Scorch Page 2

  She had been appalled, he’d seen it, and had braced himself for pity. Instead, she had linked her hand through his elbow and said, “Then I should be grateful for the time I’ve had with her. The time I still have. Thanks for telling me that, Vin. You always seem to put things in perspective for me.”

  He hadn’t meant to come off as scolding her and he sure as hell had never said anything profound to her or anyone else. The way she had sat there, two hands on his arm above his elbow, head tilted into his shoulder, had moved him, though. He’d felt like, in that moment, somehow he was helping her.

  “I remember,” she said now, and he wondered if that old moment of shared grief had been the reason they had gravitated toward each other in the new one.

  He cleared his throat. “They died in a house fire. I don’t remember much about it.” Except smoke and sirens and screaming. His mother had been pregnant. “The firefighter who carried me out came to see me in the hospital. This started out as a way to cover up burn scars.” He lifted his right arm, sleeved with ink. “He checked in on me over the years.”

  Frank and his wife had wanted to adopt Vin. That had fallen through when Frank had had a stroke. He didn’t tell her that part. It was still a big what-if in his life. What if he had grown up feeling wanted? What if he’d had a proper family? Would he be a different man? Believe in different things?

  Would he be in a stable relationship, raising a family of his own, instead of still searching for a way to dig in and feel he belonged?

  “I just knew it was the job I would do when I grew up. I was living in Billings, did well on all my courses and had a job lined up with the local department, but at the last minute they cut the budget on new hires. I had all this training, wildfire season was starting, so I was able to hire on as a temp in Missoula.”

  “And you’ve never wanted to go back to a city job?”

  “I realized right away I prefer wild land.” Fewer people and politics. He had shifted constantly all his life so the frequent travel hadn’t bothered him.

  He had always wished for a sense of permanence, though. An anchor. To some extent he had one now, with his full-time position at the base and buying Jacqui’s house, but he couldn’t shake a sense that it was as tenuous as a strand of a spider’s web.

  “Our gain,” Jacqui said with a flash of a smile. “How is the new guy? What’s his name? Sam something? Are you going to be okay working for him instead of Russ?”

  “Gaskill,” Vin supplied, letting out a subtle breath, relieved she was moving toward a less personal topic. “It’s early days, but he seems all right. He’s from Texas so he tawks lack thi-us.”

  “Like Forest Gump?”

  Vin had always enjoyed that wit of hers. It was good to see it coming back along with her smile.

  “I might be exaggerating,” he admitted. “He’s ex-Army Ranger. Knows his stuff. No bullshit.” Not everyone was as accepting of Russ’s replacement, but Vin was a foster kid. He was used to change, summing up a new authority figure, doing it their way. “He, uh, lost his wife. He hasn’t said much about it, but I get the impression he pulled up stakes and is making a fresh start.”

  Like you, he was going to say, but stopped himself. It made him melancholy to think of her leaving for good. She was taking Muttley so he wouldn’t even have that excuse to talk to her anymore.

  Nothing was permanent. He ought to know that by now.

  But he still craved it.

  Jacqui scrubbed the dog under his collar and asked, “Have you had any more rescues since I talked to you last?”

  “No, the snowboarders have been staying in bounds this week. Hallelujah.”

  “Been on the hills for fun?”

  “Nah. Working on the house when I get the chance.”

  She fell quiet again for several miles, which suited him. He was basically a loner. He had come to terms with that as his marriage had disintegrated. Making conversation wasn’t his strong suit. Although, he and Tori really hadn’t had much in common to talk about. He couldn’t play the victim in their breakup. They’d been mismatched from the start.

  He’d probably talked more with Jacqui, about more personal things, than he had with any girlfriend or workmate he’d ever had.

  He was going to miss her.

  A lot.

  *

  The house.

  Jacqui had had a plan when she left Florida. Not a perfect plan, but at least a plan for moving forward with her life. She had decided to empty the house she and Russ had built. Vin had been staying in it, finishing it. He wanted to buy it and they had agreed on a price.

  While she was here, she was going to talk to her husband’s replacement about the work she used to do at the base and help him hire her replacement. Then she would say goodbye to all she knew, put her husband’s dog in the back of her hatchback, and drive across country to a new life in Florida where she had pretty much accepted a job in a county clerk’s office. She would cook dinner for her Dad on Sundays and go to the movies with her stepsister on Fridays.

  Nothing about that excited her. It was the furthest thing from the kind of life she had always pictured for herself, but she hadn’t expected to do anything but go through the motions for months, maybe even a year or two. Joie de vive was a distant fantasy. Dating, maybe marrying again, and having a second chance at making a family… She knew in her head that was possible, but in her heart it was so far from being on the table it hadn’t even been brought home from the grocery store yet.

  She had resigned herself to depression and loneliness.

  Then she had landed in Kalispell and knew how Dorothy felt when she was finally back in Kansas. The same sun shone as in Florida, but without the heat and humidity. The horizon was a line of muscled mountains, the land still dulled by winter. The traffic was sparse and filled with rugged four-wheelers. A high-octane smokejumper who knew her husband as well as she had was acting sweet and protective while swearing around her because they all treated her like one of the guys. For the first time since her husband had died, she was “Jac” again.

