Chapter Seven
The slurry hit him with the force of a speeding truck, knocking the air out of him, damn likely leaving bruises the size of baseballs on his back, but the air temperature dropped palpably as the fire in the immediate vicinity slowed, beaten back by the pink foam dropped from the airplane overhead. He rested his head on Peyton’s shoulder for a moment as realization sank in. The pilot had cut it damned close this time, but Gabe was in no mood to complain. He wouldn’t even question how Jen had known just where they were to direct the slurry.
He wasn’t going to die today. He’d beat the dragon again.
Joy sliced through him and he eased off Peyton, rolled her onto her back. He grinned at the puzzled surprise in her eyes. He wiped dirt and slurry off her face and kissed the question off her mouth.
She stiffened with surprise or protest—he didn’t have time to recognize it before she wrapped her arms around him and pulled him down to her, taking the heat of him into her.
Her mouth stretch into a smile beneath his. She released him and raised her hands above her head triumphantly. He drew back to hear her laugh, to watch her eyes shine up at him as she reached up to wipe slurry off of him.
“Pink is definitely your color,” she decided.
He laughed, throwing his head back to let the sound carry. “Yeah, I think I like it.”
He grinned down at her, his pulse slowing to a languid beat. How could a woman covered with soot, sweat and slurry be so beautiful? They had to take advantage of the reprieve to get out of here, but before they did, he needed to kiss her again.
Her expression told him that she knew his intentions and welcomed them. Her lips parted. A thrill of desire went through him and he kissed her.
He didn’t taste ash, didn’t taste sweat, only tasted hot, willing woman. Peyton. Pleasure curled through his blood, unfurling feelings he’d forgotten. They flared to life, more powerful for being dormant.
“Gabe!”
It took a moment for him to realize Peyton was not the one calling his name, which would have been difficult with his tongue in her mouth. He lifted his head, which Peyton protested with a whimper.
Through the smoke Gabe saw a group of firefighters striding toward them, clad in smokejumper gear. His elation evaporated and he sat up slowly, thoughts of Peyton pushed aside as he focused on the jumper in the lead, a man he recognized at this distance.
Jen had sent her new husband to bring her ex-husband home. Son of a bitch.
Gabe climbed to his feet, ignoring the aching muscles, the popping joints, as he brought himself face to face with his former best friend. He hadn’t spoken civilly to Doug since Jen announced she was in love with him and planned to marry him. The memory made bile rise in his throat, but he refused to drop his gaze.
“Doug.”
His fists clenched, his shoulders tightened. Last time he’d tensed up like this, he’d busted Doug’s nose. He swore, rolled his shoulders and reached down to help Peyton to her feet.
“You guys okay?” Doug asked.
How could the bastard be so civil? Oh, right. He had what he wanted.
“We’re just dandy. You didn’t have to jump out of a plane on our account.”
Beside him, Peyton brushed off her butt, an odd gesture since she was coated in filth, and reached out a hand to Doug. Gabe resisted the urge to slap her hand away. “I’m Peyton.”
Doug took her hand in a brief clasp, his own bandaged, but he didn’t wince when Peyton gripped him. “Doug. You’re both in good shape?”
“We wouldn’t be if the slurry hadn’t hit,” Peyton replied, her smile a little too friendly. What did women see in the man? He was balding and skinny, and he had to wear a bridge because he’d knocked out his front teeth in smokejumper school. Apparently women weren’t as shallow as rumor had it.
Doug grinned at Peyton and Gabe wanted to drag her behind him.
“Yeah, old Pedro nailed it, didn’t he? He’s been flying fires for longer than you’ve been alive.” He turned to Gabe. “We’ve got a route for you to get back to camp. I would’ve called for a chopper but you hate to fly.”
Gabe ground his teeth hard enough to pulverize his molars. Peyton glanced at him in surprise. How dare Doug expose his weakness to a stranger? He realized his reaction was adolescent, but he struggled to get past it.
“Yeah, well, we don’t need an escort. You and your crew can hold this line.”
Doug cocked his head like there was nothing wrong at all. “I got orders to bring you straight to Jen.”
“Well, you know what you can do with those,” Gabe muttered, backtracking to see if their packs were salvageable.
“Gabe,” Peyton chided, and he scowled, not needing her to remind him of his manners. She moved toward Doug again. “I’m sorry.” At first, Gabe thought she was apologizing for him and he spun around in fury. Then she said, “But do you have any water?”
“Yeah, yeah, of course.” Doug dug into his pack and presented two bottles, condensation dripping from them and making Gabe salivate at the thought of cool water. Doug held one to each of them. Gabe ignored the offering, so Peyton took them both. “Don’t drink too fast now,” Doug warned.
