Chapter Five
“We hike.” Gabe handed Peyton her pack.
She turned her head sharply, but not before he glimpsed tears in her eyes. Her attempt to hide them reassured him. As long as she was strong enough to hide her fear, she would keep up. Her pride outweighed her terror. She was going to have to be tough these next few hours.
“We have to get off these rocks. They’re heating up fast.” He hoisted his own pack on his shoulders. “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
He’d already found their escape route on his first assessment, years of training kicking in. “Up the hill.”
She followed his gaze up the steep, rocky mountainside. “I thought fire moved fastest uphill,” she said, only the slightest quaver in her voice.
He blew a breath out through his nose. “Again with the questions. If we stay on this rocky face, we’ll eventually reach a spot where we can work around the fire and go back down to camp.”
“Why didn’t we do that with the campers?” Her words huffed out. But she pulled on her pack, buckled it over her breasts. “We could have been back by now.”
He considered a moment before deciding to tell her the truth. “It’s rough going. They wouldn’t have made it.”
“Oh God.”
The forest was at their back, on their left. The fire had burned through fast, not taking all the fuel, their biggest risk. To their right was a burned-out meadow, but Gabe couldn’t be confident that all fuels had been consumed, so they stayed on the rocks. Farther up, the forest veered west, the meadow east, leaving them a greater expanse of rock, a safer barrier. But a steeper climb.
The footing over the big, smooth rocks was tricky. He remembered her blistered feet, but they couldn’t stop. The fire moved like a living thing, snaking around rocks to nibble greedily at fresh fuel. The heat pounded at their backs, under their feet. When the mountain got steep enough for them to climb on all fours, the heat radiated from the rocks beneath their hands. At least the smoke was below them, and they didn’t have to fight it as well as altitude and exhaustion.
Peyton kept pace with him, so either he was slowing down or she was scared spitless. Determination tightened her face and he hid a grin. Who said pride was a sin? It was damned sure going to save her life.
“Break,” he croaked once the rocks started to feel cool to the touch. He swung his butt around to plop it on an outcropping. “Got water?”
She mimicked his movement, swayed a little when she stared back the way they’d come. The treetops were deceptively green, and every now and then a flicker of fire moved beneath them. On the far side of the trees was a stretch of black, probably the route his crew had taken back to camp. He’d asked when he called for the helitack—they’d arrived at camp safely.
He pulled his water out and tossed the pack behind him. “Looks harder than it was, right?”
She slid him an incredulous glare. Good, she hadn’t lost her sense of humor in her scramble up the mountain. She’d need it tonight. He grinned and offered her his bottle. She shook her head and reached for her own. He had to fight his growing admiration. Most rookies would be crying, complaining, but she did neither. That it gave him a sense of pride disturbed him. So he turned his thoughts away.
“At least you’re not climbing up through a tunnel.”
She grunted and raised her water to her lips.
It went against everything ingrained in him, but he had to know. “What was with that? You get lost in a cave as a kid?”
She shook her head. “Nope. Never been in a cave till today. I hope I’m never in one again.”
“So what happened?”
She glanced at him, then turned her attention downhill. So she’d decided to ignore him. It wouldn’t surprise him. She had stubborn down to an art form. “You know what a hope chest is?” she said at last.
“Hope chest?”
“A cedar chest, maybe four feet long, two and a half feet deep?” She pulled off her gloves, inspected her blistered hands, but she’d probably rather look at anything but him right now. “In my family, all the girls got one at a very young age, to store quilts and stuff for their house once they got married. Very old fashioned, but there you have it.”
“Okay, sure.” The image of young Peyton planning her wedding amused him.
“I got locked in mine when I was eight.” She shrugged a shoulder as if the words didn’t mean anything.
“What, were you playing hide and seek?”
She took off her hard hat and passed a dirty hand over dirty hair. He sensed her nervousness and wondered if it occurred to her not to answer the question. “No. I wanted to see what it was like to be dead.”
Like a coffin. Jesus. Her nonchalant tone hid the very real terror the young Peyton must have experienced, and the bravery in her voice reached inside and grabbed him.
“It had a latch on the outside and there was no way I could get it open. I was locked in for an hour before my mother found me.”
Her voice was hollow, like her cries for help must have been inside the cedar coffin, and nausea rolled in his stomach as he imagined her fear. Jesus. What would an experience like that do to a person? The scars didn’t stop at claustrophobia.
But there was something more. She hadn’t thought of climbing into the chest on her own.
