Scorch (8 page)

“Shit, that takes guts.” Greg’s tone was both disbelieving and reverent.

“Gotta have some to work in this building,” Vin said with forced lightness.

“I heard she was selling her house to you and moving to Florida,” one of the other men said.

“She still wants to sell it to me, but she’s staying here,” Vin said with equanimity.

“Where are you living until then?”

And here it was, the question he’d managed to avoid for almost two full weeks.

Vin plucked his towel from its hook, silently indicating he was heading for the shower and this conversation would wrap up very quickly. At the same time, he knew it was better to start the gossip himself, like a burn out, so he could contain the bigger inferno.

“I’m still living at her place. I don’t feel right about buying it. I think she should stay in it and I should move out, but she doesn’t want to be there alone so…” He shrugged and kept his gaze level as he stated, “I’m staying in the guest room until we settle things. Our work hours are only getting longer so neither of us is there much anyway.”

Guest room
.

He heard the way all the cogs in every brain in the room hung up on that claim, halting in suspension of belief. He snapped each man a brief, warning look. Yes. The
guest
room. Shit, he slept alongside women in the bush every summer, had even shared rooms in bunkhouses when things were busy and cots were at a premium. No one had jumped to conclusions he was sleeping with any of
them
.

“Good work today,” he said gruffly as he left for the shower, thinking,
Come on fire season.
Once it started, no one expended an ounce of energy on anything but smothering flames.

A sick knowledge that word was flying through the ranks lingered in the pit of his gut, though.

Sure enough, as he left later that day, he felt the sideways looks aimed his way, especially when Jacqui came out behind him and called his name from the steps.

“Are you going home? Can you take him? I have to stop at the post office.” She showed him the handful of envelopes she held and pointed at the dog who’d followed her onto the steps.

“Sure,” Vin said with forced indifference. He opened the door of his truck and Muttley trotted down the stairs then ambled over to him, leaping into the cab the way he had all winter—except now it held notable significance to everyone in the vicinity.

Half an hour later, Jacqui came into the house as Vin was scouting dinner ingredients. He’d pulled a couple of chicken breasts from the freezer, but they were frozen solid.

“I guess I’ll thaw those in the microwave?”

“Oh, um, I didn’t take anything out because I’ve been meaning to ask you… You’ve been so busy I haven’t seen you.” She set down her bag on one of the kitchen chairs. “I’m going to Russ’s sister’s for dinner tonight. His parents are going to be there and I know you’re on call with S&R, but… I spoke to Rhonda. She said of course to invite you.”

He made a face, thinking of the gossip that was already starting.

“Please?” she blurted with panic edging her eyes.

Vin recognized that look. She’d worn it when she had told him she was coming home and again when she had talked about emptying her bedroom of Russ’s things. She still hadn’t gone into the master bedroom as far as he could tell. She was sleeping on the couch and using his bathroom to shower.

“Need a wingman?”

“It’s weird, right? I’m being weird. They’re family. I shouldn’t feel threatened.”

She’d been keeping a low profile since she’d come home, picking up the odd grocery item, but mostly going from home to the base and back. He’d heard her take a few calls, but hadn’t seen her make any, seeming reluctant to advertise that she was back.

He leaned on the counter next to the fridge, thinking about how much the evening would suck for him.

“No?” She sounded forlorn.

“I feel really guilty, Jac. I’ve seen Rhonda a couple of times at the bank, but his parents? Not since the funeral.”

“They don’t blame you!” She came forward and gripped his wrists where he had them folded across his chest. Her hands were cool from being outside. “We all know that the work is risky, that this could happen. No one thinks you could have done anything more than you did.”

He searched her eyes, really hoping that was the truth.

“Oh, Vin.” She breathed. “When you said you think all the time about what else you could have done, you weren’t exaggerating, weren’t you?”

He closed his eyes, letting out an exhale that was more a jagged groan of pain. “It’s an endless loop.”

“The counseling didn’t help?”

