Road to the Fire's Heart Read online

  She wished she had the breath to ask him questions, but she’d left the ability to speak far down the slope.

  Instead, she focused her headlamp on the ground in front of her. A simple rhyme formed in her head as she climbed. It so exactly matched the pace of her steps that she was unable to eradicate it.

  Jess and Jill went up the hill,

  With damned heavy pails of water…

  4

  Jess had tried to burn her out on the hike up. He wasn’t completely sure of his own motivations. It wasn’t as if there would be any easy way to evacuate her if she reached the fire line and then wanted to go home. The only crews who worked farther from base on a fire than the hotshots were the smokejumpers. The smokies went where there were no roads at all. The hotshots drove to the end of the road and then hiked in with nothing but the saws and axes on their backs. The fact that now they were only a half mile from a forest road was the closest they’d been to civilization in five days, having started well to the west.

  But every time he glanced back to check on her, Jill Conway-Jones was still there behind him. Sometimes closer, sometimes farther back, and once stopped and turned to stare out at the forest. She hadn’t even set down her heavy load, just stood staring out at the wonder of it all.

  It was one of the best parts of being a hotshot and it surprised him—and made him like her even more—that she appreciated the land.

  The work was brutal, the hours and pay sucked, but to stand out in vast stretches of wilderness and observe the ever-changing landscape was worth almost any price. He hadn’t expected some engine driver to understand.

  He’d finally turned away from watching Jill watch the fire and continued up the slope. He was always building stupid fantasies in his head and she was just another opportunity make up false dreams.

  Jess had never held a fantasy about Candace, or Patsy the team’s other assistant super, even before they each had married. But it was still his trademark. Build a ton of stupid dreams and then watch them shatter as reality got in the way. Beautiful blond Supergirl firefighter falls into his arms, sure, but really is partner with someone named Trent. He guessed it was close enough to Clark Kent, but that didn’t mean he had to like it. The compound last name put the final stamp on his stupidity.

  His legs and arms were burning as he crested another rise and stepped into an unexpected clearing of grass and slash. Three steps later before he could stop himself, he stumbled on a passed-out hotshot and landed full upon him.

  “Uh,” Evan grunted. “Can’t I even get a nap without you crawling in with me? Been waiting on you, Jess. You got any fuel on you?”

  Jess rolled off him, too exhausted to speak. The last thousand feet his arms had burned like demons and his attention had tunneled until each step became his whole world. Instead, he thudded his knuckles against one of the cubes.

  “Good job, bro,” Candace’s husband rolled to his feet, something Jess was incapable of at the moment. “Just remember to keep your mind off my woman,” Evan paid him back for the earlier tease over the radio with a friendly slap on the shoulder that almost tumbled him back to the lying on the ground. Then Evan headed off in the other direction carrying the fuel cube as if it didn’t weigh a thing. He didn’t take the water cube. Yet more payback—still worth it.

  Now if he could just lie here for a minute until his arms stopped screami—

  Jill!

  He’d forgotten about her for the last part of the climb. How far behind had he left her? That was rude as hell no matter what he’d been thinking.

  He jerked to his feet, spun—and ploughed head on into Jill. Once again he landed on top of a firefighter in the grass.

  Jess tried to roll off her but was blocked by the fuel cube she’d been carrying that now lay beside her. He started to roll the other way, but she stopped him.

  “You roll onto the food bag after I carried it all this way, you’re going to end up being a very dead firefighter.”

  “Right, sorry.” Though it was hard to be completely sorry, lying on top of her, with their faces inches apart and lit by the side glow from their headlamps. He’d been right before how pretty she was. It wasn’t just the blond ponytail. She had bright blue eyes and an open face—presently covered with smears of smoke.

  “Are you going to be getting up soon or are you just planning to lie there trying to pretend there isn’t a fire coming?”

  “Uh,” he climbed off her and gave her a hand up. “I was just coming back down to—” But she was already here.

  “To rescue the poor waif?” She ignored his offer to give her a hand up. “What part of ‘I’m a firefighter’ didn’t you get?”

  “The part where you’re tougher than I am.”

  “I’m not tough,” she dusted off her Nomex fire-resistant pants and shirt as if he’d somehow dirtied them. Then she fired an absolutely radiant smile at him that almost knocked him to the ground again, “I’m just stubborn as all get out.”

  5

  And if she wasn’t, Jill would have had the good sense to have grabbed that helicopter ride and flown out with Trent. It had taken everything she had and more to conquer that ravine’s slope with fifty pounds of fuel and food in addition to her own gear. But she’d done it and now that she was here, there wasn’t a chance that they were going to find her wanting.

  “So,” she looked at Jess. He still inspected her wide-eyed as if she’d transported down off an alien ship rather than just battled up a mountain in his silent wake. “Are we good to go?” She didn’t even know if she could lift a kitten at this point, never mind a Pulaski.

  “Sure,” he picked up both his remaining water cube—she’d seen the bobbing light of someone carrying Jess’ fuel toward the fire line—and her fuel cube. She was about to call after him that she could carry her own damned fuel, but wasn’t sure if she could so she kept her mouth shut. Shouldering the food sack, she followed in his wake.

