Flash of Fire (18 page)

Robin ignored the knock that had woken her and the rattle of the doorknob that followed. After a long moment, a set of heavy steps walked back down the hallway and thudded slowly down the stairs.

About a minute later, the heavy footsteps returned and she heard a key unlock the door.

Didn't Mickey get that his pack
outside
the door meant go away?

A chair scraped on the wooden floor and creaked as someone sat in it close beside the bed.

Go away, Mickey.

She kept her head under the covers. It was hot under here with all her clothes on, but Robin was not going to talk to Mickey while she lay in a bed. They had made love in tents and under the stars along the banks of Larch Creek in both broad daylight and soft twilight. They had yet to do so in a bed and she sure wasn't going to start a fight from one.

Go away, Mickey!
Robin tried to think it louder, loud enough that he'd hear it.

It didn't seem to be working.

Well, Mr. I'm-So-Patient-And-Calm, you're just going to have to get the message at some point.

He hadn't even fought for her. She'd dumped his food, been a stonewalled bitch, and he'd let her get away with it like some kind of spoiled brat.

“It's not that I'm spoiled,” she told the corner of the pillow that was under the covers with her.

Or had she hurt him so badly he wasn't able to respond? She didn't like that idea at all.

“Then what are you?” The tone of the voice, muffled by the blankets over her head, was so unexpected that, for a half moment, she thought just maybe the pillow was answering.

She lifted a corner to peek out.

“Emily?”

She couldn't account for how Mickey Hamilton had transformed into Emily Beale. Robin went back under the covers but figured that was too chickenshit, even for her. Tossing back the sheet and too-warm blanket, she sat up and dropped her feet to the floor, still clad in boots muddy from the riverbank.

“Crap!”

“You're a mess, Robin.”

“Thanks for flying all the way to Alaska to tell me something I already know, Emily. Really helps.”

“Tell me about the fire.”

Robin eyed her for a moment.

No hint of sarcasm or humor. No…

“Shit! Next you're going to say
Tell me about your homeworld, Usul
.”

“Fine, we can talk about the
Dune
books and the sandworms first if you'd like, but I'd rather talk about the fire.”

Robin rubbed her face, trying to shake off the last vestiges of the nap. She felt thick, confused. “Because you know if you asked about Mickey, I'd throw your ass out of here.”

“I will say three things to that. First, I'm not stupid. Second, I'm pregnant, soon to be bigger than a Russian Mil Mi-26 super heavy-lift helicopter, so please throw gently. Third, you may find that I don't throw so easily because I'm at least as nasty as you are.”

“Yeah right.” Robin went to the small sink in the corner of the brightly decorated room. It was her first good look at it—room decor hadn't been at the top of her list when she'd arrived—and she definitely wasn't ready for the results.

It was a room of Pooh. Not just in little ways, a stuffed animal here and a lithograph there. And it wasn't just cutesy touches like pinecone-shaped soap and towels with large, black bear paw prints as if they'd been muddy like the impressions her boots had left on the sheets. Nothing at all Disney about it.

A whole corner of the room had been reshaped to look like a tree had grown right into the side of the house, with a hole high on the side and a crooked sign that said “The Wolery.” There was a spinney thicket in the other corner, mostly made of pussy willow branches, that had what might or might not have been a woozle peeking out from among them.

There was an actual round hole in the wall above the head of the bed with a small Kanga and Roo peeking out and an empty larder just visible inside.

“Please tell me your room isn't like this one.” She kept her back to Emily as she braced herself against the sink and tried not to look in the mirror. She'd actually be happier if—ha! There was one Mickey hadn't come up with—Christopher
Robin
looked back out at her. She certainly wasn't ready to face herself.

“No.” Emily spoke as if this was somehow a rational place and a rational conversation. “We're in the land of
The Little Prince
complete with baobab trees, a beautiful and rather vain rose under a glass dome, and most of an airplane. Tessa sleeps in the cockpit, and our bed is on one of the wings. Thankfully there is no giant snake that has swallowed an elephant whole.”

