Flash of Fire (14 page)

“Daydreaming there, Robin,” Jeannie said from close by her elbow. Her dark eyes were sparkling. “If Mickey was even half as attentive as my Cal, I can see why.”

Robin scanned to make sure none of the men were close by before answering. “Attentive might be an understatement.”

“Aren't men wonderful?” Denise did her crop-up-from-nowhere trick.

“They do have their moments,” Robin agreed and ignored the slight blush on Denise's cheeks. Gave her shoulder a friendly rub instead.

These women were welcoming her, had welcomed her. Robin could always pick up men, but women friends had been few and far between. While she was in the Guard, she'd attributed it to being in a man's world. And once out, she'd attributed it to being a soldier suddenly caught in a civilian's world.

Last night that hadn't been the case. They had been women together, dancing in their men's arms.

And these women were accepting her, even Jeannie who had the most reason not to. Robin did her best to respond in kind.

“He made it glorious,” she confessed.

“The way you two were dancing onstage would have made me really jealous if Cal hadn't come along.”

“The dancing didn't stop onstage.”

The other two women sighed happily. “No, it didn't,” they agreed in unison.

Robin threw open her arms, and in moments, they were sharing a group hug. It was as new and different as Mickey being in her life, and somehow it felt just as important.

* * *

“Damn!” Mickey exhaled it on a sigh.

Vern stood close beside him. “Beautiful, happy women in the morning sun.”

“Yep” was all Mickey could think to say. No woman had ever given to him the way Robin had last night. He'd never get enough of her, even if he spent a lifetime trying to please her.

Vern slapped him on the shoulder. “Uh-huh. That's exactly how it feels.”

“Okay.” Mickey used Robin's phrase because it was the best he could come up with. He knew what
it
was.

Mark's two-finger whistle sliced through the quiet air and he waved them all over to Firehawk One.

Everyone gathered around.

Mickey wanted to slip up to Robin, but she was firmly between Denise and Jeannie.

“Leave it alone, bro,” Vern whispered over his shoulder.

“Right. Male solidarity and all that.”

“Uh-huh.” Vern's affirmative grunt wasn't very convincing, especially not as he sidled up on Denise's other side and leaned down to kiss her atop her head.

Akbar's crew was mostly loaded back on the MHA aircraft. Akbar alone trotted over for the meeting. The Alaska Fire Service team were mostly loaded as well, though Tim and Macy came over to say good-bye.

“We've got a bit of a changeup here,” Mark started out. “Don't know if anything's going to come of it, but we're going to divide up for the moment.”

Mickey caught the change. Quick glances between Denise and Jeannie. If Robin hadn't been between them, he might have missed it, but they had leaned forward to look at each other.

Vern and Cal looked suddenly grim. No other reactions around the circle, and it looked as if Robin had missed it all. Then, after the others had all schooled their expressions back to neutral, Robin glanced at him. She hadn't missed a thing, which he acknowledged with the tiniest tip of his head.

Something was up and neither of them was in the loop.

“Akbar, you and yours are headed back to Oregon. There's a new fire out near the Dalles with your name on it. You'll take Betsy and her kitchen gear with you on the planes.”

He must have already told Betsy, because she was busy shifting her pile of gear over to the Shorts Sherpa.

“The rest of you, we're going to take a couple days R&R until we know for certain what's going on. But we are on call. We'll be dropping in on your hospitality, Tim, over in Fairbanks. Though I'd rather not have four MHA helos parked out in front of the Ladd Army Airfield.”

“Come on out to Larch Creek,” Macy suggested. “It's less than a fifteen-minute flight to Fairbanks. We have a field behind the town hangars where you could all park as long as you want.”

“Oh, man,” Akbar whined. “A chance to visit with you guys and I have to go jump a fire. Tim, why the hell did you have to fall in love with a lady up here?”

“Why did you fall for a wilderness guide?” Tim returned fire.

“Well, at least I can ride a horse with her. You looked like a stick man the few times I got you in the saddle. You know that you set the record for—”

“Boys.” Mark's tone stopped them. Then he turned to Macy. “That sounds perfect. Thanks.”

Mickey waited, but no other explanation was forthcoming.

Robin started to speak, then glanced at Mickey. He shook his head to stop her. She scowled but kept her peace.

“Let's go.” Mark slapped his hands together and everyone began to disperse.

