by Marnee Blake
“I’m fine,” she said firmly. All she wanted was to forget all about this.
“Me too.” Hunter offered his hand. “Thank you, though.”
After the policeman walked away, Hunter leaned over, studying her. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
She wasn’t. But what she was sure of was that she didn’t want to go to the hospital, and she definitely didn’t want to spend any more time answering questions about why this girl might have targeted her.
Was there a chance that this had something to do with Joshua? Had he found her? Sending a meth addict with a gun to rob her didn’t make any sense. Joshua had always been more hands-on than that.
Much more hands-on.
No, it was probably a fluke. She’d read recently that the opioid and methamphetamine market scourge had increased in their county in recent months.
Would there ever come a day when she didn’t automatically think everything had to do with Joshua? He’d been in jail when she had left Chicago. Someday she’d need to stop looking over her shoulder. Today wasn’t that day, though.
“Yeah, I’m okay. We just must have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.” She stood, wiping her hands on her legs. She could see the front door of her office, could see Tracy standing in the door, scanning the scene, trying to see what was going on. The building beckoned to her, safe and predictable. Everything that had happened pressed down on her, and she suddenly needed to get out of there. “Listen, I’m going to be late for work. Thanks for the smoothie, and for everything.” As she stared up at him, she remembered how he’d put himself between her and a crazed drug addict with a gun. A “thank you” didn’t seem to cover something like that.
He shrugged, tapping the table beside him. “No problem.”
“Um, did you want to train together tomorrow, then?” God, what an awkward transition. She couldn’t possibly be this socially inept.
Glancing around, he shifted his weight and shrugged again. “Not tomorrow. After my morning appointment and lunch with Mom, I promised Dak and Lance that I’d hang out with them. We were going to hike with packs.”
He was going hiking tomorrow? Once again she wondered why he was paying her if he was doing so much of the heavy training with others.
“How about a run the day after, though?” he asked quickly, as if he were reading her mind. “You have clients in the morning, right?” When she nodded, he continued. “We can go after you’re done.”
“Sure.” She shrugged. Whatever. It was a loss to his pocketbook, not hers. “Sounds good. After lunch then.” She edged closer to her office door.
“Okay, Charlie girl.” His eyes narrowed. “You’re really okay?”
“Definitely,” she said, too quickly, taking a few more steps.
He watched as she backed away. “All right, then. I’ll text you tomorrow.”
As she spun and hurried to her office, she wished she wasn’t looking forward to talking to him again quite as much.
* * * *
“So she just went to work after that?” Lance asked as he rubbed a hand towel over his face.
“Yeah. The police asked her some questions, she told them she never saw the girl before, and that was it.” Hunter wiped the sweat out of his eyes, blinking through the salty sting. He’d finished his run with Lance and his smokejumper friends. Seven miles through rocky and hilly terrain. He was pleased that he didn’t have any trouble keeping up with them. Another sign that he was ready to start training.
Now, he stood at the bottom of the trail with Lance and their friend Dak. Though the afternoon Oregon sun was bright, a cool breeze chilled the moisture from his workout.
“Did you believe her?” He shouldn’t be surprised that Dak was skeptical. He’d never met Charlie.
“Absolutely.” And he did. She had been as surprised as he had. “Besides, she’s not the sort to lie well.”
“Agreed.” As Meg’s boyfriend, Lance had spent enough time with her to know her well, too.
Did he know her well? Hunter wasn’t sure. He felt like he did. There was something between them, something he couldn’t deny.
When the armed woman had come at them, his first inclination had been to put himself between Charlie and the gun. He considered himself a regular guy, the kind of guy who would be a hero, if he was put in the right circumstances. His parents had raised him right. He’d even chosen a job that helped people regularly. He’d pulled people from burning buildings, helped them afterward if they were hurt. He never hesitated. But he’d never experienced the intense need to protect someone before, not the way he’d felt when he’d seen Charlie in danger.
There was a connection between them. Whatever it was, he knew her, deep down. He was sure of it.
And he was certain she wasn’t a good liar. “Besides, I agree with her. I think it must have been random.”
“Could be. There’s lots of meth around right now.” Dak shrugged out of his sweaty T-shirt, tossed it into the back of his truck, and yanked his gym bag off the front seat. “Heidi said they’re finding pop-up shops all through the national forests. Forest Services is having a hard time keeping up with all the cleanup.” For the past decade or so, cooks had been moving their meth labs out of the city and into rural areas to avoid police scrutiny. The stuff could be cooked anywhere, and because the national forests in Oregon were so vast and relatively close to the cities, they were prime locations. The risks the labs posed—as fire hazards and sites of toxic materials—had elevated them as a major problem for the Forest Services.
