Alaskan Fire (30 page)

Blaze stared at him, a little
ball of rage unfurling in her stomach.  “Get out of my—”  Her words cut off
when Jack stepped on her foot, hard.

Padding out of her garden,
tromping over
more
of her carefully-laid beds, Thunderbird nonchalantly
said, “What kind of rain?”

The college student in Blaze was
stunned to recognize the sound of a business negotiation, and she had to
suddenly backtrack to figure out what she had missed.  Then, stunned, she said,
“
Peas
?  You’ll do it for
peas?
”

“The ones in the supermarket are
tasteless,” Thunderbird said.  “And I fly past here often enough.  I like
peas.  Might stop in a time or two this summer and grab a couple handfuls.  You
will keep both of my rows pristine, unpicked, free of weeds, however.  I do not
like to waste my time searching for them.”

Blaze felt her heart start
hammering, realizing she was amidst weather negotiations with a
god
. 
“Um.  Okay, but it’s much too late in the season to—”

Jack stepped on her foot again,
even as Thunderbird’s eyes narrowed.

“Sounds good,” Blaze said,
clearing her throat. 

“So what do you want?”
Thunderbird said, yawning and checking his watch again.  “What kind of rain?”

Blaze scrambled to come up with
something specific that wouldn’t get her plants waterlogged and drowned, while at
the same time making best use of daylight.  After a few mental calculations,
she said, “I want heavy rain, four times a week, for five hours at night.  Full
sun during the days.  No hail.”

“Sure, sure.”  Thunderbird said,
dismissively.  “And I suppose you’d like me to avoid the tornadoes and
hurricanes, as well?”  Like he was discussing his Daily Planner.

Blaze froze, realizing he was
dead serious.  “Alaska doesn’t have—”  Then she realized who she was talking
to, swallowed hard, and said, “Yes, please.”

“All right,” Thunderbird said. 
He turned to Jack.  “You put oregano in it?”

“Butt-tons,” Jack said.

“Good.  Let’s eat.”

That night, it rained.  Hard. 
Blaze lay in bed, listening to the patter on the tin roofs, biting her lip in
happiness.  It stopped five hours later.  To the minute.

The next morning, Jack
insisted
on replanting her freshly-moistened rows, despite the fact it was already late June,
and the first frost in Alaska usually came in mid-September.  They reworked the
center of the garden to accommodate Thunderbird’s peas, then spent the day
replanting everything that had withered and died.  Blaze was actually starting
to pick up a bit of Jack’s enthusiasm by dinner time, for which they shared a
ham-and-turkey sandwich on the back porch.

Well, Blaze had a sandwich.  The
wereverine fried for himself an entire tray of eggs and a commandeered an
entire loaf of bread, slathering mayonnaise on each slice just long enough to
wrap it around a couple eggs, then stuffing the whole mess down his throat in a
grotesque display that reminded Blaze of something out of a sci-fi horror show.

Despite the massive amount of
food he ate, Jack finished first.  He sat on the porch and gave the back yard a
thoughtful look as he licked mayo off of his hands.  Blaze took her time to
finish her sandwich, feeling somewhat obligated by Jack’s appalling lack of
etiquette to eat
extra
slowly, as an example of proper eating habits. 
If Jack noticed, he never mentioned it.

When she was done, Jack jumped
off the porch and motioned her to the pile of barn lumber they’d left there the
day before.  “Come on over here, a minute,” he called to her.  He spread out a
sheet of notepaper already covered with building designs over the top layer of
boards, then pulled a pencil from behind his ear.  “Okay, so you want something
with two levels, right?  Pigs and goats down below, feed and rabbits upstairs. 
Nesting boxes, stalls, cages, feed storage, water pipes, staircase, gangplank. 
Something to catch the rabbits’ pee so it don’t fall through the floor…”  He
started drawing up plans for a two-story barn that, off the cuff, was more
functional and well-thought-out than anything Blaze could have come up with
given a week of planning and research.  Watching him methodically hash out the
little details, Blaze once again felt more than a bit insecure.

Then she realized that,
throughout it all, he hadn’t marked down a single measurement.

“How are you gonna build that
without any math?” Blaze asked, eying the elaborate structure dubiously.

He gave her an irritated look. 
“I eyeball it.”

“Come on!” Blaze cried.  “You
aren’t even gonna use a tape measure?”

He scowled at her and folded up
the paper.  “I was building houses without a tape measure since before the
Bronze Age.”  Then, discussion apparently over, he picked up a board and
started expertly counting off handswidths.

Blaze narrowed her eyes.  “You’re
using a tape measure.”

“This is faster,” Jack said.  He
stopped near the end of the board and marked it off with a pencil.

“You wanna learn your numbers or
not?” Blaze demanded.

Jack, who had already started on
another board, hesitated, then frowned up at her.

