Alaskan Fire (2 page)

“How long ago was that?” Blaze
demanded, pretty sure that her guests would take umbrage to being dunked in a
lake.

“Oh, at least ten years,” Lance
said.  “It was before I had my license.  Brucey was flying me out for a fishing
trip, all proud of himself.  You ask me, I think that dunking did a hell of a
lot for Brucey’s attitude.  He used to be such a prick.  Mellowed him out
something fierce.”

“That is not acceptable adult
behavior,” Blaze managed.

Lance only laughed.  “Oh yeah? 
Try telling Thornton that.”

“You bet your ass I will.  It’s
my lodge, my rules.”  In fact, with just that little morsel of information as a
guide, Blaze would have a
long
discussion with her handyman about the
proper rules of decorum when potential clientele, paying guests, and lawyers
were concerned.

She and Lance chatted for a few
more minutes about some of the eye-opening things that her only employee had
done in the last ten years he’d done business with the Rogers’ family, and then
Lance sat up in his chair to peer over the dash and said, “There we go.  Lake
Ebony.  There’s your baby, up on the hill.”

Blaze, whose mind had been
shocked into stunned overdrive somewhere between ‘assault’ and ‘destruction of
personal property’ nevertheless had all her worries vanish in a wash of bliss
the moment she saw the huge green roof of the Sleeping Lady slide into view between
the spruce trees on the crest above the lake.  Immediately, she found herself
having trouble breathing.

Her dream.  Everything she’d ever
wanted in her entire life was wrapped up in that big green roof and its
half-dozen outbuildings.  Bought and paid for, sight unseen.  Six hundred
thousand dollars for ten thousand square feet, thirty acres, and all the
machinery and equipment to run it as a fishing lodge.  Every penny of her
inheritance, gone, and then some.

Then Lance pulled the flaps and
the pitch of the engine changed as the small aircraft began its descent, aiming
for the deep black waters of Lake Ebony. 

I’m here.  Oh God, I’m here…
 
Blaze’s heart was pounding, somewhere between elation and absolute Oh-My-Shit-What-Have-I-Done
terror
as she watched the last of the spring-budding treetops slip under
the plane’s big floats.  Hers.  The Sleeping Lady was
hers
.  It was her
dream come true, and it was only a lake’s-length away.

The landing was surprisingly
gentle, and once they had come to a relative stop in the middle of the lake, Lance
revved the engine again and got them moving towards shore.

He idled them over to the far bank
of the lake, beneath the crest where the Sleeping Lady sat like a mistress of
its domain, surveying the lands around it.  As they neared the shore, Blaze
lost sight of the lodge through the hillside of birch and spruce trees. 

When the Cessna’s floats slid
into the gravelly mud of the narrow beach, Blaze was close to hyperventilating. 
She was
here
.  She was either going to sink or swim, and had nobody to
blame for it except herself. 

…And she was already in debt up
to her eyeballs, just
getting
here.  She’d been wanting a lodge her
whole life, but now she
had
it, and was in
debt
for it, and she
already almost felt like puking with nerves.  Her hands were shaking as Lance
unstrapped himself and crawled out onto the plane’s left float.  “Well,” he
said, “here we are.  Lake Ebony.”  He pushed the pilot’s seat out of the way
and gestured for Blaze, who was still staring at the woods in front of the
propeller in shock, to climb out after him.  “You got a ride up to the shop, or
should I just pile the stuff on the beach?”

Jerked out of her stunned
silence, Blaze climbed down onto the float and stood there, gripping the wing
strut with white knuckles, as she stared up at the woods shielding her new home
from view, trying frantically to tell herself she was not making the biggest
mistake of her life.

Lance gave her an empathetic grin. 
“Excited?”

Swallowing, Blaze nodded down at
him.  This close, sharing space on the float, there really wasn’t any way for
Blaze to back up and give him space—and thereby the illusion of a lesser
disparity in height.  Even now, she could see the little gears turning in
Lance’s head as he realized just
how
big she was.  At six-foot, Lance really
shouldn’t have had to look up at her.  Unfortunately, Blaze was about twelve
inches and eighty pounds off of average, and every checkout cashier and bank
teller in the world had let her know it.  Some gigantic Amazon somewhere had
birthed Blaze, and, once Blaze had passed between her massive thighs, the woman
had left her in an alder thicket on the mountain behind her father’s house. 
And, having just lost their baby due to a miscarriage, her parents had taken
her in, quietly raised her on their own, and could probably be sent to jail for
life for not turning her over to the authorities, if they weren’t both already
dead.

