Where There's Smoke: inspirational romantic suspense (Montana Fire Book 1) (2 page)

She grinned back, offered a thumbs-up, keeping it friendly, not flirty. After all, she knew better than to fall for firefighters. Especially the make and type of charmer Brooks, with his wide football shoulders, lean torso, powerful jumper-honed legs. Jumpers like him wore danger in their eyes, and the spark that drew them to engage in battle against the demons of nature turned them into men who played hard, wooed with abandon, and lived as if every night might be their last. Until the siren sounded and fifteen minutes later, girded for combat, they disappeared into a boiling sky.

Besides, the last—and only—jumper she’d fallen for had taken her heart and hadn’t the decency to return it.

She pulled on her goggles then strapped on her helmet, her vision gridded by the mask over the front. The cool air whistled into her ears.

“Let’s go!” This from Conner Young a second before he pushed hard out the door, rolling right, away from the plane. Seconds later, Reuben followed.

She scooted up to take her place at the door, bracing her hands on either side of the opening, glancing out to see Reuben as he dove, spread eagle, flying toward the earth. Reuben seemed more bear than man, quiet, dark, and still harboring open wounds at seeing his crew devastated.

Survivor’s guilt.

It had nothing on Estranged Daughter guilt.

Four thousand feet below, Kate spotted the little town of Ember, population thirteen hundred. A snug collection of ranch houses, restaurants, a few gift shops, a school, police station, courthouse, motel, and huge RV park made up their firefighting community nestled at the edge of the Kootenai National Forest in northwestern Montana. And right in the center of town, the towering spire of the Ember Community Church, where she’d drawn her name in the freshly poured cement of the front steps, played youth group games in the basement, and first learned what it felt like to be part of a town whose very name meant fire.

Someday, maybe, she’d go back to that little white church, find the faith her father had tried to embed in her.

To the north of town, she located their landing spot, the meadow just south of the practice towers of Ember Fire Base, home of the Jude County Wildland Firefighters.

Beyond that, in a curve of a ledge rock set at the far edge of the fire base, stood a copper likeness of a lone firefighter leaning on his Pulaski, hard hat pushed back, bedraggled, solemn, his gaze directed to the jagged, black backbone of Glacier National Park.

The Jock Burns Memorial.

She couldn’t see them, but she knew the faces of the people who assembled on folding chairs around the memorial. Fresh recruits and veterans dressed in the green fire-retardant pants, the bright yellow shirts, hard hats perched on their knees, and hundreds of locals—fathers and mothers, wives and girlfriends—who understood too acutely the cost of fighting wildland fires in the West.

At the podium would be Incident Commander Miles Dafoe, eulogizing the lost, embellishing the legends. Offering condolences, stories, and, most of all, avoiding the woefully feeble attempts to answer the lingering, brutal questions of what happened that horrific night in Eureka Canyon.

How could seven able-bodied men not see the fire charging behind them, not run, not even deploy their fire shelters?

Worse, how could legendary strike team commander, smokejumping squad leader, and Ember Base Incident Commander Jock Burns, a man who could read fire as if it burned inside him, have led them to their deaths?

The tragedy still seemed incomprehensible. Even now, nearly ten months later, the town still reeled, a murmur of disbelief behind every conversation.

And underlying it all, rumblings about the wisdom of starting up another smokejumping team.

Kate refused to let her father’s legacy die just because he had. Not when she could come home and keep the dream alive.

No matter how much the fear might reach up and try to strangle her.

This one’s for you, Dad.
She gulped a long breath, forced her stomach back down her throat. An over-the-shoulder look at Pete. He gave her a go-ahead nod, so she pulled hard out the door and flung herself into the deep.

The breath of heaven engulfed her, and as usual she longed to scream, part joy, part bone-ripping terror.

And then, the fear dropped away and she was just...flying.

Soaring above the earth, her face to the wind, her arms flung out in a wild embrace.

For seven long seconds she outran her regrets, her tomorrows full and rich with fresh starts.

Two seconds out of the plane, she started the count—
Jump Thousand
.

Wind, roaring in her ears. She rolled right, saw Pete frame the door.

