Born to Be Wild (24 page)

Read on for an excerpt from Donna Kauffman’s

Light My Fire

It was coming to get her.

She could feel the oppressive heat, hear the thundering roar. The ground vibrated. Life-snuffing smoke invaded the air, was sucked into her mouth, down her throat. She was gagging. She clawed at her neck. Choking. It was choking her.

Alive. How could anyone not see that? It moved, leaped, crawled. Lived, died. Killed. She’d learned to accept it was not her enemy. That acceptance had disappeared in the span of one lightning stroke.

She’d been a fool to think she had ever been in control. It would always be after her.

All she had to do was close her eyes.

Once again she was running through the forest, hot red-and-yellow flames licking at her boots, roaring in her ears. She heard the thunderous crack of another tree falling victim to the voracious predator. It rushed up the side of the mountain to meet them,
consume them, growing as the wind lent a hand, encouraging the feeding frenzy. It crackled with a vicious snap, leaping easily over the fire line she and her crew had labored over for the past four hours, racing to gobble up more. Black smoke and tree soot sifted through the screen of her helmet, choking her. Her lungs burned. On she ran. Again she heard the bone-shaking crack as yet another tree lost the battle. She tensed, knowing what came next. What always came next.

The pain hit hard. Sharp and numbing. With a whooshing sound it rushed from its point of origin on her ankle to sweep over her entire body. She knew it was the tree, the burning tree. Her mind assembled all these things instantly, had her reaching for her fire cover even as it made first contact, even as she knew she was lost.

She heard Toby. Toby, her jump partner for four years, shouting at her, making her lift her head even as black shadows danced at the edges of her vision and heat began to crawl past the protective barrier of her flame-retardant suit. Pain and sound and smoke all swam together, making it hard to hear, impossible to focus. Then his face was in hers, shouting at her. She heard someone scream when the tree shifted. It was her. Screams ripped from her. Then a flash of silver billowed over her. Her fire cover. How had she gotten it out?

Toby’s voice yanked her back from the edge. She felt the crushing weight of him and his gear, watched as he pulled the fire cover over him. Over them.

The cover wouldn’t hold, she knew that. It had been made to protect only one person. Toby knew that too. They hadn’t cleared the ground of brush. She tried to yell past the knot of smoke in her throat, demand that he run, that he leave her, even as she knew they had both run out of time. Again she heard the rushing sound of the fire as it found them. As it ate them. The tree crushing her ankle succumbed first.

Toby succumbed second.

She heard him scream, felt him die as she waited in breathless terror for the first lick of searing heat, wondered in that split of eternal time what it would feel like. There was a nip, a taste. Heat; oh God the heat.

And then it was over.

In the capricious way of nature’s disasters, the fire had roared on. And she had been left to survive. Survival of the damned.

Now it got even worse.

Shaking her head, as if simple denial would do any good, Jenna King thrashed, fear taking her breath in its terrifying clutches. She despised the fear. Almost as much as the heat. Oh, but it was hot. She’d never be cool enough again. She twisted, kicking, shoving at anything that covered her, oblivious to the spikes of pain shooting up her leg. The heat was worse than the pain could ever be.

A scream locked permanently in her throat. No. No!
You can’t do this to me again!

With a low, wrenching groan, Jenna grabbed at the anger, harnessed it, brandished it like a weapon, unleashing it full force on her enemy: fear. And the split second before she had to turn her head and look at what was left of Toby, she wrenched her eyes open and sat up.

Her room. She was in her room at Paradise Canyon. She blinked the sweat from her eyes, raked her hair back, and swung her gaze around, searching for reassurance, damning the semihysterical movement even as she fought to control it. Recognition of her surroundings came first. It always did. That base was what she needed most to center herself. Or so Dr. Porter had said. Breath came second. Once she drew in a lungful, she couldn’t seem to stop. In no time she was gulping, panting.
Slow down, Jenna
. In. Out. The room is full of oxygen. There is plenty for you. No smoke here. No smoke.

