Wildfire at Larch Creek Read online

  Praise for the Night Stalkers series:

  “Top 10 Romance of 2012.”

  – Booklist, The Night Is Mine

  “Top 5 Romance of 2012.”

  –NPR, I Own the Dawn

  “Suzanne Brockmann fans will love this.”

  –Booklist, Wait Until Dark

  “Best 5 Romance of 2013.”

  –Barnes & Noble, Take Over at Midnight

  “Nominee for Reviewer’s Choice Award

  for Best Romantic Suspense of 2014.”

  –RT Book Reviews, Light Up the Night

  Praise for the Firehawks series:

  “Buchman again pens an excellent read!”

  -RT Book Reviews, Full Blaze

  “Full Blaze hits it out of the park.”

  -Reading Reality, Full Blaze

  “FULL BLAZE has it all; suspense, hot-hot romance and as much edge-of-the-seat

  excitement you could possible ask for.”

  -Fresh Fiction, Full Blaze

  “The heat sizzles. Another great tale

  that provides a thrilling story.”

  -Night Owl Reviews, Pure Heat

  “Buchman writes with beauty and passion.

  The flames of passion burn brightly in this

  meticulously researched, hard-hitting, and

  suspenseful contemporary.”

  - Publishers Weekly, starred review, Pure Heat

  “If you are looking for an action packed

  romantic read...PURE HEAT is one you

  will want to pick up.”

  –Fresh Fiction, Pure Heat

  Firehawks

  Wildfire

  at Larch Creek

  Firehawks

  Wildfire

  at Larch Creek

  by

  M. L. Buchman

  Wildifre at Larch Creek

  -a Firehawks Smokejumper romance-

  Tim Harada, a lead smokejumper at MHA in Oregon, visits home — the quirky little town of Larch Creek, Alaska. The streets are named for Jack London books, the pickup trucks are all blue, and the residents are all too familiar. One in particular.

  Macy Tyler, helicopter pilot. Tim still sees her as his best friend’s kid sister. Before he leaves again, she must convince the guy she’s loved all her life that during his absence she transformed herself into a beautiful, competent woman.

  Together they must fight the past and the Alaskan wildfires to create their future after the Wildfire at Larch Creek.

  Chapter 1

  Two-Tall Tim Harada leaned over Akbar the Great’s shoulder to look out the rear door of the DC-3 airplane.

  “Ugly,” he shouted over the roar of the engine and wind.

  Akbar nodded rather than trying to speak.

  Since ugly was their day job, it didn’t bother Tim much, but this was worse than usual. It would be their fourth smokejump in nine days on the same fire. The Cottonwood Peak Fire was being a total pain in the butt, even worse than usual for a wildfire. Every time they blocked it in one direction, the swirling winds would turnabout and drive the fire toward a new point on the compass. Typical for the Siskiyou Mountains of northern California, but still a pain.

  Akbar tossed out a pair of crepe paper streamers and they watched together. The foot-wide streamers caught wind and curled, loop-the-looped through vortices, and reversed direction at least three times. Pretty much the worst conditions possible for a parachute jump.

  “It’s what we live for!”

  Akbar nodded and Tim didn’t have to see his best friend’s face to know about the fierce wildness of his white grin on his Indian-dark face. Or the matching one against his own part-Vietnamese coloring. Many women told him that his mixed Viet, French-Canadian, and Oklahoman blood made him intriguingly exotic—a fact that had never hurt his prospects in the bar.

  The two of them were the first-stick smokejumpers for Mount Hood Aviation, the best freelance firefighters of them all. This was—however moronic—precisely what they lived for. He’d followed Akbar the Great’s lead for five years and the two of them had climbed right to the top.

  “Race you,” Akbar shouted then got on the radio and called directions about the best line of attack to “DC”—who earned his nickname from his initials matching the DC-3 jump plane he piloted.

