The Ides of Matt 2015

by M. L. Buchman

  The smokie’s bosses had been along on the trip, a pair of heli-aviation pilots. A man and woman and their little daughter. Neither spoke much, but their unity—their perfect togetherness—had been such a daunting vision, that it had set the bar impossibly high. She wanted what they had.

  Candace and Luke were another couple that felt that way—the only other example she’d ever met.

  So, she trained and became a hotshot. On the teams she laughed and teased, and occasionally played the “I fight wildfires for a living” card to pick up a handsome man in a bar. But there was a part of her that dreamed of finding that “right man” someday.

  That was the thing that this girl wanted more than frustrating a handsome, successful man.

  Not a chance she’d be admitting that out loud though.

  6

  Colin watched her sleep.

  He’d offered the couch, but she didn’t want to mess it up with her soot-stained clothes. Instead, she landed in his back-porch hammock and was out in seconds. He parked himself in an Adirondack chair on the back porch and again took in the night.

  The stars that he’d been watching to the east, were blocked to the west—the direction Tori had arrived from—by dark clouds. They weren’t black, as clouds usually were at night, but glowed red along the bottoms as if they still caught the last of the long-past sunset.

  Fire. They glowed red with fire. The hints of wood smoke from this morning were more constant, though still swirled aside by the gentle night breezes. Close, but not too close. Staying far away, he hoped.

  He should go inside. Pack his notes and laptop in a bag so that he could grab it and go if he had to. But he couldn’t break the easy comfort of sitting and watching Tori sleep.

  The charge on his body guaranteed that any chance of sleep for himself lay a long way off. Pretty, motivated, tenacious, and smart were only a few of the adjectives he cataloged on her behalf. She’d synthesized what he was all about with very few clues, and then had the decency to read that he didn’t want to talk about it.

  Mirella, despite being the one who’d cheated on him, had wanted a big piece of who he was when she left. She wanted rights to any books he’d written while they were together and any number of other things that his attorney had refused to give up. By the time the acrimonious battle was complete, Colin had paid her nothing and she had convinced him that the only reason she’d ever been with him had been avarice. He liked to think that hadn’t been the case. But however it had started, it had nothing to do with love.

  He wondered what Tori was like when she wasn’t drugged with exhaustion. Still beautiful. Still thoughtful. Still tenacious. He was surprised that he’d very much like to discover more despite swearing off women.

  Colin knew too little to make conjectures, but he had enjoyed every waking moment they’d had together, at the table and even lying in the garden’s dirt.

  That kiss. That brief, spectacular kiss. That had been one thing about Mirella, the sex with her was always fantastic. She might have needed something he couldn’t supply to send her seeking another man’s bed, but the woman had been built hot and made to last.

  He’d kissed Tori for approximately three seconds, and it washed any lingering, lonely-night fantasies of Mirella right out of his mind. If kissing Tori was that good, what would the rest of it be like?

  “Been alone in the woods too long,” he told the night quietly.

  Colin came to the mountain cabin to write. To get away from people and the city and the distractions. He’d been seriously considering wintering over this year despite the harsh winters that sometimes swept the heights of the Cascades. Mirella had come to the cabin once, and departed rapidly. He’d guess that if he chose to winter over, Tori would be right there with him. And loving it.

  He watched over her until a small light came bobbing toward him through the darkness. A tall man wearing a headlamp came up to the porch, flashed his light on Tori’s sleeping face and then a quick scan around—without blinding Colin—before dousing the light.

  “Name’s Luke,” the man stepped forward and offered a hand. His shake was strong, firefighter strong.

  “Colin.”

  “She actually looks sweet when she’s asleep,” Luke commented.

  “How about when she’s awake?”

  “Still sweet,” Luke chuckled. “Telling you, something’s gotta be wrong with the woman to be so consistently pleasant and cheery, but I haven’t found it yet. She’s a born firefighter. Thanks for watching over her, not that this one needs it.”

  “What does she need?”

  7

  Tori would have to pay Luke back for the “sweet” wisecrack.

  “Don’t think it’s my place to be giving away any of the lady’s secrets,” Luke was telling Colin. “Why? You got an interest?”

  Tori lay very still and awaited the answer.

  “Might.”

  Colin might have an interest? All she’d done was punched him, kissed him…spectacularly, eaten his chili, and passed out in his hammock for an hour. She was about to rouse herself, despite how comfortable she was feeling, and give these two a quick whack with an axe handle just for being so male, when Luke finally replied.

  “If you want to find a better person than Victoria Ellison, you’re too late; I already married her. My Candace.” Then Luke slapped her on the calf. “Rise and shine, Ginger. We’ve got some trees to trim. You’re first up swamping.”

  Tori made a groan for Luke’s benefit. When cutting line, one person was the sawyer, and the other hauled everything they cut as far from the fire line as possible. They’d switch off after every tank of fuel, but going from nice soft hammock to swamping was a rude awakening.

  But Luke’s compliment was high praise indeed; he was crazy about Candace and deservedly so. She didn’t know that Luke thought that highly of her as well.

