Wildfire on the Skagit (Firehawks Book 9)

by M. L. Buchman

  Whatever Evan might be feeling, she knew she was looking at the best man she’d ever met.

  And maybe, just maybe, Krista Thorson deserved such a man.

  Chapter 9

  Once the girls had a safety introduction by Denise the Firehawk mechanic and had their helicopter ride with Emily and Jeannie around the flanks of Mt. Hood, they climbed aboard their buses and were gone.

  Watching twenty teenage girls group-hugging Evan had been a crackup.

  Watching the gentle hug he’d given to Mallory had almost ripped out Krista’s heart. Or perhaps it had healed it. She didn’t even know anymore.

  The camp felt unexpectedly quiet without them.

  Krista went in search of Evan. Not in the showers, not in his bunk, not in the equipment sheds. She raided Betsy’s kitchen for a couple of roast beef sandwiches and sodas, grabbed a pair of sleeping bags and headed out across the gravel parking lot.

  She found him in the only logical place, sitting on “their” fallen Doug fir well into the woods, staring at the running stream.

  Once again, she sat on the log close beside him.

  She handed him a sandwich and a soda, “Thought we should get our calories first this time.”

  “Thanks.” No smile, no tease, and no kiss. But if she was reading him right, also no dark-and-foul-mood either. He bit down on the sandwich and watched the forest.

  “You were amazing with the girls, especially Mallory, but amazing with all of them.” She wanted to ask what had happened between him and Mallory. What had they spoken of in that mere minute or two of privacy that had so changed the girl? Krista hadn’t even seen the pain in her until Evan had somehow brushed it aside. But now it was as if something had been washed away and the true woman shone through.

  “I’ll be back for next season’s tryouts,” Mallory had informed her when they hugged goodbye. Krista just might have to talk to Akbar about considering letting a true rookie onto the team, for she had no question about Mallory’s determination. She’d shifted from being driven away to being driven ahead. It was the same pain, just somehow…converted.

  And most of all had been the look in her eye and the tone in her voice. Mallory had what it took to be a smokie.

  Even trying to think about it made Krista’s head hurt. She didn’t have a lot of experience with those kinds of things. Though she suspected that Evan did and that’s why his bouts of darkness had been so confusing to her.

  Krista had a past that was both spectacularly good with her father and a major pain in the ass with school and men in general. Evan and Mallory had made trips to some other land she didn’t begin to understand.

  “Are you going to be explaining yourself anytime soon?” she asked before biting into her own tasteless sandwich.

  “Huh?”

  “Huh, he says. Yeah, that’s a way to get between this girl’s legs.”

  “Say what?” Finally, he turned to look at her. Then he looked down at his half eaten sandwich and back at her. “Wow! Why am I thinking I just missed something really important?”

  “Because you may be dense, but you aren’t stupid, Rook. Which part of your brain am I talking to now?”

  “I don’t have multiple personality disorder,” he bit down into the second half of his sandwich, but appeared to be aware of what he was doing for the first time.

  “No? Let me count them for you. One, Special Forces Green Beret dude who can do some really amazing shit. Two, one of the best smokejumpers to ever join MHA. Three, Mr. Dark and Moody—who is very mystical and enticing, by the way. Kind of like a rattlesnake a person just can’t seem to stop poking a stick at. Four, five, and six, a guy who can help a lost young woman find a center, utterly charm and inspire a whole troop of eighteen year old girls, and do the same to a twenty-eight year old one as well.” She tapped her own chest and realized that “utterly charm” didn’t begin to cover it.

  “That’s quite a list,” he nodded as if they could all somehow be the same person. “Though I think most of that ‘inspiring a whole troop’ goes more to you than me. Anything else?”

  “Seven, the best lover I’ve ever had.”

  “I admit,” he finished his sandwich and reach for a soda. “I do like the sound of that last one. Would you like me to elaborate on that last attribute?”

  “Soon, Rook, real soon.”

  She really wanted him to, but she had to make some sense of all of those conflicting men that were embodied in the man beside her.

  “Tell me about your sister.”

  # # #

  Evan had known that was coming, nodded that it was a fair question, but had to look away again. Had to turn away from Krista and look into a past far darker than the evening shadows around him. But, like the forest, there were also sun dapples of brightness in his memories that he’d forgotten—lost—until he spent three days with a group of young women with so much life in them.

  “Twenty-eight. Francine would be your age if she’d lived, instead she was dead when she was the same age as Mallory. My kid sister, a total pain in the ass. Too damn smart, I guess, hell of a lot smarter than me anyway. She saw everything so clearly.”

  Evan looked out into the shadows beneath the trees but could see her fading memory no more clearly for all his searching.

  “She saw people and would tell me about them.” He could almost see Francine sitting by the stream giving him her you doofus look.

  “I mean, she really saw them, in here,” he thumped a hand against his chest. “The shit Mom and Dad pulled when we kids didn’t meet their social agenda. It thought they were just weird. She’s the one who pointed out they were near psychotic, alcoholic assholes who only cared about themselves. The girls and guys at school, the nasty ones with so little going for them that their egos were the only thing they could bring to the game.”