“Why did you want to know what it was like to be dead?” He kept his voice controlled, not letting her see the effect her story had on him.
She put her helmet back on. “My sister died. She was hit by a car doing some idiotic trick on her bike. One minute she was there and the next she wasn’t. The rocks are starting to get warm.” Her tone changed from melancholy to matter of fact as she pushed to her feet to avoid any more questions. “We better keep moving.”
Why had she told him all that? Peyton got herself a good foothold and pulled herself up the rock, ahead of him, like he insisted. Her family didn’t discuss her sister’s death. She hadn’t told Dan that story till they’d been married.
Of course, Dan hadn’t seen evidence of her claustrophobia the way Gabe had. She owed Gabe an explanation for freaking out on him back there. Telling him the story was better than him thinking she was a wimp.
Which she was. But with a reason.
That was it. It was the situation, not the man. If only she could keep her mind on her purpose, look for the humanity in the hero, without showing him hers. The sympathy in his eyes when she told him her story unsettled her. She had to protect herself, because right now she was feeling just too damned vulnerable.
The confession had the effect of emptying her mind. Only motor skills remained, putting one foot in front of the other. She couldn’t comprehend her own exhaustion, only that the fire was coming up and the sun was going down.
“We’re not going to be able to see much longer,” Gabe said after what had to be an hour of silence. She didn’t remember ever experiencing such a lengthy silence with another person. Of course, forming words took brainpower and she’d depleted the last of hers. “I’d hoped to reach that ridge before sundown.” He motioned upward, and the place he was pointing to seemed unreachable. “We’ll keep going till the batteries run out.”
“Mine is already winding down.” Even talking took too much energy.
He chuckled. “I mean in the headlamps. The flashlight won’t do us any good since we need our hands.”
“What’ll we do if the batteries run out?” Her words came slow and slurred.
“Stop. Are you going to be okay? Are you hungry?”
She waved her hand at him weakly, too scared to eat. But if she didn’t get food, if they didn’t rest, she couldn’t keep up much longer. Still, she lied. “I’m fine.”
“You’ve got food in your pack, right? You didn’t give it all to those girls?”
“I’ve got food.”
“Then eat.”
She studied him a long moment before plopping down and pulling an MRE out of her pack.
He knew two of her weaknesses and hadn’t revealed one of his. She tore into the pseudobeef. “What about the fire?”
“If it gets close enough, we’ll see it.”
“Very funny. We can’t sleep. The fire could come up on us.” She hated the pathetic tone of her voice but was too tired to muffle it.
“You can sleep. I’ll keep a lookout.”
Good Lord, how could the man think he wasn’t a hero if he was willing to go without sleep so she could rest? He had to be more tired than she was. She couldn’t allow that sacrifice. “I’m not going to sleep if you can’t.”
He rolled his eyes, not hiding his disgust that she was arguing with him. Again. She felt a small twinge of guilt for irritating him, but she needed him to see her as an equal, as he had in the cave.
Of course, if Gabe Cooper had an equal, she wouldn’t be doing this story.
“You’ll sleep if I tell you to.”
“You can’t make me,” she said, realizing too late how childish that sounded.
He snorted. “I don’t think I’d have to, but do you have to argue about everything I tell you?”
“No, but—”
“Peyton.” Though his tone was soft, the underlying intensity alarmed her more than his temper would have. “We will get out of here. Just not tonight. Going down the mountain will be harder than coming up.”
She didn’t want to wait. As bone weary as she was, she wanted to put miles between her and this fire, all the way back to Chicago, if possible. “But we’ll have gravity on our side.”
He kept his voice calm, though her questions tested his patience. “What about forward motion on rocky terrain? I don’t want you falling on your face going down the mountain. We’ll find a safe spot, I promise, and wait till morning.”
“We should’ve stayed in the cave,” she muttered as they trudged on.
He stumbled a bit, as if doubting his decision to move up the mountain. “If I’d acted sooner, we could have. I’m sorry we didn’t make the helicopter. By the time I realized we wouldn’t make the chopper, we couldn’t have gotten to it.”
“If I had been faster getting out of the cave, if I hadn’t freaked out that you left me alone, we’d be back at camp by now.” Despair and exhaustion made her petulant, and while the knowledge shamed her, she didn’t have the will to battle her own faults.
“Peyton.” He stopped, turned her toward him, his own eyes intent in his grimy face. His responsibility for her must weigh on him and her questions were making his job harder. “We’ll get out of this. It’ll be hard work, but we’re going to get out of here.”