Robin came up to Mickey and wrapped him in an unexpected hug. He buried his face against her neck, but rather than nuzzling in as well, she whispered in his ear.

“What do you know that I don't?”

He sighed. He'd never been the most romantic guy, but it looked as if he was the romantic one in this relationship.

“First”—he shifted so that he wasn't mumbling against her neck—“Mark only ever gives out as much instruction as he's willing to. No amount of questioning shifts that.”

“Asshole.” But there was a laugh in her voice. “Second?”

“There's more to MHA than fighting forest fires. I don't know what it is, but there's shit that happens that no one talks about afterward. I'm guessing this could be one of those.”

Robin held him a moment longer. “The nondisclosure agreement and the governmental security check.”

He nodded. “I don't know what's behind that curtain, but it's possible we're about to find out.”

She gave him an extra squeeze and then stepped out toward Firehawk One.

“Hey,” he called to her. Not even a kiss?

She must have read it clearly on his face. “Couple days off in small town, Alaska. You just might get lucky, sailor.”

That was an encouraging thought. “It's flyboy, not sailor, Ms. Robin of the Hood.”

Her laugh sparkled in the sunlight and she started to prep her helo.

Mickey turned to do the same to his.

There was a third thing he knew that Robin didn't, though it was too soon to share.

Mickey knew he was completely in love with one Robin Harrow.

Fairbanks sat four hundred miles west along the Yukon River watershed from Dawson City—though the meandering river easily traveled twice that distance to make the journey. Larch Creek was a little town thirty miles south of Fairbanks, perched in the foothills of the Alaska Range.

It was one of the most breathtaking places Mickey had ever been. An isolated valley with a wide basin but high hills wrapping the town in a vast bowl. It stretched along one side of a small, active river that looked to be draining directly from the big glaciers of Denali. Despite being seventy miles away, the tallest mountain in North America dominated the view at the head of valley. It surprised him at every turn: driving into town from the tiny airport—whose runway was actually a chunk of the one road into town—stepping out of the small B&B that Macy had called ahead to reserve for them before stepping into the town's one restaurant/bar—a massive log structure with
French Pete's
carved deeply into the log over the doorway with a hatchet. He turned, and there was Denali's white twenty-thousand-foot peak.

But it was the river that caught his attention.

“How far upstream can you kayak?” He turned to Macy, who had landed beside him at the big lunch table.

“What?” She cupped an ear in his direction.

The interior of French Pete's was a surreal space with caribou and moose antlers adorning the walls and a thousand odd collectibles tacked up between them. A massive, wood-spoked ship's wheel hung on the wall with glass floats dangling off each spoke, even though they were hundreds of miles from the ocean. Paintings of dogsleds that might have dated back to Jack London and the gold rush days. A large American flag that took him a moment to realize why it looked wrong—it had only forty-nine stars, made in the eight months between Alaskan and Hawaiian statehood. Old license plates. Even more had been stacked up haphazardly on the porch out front, a great jumble of unfathomable content.

But what had caught his eye was the half of a kayak bolted to the ceiling. The paddler was a dummy—at least he hoped it was a dummy and not a corpse—and wore a full set of scuba gear, with his flippered feet sticking out where the missing half of the boat should have been.

Robin and Denise were chatting away like two best friends to his other side. The table was a cheerful mayhem of conversations and laughter in one corner of the surreality.

He pointed upward and raised his voice.

“Kayaking, how far upstream?”

“Only Class I and II rapids for about ten miles. The same again another five miles beyond that. They're separated by a Class III rapid that runs about a half mile and no way on the planet to portage around them. There's some Class IV above that, but it's probably no good with the low snowpack this season. For the few kayakers who make it to Larch Creek, I deliver them upstream with my LongRanger.”

“Where can I rent gear for two?”

Macy shrugged. “In Larch Creek? Wow, that's a good question. A couple of us have canoes when we want to go hunting in the woods across the river, but I don't know anyone with a kayak except Carl.” And she too pointed upward. “And that's only a half one. Maybe you could fly into Fairbanks. I think that they've got those plastic boats for the day-trippers on the Tanana River along the Fairbanks waterfront. Don't know as I'd want to run a rapid in one though.”

“Shit!” Mickey looked around, feeling a little desperate. He had this image in his head: Robin Harrow in a whitewater kayak. To hell with motorcycles and cancan dresses. It was the best image he'd had of her yet and he couldn't wait for—

“Wait!” Macy gripped his arm.

