Flash of Fire

by M. L. Buchman

  “Shit!” Mickey looked around, feeling a little desperate. He had this image in his head: Robin Harrow in a whitewater kayak. To hell with motorcycles and cancan dresses. It was the best image he’d had of her yet and he couldn’t wait for—

  “Wait!” Macy gripped his arm.

  “What?”

  She laughed. Macy tugged and dragged him back out to the porch. You could have a big summer party out here if it weren’t for all the junk—only a narrow path remained between the front steps and the entry. It was hard to make sense of the hodgepodge. There was defunct mining equipment, an old motorcycle, a dogsled with a broken runner filled with more moose antlers—they shed them every year, Macy explained, which made the local supply unending—a broken wooden airplane propeller—a lone wagon wheel, five cross-country skis, none of which matched.

  And sticking out from the depths of the pile, a narrow prow of sun-bleached plastic. It took them a few minutes, but he and Macy soon unearthed a pair of kayaks with a very faded “Rent Me” sign on one of them. More digging unearthed some paddles. Sealed in bags in one of the cockpits was the rest of the necessary gear, including a pair of nylon spray skirts in surprisingly good condition considering the sun-faded state of the boats themselves.

  “What are you up to?” Robin asked from somewhere beyond the mound of crap between the kayaks and the front door to the restaurant.

  He waded back to her and held aloft his final find. He selected one of the hard-shell safety helmets and—after checking to make sure it had no spiders or other nasty surprises lurking within—pulled it down over her head.

  “Oh, babe. You’re gonna love this!”

  * * *

  “Love this” was not exactly what Robin was thinking a mere two hours later. What she had been thinking was a hot shower, a soft bed, and a couple days of restaurant food. What she was doing was watching her one link to such niceties take off and disappear back to the north in the form of Macy Tyler and her Bell LongRanger helicopter.

  As the engine noise faded, the reality of their situation began to sink in. Except for radios currently stowed away in plastic bags, their contact with the outside world consisted of paddling tiny little boats to the next nearest human being, over a dozen miles downstream.

  “You are dog meat, Hamilton.”

  “Uh-huh.” Mickey kept organizing their supplies into gallon Ziplocs that he’d bought at the tiny general store.

  “I mean it, Mickey.” Something in her tone must have caught his attention and had him stop and look up at her.

  “Listen—”

  “I’m not feeling very cooperative at the moment,” she snarled back.

  “No…listen,” he said softly.

  And she did.

  The helicopter was gone. The last heavy beats of the rotors were done echoing off the valley walls.

  But there was also no roaring fire, racing helos, radio call static crackling in her ears every thirty seconds, or any of the other mayhem that had filled the last seven days. And the week of hopes and interviews, of testing and training, that had come before, that was also gone. Before that? Six months at the truck stop—pretty much without a day off.

  The first sound she heard? The soft burble of the stream entering the small mountain lake where Macy had dropped them off. They were in a grassy clearing little bigger than the helicopter. Trees ranged upward on steep hills all around the lakeshore. The air was breathlessly still, making the lake a mirrored sheet that reflected the fantastic image of Denali’s north face.

  Some bird chirped to ask if the noisy helicopter was gone and was it safe to come out again. Another answered. A moment later there was a rustle as a squirrel raced across an overhead branch to look down at these new intruders.

  More bird calls. More small critter noise.

  But all of it so soft she could soon hear the beating of her own heart, her own breathing.

  And the trees lived up to the river’s name—Larch Creek. They were wrapped in a world of tall larch conifers, most a soft green, some yellowing with age as if it was already autumn but they were struggling on. The undergrowth was grasses and low berry bushes.

  And the silence behind it all, she could only describe as…

  “Wow.”

  Mickey came up beside her and wrapped his arms around her waist but didn’t speak. He leaned forward so that his head was beside hers, chin ever so lightly on her shoulder.

  She couldn’t hear his heart, but she could feel it beating where his chest pressed against her back.

  The silence slowly soaked the craziness out of her.

  “Why did you bring me out here? You could have had your nefarious way with my willing body at the B&B in a nice, soft bed.”

  “Okay, I should have thought about that aspect more carefully,” he joked in her ear. Then he turned her to face him, and there was something much more serious going on behind those eyes.

  Uh-oh! Robin’s internal alarms went off. She wasn’t even sure what they were, but they were now ringing more loudly than the bird chatter in the bushes and trees around them.

  “My dad is a tour guide in the summers. Raft and kayak. As a kid, I spent my summers with him out on the Oregon rivers.”

  “In Tucson we spent it out in the desert with a .22 rifle, shooting rattlesnakes. Personally I preferred going to the local NASCAR track. So this is about connecting with your dad? Or your inner child?”

  Mickey scoffed. “You see my dad anywhere handy?” He pretended to squint into the trees, then shaded his eyes to look across the lake up toward Denali.

  “What about your inner child?”

