A Blaze To Bear (Fire Bear Shifters Book 1) (4 page)

Charlotte was beginning to think that she had imagined that part of the conversation. Ian and Zach had been too far away for her to catch every word of their discussion, and she must have misheard or misunderstood something. Her cheeks turned pink with embarrassment as she realized how silly she had been to think there was a possibility that shifters actually existed. The heat and lack of sleep must be getting to her.

As the crew reached the pickup point where a small aircraft had flown in to meet them, Charlotte forced herself to turn her thoughts toward something other than Ian or supernatural beings. She began mentally reviewing the repairs she knew she would need to make to her gear when the crew returned to base, and daydreaming about sleeping in a real bed. All these crazy thoughts swirling around in her head would surely be cured by a good night’s sleep.

Ian heard Charlotte’s voice drifting up to his office from the first floor of the hangar. It sounded like she was raving about flaring your parachute properly on landing to avoid injury. Ian rolled his eyes. Just great. After they had all been through vigorous smokejumper training for the last several months, this chick was going to come in and pretend she was some expert. Ian didn’t care how sexy Charlotte looked or how attracted his bear was to her—he wasn’t going to let her dispense advice to his men on how to handle their parachutes. He stormed out of his office to head down the stairs and end her impromptu training session. He had been trying to reach Jessica to push for a reassignment for Charlotte, but Jessica had not returned his phone calls.

Ian’s eyes churned angrily as he stormed toward the stairs. He couldn’t take much more of this. His emotions were on edge, and every little thing set him off. As Ian reached the top of the stairwell, he paused to take a deep breath. He needed to calm down, and show that he was in control. He would walk down there with an air of authority, and coolly let Charlotte know that she needed to quit her unauthorized lessons.

But as Ian stopped to regain his composure, he found himself listening to a few words of what Charlotte was saying. Her theories were actually really interesting. He hadn’t been taught most of what she was saying at smokejumper training, but it seemed to make sense. The instructors at smokejumper training didn’t have time to get into the finer points of flying a parachute, but it sounded like Charlotte had done some pretty advanced training on canopy control. He peeked over the top of the stairwell and saw her drawing something on a whiteboard that she had set up on an easel. She was sketching out landing patterns, and all four of his other crew members sat in a semicircle in front of her, taking notes and nodding occasionally.

Ian’s anger slowly seeped away, replaced by curiosity. He sat on the top step of the stairwell, where he could hear her but she couldn’t see him, and he listened. The woman obviously knew what she was talking about. She was explaining to her eager students how the gravitational forces of pitch, roll, and yaw affected the way your parachute would fly. Ian raised his eyebrows as she spoke. It was pretty high-level stuff, compared to the training he had received during his smokejumper course.

Ian listened for several minutes, taking mental notes of the concepts Charlotte presented. His eavesdropping on her lesson was finally interrupted by the sound of his office phone ringing. He quietly stood and walked back to his office, where he saw Jessica’s name popping up on the caller I.D.

“Look who finally decided to call me back,” Ian said into the receiver.

“Yeah, yeah. Hello to you, too. Listen, I’ve got some news you’re not going to like,” Jessica said.

Ian sighed dramatically into the phone for Jessica’s benefit. “Lay it on me,” he said, even though he already knew what she was going to say.

“I can’t get Charlie reassigned.”

“Charlotte, you mean,” Ian corrected.

“Right, whatever. Everyone here calls her Charlie. But Charlotte, Charlie, Charlemagne—doesn’t matter to me what you guys call her. You’re stuck with her for the season.”

“You’re slacking, Jessica.”

“I’m not slacking,” Jessica said, her voice frustrated. “I’ve tried everything. But the other crews are all a lot larger than yours. It doesn’t make sense to take a smokejumper from you guys to add to a different crew that’s already bigger. And all my pushing is making people suspicious. Unless you want to deal with a lot of big shots breathing down your necks and asking a lot of questions, I suggest you just deal.”

Ian didn’t say anything to Jessica. He didn’t want to acknowledge her admonition to “just deal,” so he let the statement hang in the air. She finally sighed and spoke again.

“Look, Ian, I’ll keep a sharp eye open in case anything changes. But, for now, I think it’s best if you just accept the fact that you’ve got an extra crew member for the season.”