  Krista was holding his hand, but he couldn’t turn to look at her.

  “She was also naïve, a real sweet kid. Kept trying to help people. But if you want to help someone, you teach them how to be better at what they’re good at. Green Berets taught me that. Francine kept pointing out what people were bad at, couldn’t help herself any more than your poor stick-poked rattlesnake.”

  He took a deep breath, he had to finish the thought he’d spent a decade dodging. The forest was in the dead silence that came after the day-critters had roosted or burrowed, but the night ones hadn’t yet come forth.

  “I told Mallory that maybe I went Special Forces to defend my sister, and maybe that’s why Mallory’s brother went and died. To defend her.”

  Krista hissed in a sharp breath of sympathetic pain.

  “I wish that really had been me. The truth is that I went in because I couldn’t help Francine. No matter what I did, it just got worse. I should have gotten her a therapist, drugs, committed her under a suicide watch, something. But what did I know. I was going to be a soldier. That was my ticket out of our screwed up family and I took it.”

  The pain was too much, too deep, and the tears came though he fought against them; a battle he’d won for years now lost.

  “Didn’t know,” he talked through the roughness in his throat, “that I was kicking out the last peg that was propping her up.”

  Krista folded him against her and he let her.

  He’d thought by coming into the woods, he was buying time to get his act together after the crap he’d churned up inside himself while helping Mallory. So why had he come to the only special spot he and Krista had to call theirs if he was trying to avoid her?

  She brushed her hands over him, kissed him atop the head as he lay against her, and murmured words he couldn’t hear but could feel washing over him like the cool evening air.

  The agony that had been burning in him was abating, retreating before Krista’s instinctive acceptance and kindness, quenched against a past he couldn’t fix. He’d been
twenty-two, fresh out of college, and ready to take on the world. What did he know about pain yet? He could fix it for his sister, but maybe he could repay it in her name.

  He pulled himself back from Krista. Pulled back until he could see her in the fading light of the sun gone behind Mount Hood, but not yet set.

  “You do this next year, I’ll be there. Don’t care where I have to come from, even the goddamn grave. I’ll be there. If I can save even one of them…” and his voice choked off, he couldn’t continue.

  # # #

  Krista kissed him. What choice did she have?

  She expected the attack, his need to purge the impossible pain he carried inside him. To lose himself in the act of sex. She would give that to him, whatever release he needed.

  She half hoped for the tenderness that he’d so surprisingly given her the first time they’d made love. She wanted to try again to see what it felt like to be a woman who deserved tenderness.

  She wasn’t ready for the two combined.

  With an intensity that had worried Akbar on the fire enough to come and ask her opinion before he spoke to Evan, her soldier boy turned his full focus on her.

  Wordlessly, because he was clearly far beyond words, he focused completely on giving her exactly what she wanted. He didn’t kiss her hard, but he did it so thoroughly that she felt as if she’d never truly been kissed before.

  Evan unrolled one of the sleeping bags and eased her down onto it.

  He didn’t strip and take her, he didn’t even pull off her shirt. Instead he used those big, powerful hands to stroke and mold her until she was no more than putty shaped to his pleasure.

  When a fire burned, it could burn on the surface or climb up the ladder fuels—from brush to sapling to tree to the top where it formed a running crown fire that raced with the wind through the treetops independent of the fire below. Depending on the intensity of the fire, the forest’s recovery might be fast or slow.

  But sometimes it burned down instead of up.

  A ground fire burned down into the deep duff or peat. Hard to detect and even harder to extinguish, it killed the very soil as it progressed. Soils could take decades to recover from an intense ground fire, the forest that would eventually return would have no hint of the old but had to be created anew.

  That’s the way Evan made love to her. Every move, every moment, he created such an intense heat, such an intense feeling that it burned away anything Krista had known about herself.

  When he finally freed her from her clothes and she arched hard against his mouth and hands at the slightest touch, there was no room left for self doubt. There was no over-tall, big-boned, over-built smokejumper who happened to be female. All that remained behind was a woman helpless to do anything but respond to the man.

  He entered her with the same gentle power, slow, tender, and wholly unstoppable. He rode her up until she knew only one thing. Until all else was erased.

  Even as her body thrashed with the pleasure Evan sent scorching through her, Krista knew one clear, perfect truth.

  With all his many facets, with his darkness and his passion and his joy, she was absolutely in love with him.

  And that was something she wanted with no man.

  # # #

  Evan woke in the pre-dawn darkness to a hand stroking him.

  Krista lay long and naked against him between the sleeping bags. The very first birds were singing in the trees. The brook was bubbling happily nearby.

  “Wakey, wakey, Rook.”

  “How can you have your hand where you do and still call me that?” He rolled his hips to gain a little more pressure against her palm. “Not that I’m complaining about your hand’s location.”