  “My inner child?” Mickey looked down and poked a finger at his own ribs a few times as if looking for it. “Trust me, Robin, there is not a single childish thought in my head at the moment.” Then he turned those surprising blue eyes of his in her direction.

  No, there wasn’t a single childish thought there, that was for damn sure. She could feel her body heating in response, but chose to ignore it…for the moment anyway.

  She slipped out of Mickey’s arms and used the lake as an excuse. She wandered down to the edge of the lake and stuck in a finger.

  “Yipes! That’s freezing!”

  “Glacial melt. I guess we’re gonna be pretty stinky by the time we get back to Larch Creek.”

  “And how soon is that?”

  “Could do it in a day if we had to. Two days is comfortable.”

  Then he looked away from her, and she could feel the pressure of his need for her ease as his gaze traveled elsewhere.

  “I could stay right here a long time though.” He spoke mostly to himself.

  Robin watched Mickey watch the landscape. It was the first place he’d really made sense to her. He flew a firefighting helicopter as well as anyone she’d ever seen. As Mark had pointed out, Mickey was also a natural leader; people simply followed his initiative. Not because he ordered it, but because when he did something, it was straight from his heart.

  As Mickey had jumped up onto Gerties’ stage so effortlessly and stalked across the boards to take possession of her, there had been an impossible rightness. One so powerful that the other three men followed him without any argument, possibly without any thought that they were about to make fools of themselves in front of a hundred Canada Day revelers.

  Summer river guide. The strength that he wielded so effortlessly was a legacy of an active child with a paddle in his hands for hours every day.

  Maybe here in this place she could understand more of who he was. Here was a place he belonged.

  She walked quietly upslope to the pile of gear and fished out a sleeping bag. She spread it on the thick, soft grasses and then sat down upon it.

  “Mickey?” she called to the man who still stared outward as if fitting in somewhere was the most natural thing in the world. And not the absolute im
possibility that Robin knew it to be. The only place she ever truly fit was… She didn’t know. Neither the truck stop nor the cockpit of an AANG bird. Maybe Harrow women were above such things.

  He turned slowly to look at her.

  She patted the sleeping bag beside her. There was a wildness to him that she hadn’t seen before. Not of danger or loss of control, but of belonging where modern man no longer did.

  He stalked up and looked down at her for a moment. She’d have felt small if his look didn’t make her feel so powerful. No one had ever needed her the way Mickey Hamilton did.

  Instead of patting the sleeping bag beside her again, she opened her arms to him.

  As he knelt before her and then lay her back, he said her name softly.

  “Robin.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  It was a statement.

  A statement that maybe there was somewhere she did belong. She’d certainly never been in a place like Mickey’s arms.

  * * *

  Mickey had thought he knew something about making love to Robin. Finally alone and not exhausted by the firefight, he discovered that he hadn’t a clue.

  When he lay down over her on the grassy slope above the unnamed glacial lake, she welcomed him without any question. Her kisses had been wonderful, but now her light blue eyes were filled with something more. When she closed them to kiss him, there was a quietness about her that hadn’t been there before.

  Oh, he’d been able to gentle her into letting him explore her body, but now there was no need to do so. It wasn’t that she was gentle; her kiss was so hard—with her arms locked behind his head forbidding his easing back—that they would both have bruised lips. Rather it was that the quiet had moved inside of her.

  When he uncovered her lovely breasts and palmed them both and planted a kiss between, she hissed with pleasure and need.

  And when he had removed the rest of her clothes and dragged off his own shirt, he moved to explore what was last uncovered. She rose for him in a flight so smooth, so deep, that it didn’t come from mere bodily pleasure and release. Her whole being shone from her. So in tune with what was happening that even her cries didn’t still the birdsong.

  Robin Harrow, sprawled golden and glistening beneath the warmth of the Alaskan sun, was no mere revelation. She was a goddess incarnate—except that made her too remote and there wasn’t a single thing remote about her.

  Not as she held him in place until the last shudder had run the length of her delicious frame for the last time. Still not letting him move until long after her breathing and pulse had returned to normal.

  Only then did she let him up to lie fully side by side against her. He should remove his pants, but was too distracted by trailing his hand over the length of her naked form. Mickey was unable to believe that she was real.

  But when he leaned over to kiss her, she shook her head.

  “Doesn’t seem right.” Her voice was a whisper.

  “That I want to kiss you?”

  “No, that you can make me feel that way. I’m not big on vulnerability.”

  “Not vulnerable?” He propped himself up on one elbow to survey the woman sprawled before him, completely naked and totally relaxed as if she didn’t have a muscle left in her body.

  “No.” She opened one eye and looked up at him.

  “Yet you just were.”

  “I know. And the results were out of this world, Mickey with the blue eyes. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” Which sounded pretty damn stupid with what he’d just been doing to her, driving her helplessly with his own greed to see just how much he could make Robin Harrow feel. He’d wager he hadn’t come close to the limit yet.