Ian grunted in response, and Jessica bid him farewell, likely relieved to get off the line.

Ian sat down in his office chair and leaned back, running his fingers through his hair. He should be angrier than he was about Jessica’s news. He should push harder to get rid of Charlotte, playing up the possibility of a romantic conflict of interest if it came to that. But instead, Ian closed his eyes and pictured Charlotte downstairs, her bright eyes sparkling as she shared her wisdom with the crew. His bear growled as he pictured her strong, slender body, looking sexy and tanned in her t-shirt and athletic shorts.

Like it or not, he was stuck with her for the summer. And he honestly didn’t know whether he should like it, or not.

* * *

Late that evening, Charlotte tossed and turned in her bunk. She felt restless and unsettled, and after over an hour of staring wide-eyed at the ceiling, she decided to slip outside and get some fresh air. The sound of soft snoring came from the bunks on the other side of the room, and she tiptoed by the sleeping men as she left the room. She had never bothered to move to a closer bunk, even though there were several available. Staying as far away from the snoring as possible usually helped her sleep better.

Charlotte slipped out into the cool midnight air, wearing only a light t-shirt and cotton pajama pants. She shivered slightly as a brisk breeze hit her. Even though it was summer, the Northern California evenings could be quite chilly. Charlotte sat on the tabletop of a picnic table located in the grassy area just in front of the hangar, and used the bench of the table as a footrest. Then she turned her neck upwards toward the sky. She loved looking up at stars, but the light pollution made them hard to see here. The smokejumper’s base had been nestled nicely into a group of trees, giving them the illusion of being in the middle of a forest, but the hangar was actually not too far away from San Francisco and Oakland. The lights from those large cities drowned out most of the starlight. Charlotte squinted up into the darkness anyways, trying to see if she could make out where the big dipper began.

“Not very impressive, is it?” came Ian’s voice from behind her.

Startled, she jumped and wrapped her hands across her chest in a protective stance. He had been a little less rude lately, but he still didn’t talk to her that much. So she wasn’t quite sure why he had decided to follow her out here now. She just wanted some peace and quiet, and having him around made her heart race in more ways than one. The fact that he had come out here bare-chested, wearing only a pair of sweatpants, didn’t do anything to slow down her pulse. His muscular chest and abs seemed to shimmer in the moonlight.

“What’s not impressive? The stars?” Charlotte asked, even though his meaning had been obvious.

“Yeah. They’re hard to see out here. Too many cities nearby. I’ve definitely seen better,” Ian said with a wink, hopping up onto the picnic table next to Charlotte. The tabletop creaked in protest as he settled his sturdy body onto it.

Charlotte couldn’t help but smile at the thought of some of the starscapes she had seen. Although huge wildfires tended to block out the sky with their smoky, orange glow, smokejumpers often got a chance to see some spectacular starry nights on their hikes down the mountain, after the fires had been squelched. To a lesser extent, ground crews sometimes had a chance to enjoy the starry wilderness skies after a job had ended when they needed to wait a day for more trucks to come in and haul them out.

Charlotte leaned back so her upper body was completely lying down on the tabletop, with her feet still using the bench as a footrest. Ian followed suit, and they laid side by side in silence for several minutes, both looking up at the sky and trying to make out familiar constellations through the light from the nearby cities. Charlotte could feel her heart racing with nervous excitement at Ian’s proximity to her. Even though the way Ian acted annoyed her most of the time, she couldn’t shake the magnetic draw he had on her. And this moment felt somehow intimate, with the two of them alone beneath the stars. She hadn’t felt this way about anyone in a very long time.

Nearly thirty minutes had passed by the time Ian finally looked away from the night sky and over at Charlotte. Charlotte had almost thought he’d fallen asleep.

“I’m really sorry about the way I treated you when you first arrived. And for ignoring you the last week or so. Things have been…complicated.”

Charlotte frowned. “Complicated? Why? Because you’re attracted to me?” As soon as she said it, she regretted it. She should have just accepted his apology and moved on. Now she had made things weird. Well, weirder than they already were—with him spending most of his days avoiding her like the plague, and her secretly wondering if he was actually part animal.