  The night was quiet here.

  A chainsaw coughed to life close ahead and then another. In moments they were biting wood.

  Okay, it was a relatively quiet night. At least there was no roaring truck engine or even louder fire. The night here was truly dark outside of their helmet lights. The smoke clouds far above glowed the deep red of reflected fire light, but it wasn’t bright enough to cast any light over the scene.

  What she’d initially taken for a clearing was one end of a fire break. It stretched for a half a mile along the ridgetop. The line had been cut, the branches dragged away, and, once they reached the far side of the cleared line, they were walking on a stretch a dozen yards wide that had been scraped down to deep soil or rock. There were no machines up here, not this high up the mountain. Unbelievably, this had all been done by hand.

  Maybe she wasn’t ready to be a hotshot.

  They reached the far end of the cleared line. Here the chainsaws were hard at work. A line of soot-covered workers followed close behind them dragging away branches.

  Jess stopped by a woman wrestling an impossibly large branch into submission.

  “Jess! Thanks for the fuel. Chopper’s down for the night and they didn’t bring any gas in the last supply run.”

  Jill recognized the voice from the earlier radio exchange. The voice had given no impression of the woman. In person, Candace the team’s superintendent looked all-powerful. Smeared with dirt and smoke char, sawdust caught in her hair, she looked like Superwoman making Jill’s own Supergirl feel more like Supertoddler.

  “I’ve got a tag-a-long,” Jess set down the cubes he was carrying but didn’t even have the decency to hug his girlfriend.

  Jill moved up beside him and shoved him hard on the shoulder. Unable to step high enough to clear the cube he’d set down, he fell sideways into the cleared dirt.

  “I am not a tag-a-long,” she practically shouted down at him. “I’m a firefighter.” She look
ed back up at Candace who was watching her with a half smile. “I’m no hotshot, but I’ve got my red card,” Jill said it more quietly this time.

  “Well, let’s see what kind of a hotshot you make.” Candace didn’t hold out a hand, leaving Jess to struggle back to his feet as she spoke to him. “She’s attached to your hip. Teach her. Safety, procedures, whole thing by the manual. Start with swamping.”

  “Okay,” Jess didn’t sound very happy about it, but it was more than Jill had even hoped for—a tryout on a live fire. He headed toward the sound of chainsaws punctuated by the sharp crack of a falling tree.

  Candace stopped her before Jill could follow along and looked at her with an intensity that was alarming for a moment, then she smiled brilliantly, her teeth bright in comparison to her char-stained face.

  “That one needs a lesson or two in humility. Kick his ass, sister.”

  Before Jill could respond, Candace had once again clamped onto her branch and was dragging it off into the trees.

  For the next twelve hours, she and Jess did just that.

  “Swamping. It’s called swamping the branches, not dragging.”

  “Why?”

  Jess paused and laughed, making her stumble on the branch he’d been dragging just in front of her. “I haven’t a clue. But it’s swamping. That much you can trust me on.”

  As they worked back and forth across the fire line, following behind the sawyers, they spared a some breath to talk. Jess told her about his degree in Psychology.

  “Never was much at research and I sure didn’t want to spend my life listening to other people’s problems. I don’t know what I was thinking. It was interesting and I met some good friends, but being indoors wasn’t my idea of living. I met Candace in a coffee shop. She was from a firefighting family and she made it sound so amazing. She and I worked crews all over the west. When she got the call to form up a new team and tapped me for assistant super, it was just about the best day of my life. It was like I really knew I’d done something.”

  The way he talked about Candace was a curious mixture of humbling and daunting. The more he talked about her, the more imposing the super became. He clearly worshipped the ground she walked on. But it was also a little bit odd. He only spoke of her in relation to firefighting. How she’d done recruitment in a way he’d never seen before. How she kept everyone’s spirits up even after a two-day cut on a fire line that was overrun. He never once said anything about their relationship.

  “I came from a firefighting family,” she told him, but Jill never had much to say beyond that. She came from a line of firewomen. She was the only daughter of two of Seattle’s first female fire officers. That she was straight didn’t bother her moms; they had made her various boyfriends welcome over the years. And her birth mom’s father, Grampa Jones, had been one as well. Jill had served with her parents awhile, but felt overshadowed by them. They were both such strong, outgoing personalities that Jill had feared she was becoming invisible in her own quiet way.

  They’d been surprised when she’d signed up for the wildland engine crew. But if they’d been hurt, they didn’t show it. Instead, for her birthday they’d given her tuition for both emergency vehicle training and the expensive CDL—the commercial driver’s license wasn’t required but they had gotten it for her anyway. Neither of which would have saved her from the rolling tree that had wiped out their engine even if she’d been at the wheel.

  She kept quiet on the details of her firefighting family because she’d learned over the years that most guys didn’t understand about growing up with two mothers, so she kept that fact to herself.

  She hadn’t gone to college. She’d been a Junior Fireman in high school and gone straight into the academy for three months to earn her firefighter certifications. There had never been any question about what she’d do, only what her particular path to fire would be. Listening to Jess Monroe talk about Candace Cantrell was definitely giving her ideas.