  “I didn’t think you were,” she murmured softly. She sheathed him and rose above him, sweeping the sleeping bag they’d been using as a blanket, like a cape to keep her warm against the cool morning air.

  She settled down over him, a perfect fit. She started with a slow rock of her hips that had him closing his eyes to relish the feeling.

  “Okay, as long as you do that,” he managed to gasp out. “I don’t mind if you insist on calling me Rook.”

  “Well,” she did a side to side thing that she hadn’t done before and he hoped that she did often in the future. “I can think of many things to call you, but I don’t think you’d like them to be your tag among the crew.”

  “Understood. Let’s keep those…oh my god, do that again…just between us.”

  “Look at me, Evan.”

  After a couple of failed attempts, he opened his eyes and did.

  The breaking daylight was revealing Krista a little more each moment. He pulled her face down to kiss her good morning as she continued building the rhythm between them.

  “Best sight I’ve ever woken to,” he made a point of leering at her shadowed breasts. “Damn but you’re an incredible woman, Krista.”

  “An incredibly large woman,” there was a tone in her voice that rang false.

  “Not filing any complaints,” he tried a joke, but it didn’t work.

  She kept them moving, but the feeling had changed. The motion of their bodies was no longer he and Krista, it was just their bodies.

  “Stop for a second. Just stop,” he finally clamped his hands on her hips to hold her still.

  She wouldn’t look at him.

  “Krista, now you need to look at me.”

  Only after several false attempts did she look at his eyes.

  “I’m not the best guy around with words, but I know one thing for certain.”

  He waited until he got a soft, “What?”

  “Any asshole that made you feel that you are one bit less than magnificent was an idiot. You are kind, big-hearted—”

  “And I have big breasts that you are very partial to,” she added with chagrin and no matching smile.

  It was hard not to acknowledge where his hands had naturally drifted. “No arguments on that point. But if you think I’m with you because of your fine breasts, then you’re even dumber than I am.”

  “So why are you with me?”

  Evan tipped his head from one side to the other trying to figure out how to answer that. He was past wondering why he was having this conversation at this particular moment. “I’ve never been with a woman I wanted more or made me feel so crazy good. But that doesn’t cover it.”

  “Then what does?”

  “What is it with women needing words?”

  “Because guys are incomprehensible and women get tired of always trying to explain them to ourselves.”

  Evan groaned in frustration and startled the same stupid squirrel watching them from atop the log.

  What he wanted was to finish what they were well past halfway doing. Wiggling his hips didn’t get him any response from the woman straddling him. She was warping his body with her amazing figure and his mind with her incredible eyes and impossible questions.

  “Why am I with you?” he growled it out.

  She nodded with the perfect complacency of someone who knew she was in absolute control. If only she’d looked happy about that power instead of so sad.

  “Because there isn’t another woman alive or dead I’d rather be with. When we have sex, I need you more afterward than I did before we started. I miss you every goddamn second we’re apart. Not your body, you,” he huffed out the last of it in total exasperation at his position. Here he was buried as deep as could be in an amazing woman kneeling over him so that her impossibly fit body was on incredible display…and he was being asked to think.

  Krista was looking at him wide eyed.

  “What?” he practically snapped at her.

  In answer, she propped her hands on his chest, slowly closed her eyes, and tipped her head back as she shifted her hips in that amazing way she had earlier.

  He wanted
to demand an answer, but Krista didn’t give him an opportunity. Instead she scooped a hand behind his neck and pulled him up to bury his face in her breasts.

  Evan would worry about understanding women some other time.

  # # #

  Somehow he kept surprising her. Krista had no doubt that Evan enjoyed her body. Definitely a T-and-A man and heavy on the former. Her body sort of made sure most of her lovers were that way, though none had ever been as imaginative or thorough about it as Evan—as he was proving at this very moment sending convulsions of pleasure along her nerve endings.

  But not a one of those past lovers, the good or the bad, had ever made a differentiation between her generous curves and the person who dwelled inside them.

  Not a one until Evan.

  She wasn’t thanking him with her body. When his words sunk in, her body had simply decided that it desperately wanted what she’d so rudely interrupted with her questioning.

  It was a final confirmation of something that had kept her awake for so long last night while Evan slept in her arms.

  The whirlwind of sensations that shot through her came forth as a cry from both their throats.

  For a moment, she gave herself completely to the wonder of the pounding that coursed through her system. That beat against the last doubts until her and Evan’s bodies flagged and were still, though their breath continued to heave like they had just completed some harrowing parachute jump.

  Last night she’d learned that she was completely gone on Evan; though she’d keep avoiding the “L” word, thank you very much. Crazy about him as she’d never been or even imagined being at any point in her life. And she…

  An eerie sound built slowly in the breaking dawn light. At first she wondered if it was coming from Evan, then maybe from herself.

  Finally the sound climbed high enough that she could identify the source as the MHA basecamp a few hundred yards away through the thick trees.

  “Fire,” she managed on a gasp.