This particular female pilot had done a damn neat bit of flying to save his behind. And she said that her teammate was unbelievably better. So maybe the pedestal was deserved in this case.
“Can’t see when I drop, but I’m not above peeking.” Having said that, Jeannie spun them around in a move so slick it left his head spinning. She continued to fly in the direction she’d been going, but now they faced backward so that they could see where she’d just flown.
Even as Cal reoriented himself to flying backward, he could see the results. The water, mixed with foaming agent, had expanded in volume by more than ten times to cover a broad area. Jeannie’s load had dropped over a swath of crown fire, flames jumping from the top of one tree to the next.
How many times had he stood beneath a crown and raged as the fire passed him by, high overhead, totally out of his reach to fight it? He could see the line where the foam had cooled the upper fires, knocking them back to earth, down to where the hotshots and other fire teams could fight them on the ground. He’d often appreciated it from the ground, but he’d never seen it from above.
“Sweet!”
“Thanks.”
They shared a smile. Then she shifted the controls. In one smooth motion they went from flying backward to flying forward the way they were facing, headed once more for the swimming pool.
“Where did you learn to fly like this?” Cal had seen a lot of pilots, but Jeannie had a smoothness he hadn’t seen before. “It’s like you’re wired into the gear. And the way you stayed stable in the currents off the ridge when you saved my sorry ass… You must have some kind of mystic communion with the world’s winds.”
Jeannie was grinning. “I’m a cyborg, wired straight into my sweet machine. Do you always run your mouth like a ’roo gone mad?”
“A ’roo?”
“A kangaroo.”
“So you’re from Australia?” Cal did his best to appear clueless.
“What, didn’t my accent give me away?”
“Might have if I hadn’t thought you were a Kiwi.” Of course he’d recognized the Strine in her speech. It was like Scottish, always sounding so sexy to his American-trained ear. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t tease her about it a bit.
“A Kiwi?” Her voice rose enough to hurt his ears over the headset that blocked most of the rotor noise. “A Kiwi? I sound like a goddamn islander? Wherever you got your ear, you should demand a goddamn refund.”
“I asked for one, but when I was on the Black Saturday bushfire, they weren’t issuing Strine hearing aids to bloody Yank hotshots.”
The chopper actually jinked sideways as Jeannie twisted to look at him. She recovered instantly, he was glad to see, and continued her descent toward the same swimming pool they’d used before.
She lowered and started the snorkel before speaking again. This time her voice was whisper soft.
“You fought Down Under on the Black Saturday fire?”
“Sure, didn’t you?” He tried to make it funny.
She nodded, but didn’t say anything.
And suddenly he was sorry he’d teased her. More than a million acres, four thousand homes and businesses, and 173 lives. The flames had moved at over sixty kilometers per hour across the land. Even cars weren’t fast enough to escape the flames on some of the rutted back roads that the Australians called tracks.
Jeannie sucked another nine hundred gallons into the belly tank, while the furniture that hadn’t been blown aside before was slammed up against the fence. After that, they fell into a quiet routine as she flew.
On one of the trips, he had her call the hotshot ground crew. “They’ll want to know about that tongue of fire to the west. They can’t see it from the ground yet, but if they move fast, they can cut it off.” And by the time they returned with the next load, the hotshots had done just that. It was a new perspective up here, one that they mostly enjoyed in silence.
They made three more trips before she needed to get more foaming agent and fuel. He kept taking photos, but nothing matched that first portrait of her. The image was burned into his brain. He’d take a picture of Beale’s helicopter, for that was the ex-major’s name, spilling retardant…and think about Jeannie’s profile. He’d hear the tank doors opening for their own drop…and think about her smooth accent.
Cal Jackson never went soft on any woman, yet somehow she’d slipped past his guard in just their first hour of meeting. Hell, in the first ten minutes, if he was willing to admit the truth. Which he wasn’t.
When they returned to the helispot to fuel up, he hopped off and left her to fly the next round alone. First, he’d been running with the hotshots for more than forty straight hours before he’d been trapped, and he was falling asleep in the seat now that the last of the adrenaline was gone.
Second, he needed a little more distance from Jeannie of the deep-red hair.
Chapter 2
Jeannie dropped down beside Beale’s chopper. Normally she liked this time of day. The sun setting especially red and gold because of all of the dust and ash in the air. She’d logged more than seventy thousand gallons dropped and one hotshot photographer rescued. She liked the way the two Firehawk choppers looked side by side in the farmer’s field that they’d converted to a helispot—a fancy name for some tanker and fuel trucks, a food truck with some rickety picnic tables, and a row of tents.
Her old MD500 was already in. Vern Meany was getting the hang of her. The pair of MHA’s Huey 212s were landing just as she was. Not a coincidence. The U.S. Forest Service contract said no flights between thirty minutes before sunset and thirty after dawn. Only Emily Beale was night-certified, but even she tried not to fly that shift, because she had to be grounded to rest a minimum of ten hours straight out of every twenty-four. One emergency night flight could screw up the morning runs.
The advantage of the helispot was that it was less than five minutes flying time from the near edge of the fire. The disadvantage was a lack of any form of amenities. What she really needed was a hot shower and some time to get over being pissed at Mr. Cal Joker.
