“That was ugly.”
That statement encompassed the total scope of his comment. Cal went silent and continued his inspection of the dark sky. This time there was no joking, no sense of humor about it. The grim statement said that she had indeed misjudged him. He wasn’t being flippant about fighting fire. Somewhere in his past, he too had seen what it could do.
Chapter 3
Someone kicked Cal. Hard.
He grunted and rolled away. It was dark, predawn maybe.
Cal had been in enough fights as he bounced between foster homes that there was no hesitation. Pivoting on an elbow tucked against his side, he swung out his feet in a wide arc.
A high cry and his attacker fell to the ground with a grunt.
Cal rose to get the position advantage and banged his head hard against the underside of the truck he’d been sleeping beside. That dropped him back to the ground and filled his eyes with blazing splotches of light.
He knew he wouldn’t be stable if he tried to stand after that hard a blow to his head, so this had become a ground war.
Finding his attacker by their gasping breath, he rolled right on top of…
“Ow! What the hell?” Jeannie!
“Jeannie?” He had her pinned beneath him in the darkness.
“Cal?”
“Why the hell did you kick me?” His head was really starting to spin now.
“I tripped on you. Why did you kick me?”
“I was sleeping.” He slowly became aware of her body warm against his. He’d slept under his jacket, which had been fine until the morning dew settled damp and chilly. Jeannie wasn’t damp and chilly. Everywhere they touched, a warmth radiated out of her.
“You slept here? In front of Steve’s truck?” He could feel her breath brushing against his cheek.
“As good as anywhere.” He breathed in deeply. The morning was quiet, just the two of them wrapped in a breathless cocoon of dark and silence.
“You smell incredible.” He buried his nose in her hair and inhaled again. “Really incredible.”
“You’re slaying me with your poetry.” She shoved against him. “And your body weight.”
“Oh, sorry.” He sat up slowly, unsure of the whereabouts of the truck bumper. There, close behind him. He reached out a hand and helped her sit up, making sure she didn’t clip the heavy steel. His legs were across hers, and he was sort of sitting in her lap. They were so close that they were practically in each other’s arms… They were in each other’s arms. The back of her leather jacket lay against one of his palms as he held her upright, the thin T-shirt material covering her rib cage beneath his other.
***
Jeannie knew it was dumb, but she let herself stay in Cal’s arms a moment. It felt so good to be held. She’d lost half the night to nightmares of her family cattle station in flames. Seeing generations of history and hard work burning, as if she’d actually seen it consumed by the flames rather than being fifty kilometers away dropping a load of foam while it happened.
Cal’s hands on her felt good, strong, safe. She could feel her pulse against his palm. Reaching out into the dark, she found his chest. Like any wildland firefighter, apparently even one who wielded a camera, he was immensely fit.
Safe.
That word circled back again, washing off the blackened layers of last night’s fearful sleep. Then she had an evil thought. If simply being held by Cal Jackson felt this good, what would it be like to kiss him? Maybe if she were a morning person, her common sense would have awoken by now. But she wasn’t. She was a night owl with an early alarm clock.
So, with her common sense having hit the snooze button, Jeannie leaned in the last few inches and kissed him.
Cal actually hesitated. Actually had the decency to pull back, to make sure it was something she meant to do.
But the first brief meeting of lips was enough. It told her what she needed to know. Jeannie left one hand on the center of his chest. She ran the other up his shoulder, into his ever-so-soft hair, and pulled him back to her.
This time he didn’t hesitate. Neither was he all tongue and hard pressure. He tasted her lips, then her tongue, as if they were the finest treat. His hand didn’t lunge up and grab her breast. It simply wrapped around her ribs, holding her tight against him. Such amazing hands.
She’d noticed them on the flight yesterday, even as he took her photograph. Big hands that held the camera so delicately, as if it were porcelain, but with the confidence of long familiarity. That was why she’d turned away to concentrate on the flight, because she could really spend some time getting to know those hands.
