Flash of Fire (17 page)

The MFDD zoomed into the foreground of her sight line.

She almost missed copying Mickey's little sideways jog to line up in the center of it, and then he was gone, flying out into space flat and level, paddle raised over his head in both hands like a banner of triumph.

A sound broke briefly louder than the rushing waters. It might have been a
Whoop!
of delight. It might have been a scream of terror. She knew which hers would sound like as she went over.

Then he disappeared vertically out of sight, perhaps plunged forever into the murky depths of the crystal clear waters.

Deep breath, Robin. Last moment of existence!

The roaring water was intensified…magnified…explosively loud in the narrow cleft of rock. And then the water went smooth, accelerating so quickly that again she was slammed against her cockpit's back band. At the last moment, she remembered to pivot her hips upward, trying to kick the sky.

Her kayak shot out into space—straight and true—and she was flying!

For an instant she hung weightlessly above the stream. The water rushed by far below her.

Mickey paddled idly backward off to the side of the landing pool, looking up at her with a huge smile on his face.

And then gravity took her.

She plummeted ten feet straight down.

Hit the water so hard that the boat disappeared underwater right up to her chest.

For a moment only head, shoulders, and upraised arms—she didn't remember lifting her paddle in exactly the same triumphant way that Mickey had—were clear of the river. And spray spewed outward in a beautiful plume in every direction.

Then, like a cork, the kayak once more lofted her above the river, though by only a few inches this time, before she smacked back into the water again. She dug in with her paddle to control her line, and Mickey shot forward to join her.

Side by side, they raced down through the lower rapids.

It took Robin a moment more to recognize that the sound echoing off the canyon walls, a high note over the quieting basso roar of the river, was her own laughter.

* * *

“How about we just stay here and never leave?” Robin looked up at the sunrise light glinting off Denali. The mountain seemed smaller, less daunting now than it had before. The river flowed by only a few steps from her feet, where she sat on the grassy bank.

The river had gone lazy and, except for a few little sections, was going to be an easy float into town, which lay just a few miles away.

In just a day and two nights, she had become immersed in this life. Okay, it had drawbacks. Hanging the food in a tree at night. Sleeping with a loaded rifle that Macy had loaned them—a big, nasty, bear-killing rifle. Knowing that if she left the relative protection of the valley and its constant soft breezes that she'd be eaten alive by mosquitoes.

But right now there was warm sun, amazing views, and a very handsome man cooking her breakfast over an open campfire beside a burbling river.

“You call it, Robin, and I'll build us a cabin here in the woods.”

Right. Like that was going to happen. Living under a blanket of snow and ice for six months or more of the year. Her Tucson blood would freeze in her veins and she'd be a permanent icicle long before spring melt out.

“Nice thought, but I'll bet this place is idyllic for about three weeks a year.”

“Longer, but I think it's more the company than the environment.” He handed her a plate stacked high with pancakes drowned in maple syrup.

“How?”

“Old camping secret.”

“You can tell me but—”

“—I'd have to marry you.”

“Good luck with that.” She took a bite and it was amazing, better than anything at Phoebe's, and breakfast was their specialty. They had the richness of whole wheat and the intense flavor of the tiny wild strawberries she'd seen him picking earlier. He'd even packed along maple syrup and butter without her noticing. “Damn, these are good, Hamilton. You should use these as an audition when you
do
find someone you want to marry. Audition, hell. Use it as a closer. Totally killer.”

There was a pinch at the thought of another woman having Mickey Hamilton, but Harrow women didn't wed. But if she was looking for the perfect candidate to give her a daughter and continue the Harrow line, Mickey just might be that.

She took another mouthful and glanced over at him. He was frozen with a forkful of pancake halfway between plate and mouth. He looked as if he'd been dipped in plastic.

“What?” There was something working across his face.

For all his guyness, Mickey was lousy at hiding his thoughts and feelings—such a straight-up, honest guy. Emotions flowed easily across his features…but she had to be reading this wrong. She bit down on a sour berry.

“Oh no, Hamilton. No way are thinking what I think you're thinking.”

“What am I thinking?” His voice was low, almost dangerous.

“Look here now. We've had some great sex and a lot of fun. That's all I'm looking for. A summer with maybe a few more fires in it and a great lover in my bed. That's it. That's as deep as Robin Harrow goes. Shallow, fast-moving current, that's me.” She pointed at the river, which ran slow and deep by their camp.

