Brandon's Bride

by Lisa Gardner

  “Victoria tells me your chocolate sodas are the best.”

  “Victoria? Oh, Vic. Sure, sure. And she’s one of my better customers.”

  Victoria blushed. “Don’t tell Randy,” she muttered.

  Brandon waited until Tom was scooping out the chocolate ice cream, then said as casually as possible, “Say, have you ever heard of anyone named Bud Irving?”

  Tom froze with his hand inside the ice-cream carton. Victoria stiffened.

  “Bud Irving?” she asked incredulously.

  “Why are you interested in Bud?” Tom asked carefully.

  The relaxed mood was definitely gone. Apparently, the subject of Bud Irving was a shocking one. Brandon proceeded slowly. “Bud was an old friend of my father’s. I’d heard he might be in the area.”

  “Oh, Bud’s in the area, all right,” Tom said, resuming plopping ice cream in the old-fashioned mugs. “And so are his surveillance cameras, his Dobermans, his sharpshooter rifles. Bud’s, uh, Bud’s a little bit socially challenged.”

  “Bud’s crazy as a loon,” Victoria added bluntly. “Holed himself up on the top of his mountain, ranting about everyone who’s out to get him. He’s got more feet of barbed wire than common sense, and when he comes to town, he talks to people who don’t exist.”

  “Bud probably needs to see a doctor,” Tom said more diplomatically.

  “Bud saw a doctor. Then he said the doctor was out to get him, too.” Victoria turned to Brandon. “Last year, we voted Bud the person most likely to climb a clock tower and shoot young children. My father keeps an eye on him. When Bud does decide to come into town, my father makes him leave the rifle at home. You don’t want to get involved with Bud Irving.”

  “Oh,” Brandon said. He wanted to sound casual, but it came out strained, and once again, he felt Tom’s scrutiny. He looked at the counter. So the last tie he had with his father was a crazy old man suffering from paranoid delusions. He wondered if he should be surprised.

  Tom abruptly slid the two chocolate sodas down the counter. “Vic’s probably right,” he said quietly. “I would stay clear of Bud Irving.”

  “All right,” Brandon said. “All right.”

  The front bell chimed, so Tom excused himself. Victoria leaned over and took a deep, appreciative sip of her frothy soda, but her gaze was on Brandon’s face.

  “How old were you when your father died?” she asked.

  “Twelve.”

  “And you remember the name of his friends?”

  “When you don’t have much to remember, you keep what you have.”

  “I guess,” she said, but he knew she didn’t believe him. Finally, she turned her attention to her soda and sipped gustily.

  “Did your husband bring you here often?”

  “Nah, Ronald didn’t waste his thirst on chocolate sodas. He was strictly a Bud man.”

  They lapsed into silence, drinking their sodas and staring at the bulb lights. Victoria seemed happy with her soda. Brandon didn’t taste his at all. He was thinking of barbed wire and Dobermans and high-powered rifles. He was thinking of crazy Bud Irving and all the secrets his father still wouldn’t share.

  * * *

  Arriving at the ranch, they discovered a young man with unfashionably long blond hair and a goatee lounging on the front porch, the orange tomcat purring smugly on his lap. As the truck pulled up, he unceremoniously dumped the cat on the ground and stood, stretching out a lean, limber body.

  Brandon was afraid he already knew who the man was. Sure enough.

  “Charlie!” Victoria boomed, sliding out of the truck as it was still rolling to a halt. “When are you gonna remove that dead rat from your face?”

  “I’m just too stylish for this family,” Charlie drawled, crossing his arms over a thin blue T-shirt with the word Mercedes stretched over his well-toned torso. He gazed at Brandon with frank, appraising interest. “So you’re the hotshot.” He made it sound like a challenge. His expression was bland.

  “Oh, stop staring,” Victoria snapped. “Next thing I know, you two will be dueling on the delta. Listen, there’s two hundred pounds of grain in the back of the truck. Put some of that testosterone to work on it.”