“I can't imagine you being nasty.” She grimaced a little at her early nickname of Queen Bitch Beale, but that had been before she knew Emily. “In what ways are you nasty?”

* * *

“One step closer, Henderson, and I will not be accountable for my actions.” Mickey sat on the riverbank across the road from the aircraft hangars that used the way into town as a runway. The helicopters parked out back, and his key to the Twin 212 was in his pack back at the B&B.

Useless!

Mark stopped three paces away and Mickey refused to look up. He'd only see his own face reflected in Henderson's mirrored shades.

“You know.”

Mark tucked his hands in his jeans pockets and turned to look out over the river.

Mickey had been watching a wolf slip silently through the thick stands of yellow larch trees on the other side of the river. No bridge across, the town was on this side and the steeply rising wilderness just fifty feet away on the other.

“I think you're only the second person to ever have yelled at Emily.”

Mickey felt really lousy about that. She'd done nothing to earn the rough edge of his tongue, but he'd needed someone to lash out at.

Mark finally sat two paces off, also facing across the water.

“What did she do when you yelled at her?”

“You think I'm a madman? That's the most dangerous woman I ever met. I'm not suicidal enough to think that yelling at Emily Beale is any kind of a long-term survival tactic.”

“Then who was first?”

“Childhood friend named Peter Matthews. Now that's a seriously brave man.”

“Peter Matthews.” Someone that Mark Henderson considered to be brave must be something. “What? Like the President?”

“One and the same.”

Mickey had meant it as a joke. A look at Mark showed that it wasn't.

“They grew up next door to each other,” Mark explained as if this was somehow normal.

President of the United States Peter Matthews? “What did she do to
him
?”

“Married me. That seemed to upset him quite a bit. Though the yelling was back when they were kids and apparently had something to do with a brand-new pair of sneakers, the DC Reflecting Pool, and several policeman. She still calls him Sneaker Boy to this day.”

Emily with a sense of humor was almost as hard to imagine as anyone calling the President that.

“First time I let her know my feelings for her, it went about as well as it looks like your attempt did.”

Mickey was absolutely not ready to talk about Robin. He tried to wait out Henderson as the wolf slipped away through the larches and out of sight. They were left with only the flowing river to watch.

Mark didn't explain and Mickey couldn't help himself; he finally took the obvious bait.

“So what did Emily do?”

“We were on an aircraft carrier when I kissed her. She slammed me facedown into a ready-room table, then stalked out, climbed into an F/A-18F Super Hornet, and catapulted out of my life.”

“Yeah,” Mickey agreed, never having even seen an aircraft carrier except on TV and in the movies. “I hate it when that happens.”

* * *

Robin moved to the bed and sat on it facing Emily. She did her best to ignore the small piglet peering worriedly up at her from under Emily's chair.

“You really did that to him? Planted his face hard?”

Emily nodded.

“Damn. Knew there was a reason I liked you.”

And Emily smiled at her.

Somehow that was all it took for all the pain and anger and hurt to just wash out of her.

“I like you too, Robin.”

“Well…” Robin looked for something do with her hands. She took one of the small Pooh pillows that she'd strewn to the floor—this one was hexagonal and made of honeycomb material that looked as if it was really dripping with honey—and gestured for Emily to lean forward. Robin slipped it down behind Emily's back. “Don't get all mushy on me, okay?”

“That's not the sort of women we are.”

We?
“How did you just do that?”

“Do what?”

“Uh-huh. No Emily games. How did you just make me feel so goddamn important? No, important is the wrong word. So…pleased with who I am.”

“That's what I expected you to find in the fire.” Emily shrugged. “That's part of why I wouldn't let Mark fly with you. You were supposed to discover that for yourself. Reconnect with the soldier in you who knows who you are.”

“Well, it was working until I was a total shit to Mickey this morning.” Which she so wasn't going to talk about.