Jeannie wasn’t promiscuous; she enjoyed a good joke and a good tease as much as the next girl. It almost always stopped there. But Cal’s kiss could convince her that she’d really been missing something. Nerve endings all down her body insisted on telling her just how happy they were with this wake-up call.
Cal broke it off first. Easing back. Pulling away. Coming back for just the gentlest brush of lips. Then easing another inch away.
Her head was spinning from far more than the fall when he’d swept her feet out from under her.
“Whoa there, Helitack. Just whoa there.” His breathing was ragged.
She liked the nickname. Jeannie typically flew in a helitanker role, but every now and then, especially with the big Firehawk, she transported a crew into position for a helicopter-launched attack, a helitack.
Jeannie brushed her lips across his once more and could feel his pulse race skyward. Had she ever had that effect on a lover? Sure, when they were at the top moments of sex. But just from a kiss? Not that she could recall.
Then she could feel her own ribs heaving against his palm and she knew she was no better off.
“Damn, Hotshot. That kiss was aces.”
“Right back at ya, Helitack. What brought that on? No, wait. Don’t answer that. I don’t want to know. It’s a dangerous weapon, and I don’t know if I’d survive if I knew how to wield it—not if it makes us do that again.”
Jeannie turned, able now to see him faintly in the slowly breaking day. She shifted until she knelt, straddling his knees. Against his mild protest, he didn’t put up much of a fight, she draped an arm over either shoulder and leaned in to kiss him again. Just to see if her first reaction was real or imagined.
Overbalanced, he tipped back against the truck.
“Ow! Shit!” He jerked the hand from her ribs and moved it to the back of his head.
“Sissy!” She hadn’t knocked him against the truck that hard. She ran her fingers through his hair until she found his fingers and then the massive lump.
“Easy,” he hissed. “Undercarriage of the truck. Thought you were attacking me, and I tried to stand up under the truck.”
She eased back until she was sitting across his calves and helped him upright.
“Remind me to be more careful if I ever wake you up again. You wake up nasty, Hotshot.”
“While you just kick people in their sleep.”
“Completely intentional, I promise. I’ll make sure to do it next time too. I’ll just dodge away faster. Truth be told, I don’t wake up gracefully either, at least not before noon. But why sleep here?” She stood. She really needed some coffee and then to prepare her bird for the day. Maybe some food before she actually flew, if her stomach woke up soon enough. And if it stopped flip-flopping about from the overwhelming power of Cal’s kiss. She helped him to his feet, then bent down to retrieve his jacket while his eyes slowly uncrossed from the vertigo of standing up.
“No beautiful helitack gals offering me a share of their bed. Besides, I like sleeping under the stars. Slept out on a lot of fires.”
She gazed upward. The lightening of the eastern sky didn’t brighten the day much. All it did was add definition to the massive ash cloud.
“No stars,”
she commented. She looked down to see him rubbing the back of his head once more and wincing.
“Damn truck just made me see plenty of them.”
“A lot of smoke up there.”
With the unerring compass of a firefighter, he turned to face the ash plume without even needing to scan the horizon. He gazed at it for ten long seconds, assessing the pattern and flow of the clouds. They didn’t need to exchange any words; they both knew how to read it.
The lower reaches of the smoke cloud weren’t just dark, they were black with hot ash. Mid-level billowed with fast-moving heat clouds. The high plume, lit white by the morning sun behind it, rose until the jet stream flattened its top. All that taken together meant that the fire was on the move and had found plenty of fresh fuel in the night. New territory burned and new areas were under threat.
“C’mon.” He took her hand and pulled her toward the food truck. “We’ve got to get you up in the air.”
That simple. Like any true wildland firefighter, what he cared most about was beating the fire.
That he had also just, without hesitation, stated that she was a major asset in the battle was rather startling. No gender question. No age question. No competency doubts. All that crap about pretty women and big helicopters that was usually thrown across her path didn’t exist for Cal Jackson.
