How to Tame a Wild Fireman

by Jennifer Bernard

  Chapter Four

  If Lara blocked out the faraway roar of the fire, the barked orders and tense teasing among the firefighters, not to mention the unrelenting heat and the sweat running down her sides, she could almost imagine she was back in the relative peace of San Diego Hospital.

  For the first time since coming back, she actually felt comfortable.

  When she’d first shown up with Annabella and Romaine and offered to help the medical staff, it had been an entirely different story.

  “No,” Bill Donnell, the head of the Med Unit, told her, barely glancing her way, and clearly lumping her in with the ladies. “We already contacted all the local medical resources in the area. Massage doesn’t count as a medical resource.”

  “The firemen adore our massages,” Annabella protested.

  “Massage away. But no medical treatment.” And he’d brushed past them on his way to a firefighter who’d just been brought in via helicopter with a gash on his leg. Someone had applied a clumsy tourniquet. Donnell used scissors to cut through his filthy pants.

  Stung, Lara followed. “I’m not here to give massages. I have a medical degree from Stanford.”

  “The good Lord spare me from med students.”

  “I’m not a student, I’m finishing up my residency at San Diego Hospital.”

  “I hear they have a topnotch plastic surgery department.”

  “Mine’s in family medicine.”

  “See any kids around here? Didn’t think so.”

  He stalked away from her, but she chased after him again, followed by Annabella and Romaine. “I’ve done some emergency fieldwork too. Family medicine involves all age groups.”

  “Yeah? What was your last case?”

  Lara winced, but couldn’t lie. “I delivered a baby on a city bus.”

  The medic swung around, his hard gaze raking her.

  She stood her ground and barreled on. “Do you have any idea how unsanitary conditions are on a bus? I’ve done ER rotations and treated burns and broken legs.”

  “You’re not going to give up, are you?”

  She shook her head.

  “Fine. Take this one.” He gestured to the gurney where his newest patient lay clutching his thigh. “If he loses a leg it’s on you.”

  Romaine gasped. “Why do you have to be so mean, Mr. Fireman?”

  He spared her a glance of disbelief, then turned his attention back to Lara. After all her time in med school and in the hospital, it would take more than a few harsh words to knock her off-stride. She welcomed the challenge. Besides, she realized as soon as she bent over the injured firefighter, the poor guy was in no danger of losing his leg. It was a shallow flesh wound, no more. Someone out in the field had panicked and applied a completely unnecessary tourniquet.

  She quickly snapped on some gloves and examined the gash. “We can lose the tourniquet, it’s not helping anything. I’ll clean it, use some steri-strips to keep the wound closed, and he’s good to go. He may not even need stitches.”

  “I told Mort he was a freaking idiot!” The firefighter sat up, looking better already. “I always bleed like a stuck pig. Can you get this thing off me now?”

  Donnell gave Lara a wary nod. “He’s all yours. If you don’t kill him, we’ll try you out on another. But I gotta warn you, it’s not glamorous work. Mostly, you’ll be dealing with blisters. Now get busy, another crew just hiked in.”

  As she began dismantling the tourniquet, she caught the admiring gazes of Annabella and Romaine.

  “I offered him some shiatsu on the first day we were here and he nearly bit my head off,” whispered Romaine.

  Annabella merely put her palms together and bowed to her. Earning their respect was surprisingly gratifying.

  From then on the Goddesses brought her cookies and water bottles as she worked. A steady stream of injured firefighters limped to her corner of the medical tent. The work was not at all what she’d expected. Very few of the injuries were burns. As Donnell had warned her, the injuries mostly had to do with feet. Blisters were a big one. She spent a lot of time setting firefighters up with bowls to soak their feet in, nearly gagging from the stench as they removed their socks. She saw a few rolled ankles thanks to the rocky terrain they were working in. Dehydration was the other big culprit, causing heat exhaustion and stress. For this she handed out mineral supplements, glucose tablets, and lots of bottles of water. If the case was severe, she called for a Medevac.

