Alaskan Fire (15 page)

* * *

Blaze didn’t sleep well that
night, and had only gotten an hour or two when she heard Jack moving around
upstairs near dawn, tinkering with the pipes.  She crawled out of bed and went
upstairs to figure out what he was doing, and why he didn’t keep to normal
workday hours.

She found him on his hands and
knees in the main upstairs bathroom, and the first thing she noticed upon
tentatively pushing the door aside was the way his jeans were stretched
deliciously tight against the hard round curves of his buttocks.  She
swallowed, hard, but found herself unable to look away.

“Should have the water turned
back on by the end of the day,” Jack said.  He hadn’t even looked over his
shoulder.  He was bent over the toilet,
shirtless
, peering down the
back, muscular arms flexing as he fiddled with something inside.  “Damn,” he
said.  He leaned back on his knees and wiped sweat from his brow as he turned
to her.  His fingers were black with grease.  “They literally disassembled this
place.  Drained every pipe, emptied every toilet, broke it all down.”

“Why?” Blaze asked, trying not to
stare at the way his naked shoulders were rippling as he lowered his arm.

The flat
Oh-My-God-I’m-Working-For-A-Stupid-Ass-City-Slicker look that he gave her,
however, was enough to drag her out of any potential fantasies in a hurry. 
Thank you, Jack. 

“Gets about forty-five below zero
around here in the winter, Boss,” Jack said.  He always used ‘Boss,’ she had
noticed, when he felt she had done something particularly stupid.  Like he was
reminding himself where his next meal was coming from.

Blaze frowned.  “I know that.” 
She’d researched the weather extremes when she’d been deciding which crops to
try and grow.

When she added nothing further,
Jack sighed.  “Stuff explodes when water freezes.”  He tapped the toilet bowl
with a knuckle, making the ceramic ring.

Blaze felt her face redden furiously
when she realized the obvious.  “Oh,” she muttered, utterly humiliated yet
again by the crass, utterly-capable handyman shit.

“But,” Jack said, getting up, making
the muscles in his abdomen ripple, “I can finish that later.  Now that you’re
up, let’s go get you caught up on the inverters.  You tried to leave the
generator running all night.  You have a
battery system
here.  If you
don’t shut it off once the inverters are done charging, you’re just burning gas
you could’ve used for winter.”

“Oh,” Blaze muttered, feeling
like someone had scalded her face in a pressure cooker.

“No biggie.  Now you know.”  Standing,
Jack peered up at her as he shrugged back into his plaid long-sleeved shirt. 
After dropping the bomb that Thunderbird had paid her a visit, the wretched
bastard had proceeded to tell her, oh, by the way, I’m headed home, now, have
fun all alone in the dark.  As if this kind of crap happened to him on a daily
basis.  Return To Anchorage had gotten quite a few checks that night, while
staring at the ceiling in the darkness of the creepy, too-big house, a broken
Colt arranged beside her bed.

“You know,” Jack said
conversationally, as he buttoned his shirt, “You don’t have to know
everything.”

Blaze blinked and stiffened. 
“What?”

He gestured at the toilet.  “So
you didn’t know the pipes would explode if they weren’t drained.  So what?”  He
cocked his head at her.  “I’m sure you learned some stuff back in the city that
I don’t know.”

Blaze snorted.  “Nothing important.”

He gave her an uncertain, wary
look, seemingly trying to decide something as he scanned her face.  “What about
math?” he finally suggested.

She frowned at him.  “What, like
Calculus?”

He cleared his throat and then looked
away again.  “Any math.”

Blaze stared at him.  “You can’t
do
math
?”  She hadn’t meant it to come out as a sneer, but it did.

Jack stiffened as if she’d hit
him.  “So that’s what it feels like,” he said softly.  He grabbed his hat off
the floor and yanked it over his head, then moved to push past her.

Blaze caught his shoulder. 
“Hey,” she said softly.  “Sorry.”

He gave her an irritated look. 
“Was just trying to make you feel better.”  Narrowing his eyes, he added, “You
know?  Like I promised?”

Meaning he was still taking his
oath seriously and trying not to be an asshole.  She frowned down at him. 
“Then you really
can
do math?”

“Lady,” he said in a growl, “I
can’t do math any more than I can read a book.” 