He opened his eyes enough to silently ask if she was serious. “They told me to keep a
diary
.” He let his shoulders drop as he was honest with himself. “Actually, they said to keep a record of what I’m thinking, or, if that’s too much, to at least note the time, to track how often I think of the accident. That way I’ll be aware that I’m doing it and can make a point of thinking about something else. I get the reasoning, but…” He pushed his hand into his hair.

“Letting go of the guilty thoughts feels like letting go of Russ, which feels disloyal and awful.” She said it with the knowledge of shared experienced.

“Yes.” The huge cloud of inadequacy over failing his friend broke apart enough to offer the barest glimmer of sunlight. He rubbed his face, digging his finger and thumb into eyes that felt salted and painful. “I watched it happen and couldn’t do a damned thing. I couldn’t get to the ground any faster. I couldn’t get to him, couldn’t get
up
to him, any faster than I did. I ordered the rescue chopper. That’s all I could do. Then I probably made his injuries worse, lowering him, but I couldn’t wait for help. For a spine board and collar. I couldn’t leave him up there.”

“I know. You did everything right, Vin. You did everything you
could
do.”

Her light fingers soothed across his forearms and it was almost an irritation. His guards were all the way down, leaving him raw. His skin felt like the top layer was gone, but he needed that touch even though it blistered. It kept him here, not straining on the end of a rope as he lowered his unconscious friend in increments, through branches, sweating bullets at how painstakingly slow it was. Listening for chopper blades, listening for Russ to wake up and trash talk him for overreacting…

He hadn’t been overreacting.

He was trying not to let the terror and helpless rage and grief overcome him now. But he had to say this to Jacqui. He needed her to know.

“I want to go back to before we left the base.” His voice was gritty and dry, painfully dry in his throat. “I want to tell him that we should wait for Dodson to get there. He was on his way and if we’d waited twenty minutes, the entire day could have been different. But Russ said no, he wanted to jump. He wanted to go because he hadn’t been out in a while and he had this same fucking bug, Jac. He needed to jump.”

“I know.”

When he thought he had control of his expression, he let himself look at her.

Her eyes were wet, her expression fatalistic. “I know.”

He sniffed back the congestion in his nose and made sure there weren’t any tracks under his stinging eyes. His face felt as though it was melting. He scrubbed it back into place.

“Don’t feel guilty, Vin. I know it’s not that simple, but I’m telling you as your friend and coworker and Russ’s wife that you aren’t responsible for Russ’s death. He wanted to jump. No one pushed him out of that plane.”

It
wasn’t
that simple. His guilt was compounded by how fragile Jacqui had become as a result. That was a big part of the reason he would do just about anything to cushion any further blows life swung her direction.

But he had really needed to hear those words aloud. The fact they came from her gave them extra power. He took a shaken breath and opened his arms. He was already split down the middle and wide open. Pulling her in stopped up that gap. It hurt, but felt good. The pressure of her warm body eased the pain and let him catch his breath.

He wasn’t an expert on personal relations, but he understood the embrace to be a bonding moment. Physical contact with men, elbow to elbow in mud or in a chain or on a rope, built trust that you could be in close quarters without threat. Cuddling a woman built the trust for more intimate physical contact.

This was both of those things and more. It was a deeper kind of trust built on emotional contact. He had never in his life believed in soul mates or anything frou-frou like that, but in this moment, he knew the two of them occupied not just the same head space, but the same heart space. They weren’t alone on two sides of Russ’s death, they were side by side, facing it together.

And out of the blue, in this quiet moment of closeness, the nagging loneliness that was his only true friend, stepped aside. For a moment, he was awash in a feeling he couldn’t even name. It was beautiful and terrifying, like the peaceful float in the air before he felt the slam of the ground below.

He found himself smoothing his hand up and down her back, slowing to get to know the shape of her, tracing her spine, spanning across the small, sharp plates of her shoulder blades, liking the weight of her against him and the familiar smell of—

“Is that my shampoo?”

He dipped his nose closer to the feathery silk of her hair, inhaling again, kind of turned on by the mingling of her scent with his.

“I like it better than mine. You’re starting to think I’m a real pain in the keister, aren’t you?” She tilted her head back, flashing a playful grin. Her arms stayed curled around his waist, palms flat and warm against his lower back.