  The other big surprise was how much the firefighters stank. Didn’t anyone take showers? Noticing her scrunched nose, Donnell explained that many firefighters were reluctant to shower in a stall where a thousand other filthy guys had already showered. After the fire was out, a lot of them booked a hotel room just to get clean.

  “You’re done,” she told her current patient, though the word “patient” didn’t fit the utter lack of patience with which he watched her work. He was in his late twenties, his face streaked with grime and soot, his muscular body straining to get back into action. He’d cut his thumb on a branch; she swabbed and bandaged it and now he was raring to go. Showing no respect for her careful bandage, he swiped it across his forehead.

  “Hey! I worked hard on that.”

  “Gotta break it in.” He winked at her. “Nice work, Doc.” He bounded out of the chair.

  “I think you should rest a little before you go back out there,” she called, futilely. He waved her off as he reported to the incident commander. “At least hydrate!”

  “You should take your own advice,” said Annabella, who was working the kinks out of an exhausted firefighter’s shoulders a few yards away. “And you should put on sunscreen too. You’re starting to burn. Did you notice that gorgeous fireman who was staring at you?”

  “No.”

  “He had the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen. Very . . . what’s the word . . . charismatic. Fiery. Fabuloso ass.”

  “Shh.” She glanced around at the bustling scene. “Don’t talk like that here. People might get ideas.”

  “I might not mind those ideas. Especially with someone like him.”

  Annabella’s description filtered into her mind. Blue eyes. Charismatic. Of all the people she’d known in her life, one boy fit those words perfectly.

  No. It wasn’t possible. Just because she was back in Loveless didn’t mean Patrick Callahan was. And why would the exiled son of the former governor be fighting a wildfire?

  “He was looking at you as if he recognized you.”

  The firefighter she was massaging lifted his head. “I have blue eyes. And women tell me I have a nice ass.”

  “And so you do, querido,” said Annabella soothingly. “I noticed right away.”

  Lara plunged back into her work, pushing aside the uneasy feeling Annabella had inspired. It would be too weird a coincidence if she and Patrick were both back in Loveless. Both helping out at the same wildfire. At the thought of seeing him again after all this time, a shivery thrill tightened her stomach. Love him or hate him, Patrick wasn’t the kind of guy you ever forgot. Not that she loved him. Or hated him—too much. No, she was neutral on the subject of Patrick Callahan IV. Totally neutral.

  Patrick and Dan worked like dogs, clearing away the vegetation around the squat little concrete building bristling with electronic monitoring devices. In the distance, they heard the fire beating at the air like demented angel’s wings. The chopper didn’t wait around long, clearing out about ten minutes after they started the prep. Neither of them worried about it. Either someone else would pick them up or they’d hike out to a road.

  First they got the chainsaws going and cleared away the bigger brush. Then they went after the understory with Pulaskis, trying to get it all the way down to dirt. Their goal was a cleared perimeter of at least a hundred feet.

  They hacked at the brush, muscles straining, sweat drenching their yellows. Patrick’s feet weren’t yet used to the brutally rocky terrain. It felt as if they were burning up inside his boots. He kept an ear tuned to
the steady roar of the fire. It sounded like the thunder of an otherwordly, enormous herd of stampeding mustangs, coming closer, closer . . .

  When they’d gotten about three-quarters of the job done, a voice crackled over the tactical channel.

  “Fire’s picked up speed. Chopper’s unavailable, but according to the map there’s a two-track vehicle trail about a mile to your east. We’ll send ground crew out with a four-wheel drive. Can you make it?”

  “Ten-four. I know where it is,” answered Patrick. If he wasn’t mistaken, he and Liam used to ride their dirt bikes down that road.

  “Let’s light some fusees and get the hell out,” he told Dan.

  “Man with a plan. I like it.”

  They pulled the long red fusees from their packs. They looked like firecrackers but smelled much worse. As Patrick cracked the fuse on the end, the stench of sulfur made his eyes burn and tear up.

  “Bet you don’t do that much during a structure fire, mate,” called Dan.

  “Nope. I’m the topman. Give me an axe and I’m home.”

