“I wouldn’t say that. I write for one of the bigger news magazines, but I’m nowhere near the caliber of some of those writers. I’m certainly not the best. But I have a talent.”
He looked sideways at her. “You’re big enough that you can survive on your income for however long it takes to do this story.”
His reasoning must have surprised her, because she raised her eyebrows at him. “I do all right.”
When she didn’t elaborate, he asked the question plaguing him since she’d walked into the strategy tent, shiny haired and clean nailed. “So how did you end up going through training and getting on a crew?”
“How can you understand something from watching it?” She swung her hand about to indicate the forest as her voice grew stronger, no longer out of breath. “I wanted to get on the inside, to see how it felt to be up against the fire, to know it could turn on you at any time.”
The passion in her voice made him wonder what it would be like for her to channel her passion in other areas. “So now you know.”
“Now I know.” Footing grew tricky, leaving her a bit breathless. “Is this the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?”
Uh-uh, he wasn’t falling for that. She was trying to turn the conversation back to him again. Not going to happen.
“Being saddled with a reporter? Probably.”
“Har-dee-har-har.” She tossed her head, freeing her ponytail from the collar of her shirt, baring the graceful line of her throat. The dirt smudging it only reminded him of how she didn’t belong here. “I mean being stranded, unable to get back to camp, running low on water.”
“We’re not stranded, we will get back to camp today. And no, this isn’t the worst I’ve faced.”
“What is?”
He shook his head. He didn’t talk about it. But this was nowhere near as bad.
“So what would you do if you couldn’t be a Hot Shot anymore?” she asked blithely.
“I don’t think about it.” He spoke more sharply than he intended. He was superstitious about damn little, but this was something he believed without question.
“What? You aren’t serious.”
“I don’t think about it,” he repeated. “It’s bad luck.”
“But surely—you aren’t a kid. You can’t think of doing this forever,” she said, her tone disbelieving.
He spun on her. “Cut it out, Peyton. The minute a Hot Shot starts thinking about getting out, he gets hurt. So we don’t think about it. Period.”
“You’re kidding.” She tucked her thumbs in the straps of her pack and tilted her head, like she was studying some animal in a zoo. “You don’t seem the superstitious type.”
He couldn’t waste his energy on the anger swelling in his throat, so he cut it off like a burning snag. Not an easy job, but necessary. “I’m not. But why take the chance?”
“What are you scared of?” she pressed.
He snorted. “Not a damned thing.”
“Right. You can’t tell me you weren’t scared yesterday.”
“I can tell you all I want.” He headed down the mountain again.
“It just wouldn’t be honest.” She skidded after him. “Come on. I told you about my claustrophobia.”
He chuckled. “Like I hadn’t already figured it out.”
“Why do you love it so much? I mean, you come back year after year, right, so you have to love it.”
As long as he kept her talking, she wouldn’t think about being hot or tired or thirsty. And if he was going to be featured in a national magazine, a good sound bite wouldn’t hurt. Yeah, he was proud. Shoot him. “I like facing the dragon and kicking its ass.”
“The adrenaline,” she said with an ah-ha tone in her voice. “The ultimate man against nature.”
“Yeah, I guess. You walk right up to the fire and think, this is where we stand. Right here.” He held his hands out in front of him like a photographer framing his shot. “You aren’t going any farther because I’m going to stop you. You can’t walk up to a hurricane and say, screw you, you aren’t going to reach the coast. Or a tornado. But a fire, yeah, I can stop it. I know how and I’m good at it.” Suddenly embarrassed at revealing so much, he dropped his hands to his sides and moved on. “You aren’t writing this down.”
“I think I can remember,” she said. “Providing we get off this mountain.”
“Just think of this as an adventure.”
“Let’s hope the adventure part is over.”
He wouldn’t count on that.
Apparently she sensed his discomfort at his revelation because she took over the conversation. As they hiked on, she told him of her various experiences before she became a reporter. He couldn’t picture the woman beside him working as a bartender, a zookeeper. She’d even gone to EMT school. Now her decision to come fight fires made sense. She blew wherever the wind took her. It would carry her off again.
He envied her, in a way. While he’d stayed in one job and gained experience, she’d flitted from place to place and gained experiences. But she’d never be good at one thing. And Gabe liked being the best. He wouldn’t settle for less.
“So why all the different jobs?”
Surprisingly, she shrugged. “I haven’t found anything I was good at. Or liked enough to become good at.”
“You know, you learn how to be good at something by sticking to it.”
“That’s what I’ve heard,” she said lightly. “Nothing ever seemed worth it to me.”
Now that, he didn’t get. Why try something new if you didn’t want to learn from it? And why learn from it if you didn’t want to be good at it? “So when the going got tough—”
“I got going.” Her flip tone was gone, and she moved farther away from him.
“It’s not like you settled on an easy job. How long have you been a reporter?”
And a little farther away. “Almost three years.”
He arched a brow. “Not long to be a journalist before getting on at a national magazine.”
She tossed her hair back. “Some of my stuff got noticed early in my career. I was lucky.”