“I know.” She tried to smile, to show her appreciation of his encouragement. “I’d just kinda like to skip the middle part.”
“Come on.” He released her, leaving her bereft for a moment, floating, before she took steps to follow him. “We’ve got to take advantage of the light while we have it.”
After the sun went down, their headlamps put out miserly light in the pitch blackness. The only light was the glow of the fire beneath them; the smoke had obliterated the moon and stars. It was too dark to tell if they were still in the open or if they’d gone back into the trees. The ground had leveled off so it felt like they were moving sideways instead of up. She hoped Gabe knew where they were. She was pretty sure he did, at least in relation to the camp.
Though she couldn’t see him, she sensed him, and not just because of the noise he made as he climbed, as he breathed. It had to be because they were the only two people on the mountain, right? She would feel this way about any person she was running for her life with, this connection, this need.
It wasn’t because he was a man, a strong man. A handsome man. A hero.
Her muscles trembled with every step. Her head didn’t want to stay upright on her neck, and sweat soaked her T-shirt through the fire shirt he insisted she wear.
Ahead of her, Gabe crouched and she almost tripped over him. She caught her balance with a touch to his back, damp with perspiration, hard with tension. He stumbled a bit, then stood slowly. She dropped her hand away.
“We’ll camp here,” he announced abruptly.
“Camp?” She turned back to where the fire glowed below them, reflecting off the smoke in an eerie red light. “But the fire—”
“We’re in the black. No fuel.”
Where had she heard that before? “We thought we were in the black where the helicopter landed.”
He sighed. Another question he didn’t want to answer. Then the ground around them was illuminated. She shielded her eyes from the sudden light of his flashlight. He walked around the area, kicking up burned grass and clouds of ash.
“It’s cool,” he assured her. “No embers.”
She was afraid to trust nature, but she did trust Gabe Cooper. In relief, she sank to her knees, fatigue quivering her muscles. “I’m so tired but I don’t think I can sleep.”
He dropped his pack beside her, sending up particles of soot and making her cough. He lowered himself to the ground next to her with a groan and switched off the flashlight. The darkness beyond the pale beams of their headlamps was overwhelming and silent, and she reached for him, then stopped herself. He wouldn’t interpret the touch as being a means for her to regain her balance, like on the climb. He’d attribute it to female hysteria, to cowardice, and that she couldn’t bear, for him to find her lacking in any way. She closed her fingers around her pack instead.
“Got any water left?” he asked, oblivious.
“A little.”
“Make it last.”
She dug out her bottle by feel, shook it to gauge how much water was in it. Less than half, probably. She would only take a sip to wash the dust from her throat. But when the tepid water touched her lips she wanted to gulp it down. Gabe pulled it away from her. In the dark, his fingers brushed hers, bare now, no gloves, and she almost dropped the bottle. At least he couldn’t see her fumble as she secured the container and stuffed it back in her pack.
“Tomorrow will be a long day without water.” He pulled his pack in front of him and pawed through it.
“I know.”
“Ever sleep outdoors?”
“Not in the middle of nowhere.”
He turned toward her. “Even in a tent?” he asked, disbelief in his voice.
Was he was teasing? So what if she hadn’t slept outside? She hadn’t had the desire. Did that make her weak?
“Do you have a tent?” she asked.
“A little one-man job. No sleeping bag, but it’ll be some protection.”
“From what?”
He paused. Then as if it was obvious, explained, “The temperature’s falling fast.”
“What do you mean, falling? I’m sweating like a pig.”
“Lovely,” he said, laughter in his voice. “As high up as we are, it will probably get down to the upper thirties. The tent will be some protection for you.”
Upper thirties? In July? “For me? What about you?”
“I’ll be fine outside. I’ve done it before.”
“Without a sleeping bag?” she asked skeptically. “Or a fire shirt?”
“Well.” He swallowed. “No.”
“Then you’re in the tent too.”
He paused again, giving her time to consider what she’d just offered. She was going to sleep in the same tent as a man she’d known a—was it only two days? How could this all have happened in two days?
“It’s real small, close quarters,” he said. “And I said I’d keep watch.”
Was it her imagination or did his voice sound huskier than it had a minute ago? Imagination or reality, it sent skitters down her spine to places long ignored.
Okay, get a grip, Peyton. Yeah, he’s a hunk. Yeah, she’d be sleeping next to him, but they’d both be fully clothed and too exhausted to act on any interest. If there was any on his part. Which there probably wasn’t.
Not that it mattered.
