Flame (Firefighters of Montana Book 5) (8 page)

They worked hard through dusk and Sam called them off at about eight. Part of responsibility was looking after they crew—making sure they were kept hydrated and fed, with plenty of energy to do their jobs safely.

When Dex sat down with the other guys, joshing each other with their ritual complaining about being away from home and The Drop Zone, he opened his ration pack to see a ziplock bag of trail bars. He hadn’t wanted to admit it to Cady, hadn’t wanted to admit that he needed anything from her, but he damn well loved them. He wished he had a stash at home that he could tuck into when he was watching a game or the latest car chase movie. He pulled out his sleeping bag, rolled it out on a flat bit of ground, and crawled into it.

He looked up into the sky, clear and full of stars, the scent of smoke everywhere around him, and thought of Cady Adams and that kiss four years ago. Of her pink explosion of a bakery. About how one of those chocolate chip cupcakes of hers would taste. Of how Cady would taste.

Their timing had never been right. When his mother had died, he’d left Glacier Creek, never planning to come back for anything other than a visit every now and again to see his father and Mitch. And when Mitch got married, to see Sarah and a couple of years later, baby Lila.

He’d never wanted to start anything with a woman here in Glacier Creek. He hadn’t wanted to be tied down that way. He’d needed to roam and he had for years. Montana couldn’t hold him then. But things had changed. He was back now and so was Cady.

As he drifted into a fitful sleep, the stars winking above him and the smell of smoke in his nostrils and in his hair, he knew things with Cady were about to change.

W
hen Cady was
stressed, she baked. And she’d baked so much in the twenty-four hours Dex and the rest of the smokejumpers had been up the mountain, she had enough left for a girls-only Sunday afternoon cake and wine date with Jacqui, Laurel, and her two other friends, Dr Lina McArthur and Callie McClain, who was back in Montana for a visit.

She thought it would be a distraction to have them around. She’d opened a couple of bottles of wine and presented a platter of her most decadent caramel-iced cupcakes, and it wasn’t three seconds into that first bite before all the women were talking about their men. Their men, who were together fighting the fire up on the mountains above Flathead Lake. Their men, who took their lives into their hands every time they strapped on a parachute. Cady could understand all the joking and laughing going on among the women was their way of avoiding talking about how scared they all were about what they didn’t know might be happening up there. So they talked about happier times, about how they’d all met.

“It was wolves that brought us together,” Callie laughed. She was a vet and had been trying to evacuate a wildlife sanctuary when fire threatened it this past July. Tyler Dodson had been one of the smokejumpers defending the property.

“If Ace Clark hadn’t been injured on a jump, our eyes wouldn’t have met across the crowded ER,” Lina said with a warm smile.

The women laughed at Lina’s happy shrug.

Cady reached for the wine bottle and filled the empty glasses around the table. She enjoyed the playful and teasing banter. She’d missed having friends like this in the years she’d been away in California and was so grateful to have them around her now. They were her family, since she no longer had one of her own, and with her unsociable baker’s hours, these nights were precious.

“Ace has a great ass,” Laurel said with a wink. “Objectively speaking, of course.”

“Vin’s is better,” Jacqui called out, clinking her wine glass against Laurel’s. “He would absolutely, definitely win the Great Glacier Creek best ass challenge!”

There was more clinking of wine glasses and hoots of laughter. Cady tried to join in, but the more she thought of those other guys’ butts, a pang of frustration welled inside her. She didn’t have a man butt of her own to brag about. She stared into her wine, swirled it around in her glass, hoping the others wouldn’t see the mix of confusion, regret, and sexual frustration in her eyes.

“Now,” Jacqui announced as she reached across the table for another of Cady’s caramel cupcakes. Silence descended, as if everyone was waiting for an important pronouncement from Jacqui. “Is it just me, ladies, or has anyone else here noticed that our station rookie, Dex McCoy, somehow got hotter when he was away in Missoula.” Jacqui’s eyes twinkled in delight. “Cady? What do you think?”

