“Seriously? I used to read his books when I was stationed overseas.”
Stationed? “Where were you—”
“In the army. Desert Storm.”
“You were in Iraq.”
He made a noncommittal sound.
“Not Iraq?”
His mouth tweaked up on one side. “I was a Green Beret. So, yeah, and whatever.”
Oh. No wonder he had this edge about him, a sense that he took in everything around him. Like the kids playing on the pebbled beach, throwing rocks in the water, and the teenagers riding their skateboards in the street, and a few adults sitting on the deck at the nearby tavern. And she guessed he’d probably even seen Kyle Hueston walk by in his deputy uniform.
“How did you go from a Green Beret to a hotshot?”
“Smokejumper.”
“What’s the difference?” She finished off her pizza, wiped her fingers.
“Smokejumpers are normally the first line of defense when a fire is unreachable. We jump in, usually miles from the nearest road, and use axes, shovels, chain saws, and strategy to put out a fire.”
“So, superman firefighters.”
Oh, that sounded lame. She wanted to cringe, but that side of his mouth tweaked up again, as if pleased.
“Just kidding. But it sounds dangerous.”
“It can be. But we have a crew trained by one of the best—Jock Burns. He’s the reason I joined up. My dad used to jump for Jock years ago.”
“I’ll bet your dad gets a kick out of that,” she said.
And oops, she said something wrong, because his smile fell and, as he looked away, a muscle pulled in his jaw. “Yeah.”
“Did I tread somewhere I shouldn’t have gone?”
“No.” He finished his pizza. Looked out at the lake. “My parents died when I was seventeen. Auto accident.”
Oh. “I’m so sorry.”
“Thanks.” He wiped his hands on his napkin. “I think I need a drink.”
She glanced at the tavern, heard the raucous music lifting from the deck.
He must have followed her gaze, maybe even seen her expression, because he added, “A Coke will do just fine. Or a malt?”
“How about something from Licks and Stuff?”
He nodded, got up, and they headed for ice cream.
Not a date. Better, actually, because he was easy to be with. Especially when he ordered two chocolate malts and handed her one.
They were walking back to the beach when he added, “I do think he’d be proud of me.”
Huh? Oh, his father. She’d been busy watching the way his arms filled out that T-shirt, imagining him swinging a Pulaski—that special ax firefighters used, a tidbit she’d discovered while reading John McClean’s Fire on the Mountain, thank you, Amazon, for that quick download.
She just might be the most pitiful tour guide in the history of Deep Haven.
Not. A. Date.
“I only joined the army because I didn’t know what else to do with my life. My brother and I went to live with my grandpa after our parents died. Grandpa fought in World War II. I guess I wanted to be like him. And the military gave me focus. A purpose.”
“How long did you serve?”
“Three tours. I got out about seven years ago.”
“And since then you’ve been smokejumping?”
They reached the edge of the beach and he sat on a boulder, facing the sunset. “Not all the time, but yeah. It seemed like something my father would like me to do. And I like it—it’s hard, but focused work. Easy to lose yourself in, and there’s a brotherhood, not unlike the military.”
He had an interesting face. High cheekbones, a tiny scar under his right eye. A strong jaw, a nose with the tiniest of bumps, as if it had been broken once. And the slightest upturn of his lips, as if even in repose he might be harboring a smile.
The kind of face that held secrets in his enigmatic expressions.
And shoot, if it didn’t stir up the desire to sit here forever, listening to his voice as the sunset turned the shore golden, his eyes a deep, sapphire blue.
“Why is there a fish on the bottom of your pots?” he asked.
“I’m a Christian. It’s my way of imprinting faith into my work.”
And slowly, he smiled. A deep, curious, even delighted smile, and with it, a look that settled on her, no, settled through her, as if trying to reach inside her, discover her.
She swallowed, her throat thick.
“Really,” he said.
She managed a quick nod.
Then, “Me too.”
