by Radclyffe
“We’re done here.” Mallory took a step back, needing to sever the connection she didn’t want and hadn’t asked for. When she looked away, the hypnotic pull of Jac’s dark eyes broke, releasing her, and she was caught off guard by a swift surge of loneliness, as if she had lost something she hadn’t known she needed. She countered the momentary weakness with a surge of temper. She did not want this. And she definitely did not need it. “Meet me on the hangar deck in ten minutes.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Good.” Mallory had to find her footing, reestablish control. She was the team leader. Her path was clear. All she had to do was keep her distance, and she’d be fine. This strange draw she felt to Jac Russo would disappear fast enough once they got back on the training schedule.
Mallory spun on her heel and left the infirmary as quickly as she could without seeming to flee. Outside, she found the other rookies still congregated in front of the hangar. Striding over to them, she answered their unspoken question. “Ray got a little banged up out on the trail, but he’s stable now. You all made it in under the required time, so you’re good. Everyone take a break. This afternoon, we’ll work with full packs, so eat a big lunch.”
Her announcement was met with grins and a chorus of approval.
“Sure thing.”
“Roger that.”
“Yes, Cap.”
Hooker stepped a little apart from the crowd. “Russo find him?”
Mallory hesitated. She didn’t buy Jac’s story—the timing and terrain didn’t support the sequence of events, but she wasn’t sure why Jac had put forth the explanation. Until she knew more, she didn’t want to lay responsibility on her. “The details are a little sketchy right now. Ray is sleeping.”
“Are we going to evacuate Kingston to a regional medical center?”
“No need to. He’s doing fine.”
“If he goes bad, it’s an hour to the nearest hospital.”
“He was never unconscious.” Mallory kept her temper in check. Maybe Hooker was just worried about one of his colleagues. Maybe. “There’s no evidence of serious injury, and he’s being carefully monitored. He doesn’t want to go, and I don’t see any reason to send him at this point.”
“Sure thing, Boss,” Hooker said, his tone just short of sarcastic. “Whatever you say.”
He swaggered away, his tone and manner cocky. Mallory wasn’t surprised or even all that bothered. She’d seen plenty of firefighters like him, guys who thought they knew better than all their bosses, male or female. Not that many females headed teams, but that was mostly because there just weren’t that many in the system. The few ranking women were usually well respected and had no problems. But when you worked in a predominately male profession with guys who made the word macho sound prissy, you were bound to run up against some guys who resented female authority. Maybe Hooker was in that camp, maybe not. Right now, she couldn’t worry about it. She had one injured rookie and another who by rights should be packing to go home. She should already have told Jac Russo to go home. Russo hadn’t been her pick, and she didn’t want Russo on the team. Boot camp was designed to root out the physically unfit and the psychologically ill-suited for smokejumping. The course was rigorous for good reasons and rookies didn’t get second chances. She had a perfectly legitimate reason to let Russo go.
Mallory headed toward the hangar, wondering why she wasn’t even certain what she was going to say when Jac showed up, let alone what she was going to do. Her avoidance of the simple, obvious decision couldn’t have anything to do with the way Jac looked at her. She wouldn’t let it.
*
Jac leaned down over Ray and said, “Check you later, buddy.” He was already asleep. Straightening, she said to Cooper, “I’ll be by in a while, but if something changes, would you give me a holler?”
“Friend of yours?”
“He is now.”
Cooper nodded. A veteran like him would appreciate how strongly and quickly allegiances were forged among those on the line. “Sure thing, rookie. See you in a bit.”
“If I’m still around,” Jac muttered. She left the infirmary and headed across the yard to keep her appointment with Ice James, trying not to dwell on what was about to come down. Nothing she could do to alter the facts. Whether she stayed or whether she left was completely up to Mallory. She hadn’t passed the first leg of boot camp, and no excuses would be offered. The job was black and white. There was no such thing as a margin for error when fighting a fire. Errors meant injury or death. There were no second chances, no do-overs, no remediation. Mallory had made it pretty clear first thing that morning that she wouldn’t make any kind of concessions for Jac, and why should she? Out here, Jac was the same as everyone else. A firefighter whose past was unimportant, whose place was defined by her performance and nothing else. She wouldn’t have it any other way and wanted nothing more out of her life than to be judged by her actions, not by the words or opinions of others. So now, she could hardly argue that the verdict be based on anything other than her performance. Not her intentions, not her desires, not her needs.
Jac stared at the dark recesses of the hangar, feeling as if she were walking into the belly of the whale. Taking a breath, she entered the cavernous space. The jump plane occupied the place of honor in the center of the room, poised like a great beast ready to leap from its hiding place into action at the first sight of prey. Benches holding machine parts and tools lined the far wall. The air smelled like engine oil and metal shavings—tart and pungent. The space exuded an anticipatory feeling, as if waiting for the adventure to begin. She remembered Mallory saying she slept in the loft and imagined her asleep, surrounded by the scent of machines. She wasn’t surprised Mallory slept just one step away from the aircraft that would carry her to the fire line. Mallory struck her as a woman who welcomed a worthy opponent. She liked that about her. Liked it a lot.