  Tim moved to give the deployment plan to the other five sticks still waiting on their seats; no need to double check it with Akbar, the best approach was obvious. Heck, this was the top crew. The other smokies barely needed the briefing; they’d all been watching through their windows as the streamers cavorted in the chaotic winds.

  Then, while DC turned to pass back over the jump zone, he and Akbar checked each others’ gear. Hard hat with heavy mesh face shield, Nomex fire suit tight at the throat, cinched at the waist, and tucked in the boots. Parachute and reserve properly buckled, with the static line clipped to the wire above the DC-3’s jump door. Pulaski fire axe, fire shelter, personal gear bag, chain saw on a long rope tether, gas can…the list went on, and through long practice took them under ten seconds to verify.

  Five years they’d been jumping together, the last two as lead stick. Tim’s body ached, his head swam with fatigue, and he was already hungry though they’d just eaten a full meal at base camp and a couple energy bars on the short flight back to the fire. All the symptoms were typical for a long fire.

  DC called them on close approach. Once more Akbar leaned out the door, staying low enough for Tim to lean out over him. Not too tough as Akbar was a total shrimp and Tim had earned the “Two-Tall” nickname for being two Akbars tall. He wasn’t called Akbar the Great for his height, but rather for his powerful build and unstoppable energy on the fire line.

  “Let’s get it done and…” Tim shouted in Akbar’s ear as they approached the jump point.

  “…come home to Mama!” and Akbar was gone.

  Tim actually hesitated before launching himself after Akbar and ended up a hundred yards behind him.

  Come home to Mama? Akbar had always finished the line, Go get the girls. Ever since the wedding, Akbar had gotten all weird in the head. Just because he was married and happy was no excuse to—

  The static line yanked his chute. He dropped below the tail of the DC-3—always felt as if he had to duck, but doorways on the ground did the same thing to him—and the chute caught air and jerked him hard in the groin.

  The smoke washed across the sky. High, thin cirrus clouds promised an incoming weather change, but wasn’t going to help them much today. The sun was still pounding the wilderness below with a scorching, desiccating heat that turned trees into firebrands at a single spark.

  The Cottonwood Peak Fire was chewing across some hellacious terrain. Hillsides so steep that some places you needed mountaineering gear to go chase the flames. Hundred-and-fifty foot Doug firs popping off like fireworks. Ninety-six thousand acres, seventy percent contained and a fire as angry as could be that they were beating it down.

  Tim yanked on the parachute’s control lines as the winds caught him and tried to fling him back upward into the sky. On a jump like this you spent as much time making sure that the chute didn’t tangle with itself in the chaotic winds as you did trying to land somewhere reasonable.

  Akbar had called it right though. They had to hit high on this ridge and hold it. If not, that uncontained thirty percent of the wildfire was going to light up a whole new valley to the east and the residents of Hornbrook, California were going to have a really bad day.

  His chute spun him around to face west toward the heart of the blaze. Whoever had rated this as seventy percent contained clearly
needed his head examined. Whole hillsides were still alight with flame. It was only because the MHA smokies had cut so many firebreaks over the last eight days, combined with the constant pounding of the big Firehawk helicopters dumping retardant loads every which way, that the whole mountain range wasn’t on fire.

  Tim spotted Akbar. Below and to the north. Damn but that guy could fly a chute. Tim dove hard after him.

  Come home to Mama! Yeesh! But the dog had also found the perfect lady. Laura Jenson: wilderness guide, expert horsewoman—who was still trying to get Tim up on one of her beasts—and who was really good for Akbar. But it was as if Tim no longer recognized his best friend.

  They used to crawl out of a fire, sack out in the bunks for sixteen-straight, then go hit the bars. What do I do for a living? I parachute out of airplanes to fight wildfires by hand. It wowed the women every time, gained them pick of the crop.

  Now when Akbar hit the ground, Laura would be waiting in her truck and they’d disappear to her little cabin in the woods. What was up with that anyway?