  In Florida, all of this was something she had found difficult to talk about. Because she had been missing more than Russ. She had been missing this. Her life.

  When the hangars of the twenty-acre facility came into view, she felt Vin glance at her. She could already see the jump tower as he made the turn. He took it very carefully, like he had a load of nitro glycerin in thin glass bulbs as cargo.

  “Okay?” he asked quietly.

  “Yeah.” Her voice croaked. It was going to hurt, she knew it would, and braced herself as the huge log cabin that was the main building grew before her. It was two stories, weathered and solid and familiar.

  A pointed ache arrived, but it wasn’t the same horrible, shattering pain she’d received here that day. There were way too many memories here for that to be the only one. She’d been coming here since high school. She had left from the base the day she had graduated high school because fire season had started and she was trying to prove her dedication to Hugh. She had come back to work that evening—unpaid—instead of partying with the rest of her classmates.

  Over there, toward the equipment sheds, was where she had broken up a fight between a couple of rookies one year, not giving a single thought to her own safety, only theirs. The work was dangerous enough without faces getting broken in the parking lot. Tyler Dodson had read her the riot act over that one, which still made her blush with remorse that she’d made him so mad, but also warm with a sense of being valued, he’d been so worried about her.

  Russ had proposed here and over there was where she had cried with her mom when her mom had come from the doctor to tell Jacqui about her diagnosis. Jacqui had bought her first car from one of the smokejumpers and had driven it home from this parking lot, proud as punch, and this was where Russ had walked in with Muttley in his arms and said, “Look what I found. Can we keep him?”

  Returning to the station after this absence was like standing on a broken le
g as it came out of its cast. There was a dull, sad pain that reminded her of her injury, but she wasn’t injured afresh. She instinctively knew the only cure was to move through the pain, accepting it as a cost of returning to use.

  “I thought I would resent or blame…” Her voice thinned with emotion. “But he always loved it here.” She had always loved it here.

  She glanced at the handful of trucks, the empty helipad, the jump tower standing sentry. Rookie selection had started, but it was the weekend so the place was fairly quiet. The firefighters were expected to stay in shape through the winter so the ones that were here might be working out. This time of year, they might be out for a run or, if the weather stayed dry, they could be painting or doing any of the other myriad of maintenance chores around the building and grounds. The equipment inspection was ongoing. Inventory for the season would be coming in, needing to be received and put away.

  So much to do, she thought with a niggle of urgency.

  But she was grateful it was a ghost town at the moment. She hadn’t really talked to anyone except Vin all winter and she wasn’t ready to talk about her plans for the summer because—she absorbed with deep anxiety—she didn’t know anymore what they were.

  Florida was that place she had bolted to when her period arrived and she had had to accept that her chance at having a family with Russ was really gone. Her father’s bungalow had been a warm, safe place to hide while her wounds were fresh, but she didn’t want to go back to Florida.

  That realization was coming up inside her like the sun over the mountains.

  Was she ready for this though?

  The door beside her opened and she realized Vin had come around.

  “I wasn’t sitting here waiting for you to do that,” she said with a splinter of her attention, blushing at how sweet the gesture was. Even her old-school father didn’t open doors for her.

  “I know.” So calm and there for her.

  She held out her hand, not really thinking it through until he hesitated briefly, surprised, before he grasped hers and steadied her as she climbed from the truck.

  She should have let go at that point, she supposed, but laced her fingers through his and tightened her grip. She felt the weight of his gaze as they walked. The stairs were swept of snow and she climbed them with an ache of exertion in her thighs because she’d been sitting for hours.

  Muttley scampered ahead of her, nose to the floor as they entered, looking for Russ, she thought with a pang.

  The smell of wood and age and stale aromas from the kitchen area and the locker and ready rooms down the hall gathered around her like old friends. Soon they’d have all the doors open, airing out the building from being closed up all winter, but she was glad it was stuffy and potent, reinforcing her sense of returning to where she belonged.

  She glanced left, toward her desk, automatically thinking to put her purse in the drawer where she always kept it. The horseshoe counter that surrounded her reception area was littered with papers and coffee cup stains. The cabinet behind it was stacked with piles of neglected filing.

  A man and woman were speaking behind the closed door of Russ’s office. She skimmed her gaze past that, through the common area below the overhang of the loft, to the line of windows along the back wall, taking in the soothing view of the lake.

  Best job on earth, she had thought daily, sitting at her desk with that view just a lift of her lashes away.

  She swung her gaze to the far right, to the kitchen area that was less disastrous than her desk. Everyone was decent about washing up after themselves, but she would bet the cupboards were low on the necessities like coffee filters and sugar cubes.

  Oh, damn, the cookies, she realized with a pang of failure. She usually made a batch a week through winter, freezing them so they wouldn’t run out in the height of summer, when the firefighters needed every calorie they could shove in their neck before they geared up for their next call out.

  Her gaze traveled from there up the stairs to the loft and she couldn’t avoid it any longer.