“What? Weren’t you on the Black Saturday fire? Hell of a lark.”
Her family’s home and all of their belongings had gone up in that fire. They’d lost several acquaintances and one good friend whose husband had never recovered from the loss. Jeannie had done her best to fight the fire, but half the time her chopper was needed for rescue more than protecting homes. And then they were grounded most of the remaining time due to the high winds and dense smoke.
Her parents’ agri-flight company had literally gone up in the smoke. They’d managed to fly out two of the crop dusters, but that meant they’d had to leave the cars behind to burn along with a half-dozen aircraft they’d been repairing for other pilots. And the home that had been in their family for generations…gone.
That was what had driven her back to the United States. She’d first come here for her master’s degree in fire science, flown a couple summers with California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and one with Mount Hood Aviation, then gone to fly in Australia after graduation. But there was more to learn. When MHA had called with a year-round gig, she hadn’t been able to turn down the offer.
But Mr. Asshole Photographer had sure taken any joy out of the day. His mother should have thrown him away and kept the bloody stork.
Once the Firehawk was settled, Jeannie began the shutdown checklist. Cycling down electronics and engines and finishing up the logs for the day was normally a soothing, meditative action. But her pen wouldn’t write; it took her a while to scrounge up one that wasn’t dried out. The setting sun was streaming straight into the front windshield, making it wholly impossible to read the gauges in the shadow. And her pretty chopper had a hundred smoke smears on the seat, the headset, the door, the cargo bay, the…all from the jerk who wouldn’t stay safe with his hotshot crew.
After n
early breaking the plastic clipboard with the log sheet on it, Jeannie set it down very carefully. She slowly removed the headset that felt as if it had become permanently implanted into the sides of her head and hung it over the collective. Now she could hear the soft pings of the metal cooling in the turbine engines.
Jeannie leaned her head back against her seat, closed her eyes, and did her best not to scream.
The right-hand door on her side of the chopper creaked open, letting in the smells of smoke and cooking dinner. Of the achingly dry grasses—they had to worry about not igniting them with the service truck’s exhaust even though the hay harvest was done.
“Hi!”
She opened one eye and spotted Calvin Jackson standing just to her right and wearing one of his smarmy grins on his handsome face.
She didn’t plan.
She didn’t even think.
Jeannie blessed being left-handed as she shot out a fist and clipped him sharply on the chin. With it coming all the way across her body, she got some good power behind it. He tumbled backward, landing hard on the ground at Emily Beale’s feet. She had come up behind Cal without Jeannie noticing.
Jeannie looked at Emily, waiting for her reaction. Behind her mirrored shades, the fierce blond tilted her head down to look at the man groaning at her feet, then back up at Jeannie.
“Nice punch,” was all she said.
“Uh, thanks.” Jeannie’s hand hurt like hell. The guy must have a steel plate embedded in his chin.
Jeannie had to reach over with her right hand to pull the ignition key—her left hand was zinging too much to grip at the moment—and then she climbed down and closed the door.
She stepped over Cal, stopping shoulder to shoulder with Emily but facing in the opposite direction. “Okay if I finish the shutdown later?”
“Get some ice on your hand. I’ll ask Denise and her service crew to finish it for you.”
Jeannie nodded, managing not to look down at the evil Mr. Calvin Jackson, then headed for the food truck to get an ice pack and a cold beer.
***
“You certainly didn’t make a friend today, did you?”
Cal lay on his back, the short-cut grass prickling like hell. His head hadn’t stopped spinning, so he didn’t try getting up just yet.
He blinked open one eye against the pain. A pretty blond looked down at him through mirrored shades. He’d bet she’d be even better right side up, but it wasn’t worth the risk of standing to find out.
She waited quietly.
“I kinda thought that I had, but apparently not so much.” He levered himself up to sitting position and leaned back against the chopper to wait out the head whirl. He was right. Once the blond steadied a bit in his vision, she was a stunner. A stunner with a wedding ring and a serious dose of attitude.
“If you damaged her hand, I won’t be pleased.”
He opened his mouth to protest on behalf of his chin, then thought better of it. “You must be the ex-major she was talking about.”
“Which means I know many ways to hurt you. What did you do to her?”
“Nothing. She saved my life today, damned amazing bit of flying. She’s really, really good. I liked her too. But I was mainly coming over to thank her again for saving me.”
At that the major stopped her “looming in the gathering darkness” thing. She was tall, slender, and poised like a fighter. There wasn’t a chance in hell he was ever going to mess with her.
A big man strolled up close enough for Cal to see him clearly. Cal hadn’t noticed when the sun had disappeared beyond the trees, though it still lit the sky with the blood-orange of an ash-filled sky. The guy was the antithesis of the woman: dark-haired, broad-shouldered. He had a big, easy grin, a rolling gait, and a one-year-old girl tucked in the crook of one of his massive arms.
“Trouble here?” He handed the girl off to the woman. Then he abruptly changed moods and took over doing the badass looming thing.
“Just trying to figure that out myself,” was the woman’s soft reply as she settled the baby more comfortably.
