Radclyffe - Firestorm

“We still have the field training left to do. I haven’t exactly impressed Mallory so far.”

Sarah glanced over at her, her brows a dark slash across her forehead in the moonlight. “It’s not about impressing her, you know that, right?”

“I know. She’s totally fair. She’s a great training instructor.”

“Uh-huh.”

Jac’s face heated. Sarah sounded as if she was waiting for Jac to say more, but there was nothing she could—or would—say. Mallory had been nothing but professional. Jac was the one out of bounds, and she sure wasn’t going to share her frustration with Mallory’s best friend.

“You now, Jac—” Sarah’s cell rang and she fumbled in the pocket of her jacket. “Hello?…Hey, we were just—”

Jac straightened. Something in Sarah’s tone put her on alert.

“About half an hour—maybe a little bit less. What’s up?” Sarah nodded silently. “Okay. Jac is with me. Who else is at base?…Figures, everyone’s away…Hold on.” Sarah looked over at Jac. “How much search and rescue experience do you have?”

“Plenty. I got certified when I worked at a ski lodge in college, and I had more than enough practice in the Guard.”

“Jac is good,” Sarah said into the phone. “You want me to call Tommy’s and see if I can round up anyone else?…Okay, your call. See you soon.”

“What?” Jac asked as soon as Sarah hung up.

“A party of climbers are missing up on Granite Peak. No radio contact since this morning, and they’ve been religious about checking in twice a day. We got called to assist the rangers because we’re the closest base. Mallory wants to leave as soon as we get in.”

“Okay,” Jac said, grateful to bury her personal ghosts as a surge of energy filled her with purpose. She couldn’t do anything to change what her father thought of her, or to escape public scrutiny and opinion, or to convince Mallory she was worth letting close. But she could fight for someone else and maybe make a difference—and the charge of putting herself on the line helped fill the empty spaces inside.

Chapter Nineteen

Sully walked into the ops office while Mallory was running checks on the radio transmitters the team would need for the search. Even though he must have been asleep when the call for backup came in from the ranger station in Granite Peak Park, his face was unlined, his shirt unrumpled, and his khaki trousers sharply creased. Mallory had had one leg in her sleeping bag when he’d called her. The adrenaline rush had roused her, but her eyes felt gritty, and her jeans and chambray shirt, though clean, had just come out of her laundry bag, and they looked it.

“I’ve got this, Sully,” she said. “No need for you to stay up.”

“Uh-huh.” Sully leaned against the doorjamb and crossed his legs at the ankle. “Who are you taking?”

“Sarah and Russo. Everybody else is still off base.”

“You want me to set up the field camp tomorrow when the rest of them get back?”

“That works, thanks. I don’t want boot camp to carry over into June.” Mallory stacked the radios next to a pile of topographical maps. While she worshipped order, if she got bent out of shape every time her schedule got torpedoed by an act of nature, she’d have been committed by now. “Hopefully we’ll find these kids in the morning and be back by tomorrow afternoon.”

“Who’s the lead on the search?”

“David Longbow. He’s sending four teams out at dawn. We should have plenty of time to get there.”

Sully crossed the room and craned his neck to see out the high horizontal window. “Lotta cloud cover coming in. I doubt you’ll be able to get any planes up.”

“I know. I just checked the forecast. A cold front coming down from Canada might bring snow in the high country by tomorrow midday. We really need to find them before that.”

“It’s too early in the season for a climb that high,” Sully said, shaking his head.

“David says the rangers tried to talk them out of it, but”—Mallory shrugged—“it’s still a free country.”

“Yeah, I know.” Sully grinned wryly. “And I recall not listening to anyone when I was their age either.”

Mallory chuckled. “Sully—I’m not so sure you’d listen now.”

“Be careful out there, okay?”

Mallory nodded. “You got it, Chief.”

She grabbed the gear and headed into the yard to load the Jeep. Ground searches this time of year were always frustratingly slow and dangerous, as the snow covering the slopes in the high country started to melt underneath the crusted surface. Slides and mini-avalanches were common. She hoped to hell those kids hadn’t been caught in one. If they had, the SAR teams might not find them until July. She hoped she wasn’t making a mistake bringing Jac along, but she could use the manpower. Jac might be a rookie in terms of smokejumping, but she did have experience on the line, and many search and rescue volunteers had even less experience than Jac. She couldn’t explain the anxiety gnawing at her insides, but trying to puzzle out that strange sensation was a lot more comfortable than dealing with the surge of pleasure and relief she’d experienced when Sarah had told her Jac was on her way back with her.

Jac wasn’t spending the night with Chantal, and Mallory had absolutely no reason to be happy about that. Not just happy, practically jubilant. Ridiculous. She wasn’t about to start keeping tabs on Jac’s love life. She didn’t even want to think about Jac’s love life. She especially didn’t want to think about Chantal and her perky breasts and her pouty lips and her hands that were all over Jac every time Mallory looked in their direction. God, Chantal had looked ready for Jac to fuck her right there in the middle of Tommy’s.

Mercifully, the sound of an engine dissolved those particular images, and she spun around to watch Sarah’s Mustang pull in behind the Jeep. She resolutely did not look at Jac when Jac climbed out of the passenger side and joined Sarah.

“Hey,” Sarah called.

“Good to see you.” Mallory grabbed her go bag and stashed it in the rear compartment. The gravel crunched under their approaching footsteps, but she kept working. Her pulse tripped when the barest hint of pine wafted to her. The tangy scent made her stomach quiver absurdly, as if she’d never smelled the forest before. She lived in it, for God’s sake.

“What do you need us to do?” Sarah asked.

Drawing in a slow breath, Mallory straightened and turned. Sarah and Jac stood a few feet away in a pool of moonlight. She’d just seen Jac a few hours before, and there was no reason for her heart to race, but it did. The tightness in her stomach, the anticipation in her thighs, annoyed her almost as much as it amazed her. Jac hooked her thumbs in the sides of her pockets, rocking ever so slightly on her heels, her gaze steady on Mallory, as if to say, Here I am. What do you plan to do about it?

Nothing. She planned to do absolutely nothing about Jac beyond treating her precisely as what she was—a rookie member of the team. Racing heart and sweating palms be damned. Biology—that’s all it was—reflex, too long without a little human contact. Like she could have had with Emily if she’d been able to get Jac out of her mind.

“Change if you need to, and then grab your go bags,” Mallory snapped. “You’ll need ice gear. Everything else is loaded. We’ve got about a three-hour drive. No reason to have Benny fly with weather moving in.”

Sarah glanced up at the sky. Thick swaths of blue-black cloud swirled rapidly across the sky, obscuring the moon and blanketing the stars. “It was clear when we left Bear Creek.”

“A heavy front is coming down from the north.”