  She sucked in her breath as she saw the parachute. Everything grew very still as she took in the sprawl of red, white and blue across the rail of the loft. She cocked her ear, listening for the sound of a sewing machine, but it was silent up there in the exalted land that one only entered if invited.

  The watery sun slanted in the upper windows to glint behind his name. Even in death, her husband wore a hero’s glow.

  She spotted the 1* and released Vin’s hand to hug his bare arm.

  “One ass-te-risk.” Russ’s favorite warning to the men. And there was the long, mended tear where the tree branches had ripped it as he was flung into the trunk. She drew a shaken sigh, clinging to Vin’s arm as she tried to hang onto her composure.

  “I think all the time about how hard that must have been for you, bringing him down. Not just physically dangerous, but mentally hard.”

  She felt the small jolt that went through him.

  “I go over it all the time, wishing I could have a do-over,” he admitted very quietly. “Thinking there must have been something I could have done differently. We both trusted the spotter. He followed procedure with the streamers. He swears that gust of wind wasn’t indicated. When I saw it catch Russ, I thought I would be sent in right behind him.”

  Jacqui had read the full report from the investigation. The spotter had been a long-time member and a jumper himself, a man she would have trusted with her own life. He’d been devastated by the accident and had since quit for a completely different line of work, having lost confidence in himself. She didn’t blame him for Russ’s death any more than she blamed Vin.

  Vin had been in the air above Russ, already out of the plane, helpless to do anything but watch. She stroked his arm, unable to imagine how agonizing it must have been for him and tried not to think of it.

  The coroner had said Russ wouldn’t have survived the impact. He’d been knocked unconscious and even if Vin had been able to bring him down faster, even if Russ had been set in the rescue basket sooner and whisked to hospital in seconds, it wouldn’t have made a difference. The head trauma and his internal injuries had been too severe.

  “I keep wondering, if I had been the kind of wife who nagged her husband to keep his feet on the ground, would he still be alive?” Her voice was a faint rasp.

  Vin glanced at her, mouth pulled down at one side with disgust. “No. We’re junkies. The nagging just makes for a lousy marriage.” His flinty gaze lifted to the ’chute.

  “Yeah,” she agreed, knowing he was talking about his own brief marriage and the other ones they’d seen impacted by the work these men did. Firefighters, in general, and smokejumpers in particular, couldn’t let go of what they did. They loved it too much. That had to be accepted if you were going to love one of these men.

  “If you guys are junkies, I’m a junkie for the sidelines of it,” she said wryly.

  “You? A firefly? I don’t see that.”

  She pinched the arm she was still hugging. It was muscled and strong. He was infinitely solid the way all the firefighters were. She fully understood why they attracted so much female attention they had their own type of groupies. Leaning into him felt safe and reassuring. Enticing.

  “I mean I like being part of the support staff. I’ve always liked being here, listening to the stories. I was never going to be a real part of it. I’m not built for carrying a hundred pounds of gear and I have no desire to jump out of planes or be on the front line, but from the minute I started volunteering here, I just wanted to be here all the time, helping you guys do what you do.”

  “I thought it was because you had a crush on Russ.”

  “That’s what everyone thinks,” she mumbled, releasing him and folding her arms across herself, still sensitive to how much teasing she had suffered over that. “But I fell for working with firefighters before I fell for him. I love the way you guys can push aside everything, no matter the chaos, and make do with what you have and someh
ow manage to save the world.”

  “We don’t need any help in the ego department, Jac.” His gaze cut to hers, filled with smug self-disparagement. “You do sound like a firefly, talking like that. We’re not superheroes.”

  “I know. Believe me, I know.” She knocked her shoulder into his immovable frame. “I also know you can’t be bothered filling out the right billing codes for your timesheets and get your poop in a knot if someone orders the wrong kind of thread. That’s where I come in. You’re great at working in chaos and I’m great at creating order from the mess you leave behind.”

  “Yeah, we’ve been missing your TLC. Someone thought Cady’s power bars were too expensive and requisitioned a pallet of granola bars from an army surplus place. They’re disgusting. Seriously awful. They taste like bear scat.”

  “How do you know? Eat a lot of scat, do you?” she asked with an innocent bat of her lashes.

  His mouth quirked and the feeling of homecoming struck her anew. It was this playful trash-talk and Russ’s parachute and the building itself. The high ceilings and indistinct, hollow-voiced sound of people talking through the walls. The sewing machines were quiet, the sofas and chairs here in the common area empty, but in a couple of months this building would be a hive.

  The hive where she loved to buzz around with everyone else.

  Seven years ago, she had begged Hugh, the former captain, to hire her when a permanent position came up. It hadn’t been about Russ. When Russ took over, however, and again when they married, he had been worried they wouldn’t be able to work together. She had repeatedly told him he would leave this place before she did.

  Oh.

  Her heart clenched.

  God she was tired of looking backward with burning eyes.

  The voices grew louder and the door to the captain’s office opened.

  Laurel Keenan came out with a man who had to be the new captain because he was not only built like one of the firefighters; he wore the straight-spine of military and the confidence of a man in authority.

  “Hey, Jacqui!” Laurel’s tight expression brightened with warm recognition. “I didn’t know you were back. Great hair. That suits you.”