Wildfire on the Skagit (Firehawks Book 9) (9 page)

Krista laid back against the tree’s bark—its roughness the only thing that kept her from sliding down onto the forest floor.

# # #

Evan knew nothing about the Oregon wilderness, except for the locales that had burned. The Zulies flew most of the West, covering Alaska to California from their Montana Base, but between the U.S. Forest Service smokejumpers in Redmond, Oregon and
the
elite contractor in the entire business—Mount Hood Aviation—there hadn’t been much call for him to come to the state. At least not until he’d gotten a job here.

So, when Krista loaded them up with rappelling gear and bag lunches from Laura’s stash, he shrugged and went along with the ride.

“When there’s a crisis,” Krista lectured as they trooped through the woods, “smokejumpers are first responders. On a wildfire, we’re what’s called a Type I Crew. In other words, the worse it is, the more likely they are to send us. But we can also be called out on flood relief, hurricanes, even oil spills.”

“With my last outfit…” It still felt odd to refer to the Zulies in the past tense; he’d jumped with them for so long. “…I’ve done hiker search and rescue as well as jumping to downed aircraft that no one else can get to quickly.”

“So, we need to know a lot about ropes and harnesses for safety work.”

“Or if you get hung up in a tree while your jumping and need to lower yourself down.”

That earned him a lot of surprised looks.

“Sure, jumping near a fire, the winds are incredibly unpredictable.”

“As the Rook found out on his first fire with me,” Krista teased him.

“I didn’t land in a tree,” he protested.

“No, he landed in the fire itself.”

Which wasn’t entirely accurate about the jump but was dead on when it came to Krista. He’d definitely landed in something wonderful and intense…and potentially incendiary if he didn’t get her alone soon. So, he gave a “you caught me” shrug which had the girls laughing.

“We’re going to teach you some basic rope work,” Krista stopped at a long grassy slope. It was steep enough that it would be hard work to walk on, but if you fell you wouldn’t roll very far.

They spent the rest of the morning with one end of the ropes tied off to a line of stout trees and the other through the brake on their rappelling harnesses. They got to the point where they were quite comfortable moving up and down the slope. Standing perpendicular to the slope they were steeply tipped from normal gravity, but they learned how to trust the equipment and work from those positions.

Thankfully it was a shadowed slope, because the rope practice was an intense workout and the sun was bright and warm. The girls would have cooked their brains if they did all this exercise in the sun.

Then after a lunch of MREs—which elicited all of the surprise and complaints he’d expected—Krista led them to a steep wall. The cliff wasn’t vertical, but it would be a very hard wall to free climb and even harder to descend. It was less than a hundred feet, but to them it must have looked like a thousand.

Much to his surprise, after some initial hesitation, they all made their way down walking slowly backwards down the wall, practically lying flat in relation to gravity.

The excited cheering grew with each person who made it down until he was the only one left at the top of the ridge. He released and tossed each rope down except for one.

Over the very steepest section of the cliff, he doubled the last rope around a tree trunk rather than tying it off to one. He ran the two lines through the rings on his harness and knotted both ends so that he didn’t rappel past the end of the ropes even though they were lying on the ground when he tossed them down.

“Clear below,” he shouted down the cliff. They all backed away to the edges of the small clearing between the cliff base and the stream running down the valley; twenty faces staring up at him from beneath their hardhats.

Once he was sure they were clear, he did a Special Forces rappel. Kick hard off the cliff; let the rope fly. Cinch it to slow down just before swinging back to the cliff face. Time the next two-footed kick so that he didn’t lose any momentum; let the rope fly again.

In seconds he was at the base of the cliff having only touched it three times, including the top. There was a stunned silence as he unknotted one of the ropes and tugged on the other until the free end of the line had passed around the tree at the top of the cliff and snaked down into a pile in the grass at his feet.

He finally heard a soft, “Holy shit!” from one of the girls. Neither of the chaperones made any attempt to hush her.

