Hot Point (23 page)

Her parents had given her so much. Even her dad, who she now understood better as an adult than as a lonely teen, had done the best he could for who he was. He was a quiet man who loved planes and loved his museum. And his daughter. She would deny it if she could, but he did love her as well as he could manage.

Denise's seat dropped out from under her. In a moment they went from the trees being a lumpy carpet a few hundred comfortable feet below to flying so close to the treetops that she pulled up her feet.

Vern didn't swear or curse; he simply pulled up on the collective and tipped the nose forward for more speed. “All pilots,” he called out over the radio. “We now have a downdraft of about two hundred FPM developing.”

Denise's fingers ached from where she'd latched on to her seat cushion. She checked their instruments. They'd actually only dropped about fifty feet, but it felt like a lot more.

“Roger that,” Mark replied. “Everyone, flight levels up another hundred feet and keep loads at ten percent less until we see how it develops.”

“Sorry.” Vern spoke softly as he lined up and dumped his load, spraying it directly on a line of pine trees that looked more like torches than trees.

“I'm okay. You scared me.”

“Huh?” He looked around as if he hadn't really noticed the plunge toward the trees. “I meant I was sorry for getting up on my soapbox. If you don't want to have kids, that's your choice, of course. Not mine to say.”

“Damn it, Taylor. I'm trying to be mad at you. Stop being so considerate.”

“Oh, sorry.” He didn't sound the least put-out. “Not working, huh?”

“Not working.”

“I'm a hard guy to stay mad at. All the best women say so.” He aimed one of those sassy grins at her. “Does this mean I can get wake-up sex tomorrow?”

The laugh bubbled up inside her. “Only if you can wake up in time.”

“Harsh.”

* * *

What was harsh was how Vern felt two exhausting days later. The PANACOMA fire had battled them back and forth. This was a country that didn't have smokejumpers, so there was no one to cut firebreaks. Only the U.S. typically fought fire with retardant, so aerial application of retardant-based firebreaks weren't in the battle plan either.

The only way to stop the fire was to beat it to death from the air. There were people on the ground: armed with rakes and shovels and wearing sandals and thin shirts, not armed with chain saws and water pumps and wearing Nomex gear. They didn't have a single trained firefighter on the ground. They didn't even have radio communications, so the efforts were wholly uncoordinated.

But still, they beat it. Sunrise to sunset, two days in a row. The only breaks were to refuel. Meals were a gobbled-down sandwich or an energy bar.

Vern now hovered above the black, looking for any remaining hot spots. He was the last one aloft. Steve had his drone's infrared camera on a feed that Vern could watch on his terrain map screen.

“There's one.” Denise pointed toward his screen. “Lower right corner.”

There was. For the hundredth time in two days, he blessed that she was along. He was so tired that he wouldn't have trusted himself to fly solo, but she kept him on his toes. Served as an extra set of eyes, did some of the simpler flying so that he could at least shake out his hands every now and then.

“I think it's the last one. Punch it, Vern.”

He slid over what had once been a cluster of rosewood trees and punched it. A thousand gallons of water fell from the sky in a hard deluge, hard enough that he could see it crater the char, then create a small wave of runoff. The hot spot was extinguished so fast it didn't even have a chance to release smoke in complaint. It was simply gone.

And with that, he was done and done in.

“How's your fuel?” Mark called over the radio.

He had to squint to see, then he remembered. “Topped off half an hour ago. I'm near full.”

“Good. New coordinates, Vern.”

“I'm wiped out, boss.”

“New coordinates.” Mark's voice was stern as he read them off.

Denise punched them into the nav system for him and Vern turned, cursing Mark. Maybe he'd take the museum job. Or if Denise took it, maybe he'd get a job doing flight tours somewhere nearby. Or driving a taxi. Nah. He hated traffic; he liked flying over it. Air taxi?

He slid down over the cloud forest, already wrapping itself in a soft evening fog. No flame, little smoke. Unlike in the U.S., there was no Type II or III incident response team to make sure the fire was well and truly out. Also no habitat stabilization and restoration team hot on their heels. If the fire reignited, they'd have to come back and fight it again.

The nav directions led them back down over the hamlet of Río Negro, a town that had known little silence for the last two days because of the reloading choppers in constant circulation.

But the coordinates weren't to the pond; they were to the farmer's field. It wasn't on fire.

He radioed Mark. “Care to explain?”

“Just set it down. Off to one side. We'll be there in a minute.”