“Me?” Cady’s voice came out with a squeak, more reminiscent of a teenage boy in the throes of puberty than a trained pastry chef and small business owner.

“C’mon, Cady.” Laurel teased. “You must have noticed, because he sure as hell was noticing you at The Drop Zone yesterday after the commemoration ceremony.” Laurel’s eyebrows quirked upwards and there were nods of agreement all around her.

She liked these women. Hell, she loved these women. But she couldn’t go there.

“Didn’t you go to school together?” Lina asked, looking confused. “I’m still catching up on how you all know each other.”

“We all did!” Laurel added. “And until Cady went away to the culinary institute, she’d lived in Glacier Creek her whole life. But Dex moved away pretty much straight out of high school, didn’t he, Cady?”

“Yep. Right after graduation.”

“But you’re both back now and I’m guessing it’s pretty hard to avoid each other, right?”

Cady saw almost the whole population of Glacier Creek each week when they came into her shop, but Dex had made an art out of avoiding her.

“I’m learning about small towns,” Lina added. “I’m running into half my patients in Cady’s Cakes, or the library, or the post office. Not to mention The Drop Zone.”

Cady knew she had to give her friends some kind of explanation. “We never hung out in the same crowd or anything like that. He was always a bit… aimless. I had big dreams, even then.” She swallowed the enormous lump in her throat. “Maybe familiarity breeds contempt, or something.”

“It wasn’t contempt I saw in his eyes,” Laurel said. “I think familiarity might be fostering something else entirely.”

When Jacqui’s phone, positioned in her line of sight on the low coffee table in Cady’s living room, began to vibrate and blink, she quickly reached for it.

“Vin?”

A skitter of fear went through each of them. Cady could feel it reverberate around the room, through each of the hearts of the women gathered around her, until it lodged in her throat, making her breath disappear. They all watched Jacqui’s face for a reaction, a sign, a flicker of something.

When a smile quirked the corners of her mouth and she exhaled, they breathed, too. “Okay,” she said, her face flooded with relief and love. “Get home safe. Love you, too.” She ended the call and slowly put her phone down on the table, before picking up her glass of wine and raising it in a toast.

“They’re okay. Everyone’s okay. They saved two cabins up on the ridge and they’re back at Kalispell. To our Montana smokejumpers!”

“To our Montana smokejumpers!” the women cried.

*

Within half an
hour, Jacqui, Laurel, Lina, and Callie had left. They’d thanked Cady for the wine, the conversation, and especially the cupcakes, and she’d hugged them each in turn as they’d left. Being the partner of a smokejumper required an enormous amount of courage, too. Okay, so they weren’t the ones jumping out of planes, but they were the ones holding the fort at home, working in their own careers, some looking after kids alone, trying to make the extraordinary ordinary. Cady thought it took a particular kind of resilience and strength to partner those men and women. Her four friends had it in spades.

As she stacked the wine glasses and the plates in the dishwasher, wiped down the coffee table, straightened the cushions on the sofa, and quickly went over the carpet with her vacuum, she couldn’t fight thinking about Dex. The rookie, that was what Jacqui had called him. He was, compared with the other men and women at the station. He’d only joined a year ago, about the time she had opened up Cady’s Cakes. A rookie he might be, but he wasn’t a kid. He’d long ago developed the physical strength of a hard-working man, someone who worked hard all day—she could see it in the width of his shoulders, his chest, the tightness of the muscles under his shirt. So, yeah, she’d looked. She’d imagined. She’d fantasized.

Oh, yeah, she’d fantasized. And since his admission at The Drop Zone—that he’d kissed her back, that night four years ago, she’d fantasised a whole hell of a lot. Sheet twisting, sweat-inducing fantasies. Why had she remembered everything else about her clumsy attempt at seduction, and her subsequent shame and humiliation, but not that one particular detail that could have changed everything?