Cal looked around, but didn’t see help coming from anywhere soon. He was on his own here, a feeling he knew all too well from his youth. But he was no longer a small boy easily bullied and beaten.
He struggled to his feet, only having to brace himself briefly against the chopper before his head finally settled. If he’d had more than two hours sleep in the last forty-eight, he’d be fine, but he was still more light-headed than the day after a serious bender. He recognized the guy’s aggressive stance, so he matched it, even though the guy towered above his own six feet. He sure hoped he wasn’t about to get slammed a second time. Unlike Jeannie’s, this guy’s fist looked as big as Cal’s head.
“I’m just a photographer. Got cut off from my hotshot crew and—”
“Cut off. How?” The big guy’s voice was deep. “Who was your escort?”
“No one. I’m not some newsie.” Cal had escorted plenty of reporters around a fire when he was a hotshot—he’d hated it. Without proper training, civilians were always getting into trouble, doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, asking stupid questions when the priority was working some serious hustle on cutting a fire line. Or getting the hell out of Dodge as he should have done earlier.
From experience, Cal knew that was what the guy would be thinking he was. He only knew of two wildfire photographers in the whole country with red-card firefighter certification, and he was one of them.
“I’ve been embedded with them for over a month. I earned my damn red card a decade ago and spent seven years in the crews before I picked up the camera. I hesitated for a photograph and there was a bad fall. I wasn’t more than a hundred feet behind and got cut off. Shit! And now I’ve got you two on my case and Jeannie punching me for reasons I can’t fathom.”
There was a silence. A long-held balancing act.
Cal didn’t back down.
“Harrumph,” was the big guy’s only comment.
The woman watched Cal for a moment longer, offered him the barest of nods, then cooed at her daughter and just walked away.
The big guy watched his wife’s departure for a long moment before turning back to face Cal. Now he wore a smile.
“What?” Cal closed his fists, just in case the smile was a feral one of the moment before attack.
The big guy held out a hand, taking Cal’s fist and shaking it when he didn’t respond. “Emily’s a pretty good judge of people. And I’ve been married to her long enough to know better than to second-guess her.”
“So, I’m… What? I’m suddenly magically okay?”
“Well, she didn’t throw you off base for messing up Jeannie’s hand with your chin.” The guy slapped him hard enough on the arm to send Cal staggering aside.
“Is your wife really that fierce?”
“You have no idea. So don’t get all cocky, but she’s going to leave it up to you to fix whatever you messed up with Jeannie. She’s very protective of her crew. I’m Mark Henderson, the Incident Commander—Air for Mount Hood Aviation. In my official role as ICA, I’ve already chatted with the hotshot crew boss. He said you were a good man in a tight spot, not given to mistakes or panic, and just got caught out. So you’ve got no problems with me, as long as you have none with my wife.”
Cal rubbed his chin one last time. “I still don’t know what the hell I did wrong.”
A blond in a stained MHA coverall pulled her service truck up beside the chopper.
“Good punch, eh?” Henderson was being amused.
The woman pulled out a flashlight and a clipboard with a checklist on it, then climbed up into the chopper pilot’s seat, leaving the door open.
“Straight left.” Cal returned Henderson’s smile. “So fast I never saw it coming.”
“She has an older brother,” the woman informed him in
a no-nonsense tone.
“Hey, Denise.”
“Hey yourself, Mark.” The blond smirked down at Cal.
“Her brother’s in the Royal Australian Air Force now, but apparently he used to tease the hell out of her when they were kids. Guess she learned to fight back when someone deserved it.” She turned to her task and apparently he dropped completely off her guy-even-exists radar.
Great. Now he was being told he’d actually deserved something that…he didn’t deserve. Cal wondered just what planet he’d landed on where stunning women with blond hair down to their butt fixed twenty-million-dollar helicopters and wholly discounted perfectly innocent hotshots.
“C’mon.” Mark rested a hand on Cal’s shoulder. “Let’s get some dinner.” They headed toward the food truck and the picnic tables scattered around it as Denise started to work on her checklist.
Cal fell in beside him, half thinking he shouldn’t go anywhere near wherever Jeannie went. But he didn’t have a lot of choice with Henderson’s meat-cleaver-sized hand on his shoulder.
“First time I tried to kiss my Emily, she slammed me face-first into a mess-hall table on an aircraft carrier. Could have had my ass court-martialed. Should have. I was her commanding officer and way out of line. Married me instead. ’Course I had to follow her halfway around the planet and back to convince her that was the right thing to do.”
“I didn’t try to kiss Jeannie.” Hadn’t even really thought about trying until this very moment. She was too smart and focused for him anyway. And unless he wanted to be on the receiving end of another serious punch, it was something he wouldn’t be trying anytime soon.
“You’re not stupid, are you?”
Cal looked over and up at Mark. There weren’t all that many people he had to look up at. Now it was Mark he wanted to strike at unexpectedly, feel that satisfaction of fist against bone. Cal had found a way out of high school at sixteen. Junior year he’d forged an ID and joined a fire cleanup crew while still underage. He’d been motivated and it took less than six months to make hotshot—one long, hard fire season. He’d done that fair and square.
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