  Blinking through the smoke, he touched off little fires at regular intervals along the rest of the perimeter. The dry grass crackled and burned nearly instantly.

  “What is this stuff?” Patrick called to Dan.

  “I heard it called cheatgrass. They planted it to restore burn areas. It kind of took over. Very dry and flammable.”

  Patrick gave a harsh snort. “Are they trying to keep us employed?”

  “Doing a bloody good job.”

  “I hear that.”

  When the understory had burned to the dirt, they stamped out the last remaining sparks with their boots, then gathered up the chainsaws, remaining fuel, and Pulaskis. Dan took a long draw on his water bottle. Patrick followed suit, angry with himself for forgetting such a crucial detail of wildland firefighting. Dehydration could kill you out here.

  When he was done, Patrick stowed the bottle with the rest of his line gear and heaved his PG bag onto his back. “Let’s book. I don’t like the sound of that fire.”

  “Lead the way, Yank. Unless there’s a wallaby around, I’m lost.”

  Patrick set off toward the east. Even though both of them had worked hard, he set a quick pace out of respect for the insistent bellow of the oncoming fire.

  “Sounds like a monster,” he called to Dan as they trotted through the pinyon.

  “They’re saying she’s a record-setter.”

  They hurried across the rocky, treacherous landscape, in which steep hills and loose dirt threatened to twist their ankles and bake their feet. Patrick blotted out the pain and focused on moving forward, paying attention to every footfall. The last thing he wanted to do was get injured on his first day out here.

  At the thought, he remembered the girl in the med tent, the one who looked so much like Lara. At the same time, it occurred to him that the two-track road where they were headed dead-ended at Goldpan Canyon.

  Goldpan Canyon.

  A memory rushed back—the last time he had gone there with Liam and Lara, during the summer after his freshman year in college. He’d had a fight with his father and needed to run, or howl, or beat someone up—or something. The devil in him had chosen to tease Lara.

  “All I’m saying is, if I lived with all those women, I’d try to pick up a few pointers.” Patrick had waited until Liam’s attention was elsewhere, so he could keep the conversation between Lara and him.

  Lara, as always, gave as good as she got. “So you need pointers? And I thought you were God’s gift to sorority girls.”

  “Nothing wrong with honing my skills. Come on, sneak me in, just once, so I can listen at a keyhole.”

  “What’s in it for me?”

  “I have some ideas. Fun ones.” He winked, loving the way she flushed under his teasing. None of the more sophisticated girls he knew at Princeton were as fun to rile as Lara. And when she got mad, her eyes glowed like amber in firelight and her lush lips tightened.

  So did his cock. He couldn’t let Liam know how much his best friend turned him on.

  “Unless your ideas involve you jumping off a cliff, they won’t be fun for me,” she retorted.

  He laughed. “You know you shouldn’t tempt me like that.” And as soon as he said the word “tempt,” he found he couldn’t drag his eyes away from her. She lay on her side, propped on one elbow, her black hair brushed away from her face, black makeup smudged around her eyes, making them even more dramatic. Everything about her contradicted itself. The harsh ink-black of her hair didn’t match the fine texture of her skin. Her goth-girl clothes masked the beckoning curves of her body. His hands itched to tear that long gloomy dress off her body and find out what she really had going on underneath. What was it about her that got under his skin like that?

  With a huge effort, he made himself look away, shading his eyes to check the sun.

  “It’s getting late,” he signed, after tapping his brother on the shoulder. “We have fifteen minutes until Liam has to cut up apples for the horses’ bedtime snack.” They all knew how much Liam hated being late for anything in his orderly routine.

  Liam got an anxious look. “Lara can’t help me tonight. She has a date.”

  “Oh really?” Patrick swung his gaze back to her. Her cheeks turned an endearing rose-pink. “I thought you didn’t date Loveless boys.” Although he tried to make a joke of it, it came out more serious than he’d intended. Lara never went on dates. The local boys were all too scared of her. He was pretty sure he didn’t like the idea of her on a date.

