“We killed that sucker!” Curt announced in a loud voice. “This boy needs a beer and a kiss.”
“Not in that order you don’t,” Stacy leapt into his arms and Curt looked pretty damn pleased with the change of priorities.
Jasper crossed to the cooler and grabbed a pair of cold ones. He uncapped and tucked one in Curt’s hand where it was still wrapped around his wife’s back. Then he retreated to the shadows near Maggie—directly opposite Jana she noticed. He pulled down his white cowboy hat low enough to hide his eyes, but she’d wager he could still see across the fire just fine. Suspicions ninety percent confirmed.
Did Jana know? Not much got by her, but she wasn’t looking toward Jasper either. So maybe not.
Ty, their summertime hired help who’d been off with the guys on the Siletz fire, headed off to get the fuel truck. She really needed to talk to him about relaxing at least once in a while. Nah, he was young. He’d learn it on his own. Besides, she was the last person who should teach anyone about relaxing.
Then Palo stepped around the back of the trailers, as if he’d circled to make sure everything had survived the five-hour drive back from the fire site. Or maybe so that she wouldn’t notice him. He was like that—all stealth in plain view.
Maggie felt more than the fire’s heat flash into her as she noticed where his eyes went. They didn’t travel to Curt and Stacy still making a happy spectacle of themselves. They didn’t go to Jana as she heckled her brother and sister-in-law. He stood back in the dark, but even by the fading reach of the firelight, she could see that he was looking directly at her.
And it wasn’t the way that Amos and Drew did, staring in wonder.
He looked at her like a man fresh saved by a Coastie ocean rescue. The moment he stepped once more onto dry land—as if he’d never thought he’d see it again.
She tried to look away. Wanted to join in on Jana’s razzing, though her throat was too dry and she couldn’t seem to raise her beer.
Palo didn’t flinch aside. She’d bet she could heave an entire rack of crowbars into the ground between his feet and he’d just look down at them, and back up at her.
Having been caught staring, he didn’t look away.
And until he looked away, she wasn’t going to either.
But he didn’t!
How had a girl from Astoria, Oregon ended up in a Mexican standoff with a Finnish-Hawaiian fire pilot?
And what was she going to do about it?
4
Palo waited. Waited to come to his senses. Waited for Maggie to blink so that he could convince himself that it wasn’t him she was looking at. She never had before except in passing.
Not that he’d done anything to encourage it.
Men like him didn’t deserve women like Maggie Torres. It wasn’t just her looks. Five-foot-two of curvy Latina with dark brown hair down to her shoulder blades, so thick a man could get lost in it.
She was everything he wasn’t.
Smart, funny, and a crazy good mechanic. People lit up the moment she entered a room and sighed sadly when she left them behind. Her easy laugh always brightened any gathering. She always had the quick joke or tease. By the time he thought one up, the conversation had long since moved on.
People barely noticed when he arrived or departed and he was fine with that. He preferred the quiet.
She had quiet moments too, though they were rare. She went silent when she was chasing a mechanical problem, focusing all that skill. But that wasn’t it. It was the moment before she’d spotted him, while he was still on the far side of the trailers looking at her through the steelwork of the helos’ landing skids.
Quiet. At peace. That’s when her true beauty came out and shone brightest for him.
Definitely not the kind of quiet she was at the moment.
She looked across the sparks and darkness like a toreador throwing down the red cape in front of the bull, daring him to make the next move. He could feel the impact of those dark eyes aiming bolts of fire in his direction until he was surprised that the gravel didn’t turn to lava all around him.
What would it be like to be with a woman like that? To take her down and hold her close?
Not for him. Not for the kid from the San Francisco streets.
His gang had chosen his first name. “I’m gon’ be rich someday! You just see,” he’d declared in his five-year old surety. “Rich? You must be from Palo Alto. That’s where those rich folk live. We gon’ call you Palo.” He’d chosen Akana because, when child services grabbed him after he was caught robbing a grocery store at eight, it had sounded cool and Japanese. And Japanese were all smart, rich, and drove BMWs. Instead, he’d been fostered to a guy who drove a rattletrap Ford pickup and flew helicopters for the power company—traveling the high-power lines year in and year out looking for problems. Palo had flown with him whenever he could so that he didn’t have to see the string of men his foster mom entertained whenever her husband was gone.
Palo hadn’t been along when the helo failed high in the Sierra Nevada. They’d traced it back to the mechanic—a mechanic who lived nowhere close to Maggie Torres’ standards. They’d fired the mechanic, hired a new one, bought another bird, and hired Palo to take his foster father’s place. He’d flown those same lines for six years before Curt Williams had hired him away.
It had been years before he looked up his own name and decided he was Finnish-Hawaiian to the rest of the world. It was certainly better than whoever he really was and he’d decided to keep the name.
And all he could do was stare across the fire at the most beautiful and amazing woman he’d ever seen and know for a fact that he had no right whatsoever to cross one step closer.
So instead, he nodded to her briefly and turned back into the night.
