Radclyffe - Firestorm

“Wait a minute,” Sarah said. “If you think Hooker was a plant, how the hell did they get him into our station?”

“I pulled his personnel files last night. He was a last-minute applicant when another guy got injured. He was qualified, Sully passed him on to me as a probable accept, and I agreed when I reviewed the applicants.” Mallory shook her head. She should have caught that something was out of whack. “He looked really good on paper. Now that I think of it, maybe too good.”

“You couldn’t have known.” Sarah sat on the boulder next to Mallory and wrapped her arm around her. “So what are you going to do now, Ice?”

Mallory stood and tossed the dregs of her coffee into the smoldering ashes. “I’m going to finish up boot camp and see if Hooker comes back and proves me wrong.”

“And what about Jac?”

Mallory looked away, afraid if she saw the sympathy in Sarah’s eyes she’d embarrass herself. She’d walk through fire for Jac if Jac were hurt, but Jac had left by choice. If they hadn’t slept together, she might have gone after her all the same, but they’d blurred their boundaries now. That one night changed everything. Especially for her. “I’m kind of hoping she comes back too.”

“If she doesn’t?”

“I guess that’s the really big question, isn’t it. I wish to hell I knew the right answer.”

*

Three days later, Mallory still had no answers, but she was more certain of a few things. Hooker had not come back, and when she and Sully tried to track him down through the regional office, no one seemed to know where he was. When she wasn’t supervising the rookies while they climbed trees, cut lines, or assessed and laid out safety zones, she was digging into Hooker’s background. She didn’t come up with anything except that the paper trail stopped abruptly with the application that Sully had received early in the season. Hooker was a plant, and that had to have been arranged well before Jac was inserted into the team. No doubt, Fleming was a long-range planner.

She got up before the sun and didn’t crawl into her tent until she couldn’t stand up any longer. Exhaustion allowed her to sleep, but it didn’t stop her from dreaming. She could keep Jac out of her thoughts during the day by focusing on the firefighters she needed to train, but she couldn’t prevent Jac from invading her thoughts when she lay down to sleep. She saw her quick smile, heard her easy laugh, felt the gentle touch of her fingers on her face. She saw her eyes darken with desire, heard her moans of passion, felt the immeasurable pleasure of Jac filling her, taking her, surrendering to her. She ached for her with every bit of the soul-lacerating pain she’d lived with since she’d lost her men. If she hadn’t had her crew counting on her, she might have broken.

“On my mark,” she called to the three men set to scale the test trees. She stood at the base of one with her stopwatch. Sully and Sarah were timing the climbs at the others. “Go.”

She stepped back, craned her neck, and clicked off the watch when Anderson reached the preset target high up in the air. She took note of his technique as he descended. The other men reached the ground nearly simultaneously. “Nice job.”

“Thanks.” Anderson released his harness from around the base of the tree, hesitated, and said, “Have you heard anything from Jac?”

Mallory’s jaw tensed. “No. Not yet.”

“But if she comes back, she can make up what she missed, right?”

“She gets points for the fieldwork during the search and rescue mission we did.” Mallory slid her stopwatch into her pocket and sighed. “But she has to make the last jump on Saturday.”

Anderson pushed his hard hat back off his forehead, appearing to be fascinated by something in the trees beyond Mallory. Then he dropped his gaze to hers. “Sometimes a person goes AWOL because they don’t quite have their head on straight. That’s when someone in the squad needs to go get them and drag their ass back to base before they really get themselves into trouble.”

“This isn’t the Army, Anderson,” Mallory said. If Jac had just been one of her crew, she would have gone after her already. But Jac hadn’t wanted her along. Maybe didn’t want her at all. Jac’s choice, not hers.

“Close enough,” Anderson said. “If you tell me where she is, me and Ray will go collect her.”

Mallory studied him. “You know who she is, right?”

“Oh yeah, I know. She’s one hell of a wildland firefighter.”

“Yes, she is.” Mallory tried to set aside her personal feelings, ignore the hurt. Anderson was right—Jac was crew. You didn’t abandon crew, ever. Her heart said something even more important, something she couldn’t deny. Jac was hers. “I’m the boss. I’ll go get her.”

He grinned. “Good idea, Boss.”

Mallory tucked her clipboard under her arm and motioned Sarah to follow her as she walked away from the group.

“What’s up?” Sarah asked.

“I need you to cover for me for a while.”

“About time.”

“Yes,” Mallory said. “It really is.”

Chapter Thirty-one

“Daddy is going to be upset with you for wearing that,” Carly said, closing Jac’s bedroom door on her way to flopping down on the bottom of Jac’s bed. Her body-hugging white tank top rode up a good four inches above her very low-cut skintight blue jeans, exposing a glittering turquoise piercing in her belly button. That was new and, Jac was willing to bet, Daddy didn’t know about it.

“Probably right.” Jac checked the crease in her dress blues in the full-length mirror behind the closet door and shook a fold out of her pant leg so the cuff fell smartly over her gleaming black shoe. “How are you doing?”

“I’m all right. I guess there’s no way we can get out of this, is there?”

Jac carried her uniform jacket to the bed and laid it out. “You know there isn’t. How come you’re not dressed?”

“I don’t want to sit around being uncomfortable any longer than I have to.”

“I thought you were the girly-girl in the family.” Jac took the regulation measuring guide and checked the placement of her insignia on her collars and over the right breast. Then she hung the jacket on a hanger and leaned her shoulder against the closed closet door. “You want to talk about all this?”

Carly’s pretty face, more delicate than Jac’s, scrunched up. She kicked her flip-flop rhythmically back and forth against the bottom of her foot. Her hair was as black as Jac’s but longer and sculpted away from her face. She didn’t have the same dark eyes, though. She’d gotten their mother’s blue eyes. She was gorgeous and popular and just as insecure as any other seventeen-year-old. Suddenly being thrust onto national television couldn’t be very comfortable for her. Jac’s solution to the far more limited level of notoriety she’d faced at Carly’s age had been to secretly buy a motorcycle, start running with the rough crowd at school, and find herself a girlfriend, or a string of them. Carly was a lot more tightly wound, which was maybe even more worrisome.

“I sort of thought this was coming,” Jac said, hoping to get Carly talking. She’d been back in Idaho four days, and this was the first time they’d been alone. Four days that felt like forty years. She tried to keep her focus on her sister. Maybe it wasn’t too late to help her. “The announcement kinda took me by surprise all the same. You too?”

“You think he’ll win?” Carly asked.

“I don’t know. Sometimes I think the country just votes for the one who’s not in office, hoping that a change will make things better. Powell is pretty popular, though. I think he’s got a fight coming.”