“Stay there,” Blaze said.  She
turned on heel and went into the shop, pulling down the one tool that Jack
hadn’t used since he got there.  She took it out to the pile of lumber, set it
down and held out her hand.  “Gimme that paper a second.”

Jack gave the tape-measure the
same look he would have given a coiled snake, but he handed her the pen and
paper anyway.

“Okay,” Blaze said.  “How big are
you making this thing?”

“Uh,” Jack said, “Forty feet by
eighty.”

“How’d you plan on doing that?”
Blaze demanded.  “How much do you know about math?”

“I can count to a thousand,” Jack
said.  He was flushing, now, looking hard at the wood grain of the lumber
beneath his face.  He lifted a hand to one of the boards and Blaze saw a talon
slide from his fingertip, sinking into the wood.

Blaze rapped his knuckles with
the pencil.  “Stop it.”

Jack raised a lip and snarled,
but he pulled his hand away.

“Okay,” Blaze said.  “So you know
your numbers?  What’s this one?”  She wrote ‘482’ down on the sheet.”

Jack looked at it for several
moments before he muttered, “Two hundred eighty-four.”

“Four hundred eighty-
two
,”
Blaze said.

“Well, shit!” Jack snapped.  “The
Romans switched stuff around on me, too, and the Japanese and the Chinese and
the Germans and the Egyptians…  Everybody had a different system, and just when
I thought I’d started to pick it up, I had to pack up and run and start over
someplace new, so give me a damn break, okay?”  He was panting, his face
crimson, and he looked for all the world like he wanted to bolt.

“Okay,” Blaze said softly,
“Easy.”  She laid a palm on his forearm.  As he frowned down at the touch, she
prodded, “So you ever had anyone try to actually
teach
you before?”

He snorted bitterly.  “Only about
a hundred times.”

Blaze’s breath caught as she
realized what was going on.  “I think I just figured out what your problem is.”

Jack bristled, and she saw fur
sprout against his back.  “My problem, huh?”  He yanked his arm out from under
her grip and went back to counting out his handwidths on the board.

But Blaze was sure of it, now.  “You
had too many different teachers and not enough time in one place to learn any one
system, so they’re all jumbled up in your head and making it even harder for
you.”

He hesitated, his broad back
still turned toward her. 

Blaze then began to tell him
everything she knew about basic math.  Starting from the very building blocks,
and working her way up.

Slowly, Jack turned back to face
her, biting his lip.  She thought she saw tears in his eyes, but she pretended
not to notice.  “Okay,” she said, finally returning to the drawing he had made,
“Forty feet—” she marked it, “—by eighty.”  Another mark.  “You can read
those?”

“Yeah,” he said, reluctantly.  It
was the first word he had spoken in a couple hours.

Thus began Blaze’s career as an
architect.  She gave him numbers to add or subtract to get a total, and he
would scowl over every inch, poring over the numbers on the tape with the same
concentration of someone who only half understood, but who was determined to
figure it out.  Sometimes, due to the fact that Blaze
wasn’t
an
architect, it was hard to translate what he
wanted
to do onto paper.  The
roof, for instance…  She had no idea what he meant by ‘eight-twelve pitch’
until he put two boards together, perpendicular, then, looking at her as if she
were an utter imbecile, made eight measurements with his palm straight up and
twelve measurements outward from the T, creating a triangle with a steep outward
side.  The ‘pitch,’ as he explained to her.

For his part, Jack taught her how
to mix and form concrete, how to smooth it out with a trowel, how to use a
table saw, how to work a level, and how to properly pound nails.  Blaze had
never realized that there was an actual
method
to pounding nails, and
was amazed to watch him set and drive nails with two rapid blows, then
flabbergasted when he showed her to do it herself.

It took almost two weeks, during
which, Blaze had to order another Beaver load of groceries—mostly meat and eggs—but
by the time the barn was finished, and the two of them were standing outside,
admiring their handiwork, Blaze was feeling much more confident about her
usefulness in the woods, and Jack wasn’t acting like an asshole anymore.

In fact, more than once
throughout the construction process, Blaze had caught him staring at her, mouth
agape, and the ‘Yeti’ and ‘Clydesdale’ comments had all but faded from his
vocabulary.

“Well, how’s it look?” Jack
asked, leaning back against the four-wheeler, shirt off, covered in a day’s
sweat, a root beer in his hand as he surveyed the two-story barn.  “Think your
goats’ll like it?”

Seeing it there, completed, Blaze
felt a welling of joy that she had to share.  She leaned over, put both huge
hands on either side of his head, and kissed him, right on the lips.  “It’s
perfect,” she said, beaming.  “Thank you.”

Jack went crimson and immediately
found his feet very fascinating.  He scuffed them in the dirt.  “Yeah, well,
thank you, too.” 
Scuff, scuff.
 “Was nice to, uh, learn something
new.”  Even then, the neon-green tape-measure stood out proudly against his hip,
taking a spot beside his hammer on his tool belt.  When he looked up at her,
his green eyes were filled with gratitude.