  Tim looked down and cursed. He should have been paying more attention. Akbar was headed right into the center of the only decent clearing, and Tim was on the verge of overflying the ridge and landing in the next county.

  He yanked hard on the right control of his chute, swung in a wide arc, and prayed that the wind gods would be favorable just this once. They were, by inches. Instead of smacking face first into the drooping top of a hemlock that he hadn’t seen coming, he swirled around it, receiving only a breath-stealing slap to the ribs, and dropped in close beside Akbar.

  “Akbar the Great rules!”

  His friend demanded a high five for making a cleaner landing than Tim’s before he began stuffing away his chute.

  In two minutes, the chutes were in their stuff bags and they’d shifted over to firefighting mode. The next two sticks dropped into the space they’d just vacated. Krista nailed her landing more cleanly than Tim or Akbar had. Jackson ate an aspen, but it was only a little one, so he was on the ground just fine, but he had to cut down the tree to recover his chute. Didn’t matter; they had to clear the whole ridge anyway—except everyone now had an excuse to tease him.

  # # #

  Forty hours later Tim had spent thirty hours non-stop on the line and ten crashed face first into his bunk. Those first thirty had been a grueling battle of clearing the ridgeline and scraping the earth down to mineral soils. The heat had been obscene as the fire climbed the face of the ridge, rising until it had towered over them in a wall of raging orange and thick, smoke-swirl black a couple dozen stories high.

  The glossy black-and-racing-flame painted dots of the MHA Firehawks had looked insignificant as they dove, dropping eight tons of bright-red retardant alongside the fire or a thousand gallons of water directly on the flames as called for. The smaller MD500s were on near-continuous call-up to douse hotspots where sparks had jumped the line. Emily, Jeannie, and Vern, their three night-drop certified pilots, had flown right through the night to help them kill it. Mickey and the others picking it back up at daybreak.

  Twice they’d been within minutes of having to run and once they were within seconds of deploying their fire shelters, but they’d managed to beat it back each time. There was a reason that smokejumpers were called on a Type I wildfire incident. They delivered. And the Mount Hood Aviation smokies had a reputation of being the best in the business; they’d delivered on that as well.

  Tim had hammered face down into his bunk, too damn exhausted to shower first. Which meant his sheets were now char-smeared and he’d have to do a load of laundry. He jumped down out of the top bunk, shifting sideways to not land on Akbar if he swung out of the lower bunk at the same moment…except he wasn’t there. His sheets were neat and clean, the blanket tucked in. Tim’s were the only set of boots on the tiny bit of floor the two of them usually jostled for. Akbar now stayed overnight in the bunkhouse only if Laura was out on a wilderness tour ride with her horses.

  Tim thought about swapping his sheets for Akbar’s clean ones, but it hardly seemed worth the effort.

  Following tradition, Tim went down the hall, kicking the doors and receiving back curses from the crashed-out smokies. The MHA base camp had been a summer camp for Boy Scouts or something way too many years ago. The halls were narrow and the doors thin.

  “Doghouse!” he hollered as he went. He raised a fist to pound on Krista’s door when a voice shouted from behind it.

  “You do that, Harada, and I’m gonna squish your tall ass down to Akbar’s runt size.”

  That was of course a challenge and he beat on her door with a quick rattle of both fists before sprinting for the safety of the men’s showers.

  Relative safety.

  He was all soaped up in the doorless plywood shower stall, when a bucket of ice-cold water blasted him back against the wall.

  He yelped! He couldn’t help himself. She must have dipped it from the glacier-fed stream that ran behind the camp it was so freaking cold.

  Her raucous laugh said that maybe she had.

  He considered that turnabout might be fair play, but with Krista you never knew. If he hooked up a one-and-a-half inch fire hose, she might get even with a three hundred-gallon helicopter drop. And then… Maybe he’d just shame her into buying the first round at the Doghouse Inn.