That was one of the many unhappy
surprises that Blaze had discovered in the lawyer’s office four months ago. 
Adopted.  It still hit like a freight train, every time she thought of it.

Then she realized Lance was still
looking up at her, waiting for her answer.

“So excited I think I’m gonna
puke,” Blaze managed, still trying to focus all of her attention on the
textured aluminum plating between her men’s Size 11 hiking boots, attempting to
force her stomach into submission.

“Well,” Lance said, “If you wanna
go sit down, I’ll unload for you.”

Blaze automatically felt herself
prickling at how quickly he offered to do her work for her.  “I’ll be fine,”
she said.  She ducked her head through the door and grabbed a load of groceries
from behind the pilot’s seat, not waiting for Lance to unlatch the back
compartment.  She normally tried not to make a big deal of it, but she wasn’t
stupid—she knew that the Alaskan Bush was a man’s world, and that if she didn’t
want to start a precedent of Let’s All Take Care Of The Poor Helpless Woman,
she needed to start proving her competence the moment she stepped off of the
plane.  First impressions, her mother had taught her, were everything.  If Blaze
showed every man she met on the river that she was smart, capable, and willing
to work, they wouldn’t patronize her, and those that did, she could simply tell
them to get screwed.

Blaze had been raised by the
epitome of an Independent Woman—her mother, who had made her millions in real
estate, had insisted on keeping separate finances despite her father’s greater
wealth—and after earning her way through her Business degree, Blaze was
not
going to allow a bunch of scruffy, rugged, largely-unemployed men to treat her
like a second-class citizen because she had a couple of A-cups and internal
plumbing.  Groceries retrieved, Blaze gingerly started towards the shore,
picking her way across the wet aluminum float.  Out in the woods, she heard the
sound of an engine and looked up.

A stout-looking man was driving a
blue 4-wheeler down a winding dirt track, pulling a flatbed trailer behind
him.  It rattled and bounced as it jumped over roots and stones, making a
ruckus as it worked its way down the hill to her.  Blaze watched it approach as
Lance worked his way around to the other float and began opening the back compartment
of the airplane to access her luggage.

When he came fully into view, the
man driving the 4-wheeler looked
nothing
like what Blaze had envisioned
over the phone.  Instead of the hairy, dirty, graying, plaid-covered Bushrat she
had been expecting after exchanging instructions with his gruff voice over the
phone, he was clean-shaven, with jet-black hair, relatively tidy, and wearing tight
blue jeans and green flannel shirt.  A well-worn Carhartt jacket was slung over
his shoulders, zipper open, exposing a broad chest beneath.  And he looked
young
,
which was completely at odds with how long she’d heard he’d been skulking
around this part of the Yentna. 

Hell, from the way
some
people told it, he’d been living in the same damned cabin since the Gold Rush,
so Blaze had hired him fully expecting a wrinkled old fart who had to grab his
reading glasses to figure out which nut went on which bolt.

But to her shock, even from this
distance, Blaze could see that Jack Thornton was built like a Greek god.  Pecs
that strained against his shirt.  Shoulders that made divots in his jacket.  Legs
that looked like they could crush the 4-wheeler like a used soda can.  When
Jack slowed the vehicle and the deepest green eyes that Blaze had ever seen met
hers, however, Blaze felt her heart give an extra thud.  Then she watched his
muscular ass stretch against the jeans as he dismounted…

…and her elephantine foot slipped
out from under her, and she went crashing backwards into the frigid waters of
Lake Ebony.

Cold and humiliation washed over
her like a wet blanket from God, putting out her idle fantasies as quickly as
if she’d been dunked in liquid nitrogen.  Blaze sputtered to the surface,
gasping, blinking up at the horrified face of the pilot, who was kneeling on a
float, offering a hand to help her, and then her very first employee, who was
smirking.