As he coiled the rope, he turned to face them. “That is a seriously advanced technique. Took me a long time to get it right with some of the best trainers in any military. But I just wanted to show you that there are whole different levels to each of these skills we’re showing you.”

“Right,” Callie drawled it out. “Like they’d ever let a girl do that.”

“Our senior pilot,” Krista spoke up, “flew a Black Hawk helicopter with the Army’s SOAR. They’re the very best pilots; the same people who flew into bin Laden’s compound. Annapolis, West Point, and the Air Force Academy are running fifteen to twenty percent women in every class now. Many Hotshot fire crews are a quarter women now. Smokies like me are still rare, but being a smokie is tough.”

“There’s a reason they call it the Special Forces of the firefighting,” Evan acknowledged. “But we had three out of eighty in the Zulies.” The look of determination that rippled through the group of girls was one of the best things he’d ever seen. The world had just opened for these young women. No small town would ever hold one of these back from anything she wanted to do.

He looked to Krista and knew this was the moment she’d been waiting for, this is why she had started this. Her face simply glowed with joy.

That.

That was what captivated him about her, the way her heart simply shone from her face.

He wondered at her strength that she’d found a way to climb to smokie on her own, and loved that she cared this deeply about helping others up by simply showing them what was possible.

“You want a model for all you can be?” He addressed the girls. Then he just pointed at Krista and all their faces turned to her.

She actually blushed and looked down, which was awfully cute on her.

And Evan wished he’d met more women like her over the years. Not just powerful in body and form, but independent and confident in who they were. Maybe meeting one was enough. Perhaps that was all any man was gifted, the chance to meet one woman who was so incredible.

He almost laughed. They’d humped each other’s brains out only two or three times, managed to sleep together one single night, and fought a dozen different fires in three different states across four weeks, and here he was ready to sign up for a full-on relationship with her.

This isn’t some Army enrollment,
he warned himself. Though in retrospect he’d given that less thought at seventeen than he was giving Krista now at thirty-two. But it wasn’t just some girlfriend or casual fuck either. He cared about her, deeply.

De oppresso liber
indeed. The Green Berets read their Latin motto as “to free from oppression.” But the actual translation was “from being an oppressed man, to being a free one.”

Krista had broken with whatever her mysterious past was.

These girls were breaking free even as he watched them.

He couldn’t wish for anything greater for them.

Too bad he couldn’t wish it for himself.

# # #

The afternoon passed in a blur.

Krista was still trying to adjust to how Evan saw her. It was no longer a surprise that a man as handsome as him found her physically attractive; he’d proven that beyond any possibility of doubt.

It was that he also saw her as…an ideal others could strive for? She’d never been a model for anything except how to be a royal pain in the ass to every smokie who slacked for even a second. Yet he had made the young women of Hood River High School look at her like she wasn’t just someone special, she was also who they should try to be.

The girls had actually gotten a little shy around her, which she’d pretty much cleared up by nearly falling into the rushing river that was at the bottom of the valley they’d rappelled into. It wasn’t that she was fooling around or being clumsy, it was just that she’d suddenly noticed that she and Evan were walking along the trail beside the river holding hands.

Right in front of everyone!

When had that happened?

And then she’d walked right off the edge of the trail and would have gone into the river if they
hadn’t
been holding hands.

Once she recovered, she looked at him in some alarm. His smile was entirely too pleased with itself. She was half tempted to spin around and send him off into the river instead.

Two things stopped her.

One, it felt so damn good.

Two, the girls weren’t reacting to it much at all. She didn’t see coy whispers or sideways glances. Krista did notice several sighs as Evan made sure she was steady on her feet before they continued ahead.

She felt a sigh herself. She was good with ropes, but she’d never seen anything like the flying descent that Evan had done. While aided climbing and descending was a skill that smokies used, it was obviously one that Green Berets lived by. Knowledge of that hadn’t made it one bit less dramatic. When he did that first kick and fall, her heart had choked her by the throat to think how much she could lose in that instant. Then he’d arrested, bounced off the cliff face with the perfect ease of a top-level hopscotch player working her way down a chalked sidewalk, and dropped another dozen meters.

