Rain of Fire

by Linda Jacobs

  Trying not to make a prize idiot of himself, he turned and faced the counter as she edged past.

  Though there was plenty of room in the small kitchen for Kyle to move around him without touching, her hip grazed his on the way by. From the corner of his eye, he caught a smile on her lips.

  Before he could make a grab for her, the smile turned to a frown, her nose wrinkling as she lifted the skillet from the stove. Only then did Wyatt smell that he was burning the last strips of bacon.

  “Think we can salvage this?” She glanced over her shoulder and he wondered if she meant to sound seductive.

  Through his glasses, the blackened strips looked hopeless.

  She studied the already heaping platter of bacon he was proud of and added the burnt pieces at the side. “You never know, we might get hungry.”

  “I’m already starving.” Wrestling his libido, he reached for the carton of eggs instead of Kyle.

  “I’m starving, too.” Yet, she reached to turn off the stove burner.

  He looked into her shining eyes. Deeply embedded was a flash of something he’d seen before … over a beer in a cozy booth, outside her townhouse the night he’d nearly taken her in his arms, when they had broken apart after embracing in his office.

  If she had been any other woman, he’d swear she was coming on to him.

  Well, two could play. “I’m trying to prepare a culinary delight, here.” His tone was teasing. “If you don’t let me cook…”

  Her hand touched his; her thumb made a slow circle on the back.

  Wyatt swallowed.

  Self-control had its merits, but when her fingers moved to trace the lines of his palm, his physical reaction was immediate. This time he could not bring himself to turn away.

  Kyle raised her eyes from his hand to his face and the unmistakable passion in her gaze was no longer intermittent. “You said last night that you were afraid of this.”

  Yeah, and how stupid had he been to say that? Here was the woman he’d been in love with for years, yeah, Alicia had said ‘love,’ not ‘want’ as he’d misquoted last night.

  Wishing for Nick’s gift of gab, Wyatt raised Kyle’s hand and placed it on his chest. “My heart’s pounding like a hammer, but it’s not because I’m scared.”

  “I’m not either.” She moved her fingers in a slow circle over his T-shirt, making him want to strip it off.

  “Last chance, lady.” He pressed her palm against him. “To stop me doing something you don’t want.”

  “I want,” she said. Her other hand took off his glasses and set them beside the sink.

  “Kyle.” He sank to his knees, his hands on her hips, turning her into him.

  She gasped, spread her arms, and gripped the edge of the counter. But she did not push him away.

  He pressed his mouth to her stomach, not teasing the way he’d imagined, but fervently.

  She didn’t move, either to welcome or reject him. He turned his head and pressed his cheek against her smooth skin, praying she wouldn’t change her mind.

  Then he felt her hand in his hair. She cradled his head, pulling him closer.

  Wyatt managed to get to his feet and look down into her eyes. Without his glasses, her features appeared soft.

  He slid his hands up her arms, under the loose sleeves. Skimming his lips over the hollow of her throat, he murmured, “God, don’t let me louse this up.”

  They bumped noses. It made him feel seventeen. When their lips came together, he felt the curve of her smile. It stilled as they explored each other, gently at first. Her firm spare flesh matched his, as though they’d been poured from the same mold.

  She broke the kiss and pulled back. Her lips were parted and deeply pink.

  Lost in the best feeling he’d ever known, he said, “Don’t say no, Kyle, for God’s sake.”

  “I won’t.”

  As Kyle led Wyatt by the hand up the stairs, his sweats accentuated the long lines of his body. She felt the ache inside her chest again, knowing that what they were about to do would change the landscape forever. Yet, as they entered her bedroom, she made no move to turn aside. Their relationship had changed and there was no going back.

  Though their embrace downstairs had sealed their fate, the walk up had broken the mood enough to make her feel awkward at the prospect of disrobing.

  Standing beside her bed, she said, “I’m no good at this. I’ve been alone too many years.”