The need to move came last. Thank God she could. She almost wept with relief, purposely shutting out the memories of those early months when she hadn’t been able to. She shifted her legs over the side of the bed, barely flinching at the expected pain that went hand in hand with gravity.

She steadied herself before trying to stand. If she could focus on her recovery, she could put distance between herself and the recurrent nightmare. Then she could tuck it away, make herself believe she had dealt with it, that she controlled it, not the other way around. Eventually she might
make herself believe she had won the battle with her mind.

She might succeed, if she could live without ever having to go to sleep again.

“Out of here,” she mumbled. The words were hoarse. She would always sound rough, but she’d accepted that. It had been one of the easier things to get over. Still, first thing in the morning, all alone in her room, she always said something out loud before anyone else intruded into her day. It was sort of a gauge of how she was dealing with her life. Her new life.

She swore. This was one chapter of her new life she was closing. She needed to find control, to heal her mind.

“Well, things are about to change.” She pulled off her damp sleep shirt and stood. Damning the shakes that rattled her body every morning, she moved gingerly, testing her ankle. It didn’t feel too bad. It would never be perfect.

She struggled into cotton underwear and jeans, then yanked on a long waffle-knit undershirt and a heavy, oversized green henley. She stepped into the bathroom and looked into the mirror over the sink. “Today, Jenna King,” she vowed, “today you take your life back.”

She brushed her teeth, rebraided her hair, and swore heatedly as she struggled to get her hiking boots on. Then she very methodically gathered her clothes and the few other meager possessions she’d
collected during her four-month stay at Paradise Canyon Rehabilitation Ranch, and shoved them into a pilfered canvas laundry bag.

And she worked very hard at not thinking about the fact that she had no life to take back.

T. J. Delahaye was all set to return to Paradise Canyon for his final seven
A.M
. therapy session when he found the bra.

He plucked it off the pine branch and untangled it. Guess this is what they mean by serviceable cotton, he thought, dangling the plain underwear from his fingers. He pulled several dried pine needles out of the cup. “38B.” He uncurled the small white tag by the back hook and grinned. “Four weeks in the wilds of Oregon, but the man hasn’t lost it.”

Whistling, he tucked the bra in the back pocket of his jeans and did a little investigating. There was a break in the trees behind him, providing a panoramic peek of the rugged wilderness that was the Siskiyou Mountains. Nice enough place for a little interlude. Except there were no signs of a tussle—fun-loving or otherwise. He glanced past the pine tree, easily picking
out the signs marking the path of a recent hiker. An apparently braless hiker.

Climbing these hills for the last several weeks, strengthening his newly healed body, hadn’t been a cakewalk. Even whole and healthy, T.J. knew these trails would have given him more than a decent workout.

The woman wasn’t sticking to the trail either. But then, T.J. understood the need to be a leader rather than a follower. He just hoped she hiked more efficiently than she packed.

He stilled, focusing his attention outward. His instincts, honed to a fine edge during a career made successful from listening to them, prickled along his consciousness. He looked back down the winding trail that led to Paradise. It was a twenty-minute hike. His appointment was in ten. His physiotherapist wasn’t going to be real happy, but he didn’t waste time worrying about that.

Dr. Dave shouldn’t be too angry if he was a few minutes late, seeing as this was T.J.’s last session. That would give the good doctor, who was a young Arnold look-alike, a chance to hit on the new weight-room instructor. He decided to forge on.

Eleven minutes later he paused at the bend in the path, slightly winded. His explorations hadn’t earned him any further insights into his quarry. Not so much as a pair of panties, cotton or otherwise, had marked the path: He should have turned back several minutes before. His knee was telling him in no uncertain terms that he’d pushed too far already.

You know things have gotten desperate, Delahaye, when you’ll climb mountains to find a woman who wears white cotton underwear
. He wished now he’d packed more than a canteen. A little food would go a long way at the moment. He’d only planned to be out to see one last sunrise, to meditate a little, soak in the surprising peace he’d discovered in the wild, unpredictable beauty of these mountains and canyons. He needed one last moment alone before returning to Denver, before accepting another assignment that would take him God knew where. If he had any more time to think, he was afraid he’d decide not to return at all.