“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re exhausted too, and you said we’re safe here. In the tent, at least we’ll be warm.” Okay, her voice was definitely huskier. Probably all the smoke they’d breathed today. Uh-huh, that was it.
The tent couldn’t be that small, could it?
Okay, it was. Um. Gabe straightened up from driving the last spike. The tent was no bigger than a coffin and she was going to share it with him. No way they were both going to fit. Maybe she could sleep outside. Hypothermia had nothing on sleeping next to a man who oozed virility. But she was already shivering, though earlier she could have sworn she’d never be cold again.
“Um, I think I’ll sleep outside.”
She heard him suck in an impatient breath, but couldn’t look at him.
“We can sleep with our heads toward the opening, can even leave it unzipped a bit if you want.”
He thought her claustrophobia made her hesitate. And she had to admire his patience. She didn’t realize he had the resources. He couldn’t understand—she wouldn’t admit—his size, his undiluted maleness had her heart hammering in her chest.
“It won’t be bad, Peyton. You’ll be asleep before you know it. And it’s going to be too cold out here.”
Come on, Peyton. You ran from a wildfire today, crawled through a cave. You can sleep next to a man you hardly know. She squared her shoulders and nodded, though he’d turned off the flashlight and couldn’t see her.
He took her arm, urging her into the tent. When she crawled inside, feet first, the nylon stretched over hard ground was like the bed of a five-star hotel.
Then Gabe crawled in and sucked all the air out of the tent. Her skin tingled with awareness as he tried to fit in beside her. She scooted toward the seam and still felt the press of him against her back. She held her breath, heard him clear his throat in obvious discomfort as he settled on his side also.
“This, ah, this isn’t going to work,” he said gruffly, his breath grazing her ear.
She couldn’t turn around to look, didn’t want to see how close he was, though his shoulder bumped hers as he tried to find a spot for his arm. “Um, what?”
“Maybe you could put your head on my arm. There doesn’t seem to be any other place for it.”
She lifted her head in surprise and he took that as agreement and slipped his arm beneath. She settled back down, at first hesitant to let the whole weight of her head rest on it. He grunted her name and she tried to relax. His arm was hard and warm and smoky. Just when she thought she was used to the smell, her senses had to come back in full force.
All of them. The change in position brought his chest against her and she wished for the extra layer of his fire shirt between them. His T-shirted chest felt naked and she cursed her fertile imagination.
He flipped her hair over her shoulder away from him and she immediately tensed.
“Sorry. It was tickling my nose.” His voice was so close, his words teasing the back of her neck. She tensed all over again.
“Oh.” She smoothed the ponytail against her throat so no stray hairs would bother him. Then she shifted her hips and bumped her bottom into his groin. Both of them went perfectly still. Then, as if not to draw attention to her movement, she eased her hips away infinitesimally.
“We both have to, ah, relax,” he murmured at last.
He placed a hand on her hip and she flinched. He shushed her and slid his arm about her waist, drawing her against his body, spooning her against him, careful to keep their lower bodies apart, which of course only made her focus on it. Had her little bump aroused him and he didn’t want her to realize it?
No, she was being ridiculous. She was filthy and sweating and still wearing her boots, for crying out loud. Hardly arousing.
No one had held her since Dan died. She squeezed her eyes shut at the memory of the intimacy they’d shared every night, even the night before he died, but her eyes were too dry for tears. Good thing, since she didn’t want Gabe to think she wasn’t tough enough.
His heart beat against her back, strong and sure. One arm over her body, the other under her head, almost made her forget the tent wall inches from her nose.
And made her remember with an alien longing other things that happened in the dark.
She’d forgotten how wonderful a man’s strong arms about her felt, how safe. The thought terrified her. She took awhile to relax against him.
“That’s more like it,” he said against her ear. “Good night, Peyton. You did real good today.”
Pride rose at his words, almost blocking out the awkwardness of their sleeping arrangement. She’d hung in, she’d proven—
Proven what? That she was as tough as the people she wrote about, as Dan? Not yet.
Gabe’s breathing evened out almost immediately, but as tired as she was, she couldn’t sleep. Her mind snapped from one thought to another, from the fire to the campers, from Gabe to Dan, back to Gabe. Always back to Gabe.
He wasn’t as much like Dan as she’d first thought. Though both men were heroic, Gabe’s confidence didn’t come at the expense of caution. His mistakes were quickly rectified. He hated to be questioned about his decisions, but never failed to answer her. He was pure hero material, decisive, tough, intelligent. Just the right combination for her story.
So why was this the first time she’d thought of her story in hours?