He held out his hand then, and, curious, she took it. Found it strong, yes, and warm, and solid.
He didn’t let go, and she looked up, met his gaze.
It contained a softness she didn’t understand.
But she had a crazy, almost ethereal urge to cry.
Especially when he said, simply, “It’s so nice to meet you, Liza Beaumont.”
Chapter 2
They were all going to die if Conner didn’t get his head back in the game. It’d been a couple of days since he’d last slept. He was dog tired, stiff, and felt like he’d been run over with a dozer. His mouth tasted like ash, his eyelids felt like sandpaper and his bones rattled with the continual buzz of chain saws.
It didn’t help that the fire didn’t want to go to bed. Somewhere around two a.m. he’d chugged down four packets of instant coffee, three ibuprofens, and a chocolate bar that now sat in his gut like a rock. It all did nothing for him. He felt surly and caustic and not at all in the mood for the fire to be misbehaving.
And that’s exactly when the wind shifted and sent the fire up the flank he’d just spent sixteen hours cutting.
“Get on those spot fires!” he shouted to the group of shots, rookies at the beginning of the summer. Veterans now, after a month of fighting fires in Montana and the last two weeks in Minnesota.
With them were four smokejumpers from the Jude County team, sent out east courtesy of Jock Burns, who’d stayed behind to run a fire in Montana. Conner had nearly cheered when he saw his teammates pull up—Reuben Marshall, Pete Brooks, Nutter Turnquist, and even rookie Tom Browning.
Now everyone resembled a chain gang—wrung out, peeved, and desperate to defend the line they’d given their last ounce of energy digging. They worked on a meager logging road, widening it by a dozen or more feet. They’d worked their way about two hundred yards from the main road.
The crew used their Pulaskis and water canisters to put out the fires, their headlamps almost unnecessary. But one look at their situation and Conner knew they needed a new plan.
They worked in what looked like a graveyard. Once-majestic white pines and spruce, blown down a decade ago, now lay stripped and gray, the ground littered with the debris of the trees, sapwood slabs, limbs, bark, and a crusty scattering of brown pine needles embedded in the forest floor.
Tinder. Just waiting for a spark.
And with the fire in the distance turning the sky an eerie orange, the smoke threading through the forest, the entire scene resembled something out of a horror movie.
Clearly, he needed a shower. Food. A bed. Not necessarily in that order.
But they still had a quarter mile to dig to the gravel pit that served as the left flank line. With the main blaze a little under two miles away and the wind at five miles an hour, they had a day, at least, to establish the rest of line. To stop the dragon.
Conner had used his video footage, posted at NFS fire stations, to analyze the fire behavior, and after conferring with Jed what seemed like days ago, agreed that cutting a line along the logging road would be their best bet at stopping the fire before it reached Evergreen Resort.
Or Deep Haven.
And there he went again, his mind drawn back to Liza Beaumont. Who knew an impulsive decision to stop by her booth and say hi would result in an easy, comfortable evening spent listening to music, talking about his life as a firefighter and hers in this small hamlet. They talked movi
es and books—and she pointed out their resident author Joe Michaels in the crowd of street dancers. Conner had told her what he could about military life and growing up on his grandfather’s ranch, and she even listened to his way-too technical description of his brainchild, a firefighting drone, just in the sketching stage.
She’d sat across from him on the shoreline and as the moon rose, she dug a trail into the pebbled beach, occasionally pitching a rock out into the waves softly whispering on shore. He couldn’t help notice how the wind played with her silky hair, the stars glowing in her eyes, and for the first time in he didn’t know how long, he just relaxed.
He’d nearly heard his relief gusting out in a rush when she said she was a Christian.
Because that meant she didn’t expect anything from him but an easy, right-now friendship. He didn’t have to worry about the what-ifs simmering between them, the kind that usually made him dodge these short-term, fire-line-induced relationships. He just wasn’t into flings, like some of the other guys might be.
