her want to eat cake. Those dreams made her want to eat lots of cake. Why hadn’t she had a chocolate chip cupcake on hand that night, four years ago, when she’d kissed him? The night she’d given in to all those years of longing for him, of missing him, by smashing her mouth against his, and he’d just stood there like a big old tree. Her clumsy attempt had been a total failure. Like her entire love life up to that point. Did he even know she wanted to fuck him? Maybe she hadn’t been direct enough. Maybe Dex had figured out that she was still a virgin then. Maybe he’d had a thing about virgins, like a run-a-million-miles-from-a-virgin kind of aversion to virgins. Or maybe, more accurately, he’d had a thing about not accepting random offers from desperate, drunken women.

  “Hey, Cady,” Jacqui called from the front door of the shop.

  Cady was so glad of the distraction. “Hey, guys.” She patted the top of the box. “This is the last of the food. I hope people eat. I’ve made so much.”

  Vin chuckled. “Cakes from Cady’s Cakes? I think I’d better stand guard duty on these. There could be rioting.”

  Jacqui slipped an arm around her fiancé and looked up at him. When he pulled her close, returned the look of love, Cady sighed. What her friends had was so tender and gentle and so right. Vin had seen Jacqui through her heartbreak and had been there when she was ready to move on with her life. He was a good man. One of the best.

  “I’m sure there’ll be enough to go round,” Jacqui added. “So, we’ll see you at the station. Cady?”

  Cady swiped her hands on her apron. She could feel the silky grit of flour and there was a smudge of melted chocolate on her hip, which had hardened into a crust. “I wouldn’t miss it. But first, I’m going to head upstairs to my apartment and make myself presentable.”

  “Don’t scrub too hard. That smell of chocolate is pretty hot,” Vin said with a grin.

  He took the boxes and headed out to his truck.

  Jacqui looked over her shoulder, waiting until Vin was out of earshot before she spoke. “Hey, Cady. What happened with you and Dex the other day, when he came to pick up the trail mix bars?”

  “Nothing.” Cady began picking at the hardened chocolate on her apron.

  “You sure about that? He came back to the station looking might pissed.”

  “He was pissed? He—” Cady took a deep breath. She’d tried to give him a muffin—a muffin, for God’s sake—and he’d done it again. He’d rejected it—and her. She got the message from Dex McCoy, loud and clear.

  “What did he do?”

  “Nothing. It was nothing.” Cady reached around to her back and undid her apron, tugged it over her head. “You, skedaddle. I’ve got to pretty myself up some. And you know how long that takes, right?”

&n
bsp; Jacqui had arched a brow. Cady knew what that look meant. She wasn’t buying Cady’s brush off. But she was also enough of a friend not to push. “I’ll see you there.”

  Cady locked the door, turned right on the sidewalk, unlocked another door, and was upstairs in the shower in her apartment in record time.

  *

  Rather than being a somber affair, the commemoration ceremony for Captain Russ Edwards had been one filled with love, memories, humour and respect. A year had passed, and the shock and grief of his accidental death, while never forgotten, had been tempered by time. The new captain, Sam Gaskill, had paid a moving tribute to a man he never knew and Vin, one of Captain Edwards’ oldest friends, had everyone laughing and crying with his recollections.

  Cady had stood at the back of the crowd, not wanting to be up the front where the smokejumpers and their partners were gathered. There was something about the smokejumpers. There was an expression in their eyes that hinted they had seen things, had experienced dangers no one else could imagine. It gave them all a softness under the hard edges, even though they might not have wanted anyone to know. Every time those men and women climbed up into a plane to fight a forest fire, there was the chance they wouldn’t come back. That had to change a person. Not to mention their partners, who waited, keeping hearth and home together while their loved ones were away. Cady shivered at the thought of what they must go through.

  After the ceremony, a group of people drove from the station to The Drop Zone to share food and company. All Cady’s donated cakes, as well as food prepared by the bar’s staff, were lined up on the long wooden bar. As soon as Cady had walked in, Hugh Ferguson had motioned her over.

  “Nice work on the food, Cady.” He pulled her in for a huge hug.

  She went willingly into the big man’s arms. Hugh was like a father figure to the smokejumpers and ever since she’d returned to Glacier Creek and had been supplying her trail bars to the crew, he’d treated her as part of the firefighting family. She didn’t deserve that but, given she had no family left, she took it with warm gratitude.