Blaze snorted.  “I saw you
reading one last night.”

For the first time, she saw
genuine longing in his eyes before it was quickly masked again by his callous
snort.  “Of course I can read.  What dumbass can’t read?  It was a stupid book,
anyway.”  He gave an indifferent shrug.  “Hell, as old as I am…  It’s not like
I haven’t read every book there is out there already, twice.  All the time I
been around…hell, there were a thousand places for me to learn something stupid
like that.  Every town had a school, and every church had a pastor.  Not too
hard to learn.”  He shoved past her and started toward the stairs.

“Wait a minute,” Blaze called
after him, her mind tumbling over his words.  “You told me you stayed
away
from the cities.”

She saw his shoulders stiffen.

He can’t read,
Blaze
realized, her heart suddenly going out to him.  All the brusque comments, all
the cruel jabs were starting to make sense.  Her heart started to pound as she
realized he wanted what she had.  Badly.  So badly it hurt.

“Want me to teach you?” Blaze
asked, as he started to walk off.

His broad back hesitated again.  For
a moment, it looked like he would turn.  Then, softly, he said, “I gotta show
you the battery system.”  He ducked down the stairs, leaving her staring after
him.

Over the next brain-wracking
hour, Jack described the battery system, how it worked, how to charge it, and
how to make it explode.  Blaze could have done without the last part, but he
seemingly took great relish in explaining to her what battery acid did to the
wallpaper and human flesh.

Then, once he was done with his
heart-pounding lecture that left her somewhere between afraid to touch the
generator and absolutely terrified of the car-sized nuclear device embedded in
her basement, he said, “All right.  Let’s go put in that garden ‘fore your
pretty head implodes.”

She narrowed her eyes at the back
of his head as he made his way out across the yard.

Over the course of the next few
days, Blaze once again fell into the role of Jack’s errand-monkey.  He even
took the bulldozer back from her, when she didn’t have the skills and finesse
necessary to drag nice, even furrows through the dirt for her garden.  Then,
once garden and crop-rows were complete, Jack stood around and started to tell
her how to plant her seeds.

“Let me do
one
thing by
myself, all right?” Blaze snapped, unable to take his macho, utterly-capable
handyman bullshit anymore.  Standing in the soft, newly-exposed virgin earth
that she was still tugging roots and grass-clumps out of, she jammed a finger
back towards the shop.  “I pay you to get the lodge running.  So go get the
lodge running.  I can handle this.”

Jack opened his mouth, looking
like he wanted to say something, then shrugged and went on with his business. 
She saw him puttering around the shop and grounds several times after that, a
pile of lumber over his shoulder or a power-tool in his hand.

Working out her frustrations in
the earth, Blaze spent a few days yanking out roots, shaking out sod clumps,
and delicately arranging the garden rows into something usable.  She planted
about a hundred different types of heritage seeds in small, well-marked
test-plots, and then spent a few more days planting heirloom red, purple, and
fingerling potatoes in the open, muddy field she’d uncovered with the
bulldozer’s massive blade. 

Potatoes, in Alaska, were a sure
bet.  Kind of like cabbage, carrots, and peas.  She planted those, too, though
she didn’t have much hope for the cabbage.  Those, she knew, pretty much needed
to be started four to six weeks early, in a nice, warm, sunny window.

Blaze poured every ounce of her
love and care into her new garden, even going so far as to endure the
embarrassment of asking Jack to show her how to hook up the hose so she could
water her rows.  Instead of showing her, however, he just
did
it, and dragged
the hose out of the shop and hooked it up to a little faucet she hadn’t even
seen set into the side of the Sleeping Lady, then switched it on and handed her
the business end.  Like she was a total moron.

“Don’t use it too much,” he
said.  “Might run the well dry.”  And then, with
that
startling little
revelation, he went on with his merry business, leaving Blaze staring at the
edge of a quarter-acre of crops and wondering just how she was going to keep it
all wet enough for the seeds to germinate.  Aside from the brief visit by
Thunderbird, the sun had been burning down on them every day, all day, and as
far as she’d heard, there was no sign of rain.

This, she realized, was the first
of her mistakes in the planning stage of her little farm in the woods.  Back in
Anchorage, hooked into the city main, she’d never even
considered
that
someone could run out of water.