  “What makes you feel vulnerable?”

  “Me?” Mickey tried to think of something. “Watching other people fly. Emily, Jeannie, you.”

  “Not Vern?”

  “Nah, I’m as good as he is, or near enough.”

  “Wait.” She sat up and looked at him, completely comfortable with her nudity and his still being clothed from the waist down. “Me?”

  This time he used his strength to scoop her into his lap and kiss her. That naturally led him to think about what else was there for the taking and he began working his way down her neck toward—

  “Ow! Ow! Ow!” He followed where she pinched and pulled on his ear until he was facing her once again.

  “You said me. Watching me fly.” She let go of his ear and rubbed it in apology.

  “I did.”

  “Care to explain why?”

  * * *

  “Is it because we’re all women and we aren’t supposed to be able to fly that well?” Robin didn’t like that thought at all but wasn’t ready to force her way out of Mickey’s lap. It was a very comfortable place to be.

  “Clearly you know Emily far less well than you think you do.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  He looked out across the lake, but his hands remained on her.

  Was he even aware of them as he rubbed one up and down her back and had the other wrapped around the inside of her thigh? She suspected not.

  “I figure pilots come in three categories. Some learn to fly, just in the course of life. They make good, serviceable pilots. Gordon is one of those. Vanessa I think is another.”

  Robin had known a number of pilots like that, a lot of them actually. They were far and away the most common breed out there.

  “There are some who always dreamed of flying and still can’t believe it’s really happening. Vern and I. Bruce maybe. Henderson definitely—he’s just a hell of a lot better than the rest of us. Had a lot more practice.”

  “What’s the third?”

  “The naturals like you, Emily, Jeannie. Not that the learning was any easier than for the rest of us, but it just fits something in your nervous systems.”

  “Mark had said Emily had forbidden him to train me.” Was this the final and real reason?

  “Right, it would just screw up what you do. He can fix your knowledge with safety techniques and tactics, but how you fly? Probably not.”

  “But he flew with Jeannie.”

  “And she’s been flying fire for close to a decade, both forest and Australian bushfire, though a bunch of the early stuff was fixed wing. She’s not such raw material still.”

  “Raw material?” Robin protested.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Just waiting for the right man to come along and mold me into shape.”

  “Maybe.” That self-impressed grin of his was back.

  “I’ll show you maybe.” She started to struggle out of his lap and discovered she was near helpless to do so.

  Mickey was wrong about himself; he was an absolute natural, both as pilot and lover.

  Mickey had one arm tight around her shoulder. In a single move, he tipped her back and latched his mouth on her breast. At the same moment, his hand, which had been resting nonchalantly on her thigh, slid down and clamped on to her.

  There was nothing gentle at all this time. No floating on lovemaking as soft as a breeze. No back-and-forth play.

  He was taking, forcing her to give.

  Robin could only think of two ways to stop him as he consumed her, launching her straight toward madness.

  One was to cause him bodily harm.

  The other was to ask him to stop, because she knew he would in an instant, no matter what it cost him.

  She considered and discarded the first.

  And no way in hell was she going to do the second.

  Chapter 9

  Mickey found Robin to be exactly as he expected, as apt a student in a kayak as she was a magnificent pilot. Whitewater boats were twitchy, particularly on flat water like a lake, and some people never got used to it. Robin easily transferred that dancer–martial
arts balance and flexibility onto the water.

  “The direction you go as you paddle is largely controlled by your hips. Shift your hips right and you’ll go right, even though it will feel as if you’re leaning the other way.”

  “And I have such nice hips.”

  “I should never have told you that.”

  “You weren’t the first,” she teased.

  “Who was?”

  Robin tried to paddle away from him, but however natural she might be in the air, she still had a lot to learn in a kayak.

  Mickey slipped up close behind her. He dipped the fingers of one hand into the cold water and flicked it at her bare back—neither of them were wearing shirts.

  She didn’t yelp as he’d expected. Instead, with a backward flick of her paddle, she sent a sheet of freezing water into his face and chest. Okay, maybe she was learning the truly essential skills of kayaking faster than he’d thought.

  Then she carved a turn and almost went for an icy swim, one reason they were staying within twenty feet of the shore, where the water was less than two feet deep, while she practiced.

  Robin did manage to slide up to him without capsizing, their kayaks pointing in opposite directions so that they wound up face-to-face. He grabbed the cockpit cowling of her boat and pulled her in close. And as she melted into a kiss, he dipped his other hand overboard and raised it to cradle her breast with his cold hand.

  It almost got out of control, and they both would have gone swimming, but they managed to stop in time. Barely. He’d never been with a woman who was so damned much fun.

  “Who was your first, Mr. Smart-Ass?”

  “Debra Monroe. Or maybe Debbie.”

  “You don’t remember?” She sounded melodrama-heroine aghast.