“Boss?”
“In the back,” Mallory’s voice called her.
Jac found her sitting at a scratched wooden desk pushed into the far back corner of the hangar. A bulletin board was nailed to the metal sheet siding above it, and neat stacks of paper sat in several black plastic trays along the back of the desk. A straight-back wooden chair was the only other furniture besides the swivel captain’s chair in which Mallory now sat. She half turned as Jac approached and gestured to the chair beside the desk. “Have a seat.”
Jac settled as comfortably as she could on the uncomfortable chair, crossed her left leg over her right knee, rested her hands on her thighs, and waited. The ball was in Mallory’s court.
Mallory tapped a pencil on the faded desk blotter, its green surface covered with notes—mostly map coordinates, weather information, telephone numbers. Jac wondered idly if Mallory had made all those notes when talking to dispatchers about fire locations. She looked from the tapping pencil into Mallory’s eyes. The green was denser now, shadowed with questions. Her tank wasn’t all that tight, but Jac had no problem conjuring a mental image of her breasts beneath the thin cotton. She swallowed, looked away.
“You want to tell me again what happened out there?” Mallory finally said.
That wasn’t the question Jac had expected. “Between us?”
Mallory’s expression never changed, but the green of her eyes smoldered to almost black. “Anything you and I talk about is always just between us.”
“Sorry,” Jac said. “Force of habit.”
“What do you mean?”
Jac shook her head. “It’s not important.”
“Why don’t you let me decide?”
“Most people asking questions are in the market to publicize the answers.”
“Reporters, you mean?”
Jac foundered in the conversation. Already the discussion had taken a direction she didn’t anticipate and didn’t really want to go. But she found herself going there anyhow. “Don’t you read the newspapers?”
Mallory smiled. “I know who you are, if that’s what you mean.”
“Really? Who am I?”
“I see what you mean,” Mallory said after a minute. “That was an asinine thing for me to say, wasn’t it? Let me rephrase. I know who the newspapers say you are. I know who your father is. I don’t know a damn thing about you.”
“Well then, you’re the first person I’ve ever met who feels that way.”
“Actually, I misspoke. I do know something about you. You’re a damn good runner. And you know something about helicopter evacuation. Why is that?”
Jac’s head started to spin. Mallory’s questions weren’t linear. The conversation wasn’t what she expected. Neither was Mallory James. “I was in Iraq. I’ve seen a lot of helicopter evacuations from some pretty tight spaces.”
“Really. What did you do there?”
“I disarmed explosives.”
Mallory flashed on all the news images and photos she’d seen of the horrors wrought by IEDs. She imagined defusing one, how vulnerable a person would be in the face of such massive destruction. Giving herself time to absorb the information, Mallory carefully set the pencil down in the center of the blotter, lining it up at perfect right angles to the edge. Jac wasn’t the first vet she’d met; in fact, it seemed that a higher percentage of hotshots and smokejumpers were veterans than in many other professions. Maybe because service was part of their blood. She knew female vets, women who’d been bloodied in combat, but she’d never met anyone who’d been an explosives tech before. She only knew what she’d read about them. She almost smiled at that—more secondhand info. No wonder Jac was used to being judged by something other than herself. “Why did you choose to do that?”
“I have steady hands.”
“I noticed when you were cutting sutures for me. Not even the slightest sign of a tremor.”
Jac laughed. “I wouldn’t have lasted very long out there if I had one.”
“You’re also really good at sidestepping questions.”
“Survival skills. Although I’m not quite so good at that as I am at defusing improvised explosive devices,” Jac said, bitterness lacing her voice.
“So what’s the answer? Are you going to tell me it’s because you don’t fear death or because you don’t care if you die?”
“Is this line of investigation germane to my position here, Captain James?”
“I think it is. It makes a huge difference to me whether I can trust you to take care of yourself out there, or if you’re going to do something wild and crazy and get yourself or someone else killed.”
“I don’t have a death wish,” Jac said.
“That’s not quite the same as not caring if you die, though, is it?” Mallory was pushing and didn’t care. She’d meant what she said about needing to know if she had a cowboy on the team. But she wanted to know about Jac—she wanted to know her.
“You’re getting awfully personal.”
“What we do, all of us here every day, is as personal as it gets. And you still haven’t answered the question.”
“I did it because I could,” Jac said, realizing she’d never really answered the question in her own mind before. The job was there, she knew she could do it, and she wanted to be alone when she worked. She took a breath, decided not to second-guess her answer, and that was new for her. From the time she was twelve or so, old enough to understand who her father was and what that meant for her, she’d stopped having spontaneous conversations. He was a public person, and by extension so was she. She’d quickly learned to think before she spoke. Weigh her answers. Judge the impact of what she said. She almost never said anything that she hadn’t mentally prescreened. After a while she didn’t feel anything she hadn’t examined, judged, assessed. Except with Annabel, and look where that got her. Here. Sitting in the hot seat across from Mallory James. She wanted to tell Mallory something of herself with complete and total freedom. She didn’t ask why.