Doing as he was told, he slid as close to the trees as he dared and settled the Firehawk. There would be room for one other big Firehawk.

He and Denise had the bird shut down and filled out the flight logs. Still no one. So, they clambered down and collapsed. The grass here was lush and—once they'd checked it to make sure it was clear of any cow patties—very comfortable to lie down in.

Five minutes later, Firehawk Oh-Two arrived above them from the direction of the air base rather than the fire and settled onto the other side of the clearing. Once it was on the ground, the rest of the MHA crew stumbled out. Jeannie must have followed Emily back to base and picked up Mark and the Oh-One crew.

Denise sat up, inadvertently placing an elbow in his gut as she did so. Vern didn't even bother to try and sit up; he simply lay there and grunted.

“Six weeks.” Mark strode up as if it was the beginning of the day, not the end. “I think after six weeks, we get a day off.”

It sounded glorious. Vern could really do with a day of not having his butt pounded by his chopper.

“Maybe even two.”

“For two days off, Mark, I'm going to have to marry you.” Vern sagged with relief. He'd get to spend some conscious time with his girl.

“Why here?”

Yep, that was his Denise. Sharp as a tack that woman
, he thought dreamily. His eyes half closed as the last of the sunlight drained out of the late-afternoon sky.

“Here,” Mark said, “is right up Vern's alley.”

Vern reopened one eye to look up at his boss.

“We are parked in the back field of the Finca Río Negro—the Negro River Estate. In addition to having some very comfortable tree-house bungalows specifically set up for well-heeled tourists, it is also considered to be one of the finest producers of artisanal coffee in the country.”

Vern closed the open eye. Someone had just transported him to heaven.

Vern knew how he'd gotten here, but that didn't make it any less surprising.

David, pronounced Da-veed, wasn't some young dreamer entrepreneur. He was a small, wiry man who could have been anywhere on the far side of sixty, unless he was on the far side of seventy. Last night he had served them a simple platter of roasted chicken, black beans, rice, and fresh-made flour tortillas to wrap around it, with french fries on the side. Stream-chilled beer with dinner, and a mild coffee liqueur that he distilled himself, and fresh-sliced mango topped off the evening.

With all of them limp from the exhausting day, David led them to four bungalows. Each was a small tree house perched between five and fifteen meters in the air on a group of
Swietenia
trees.

“Tourists, they cancel when they see the big smoke you put out,” David informed them in his heavily accented English. “I tell them too late for to refund. So I am paid, but they yours for saving my farm.” He sniffed the air deeply; whether to deride the feeble tourists or prove that the air did indeed bear no scent of smoke, Vern couldn't tell.

They had protested the gift to no avail. Finally, Vern had traded a glance with Mark. They'd leave him a really serious tip.

Inside the tiny tree house had been a squat-hole that led to an under-hung bucket, a couple of bottles of water, and a beautiful queen-size bed on a hand-carved rosewood base. It had a mosquito net that draped lightly around it. Good linen sheets and a thick blanket of geometrical weaving in golds and greens, blacks and yellows that made it look terribly cozy once they'd climbed up into the tree house. Outside the window on a tiny balcony stood a pair of narrow chairs, also carved, with a view out at a long bend of the Negro glinting in the moonlight.

Closing the trapdoor, he and Denise were in their own oil-lamp-lit bubble in the jungle.

For the first time in ages, they settled into sleep rather than collapsing.

Now, some evil habit had him awake at first light. Or not so evil. Denise slept as she usually did, curled up inside the curve of his arm, her cheek on his shoulder. He rested his cheek on her hair and listened to her gentle breathing. He could imagine her lying right there a year from now, a decade, a lifetime.

It was so strange. Vern had never doubted he'd settle down someday. He had his parents' example, so how could he think otherwise? But Denise was unlike any woman he'd ever gone out with.

He'd consistently picked up women who were tall, funny, and outgoing. Between them, they'd be the life of any group, but it never lasted. Some great women. He was still friends with several, had casual email friendships with others, but the serious, love-bound relationship had never happened.

Instead, his feet had been kicked out from under him by a short, tentative, utterly brilliant introvert. His mother, with her infallible instincts, had liked Denise right away. But Denise was more like his dad—the quiet sailboat mechanic. Of course almost everyone was quieter than his mom. She was the life of every—

He jerked with the shock of it, and Denise murmured awake.

“Wha'? Fire?”