But he did enjoy her laughter, the way she leaned into his stories, listened to him. After spending a week with his sweaty, ornery, and occasionally rough-mouthed team, sitting with Liza felt like bathing in light and hope. Nearly intoxicating, and he dearly hoped he might find her again—
“Conner! Watch out for that snag!”
Jed’s voice, just down the line, and Conner looked up to see the wind had torched a nearby white pine, dead and dry, fallen at an angle. Flames raked over it, sizzling at the crown that dripped out over the edge of their line.
In the orange haze of night obscured by the smoke drifting over their line, they might have lost track of how the fire had grown.
Conner stepped away from the snag, jogging down the line. They’d cut in nearly half a mile. Another quarter mile away the road ended in a gravel quarry where the logging trucks turned around.
A big, bare area suitable for a safety zone. But to get to it, they’d have to run through uncut forest.
The snag lit another tree nearby, and fire blazed up the trunk, out through the woodpecker holes, and along the deadened branches.
“We need to get out of here,” Jed said, meeting Conner. “I’ve called in for a tanker, but it’s ten minutes or more out.”
“We might have ten minutes,” Conner said. “But—”
“We don’t want to take the chance. Let’s get moving.”
“To the gravel pit or—”
“Back along the trail. I don’t like how the fire is blowing up down the line. We’ll tell them to drop retardant on the trail, come back with a dozer.”
The trail made for a decent path as Conner rounded up his crew and headed out with Jed.
It only took a matter of minutes for him to realize how right Jed had been to call them off the line. The fire seemed to be creating its own weather, the smoke rushing over them, thick, hot, burning his throat. He pulled up his bandanna, stretched out into a jog.
Not too fast—he didn’t want to turn an ankle. But not slow enough for the ash and char to catch him.
Firebrands—pine cones, sticks, needles—swirled in the air, stinging his face.
And then he heard it—the locomotive roar of the fire, whipped to frenzy by the wind. He wanted to turn, to gauge the flame lengths, but out of the corner of his eye he could see it—the fire advancing through the forest, brilliant, hot, red-orange, bright yellow.
Angry.
He kicked up his pace and heard the heavy breathing of his crew behind him.
He heard a shout then—Jed, twenty yards ahead of him, also running hard, half obscured by smoke.
He rounded the bend and Jed caught him by the shoulders. “Stop—the fire’s jumped the line.”
Sure enough, maybe twenty yards ahead, the fire had spurred over the dirt road, torching an overhanging snag.
“We’re cut off—the others are past it,” Jed said, surveying the trail behind Conner.
The crew had caught up. Reuben pulled the chainsaw off his shoulder. A big man, even he was breathing hard from the exertion. A red line on his neck betrayed where the saw teeth had bit into his skin.
“We need another escape route. Cascade River is southwest, through the forest, about three hundred yards from here—”
“You’re kidding me. Through the forest?” This from Pete Brooks. “We can’t outrun the fire.”
“We’re going to have to,” Jed said. “Go!”
And Conner, who hadn’t panicked yet, ignored the claws in his chest, turned, and barreled into the twisted debris of forest.
“Don’t fall!” Jed’s voice, but it could have been Conner’s as he fled, slapping through brush, his feet landing on jutted, rocky soil barely illuminated with his headlamp.
He heard Jed’s voice on the radio, screaming for the retardant drop.
Conner thrashed ahead, burst into a small clearing. His breath turned to fire in his lungs.
He could hear it.
Either the rush of a river or the fire closing in.
Pete Brooks raced past him; Reuben right behind, thundering through the forest, his saw in his grip.
The other hotshots had abandoned their Pulaskis. Graham ran just a few feet behind Whip, probably making sure that she didn’t stumble. They passed Jed without slowing, heading for the forest on the other side.
“We got about forty-five seconds before this thing blows up,” Jed yelled as he raced past Conner. “C’mon!”
Conner turned to follow when he saw Tom Browning, ten yards behind, in the woods.
