Steve wanted to feel that. Truly he did. There was a family he’d lost and could never get back. But he wanted to love someone so much that they’d want to have a family of their own.
“What she’s not telling you”—Henderson’s easy and deep voice was a sharp contrast with his wife’s—“is that the young scamp has become a good friend of the President. Yes, that one. Hangs out in Oval Office every chance she gets and teaches him the wisdom according to J.K. Rowling.”
***
As the late morning warmed the air, some napped. Some lay out in the broken sunlight with a novel. Akbar and Tori set off on a hike downstream, two insanely fit individuals going exploring for the fun of it.
Steve wished he could do that. His leg hurt too much, though it wasn’t necessarily a bad hurt. The shooting pains that had wracked his leg through the winter had been cured by the third surgery. It wasn’t even the biting pain of just a week ago.
Now it was a muscle ache. He no longer thought about using his hand to lift the leg when he wanted to move it. He simply climbed out of the car, with only a little help from any handhold he could grab.
It also hadn’t folded out from under him since that first night on base. Even if he’d never be whole, maybe he was getting better. But he still couldn’t go rambling for rough miles with Akbar and Tori. Easy to picture Carly striding along with them. She belonged out here. He—
“Hey, flyboy.” He squinted up at Carly where she stood haloed by the sunlight, as if she needed the help to look magnificent. So not. Hiking boots, cut-off shorts atop those infinitely long legs. A Goonies T-shirt and his San Francisco Giants hat atop her shining hair. You couldn’t make up a woman who looked this good.
“Want to go for a walk?”
He glanced downstream where Akbar and Tori had already passed out of sight and shook his head.
“I packed lunch and a blanket. It’s not far.”
“What isn’t?”
“Are you coming or not?” Carly held out a hand.
Well, anything had to be better than where his head was right now. He shrugged and let her help him up.
She didn’t let go as she turned perpendicular to the river. In a dozen steps, they’d entered the woods hand in hand. No one watched them leave except maybe Beale, glancing over the top of her book. Beneath the tall pines, they passed through a narrow line of scrub, then walked across the upward-sloping forest floor.
It was darker here, cooler, lush with moss ranging across a hundred colors of green. Small trees stood little chance in the shadowed heart of the mature forest, leaving only obstacles of fallen giants and fern grottoes along their path. They sometimes had to duck and weave around branches, but Carly let him set the pace and he kept it slow.
A walk under the trees with a beautiful woman.
Funny, all of the ladies he’d scored runs with, both on and off the fire line, and he’d never walked in silence through a forest with one. Yet forests, or at least their fires, had been his only dream since he was knee high.
They didn’t talk as they moved through the trees. Occasionally one or the other would point. A red-tailed hawk cruising through the branches on silent wings, moving as if he were crossing open sky rather than threading a thousand gaps fifty feet in the air. Squirrels chattering their alarms. A deer and her fawn, stepping silently through the brush with that strange hesitation step of wild animals even when feeling safe.
Carly lifted their clasped hands to rub the back of his hand across her cheek more than once. Steve found it easy to return the gesture.
Perhaps a mile from the river, the forest lightened ahead as they crested a rise. At the verge they had to force a path through the brush. He held several branches aside so that Carly could get through, then turned to the view.
“A burn.” The end of the forest was an abrupt shock. Looking back at the face of the forest, it was easy to see where the near sides of trees had been burned off, the damage halted even as it killed the verge. Not a clear cut, definitely a burn.
“We fought this two years ago. I spotted it on the way in. Hadn’t realized back then that it was so close to the river.”
Steve looked out. A few of the charred giants still remained, but this fire had been hot and hard, nothing for the logging companies to salvage. It had scorched the soil, killing off everything in its path.
“Slow mover?”
“Old forest. Not old growth, but nearing maturity. It had lots of fuel, so it burned hot and long. We kept it ringed in, had it fully contained, but we couldn’t break its back. It just burned and burned.”
That explained the soil burn-down and the generation of plant life now showing. No trees had survived. This was recovery foliage.
The hot pink carpet of fireweed spread across the rolling slopes. Sumac and low alder saplings had begun to dot the hillsides. And not much else. In five years, the alder would be a couple stories high and shade out the fireweed. Grasses would be next, but none yet.
He followed Carly to a slight rise where she swung down her pack, untied a blanket, and spread it among the flowers.
She sat and he joined her.
“Now, Mr. Mercer. I have an agenda.”
He slanted a leering grin her way. “Thought you might, Ms. Thomas. You are a particularly well-organized lady, if I may say so.”
“First, lunch.”
“Spoilsport.” He brushed a hand down her cheek and traced the line of her lovely neck.
Before he could move farther, she captured his hand by the wrist and held it disdainfully to the side, like a wet and vile rag, before letting it drop.
“Second, you and I are going to have a talk.”
Why didn’t that sound good?
“Third, you and I are going to make love in the sunlight where we can actually see each other.”
That sounded very good.
“And”—she leaned in to nip his ear lightly before whispering into it—“if you don’t seriously ravage me in the process, I shall be very disappointed.”