She stopped him for just a moment before they got to the food truck, though it was hard because she could smell the brewing coffee.
He looked down at her, waiting for her. Giving her room to think her own thoughts, rather than telling her what she was supposed to be thinking.
Well, she finally knew the answer to Cal’s question from last night.
“Us,” she told him. “We’ve got to get us up in the air.”
His hesitation and nod before he turned once more toward the food truck were thanks aplenty.
Chapter 4
Exactly thirty minutes after official local sunrise, to the second, the choppers of Mount Hood Aviation roared aloft as a unit into the gray sky. Emily flew the other Firehawk to Jeannie’s right. The pair of 212s and the MD500 fell behind quickly. They were less than halfway to the front line when Jeannie spotted Henderson’s plane climbing into the morning sky.
“Good morning, sports fans,” he called over the command frequency. “We only lost a dozen homes overnight because the local engines kicked some serious butt. Any bets on the insurance companies screaming about their incompetency?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “No? Now it’s time to punch this sucker out. Firehawks Oh-one and Oh-two, I want you working the flank two miles east of where you left off last night.” He read off coordinates that Cal scribbled down on a handy pad of paper.
Jeannie toggled her number two screen to a terrain map and pointed a finger at the right keypad. “Punch in the coordinates there,” she instructed Cal over the intercom. It saved her engaging the autopilot and removing her hand from the controls.
He keyed them correctly the first time, and together he and Jeannie leaned in to study the terrain. Rough but not impassable for the ground crews.
She toggled the feed to a new overlay.
“What’s that?” Cal inspected it carefully.
“Steve’s drone imaging. He has a feed to Emily, Mark, and me. He managed to set up an auto-sync on the terrain map of his latest data stream from the drone’s infrared camera. You can see the fire clearly. But notice the small dots.”
“Looks like a smoke team.”
“Good eye. That’s—”
“I’ve got two good eyes,” Cal cut her off and aimed a powerhouse smile at her that left her heart rate distinctly elevated.
She’d definitely noticed his light brown eyes. A nice match to his wavy, light brown hair. Focus, girl. “That’s your hotshot team. Depending on where Steve is flying, the information can be out-of-date, but it at least gives us an idea.”
“Fire’s moving north-northeast.”
Jeannie couldn’t see how he could tell that from the tiny terrain map. When she glanced over, he wasn’t looking at the map any longer. Instead, he had his camera with its long lens aimed ahead.
“Cheater,” she muttered to herself. Then she saw what he’d seen. The plume was still visible from their side of the fire, but it was sending up black smoke. It was being blown away from them and had found fresh fuel. Now it was headed back into the mountains. The problem was that the fire had burned south into Parma Park. So, when it turned east once more, whole hillsides of mountainside homes would suddenly be at risk.
Throughout the long day of flying, Jeannie kept being surprised by what Cal could see. Always a beat ahead of her own observations, sometimes several. And his cameras were kept busy as well.
At one of the refueling stops, he shifted into the rear of the chopper, saying, “Gotta get away from the Plexiglas.” She rigged a monkey line for him, a three-meter strap that let him move freely about the rear cabin without falling out the wide-open cargo bay doors. He wore one of the headsets so they were still able to talk.
Every now and then he’d ask her to fly a little sideways on a drop or track a hundred yards farther north on a return flight. When she could safely comply, she did.
Most of their talk was about the logistics of fire. And he was good about dropping a conversation in mid-syllable if a call came in from outside. It was easy and friendly, but it didn’t tell her much more about the man she’d so wantonly kissed. Kicked, then kissed. And now she was awake enough to kick herself for it.