  “Aye, aye, sis,” Charlie responded drolly, then shook his head. He meandered toward the vehicle, his gaze still locked on Brandon. With a swift movement, he found a bag and hefted it effortlessly over his left shoulder. Still looking at Brandon, he wrapped a sinewy arm around a second fifty-pound bag, grunted and slung it over his right shoulder. He staggered, then stood triumphantly, his blue eyes gleaming.

  Brandon got the signal loud and clear, and most likely the next six months would kill him. With a mental sigh, he sidled up to the truck and took up the gauntlet. He grabbed the first bag and tossed it over his shoulder. Not bad—he could do this. Shifting his weight, he got his right arm beneath the last bag, grunted, staggered and through divine intervention wrestled it onto his shoulder.

  He tottered, caught his balance and stood. Sweat streaked his face. He met Charlie’s stare eye to eye.

  “Brandon Ferringer. Pleased to meet you.”

  Charlie’s face split from ear to ear into a beaming grin. “Now you just gotta carry them to the barn,” he said innocently, hitched the bags for better balance and set off.

  Brandon winced. Victoria was watching him. Charlie was waiting for him. A man really had only one choice. He pivoted sluggishly toward the barn, his already tired legs groaning beneath the hundred-pound burden, and got going. If he could hike Everest, he could do this. Of course, his thirty-six-year-old body still hadn’t quite recuperated from all that.

  He wheeled into the barn slightly off balance, spotted his target, took a step forward, almost fell and caught himself against the stable wall to keep going. Son of a . . . The feed center loomed ahead, Charlie already leaning back with his arms akimbo, smirking. Brandon made a beeline for the home stretch, and with a last grimace, dumped his load.

  Behind him, Victoria began to clap. “Congratulations, you’re both he-men. Is now the time to tell you that the corn goes next to the house?”

  Brandon was pretty sure he was going to die. But Charlie just slapped him on the back and scooped a bag off the ground one-handed.

  “Don’t worry, old man. I got this trip. I need you to have enough energy left to run.”

  Charlie wasn’t kidding. Brandon changed into sweats, and while Victoria muttered about thick-skulled Neanderthal men, the two hit the trails.

  Charlie set a fast pace, but Brandon had expected that. His legs protested—they were tired and more accustomed to distance than speed. Generally, Brandon started hikes at the back of the group but ended the day at the front as the younger, stronger men succumbed to their unrealistic pace. Slow and steady, legs of steel, that’s what got you up a mountain.

  Hotshots needed endurance, to be sure, but when a fire blew up at ninety miles an hour, hotshots also needed speed.

  Charlie leapt a small stream. Brandon got a stitch in his side. He ducked his head and ignored it, even as his breathing labored. Focus, Brandon, focus.

  He blanked out the whipping pine trees and spicy, dusty air. He blanked out Charlie’s effortless sprint and the rugged, tricky ground. He thought of Maximillian, and the casual way he’d walked out the door one day and never come back. He thought of his mother standing in the foyer and saying his father’s plane had gone down. The devil had finally caught up with Max.

  And he thought of Julia, and how she must have bundled up to go out for a walk that cold winter’s day. She’d been working on a special birthday present for him, putting together a family tree. She’d been researching Max and the partnership he’d formed with Bud Irving and Al Simmons almost forty years before. Was she thinking of that as she walked through Central Park? Or was she thinking of the bright blue sky? Or was she wishing that Brandon would give in to her
pleas and stop working so hard?

  And did the mugger say, “Stop investigating Max,” right before he pulled the trigger?

  “Okay, okay,” Charlie gasped.

  Brandon’s mind jerked to the present. The younger man had slowed to a cooling pace. The trees no longer whipped by so fast, and the hard, dusty ground had grown smoother beneath their feet.

  “Take it easy,” Charlie exclaimed. “You’ve proved yourself, Ferringer. Now slow down before you hurt something. Don’t want to burn out before Monday.”

  Brandon slowed. It burned to exhale. His left side ached. He leaned, rubbing it with his hands. His legs had turned to rubber and his thoughts were still all over the place.

  Charlie finally slowed to a walk, and they moved along the trail together in silence, listening to various birds sound their calls while chipmunks darted around their feet.