  Tim resoaped and scrubbed and knew he’d still missed some patches of black. The steel sheets attached to the wall as mirrors were as useless now as they’d been before decades of Boy Scouts had tried to carve their initials into them. Usually he and Akbar checked each other because you ended up with smoke or char stains in the strangest spots.

  But Akbar wasn’t here.

  Tim didn’t dare wait for any of the others. If he was caught still in the shower by all the folks he’d just rousted from their sacks, it wouldn’t turn out well.

  He made it back to his room in one piece. The guys who’d showered last night were already on their way out. Good, they’d grab the table before he got down into town and hit the Doghouse Inn. The grimy ones weren’t moving very fast yet.

  Tim had slept through breakfast and after the extreme workout of a long fire his stomach was being pretty grouchy about that.

  Chapter 2

  As Macy Tyler prepared for it, she regretted saying yes to a date with Brett Harrison. She regretted not breaking the date the second after she’d made it. And she hoped that by the time the evening with Brett Harrison was over she wouldn’t regret not dying of some exotic Peruvian parrot flu earlier in the day.

  Just because they’d both lived in Larch Creek, Alaska their entire lives was not reason enough for her to totally come apart. Was it?

  Actually it was nothing against Brett particularly. But she knew she was still borderline psychotic about men. It was her first date since punching out her fiancé on the altar, and the intervening six months had not been sufficient for her to be completely rational on the subject.

  After fussing for fifteen minutes, she gave herself up as a lost cause. Macy hanked her dark, dead straight, can’t-do-crap-with-it hair back in a long ponytail, put on a bra just because—it was mostly optional with her build, and pulled on a t-shirt. Headed for the door, she caught sight of herself in the hall mirror and saw which t-shirt she’d grabbed: Helicopter Pilots Get It Up Faster.

  She raced back to her bedroom and switched it out for: People Fly Airplanes, Pilots Fly Helicopters. And knocked apart her ponytail in the process. Hearing Brett’s pickup on the gravel street, she left her hair down, grabbed a denim jacket, and headed for the door.

  Macy hurried out and didn’t give Brett time to climb down and open the door of his rattletrap Ford truck for her, if he’d even thought of it.

  “Look nice, Macy,” was all the greeting he managed which made her feel a little better about the state of her own nerves.

  He drove into town, which was actua
lly a bit ridiculous, but he’d insisted he would pick her up. Town was four blocks long and she only lived six blocks from the center of it. They rolled down Buck Street, up Spitz Lane, and down Dave Court to Jack London Avenue—which had the grandest name but was only two blocks long because of a washout at one end and the back of the pharmacy-gas station at the other.

  This north side of town was simply “The Call” because all of the streets were named for characters from The Call of the Wild. French Pete and Jack London had sailed the Alaskan seaways together. So, as streets were added, the founders had made sure they were named after various of London’s books. Those who lived in “The Fang” to the south were stuck with characters from White Fang for their addresses including: Grey Beaver Boulevard, Weedon Way, and Lip-lip Lane.

  Macy wished that she and French Pete’s mate Hilma—he went on to marry an Englishwoman long after he’d left and probably forgotten Larch Creek—hadn’t been separated by a century of time; the woman must have really been something.

  Macy tried to start a conversation with Brett, but rapidly discovered that she’d forgotten to bring her brain along on this date and couldn’t think of a thing to say.

  They hit the main street at the foot of Hal’s Folly—the street was only the length of the gas station, named for the idiot who drove a dogsled over thin ice and died for it in London’s book. It was pure irony that the street was short and steep. When it was icy, the Folly could send you shooting across the town’s main street and off into Larch Creek—which was much more of a river than a creek. The street froze in early October, but the river was active enough that you didn’t want to go skidding out onto the ice before mid-November.

  Brett drove them up past the contradictory storefronts which were all on the “high side” of the road—the “low side” and occasionally the road itself disappeared for a time during the spring floods. The problem was that almost all of the buildings were from the turn of the century, but half were from the turn of this century and half were from the turn before. The town had languished during the 1900s and only experienced a rebirth over the last four decades.