Look Thousand
—and look she did, despite the tilted horizon, the world whirling beneath her. A blur of splendor woven from the great troughs of the rich green Douglas fir forest trenched out by ancient glaciers. She spotted the cobalt-blue lakes tucked into hidden highland crannies and ran her gaze along the bony spine of the Great Rocky Mountains of Glacier National Park rutting up to reef the dome of the sky.

Reach Thousand
. She flung her right hand back, used muscle memory to latch onto the rip cord. The other hand she stretched out, a last grasp of firmament.

Wait Thousand
. One more second to soar over the grasslands of the moraine valley, pinioned by towering ponderosa pine and dissected by highways and stale brown pastures that evidenced the bone-dry spring.

Then a quick glance again to locate Pete, soaring twenty feet away. He flashed her a thumbs-up.

Pull Thousand.
A final, unfettered cool gulp of stratosphere. Then she yanked, hard.

Her fall arrested with a jerk, her heart caught as the chute sailed her into the yonder. She flung her head back, watching the canopy billow out, a rectangular red cloud.

The surreal, abrupt silence rang in her ears. She checked the rear corners of the chute then reached for her steering toggles to come around into the wind.

Her gaze fell again on the red-striped plane as it disappeared into the wink of the sun.

Below, she spotted Conner and Reuben’s canopies already engorged, sailing along the wind currents toward the drop zone.

Maybe she’d give the crowd a little show, come in fast, roll hard, spring back to her feet, lithe and graceful, a move her father had perfected.

A trickle of color caught her peripheral vision.

No.

Pete Brooks was falling from the sky.

His pilot chute trailed, an impotent bubble flapping in the wind, unable to disgorge the main chute from its lodging.

“Pull your reserve!”

Her words died long before they reached him. But Pete had logged more than fifty jumps over the past two years under Jock Burn’s judicious eye and, without needing her words in his ear, he deployed his reserve.

The canopy whistled up past the balloon, filled, and with a snap, Pete fluttered up into the blue, safe.

Never leave your partner.

Jed Ransom’s voice in her head, the man breaking the ban to never again haunt her. His deep baritone had crawled into her head a week ago and lodged there, like he belonged.

And before she could protest, along came the memories.

Jed, holding the toggles in his strong hands, his dark hair curly out of the back of his helmet, circling her like a hawk to check her positions. Jed, those smoky blue eyes on her, following her all the way to the drop zone, shouting instructions to assist her landing. Jed, his whisper against her neck as he found her at Grizzly’s.

I didn’t leave you, Jed. You left me.

The familiar argument flickered, then died just as she heard the shout.

Pete wrestled with his fresh canopy, pulling at the tangled lines of
two
canopies, flapping, twisting, flattening.

It took just a second to piece it together—his pilot chute had finally torn free from his main canopy, but the main then tangled into his reserve. A dual chute failure, and in a moment Pete would auger straight down into the meadow, die right in front of a grieving town.

His plummet was arrested only by the drag of his partially filled reserve.

No time to actually think, for panic to grab a foothold. Just— “I’m coming to you!” She angled toward him then cut her chute away.

Free falling, once again.

She hit Pete hard, scrabbled to hold on as they plummeted together.

“Grab onto me!”

He barely had his hands tucked into her pack, his legs wrapped around her, when she reached around him and cut away his chutes.

With a jerk, they fell together, the wind turning to fire in her ears.

“Hold on!” She yanked her reserve.

The lines trickled out and she braced herself.

The lift nearly yanked her from Pete’s grasp. But his leg lock had the makings of a UFC welterweight champ, and the pack held, burning her arms, her shoulders, sucking out her breath. The canopy deployed, billowed full, a cloud of white against the blue expanse.

Silence, save for the thunder of her heart, his hard breathing whiffling in her ear.

“It’s okay, Pete. I got you.”

He raised his head and met her eyes. “I have to admit, this is my new version of best first date ever!”

She rolled her eyes. “Hold on! I’m going to try and drive us into the wind!”

He adjusted against her, and she wished she could help him hold on, but she had her hands full hoping to slow them down, capture any cushion she could manage for their impact. A quarter mile or less below, she noticed memorial attendees rising, a few running toward the field.