No such thing as luck. You were good, or you weren’t. Still. “Maybe if you had to work harder to get where you were, you’d appreciate it more.”
She stared, wide eyed, open mouthed. Not the argumentative Peyton he expected. She was speechless. Well, look at that. Never thought he’d see the day.
Then he heard it. He stopped and threw up a hand. She nearly collided with him, caught his shoulders to balance herself.
“What? What is it?”
“Shut up!” he growled.
Peyton snapped her head up at his sharp words, dragging her mind back from the path he’d set her on, the revelation that success took commitment—no, she understood that. It was the other thing, the other way around that surprised her. Commitment creates success.
She heard it then, a sound like the rumble of far-off planes. “What is it?”
“Fire.”
A thrill of fear raced through her at the single word and she released his shirt to come even with him. She’d nearly forgotten the reason they were on the run, had let thoughts of the fire slip from her mind. Big mistake. Gabe wisely hadn’t made the same one.
“Maybe it’s west of us,” she said hopefully.
He shook his head. “No, it’s in front of us.” He gestured to the thickening trees ahead of them and glanced over his shoulder at her. “Put your fire shirt back on.”
She untied it from around her waist, shrugged her pack to the ground to do as he instructed. She resented the warmth of the garment but couldn’t risk going without. “Can we go around?”
“I hope so, but it’s impossible to tell from where we are,” he said grimly, his eyes not leaving their path, as if concentrating hard enough would reveal the fire’s location. “I don’t know how the fire has changed in our absence.”
“What about the cell phone?” She picked up her pack again, fastened it over her breasts. They di
dn’t have to depend on instincts, not when they had modern conveniences, right? “Can you call the base camp and get the latest?”
He gave her a look of grudging admiration and fished the phone out of his breast pocket. He dialed for information to patch him through and started shouting in the device, pressing his hand to his other ear, walking away from Peyton as if trying to find a stronger signal.
He was able to give their location—how he knew, Peyton had no clue—and ask about the fire before yanking the phone from his ear and glaring at it. She thought he’d throw the offending piece of technology into the forest.
“It cut out.” He shoved the cell at her. “Damn it.”
She slipped it in her own front pocket for safe-keeping. “Were they able to tell you anything about where the fire is?”
“Not exactly, because Jen was too damn busy yelling at me about not coming back with the campers. But yeah, there’s been another flare-up between us and the camp.”
Jen. There was a woman who found success through commitment.
“Call her back.” She reached into her pocket.
He shook his head. “Too much interference to do us any good.”
“Maybe if we go back up the mountain we can get a clearer signal.”
He shook his head more vehemently. “Why backtrack and give the fire a chance to gain on us? We’ll keep going. Stay close.” He started down at a faster pace.
Like she’d go off on her own. Her heart thudded in her throat. “How far do you think it is?”
“Hard to tell.”
“And camp?” She was already breathless as her adrenal gland went into workout mode again.
“On the other side of the fire. Once we get around it, we’ll probably run into some crews.” He didn’t sound terribly concerned. That was good, right? “I’m surprised we don’t hear any planes.”
“Maybe the smoke is too bad. So who’s Jen?” she asked, though she knew.
His jaw tightened. “You know Jen Sheridan, Incident Commander. She gave you to me.”
“You’ve worked with her before?” Something in the narrowing of his eyes made her pretty sure the bad feelings went deeper than he let on, so she eased into her real questions. He had a way of sliding right past direct inquiry.
He cast her a glance. “You could say that.”
“I guess that happens a lot, you end up working with the same people again and again.”
“Yep.”
“So does it happen often that a woman is the incident commander?”
“Nope.”
Hm. Back to single syllables. She must have hit a nerve. She didn’t want to irritate him, much, but did wonder why this was a sensitive subject.
“I guess some people would have trouble taking orders from a woman.”
“Some do.”
A smile quirked her lips. He was so careful about what information he let out. “What about women on the crews? Do a lot of guys have trouble with that? Are there women crew chiefs?”
“Why? Looking to move up after your first week?”
She smiled. “Maybe, if you think I’m good enough. Are there a lot of romances on the fire lines?” Crap. Why ask that? Would he think—she didn’t want him to think she was interested. She didn’t want herself to think she was interested. In any case, she wasn’t doing anything about it.
He didn’t latch on to any hidden meaning. “There’s not a lot of privacy.”
“Still, life-and-death situations, close proximity…” Like last night in the tent. The warmth she felt now had nothing to do with hiking a mountain in July.
“People find ways, I guess, if they really want to.”
He was so oblique about it, she couldn’t tell if he’d had any personal experience. Her curiosity was purely objective, of course. “Have you? Wanted to?”
He stopped and turned to face her and she skidded to a halt at the dangerous tilt of his eyebrows. His impatience was palpable in the line of his body. “What do you want to know? Quit beating around the bush and just ask.”
She took a deep breath, but couldn’t quite meet his eyes, unable to convince herself about the real reason for her need to know. She focused on a rivulet of sweat washing a path through the grime at his temple. “How close are you and Jen?”