  “So why are you doing it?” Charlie asked at last.

  “Doing what?”

  “Becoming a hotshot!” The younger man glanced at him impatiently. “Come on, my father did the background check on you. Word’s out all over town that you’re some independently wealthy Ivy League investment banker. Why the hell does a rich executive want to become a low-level federal employee?”

  Brandon shrugged. “The same reason everyone else does, I suppose.”

  “No, that’s not true. We are in for the money. Let me tell you, there’s not much else I can do that pays me ten to twelve bucks an hour.”

  “When you sit too long, do your legs hurt?”

  “Oh, yeah. And my knees crack like brittle twigs.”

  “When you’re indoors for more than a day, do you feel like you can’t quite breathe?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And when you go more than a day or two without hiking or jogging, can you no longer sleep at night, your legs burning to move?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Then we’re doing it for the same reason,” Brandon said quietly. “Because I’m like that, too.”

  Charlie appeared to ponder his words. They reached the end of the trail, turned wordlessly and headed for the ranch. It was a beautiful day, the sky so blue, the soaring pine trees so green. Brandon didn’t know how to live without this world anymore, and in that way, he did fit in with the men and the women of the forestry service perfectly.

  “You know,” Charlie said, “Victoria’s been through a lot. She got a real raw deal with Ronald. I mean, a real raw deal.”

  “She told me.”

  “She didn’t deserve it. She’s a good person, you know. An amazing mother. Have you seen her with Randy?”

  “I like them both very much.”

  “That’s good to know. We’re very fond of her, you see. She has six brothers—did she tell you that? I’m one of the smaller ones—but fast. Our dad’s the sheriff,” he continued casually. “He wears a gun.”

  Brandon picked up the subtext loud and clear. He said just as conversationally, “I have a younger sister, too. Her name is Maggie. My brother, C.J., and myself are very protective of her. A few years ago, she was kidnapped from downtown Portland by an escaped murderer, Cain Cannon. I flew here from New York to offer a five-hundred-thousand-dollar reward and to negotiate her release. C.J., a former Marine, brought his collection of guns.”

  Charlie’s eyebrows hitched. “And did you get her back?”

  “We like to think that we helped. The truth, however, is that Maggie saved herself. A rather spirited girl, our Maggie turned out to be. C.J. and I never would’ve imagined. . . . Well, suffice to say, I think Maggie and Victoria would like each other a great deal.”

  “Huh. So where’s Maggie now?”

  “She lives near here. In fact, she’s married to Cain Cannon, the escaped convict.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “No. And she was right about him, too. He’s one of the best men I know.” Brandon sighed, then offered a small smile. “Women simply defy the imagination.”

  “You know,” Charlie said finally, “you’re all right, Ferringer. You’re honestly all right.”

  “Well, I try.”

  They kept walking while the sweat dried on their faces and the sun rose higher in the sky.

  * * *

  Brandon didn’t go to the house that night. From his cabin he could see the light blazing in the kitchen and could imagine Victoria and Randy sitting at the table, exchanging stories of the day and wrangling playfully over who should eat more vegetables. He heated up soup on the hot plate and ate it straight out of the pot with the spoon on his Swiss army knife, deliberately keeping his distance. Randy was at “that age,” Victoria told him, that impressionable age where he might mistake a drifter for a future dad. Brandon owed Victoria at least the decency of trying to prevent that.

  Later, he saw the lights go on in the arena and went out to find Victoria working one of her horses. He stood in the shadows, not wanting to interfere. She rode like an extension of the beast, going around and around, teaching the horse to stop with a click, turn left, turn right, back up, move forward. He’d never seen anything like it.

  The air grew musky and hot with the scent of sweating horseflesh and human exertion. He remained watching, wishing there was something he could say to reach this woman as she flew by.

  He slept poorly that night, with too many dreams he woke up unable to recall.

  In the morning, he made himself get to work. In twenty-four hours, the hotshot training would start. For the first two weeks, they’d have daily doubles, workouts in the morning and afternoon. In between they’d have classes as well as routine forestry service work. Hotshots were guaranteed forty hours of work a week—clearing brush, digging fire lines, repairing fences or trails, whatever needed to be done. Once fire season hit, they would all work a hell of a lot more.