  Luke tramped off toward the trees.

  Tori waited a moment by Colin, wishing she could see him better.

  “Thanks for taking me in,” she didn’t know what else to say.

  “You’re welcome any time,” he sounded surprised at this own words.

  Whether she was unwilling to risk another supercharged, mega-turbo kiss, or the hour’s sleep had been sufficient for her common sense to return, she merely shook his hand and turned for the trees.

  He might have an interest?

  It was stupid. It was based on nothing at all.

  The only problem she could think of was that she might be having an interest as well.

  8

  Colin brewed coffee, pulled on boots and work clothes, and headed up the slope to join them. He did pack his grab bag and leave it inside the door just in case.

  The coffee was taken, appreciated, and drunk while still too hot.

  Tori, who was running the chain saw by the time he arrived, didn’t even shut off the saw when she knocked her coffee back like a drug, then returned the mug with the briefest of nods. He almost didn’t recognize her in the soft pre-dawn light. For one thing, she was back in her full helmet and gear. But also, she was in Ginger-mode. She was moving full tilt and nothing was going to break her focus. He knew that feeling and did his best not to feel rejected by her lack of acknowledgement.

  She had cleats on her boots and a heavy belt that wrapped around the fir. She scaled up the tree to the lowest dead branches, then nipped them off with the saw. Moving the belt higher, the next dead branches dropped to the ground. In moments she was fifty feet in the air and a thick pile of dead branches had accumulated around the base of the tree.

  Luke was at the prior tree, gathering up the dead branches and dragging them in the direction of the cabin. Douglas firs grew tall, and the lower branches often died off, yet still hung on for years.

  Colin grabbed a bundle of branches and followed Luke. Luke had found the cliff edge below the cabin
and dumped the branches over which then tumbled to the bottom. Even if they somehow caught fire there, all they’d do was scorch some rock. Colin pitched his load over and they walked back together.

  “I don’t get what we’re doing.”

  “Ladder fuels,” Luke replied. “Fire wants to burn and climb up a tree. Get rid of undergrowth and it has less to burn, stays cooler on the ground. Cut away the deadwood and it has nothing to climb. The real problem happens when it reaches the crown. Hard to fight a crown fire from the ground.”

  With two of them swamping, they made quick work of what had already been cut.

  Luke fired up a second saw and began clearing the undergrowth. Colin couldn’t keep up with both of them, but whenever Tori or Luke ran out of fuel, they’d help him catch up as part of their refueling. Mid-morning he knew trouble was coming when a tanker plane roared by low overhead and dumped a broad swath of retardant on the trees. For a quarter mile, the big jet plane sent down a shower of the dark red liquid in an impossibly dense downpour.

  Tori arrived beside him as the tanker finished the run and turned back for its next load. “Retardant coats the wood and keeps the oxygen from reaching it. No oxygen means no fire.”

  “Then what have we been doing here?” Colin waved at the trees, at the whole area they’d been parking-out.

  “Layers of defense, like chapters in a book. Chapter One, we have a fireline cut about a half mile back. We’re hoping to narrow the blaze, maybe even knock it out of the crown because it’s running high and hot at the moment. Chapter Two, hopefully most of it dies when it hits the retardant line. Chapter Three, if we can really slow it down here, it won’t do much more than mow the grass in your meadow before we can extinguish it. End of story.”

  He’d been right about smart and kind. She’d thought to switch her words into his metaphor to make sure he understood it easily, rather than assuming he could cross to her side of the fence.

  “And if all three chapters fail? What’s the fourth?” He’d miss his cabin. He’d rebuild, but there were a lot of good memories here; he could hear the stories that had been written in this idyllic spot.

  She pointed up at the sky.

  A small helicopter painted black with red flames came pounding up the hill. They watched it together as it flew over his cabin, a huge, bright-orange bucket on a cable dangled far below. The pilot didn’t even slow down, just released the load of water dead-center on his roof. It soaked down the shingles and poured off the eaves in waves.

  “That’s the epilogue, just in case the fire didn’t get the message or tries to throw a few hot embers your way.”

  Colin could see it clearly. All of the different pieces and how they fit together as neatly as any story.

  But he couldn’t stop looking at the quietly competent woman he’d been working beside all morning.

  “Just in case I don’t get a chance to say it later, I meant what I said. You’re welcome anytime.”

  9

  Tori didn’t know what she was doing. It was her first break in weeks. The fire season was running hot and heavy, but Candace had finally declared that enough was enough and shuttered the Leavenworth Hotshots for five days. Thirty days without a break, they were all so punchy that safety was becoming an issue.

  Tori had thought about hanging out in town like usual. But she didn’t want the noise and the bars. She wanted the quiet that a smokejumper had introduced her to an age ago.

  By the time she parked her battered Toyota pickup beside the shiny Jeep Wrangler, Tori at least knew her destination. As if she hadn’t looked up the access road on a topo map the moment she’d gotten off the Checker Mill Fire.