Robin shed her boots, made the bed after brushing out the worst of the mostly dry dirt, and propped up some pillows of her own to lean back against the headboard. There was another chair she could have dragged over, but she didn't want to disturb Eeyore, who was sleeping curled up beneath it. She reached up a hand to tickle Roo's nose where his stuffed head poked out of the hole in the wall. She really was a basket case.

“Maybe I did learn some things. The fire was harsh; the bastard fought us for a week. But the team, damn, Emily, the team you've put together. There's nothing they can't do.”

“I know.”

“She knows.” Robin eyed her carefully but could detect neither sarcasm nor smugness.

Simple fact. If Emily Beale said it, what more was there to question?

“Mickey”—she managed to say his name without wincing this time—“thought you wouldn't let Mark train me because he wasn't a natural pilot and I was.”

“And what's your assessment?”

“Mickey is perceptive in a lot of ways.” And she needed to change the topic fast. “But if anyone's a natural, it's him. He's almost as good as you are. And me? I'm not a natural anything. I'm not buying that explanation, even if Mickey did.”

“Knew you weren't stupid.” Emily settled back in her chair and rested her hands on her belly.

“Oh no, I'm eight kinds of stupid. Maybe I'm just not totally dumb.”

“What did you learn during the fire?”

“Back to that again? Fine.” Robin started to describe the tactics and—

“Let me rephrase. What did you learn about yourself during the fire?”

That stopped her. Emily's eyes were as pure blue as Mickey's, perhaps a few shades lighter. But there was an edge there that Mickey didn't have. Emily Beale could control an entire company, perhaps an entire regiment, with a single glance. Mickey's eyes were windows to the man within.

Robin considered lying back down and pulling the sheets over her head again. Seriously considered it. Instead she hugged a pillow in the shape of a clay “Hunny” pot.

“Me? What did I learn about me fighting that fire? How little sleep I can go on?”

Emily sighed and Robin hoped it had to do with an ache in her lower back but knew that it didn't.

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

Robin tried to think of something, she really did. “I know I'm not the best pilot, but I figured that out the moment I climbed into that helo for an interview with the monstrously pregnant Queen Bitch Beale.”

Emily laughed with delight at the description.

“But on the fire I learned that I wasn't a bad one either.”

“What else?”

Robin shrugged and couldn't think of a thing.

“Okay.” Emily stared up at the ceiling painted with green leaves of the Hundred Acre Wood and blue sky beyond. “Let's try this. What did you learn about the other pilots?”

* * *

“You weren't planning anything stupid, were you?”

Mickey looked at Henderson. “What, like throwing myself in the river? No, it's too damn cold.”

“No. Like thinking about leaving MHA for another outfit.”

“Crossed my mind.”

“Come on, man. Use that brain of yours.”

“Hasn't done me much good so far.” Mickey picked at some of the small stones along the riverbank. There weren't any good skipping rocks. He chucked a river-rounded pebble out to midstream; it disappeared into the smooth-flowing water with a tiny
plink
and a small ring of ripples that was washed away almost before they formed.

“Mickey, you're a top wildland firefighter, one of the best. You didn't get here without a lot of hard work.”

“So what? A relationship is supposed to be a lot of hard work? Doesn't that sound like fun?” He chucked another pebble. This one entered with no ripples at all. “Besides, I think Robin already proved the pointlessness of that.”

“What
did
you do to her anyway?”

When Emily had asked the question, it had pissed him off royally.

Pissed him off because he only had one answer and didn't know what else he could say. He'd already tried blowing up with heart-of-fire fury…maybe he'd try confessing the truth. He gave in and went with it.

“I fell in love with her.”

“And you
told
her?” Mark sounded aghast.

Mickey stared at him.

Mark had slipped his mirrored shades up into his hair and was staring at him like he'd totally lost it.

“Uh, yeah. I did. What was I supposed to do?”