He’d kissed her back. And then four years of nothing. For Pete’s sake, what was that all about?

She stomped across her living room, grabbed the empty wine bottle from the coffee table, and tossed it in her recycling bin with a satisfying clatter of glass on glass.

Was she hungry? She checked her watch. It was six o’clock, an hour since Jacqui had received the news that the team were heading home. She thought for a moment. No, she wasn’t hungry. She’d nervously eaten too much of her own caramel cupcakes.

But she knew who might be after spending nearly forty-eight hours up on a ridge in the heat and the choking smoke.

It was the least she could do. She knew how to feed people. She could drive over to Dex’s place and give him one of her delicious frozen meals. It would be her way of saying thanks.

She checked her freezer. Since she worked such long hours, she’d got into the habit of cooking up big batches of her favourite meals, so she didn’t have to fuss about preparing dinner when she got home. After a whole day up to her elbows in flour, sugar, caramel, and icing, it was easy and convenient. And it meant she had a stash of options to choose from. She pondered what Dex would like. The cold air from the freezer wafted towards her, cooling her hot cheeks.

Vegetarian lasagna? Nope. Dex would be a meat kind of guy, she was sure of it, which meant a choice between beef stroganoff or her favourite Indian-inspired chicken curry. She went for the beef.

Five minutes later, she was on the road. The frozen meal was on the seat next to her and her heart was in her mouth.

C
ady had looked
up Dex’s address online and she was now cruising down his street on the new side of Glacier Creek, looking for his apartment complex. The street was new and gleaming and fresh, filled with low-rise modern apartments, neatly trimmed communal lawns, and trees that were still saplings. She couldn’t figure it out. This didn’t seem like Dex McCoy at all. Why did he live in an apartment in Glacier Creek when he could still be living on the family ranch, North Fork? The McCoy’s had run cattle for generations and once Dex had finished high school, it seemed logical he would stay and work the family ranch. He’d left everything to his brother Mitch and his wife Sarah to handle. It was sometimes the subject of gossip among the townsfolk who frequented Cady’s Cakes, all these years later, about why he’d left the ranch. Cady had tried not to listen in to those conversations when she’d been serving customers, but she seemed to have some ultrasonic hearing when it came to Dex McCoy. She had always been able to hear his name across her shop, even if it was whispered behind a closed hand fifty feet away.

Cady slowed when she spotted his number and pulled up out front. His truck was there in the street, it’s faded red looking out of place in this new part of town. She took a deep breath, lifted the food parcel from the passenger seat, and got out of the car. It was short walk up a neat path to his front door. She knocked, and then took a step back, tucked her hair behind her ears, and jiggled her car keys in one hand.

The door opened.

She gripped her keys so hard they made imprints on her palm.

“Cady?” Dex rubbed the confused expression from his mouth with a swipe of his big hand.

“Hi, McCoy.” She knew he was home, but it was so good to see him safe and sound and in one piece that she wanted to hug him.

But of course she didn’t. He looked tired. His dark eyes were hooded, the growth on his chin suggested he hadn’t seen a razor in a few days and maybe he’d forgotten to pack a comb in his smokejumping pack because his hair was ruffled and sticking up. And although he was wearing what appeared to be clean jeans and a fresh, long-sleeved T-shirt and not his smokejumping gear, Cady could smell smoke.

“What are you doing here?” His tone was a mix of confused and surprised. “I’ve just got back from base.” He looked at the parcel in her hands. “What’s that?”

“I brought you some dinner. It’s the least I could do since I know you’ve been up the mountain for near on two days, facing who knows what, and I thought you might be ravenous and too exhausted to cook.” The words ran from her mouth in a full force blast.
Get the words out, get it done, and get outta here.
That was her new plan, a plan she’d hatched when she realized what being so close to Dex was doing to her. And that crooked smile? She’d never seen it before in her life. Her
whole
life. Not since she first met Dex at high school when they were thirteen years old, not in all the years since.