There he could at least dream that he was more than he was.
5
What’s with you?” Jana called out.
Maggie blinked over at her after Palo faded back into the darkness from which he’d so briefly emerged.
Jana twisted around to look over her shoulder, but there was nothing to see.
Again she asked her question.
“I’m not sure,” was the best answer Maggie could find. Why would a man like Palo concede defeat like that? He’d looked beaten before he nodded to her and turned away. “I’m not sure…” But she rose to her feet and had to veer sharply after three steps so that she didn’t walk straight into the fire.
“What’s with her?” Jana asked no one in particular.
If anyone answered, Maggie didn’t hear them.
Palo hadn’t gone far. He sat on the tail of the second trailer. It was a low-bed, so he sat with his feet on the dirt, looking up at the stars. This far away the campfire offered only the vaguest silhouette. There was no moon yet and her eyes were only slowly adapting to starlight.
“Hey, Akana,” she tried to keep it light.
“Hey, Torres.” Palo’s tone did remind her of Papa’s. It simply said, yep, here I am. Hard to read what he was thinking one way or the other.
“Mind if I sit?”
“Help yourself.” No shrug, that she could see. No hint of anything, except that she should help herself.
So, she scooted up on the trailer’s deck, ending up a little closer to him than she intended, but didn’t want to move away either. She knew that not everyone shared her ideas about close personal space. Actually, that was another thing that reminded her of Papa…he was the only one she’d really enjoyed having a closer personal space with. Despite that, she didn’t feel any pressure to move away from Palo.
She swung her feet above the dirt for something to do.
“What was that?”
Palo didn’t play dumb, which she liked. Instead, she could make out that he was staring at the stars.
So, for a while, she stared with him and watched Orion the hunter and Taurus the bull fighting the battle that they’d been having since the Greeks had named the constellations a kagillion years ago.
“There’s a lot to admire about you, Torres,” Palo said to the darkness as if it was plain fact.
“It’s skin deep, Akana.”
“I get that. Not what I was talking about. The way you’re put together gets a man’s attention, no question about that. It’s what’s past that I was talking about.”
Maggie tried to catch her breath. No one admired her like that since… No. It was time to stop drawing parallels between her Papa and any man she was interested in. It wasn’t fair to the man. If she kept comparing Palo to Papa, she’d never see the man as clearly as Stacy saw Curt—loving him with all of his shortcomings. If he—
Holy Mother! She had not just thought about being interested in Palo Akana.
But the idea, now that she’d thought of it, didn’t sound as crazy as she expected it to.
Palo still sat. It was a comfortable silence, one that wasn’t pushing all of her action buttons. It was the kind of silence that invited questions into it.
But she didn’t know where to start.
“Finnish-Hawaiian, huh? What was that like?”
Palo was silent so long that she wondered if she’d somehow misunderstood something.
Then he sighed. “Of all the places in the world, you had to start there?”
She didn’t know what to say, so she stared at the sky and waited.
6
Talking about his past always wrung Palo dry. He wasn’t sure the last time he’d been so exhausted. They’d fought fire for four straight days. They’d started this morning at sunrise and only been released at five o’clock. Everyone had agreed they wanted to get back to the Firebirds’ base, so they’d driven through the evening and the slow mid-summer sunset to reach the Illinois Valley Airport.
To see the women there, sitting around the fire as if waiting for them, had caught him so off guard. Curt welcomed by Stacy like he was coming home. The crew sitting around the campfire like they all belonged. Palo had never belonged anywhere except for his early days in the gang and flying beside his foster father.
But none of that was what had knocked him back.
Now that he’d spilled his past in the dirt beneath Maggie Torres’ feet, it felt as if all life had been ripped out of him. Nothing remained except for the scorched Black.
He’d only told bits and pieces of his past to anyone before, never the whole thing. It always earned him, “Oh you poor thing,” or something like that as if he was a wounded puppy. It hadn’t taken him long to learn to keep his mouth shut. Why hadn’t he been able to do that around Maggie Torres?
“I went back and looked up missing persons reports. You know, for kids lost around that time,” apparently there was even more to dump at Maggie’s feet. “You wouldn’t believe how many kids every year, just in San Francisco. Almost two thousand: runaway, family abduction, unknowns…”
Still Maggie gave him her silence. He couldn’t look down from the sky where his dreams lay to see her reaction. All he could hold onto was that she was still there beside him.
“I figure I belonged to the gang. They were my first memories anyway. A lot of teen pregnancies. Our gang leader would have been thirteen or so back then—could have been my dad, if he even knew. Moral standards and monogamy weren’t real priorities when you’re trying to survive on the streets. I tried to find them years later, but they’d disappeared into the dust. It was all Pinoy Pride and Nortenos the one time I went looking. Who knows what it is now? Haven’t been back.”
Maggie rested one of those fine, strong clean hands on his shoulder. They might be covered in grease or fire ash, but they were ever-so clean in other ways.
Here it came. Poor little boy. At least she wasn’t disgusted and running away, but this wasn’t much better. He hated pity.