And then he’d turned it around as a lesson to inspire young women…and now she was right back to where she’d started, with the day blurring behind her. The sole reality was Evan’s hand anchoring her to the earth so that she didn’t fly away.

They finally reached the ultimate destination she’d planned as a treat for the outing, the Tamanawas Falls. Forty feet wide, the hundred-foot falls hammered down into a rocky landing pool in a smooth curtain, throwing up a cloud of mist that softened and cooled the hot summer day. There was a big cave back behind the falls and soon the girls were off exploring.

Yet rather than joining them, she and Evan perched on a rock that offered a spectacular view, and also allowed them to keep an eye on the whole area.

“What’s with…” she flexed her fingers in his but didn’t let go.

He shrugged. “Seemed like a good idea at the time. I was standing there telling them all how wonderful you are, then it sunk in finally how wonderful you
are.”

“I don’t know. Sounds like lust to me.”
Didn’t sound anything at all like lust.
Though she’d feel far more comfortable if it did.

“There’s that, too,” Evan agreed amiably.

She noticed that he was scanning the green bowl of the waterfall from behind his dark sunglasses, constantly on the lookout for the girls’ safety; which was good because she couldn’t focus for crap at the moment.

The area was thick with ferns and moss. The mist-slick, hard rock kept most of the trees small. It was a truly beautiful spot, one of her favorites in the entire National Forest. But she’d never been here with a man before. Not a man she was willing to hold hands with in public anyway. She tried to remember if there had ever been one of those before, but couldn’t think of one.

“But there’s also what you are doing for these girls,” he continued in the same voice as if that didn’t turn her world completely over.

In prior seasons, the smokies who’d helped out had gotten into the fun of it. Made sure the groups had a good and safe time. Without any prompting on her part, Evan had gone beyond and helped make it a life-changing event.

And based on how she was feeling, it wasn’t only girls whose life was being changed. Even if he walked away tomorrow, he’d given her an image of herself that she’d never lose. She pounded it into her memory so that it would be anchored there for when this ended.

In this one instant she felt competent and desirable. She felt as if she’d actually become what she’d always strived to be and knew she could never be. Probably never would be again except for this moment.

Herself.

So she wrapped that up especially carefully and tucked it deep inside.

But there was even more.

She’d never given much thought about the man she’d want to be with for more than a fling. Most guys were just such…guys. Many of them good and decent, some total jerks, but all still just guys. She’d wanted something more, but had never been able to quantify what that meant.

More often than not Krista pictured herself as the rasty old smokejumper, maybe sent to the parachute loft after her knees gave out, smoking cigarettes (though she didn’t smoke), and with a whiskey-rough voice (though she only drank the occasional beer). Her pastimes would be telling stories of “how it once was when there were
real
fires” and generally giving the rookies shit.

Now that Evan Greene sat beside her, still—unbelievably—holding her hand, she found it easy to quantify what she wanted in a man. There was the whole list sitting right beside her.

# # #

“Ready?” Evan checked Callie’s harness. He’d already made sure she had on the heavily padded jumpsuit and that her helmet with the wire mesh face protection was securely in place.

“Ready,” she acknowledged with the mix of fear and excitement that most of the girls had expressed the moment before the first jump.

Just like a spotter would, Evan leaned out the door and made sure the area was clear. Krista flagged him from the sawdust pit drop zone that she was ready.

He pulled his head back in, checked Callie once more through the mesh to make sure she wasn’t hyperventilating, then slapped her on the shoulder and shouted, “Go! Go! Go!”

Without hesitation, Callie yanked herself out the door of the forty-foot jump tower. It was just a weather-weary platform with a safety railing on three sides. The fourth had a short wall with a jump door framed into it, so that it would feel more realistic.