Mickey narrowed his eyes at her. He opened his mouth, but she held up a threatening fork to warn him.

“I'm serious. You're wonderful, Mickey. Perhaps the best man I've ever met and definitely the best I've ever bedded. And when I'm ready to have a kid, you'd be a prime candidate. But I come from three generations of single women. We absolutely do not—”

Something clarified in his features.

“We do not…” She tried to continue but couldn't find the words she'd meant to say when confronted with the suddenly self-assured look on his face.

“I love you, Robin.”

She tried to answer the flat statement past the tightness in her chest but couldn't manage it.

“I didn't know it,” Mickey continued in that same soft, reasonable tone that had coaxed her out of the safety of her eddy pool and back into the mad river. “But I do now that I've said it. There's only one woman for me, Robin Harrow. You're it. So I'm thinking you're going to have to deal with it.”

“Deal with it!
Deal with it?
Are you fucking nuts, Hamilton? Look at me.”

“One of my favorite pastimes,” he said calmly. Perfectly calmly. The squint was gone and that little smile of amusement was back.

“Well, cut it out!”

“No promises on that. You're an awfully attractive woman to look at.”

“Fine, look all you want. But take back that other thing you said.”

He shrugged and continued eating his pancakes as if this was in any way a rational conversation. Those blue eyes studied her.

Unlike her normal tendency, she knew that striking out at him wasn't going to help a thing. Last time, she'd smacked him was in the helmet with her paddle…and he'd kissed her.

A kiss she'd quite enjoyed.

And something she so couldn't deal with at this particular moment.

“Damn you. All I wanted was a simple, uncomplicated fling. Was that too much to ask?”

“Appears so.” He kept eating his stupid pancakes. She looked down at her own, missing only a few bites. It wasn't pettiness that made her cast them into the river; it was that there was no way she'd be able to keep them down if she ate another bite.

Fish began poking at them as they drifted downstream. They'd be long gone before they reached Larch Creek.

She tossed the empty plate on the grass between them.

A look of sharp pain crossed his face. He looked from the empty plate to her face and back down.

She didn't mean it that way, as if she was rejecting his delicious food just because he'd…said that thing he'd said. But she couldn't bring herself to say anything else either. So she pulled her knees tight up against her chest and turned once more to stare out at the river.

Why did it have to get complicated? Most men would be glad to have her willing body and a summer of fun.

That was Mickey's problem: he wasn't most men.

* * *

Mickey stared at the empty plate between them on the grass after Robin threw his food away.

He loved her. It didn't matter how briefly they'd known each other. What they had or hadn't done or said. It was Truth and he knew it.

He loved her…but she didn't love him.

Some great sex.

Was that really all she thought it was? Sure, it had started there. But he wasn't an overeager and clumsy boy of sixteen losing his virginity to a girl whose name he no longer exactly remembered. He knew that sex did not equal love. But Robin, the person behind that amazing sexual punch, had dazzled him even more.

Calm.

He would be calm.

He finished his pancakes, wondering where the flavor had gone. Without comment, he took her plate, his, and the fry pan to the edge of the river and washed them clean.

While he was washing the dishes, the rest of her words came clear.

“Wait a minute!” He spun back to face her.

“What?”

“You'd purposely have a kid without a family?”

“Sure. I want a girl someday. Hopefully a cute one, like Emily's kid, Tessa.”

“Emily
and
Mark's kid,” he managed through clenched teeth.

“Well, sure. That works for Emily, but no way am I going to marry some guy to get one. Mom didn't. Not Grandma either.”

“In what kind of screwed-up world does that make any sense at all? Sure, there are single parents out there, even never married ones, but it isn't the kind of thing any idiot does on purpose.” Mickey tried to picture growing up without having his mother or his father. Even trying to imagine it ripped at his gut. He'd had plenty of single-parented friends, but he could see the damage it did. “You'd raise a kid without a family?” The anger was heating up inside, and he wished he hadn't finished his breakfast, which was roiling in his gut like Class IV rapids.

“Worked for me.”

“Yeah. It made you fricking crazy.”

“No wedding, Mickey. No marriage. I'll be no man's wife. Crap! Now I sound like some stupid Irish ballad.”

“I'd no more give you a child to raise on your own than…than…” He didn't have a worse than. “I grant that some women have no choice. But what your mother did and your grandmother before her, that was a choice. It was cruel and nasty and narcissistic.”