She never dated within her own crew. Jeannie had made that mistake once years before when she’d been living in Katherine in the Northern Territory and flying supplies out to the cattle stations while still piloting fixed wing. Jeannie actually did owe Jeoffrey some gratitude. The awful collapse of their relationship had been part of what motivated her to leave Katherine and go to America for her fire science degree, which had ultimately gotten her into flying fire-attack rotorcraft.
When Cal hadn’t been part of their crew, uh, yesterday… How had he done that? Just yesterday he’d been a complete unknown. And now she’d kissed him and he was wandering about her chopper as if he’d always been there. She could feel the tiny shifts when he crisscrossed the cargo bay. Was aware of him in a way that was really upsetting her. She didn’t want any of this.
One thing Jeannie knew that Cal would just have to learn: once she knew what she wanted, there was no stopping her. And what she wanted was not Cal Jackson. At this point in her life she cared about flying and fire and her new Blackhawk. That was plenty.
The decision made her feel easier about this morning’s kiss. It had been merely a pleasant aberration. She tried to engage Cal in a friendly conversation over the headset; that would prove that she could be pleasant without jumping into bed with a man.
Cal didn’t cooperate. His replies were brief, often monosyllabic, occasionally no more than grunts.
Jeannie was starting to get pissed again, so she decided to ignore him and focused on the problems around her. And there were plenty.
The Grindstone Canyon Fire had long since gone beyond Grindstone Canyon. Now that the fire was moving back into residential neighborhoods, the battle on the ground had shifted from wildfire engine crews on twisty logging roads to include a lot of local engine companies defending homes. Now that they had roads, the fire districts’ big, pretty red engines could access the fire’s leading edge.
The city had already killed the electricity to the entire hillside. The number of secondary fires caused by sparking wires from burned-over power poles and torched houses was a major concern. Even more than the evacuation orders and the house-to-house searches by the police, the loss of electricity had finally convinced the residents it was time to leave. Maybe it was the loss of their air-conditioning. It didn’t matter in the end.
What did matter was that suddenly the roads were clogged with panicked drivers try
ing to salvage their belongings into their sports cars, then racing downhill. At the same time, the news vans raced uphill. The resulting congestion blocked the big engines from getting where they were needed among the narrow, twisting roads.
That doubled the load on MHA. Several big air tankers were up. Making neat seventeen-minute laps from the airfield, the pair of red-and-white BAe-146s were dropping beautiful long swaths of bright red retardant on the ridges. Their four jet engines and three-thousand-gallon capacities made them powerful allies. They were also maneuverable enough to navigate the steep hills reasonably well. They couldn’t get down into the terrain like the rotorcraft, but they were still amazing to watch.
Sometime during the morning, the cooler sea breeze was replaced by the Santa Ana winds. They weren’t heavy yet, but they were predicted to be. And since this fire was already in the Santa Barbara suburbs, the fire teams had to kill it fast. That wind change—along with the fire’s invasion into residential areas and the complexity that added—had escalated it from a Type II to a Type I fire during the morning. Rick Dobson, MHA’s Type I Incident Commander, one of only seventeen in the country, was flying in from Utah in a King Air and issuing a constant stream of instructions to Henderson and Carly Mercer, MHA’s fire behavior analyst.
Thankfully, that increased their loads, but not hers. Her job was to fly and dump. Normally she clung to every word Carly said, trying to figure out how the woman saw what she did. Nicknamed the Fire Witch, Carly was another of those people who made Jeannie feel smarter simply by working with her. For all of Jeannie’s flying and fire science degree, Carly knew things that could never be taught. Of course, she’d been raised by a smokejumper father and, after a fire had caught him, by her smokejumper uncle. Fire was in her blood. Jeannie knew it would be in Carly’s kid’s blood, when she got around to having one. For now, Jeannie concentrated on listening to Carly and flying as much like Emily as she could.
She lined up her latest load of water over the backyard of a house clogged with ornamental trees dying from the long summer. The moment before she released her load, right where the ground crew really needed it, her radio crackled on the command frequency.
Full Blaze Page 5