“Shhh.” He brushed a hand over her hair. “Nothing. It's okay.” He waited until she'd snuggled back to sleep before returning to the scary thought.

He'd spent a lifetime looking for his mother.

Well, not quite, but close enough to be kinda weird. He was always drawn to tall, extroverted, creative types. It never mattered what their art was; one of his longest relationships had been with the assistant brewmaster at the big brewery in Hood River—a true artist with flavors.

Denise was a magician with mechanics, but even when he tried to, he couldn't quite twist it under any definition of being a creative artist. She created order—the perfect order of a machine performing at its engineered peak. He'd learned that in any group of more than three or four, she went silent.

Even after MHA's two months together at the quad of Palmerola Air Base apartments, if all eight of them were around the table—as they often were—she rarely spoke unless directly addressed.

How bizarre. If she agreed—though he wouldn't ask until she'd decided about the job—this was the woman he'd be spending the rest of his life with. With or without children didn't matter. He had his preferences, but as long as she was there, the rest was less important.

With that decision, he came one step closer to understanding Denise's father and the terrible loss the man had tried so hard to keep from his daughter. Whether or not they both would have been better off if he'd had a breakdown and then restarted, rather than locking it away inside, was now ancient history.

But his daughter was so full of life. It was only that she didn't see it.

He did.

And he'd count himself very lucky to be with her.

He drifted back to sleep, until he was woken in a terribly delicious way by the love of his life.

* * *

They hadn't made it to breakfast. Denise observed that no one had, except for Mark, Emily, and Tessa, who were returning from a hike in the woods.

Lunch was a major meal here, the biggest of the Honduran day—quite different from the firefighter's usual quick bolting down of calories. It wasn't fancy, but it was good and it was substantial. The
pastelito
had shredded beef, avocado, beans, and potatoes wrapped in a flour tortilla and deep fried. On the side was coffee.

She'd never really acquired the taste, despite growing up in Seattle, so she asked for hot chocolate. Honduran, fresh-ground hot chocolate didn't have the big, milky punch of American hot chocolate. Instead it was light and so pure. David was only too glad to explain. Fermented and roasted cocoa beans ground fine with roasted fresh cinnamon, then built up with sugarcane juice and hot water. Pure heaven.

But watching Vern with his coffee was fun—he went completely nuts. He found out that David was something called a Q cupper.

Vern was decent enough, despite his excitement, to explain to her as they went. “There are only a thousand Q cuppers in the world. They are highly trained and tested graders of specialty coffees. They rate everything from the bean to the final product and the eight steps in between.”

Nothing would satisfy but that they follow the whole process, from the donkeys carrying the heavy bags down from the steep hills of the thousand-acre farm. The beans were then dumped into water; any that floated were thrown away as defective. The depulping removed the bright red hulls from the precious inner bean. Though done by a grinder, the process was finished by hand. Fermenting tanks led to long, drying tables set out in the Honduran sun. Denise wished she'd thought to bring her straw hat, but it was hanging up in her service container.

Then the beans had the final hull removed before they were sorted by size so that each batch would roast evenly in the same amount of time.

“Only light roast,” David had insisted. “Dark roast is done to hide bad coffee. Good coffees only use light roast.”

Vern was nodding as if this made perfect sense.

Denise had drifted off, wanted to go exploring. David's wife, who looked as ancient and wrinkled as her husband, had given her a small map of the local trails. It had drawings of waterfalls at various places. The woman spoke no English, and always being on the base or in the air, Denise had picked up woefully little Spanish. Her high school French was of no use whatsoever.

But the woman had pointed at her, then at Vern, raising her eyebrows and offering a smile that meant she knew exactly what Denise was looking for. She took a pencil and drew in another trail. She drew in a stream, even a small bridge, and finally another waterfall. Then she tapped the beginning of the trail, pointed around the back of the roasting house, and winked.

Denise winked back and took Vern's hand. He tried to lead her inside a large shed to follow the packing process, but she dragged him aside. David offered her a knowing smile. Half of the afternoon had spun away.

“Sorry, I don't know what happened to me. It was like a drug.”

“I thought coffee was one.”

“Only to some of us,” he'd scoffed at her hot chocolate.

As they entered the canopy of the forest, he kept bubbling on about what he'd learned, only slowly becoming aware that they had left civilization behind. Denise had gone hiking a few times around Mount Hood. The tall Douglas fir and aspen forest had little undergrowth beneath the dense canopy other than ferns.