  He needed to get equipment. He should stock up on food. He should make sure he had enough clean socks and underwear. He should get focused.

  When he came out of his cabin Sunday morning, Victoria’s truck was gone. He hiked into town rather than risk his rent-a-wreck. The walking stretched his legs. He bought a better backpack from the general store, fresh hiking socks with the extra thick toes and heels, loaded up on canned soup and powdered milk and hiked to the ranch.

  He ate another fine meal of minestrone soup, sitting on the edge of his bed and reading the firefighter’s handbook on wildland firefighting.

  Later, he sat on the front porch and stared at the sky.

  When Victoria’s rusty truck barreled into the yard, he was pathetically happy. Randy darted out first, wearing his good jeans, which were still dark blue, and a fancy Western dress shirt with mother-of-pearl snaps. He raced to Brandon’s cabin, saying, “How are you what are you doing can you help me with my homework now?” in one big rush. “Mom said I wasn’t supposed to bother you too much,” Randy stated. “You gotta get ready for tomorrow. Charlie says the first two weeks are hard, and then you guys’ll be traveling all the time. I wanna be a hotshot someday.”

  Brandon gazed over Randy’s head to Victoria, who lingered by the truck, her features obscured by twilight. Her blond hair was down, forming a pale, silky curtain around her shoulders. Like Randy, she wore her good jeans, combined with a nice red silk blouse. He should’ve known she wouldn’t wear dresses even to church.

  He should’ve known that he’d find her even more attractive this way. He dropped his gaze to Randy.

  “I can help you finish the problem set tonight,” he said soberly. “After that, I don’t know. Charlie is right. The next few weeks are going to be very busy.”

  Randy seemed to accept that readily enough. In his mind, hotshots probably spent their free time flying to the rescue and leaping tall buildings in a single bound.

  “Cool. Come on.” Randy dashed for the house.

  Brandon walked, taking the time to
casually stroll by Victoria. This close, he could see the shadows the falling night had dusted over her face. Her light eyes glowed more gray than blue.

  “You look very pretty tonight,” he said somberly and walked away.

  Behind him, she expelled her breath sharply, and for the first time all day, he smiled.

  Chapter 4

  Superintendent Coleton Smith was a tough son of a bitch. Late fifties, whipcord lean, he had a fanatical gleam in his dark eyes and the fire stamped into his face. His left cheek bore a flat, shiny brand, as if he’d been struck by a hot iron. Tendrils of scar tissue dug furrows through his cropped gray hair. His left ear was gone completely, the flaps of skin rebuilt just enough to channel the sound waves into his eardrum. Down his neck, across his collarbone, down his left arm, the fire had oozed like rivulets of lava, searing away the man’s skin and leaving its own particular kind of smooth, plasticky scars in its place.

  On Coleton’s left hand, only three fingers remained. They were clumped together as if they were still hiding from the encroaching flames.

  “Mann Gulch, 1949,” Coleton Smith barked at oh six hundred Monday morning, pacing before their seated forms, “twelve Smokejumpers dead. Storm King Mountain, 1994, fourteen firefighters—nine Prineville hotshots—dead. This won’t happen again, and in the next two weeks, I’ll tell you why. I’ll pound it into your brains. I’ll squeeze it between your eardrums until the next time a slow-moving creeper blows out, you people will know exactly what to do.” Superintendent Smith slapped a red hunting cap on his head, obscuring half his scars. “Now get off your asses, and let’s see what you got.”

  He ran them hard, ten men and eight women hitting the dusty, rocky trails and trying not to sprain an ankle. They were an eclectic mix of size and shape, age and sex. Some people had spent the winter outdoors or at least in a gym, and they were already lean, mean machines, sprinting to the front and setting the pace. Others had spent the last six months behind a desk and had a thin layer of winter insulation dulling their edges. In the coming weeks, that fat would be wicked from their bodies as if it was water.