Peyton waved aside his warning, feeling like an old pro after her brush with death, though adrenaline still raced through her blood. And yeah, a little lust accompanied it. What would have happened if the smokejumper crew hadn’t shown up?
Gabe returned with one pack, his. “Yours is toasted. Sorry, Peyton.”
She shrugged like it didn’t matter, though a shudder ran through her. Danger had been imminent, but knowing her pack was gone when she’d dropped it only a few yards back turned her guts to ice.
“We cut it close, huh?” she said with a shaky laugh, wanting to collapse against him.
He turned his back on the jumpers and squeezed her arm. Something akin to tenderness was in his eyes when he said, “But we made it.”
They had, and the kiss celebrating their survival still had her quivering. She hadn’t kissed a man since Dan and she’d been ready to tear off her clothes in broad daylight for Gabe Cooper. The sex would have been incredible. She’d never felt so alive as she did after her brush with death.
Good Lord. She almost had to die before she understood why her husband had done what he did. The rush of beating death, of outwitting a force larger than herself was intense, almost sexual. To live through something like this once was incredible. To go to work every day knowing your life could be put on the line and you could beat it—yeah, it could be addictive. The realization stunned her, and humbled her, but didn’t dim the excitement still coursing through her.
She wondered how long the thrill would last.
Doug left his crew punching line around the slurry-dampened fire and the three of them headed through the healthy forest to the black. From there it was smooth sailing. They’d been so close, Peyton realized, and almost hadn’t made it.
Gabe again protested the need for Doug’s escort, but Doug insisted he had orders. Peyton sensed there was more going on. The tension between the two men was more stifling than the heat. She thought Doug might want to say something, but Gabe’s sullenness prevented him from doing so.
She glanced from Doug to Gabe. What was she missing here? A rivalry of some kind, but over what? A Hot Shot-smokejumper animosity? The two men seemed to know each other. Gabe was downright hostile, and she didn’t think it was because Doug had interrupted their kiss.
Gabe could almost see the questions hovering on her tongue. She was going to ask about him and Doug. He was actually impressed with her restraint so far as she hiked between the two of them. They’d cleared the trees and the view was open, sloping terrain leading down to the camp. Fire couldn’t creep up on them now. They’d see it coming.
Doug seemed to have something he wanted to say. Good Lord. It was like being on frickin’ Oprah. Not for the first time Gabe wished he was the hell alone. He walked ahead, leaving Peyton with Doug, hoping to discourage her curiosity, but kept his ear tuned to the conversation.
“So what’s going on here?” Peyton asked, and Gabe envisioned a bundle of dynamite having its fuse pulled in the nick of time. She’d been bursting with the question since she’d laid eyes on Doug.
“You know Jen?”
Gabe hadn’t expected Doug to be quite so forthcoming. He heard an understanding tone in Peyton’s response.
“The incident commander?”
“I’m married to her.”
“And—oh.”
Gabe slowed, let them catch up as anger boiled in him, as violent as the fire they’d just walked away from. “Maybe you’d like to tell her how you ended up married to her.”
“I don’t think...” She looked from one man to the other.
Hell, no. He wasn’t letting her off easy. She’d started this. He took a step toward her, and a small part of him was glad she didn’t step back. He didn’t want to pull any punches, and if she could stand up to him, more power to her. “You mean you don’t want to hear about how the three of us were always together? Best friends? How Doug was the best man at our wedding?” The questions rolled out of him, one after another, and he didn’t take his eyes from her face.
Peyton sucked in a breath and broke eye contact. Doug had stopped too.
“I was a smokejumper for a few years when I first came out here, before I got sick of jumping out of planes. The best of the best, Jen called them. She wanted me to leave the Hot Shots to go back to it, and when I wouldn’t, she turned to my best friend.” Saying it aloud for the first time threatened to choke him but he went on. “You don’t want to know that on our fourth wedding anniversary she told me she’d fallen in love with Doug and wanted a divorce?”
“Gabe, I—” She tried to stem the flow with an ineffective raised hand, but he waved it off. Her questions felt like a betrayal after their night on the mountain. Why had he expected anything different? Doug inspired betrayal.
“No, you wanted to know. You ask questions, that’s what you do.”
He had to walk away before his temper took an uglier turn. She reached out but he shook her off, putting distance between them again.
“And then he decided he’d show her. He went up with another crew and jumped one more time, damn near killed himself on the mountain,” Doug said. “Landed in a tree. He was in the hospital for three days.”