Here, the jungle super-story was far above them. A massive
Ceiba
tree did that jungle thing she'd always seen in movies, where its base split in waves of high, thin ridges for the last ten feet to the ground. She could stand between two waves of the base and not see Vern in the next one.

The thing she hadn't been ready for was how much life was here. Ferns grew under low frondy bushes that were overshadowed by some type of palm tree which snuggled in between rosewood. All the lesser growths stared upward at the
Ceiba
and
Swietenia
with dreams of grandeur.

“Look!” she practically screamed in surprise, startling both Vern and the brilliant red-and-blue feathered macaw parrot that had merely been going about its business. It aimed a sharp complaint at her before soaring off behind one of the palms. She kept waiting for it to reappear. It didn't.

Further on, Vern pointed out a bird with a big, yellow beak almost the size of its body. “A toucan.”

In the mile walk along the trail, they spotted dozens of creatures. Birds, salamanders, bugs, and a snake that Vern flicked into the bushes with a stick.

“My hero,” Denise cooed at him.

“Hey, for its sake, I hope that it was less afraid of me than I was of it. Snakes are freaky strange animals.”

They'd been following a stream lost in the brush off to their right most of the way. The trail crossed a fallen log that must be the bridge in the drawing and then dipped down to a small pool. A waterfall, perhaps ten feet high, trickled down and splashed over rocks to make the pool sparkle where bits of the afternoon sun reached the surface. The pool itself was a dozen feet across with a smooth rock bottom.

She dipped in a toe. Warm. Very warm. Maybe there were hot springs upstream. The trees surrounding the pool were shrouded in flowers as big as her head, vibrant with yellows and reds. “That does it. I'm moving here.”

“Anything you say, Ms. Conroy.”

“Anything?” She smiled up at him.

“Anything.”

Well, she'd see if he was as good as his word.

* * *

“You touch me, I stop.”

Vern looked down at her. “I don't see how those two can coexist in the same universe. How am I supposed to find the control not to touch you?” He held up their still-joined hands from their walk.

“Figure it out, Slick.” She pulled her hand from his.

He sighed deeply but was grinning. Beautiful man in the jungle primeval.

Well, Denise was feeling very primal, even if she wasn't sure either how this was going to work. Vern was always taking her to new heights and new sensations. He was a lover very focused on making her body exquisitely happy. It wasn't that she felt a need to give that back; their satisfaction was clearly mutual. It was more that she wanted to be…

What? She wasn't sure. The idea had simply popped into her head and she'd gone with it. She was learning that when she stumbled on something that wasn't how her mind typically worked, that was a good enough reason to go with it. Vern had expanded her thinking of herself almost as much as he'd expanded her thinking of her body.

It wasn't about being dominant. Vern had no more of those games in his lovemaking than he did in who was driving the car.

She slid his T-shirt up and off. The sunlight dappling down through the forest canopy wove shifting patterns across his skin. Parrots and other creatures of the jungle offered a fading background soundtrack that slowly drifted from her attention.

“I could—”

“Shh, No talking allowed either.” Denise circled him without touching, only admiring. She let him wait as she studied the lines of his shoulders and back, admired the definition of his powerful body. When at long last she ran a fingertip down his spine, he shivered.

With touch and caress, she brushed over him, never once moving back into his line of vision. Reaching around, she dropped his pants until he stood like a magnificent naked god at the edge of the jungle pool.

Me
, was all she could think.
He
is
here
for
me.

He hissed with frustration as she brushed her hair down his back, jolted when she pressed her bare breasts against his back, moaned when she slid her hands between his legs and cupped him from behind.

She wanted…so much. She wanted to understand inside herself that somehow she deserved this. No, she knew that already. The thought that she was unworthy of this intimacy had also long gone by the wayside and morphed into acceptance. Yes, she was worthy. She knew that now.

Denise felt his building shivers as she lay against his back and investigated his chest, belly, and thighs with arms wrapped around from behind. She held off as long as she could stand it before she began to caress and stroke him in a way the caught his breath up short.

Vern began cursing quietly under his breath as his body's tension built and built like a wildfire slowly consuming more and more of him. If the jungle residents were still chattering, Denise didn't hear them. All she heard was the effect she was having on his body.

Did she want to somehow confirm that she could do this to a man like Vern? That was a laugh. The way he reacted to her slightest touch, and she to his, told her all she needed to know about that.

Vern groaned as if in agony.

She teased him to the very cusp and kept him there, stilling her hands and leaving a line of kisses down his back.