  Wyatt moved closer. “Right now, I don’t feel any good at it, either.” Ever so slowly, he bent to her. It seemed to take a long time while the care with which he moved underlined that she was both delicate and treasured. Finally, his parted lips brushed hers. He drew her bottom lip into his mouth, a gentle tug that pleaded for response.

  Kyle didn’t move, poised on the verge. Wyatt’s tongue traced the seam where her lip met the inner flesh of her mouth. Their hands were still clasped.

  “What’s going to happen to us … after this?” she murmured.

  “You said you wouldn’t say no.” He cradled her cheek with his palm.

  “I’m not saying no, I’m just…”

  “Talking too much.” His kiss smothered her words. This time he was no longer gentle; but dragged her against him.

  She pulled back once more. “I want to be clear that I’m just wondering …”

  Wyatt gave her a rogue’s smile. “Who knows what will happen anytime? Will the volcano blow? Will this make things better or worse?”

  He was right. Though there were no guarantees to the future, she could not imagine turning away.

  Her hands caressed his back, tugged his T-shirt free of the waistband of his sweats and found bare skin. He drew in his breath. “I need to tell you, though. Alicia didn’t accuse me of wanting you.”

  Kyle frowned. “She didn’t?”

  “No.”

  Wyatt deftly tucked his leg behind Kyle’s and she felt him take her down on the bed. They landed together, nose to nose, laughing softly. Propping himself up on an elbow, he focused on her with nearsighted eyes.

  “Nope. It seems Alicia knew some things better than I did myself.” He smoothed Kyle’s bare stomach and she felt again the sense of rightness between them.

  “So what did she say?”

  “She said I was in love with you.”

  Kyle awakened more slowly than usual, with a languid feeling of well-being. Twilight filtered through her bedroom window. She had a vague recollection of Wyatt tucking the blankets around them after they’d gone downstairs to eat, come back up, and made love again. How sweet it had been to drift into much-needed slumber.

  This was foreign, the way lying with him made her bed seem smaller, yet not crowded. Even the room looked less large, but now the dimly lit bower imparted a sense of intimacy rather then one of darkness closing in.

  Wyatt shifted her closer with a gentle tug until her bare back was warm against his chest. She pressed his hand to her breast and could no more imagine taking back what had happened than she could deny her own name. The first time had been fraught with the urgent haste of feeling too long denied. The second had been slow and sweet. The beauty was in the details, for though the act of love was always the same, each time was different.

  Wyatt whispered, “You awake?”

  She answered by placing her hand over his.

  With his other arm, he reached to snap on her bedside lamp. “Little dark in here.” She flinched at the brightness.

  The bedside clock said almost 7 PM. “I can’t believe we slept so long.”

  “We both needed to rest … after everything.” It all came rushing back, Hollis firing her, the crescendo of seismic activity, Nick heading back into the park interior.

  Wyatt pointed to a coil of rope on the floor. “Is that what you used to climb out the window?”

  The memory of hanging outside in the middle of a thunderstorm embarrassed her. “I should have known better.”

  “On the contrary,” he said, “Most people never think about
an earthquake, but when I hear glasses rattling in my cabinet, there’s nearly always a reason.”

  “I really missed the mark that night.”

  “I don’t think you did. After you told me you’d panicked for no reason, I checked the records at the earthquake center. There was a disturbance in Alaska at about 2:30 AM Mountain Time that you may have detected.”

  “So you don’t think I’m crazy.”

  “Not even a little bit. Come here.”

  He settled back and drew her against his side, her head cradled on his shoulder. His warmth seeped into her. Here, she’d been impatient with him for being negative toward Nick, when he’d been so right.

  How could she have thought three sun-gilded weeks with an inconstant young man were the ultimate idyll? She should long ago have focused on the fact that Nick had left her without a backward glance. The only explanation was that she’d used him as a shield against becoming intimate with anyone else … an effective means of keeping her secrets.

  The telephone rang.