“Plenty of guys get shot over there, but warfare medicine—it’s awesome. Most live. But the ones who die—most of the time they die in explosions. The IEDs are inhuman. The worst thing any of us have ever seen. Indiscriminate weapons designed for the greatest degree of destruction. Completely without honor. I hate them, and I wanted to be the one to take them out.”
“The one,” Mallory murmured. “You alone?”
“Yes,” Jac said instantly. “Just me and the device. One on one. As personal as it gets.”
“Some people would say that fire is personal,” Mallory murmured. “But out there, Jac, you can’t fight alone.”
“I know.”
“And I have to be able to trust you to remember that.”
“I know.”
“What happened out on the trail today?”
“Ray fell, I found him. I rendered emergency care and waited for backup.”
Mallory nodded. “And what’s the story you’re going to tell the rest of the team?”
“What I told Ray I would. It doesn’t matter to me if a couple of the guys think I screwed up. It matters to him. I don’t know why, I only know it matters. He’s a good guy, I like him.”
“Why didn’t you signal for a spotter? You must have seen them circling every few minutes. That ravine is tricky—even with guide ropes. Which you didn’t have.” Mallory spoke levelly, almost offhandedly, but her eyes were searching. “Why didn’t you do the smart thing—the prescribed thing—and wait for backup up on the trail?”
Jac suppressed a shudder, her skin vibrating as if Mallory were running her hands over her the way she had Ray out in the field—examining, studying, weighing and measuring. Measuring her. She was used to being judged, but this time she wanted the opinion to be based on who she really was, not an assumption.
“I didn’t know how seriously he was injured, but he appeared unconscious.” She shrugged. “I wasn’t going to stand up on that trail waving my arms in the air while a guy died from respiratory obstruction or bled out.”
“Judgment call?”
Jac’s jaws ached, and she made an effort to unclamp her teeth. “That’s right.”
“You didn’t finish the course today,” Mallory said in that infuriating calm tone.
“Are you gonna wash me out?”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“No reason at all.” Jac sucked in a breath. She wouldn’t make an excuse, but she wouldn’t go quietly either. “Except—”
Mallory leaned forward. “Except what?”
“Except I’m a damn good runner, and I climb as well as I run. And if you’d been up on that crest today, you would have done exactly what I did. Any good smokejumper would have.”
Mallory smiled but her eyes were flat. “You think you have me figured out?”
“I know I don’t. But I know I want to.”
Mallory leaned back in her chair, the cool mask sliding into place. “You’ve got half an hour to get something to eat, then you and I are going out for a run. Let’s see if you make the time. Last chance.”
“Why don’t we run with packs this time?” Jac rose, wondering where along the trail this morning she’d lost her mind. Maybe when she smelled the honeysuckle.
“Ever run with eighty-five pounds on your back?”
“No, but I know I can do it.”
Mallory stood, and they were very close together. Jac caught the scent of honeysuckle and saw a trickle of perspiration track down Mallory’s neck. She wanted to catch it on the tip of her tongue. She raised her eyes to Mallory’s face and wondered if Mallory could read what was in her mind, because the green of her eyes had changed yet again, brightening, gleaming, reminding her of a secluded forest glade on a spring morning. Ripe with invitation.
“All right, Russo,” Mallory said softly. “Let’s see what you’re made of.”
Chapter Six
By 1300, the early May day was as warm as late June, and Jac started to sweat a minute into the run. She’d stripped down to her T-shirt and cargo pants in anticipation of the long, hot, hard run, even though she knew the eighty-five-pound pack wa
s going to chafe her shoulders without a jacket to cushion the weight. A calculated risk. She wanted to make good time. Hell, she wanted more than that. She wanted to beat Mallory back to base, fully loaded, running all out. Dumb, yeah, but she couldn’t shake the feeling there was more on the line than a temporary six-month posting or even whether or not she moved on to the next round of boot camp. This felt personal—between her and Mallory. She’d gotten so used to others taking her at face value, or what they assumed to be face value, she’d long ago stopped caring what people thought of her. From the instant she’d met Mallory that morning, everything had been different. She’d felt judged, sure, but that was nothing new. What was new was she cared that the woman making the judgment know the truth about her. If she was gonna wash out, she was gonna make the decision hard for Mallory.
Not exactly a brilliant plan, and definitely not the best one she’d ever had. She was going to have to work to impress Mallory, because the woman was a machine. Mallory ran effortlessly beside her, a zip-up canvas jacket over her T-shirt. Standard field apparel under her pack, not as heavy as a Kevlar jump jacket but still damn hot, and not a drop of sweat showed on her forehead or her neck. Jac’s T-shirt already clung to her back and between her breasts, wet through.
Mallory caught her looking and observed calmly, “You’re flirting with heat exhaustion.”
“I’m not the one wearing a coat.” Jac wasn’t breathing heavily and could still talk while running, which was proof enough that her cardiovascular state was pretty damn good. She tried not to look self-satisfied. “I think you’re the one who needs to worry about the heat.”