But he was returning. That afternoon. He had his doctor’s okay, and he had his plane ticket. It was just the lulling effect of his first break from the constant action in ten years that was making him think weird thoughts.

He cast another glance farther up the trail but shrugged and turned back. He’d endure one last lecture from Dave, get a good rubdown, then head out. He was scheduled for a debriefing with Scottie at the Dirty Dozen home base in Denver at three that afternoon. He was certain once he was back in the saddle, everything would fall into place. He’d feel like his normal, gung-ho self.

A sudden rushing noise followed by a high-pitched scream stopped him dead. He was running uphill, away from Paradise Canyon, his doctor, and his plane ticket, before he even made the conscious decision to do so. He focused on staying upright and
not tripping, and ignored the rushing feeling of relief—and reprieve.

As soon as she came to a tumbling stop and realized she was still alive and mostly whole, Jenna let loose with every curse word she’d ever learned. Meticulous planning and attention to detail was her forte. In her profession it often meant the difference between life and death.
Yeah, but you don’t belong to that profession anymore
.

It was the first time she’d let herself even think it. It hurt. Badly. It was also no excuse for her current predicament. But she was too busy feeling sorry for herself to let that minor detail slow her down.

Scowling, she groaned as she slid the strap of the laundry bag off her shoulder. Even with her crude modifications, it made a lousy backpack. She was certain it had left a permanent three-inch groove in her skin. She was also disgusted with herself. For a woman who’d routinely hiked with over seventy-five pounds of gear through rough terrain, it was hard to accept that the same sort of terrain had demolished her in under three hours, and she’d had fewer than twenty lousy pounds on her back.

“Pansy,” she muttered, wanting to sound like the quick-thinking, self-disciplined Jenna King she used to be. Instead she sounded whiny.

She’d never tolerated whiners.

She didn’t think she’d done any serious damage to herself—any new serious damage anyway—but she
took the time to test out each joint and run a quick probe of her legs with her hands. There was pain. Steady, throbbing pain. For the last six months that pain had been her constant companion. As her heart rate returned to something close to normal, she conceded that there was more pain than usual.

Great. Just great. She didn’t look up the incline behind her, not really interested at that moment in seeing how far she’d slid when the narrow path she’d been following around a large rock had suddenly crumbled under her feet.

She bent forward to carefully pick open the laces of her boot. Her hiking boots were the only item of clothing she’d forced her parents to bring to her. Not because she’d planned to go AWOL, but as a personal testament to her own will and drive. They had been a symbol to her, a goal.

She loosened the brown leather flap, giving in to a long, relieved groan as she slid the boot off. With increased blood flow, the pain intensified. She’d never get the thing back on. God, she thought, remembering her very vocal defiance six months before. In the face of insurmountable odds, she’d declared nothing would stop her from returning to her career as a forest firefighter and member of one of the elite smoke-jumping teams. How painfully pathetic she must have appeared to everyone, especially her parents.

Difficulties aside, and they had years of them under their belts, they loved her. That was one thing she didn’t doubt. It was why she’d agreed to come to Paradise Canyon Rehab Ranch instead of heading back
to Missoula to lick her considerable wounds in private.

She stared at her discarded boot. A symbol still, but now of defeat. What in the hell was she going to do?

“Hey, you okay down there?”

Jenna jumped, instinctively reaching for her pulaski or chain saw, feeling foolish and unreasonably angry when her fingers encountered nothing more than a laundry bag stuffed full of clothes.

She swore again, both at herself and at the fresh wave of hot pain lancing up her leg where she’d banged her ankle when she’d jumped. Wonderful. Out in the middle of nowhere, and she still managed to have an audience for her latest humiliation. Couldn’t she catch one break?

“Hey! Can you hear me?”

“Yeah,” she yelled halfheartedly. “I can hear you fine.”

“Are you hurt?”

“Just my ego,” she muttered. But she supposed that’s what she got for thinking it was okay to have one. “I’m fine,” she yelled. “Just peachy,” she added under her breath.