“What?”

She laughed. Macy tugged and dragged him back out to the porch. You could have a big summer party out here if it weren't for all the junk—only a narrow path remained between the front steps and the entry. It was hard to make sense of the hodgepodge. There was defunct mining equipment, an old motorcycle, a dogsled with a broken runner filled with more moose antlers—they shed them every year, Macy explained, which made the local supply unending—a broken wooden airplane propeller—a lone wagon wheel, five cross-country skis, none of which matched.

And sticking out from the depths of the pile, a narrow prow of sun-bleached plastic. It took them a few minutes, but he and Macy soon unearthed a pair of kayaks with a very faded “Rent Me” sign on one of them. More digging unearthed some paddles. Sealed in bags in one of the cockpits was the rest of the necessary gear, including a pair of nylon spray skirts in surprisingly good condition considering the sun-faded state of the boats themselves.

“What are you up to?” Robin asked from somewhere beyond the mound of crap between the kayaks and the front door to the restaurant.

He waded back to her and held aloft his final find. He selected one of the hard-shell safety helmets and—after checking to make sure it had no spiders or other nasty surprises lurking within—pulled it down over her head.

“Oh, babe. You're gonna love this!”

* * *

“Love this” was not exactly what Robin was thinking a mere two hours later. What she had been thinking was a hot shower, a soft bed, and a couple days of restaurant food. What she
was
doing was watching her one link to such niceties take off and disappear back to the north in the form of Macy Tyler and her Bell LongRanger helicopter.

As the engine noise faded, the reality of their situation began to sink in. Except for radios currently stowed away in plastic bags, their contact with the outside world consisted of paddling tiny little boats to the next nearest human being, over a dozen miles downstream.

“You are dog meat, Hamilton.”

“Uh-huh.” Mickey kept organizing their supplies into gallon Ziplocs that he'd bought at the tiny general store.

“I mean it, Mickey.” Something in her tone must have caught his attention and had him stop and look up at her.

“Listen—”

“I'm not feeling very cooperative at the moment,” she snarled back.

“No…listen,” he said softly.

And she did.

The helicopter was gone. The last heavy beats of the rotors were done echoing off the valley walls.

But there was also no roaring fire, racing helos, radio call static crackling in her ears every thirty seconds, or any of the other mayhem that had filled the last seven days. And the week of hopes and interviews, of testing and training, that had come before, that was also gone. Before that? Six months at the truck stop—pretty much without a day off.

The first sound she heard? The soft burble of the stream entering the small mountain lake where Macy had dropped them off. They were in a grassy clearing little bigger than the helicopter. Trees ranged upward on steep hills all around the lakeshore. The air was breathlessly still, making the lake a mirrored sheet that reflected the fantastic image of Denali's north face.

Some bird chirped to ask if the noisy helicopter was gone and was it safe to come out again. Another answered. A moment later there was a rustle as a squirrel raced across an overhead branch to look down at these new intruders.

More bird calls. More small critter noise.

But all of it so soft she could soon hear the beating of her own heart, her own breathing.

And the trees lived up to the river's name—Larch Creek. They were wrapped in a world of tall larch conifers, most a soft green, some yellowing with age as if it was already autumn but they were struggling on. The undergrowth was grasses and low berry bushes.

And the silence behind it all, she could only describe as…

“Wow.”

Mickey came up beside her and wrapped his arms around her waist but didn't speak. He leaned forward so that his head was beside hers, chin ever so lightly on her shoulder.

She couldn't hear his heart, but she could feel it beating where his chest pressed against her back.

The silence slowly soaked the craziness out of her.

“Why did you bring me out here? You could have had your nefarious way with my willing body at the B&B in a nice, soft bed.”

“Okay, I should have thought about that aspect more carefully,” he joked in her ear. Then he turned her to face him, and there was something much more serious going on behind those eyes.

Uh-oh!
Robin's internal alarms went off. She wasn't even sure what they were, but they were now ringing more loudly than the bird chatter in the bushes and trees around them.

“My dad is a tour guide in the summers. Raft and kayak. As a kid, I spent my summers with him out on the Oregon rivers.”

“In Tucson we spent it out in the desert with a .22 rifle, shooting rattlesnakes. Personally I preferred going to the local NASCAR track. So this is about connecting with your dad? Or your inner child?”