He was limping, badly.
And, to Conner’s horror, when the kid hit the meadow, he tripped on a rock, and went flying.
Conner stifled a word and ran to him.
Tom’s helmet lay on the ground a few feet away. Grime and soot streaked his face, his expression a grimace of pain as he grabbed his ankle and howled.
“Get up—”
Tom rolled to his feet. Swore. Conner grabbed him by the shirt, flung his arm around his shoulder. “Let’s move.”
“Sorry—”
“Just run!”
The kid fought, his teeth clenched, as the forest exploded around them.
Training images of fire entrapments burned into Conner’s brain. How firefighters cooked under the flimsy tinfoil shelters that were meant to shield them from a flashover.
Hardly.
But even if they didn’t burn, the superheated air could sear their lungs. Already his eyes watered, sparks swirled around him, landing in the forest, igniting brush and trees.
However, deploying their fire shelters in this fuel-rich forest would be lethal.
They ran through a gauntlet of fire. Conner held his arm up to his face, fighting the burn, the flames.
Then he saw it—a clearing of the trees—and against it, the yellow fire shirts of his team. Heard Jed yelling at him.
The world narrowed, focused on the pinprick hope of survival.
They broke out of the forest and Jed caught Conner’s arm before they both flew over the edge into a gorge twenty feet below, a frothing, cool river.
“C’mon!” Jed said, and pointed to a wash where boulders and rocks formed a natural slope.
His team was already scrambling down the cliff.
Conner helped Tom over to it, the fire crackling behind him, then scooted down, his heart in his mouth as he nearly jumped into the wet sanctuary of the gorge.
Jed tumbled down right behind him.
They stood there, congregated near the river’s edge, gulping in air as the smoke gathered above them, the fire flickering out over the cliff.
Reuben let out a hot breath. “That was close.” He pulled off his bandanna and pressed it to the wound on his neck.
Jed hauled out his radio, called in to check on the other hotshots.
Conner closed his eyes with near tangible relief when Sarge, the crew boss, called in.
Only then did Conner hear the roar of the drop plane, soaring in to bathe the forest in re
tardant.
Tom sagged down in the river, grimacing.
No one spoke then, just watched the fire throw cinder and ash into the river, the forest sizzling, popping, choking around them.
The silence stayed with them as they hiked upstream, as they found a place to climb out, as they called in their position and hiked another two miles to a forest service road.
Miles DaFoe, who’d flown in to help as Incident Commander, picked them up in the buggy. They crammed into it, gulping water, staring out the windows.
And this was exactly why he needed friendships with no strings, no promises.
But he needed them all the same.
#
Liza wasn’t usually rousted out of bed before dawn, but something nudged her spirit, a darkness that tunneled through her, twisted her through her bedsheets.
She couldn’t get Conner off her mind.
She didn’t want to attribute her thoughts to the way he’d turned an hour of touring the Deep Haven festival into six delicious hours of conversation, cumulating with them sitting on the beach, listening to the waves comb the shore while he told her about his life in Montana. And a few near misses during his military service that he’d probably completely played down.
He was a quiet man, with a self-deprecating sense of humor, and when he talked, he picked up things, like a rock, rubbing it with his thumb, or folding his napkin, or even sorting through the pebbles, looking for an agate. Like he always had to be moving, thinking, even as he let his thoughts slow down. Unravel.
With their conversation, any sort of weirdness between them, the kind that might accompany a stir of desire, of hope, also settled into a comfortable warmth.
Friends.
Liza couldn’t exactly ignore the way when he looked at her with those amazing blue eyes, her heart gave a rebellious leap, but she’d managed to tame it into a soft smile. She’d had good-looking, just-friends before. Most of her life, actually. And sure, nothing like the way Conner made her feel, but it didn’t matter.
He was in town for only a few weeks. And during that time, she’d do her best to be his friend.
Playing With Fire: inspirational romantic suspense (Montana Fire Book 2) Page 3