“No!” she shouted at him. “It's because men are such assholes!”

Mickey knew if he said another word, it would be harsh and impossibly cruel and that he'd never ever be able to take it back.

It took more strength than he'd ever known he had to turn back to the cleanup along the bank. One of the plates was gone, sunk out of sight despite the clear water.

* * *

Robin stared at Mickey's back.

She was right; she knew it. Maybe not right for his world but definitely right for her own.

It would have been better if she hadn't just called Mickey an asshole, but that boat had already sailed. She could see that she'd hurt him, but he'd get over that. At least she hoped so.

But Mickey was different every single time. She'd expect one thing and he'd be another, time after time.

If he wasn't going to get over it?

She looked upstream.

The high lake where they had made such love just two days ago was forever away from where she now sat. Beyond the uncrossable fall off the Mighty Tea Cup of Death and Destruction. That had been the idyll—near enough the closing bell of their relationship as more than fellow pilots, though she hadn't known it at the time.

A moose and her calf had wallowed along the river's edge not a hundred feet from their quiet camp last night. More birdlife than would ever visit the Tucson desert, migrated through, spending a minute, an hour, or a day before continuing their journey north. Or perhaps they were birds who had come to spend the summer. To stay awhile and breed in this valley. Even now they might be in the bushes all around them, making baby birds.

Not her. Not even with Mickey Hamilton. Ten minutes ago, she had never wanted to leave and now she couldn't wait to get away.

She tried not to think of what lay ahead.

Instead, she simply did another thing that her mother had taught her. Robin began reeling in the strings. Mentally breaking her connection to those around her.

Jeannie, Denise, Vern…she would fly with them as she'd been contracted to do.

Mark and Emily…well, at least she now knew that the Night Stalkers truly deserved the respect she'd always had for them.

Mickey…how the hell was she supposed to cut him off? But her choices were limited, gone. Only one safe path remained down the river. She didn't help him pack up camp or douse the fire or load the kayaks. She sat like a stone as if he had petrified her into a river boulder—the kind with a lethal keeper hole just around the corner.

He set her gear in front of her, and when he began pulling on his own spray skirt and helmet, she did the same.

They entered the water together.

It was a very quiet trip to Larch Creek.

Robin spent the time slowly folding in on herself. She tried not to feel as if she was sitting in a little eddy current, spinning quietly out of control while she went stark raving mad.

Robin knew she was overreacting. Or at least not making sense to anyone other than herself.

Their triumphant return to Larch Creek from the wilds of Alaska should have been a time of stories and laughter. Of sitting around that big table in the town's only restaurant and recounting the saga of the Mighty Furrow of Death and Destruction. Perhaps turn it into a ballad that would be passed down through the generations.

Instead, she'd done the only thing she was capable of doing.

She'd walked through the little town, leaving Mickey to return the kayaks and other gear. A few people greeted her, but she didn't know anyone here and just kept walking with only a nod of acknowledgment.

When she reached the oddly named B&B, the Bookish Bed and Breakfast, she looked at the shower. The one that she'd been looking forward to showering in with Mickey.

Instead, though it was still mid-morning, she crawled into her room—
their
room, his pack resting on the floor reminded her. She set his pack against the outside of the door and bolted it before crawling into bed.

Robin didn't cry. Didn't believe in crying because it certainly never fixed anything.
Crying is weakness!
And though her eyes burned and her nose ran, she lay there under the covers until she finally lost herself in the oblivion of sleep.

* * *

Mickey had thought to return the gear and slink away. He'd seen Robin walk off to the B&B without a word. Maybe what he'd do was go sleep in his helo. Or call up Tim the smokejumper and see if the Alaska Fire Service needed some air drops until the next MHA call.

Maybe he'd go find Vern and get good and truly shit faced.

Maybe he'd find a bottle of scotch and do it all by himself.

They'd pulled out on the riverbank right across the road from French Pete's restaurant-bar. He carted the gear back up onto the porch, stuffed it down beneath the blue truck hood that might have dated back to the 1930s, complete with a Plymouth winged victory chrome ornament—all that was missing was the truck. Who knows, maybe it was somewhere here under all this crap.

And then he stood there without a clue what to do.

Well, if he was going to get plastered, he was standing on the front porch of a bar.

He shouldered his way in through the front door, raised a hand once in case anyone was calling his name, and went up to the bar.