“I would, if you had more hair. And we lived in nineteen-oh-two.”

They shared a grin and he grew aware of the way her pelvis was angled to brace her weight against the tops of his thighs. Her stomach warmed his goods.

Her gaze drifted to fix on his mouth and her smile faded. Her lips parted.

He felt his tongue move to wet his own lips. The tingle of desire crept in, gathering across his shoulders as an impulse to drag her closer, readying his mouth for the feel of hers. He started growing wood.

Shit
. He straightened off the counter and pressed her back a step. What the hell was that? Had he nearly kissed her?

She was blushing all over and scampered to pick up her bag from the chair. “Yeah, so, um, Rhonda’s?”

“Sure, yeah, totally happy to score a free meal.” Score. Bad choice of words and he should not be agreeing to be her
date
for the evening, but he was saying anything to get them past that stupid
“wanna kiss?”
moment.

All those askance looks at the station ballooned in his mind.
Nice one, Kingston
.

“Thanks, Vin.” She sounded sincere, but kept her gaze down. “I’ll, um, take Mutt for a quick walk. He can’t come. Their daughter is allergic.”

“So I have time to shower and shave.” He gave his sandpaper jaw a scrape with his palm. “Do I need a tie?”

“No! No, of course not. But, yeah, take your time. We can leave in an hour or so. I’ll see what kind of wine is in the fridge in the garage. Save us stopping on the way.”

They were both babbling and she thankfully put a stop to it by calling the dog into the garage. The door whooshed shut and he heard the leash rattle off its hook on the back of the door.

Vin let out a breath at the ceiling, then took the stairs in big leaps, putting as much distance between himself and Russ’s widow as he could.

A
s they got
on the road to Rhonda’s, Jacqui confessed, “They were really hoping I was pregnant.”

She was trying to get things back to normal from an hour ago when she’d given Vin that,
kiss-me-you-fool
invitation, and he’d veered away like she was a street beggar.

She hadn’t meant to come on to him. Hugging him had felt really natural and nice and his mouth was so damned intriguing and kissable looking. His whole body was, well, she didn’t blame women for throwing themselves at the men from the base. They were insanely fit.
All
of them. Not just Vin.

None of the rest were provoking this level of lust in her, though. Her desk at work put her right in the mix of the men, grabbing coffee and throwing down with trash talk. They tossed banter her way and some were inveterate flirts who charmed out of habit. They were good-looking and funny and she adored them all like Snow White’s dwarves.

Except Vin.

She wasn’t sure why attraction toward him kept blindsiding her like this. It was mortifying when he obviously thought of her as a friend. If her interest was
unwanted
.

“Russ’s parents?” Vin swung his head to ask. “I guess that’s understandable.”

“Hmm? Oh. Yeah,” she agreed morosely, looking out her side window at the herd of bighorn sheep that had come to lower ground to search out the first tufts of spring’s greenery.

“You were, too, weren’t you?” he asked after a beat, quiet and wary, like he was treading very cautiously. “Hoping for a baby?”

She sighed. He wasn’t the only one struggling with guilt.

“I wanted to raise a baby with my husband, not by myself.” She picked a strand of yellow dog hair off her knee. “Single parenting isn’t easy. My parents did it for years after they divorced and they were still, you know, both alive and part of my life. They cooperated with each other as much as possible. Dad paid support to Mom. Money was okay on both sides. And even though they divorced when I was nine, Dad didn’t take that job in Florida until I was thirteen. So it wasn’t all on just one or the other to do it all with raising me. But they were both still holding down demanding jobs and had mortgages to pay. When Dad moved to Florida, it was for a really good promotion, not to get away from parenting. I always went to him for Thanksgiving and the summer, which gave Mom a break, but Dad hated leaving me alone during the day while he went to work. Which was ironic because here, Mom left me alone when she worked nights.”

She had wanted so badly to zip her family back together. Sometimes she wondered if she had expected too much from her marriage. Had she put too much pressure on Russ to rewrite her childhood?