Looking at him, Blaze’s breath
caught.  The sun, coming in at a slant just above the horizon, was painting his
body in the golden light of late evening.  Shirt off, still sweating from
climbing around on the roof, he was beautiful.  Blaze had to clear her throat
and look away, lest he catch her staring.  “So, uh, I guess fencing is next?”

“Might be a good idea,” Jack
agreed, pushing off of the 4-wheeler.  “Tomorrow, though.” He stretched and
yawned, and Blaze watched in awestruck appreciation as his big shoulders worked. 
“Too tired to keep my eyes ope—”

This time, he
did
catch
her staring.  He grinned and flexed with one arm downward and one arm bent
upward, giving her an excellent view of the musculature of his back.

Blaze’s heart began to pound and,
face flushing, quickly found something else to do.  She stood up and started
gathering up her root beer and work gloves, then reached for the bug dope to
take it inside.

“Hey Blaze.”

Jack was close, almost right
behind her.

Blaze turned in confusion.

He was grinning, his green eyes
twinkling with that mischievousness she had come to associate with backhoes and
Manual Labor 101. 

“What?” Blaze asked,
suspiciously.

Jack opened his mouth, and then his
grin faded.  He got this funny frown on his face, like he was trying to
concentrate.  Then he wrinkled his nose, closed his mouth, scowled, then opened
it again.  “Your smile…is…”  He grimaced, then shook his head.  Biting his lip,
his green eyes filled with consternation, he said, “Your face…”

“My face?”  Blaze winced.  “What,
do I have something in my teeth?”  She
had
forgotten to floss that
morning.  At his look of horror, she cupped her hand to her mouth, blew into
it, and sniffed.  No, it didn’t
smell
like something was rotting in
there.

Jack flushed red and scratched at
the back of his neck, then licked his lips and got that funky constipated look
again.  “Your hair. 
Tall
.”

“My
hair
?”  Blaze glanced
down at it.  Yeah, she supposed some of it had fallen out of the braid while
throwing up the rafters and she probably looked like a sweaty orangutan.  She
sighed.  “Okay, so what is it?  I’m a gangly-ass Yeti who needs a shower and a
haircut?  My buckteeth are blocking your sun?  What?”

He just stared at her.  “I’m
not
that much of a dick.”

Blaze just laughed.  Shaking her
head, she chuckled and said, “I’m gonna go get that shower before I try really
hard to figure out which part of me you were insulting this time.”  She started
to turn.

Jack stepped closer suddenly,
until their bodies were
touching
, and grabbed her wrist, tugging her
back abruptly.  “Truth is…” he said hesitantly, his eyes searching hers.   

“Truth is?” Blaze whispered, her
heart already starting to pound where he was holding her in place, his hard
body against hers.  Lord, he was
strong
…  It was all she could do not to
go all mushy inside at the way he held her there with all the power of a
grizzly, yet those iron-crushing fingers having all the gentleness of a teddy
bear.

He’s insulting you
, a part
of her reminded. 
Just save that thought, sister.

Jack’s green eyes must have found
whatever they had been searching for, because a slow grin spread over his face
as he looked up at her.  “Truth is, I kinda got a thing for Yetis.”  And he
reached up with a powerful arm and pulled her head down into a kiss.

Heart hammering like a machine
gun, Blaze dropped the items from her hands and returned his embrace, leaning
into him, melting under the strength of his kiss.  He wrapped a big arm around
her waist as the other reached up and his fingers dug into her hair, holding
her firmly in place.  Blaze shuddered at the feel of something so completely
male
,
so utterly close.  This was
not
a geeky roleplaying college nerd.  This
was something
entirely
different, and he was making that clear to her
with every heart-pounding second.

“Oh my God,” Blaze gasped, when
he released her to breathe.  Her head was swimming, and she had to slump to the
4-wheeler seat to keep from falling on her ass.

Jack was grinning at her as he
reached down for something hidden behind the 4-wheeler’s front tire.  “So, uh,
wanna christen the barn?”

Blaze was on her feet and
dragging him stumbling across the yard before he’d finished his sentence. 
Inside the barn, she shoved him against a wall and started ripping his clothes
off—and Jack grunted and grabbed her hand, stopping her.

Blaze stared down at him blankly.

Jack held up a bottle of wine
between them like a holy symbol.  “
Christen
it,” he said, shaking the
bottle.  It was a brand she didn’t recognize, which, considering her wine-snob
of a father, probably meant it was very expensive indeed.  When she just stared
at him, Jack offered, “You know, drink a
toast
, say a few words, splash
a little over the sides for good luck?”  He was shying away from her
uncomfortably, and was looking at her like she’d just tried to shove her hand
down his pants.