  6

  Jess couldn’t get a feel for Jill Conway-Jones. He remembered down at the wrecked engine that she’d been funny. But up here on the line, she was mostly quiet. When she spoke, it was to ask him about hotshotting.

  They switched over to grubbing a twenty-foot line, which was just as exciting as it sounded. It was working the dirt with a Pulaski until there was nothing living in a swath that was hopefully wide enough to stop a fire from crossing—not even organic duff was allowed to remain. The cut trees would force the fire down to the ground, the removal of the branches and underbrush would rob it of fuels to slow it further, and the grubbed line would hopefully stop it cold.

  But for everything she didn’t say, she more than made up for by doing. She’d tirelessly leaned into branches that must have weighed more than she did. And, once she got the proper Pulaski technique, she kept up with him right down the line.

  The more he did manage to get from her, the more he cursed the luck of Trent the engine driver, whether he was Conway or Jones. A woman like her didn’t come along even every year, never mind every day.

  He did finally poke around enough to rediscover her funny side.

  “Supergirl is trying to be superhotshot,” Jess had forgotten his early nickname for her until they’d worked through the whole night and a dirty, smoking dawn was approaching.

  “No, she’s actually trying not to be superlame.”

  “She’d can’t be,” Jess insisted in between slices with the Pulaski—he had to chop out a stubborn root. “That job description has already been taken by me. Only one allowed per team.”

  “Fine. You want the title, it’s yours,” the smile he could hear in her voice through the exhaustion just made him like her all the more. “I’ll get myself a t-shirt to prove it. It’ll have the red and yellow S on it and then in tiny letters, I’ll have it say, ‘…and, yes, he is with me’.”

  Almost too exhausted to breathe, she still gave him the energy to laugh.

  When sunrise finally did happen, they’d sat on a cut log to rest through a breakfast break of energy bars, an orange, and a canteen of water with electrolyte powder.

  “Yum! You hotshots really know how to live the high life.”

  Jess grimaced, “Just wait until the fire gets here. This has all been prep.”

  As if in answer to her question, the first air tanker of the morning raced by low overhead, dumping a long line of red retardant on the line of trees beyond the firebreak. Wouldn’t do to have some errant spark, of which there would be plenty to hunt down and kill during the height of the battle, ignite the fire beyond the fire line.

  7

  “How’s our tag-a-long doing?” Candace walked up to where she and Jess were still eating on the log. Beside her was one of the sawyers, a big handsome guy she hadn’t met yet. Candace put enough sarcasm in her voice that Jill knew she was being teased.

  Jess groaned as if wounded to the core and Jill had to fight to suppress a laugh. His constant energy and sense of fun was all that had kept her upright through a brutal night’s work.

  “I think I’m now the tag-a-long,” Jess whined like an old man. “Jill doesn’t know the meaning of slow down. Picks up technique faster than any recruit who’s ever crossed our lines.”

  “He’s been a great teacher,” Jill put in. His constant fine-tuning, even long after exhaustion had them both staggering, had revealed a drive for excellence that matched her own and a style of patient teaching that she could only hope to learn some day.

  “She learns even faster than you, big guy,” he addressed the sawyer.

  “No way!” The guy faced her squarely. “Okay, lady. That means it’s you and me for the fire. Then we’ll see how you do.”

  Jill couldn’t tell if he was teasing or serious. He was an imposing man. Like one of those military clichés with the manly jaw and the broad shoulders.

  “Aren’t men just the cutest things?” Then Cand
ace pulled him into a kiss.

  And not just some friendly peck either.

  Jill startled and looked from them to Jess to see how he was taking it. Rather than angry, he looked…jealous?

  “Come on you two. Do you have to keep proving how happy you are? Get a room, go behind a tree, something.”

  The big guy broke off and looked down at Candace, “We’ve got to get him a lady.”

  Jill was still trying to catch up with what was happening. Jess wasn’t with Candace? The big guy was. That explained why he’d only talked about Candace on the fires, because that’s what she and Jess did together—team superintendent and assistant. Jill had to sift through all the stories he’d told about their meeting and working together. If they weren’t a couple, everything shifted to show his huge respect for a strong woman. She’d thought he was putting his lover up on some silly pedestal, ready to fall.

  “How about you, lady?” The big guy looked down at her. “You in the market for a slightly used hotshot? He’s kinda scruffy, but we all like him well enough.”

  “No, she’s got a guy, the broken arm we medevaced out last night. Her name’s Jill,” Jess offered. “Jill, this char-monkey is Evan. But we call him Mud to keep his ego in check.” Then he leaned close as if to whisper in confidence, “Doesn’t help.”

  Jill felt cornered until she caught Candace’s sly smile. Here were two men who thought that a strong woman was an asset—not just an asset, but absolutely worth seeking out and following. Jill had been raised by two of the strongest women that she’d ever met, ones she’d spent her whole life trying to make proud.

  And she’d bet that both of her moms would love these three.

  Here they were, three magnificent firefighters, standing as friends for a moment in the dawn light before turning to face the approaching flames.

  Could there be any place that she’d rather be?