And, as the scorchingly hot,
sunny days went on and the moist, fluffy earth she’d exposed began to dry up
into dust, water quickly became Blaze’s primary focus in life.  She would use
the hose until the grinding sound from the pump told her she’d run out of
water, then she’d started dragging it up from the lake.  Totally illegal, she
knew, but she was desperate, now.  She’d poured
thousands
into seeds,
and she
needed
those plants to help feed guests, because she’d never
calculated on having to buy
potatoes
at the grocery store, when it came
time to feed fishermen.

And yet, as many trips up the
hill she made with water-buckets, wasting fuel and time painstakingly pouring
gallon after gallon into the parched soil, most of her field simply didn’t
sprout.

“You know,” Jack said one day,
having stopped in his daily tasks to watch her for a minute as she moved along
the rows, hunched over, five-gallon bucket in hand, “You might as well give up
on the field and save what you can.  It’s late June.”  He jabbed a thumb at the
sky.  “It ain’t cooperating wit’ ya.”

Indeed, with all the time she was
putting into the field, her garden was bone-dry, and most of the tiny seedlings
had shriveled.

Interior Alaska.  Gotta love it. 
Blaze dropped the bucket and slumped to her ass in a row, staring in despair at
several weeks of wasted effort.  …And hundreds of dollars of rare, heirloom
seeds that would never sprout.

“Hey, at least you tried, right?”
Jack said.  By the commiserating look on his face, that seemed to be his way of
trying not to be an asshole.  At least he was still trying.  “Maybe livestock
would be a better idea.” 

Blaze lowered her head between
her knees, shaking it in despair.  “Part of the reason I needed the crops was
to feed the livestock.  If oats won’t grow, we can’t really have chickens
without barging in several tons of grain at thirty cents a pound.”

Jack grunted.  “Well, ya kinda
got a point there.”  He grunted, then scratched his nose, leaving a
grease-smear. 

The whole garden was suffering
from lack of water, and no matter how many gallons she emptied onto the soil,
walking through the rows was like padding through a desert, leaving two-inch-deep
footprints in the powdered dust.

Her eyes caught on the scraggly
little mango tree that Jack had insisted on planting at the end of one bed,
then she gave a depressed laugh.  “I don’t think I’m as cut out for this as I
thought I was.”

Jack gave her an odd look. 
“Well, honey,” he admitted reluctantly, “I
did
kinda think you’d do a
bit better than this.”

Oh, great,
Blaze thought,
humiliated.  He sounded like a disappointed parent.  She flopped backwards into
the non-germinating row to stare at the sun as it made its way across the deep
blue sky.  She supposed it wasn’t the end of the world.  So she’d have to buy
groceries at Costco.  Big deal.  Everyone in the Bush did that.  At least the
air was clean, and she didn’t have to deal with traffic.

She could
hear
Jack shrug
when he said, “But I coulda just been wrong about you from the start.  And
hell, if it was easy, more people would have done it.”  He turned to wander
back off to one of his projects.

“Wait.”  Blaze twitched and
lifted her head to peer at him.  “Wrong about me how?”

Jack stopped, and she could have
sworn he flinched.

“Oh, come on,” Blaze cried in
despair.  “What’d I do wrong?  Not enough work ethic to be a farmer?  Should’ve
been out here
sixteen
hours a day, instead of fourteen?  Planted at the
wrong time of the day?  The
moon
wasn’t right?  Too
tall
?  Too
much distance between me and the seeds?  Just tell me now, so I can go inside
and die.”

Jack turned to face her, slowly,
his face a mixture of reluctance and unhappiness.  “Uh, well, I
thought
I’d pegged you, but stuff just ain’t adding up.  So, uh, yeah.  Sorry I got
your hopes up.”  He gestured at the withered rows.  “But I’ll still build ya a
barn, if ya want.”

“
What’s
not adding up?”
Blaze demanded, sitting up onto her elbows to get a better look at him.

Jack seemed to want to say something,
then just shook his head.  “You’re just a rich brat from the city with some
expensive perfume or somethin.  I hear they add hormones to that stuff
nowadays.”  He shrugged.  “Probably what got me.”