Sandra Field - Wildfire

She frowned at him. ‘Yes,’ she said in a clipped voice. ‘How do you know that? I’ve never laid eyes on you before.’

She had not laid eyes on him. But he most certainly had laid eyes on her. Although his heart was banging against his ribs, at another level Simon was not even surprised to learn her identity, for every movement she had made in the last few minutes had told him who she was. Feeling colour creep up his neck, fighting to keep his voice casual, he said, ‘I’m Simon Greywood. Jim Hanrahan’s brother.’ He held out his hand.

Shea took it with noticeable reluctance and gave it the lightest of pressures before releasing it. ‘The one from England,’ she said. ‘The artist.’

‘That’s right,’ he said, smiling at her in a way a number of women in London would have recognised. ‘I’m here for the summer.’

She did not smile back. Instead she gave his spanking-new T-shirt a derisive glance. ‘Aren’t you afraid you’ll get your hands dirty?’

He felt his temper rise. ‘I did apologise for my mistake.’

‘I wasn’t referring to that particular mistake.’

‘So what have you got against me, Shea Mallory?’

‘I’ll tell you,’ she answered, scowling at him as she thrust her hands in the pockets of her trousers. ‘I helped Jim write that first letter to you, so I know how much it meant to him. His parents didn’t tell him he was adopted until he turned twenty-five...once he discovered he had an older brother, he wanted to get in touch with you right away. So he wrote to you. And for six weeks you didn’t even bother to write back.’

‘That’s true,’ Simon said shortly. ‘But—’

‘With all the money you’ve got, I would have thought you could have picked up the phone—seeing that you were too busy painting rich people to write a letter.’

‘This is really none of your business—it’s between Jim and me, and nothing to do with you.’

She raised her voice over the growl of an approaching truck. ‘He and I went canoeing four weeks after he wrote to you. He was really upset—and he’s my friend. In my book that makes it my business.’ She glanced to her right. ‘Now you’ll have to excuse me, that’s the truck with the oil drums. Be back here at quarter-past nine.’

The truck lurched down the track and came to a stop three feet from where Simon was standing. The driver gave Shea a cheery hello and climbed out. Simon, knowing he had definitely got the worst of that round, strode up the hill to find his brother.

Jim was standing by a pile of gear chatting to two other men, whom he introduced as Charlie and Steve. Simon said, ‘We leave at nine-fifteen.’

‘We’ve got time for a coffee, then,’ Steve said, and headed for the kitchen, Charlie hard on his heels.

‘Jim, why the devil didn’t you tell me Shea was the pilot?’ Simon demanded.

Jim blinked. ‘For one thing, I didn’t know...there are seven or eight different pilots. For another, I didn’t want to engineer any kind of an introduction and be accused of matchmaking.’

‘You don’t have to worry—she can’t stand the sight of me.’

‘Whyever not?’

‘She thinks I should have picked up the telephone the minute I got your letter.’

‘That’s not exactly her business,’ Jim said thoughtfully.

‘That’s what I told her. Which didn’t endear me to her.’

‘Oh, well, I suspected she might not be the woman for you,’ Jim said with a dismissiveness that grated on Simon’s nerves. ‘Why don’t we grab a coffee and a doughnut before we go? It’s going to be a long day.’

Simon subdued various replies, making a manful effort to pull his mind off an encounter that had left him as stirred up as an adolescent. ‘Won’t we need gear out there?’ he asked.

‘The Bell—the big helicopter—took it out half an hour ago along with another crew. This isn’t a bad fire, as forest fires go...a good way for you to get your feet wet.’

The fire was not foremost in Simon’s mind. He had now seen two sides of the woman called Shea: the laughing creature playing in the water, and the cold-eyed pilot of a government helicopter. Although he was still smarting from her rebuff, this did not in any way diminish his desire to find out more about her. Both sides of her had got under his skin. Nor, he was sure, were these two facets of her personality the whole woman.

Besides which, he was determined to make her smile.

At him.

* * *

At nine-fifteen the four men headed towards the helicopter, Simon now arrayed in his orange overalls and carrying his hard hat and ear protectors. The sharp tang of smoke filled the air.

Shea was sitting in the helicopter doing her pre-flight check. Without making it at all obvious Simon engineered it that he was the one to sit beside her in the front. After doing up his seatbelt, he put on the headset, prepared to enjoy himself. The cockpit was small, so he was sitting quite close to her. Unlike the women he was accustomed to, she did not smell of expensive perfume. She smelled of woodsmoke.

She checked over her shoulder to see that she had her four passengers. Then, all her movements calm and unhurried, she flipped a number of switches and opened the throttle. The blades started to whirl, faster and faster, and the cockpit jounced up and down. After waiting a couple of minutes for the starter to cool, she turned the generator on, wound to full throttle and did the last of her checks.

Then her voice came over Simon’s headset. ‘Patrol three to fire boss. Taking off with four mop-up crew for the south flank of the fire. Over.’

‘OK, patrol three. The Bambi’s out there already. Proceed to the head of the fire for water drops. Over.’

‘Roger, fire boss. Over and out.’

The Bambi, Simon knew from his course, was the brand name for the water-bombing bucket. His muddled feelings for the woman beside him coalescing into simple admiration for her skill, he watched as she eased up on the throttle with her left hand, her feet adjusting the anti-torque pedals. As gently as a bird, the helicopter lifted from the ground, the dust swirling from the downdraught. She turned the nose into the wind, picked up the rpm’s, and with her right hand on the cyclic drove the machine forward and up. Feeling much as he had on his first plane trip, Simon saw the depot fall behind them, the trees diminishing to little green sticks, the dozer road to a narrow brown thread.

He said spontaneously, ‘How long have you been a pilot?’

‘Four years on helicopters. Three years fixed-wing before that.’

As she brought the helicopter round in a steep turn to face the fire, his shoulder brushed hers. The contact shivered along his nerves, much as the ripples had spread over the surface of the lake. Because her shirt-sleeves were rolled up, he could see the dusting of blonde hair on her arms, and the play of tendons in her wrists as she made the constant small adjustments to the controls. She wore no rings. Her fingernails were rimed with soot.

Why dirty fingernails should fill him with an emotion he could only call tenderness Simon had no idea. Fully aware that everyone on board could hear him, he said tritely, ‘You like flying.’

‘I love it,’ she said. ‘It’s what I like to do best in the world.’

The fire was closer now, so that Simon could see its charred perimeters and the columns of smoke shot through with leaping flames. I want to make love with you, Shea Mallory, he thought. I don’t know when or where or how. But I know it’s going to happen. I’m going to make you laugh with passion and cry out with desire, your cool grey eyes warming to me like mist burning off the lake in the sun. And you’ll find there’s something else you like to do the best in the world.