A tough-looking man sat behind the bar playing chess with a girl who sat on a high stool across from him.

“Scotch,” Mickey managed with a throat that had gone unexpectedly gruff with the morning's disuse. He tried clearing his throat but it didn't help. “Glass and a bottle”—he considered a moment—“without the glass.”

The man looked at him for a long moment before turning back to the game and moving one of his pawns. Then he reached back without leaving his stool, snagged a heavy stoneware mug, and filled it from a nearby pot of black coffee.

Mickey looked down at the cup in front of him and back up at the bartender.

The man's eyes were clear brown, frank, and assessing. At first, Mickey thought this was going to turn into a confrontation—maybe with him beating the shit out of the guy and climbing over the bar himself to grab the bottle he wanted, that he could
see
sitting on the back shelf.

But the guy simply waited.

The little girl, maybe ten years old, waited as well. Neither one was watching the board; they were both watching him.

“That's better for what ails you, lad,” the bartender offered in a laconic tone. “Trust me, I know.” And then he and the girl turned back to their game.

Mickey stared at the cup for a long moment before reaching for the sugar. No packets around—not white, blue, yellow, or pink. There was only one of those old-fashioned glass jars with the silver lid. He poured a healthy spoonful and began stirring it in.

He prepared himself for sludge but instead tasted a fine French roast—that he'd pretty much murdered with a sludge-load's worth of sugar.

He set the mug down on the bar as the floor creaked behind him. Mickey braced himself for one of Vern's friendly slaps on the back, sure to be accompanied by a knowing nod and wink.

That would be good.

Because then Mickey could beat the shit out of him. He'd never actually been in a bar brawl before, but this felt like his moment. He clenched his fists in preparation.

But instead of a heavy slap, the person moved from behind him and levered herself awkwardly up onto the stool on the side away from the chess game.

“Emily? What are you doing here?”

“I flew up to visit my husband.”

“You flew? In your state?” She'd gotten bigger in the week since he'd last seen her.

“On an airplane!”

“Oh.”
Duh.

“Now that the pleasantries are over. What the
hell
did you do to
my
pilot?”

“Does the whole goddamn world have to be mad at me?” He spun back to face his mug of coffee and stared across the bar at the scotch. Sitting right there, snuggled up between the Kentucky bourbon and the Irish whiskey.

Another glance at the bartender was answered with a shake of the man's head even though he hadn't looked up from his chess game. Mickey sipped his saccharine coffee.

Actually, having Emily Beale mad at him was a new one.

“You”—the ire in her tone forced him to turn back to her as assuredly as if she had grabbed his chin and yanked—“mess up my new pilot so badly that she doesn't even recognize me waddling down the street? You've earned a great deal to answer for, Mr. Hamilton.”

Telling her that the way she walked had nothing to do with waddling and a great deal to do with striking terror into people didn't seem like a good approach at the moment.

As a matter of fact, he had no idea what was a good approach at the moment. He was ready to take someone apart just on general principles. But not a pregnant lady. Where was Vern when he needed someone to pound on?

Or the fuck-'em-and-run excuse of a father who'd messed with Robin's head in the first place? He was gonna hunt down the little shit and break him into teeny-tiny fireman bits and then bury his ass under a four-hundred-gallon load of retardant.

“Mickey!” Emily's call for his attention woke something deeper. It woke the memory of Robin tossing his food and his heart into the goddamn river and denying who
she
was.

“I?
Me?
” He spun to face the only target he had. “This is somehow
my
fault?” His voice was climbing to a full shout and he was helpless to stop it. “I tell her I love her and this is what I get?”

Emily didn't even blink, like she was studying a toad.

“Fine! To hell with her and to hell with you.”

The silence that followed was deafening.

Sorry
, he mouthed to the kid, who just shrugged. Hanging out in a bar, she'd clearly heard worse language. He shoved off the stool and headed for the door.

Vern came up to him, and Mickey didn't care if it was going to be a friend's commiseration of
What's wrong, buddy?
or a
What the fuck, dude?
—he didn't need either one. He shoved Vern hard in the center of the chest and sent him flying backward into a chair that would have dumped him to the floor if he hadn't banged hard up against a wall first.

Mickey pounded out the door and looked up and down the street. No liquor store.

The only gin joint in town was the one behind him.

Fine.

He took a right and walked down the street.

Past the point where Robin had walked away from him, he headed out of town.