“She’s my ex.”
Whoa. Stunned, she set her feet apart to keep her balance, and used the rest of her energy to snap her jaw shut. “Ex as in married?”
“Ex as in divorced.” He started down again.
“Wow.” The word jolted her heart into beating again. She’d expected a connection, but a marriage? Gabe married, domesticated? Apparently it hadn’t taken. “Is this the first time you’ve worked with her since the divorce?”
“It’s the first time I’ve seen her since the divorce.”
“Wow,” she said again, truly at a loss for words. Almost. “That’s gotta be tough. What happened? I mean, if you don’t mind my asking.”
He snorted his opinion. “None of your business.”
Like he would be forthcoming on a personal item when he wouldn’t tell her if he worked for the Forest Service. As usual, he didn’t notice or care, instructing her to be quiet so he could listen for the fire.
They trudged in silence for what seemed like hours, the roar of the fire rising and fading, raising fear and then hope. Finally Peyton could be silent no more.
“I have to stop.”
He paused, glancing at her, his brows lowered in concern. “Are you thirsty? Feeling sick?”
“I have to—see a man about a horse.” She borrowed his euphemism.
He relaxed marginally. “All right. Go back the way we came. I don’t want you walking into the fire. And stay where I can see you.”
She stopped cold. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Nope. If I can’t see you, I won’t know if you’re in danger.”
Her face was hot and her bladder was full. “Never mind. I can wait.”
“Not for the next few hours, you can’t. Go ahead and go. You can hide behind a tree. I won’t look. I just have to be able to see you in relation to the fire, all right?”
Her bladder tapped its foot impatiently as she weighed modesty against necessity. “You promise you won’t look?”
He rolled his eyes. “You think I want to watch you pee?”
“I don’t know what kind of a perv you are.”
He grinned and winked. “A totally different kind. Hey, Peyton!” he called as she walked off.
She turned.
“Got TP?” He tossed a roll at her.
She caught it one-handed and turned, red faced, to find a big fat tree.
“We’re in trouble.”
Gabe’s voice from the other side of the big fat tree made her jump as she fastened her pants.
“Jesus, Cooper!” How had he snuck up on her?
“We got a blowup. No time for modesty. We’ve got to move. Have your gear?” His voice was the sharp businesslike tone she’d heard in the camp, not the lazy drawl she’d grown used to today.
She came around the tree pulling on her pack. He nodded his approval.
“Let’s move!”
“Gabe, what—?”
The words were no sooner out of her mouth than she saw the wall of flames not a hundred yards from where they stood. The fire advanced fast, faster than the flames at the camp yesterday. She watched in fascination, all the lovely colors, not just the expected warm colors, but flickers of blue and green and purple. It devoured the ground as it moved toward them, the grass and brush blackening and curling, flames licking at trees, igniting branches and needles, heating sap until the trunks exploded into torches. The heat rolled in waves, increasing in temperature.
“Don’t look at it!”
Gabe grabbed her hand firmly and started down the hill, the opposite direction from where they’d been heading, back toward the Girl Scout camp.
“What are you doing? We’re going the wrong way!”
He didn
’t stop, didn’t slow, didn’t expend the energy to explain. She wouldn’t have heard him above the roar of the fire anyway.
Each breath seared her throat and lungs as the heat washed through the air. Firefighters died by breathing in the super-heated air. She squinted against the ash and embers floating toward them on every fire-created gust.
Gabe dragged her across the rough terrain, and she finally realized his intention. The fire had moved past them, between where they were now and the Girl Scout camp. He was getting them to the burned-out area, and safety.
As her shock subsided, she hurried forward, more sure-footed, but didn’t relinquish her hold on Gabe’s gloved hand. As the smoke thickened around them, his hand became her only connection, became her lifeline. She focused on following him, on trusting he would get out of here safely. He hadn’t failed her so far.
Gabe managed to cover his mouth with his spare bandana, turned to motion for Peyton to do the same. He felt her struggling behind him. She was having trouble getting the kerchief in place one-handed, but she refused to release his hand. Not stopping, he reached back, yanked it up from her throat to under her eyes. Good thing she’d left it on, and put on her fire shirt. He couldn’t allow her to stop.
His fire shelter—he’d given it to the little girls. He staggered with the implication. No fire shirt, no shelter, no radio. Firefighting had gained many advantages in the last twenty years and he was without all of them. If the fire overtook them, he was toast. Peyton still had her shelter. Maybe, if they squeezed together, they could both fit. If not, well, maybe the end would come quick.
The smoke obscured his vision, the noise so diffuse he couldn’t tell where the fire was. His instinct, his sense of direction would get them to the black.
Peyton cried out and he turned to see her batting at her bandana. He saw the flicker of flame and yanked off the burning fabric, threw it aside. The emotion in her eyes was pure relief, but he couldn’t allow her even a moment of relaxation. They had to keep moving.
The flames moved faster than the wind in the dust dry fuels. Even if Peyton deployed her shelter now, she’d be fried if only one ember got inside. They had to get back to the black. It was the only hope for her safety.
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