Out of the park.
Chapter 30
“So what happened?”
Steve lazed back on the blanket and watched the soft clouds poking slowly across the blue sky. Lunch of a roast beef sandwich big enough to satisfy a firefighter, graham crackers, and an apple. Dessert of dark chocolate and fresh strawberries, so big they required two or even three bites to eat, had left him feeling very mellow.
They’d actually changed up the agenda a bit with a quick round of sex, a leisurely lunch, and a nap in each other’s arms. Now lazy conversation that had moved them right through to late afternoon.
Carly was easy to be around. They’d been sharing memories of their first fires and some of the real characters who fought them.
A Goonie named Ziggy, who was almost as round-faced as the cartoon character, made his off-season living writing science-fiction novels.
A hot chick named Clarice who had set out on a mission to sleep with every man on the entire Sacramento fire team and made it most of the way before a female smokie gave her a new experience. Clarice had married her rather than completing her quest. Steve told Carly that was before Clarice got to him, though it really had been after. They’d had a fun week together before she’d moved on. She and her partner had a couple of kids now, one each, both natural and born the same day.
But with her single question about his accident, a different Carly now sat next to him. This Carly wasn’t easy to be with. This one had brought him here so that they’d be alone and asked a hard question. Now he’d have to answer. Steve half wished he’d refused the walk and lunch.
He sighed, knew there was no way out of it, no matter how long he studied the clouds.
“What happened?” He cast his mind back to the prior summer. When he’d been at the top of his game, a place he’d never be again.
“July 19th. The season was barely rolling. Yet another blaze in the hills above LA. I was the lead, first flight, first stick.” Carly would know what that
meant, could appreciate it. He’d spent six hard years getting there, the power hitter, the guy they banked on to bring the runs home and keep the team alive in the process. Made it easy to buy toys like his cherry Firebird.
“Stupid goddamn accident.” He sat up and pulled out a stem of fireweed. He began plucking the brilliant pink petals one by one until they puddled about his feet.
“We got surprised by a wind shift. I was scrambling ahead with my crew. At first we were trying to get ahead of the fire to cut a fresh line. The beast had already jumped four or five firebreaks. Then we were just flat running because that beast was in a plain, old hurry.”
Steve could remember the heat. The crazy roar of the fire ripping at the sky, racing treetop to treetop, devouring everything in its path.
“We ran into someone’s mountain still. With the smoke so damn thick that he could barely breathe, the guy actually aimed a shotgun at me. I was so pissed that I smashed it out of his hands with my McLeod rake. Damn thing fired and hit his still tank. It breached down onto his wood fire and the thing went off like a bomb. He was thrown about fifty feet, not a scratch on him.”
Steve brushed aside the pile of plucked petals that had scattered on his shorts and, pulling up the pant leg, forced himself to look at his left leg, something he tried not to do. Carly sat close and really looked as well.
“A chunk of the tank got me. I came to lying on my ass. Thought I’d just been bruised and banged up from slamming into a tree or something, maybe cracked some ribs again or something like that. From here”—he brushed his fingertips just above his ankle—“to here.” He marked himself mid-thigh.
“Like I’d been through a log peeler. I left a whole layer of meat and a lot of pieces of bone in that idiot’s front yard.”
He closed his eyes and focused on keeping his voice steady.
“I was still conscious when they medevaced me out barely a hundred feet ahead of the flames.”
Carly rested a hand on his arm, but he couldn’t reach for it. Couldn’t move.
“A lot of times since then I’ve been pissed that I somehow missed severing any arteries. Then I’d have been done and gone before they could get to me. I wouldn’t have to live every day like this.”
***
Carly moved her hand from his arm to his thigh.
Steve twitched when she touched him. He would have pulled away, but she kept her hand firmly in place until he stopped trying to withdraw. Instead he turned away, his eyes closed and face resigned.
He barely tolerated it, both arms wrapped around his good leg, pulled up with his chin propped on it. Holding it close. Facing away from her into the distance of the recovering burn.
Then she began to stroke her hand lightly up and down his outstretched leg, exactly as she’d seen him do when he thought no one was watching.
The heat of his leg proved it was still human, still real.
She could see it now, feel it now. His leg wasn’t merely emaciated from too long in a cast. There was some muscle tone along the top of his thigh. But the outside of his leg didn’t extend much past the bone. The outer side of his leg was missing most of its muscle. He was right—it was a miracle he’d survived at all.
He shivered despite the heat of the sun as she traced her cool hand down the hot scar.
“No one has ever touched me there.”
His voice was cut off, frozen from her. He spoke about himself clinically, as if it had all happened to someone else.
“Doctors sometimes poked or prodded it, but that was all. I wouldn’t let the nurses rub in any salves, always did that myself no matter how goddamn much it hurt. I made them do PT with machines or exercises.”
Slowly, ever so slowly, his leg relaxed. His back slowly settled into a less rigid arch as she traced the scar again and again.
“We’re two pretty damaged souls, aren’t we?” Carly knew for sure she was.
“I guess.” Steve still kept his cheek on his knee, facing away from her. “Hard to call you damaged, though.”