Gabe spun on the other man. Betrayal. That was all the man understood.
“Gabe,” Peyton said, but Gabe barely heard her over the roar in his ears. He pivoted and started down the mountain.
“I’d like us to be friends again.” Doug raised his voice to cover the distance.
Gabe slowed a bit but didn’t look back. “That can’t happen.”
“It’s been three years—”
“It could be twenty.” Gabe turned to face the man he’d once loved like a brother. “You made your choice. Live with it. Now if we all want to get back to camp in one piece, we better keep our mouths shut and walk.”
Peyton was more miserable on the short hike back to camp than she’d been crawling through the tunnels of the cavern, than running for her life up the mountain. Gabe walked apart from them, tension and anger clear in the line of his body. She hadn’t improved matters by asking Doug about the rift; worse, she’d lit a fuse with her damned question.
Gabe had almost died after Jen asked him for a divorce. What was it with alpha men wanting to prove themselves?
Doug tried to be nice, staying even with her, trying to distract her with conversation, but her gaze strayed again and again to Cooper. Her heart ached for hurting him, for bringing his pain to the surface. Where were her reporter instincts where he was concerned? Apparently she’d left them back on the mountain.
Those thoughts were pushed aside when camp came into view. Despite her aching feet and fatigue-numbed muscles, she wanted to run the rest of the way. She passed Gabe in her eagerness. He caught her arm and eased her back.
“Hold on there, Tex,” he said, a trace of humor in his voice. “It’s farther away than you think. You don’t want to give out so close to the goal.”
“You won’t carry me?” she teased, testing his mood.
He snorted, a good sign. “Fat chance.”
“Gabe, I’m sorry—”
“Don’t.” He jabbed a finger toward her. “Don’t say another word. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay, all right, I understand.” She sucked in a deep breath, then added in a rush, “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“Sounds to me like you’re still talking about it. Let’s just forget it.”
She nodded once, pressing her lips together in frustration, and hiked on.
A shout went up as they approached camp, and yellow-shirted firefighters swarmed out of tents and hurried toward them, cheering. They circled Gabe, everyone reaching for him, trying to touch him, whether to see if he was real or as a good luck charm, Peyton didn’t know. He accepted their greeting with tired grace, less the conquering hero than a guy who’d done his job.
The crowd parted and a little blonde ran forward and launched herself at his chest, tucked her head under his chin and wrapped her arms around his waist. Peyton saw the shock on his face, saw it was Jen just as he gave in and wrapped his arms around her.
“I thought I’d killed you,” Jen said, her voice muffled against his chest.
He held Jen in his arms. For the first time in three years everything he wanted was right here. She’d come to him, had worried about him, when her husband stood only ten feet away. He couldn’t stop himself from folding his arms about her, feeling her against his body one more time, bending his head to smell her hair.
Knowing she was no longer his.
One last time. He put his hands on her shoulders and set her away from him sadly.
“We’re fine. Tired, and Peyton needs something to eat.” He looked over Jen’s head at Peyton, who watched him with a mixture of horror and fascination. Behind him, Doug’s expression was probably the same. Before today, he would have been rejoicing for causing Doug pain. Today, revenge just felt pathetic and sad. Like he’d shed a skin on the mountain and come back ready for a new life.
“Go to your husband,” he said quietly to Jen, the woman he’d craved for three years, the woman he still thought of as his wife. “You sent him to get us. Make sure he knows he’s done good.”
The hurt on her face made him tighten his grip on her shoulders for just a minute as he resisted the desire to pull her into his arms. Then she stepped away, toward her husband, and Gabe turned, not quite man enough to watch their embrace.
He found himself face to face with Peyton, who watched the little scene behind him with avid interest. He took her arm firmly and steered her toward the mess tent.
“Let’s get something to eat and you can shower.”
“Cooper!”
Gabe staggered back as Kim launched herself against him. In reflex, he caught her as she hooked her legs about his waist. Beyond her, Peyton quirked a brow. He scowled in response to her silent question.
“We were so worried!” Kim blubbered against his shoulder. “We shouldn’t have left you!”
“You had to get those kids out of there.” He patted her back awkwardly, before resting his hands on her hips and wondering how to dislodge her. “You did the right thing.”
“We thought we’d left you behind to die. It came up so fast.”
He drew back to look at her. It was tough as hell being a hard-ass with a female hanging on your front. “Did all the kids get back in one piece?”
“Yeah, they were real troopers.”
Finally realizing the brashness of her greeting, Kim climbed down his body, swiping at her face, trying to regain some dignity. Gabe watched her matter-of-fact maneuvering with some amusement.