“How did you become like you are?”
He looked down at her in surprise. The crescent moon had cracked over the Siskiyous while he’d told his tale. It now lit her eyes enough to see that there weren’t tears there. Not pity at all. No way she could be impressed, but he didn’t know what else to call her look.
“My foster dad. He was a good man. Ex-military pilot. Never spoke about it…or anything else. Real quiet type. Even more than me. Showed me by example what I always figured a man should be. My foster mom didn’t set much of an example about women though.”
“Where did you learn about them? What a woman should be?”
Palo dug down, but couldn’t find the words. He’d always thought a woman was what he found in the bars. He’d seen others, women in couples and the like, but they were always at a distance. Somehow other.
He flew the lines, endless miles of power looping from one remote tower to the next. Every now and then finding a broken insulator and a dangling line. Other times finding where a tree had fallen and damaged a trestle tower. Illegal, and insanely dangerous, TV antennas rigged high in the steel. Three bodies of sport climbers who hadn’t understood the random whimsical nature of the voltages they were messing with.
Coming “to land” only among the male mechanics and other pilots. Women for him spent their lives perched on bar stools. Buying them when he needed one: sometimes with dinner and drinks, sometimes with cold, hard cash.
He’d never thought of women as much else, until he’d seen Maggie Torres lift a wrench and tackle a helicopter like it was an old friend. Stacy and Jana were other examples, now that he thought about it.
But he’d only ever seen Maggie.
7
Oh,” Maggie finally got it. “Me? Palo, you can do better than that.”
He just shook his head like a cornered bull.
“I’m like the least girlie girl on the planet. I was such a tomboy that I made Coast Guard jocks feel like sissies. I only put on a dress and flirt in the bars to prove to myself that I’m not a complete lost cause as a woman.”
“You’re not a lost cause,” his voice was a low growl. The first emotion he’d revealed in the whole telling of his awful past and it was in the defense of her femininity. There was a laugh.
“Palo!” The frustration in her own voice earned her a smile. “No one in their right mind should be attracted to me.”
“Everyone in their right mind is attracted to you.”
“For all of the wrong reasons!” She didn’t like that they all wanted her body, not her. But Palo had already listed why he was attracted to her. His reasons were all about her real self and not—well, only a little—about how she looked.
Palo waited her out.
“How come you never said anything? How many times did you sit in a bar and watch me…” Maggie couldn’t even finish the sentence. …flirting with useless men.
“Don’t go to the bars much anymore. Not since I met you.”
And he was right. He always had some excuse or other to beg off except when all the Firebirds went as a team.
But Maggie pictured him there anyway. Pictured him sitting quietly at a stool down the end. It was easy to imagine him there—the strong silent type. Easy to imagine his foster dad beside him. She could hear the love, even if he dismissed it. Two strong, silent men. Sitting at the end of the bar, sipping their beers. One teaching the other what it meant to be a man just by his steadiness, by his commitment to his work.
And it was far too easy to imagine her not noticing him. Yet in her mind’s eye, Palo made all those other boys pale by comparison. She could feel him watching her in her imagination until her entire body tingled for real.
“Palo.”
“Uh-huh.”
She dropped down on her feet and turned to stand between his knees.
“Palo.”
He considered her for a long moment in silence, then his eyes went wide. “No, Torres. You deserve better than me.”
“And you don’t think that’s for me to decide?”
He tried leaning back, but was stopped by the helo anchored to the trailer close behind him.
“Palo.”
“Torres, don’t!”
“You’re
not getting off that easy. You’ve got to at least kiss me once. There is no way that a man can tell me I’m the model of all womanhood and not kiss me to prove his point.”
Palo groaned as if in agony.
It was almost enough to make her step back. But she hesitated a moment too long.
He grabbed her and pulled her hard against him until her thighs were pressed against the flat metal edge of the trailer and her upper body was crushed against the wonderfully solid chest of his. Palo had been carved out of granite, fire-hot stone that scorched her fingers to touch as her hands came to rest there.
For all the violence of his embrace, his kiss hesitated half a breath away, then settled upon her lips with all the gentleness of the still night.
This, was all she could think. This was what she’d been looking for in all those bars and with all those men. Heat, power, tenderness—all fabricated of something that wasn’t like any other man but remained fantastically male.
Maggie was so lost in the moment that all she could offer was a small choking cry of shock when Palo pulled back abruptly, forcing her to step away with his hands on her shoulders.
Before she could recover, he was gone into the dark.
The ground weaved beneath her like a storm-tossed rescue boat. Without Palo holding her, it felt as if the lightest breeze—the slightest impetus from a passing owl’s wing—would take her to her knees.
“That,” Stacy said from where she leaned in the darkness against the helicopter on the other trailer. “Is exactly what I’ve been talking about.”
Maggie couldn’t even nod.
8
He shouldn’t have just walked away. But he had to protect Maggie from himself. Palo knew only one use for women—up with the skirt, down with the underwear, and do that deed until they both were done.
For All Their Days Page 2