Mickey scoffed. “You see my dad anywhere handy?” He pretended to squint into the trees, then shaded his eyes to look across the lake up toward Denali.

“What about your inner child?”

“My inner child?” Mickey looked down and poked a finger at his own ribs a few times as if looking for it. “Trust me, Robin, there is not a single childish thought in my head at the moment.” Then he turned those surprising blue eyes of his in her direction.

No, there wasn't a single childish thought there, that was for damn sure. She could feel her body heating in response, but chose to ignore it…for the moment anyway.

She slipped out of Mickey's arms and used the lake as an excuse. She wandered down to the edge of the lake and stuck in a finger.

“Yipes! That's freezing!”

“Glacial melt. I guess we're gonna be pretty stinky by the time we get back to Larch Creek.”

“And how soon is that?”

“Could do it in a day if we had to. Two days is comfortable.”

Then he looked away from her, and she could feel the pressure of his need for her ease as his gaze traveled elsewhere.

“I could stay right here a long time though.” He spoke mostly to himself.

Robin watched Mickey watch the landscape. It was the first place he'd really made sense to her. He flew a firefighting helicopter as well as anyone she'd ever seen. As Mark had pointed out, Mickey was also a natural leader; people simply followed his initiative. Not because he ordered it, but because when he did something, it was straight from his heart.

As Mickey had jumped up onto Gerties' stage so effortlessly and stalked across the boards to take possession of her, there had been an impossible rightness. One so powerful that the other three men followed him without any argument, possibly without any thought that they were about to make fools of themselves in front of a hundred Canada Day revelers.

Summer river guide. The strength that he wielded so effortlessly was a legacy of an active child with a paddle in his hands for hours every day.

Maybe here in this place she could understand more of who he was. Here was a place he belonged.

She walked quietly upslope to the pile of gear and fished out a sleeping bag. She spread it on the thick, soft grasses and then sat down upon it.

“Mickey?” she called to the man who still stared outward as if fitting in somewhere was the most natural thing in the world. And not the absolute impossibility that Robin knew it to be. The only place she ever truly fit was… She didn't know. Neither the truck stop nor the cockpit of an AANG bird. Maybe Harrow women were above such things.

He turned slowly to look at her.

She patted the sleeping bag beside her. There was a wildness to him that she hadn't seen before. Not of danger or loss of control, but of belonging where modern man no longer did.

He stalked up and looked down at her for a moment. She'd have felt small if his look didn't make her feel so powerful. No one had ever needed her the way Mickey Hamilton did.

Instead of patting the sleeping bag beside her again, she opened her arms to him.

As he knelt before her and then lay her back, he said her name softly.

“Robin.”

It wasn't a question.

It was a statement.

A statement that maybe there was somewhere she did belong. She'd certainly never been in a place like Mickey's arms.

* * *

Mickey had thought he knew something about making love to Robin. Finally alone and not exhausted by the firefight, he discovered that he hadn't a clue.

When he lay down over her on the grassy slope above the unnamed glacial lake, she welcomed him without any question. Her kisses had been wonderful, but now her light blue eyes were filled with something more. When she closed them to kiss him, there was a quietness about her that hadn't been there before.

Oh, he'd been able to gentle her into letting him explore her body, but now there was no need to do so. It wasn't that she was gentle; her kiss was so hard—with her arms locked behind his head forbidding his easing back—that they would both have bruised lips. Rather it was that the quiet had moved inside of her.

When he uncovered her lovely breasts and palmed them both and planted a kiss between, she hissed with pleasure and need.

And when he had removed the rest of her clothes and dragged off his own shirt, he moved to explore what was last uncovered. She rose for him in a flight so smooth, so deep, that it didn't come from mere bodily pleasure and release. Her whole being shone from her. So in tune with what was happening that even her cries didn't still the birdsong.

Robin Harrow, sprawled golden and glistening beneath the warmth of the Alaskan sun, was no mere revelation. She was a goddess incarnate—except that made her too remote and there wasn't a single thing remote about her.

Not as she held him in place until the last shudder had run the length of her delicious frame for the last time. Still not letting him move until long after her breathing and pulse had returned to normal.

Only then did she let him up to lie fully side by side against her. He should remove his pants, but was too distracted by trailing his hand over the length of her naked form. Mickey was unable to believe that she was real.