  She jumped and sat up on the edge of the bed to grab it. Before she could say hello, Nick’s voice was urgent in her ear. “Kyle? All hell has broken loose up here.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “Who’s that?” Wyatt mouthed.

  “Nick,” she murmured, then said into the phone, “Wyatt’s here with me.”

  “He needs to hear this, too,” Nick said crisply. “Haven’t you been watching people running for the hills on TV? Haven’t you seen the seismic data today?”

  “Bad news,” she said. “After the show, Hollis fired me. Cut off my network access.”

  “Ducky. Well, tell Wyatt I’ve been using his account all day. Kyle.” He paused. “I think she’s gonna blow.”

  She went still inside. The fact that Nick had been the one to resist such a prediction made it doubly terrifying. She looked at Wyatt, saw that he had heard, and felt his hand on her arm.

  “I thought you might be in the field by now,” she told Nick.

  “The winter storm’s already pounding the West Coast, but my supplies got here an hour ago. I’ve got a chopper coming to fly me up in the morning.”

  “But you can’t go if you think …”

  “I have to.”

  “Don’t leave until we get there.” It was foolish, she knew, to want a last chance to talk him out of it in person.

  “Be here by first light and you can see me off at the helipad. Otherwise, I’ll need you to monitor from Wyatt’s office.”

  She didn’t hesitate. “That’s the only place we can get real time data. But, Nick”—she pleaded one more time—”you know how many volcanologists have died on the job.”

  “Hey, as you said on TV, do the math. The moon won’t be full until October 10th.”

  The back of Kyle’s neck felt stiff, all the boneless comfort she and Wyatt had generated replaced by urgency. “With all those people on the run, has Janet Bolido called an evacuation of the park?”

  “No,” said Nick.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  SEPTEMBER 30

  Yellowstone Superintendent Janet Bolido was barricaded in her office with her TV on. The twenty-four-hour news network had picked up the Yellowstone story like a terrier with a new squeak toy.

  In a live-action shot from Gardiner, a fat guy in a dirty T-shirt packed his car beneath a streetlight’s illumination. “I’m getting all my stuff, case I don’t get back.”

  In the next scene, an elderly woman with a drawn face stood in front of a tidy bungalow. “Our house is all mine and Dave got no insurance.” She laughed nervously. “Course I guess insurance doesn’t cover a volcano.”

  Janet twisted her hands together. All day she’d been watching similar scenes from Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. Cities and towns up to a hundred miles from the park were emptying, as people stated their intention to get out, “at least until after the full moon.”

  Outside, horns blew from the traffic jam in the hotel parking lot. The bottleneck was the only route onto the narrow dirt track to Gardiner since the canyon road was closed. She looked out the window and saw the line of cars and campers moving at a crawl.

  The list of messages Janet was ignoring was impressive: TV and radio stations from as far away as Vermont, somebody from Monty Muckleroy’s show.

  How was it possible she had such rotten timing? Twenty-seven years at Interior, sucking up to all the right politicos, to end up by blind dumb luck in the middle of this?

  She channel surfed and found Billings Live Eye in Gardiner. Carol Leeds held her jeans jacket closed against a brisk wind as she reported on the exodus north.

  Another earthquake, larger than the others today, knocked a coffee cup full of pens off Janet’s desk. A glance up at where the massive bookshelf had been before going to the scrapheap sent a clutch through her.

  Get out, she thought. Catch the next plane back to Washington and let somebody else handle this.

  The hell of it was that she’d never been good at making decisions. And she had never been in charge of a situation where peoples’ lives were threatened.

  Her office door opened without a knock. Joseph Kuni’s impressive figure in his pressed uniform filled the doorframe. His stormy gaze from beneath salt and pepper brows took her in, along with the TV.

  Stepping in, he watched silently as Carol Leeds reported, “There has been no word from park officials, but many employees are taking matters into their own hands and leaving.”

  “I just flew in from a meeting in Denver,” Kuni said in a controlled voice. “Am I to understand you have not ordered an evacuation?”