She stopped stroking his leg. She wanted to yell at him in protest, declare that she was damaged as well. But it sounded stupid next to a man who’d spent a year in and out of hospitals, who had multiple surgeries and endless hours of physical therapy.
“Hurt, for sure.” Steve spoke without moving as if she sat on the other side of him. “I can’t imagine how bad that radio call must have hurt.”
It was the single worst memory of her life. Even worse than her father’s death. When he knew he wasn’t going to survive, her father had clicked onto the circuit to the radio tower and simply said, “Tell Carly I love her.” And never transmitted again. Linc had inhaled fire while drawing breath to scream her name one more time for help she wasn’t able to give.
Steve turned to rest his other cheek on his knee so that he now faced her.
With one fingertip, he reached out and traced the line of her cheekbone. Her dry cheekbone.
Carly rubbed at her eyes, but the tears weren’t there. They had always leaked out on the rare occasions she talked of Linc’s death.
“How did you come through it? How did you find your way?”
Carly’s laugh caught in her chest and came out half-strangled. “How did you?”
Steve’s smile was sad as he traced her cheek again. “Who says I did?”
Chapter 31
Steve had no idea why Carly was here with him. She practically shimmered in the late-afternoon sunlight. Her eyes the color of the sky and as bright as the flower petals still scattered on the blanket and ranging out of sight over the rolling hills ahead of them.
Chamerion angustifolium, a pioneer species of regrowth. Fireweed was one of the first indicators of soil recovery.
She’d chosen the spot well. The surviving forest behind them, the new one, not yet grown, stretched before them. This was the line a firefighter walked every day.
“I fought this fire two years ago,” she’d said. Even if she hadn’t walked this land as a smokejumper, she’d certainly been in the air when it counted. She was no less important than the smokies or hotshots in turning and killing the fire.
Drones were still cutting-edge technology on forest fires. Maybe Steve did have a place, even if no one except Carly thought so. A part of him wanted to say she was biased because they were sleeping together, but there’d be no such thing as “good enough” for Carly Thomas when it came to fire. If it wasn’t stellar, you had to fix it. And if it was stellar, you’d have to make it better.
He looked down at her hand where it stroked once again over his damaged leg. Cool, gentle, caring.
For some idiot reason she cared about him. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or terrified, or to bow to the gods in reverent thanks.
He could feel the life flowing back into his leg beneath her gentle attention. He could feel the blood flow beneath the scar, could feel the clean summer air he inhaled trickle down to his very marrow. There was just the faintest hint of floral on the air from the odorless flowers. Somehow she did that. Found something in him that could begin to grow once more and turn him back into a human being.
“My own personal angel.” The words came out before he even knew he’d spoken.
She stopped. Her attention shifting from his leg back to his face.
Once again, he traced the impossibly soft skin of her cheek with the back of his fingers. This time, when he ran his fingers along her jaw and coaxed her forward, she flowed into his arms.
Her kiss made him more whole than he’d been since the accident, perhaps even more so than any time in his life. She gave to him without consideration, without hesitation. Her mouth drew the heat from deep inside him.
He struggled to hold back, but each time he did, she growled. The woman actually growled at him, nipped his ear, tickled his ribs, nuzzled his neck until he went nearly mad.
He shoved her down to the blanket. Then he reached out and grabbed the pile of petals he’d been plucking from the fireweed in an attempt to av
oid the fire building inside him.
Steve sprinkled them over Carly’s hair, scattered a trail of purple-pink down her black T-shirt and dribbling the last of them over her shorts and along the top of one thigh.
Her eyes fluttered shut as the petals fell upon her cheeks, opened to watch him as he leaned over her.
The landscape of her stretched before him. His hands traced her shape, memorizing what his eyes devoured: the shape of breast, the curve of waist to hip, the velvet smooth of well-muscled thigh.
On his return up her body, he hooked the edge of her T-shirt and slipped it off over her head.
He tried to be gentle when he put his mouth to her breast. But she wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling him hard against her as she arched beneath him.
Between one breath and the next, he’d stripped her naked, except for his hat. Damn she looked good in that hat. He savored her body, softer than the petals still scattered about them, sweeter than the strawberries he could still taste on her lips.
Satin and bright summer sunlight, fair skin and tan lines, and a taste that finally drove him off the deep end. He nibbled, tasted, and teased. Drank her in until she laughed and moaned.
She tried to return the favor, but each time she reached for him, he tucked her reaching hand out of the way. Ravaged she’d asked for, and ravaged he’d deliver. He drove her higher and hotter until he knew the Flame Witch burned. And she burned so damn bright.
When sweat sheened the surface of her skin and the fire of shudders rippled beneath, then he finally took her. She cried out loud enough to fill the forest and soft enough that only he could hear her.
Locking her legs around his hips and her arms around his neck, she completely let herself go to the waves roaring through her body.
For one moment, for a single shining instant, they struck flashover together, and for that perfect moment, Steve was burned clean and made complete.
Chapter 32
A ringing phone penetrated Carly’s stupor.
Pure Heat Page 17