“I’m, ah, sorry. Got a little excited.” Her face was only a shade lighter than her hair, and she studied the ground.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said with more joviality than he might have ordinarily shown, disguising his embarrassment as well as hers. “Just be glad you’ll get the next twenty-four hours off.”
“We should celebrate,” she said, then brightened. “Let’s celebrate! I’ll round up the crew and we’ll go into town for drinks.”
Gabe glanced over her head at Peyton, who stood nearby with uncharacteristic uncertainty in her bearing. “What do you say, Peyton? Sound good to you?”
“Um, sure.” She sounded surprised at being included.
Gabe nodded to Kim. “All right, good. You round everybody up. We’ll get cleaned up some so we don’t scare the locals.” He stepped around Kim toward Peyton. “Let’s see about your shower, huh? Line’s over there.” He gestured to the yellow-shirted arrow pointing at a line of semitrailers. “You get five minutes. I’ll meet you back here.”
*****
Oh God. Oh heaven. Okay, maybe the water was tepid, but it was wet. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back so the soot wouldn’t run into her eyes. Black rivulets ran down her body as she lathered her hair. It had been flat with sweat and positively black when she took off her hard hat. What she wouldn’t give for a razor.
The sad trickle of water was her refuge. She deserved it after the last thirty-six hours.
She had her story, and then some. What she’d experienced, what these men and women were capable of, could keep her in articles for a year.
Or a book. The idea popped into her head and expanded exponentially. A first-hand account of this life-or-death job.
Better, it gave her a reason to stay, to go back to the fire line. She would finally be committed to a job, like the people she wrote about.
After the cave, she’d sworn she was through. But the thrill of facing death and beating it pulsed through her. She loved the uncontrolled feeling of it. No safety nets here. You mess up, you’re toast. Literally. She wanted to experience it again and hoped to discover it had only been a fluke, that she didn’t love danger the way her husband had.
Or was the book idea only a reason to stay close to Gabe Cooper? She wasn’t so shallow, to let interest in a man dictate her actions.
Yes, interest in a man. She admitted it to herself now. Every minute they spent together, he was becoming more and more his own man in her mind, not an article for a story, not a reminder of Dan. Someone with his own strengths and foibles and heartaches.
Someone she couldn’t afford to let any closer. Maybe if she stayed, Jen would put her with another crew. But the thought took some of the shine from her idea.
Gabe had said they were only allowed five minutes in the shower, but surely no one would notice if she took a little longer. She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes.
A disturbance near the showers caught Gabe’s attention as he made his way back after dodging a horde of reporters who had staked out the mess tent. The usually orderly line of tired filthy firefighters waiting for a shower had shifted into a mob, shouting at one of the semis.
He ambled over, hung back as several of the more irate men banged on the metal wall of the trailer. “What’s going on?”
“Some rookie’s using up all the water.” One of the men scowled, not looking at him.
He scanned the group for a blonde ponytail, already pretty sure who the culprit was. “Anybody try shutting it off?”
“There’s other people showering too.”
He sighed and strode to the front of the crowd to knock on the door.
“Peyton? You in there? Peyton?”
No answer. He pressed his shoulder to the door and pushed open the cubicle.
Peyton shoved herself away from the wall with a cry and flung one arm across her breasts, plumping them up like an offering, and her other hand over her crotch beneath the slight swell of her belly. That left her with no hands to throw the soapy hair out of her face, so she glared at him through wet hanks of hair.
He leaned against the doorjamb with his arms folded over his chest and grinned at her. He should end every adventure with such a treat. Weak water pressure trickled over her white skin, slightly chafed from her washcloth. He had to shift to hide his reaction to the sight.
“Do you mind?” she demanded, her voice the growl of a hostile cat, at odds with all that softness.
She threw herself back when he reached in to shut off the water. He picked up the towel from the rack and shoved it at her.
“You’re pissing off the troops, Peyton.”
She glanced from the towel to him with a kind of hopelessness. If she reached for it, she’d have to move one of her strategically placed hands.
After another appreciative perusal of the curves she’d hidden beneath her shapeless clothes, he took pity. A shame, really, to hide breasts like that, legs like that. But the flush now covering her whole body told him it was time to retreat. He hooked the towel over the rack again and backed out.
“I’m just telling you if you turn the water on, we’ll have a riot out here. Now get dressed. My crew is taking us to town for some real food and maybe a real bed.”
Her head snapped up and his jaw snapped shut. More embarrassed than he would have expected by the inadvertent suggestion, he closed the door.