  She spent most of the hour’s hike up his trail telling herself she was being an idiot. A kiss, one bowl of chili, and one fire killed right at the very edge of a vegetable patch. That’s all there was between them.

  But each day on the fires since, she’d been watching Candace and Luke. And each time she thought about the second kiss, the one after the fire—the more she knew that she at least had to answer the question that she and Colin had written between them.

  The climb to his cabin followed a fast-running stream and then stretched out over a long green meadow. The fire had been killed in the woods. The last lines of trees stood green as well except for some char on the bark. For once, the fire’s story had gone exactly as she’d predicted it.

  His kiss had been a place of peace that had felt so right, so perfect. Part of it was the land, most of it was the man. The last of it was that he was the sort of man who had chosen this gorgeous stretch of mountainside for himself.

  But how would he react to her arrival? Was he just being so thankful to be rescued from the fire that he’d have invited Medusa to come visit?

  It had taken her a week after the Checker Mill Fire to make the mental connection. Tori had pulled one of Colin Steele’s thrillers off her own bookshelf to discover that the man pictured on the back had introduced himself to her as Colin James.

  And that had almost kept her away.

  She didn’t want to arrive as some sycophant, fan-girl no matter how much she enjoyed his novels. Yet here she was anyway, despite telling herself to stay away.

  Tori almost turned from his front porch and headed back down the trail, which was beyond stupid. She closed her eyes, trudged up the steps, and struck out at the door.

  There.

  Now she’d knocked and there was no backing away without looking even beyond stupider than she felt. Stupiderist? Even by Ginger standards, this was extreme.

  And she kept standing there.

  And standing there.

  She knocked again, harder.

  Still nothing.

  Well, she hadn’t driven and hiked and nerved herself up to quit so easily. Perseverance, she reminded herself and stalked off to the back side of the cabin.

  10

  Colin looked up the moment she came into view. It was like that utterly impossible moment that always occurred between hero and heroine that he could never resist writing. First sight of each other at the same instant.

  Even without the fire gear, he’d know her anywhere. There was a confidence, a surety to her stride unlike any other woman he’d ever known, or written. She came around the corner of his cabin as if she’d always been there, always belonged.

  He stayed where he was and waited while she crossed the back porch, shed her pack, and came up into the vegetable garden. She wore hiking boots, shorts atop some of the longest legs he’d ever seen, and a light t-shirt luridly aflame, but patterned like a checker board. Across her chest it announced the Checker Mill Fire and the dates. The second date was the last time he’d seen her; twenty days and three hours ago.

  His gaze finally made it up to her eyes as she arrived in front him.

  “Great t-shirt.”

  “I brought one for you. You worked it too.”

  “Is that why you’re here?”

  “No. Nor is it because I know who you are.”

  Colin froze. Here it comes. All of the fantasy and hopes had just become meaningless.

  “I’ve read a lot of your books. I thought you should know. I almost stayed away because of that.”

  “You what?” He hadn’t expected that. “Then why are you here?”

  She reached out and brushed her fingertips along his cheek. Not hot like fire, but rather cool like his stream, a caress that calmed and anchored him in this moment.

  “You feel it too, don’t you?” Tori asked softly.

  He could only nod.

  She closed the final step that separated them. When she slid her arms around his neck and kissed him, it was a scene right out of fiction. He’d never imagined anyone feeling so right in his arms.

  Colin knew that Tori Ellison never stopped once she found what she wanted. She’d keep right on fighting fire or whatever ca
me next in her life just as he’d always be writing.

  When they lay down together on the garden path, he knew that he needed her as much as the blank page needed words. And their story would have many, many pages.

  Where Dreams Are Well Done

  I believe that this is truly the end to the Angelo’s Hearth series. After the other stories were done, I thought that I had told all of the stories I wanted to tell from this cast of characters.

  Three things collided to bring this story about.

  One: In the second book in the series, Where Dreams Reside (which is Angelo’s own love story), he hires a new expediter. An expediter is a crucial position in a high-end restaurant. They make sure that every plate going out is perfect, in the right order, and at the right moment. A good expediter can make a restaurant, and a bad one can break it.

  When we first met Luisa, she was introduced as the evil twin of the fair Graziella (also see Blaze Atop Swallow Hill Lookout above). So here I had a sharp-tongued, utterly driven, and very beautiful woman on the line. She remained just that way throughout multiple books. And she is perhaps the toughest woman I’ve ever written, right up there with Kee Stevenson in The Night Stalkers.

  Two: In the last book of that sereis, Where Dreams Are Written, Angelo suddenly decides that he wants a third restaurant. That means he’ll need a new chef to keep the first one going. Well, I found Sam the prep chef who worked in Angelo’s kitchen back in book #3, Maria’s Christmas Table. (Yes, a writer’s mind really works this way, connecting odd bits and pieces in curious ways.)

  Three: With the earlier short story, Where Dreams Are Sewn, I had “ended” the series with Perrin’s fashion boutique. And while that was a major setting in the series, the heart of the series lay in Angelo’s Hearth Italian Ristorante.

  That’s the setting where I felt the series should finally close: where it began, in Angelo’s.