“Not to mention Johnny Santillo is back in the business.” Sledge, one of the other smokejumpers who worked with Dak and Lance in Redmond, joined them at Dak’s truck. When Hunter had met Dak and Lance at the air center for their hike, the guy had offered to go with them. Though he’d never liked the guy, Hunter had been a hotshot with him in Redmond. There hadn’t been an easy way to say no without looking like a complete asshole. According to Dak and Lance, though, Sledge had come a long way since training, and he trusted their opinions. “He got out of jail a few months ago.”
“What?” Hunter put his hands on his hips. “That guy was supposed to be put away for at least another five.”
Sledge shrugged. “Good behavior, they said.” He snorted. “But I’ll bet it had less to do with good behavior and more to do with great connections.”
“You think he knew someone on the parole board?”
“Paid someone, you mean?” Sledge smirked. “Yeah. That’s what I mean.”
Sledge was a lot of things—a meticulous perfectionist, kind of arrogant, bit of a pain in the ass—but he wasn’t a liar. And he knew people, people who would tell him stuff like that.
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
When they were hotshots, they’d stumbled on a meth lab while they’d been working a wildfire. The two cooks inside had been kids, neither more than sixteen. Due to their inexperience, the cooks had accidentally blown the place up, but when they’d called their boss, the distributor and financier of the drugs, he’d refused to help, leaving them stranded in the woods. They’d been nearly starved to death by the time the hotshots arrived.
In the days that followed, the cooks had refused to talk to the police, but Hunter had worked with them. They reminded him of his younger twin brothers—and while they had made some bad decisions, he didn’t think they should take the fall for someone else’s drug operation. Finally, after some coaxing, they described the entire network of meth labs all run by one man—Johnny Santillo—with cooks living in similar situations across the national forests. When it came time to testify against him, they did.
“No wonder Heidi’s seeing more meth again.” Hunter shook his head. “That guy is bad news.”
“Not just Heidi. The cops I know in Redmond and Bend, too.” Sledge rubbed his wet hair. “Santillo might not be the only meth dealer i
n town, but he’s one of the biggest. And he’s only been gone for a couple of years. Not long enough for his network to disintegrate.”
Well then, maybe Heidi was right. Maybe running into this addict on the street had been coincidence.
Apparently it had meant a lot to Charlie, to make sure that it was a coincidence, that the cop agreed with her assessment. Then again, in stressful situations, everyone wanted to make sense of why things happened to them.
He could relate.
“We already had some training this spring about what to do if we run across a meth lab when we’re out on a fire. Pretty much stay away from it, that was my takeaway.” Lance tossed his gym bag into the back of his Jeep. Shrugging, he closed the back window. “Nasty messes.”
“Yeah.” Nasty and dangerous.
“Hey, stiffs,” Sledge called from next to his car. “I’m done gossiping. I don’t stay the best with just hiking. I’m off to the gym. Later.” He didn’t wait for them to say goodbye, sliding into the front seat and driving off.
“You know.” Dak rubbed the back of his head, watching him go. “Sometimes I think he’s getting better and other times I think he’s still just a giant douche.”
Hunter laughed, opening the door on his beat-up TrailBlazer.
“So we’ll see you next week? At training?” Lance’s question was light and offhand, as if he was asking if Hunter planned to join them at the bar for drinks or something. But Hunter could hear the seriousness in his voice.
“Yeah.” Though he would have faked it before, since he started hanging out with Charlie, he was more confident. He was going for his first parachute jump in the morning before his run with Charlie, and he had no reason to think he couldn’t do it, especially after yesterday’s bungee success. “I’ve got this. I’ll see you guys then.”
Lance grinned. “Great. Later.”
As Lance and Dak took off, leaving Hunter alone, his doubts filled the silence. After the run, he could definitely keep up with the other jumpers. But was his head in the game, too?
Tomorrow, he was going to find out.
Chapter Seven
He couldn’t do this.
Hunter pulled over at the next emergency pull-off and shifted into park. He refused to turn off the engine, though. Whatever panic was coursing through him was going to stop. He only needed to wait it out.
Tell that to his racing heart and shaking hands.
He was only a few miles from the Bend Municipal Airport, but the distance seemed impassable. It was the distance between thinking you could do something and recognizing that you couldn’t.
His appointment to jump—his first parachute since the day he’d been injured—was in two hours.
He still wasn’t sure he was going to make it.
Why the hell was he putting himself through this? He hadn’t slept last night, too worried about everything that could go wrong. Every time he got close to falling asleep, his body jolted as if muscle memory was reminding him of how it felt to fall through the sky. He would jerk awake, sweating and cursing, tears running down his cheeks.
It wasn’t only the fear and panic—it was the weakness that was breaking him.
All morning, he had considered rescheduling dozens of times. He still had about a week before he had to show up at the air center for the first day of training. Jumping on no sleep wasn’t ideal. It would probably be best to wait until he was better rested.
Except that frightened him worst of all. Because he was beginning to wonder if he would ever want to jump. If maybe parachuting was something in his past.
His fear that he would never jump again outweighed his fear of the parachute today. He refused to be a failure. He’d come too far to quit now.