They’d fallen past Reuben and Conner, now aloft above them.

“I have to admit, your dad was right about you,” Pete said in her ear.

Her father had talked about her? She kept her voice cool. “How’s that?”

“Let’s just say he said you had more guts than any of the men he jumped with.”

She didn’t let her expression betray the truth.

“Listen,” she said. “You’re too heavy for us to land together. I can’t hold you up. I’ll try and angle us in—as soon as your feet touch, push away and roll. We might both live through this if we don’t crash together.”

“Always the Dear John. Me and my broken heart.”

And there he was, charmer Pete, back in the game.

Except, his voice pitched suddenly low. “Thanks, Kate—you didn’t have—”

“Of course I did. I’m your jump partner.”

“But—”

Their feet dragged against the high grass and she gave him a hard push.

He fell away, and out of the corner of her eye she saw him tuck and roll. Then she was landing, rolling, bouncing back to life in a graceful, Jock Burns-style landing.

Pete too bounded to his feet like he might be an acrobat, their stunt planned.

An uncomfortable twitter, then clapping began to undulate across the crowd.

Kate tore off her helmet, grabbing up her parachute in one swift motion as Conner and Reuben landed behind her.

She tried not to let her knees turn to liquid, her pulse thundering.

They’d lived. Sometimes, she still couldn’t believe how her luck held.

“Are you kidding me?” Conner’s voice. She jerked around, found him, running over to her, his helmet under his arm, his blond hair matted. He threw his arms around her, nearly knocking her off her feet. “Are you kidding me?”

She held on, just for a second, righting herself as the smattering of applause turned to cheering around her.

Breathe.

“That was crazy brave!” This from Reuben, his dark brown hair tucked into a red bandanna. He wore a rare smile. Bigger than Conner, wider shoulders, solid girth, the sawyer for the team rode bulls in his off time, bore the cowboy swagger of the men who grew up on western Montana ranches. “I swear, when I saw Pete’s chutes tangle, I was sick. And then, like the Green Hornet, there you were, racing across the sky. Sheesh, if I didn’t know better, I would have thought it was old Jock to the rescue.” He shook his head. “Like father, like daughter, I guess.”

The smallest edge of a smile tugged at her mouth, the rattle of her pulse slowing.

Then Pete bounded up. “That,” he said, “is how it’s done!” He high-fived Conner and Reuben and then leaned down and grabbed her face in his hands. Kate recognized his intent a second before he popped her a kiss—quick and fast.

She had no response as he backed up, his eyes shining. “No wonder they call you Blazin’ Kate Burns. Honey, you can save my sorry hide any day, any time.”

Then he hiked his arm around her neck. “Welcome back to Ember.”

The assembly roared, then, cheered. Jock Burns’s daughter was home where she belonged. The legacy, resurrected.

She lifted her hand to wave.

It was then she saw him, moving through the crowd at high speed, pushing back spectators, his face a knot of emotions, most of which she couldn’t name. Panic? Worry? Surprise?

No, fury.

Because as he broke free, the emotion tightened, focused into a posture she knew too well—the darkness in his smoky blue eyes, the set of his jaw, smattered now with the finest hint of dark stubble, his fists clenched and looking every inch like a man on fire, ready to scorch the earth.

Jed Ransom.

Seven years hadn’t dented his stun power. Dark, shorter hair than she remembered, the slightest disobedient curl at the temples. Wide shoulders, tapering down to a lean torso, arms that filled out his yellow Nomex shirt, lean legs that had once chased her down, saved her life.

Yes, Jed Ransom knew how to destroy a woman, make her hand over her heart with one soul-piercing look.

She’d thought the past seven years had healed her, remade her, and that she wasn’t the same young jumper who ignited at the sight of him striding across the tarmac.

Kate could still remember the sound of his voice in her ear.

Apparently she was wrong.

More, she could swear she could still read his mind, because his parting epitaph from seven years ago rose inside her, soft, dark, and deadly.
Stay away from me, Kate.

He planted himself in front of her, breathing hard. Sweat trickled down from his temple, his face just a little white. He didn’t bother to whisk the sweat away or even glance at Pete, and when he swallowed, hard, she recognized his telltale attempt to rein it all in.