But Ian didn’t flinch at the question. “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t attracted to you,” Ian said, his eyes never leaving Charlotte’s. “But that’s not why I’ve been on edge so much. Well, it’s part of it, I guess. But the real issue is that my crew members are…different. And we dealt with a lot of shit because of it back when we were on a ground crew. The Forest Service promised us that if we went through the rigors of smokejumper training, then we could have our own crew. No outsiders allowed. But of course, Boise does what they want anyways, and they assigned you here. It’s nothing personal against you. You’re a great firefighter. That’s easy to see from the one mission we’ve had together so far. But you’re still not like us.”

“You’re not making any sense. How are you guys different? Because you just seem like normal smokejumpers to me.” Charlotte looked away from Ian’s gaze.
Is it because you’re a shifter?
she wondered.
Just tell me. Let me in on your world.

But Ian kept things vague. “Well, we may not look that different, but we are.”

Charlotte sighed. “Everyone has their secrets, Ian.”

“Oh, really? What are yours?”

“You first,” Charlotte said.

“I already told you that I’m attracted to you. That counts as a secret. Now it’s your turn,” Ian said.

“You didn’t exactly confess to that. I asked if it was true and you confirmed it.”

Ian chuckled. “Still counts. Your turn.”

“Ok fine. Here’s a secret. I’m terrified of jumping out of planes.”

Ian propped himself up on his elbow and looked over at her. “Really? Then why the hell did you decide to become a smokejumper?”

Charlotte shrugged and glanced back over at Ian. “To prove I could do it, I guess. I don’t have much to live for, so I set really hard goals for myself to achieve. I guess it’s my way of providing myself with some sort of purpose for living.”

“What about your family? I saw a picture of them next to your space in the bunkhouse. Aren’t they worth living for?”

“They’re dead,” Charlotte said. “All of them. Died in a structural fire.” She saw Ian wince when she said the words, and she knew she had just made the moment awkward. But there really wasn’t an easy way to announce that your entire family was dead.

“Wow, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay. It happened years ago now, so at least the wound isn’t so fresh anymore. But I still miss them every day. I became a firefighter as a way to get back at fire, in a small way, for what it stole from me. When I realized that smokejumping was the hardest firefighting program to get into, I went for it. I thought that after a season of jumping I would get over the fear of it, but it hasn’t happened yet. Statistically, I know that I should be fine. I know that our parachutes are top of the line, and that the odds of both the main parachute and reserve parachute not opening are astronomical. But it’s still hard to stand in the door of a plane and hurl yourself out. At least it is for me.”

“Is that why you know so much about how to fly a parachute? Are you overcompensating for your fear?”

“Well, yes. I started studying all of that stuff to help alleviate the dread I felt every time I had to jump. But the more I learned, the more interested I genuinely became in the subject. The physics of flying a parachute correctly are actually quite fascinating.”

“You know a lot.”

“I spent a lot of time on it. There are professional skydivers who teach canopy control courses. Most of their clients are military or recreational skydivers. I think I’m the first smokejumper to take the courses. Honestly, I think everyone should have to do that as part of smokejumper training, but, you know, no one asked me.”

“You could teach courses, during the offseason,” Ian said earnestly.

Charlotte laughed. “I’m not sure I’m qualified to teach courses.”

“Why not? You did a great job with the crew here. If you really want to get back at fire, training elite smokejumpers is another good way to do that.”

Charlotte stared up at the sky again, mulling over Ian’s words. What he said actually made quite a bit of sense. But she wasn’t sure if the powers that be would like the idea. And she wasn’t sure she wanted to take on responsibility for training lots of rough and tumble smokejumpers. They tended to be rowdy and hard to handle.

“I’ll think about it,” she said noncommittally. “Although I do have to say, it’s nice to get some actual compliments from you for once.”

Ian looked over at her sheepishly. “Sorry it’s been so crazy. I have my own issues to deal with, and, quite frankly, having a beautiful woman like you around has complicated things immensely. I know it’s not your fault, though, and I shouldn’t have taken my frustration out on you. I’m sorry. I’ll try to be better. Just know that if I’m ignoring you, it’s not because I don’t like you. It’s probably because I’m trying to get my feelings for you under control.”