  “The key word is ‘boy,’ ” she said, tossing her head. The movement made her breasts stir under her shroudlike dress. And suddenly he didn’t care if she dressed like a ghoul, if she lived in a whorehouse, or even if she despised him. He had to touch her, had to see what she felt like under him. In a flash he was on top of her, rolling her onto her back and stretching her arms to either side. Her eyes went wide with shock, her breath came hot against his face.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Proving I’m not a boy.” The words sounded like the growl of a wild animal. Her eyes flicked sideways to Liam, who was staring at them in alarm.

  “Stop,” she said in a low voice. “You’re scaring him.”

  He didn’t release her, not yet. She felt too good under him, firm and curvaceous and yielding. “But not you? I don’t scare you?”

  For a long moment she stared up at him with eyes that looked like smoky gold in the late afternoon sun. He felt the beat of her heart, the flutter of her pulse. She smelled like roses and sweat, utterly lickable. “No,” she said. “I know you don’t want me. You’re just playing games, like you always do.”

  He bit his tongue to keep from telling her just how wrong she was. He wanted her so badly he was afraid to move his lower body in case she felt the physical evidence.

  “Get off me.” She wrenched her hands out of his grip and pushed against his chest. From the catch in her voice, he knew he’d thrown her off balance. Good. He liked having Lara’s complete attention. He rolled off her, then farther down the slope, toward the edge of the cliff. He vaguely heard Lara and Liam shouting behind him.

  Good. They should be scared. Because inside he was a fireball about to detonate, and if no one understood that . . .

  He stopped himself at the very edge, digging his hands into the scrubby grass. Liam stumbled to his knees and grabbed onto him. His brother’s terrified expression made Patrick curse himself. When Liam got overwhelmed, it took a while to calm him down.

  “Don’t worry, I’ve got pinpoint control,” he signed as he sat up. He rhythmically squeezed his brother’s arms, starting near his shoulders and moving down to his wrists. The pressure usually helped calm him.

  Lara, white with fury, burst out, “We ought to just push you over,” turned in a whirl of funereal skirts and stormed back up the slope.

  Patrick tugged his attention back to the rocky ridge he was currently climbing. No time for reminiscing out here.
When he got to the top, he looked back. From that elevation he could see the leading edge of the flames. They looked like a towering, spitting orange demon in a cloak of black smoke.

  “I see the road,” shouted Dan. He sprinted toward the narrow, overgrown trail on the far side of the ridge. Patrick didn’t move. The mighty presence of the wildfire fascinated him; he couldn’t look away.

  “Come on,” Dan shouted, his voice retreating into the distance. “Move your ass!”

  “Coming.” But still he stood rooted to the ground, riveted by the magnificent show, the Waller Canyon Fire’s dance of the veils, performed only for him. Flame met flame in a sinuous, glowing tornado of gas, like an erotic, fiery lover.

  He scrambled down the hillside and caught up with Dan, who had reached the two-track and was shading his eyes, looking for their ride. “Never seen anything like that,” Patrick panted. “Wish I had my camera.”

  “You’re a crazy bastard.”

  “That’s why they call me Psycho. Hear that sound?”

  “What, that little old campfire back there?”

  “No. Listen.”

  A groaning mwah came from the other side of the road. “What is that?” asked Dan.

  “Could be someone injured.”

  “No way. That’s some kind of an animal. Probably a sheep or something. Wildfires are hell on animals. Back in Jamberoo, I volunteer for wildlife rescue. That’s why I signed up to help out there. I was on vacation before this fire broke out.”

  Patrick looked at Dan with new respect. He was obviously much more than the fun-loving Aussie he appeared to be. Then again, Patrick knew all about how misleading surface appearances could be. “I’m going to check it out. Keep an eye out for the vehicle?”

  “Abso-bloody-lutely.”

  Patrick took off and scrambled up the hillside. His leg muscles burned from the jog through the woods, but physical pain never bothered him much. At the top of the rock-strewn hill, he lay on his stomach and peered over. He nearly jumped back in shock. A pair of terrified yellow eyes stared back at him in a white-furred, fluffy-bearded face.