  Janet cleared her throat unnecessarily and pushed to her feet. “Yesterday, I talked to Dr. Darden, the volcanologist, and he said …”

  “That was yesterday.” He dripped disdain. “Did you see America Today this morning?”

  She nodded without meeting his eyes.

  “So what are you going to do about it?”

  Her mouth opened. No sound emerged.

  Kuni advanced on her. “I think, Ms. Bolido, that you are going to issue a statement calling for the evacuation of Yellowstone, and that you are going to do it right now.”

  Feeling as though her legs went weak, she sat back down.

  Interpreting her silence as resistance, Kuni loosed his famous temper. “Or I will do it for you!”

  “I’m not going back to Yellowstone,” cameraman Larry Norris told reporter Carol Leeds and Billings Live Eye manager Sonny Fiero. It was after 11 PM at the end of a workday that had begun before daybreak.

  Sonny’s moon face expressed displeasure from behind his elevated desk. Carol slid a hip onto the polished wood and looked down at Larry. “Don’t you know what’s happening right now? Every major network in the country is mounting an expedition to Yellowstone. We’ve got to salvage our exclusive.”

  Larry wasn’t much for talk; that was Carol’s job. And though she’d overridden him plenty in the past, he’d never been quite this upset.

  Carol went on, “We’ll charter a helicopter and be the first reporters to show the smoking peak from the air.”

  Sonny smiled and flicked ash from his cigar. “I like it.”

  “Are you both crazy?”

  “Come on, Larry,” Carol said. “How am I going to do this without you?”

  “Take Sonny. He knows how to operate a camera.”

  The newly minted station manager seethed. “I’ve got to run things from here.” He waved a stubby arm. “Look, it’s your job to cover Yellowstone, has been for twenty years.”

  “Twenty years ago I didn’t have Donna and Joey.” He felt a wave of pride, for his hardworking gamin wife and for Joey, a bookworm who excelled in school as compensation for not being able to play sports.

  Carol tried again. “I’ve got Louisa in high school, but I’m not going to miss the story of a lifetime.”

  “We’ve all got to pick our priorities,” Larry said.

  Sonny stood up to his full five-foot
-one. “So pick this. If you don’t have a job, how will you take care of your family?”

  Larry pushed up and towered over both Carol and Sonny. “Are you threatening me?”

  Carol stepped between the two men. Her hand felt light on Larry’s arm, but it restrained him. “We were in dangerous places during the ‘88 fires and got out just fine. Don’t go off half-cocked over this and lose your health insurance.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  OCTOBER 1

  Long past daybreak, Wyatt drove Kyle’s Mercedes into Gardiner, Montana. He’d taken the long route around the northwest corner of the park, watching for patches of accumulated snow and black ice while Kyle slept.

  He tried to get back the euphoric feeling he’d had when she took him into her bed, a sensation of losing the boundaries between himself and her. But Nick’s call had catapulted him back to reality and made him question the wisdom of laying his feelings all out. What chance did he really have against a flashy globetrotter?

  Crossing the deserted Yellowstone River Bridge, he caught a glimpse of Alicia’s townhouse. Her Navigator was gone and so, he assumed, was she. An image of her big liquid eyes and generous mouth failed to move him; she’d been right to leave him.

  He glanced at Kyle who was rubbing her eyes. A crease on her cheek marked where she’d lain on her jacket.

  She looked at him and smiled.

  Confidence renewed, he reached to smooth the fold in her skin.

  With a broader grin, Kyle shoved her coat into the floorboards and raised the seatback. “Did the Pied Piper come through?”

  “Must have.” Only one moving car was in sight and the buildings appeared dark inside despite the dreary morning.

  Wyatt pulled the Mercedes up in front of a surprisingly open service station. “I could use some coffee.”

  Inside the old-fashioned place with a mechanic’s bay alongside, he greeted a big red-faced man in work coveralls. “Hey, Landers. Still here?”

  “Could say the same about you.”

  “Got things to do in Mammoth,” Wyatt said, “but you ought to clear out.”