God, he was glad no one was witnessing this. He had considered inviting Lance or Dak to come with him. Not that they needed any practice jumping. The veteran smokejumpers had probably already been in the sky a dozen times this spring. They would have come with him, though, if he had asked. If they were with him right now, he doubted he would be on the side of the road, shaking like a fucking sissy. He would shut his mouth and push through.
Sure, he might have had a panic attack in the sky, but he would’ve made it there.
No, he didn’t ask them because then he would’ve had to explain how fucked up he had become.
They wouldn’t judge him. He knew them both well enough to know they would understand. At least they would understand that he was struggling, facing what had happened last year. They would be supportive. They would give him a bunch of lip service about how this didn’t make him any less of a firefighter. How he was still strong.
But they would pity him. He would watch it wash over their faces, how bad they felt for him. While they spoke words of encouragement, they would think that he might never be the same again.
He didn’t need to see those concerns on their faces. He faced that shit every day in the mirror.
A car passed, slowing down, and the driver turned toward him, obviously checking to make sure Hunter was okay.
Was he okay? He wasn’t sure if he knew what okay felt like anymore.
Images of Charlie’s face sprang to mind. Her kind eyes, the way the skin wrinkled around them when she smiled up at him. The incredulous widening of them when he did something she thought was insane.
The soft curve of her lovely cheek.
In spite of his still-racing pulse, he smiled.
Charlie understood him. She might not get exactly why he did the things he did, but there was something unspoken there. Something in sync between them. Something he needed.
He was coming to depend on her too much. It was dangerous, relying on her for this sort of comfort. More, it wasn’t fair to her. She had no idea that he looked to her for peace or that she’d helped him stop panic from controlling him on two important occasions over the past week.
But despite all of that—despite how he was worried that he was using her, that it scared the shit out of him that she had this much control over his emotions—he needed her.
He would figure out what all of that meant after he figured out how to jump out of a plane again without losing his shit.
One thing was certain: he wasn’t going to make it into the sky today if she wasn’t there.
He checked his watch. It was ten o’clock in the morning. She’d be at the office.
Checking his rearview mirror, he signaled and U-turned in the street, heading back toward Bend.
* * * *
Charlie was finishing with Mr. Underwood’s hip workout when the bell on the door chimed. Glancing up, she caught sight of Hunter, filling out the doorframe.
Was she ever going to get used to how incredibly attractive he was? It wasn’t only that he was in peak physical shape. She worked out, she ran and lifted, spent time at the gym with lots of other people who were physically fit. Oregon was coated in amazing trails and outdoor spaces as well. People used them.
No, it wasn’t only that he was muscled and tall and broad. There was something too appealing about his gaze. When he looked at her, she got the impression that he saw her. That he didn’t only put together the pieces of her body, her arms and legs, and whether he liked the shape of her. He saw through that, to whatever it was in the heart of her.
For a girl who had been searching for connection her entire life, what she saw in his eyes attracted her like a moth to a flame.
What was he doing there? Their plans to go for a run weren’t for a couple of hours. She still had another patient before the end of her day.
“Mr. Underwood? Could you give me a second?” When the older man waved a hand, she helped him to a seat. She figured he’d been fine to take a brief break. He was already sweating and cursing at her. He’d been recommended to the practice after surgery, and he hated it. His wife had bribed him to come today with the promise of a hamburger
.
Reaching for her towel, she strolled over to the door. “Hey,” she greeted Hunter, trying to sound casual. “What are you doing here? We aren’t supposed to meet until later today.”
“Right.” He glanced at Mr. Underwood. “Yeah, I’m a little early.”
“A couple hours early.” She narrowed her eyes. “I don’t think you forgot how to read a watch.”
“I definitely didn’t.” He wasn’t grinning. If anything, he looked freaked out.
“You just in the neighborhood?” she coaxed, when he didn’t continue. Whatever was going on with him, she got the impression she should tread lightly.
“No. I mean, yes. But not exactly.” He ran a hand over his hair, the fingers digging in.
“Spit it out, Hunter.” She nudged her head toward Mr. Underwood. “I have to get back to my patient. What’s going on?”
He crossed his arms over his chest, leaning in so only she could hear. “I need you to come and jump out of a plane with me.”
She blinked at him. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Hear me out.” He took her by the bicep, leading her away from where Mrs. Underwood was sitting in the waiting area, trying to pretend she wasn’t listening. When they were out of hearing, Hunter’s gaze strayed to where he was holding Charlie, and he dropped his fingers. “Listen, you liked the bungee jumping, right?”
He paused, so she nodded. She had to admit, it had been fun. Something she’d never expected to do or like.
“Right, so if you liked that, you’re probably going to like parachuting.”
“Whoa.” She lifted her hands. “First of all, they are two very different things.”
“Well, not exactly—”
“And second,” she interrupted. “I’ve got clients today. You told me that you were going this morning.”
“I am. Right now.”
“You want me to leave my clients and go jump out of an airplane with you? Right now?”