…smirking?

“Damn,” Jack said, wading out to
meet her.  He was wearing rubber boots that hugged his hips, secured to his
waist by loops snapped to his belt.  He offered his big hand, grinning.  “You
dye your hair to get it that orange?  Like fucking carrot soup.”  No ‘Sorry, miss,
gotta watch your step,’ or ‘Don’t worry, it happens to the best of us…’  He
just smirked down at her and commented on the prison-orange hair that had been
plaguing her since childhood.  Hair that, despite her ongoing attempts to dye
it,
would not
retain any other color. 

Blaze’s jaw fell open in her
horror, gaining her a nice mouthful of lakewater as it drained through her soggy
scalp.  Her first two minutes in this place that was to be her new home—hopefully
for the rest of her life—and Blaze had made herself look like that helpless
woman she was trying desperately not to portray, in front of the very man she
had hired to help her maintain the lodge.  She could see the amusement in his
green eyes, knew that whatever respect for her brilliant mind and sharp
business sense that she had managed to earn in their quick, crass phone
conversations had just exploded in a wash of cold water and lake weeds.

The water where she had fallen
was little over two and a half feet deep, so Blaze easily got to her feet on
her own, red-faced and shamed to her core.  Jack’s face darkened a bit when she
refused his help, but he shrugged and started helping Lance unload the plane,
wading to the trailer and back with each load of luggage and groceries.  When
Blaze hurriedly slapped together an armful of soggy groceries and sloshed past
him, a traumatized corner of her brain noticed he was only about five-nine,
giving her a full seven inches of headspace over him, leaving Blaze with the
horrible realization that she towered over her mechanic like an A-cupped
beanpole. 

As she walked by, Jack’s neck
craned back so he could look at her, his mouth fell open, and he dropped the
box of bread he’d been carrying into the lake.

What was left of her
ill-conceived fantasies were utterly shattered as she watched the muscular
little man scrabble to pluck loaves of bread from the water.  Men, Blaze had
learned from hundreds of lonely nights at the bar, did not like their women
taller than them, and anyone who said otherwise had never been a six-foot-four-inch
behemoth thundering through the college dating scene. 

After the four years she’d spent
at the University of Alaska to get her degree, Blaze had long since given up. 
Those men who on the off-chance happened to be taller than her often had some
genetic species-survival switch tripped in their brain that made them crave
women on the opposite end of the height spectrum, to balance out the gene
pool.  As of yet, she’d only found two men who showed any interest, and both
had been skinny computer geeks she had met in college, some perverted part of
their nerdy brains somehow turned on by the whole Amazon thing.  Both had tried
to get her to wear leather armor and wield a broadsword sometime during bed-play. 
Neither had stayed long.

Fighting despair, Blaze went to
the trailer and sat on the back, sloshing a flood of water from her clothes as
she went.  She sat down and pulled off her boots, emptying small rivers from
their insides.

On one of his trips from the
plane, her luggage over his shoulder, Jack paused and glanced at her shoes. 
“Jesus,” he said, “Those are even bigger than mine.  Where you get feet like
that?  A Clydesdale?”  Then, chuckling, he went back to carrying groceries as
if he hadn’t just made Blaze’s stomach clench with shame.

Blaze almost fired him on the
spot.  She was so humiliated that it was all she could do to keep the words
locked behind clenched teeth.  The only thing that saved him was that Blaze
knew she couldn’t make the Sleeping Lady run without Jack’s help.  She was a
Business major with secret fantasies of one day running a self-sufficient homestead-slash-fishing-lodge
in the Alaskan Bush.  He was a mechanic, handyman, and carpenter who had spent
his entire life actually living her dream…and knowing what it took to make it
happen.

When the Cessna was fully
unloaded, Blaze watched as Jack pushed the plane off the beach and waded out
into the lake as he got it turned around and pointed in the opposite direction,
then gave it a big push.  As Jack was wading back to shore, Lance started the
engine and began idling the airplane out across the lake, toward a little
channel that Blaze had noticed on the flight in.

“Where’s he going?” she asked, as
Jack rejoined her at the 4-wheeler.