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Authors: Anne Marsh

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BOOK: Burning Up
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Worked for him.
When the spotter's hand smacked his shoulder in the familiar signal, he went out the door, launching himself into the whistling air and driving down toward the ground as he fell away from the plane. The drag chute snapped behind him, jerking him back and up as his ass cleared the wings, the wind tearing at his lungs and eyes. Adrenaline pumping made a man feel so goddamned alive, you forgot there was nothing but a handful of nylon and chute between you and the ground. Head up, feet down, he started the count.
Jump thousand.
Look thousand.
The jump site spun up to meet him as he came down, cataloging the fire's perimeter. So he'd go back to Strong. Do the same thing there as he was doing now. Jump in feetfirst when the call came in.
Protect.
Defend.
The ground rushed toward him. The roar of the plane's twin engines was drowned now by the fire's greedy voice as it devoured acres of prime woodland.
Reach thousand.
Five hundred feet above the ground, he groped and found the rip cord. A man got just one chance.
Wait thousand.
Above him, other jumpers whooped as they jumped free of the plane's cabin and plummeted toward the waiting fire.
Four hundred feet.
Pull thousand.
The chute opened, right on schedule, and he pulled hard on the toggles, aiming for the fluttering scraps of the markers. Laughter ripped from his throat as the canopy jerked hard above him, catching the fire's updraft. God, it was a good day. A good jump.
Check your canopy.
When he made the mandatory glance up, he spotted his boys coming down hard on his heels. Steering fast around the tall, summer-dry ponderosas, he hit the ground hard and run-rolled, pulling in the chute and shucking the harness as he came up. The powerful heat of the fire hit his face. Whooping, he turned to high-five the next jumper.
“Let's catch us a fire, boys.”
Chapter Two
B
etsey wasn't any happier taking this particular stretch of highway than Jack was. The old Ford whined as he pushed her up the nearly deserted stretch of highway, but she didn't quit. Maybe he should have bought a new pickup when his fire company had first made it into the black four years ago, but he hadn't.
Sentimental,
his brothers had accused.
Practical,
he'd countered. Truck still ran and got him where he needed to go.
If he wanted fast and sexy, he had a trio of Harleys in the garage of his Northern California base. But he'd brought the truck with him when he'd struck out from Strong ten years ago, so maybe Rio was an insightful bastard and the truck's bed was hauling a shitload of small-town baggage and memories he'd done his best to jettison along the road. Every time he slid into the cab, he came face-to-face with who he was and what he'd come from. Work hard, and the rest would come to you. Hell, he could practically hear Ben Cortez preaching that line. There were no shortcuts in life, and the truck reminded him of that, no doubt about it. As a smart-lipped teenager, he hadn't appreciated the sentiment. As a man and a former Marine, he believed in those words wholeheartedly.
The road curved, and he let the truck follow the bend, hugging the guardrail. At least he wouldn't be alone in his misery. He'd pulled in both his brothers from the other job site they'd been working. Their company could take the financial hit, no problem, but Evan liked his cushion. The kind of fire crew Jack wanted wouldn't come cheap, either—ex-military, all of them. Strong was going to be safer than Fort Knox.
“We'll both come, Jack,” Rio had laughed, his brother's mischief carrying clearly even over a bad cell phone connection. Imagining the devilish smile creasing Rio's face had been all too easy. “The fire here is under control, so we can come on back. You'd better hope Nonna knows what she's asking for,” he'd warned before signing off.
Nonna knew, all right. That was what worried Jack. She didn't just live
in
Strong—she lived
for
the damned town.
Just like she'd lived for them all those years.
Boys, she'd told him once—early on, when they were all still learning how to live with one another, and there were more bumps in the road than smooth patches—were more like puppies and kittens than the town's mothers let on. You could never have too many, and, after one look into their eyes, she'd been lost. A sucker for all that love flooding back at her, with the desperate plea of
Keep me.
She'd kept Jack. And then she'd kept Rio and Evan. She'd made them promises, and she'd kept every one.
He never knew why she hadn't married, hadn't borne babies of her own, but somehow he and his brothers had been enough for her. Together, they were a family, and he wasn't stupid. He knew what that was worth—and so, here he was, taking his truck up a highway that hadn't been re-paved since he was a boy. She wanted him to put out fires; he'd put out fires. Whatever his Nonna wanted, he'd give it to her. He could leave again at the end of fire season, when the summer was over.
So far, the weather report this summer was your standard-issue hot and dry. Solution could still be as straightforward as getting the word out about basic fire prevention and praying like hell that the storm cells stayed far away from Strong.
A man could always hope.
Town came out of nowhere, just like it always did. One minute, there was nothing but the ribbon of highway shimmering in the California heat. Next moment, familiar signs flashed past, advertising pick-your-own fruit and fresh cherries. His old truck whined harder, the engine complaining about the hot, dry climb up into the foothills of the mountains, but he was almost there. If he pulled over now, he might give in to the urge to turn around. Truck didn't want to be here, out in the middle of nowhere, and neither did he.
The only company he had on this hot, dry stretch of road was a pickup cooling down beside a big sign, tailgate dropped and flats of fresh-from-the-field berries ready for sale. Blink, and you'd miss it.
The past rushed up to meet him as if he'd never left.
Strong's founders had parked the town right on top of a pack trail that had eventually become State Route 49, as if the original townspeople had worried life might just pass them by if they weren't careful. Pulling his truck off the highway, he let the vehicle crunch slowly onto the gravel shoulder in front of the fire station. Just maybe, they'd been right to worry. Everything looked the same. Historic Main Street ambled lazily along both sides of the highway, the clapboard stores painted a cheerful rainbow of pastels. A wide-plank sidewalk sported barrels of red geraniums and white daisies. Hell, he half expected to see chickens scratching or a sheriff's posse saddling up, but there were just a handful of signs advertising a half-off sale at the antiques store and Blue Lou's special of the day.
Christ.
It was even worse than he remembered. The new fire station was a simple, two-garage building standing in for the run-down historic wreck the town had finally abandoned a few years ago and put up for sale. Black-and-yellow black-eyed Susan crawled straight on up the side of a seldom-used front door. He'd always known he'd been made for adventure and not for cottage-cozy in a small town, no matter how pretty. There was plenty of pretty in Strong, and it made his feet itch.
When he swung down from the truck's cab, they were waiting for him. His Nonna and her Ben. Her shoulder-length hair was tucked into its usual loop, although more gray streaked it now. He'd never figured out how she anchored the twist, but the hair obeyed. He'd never known how she got all her boys to listen, either, because she wasn't a screamer, and she never so much as hollered at them. She was blunter than hell, but he'd never mistaken that wry little twist of her mouth for anything but her loving acceptance of life and the boys that life had placed in her path.
She smiled when he headed toward her, holding out her arms so he could swing her up and around in a bear hug.
Ben, on the other hand, didn't look anywhere near as welcoming. Which figured.
The fire chief was the old dog here, and damned if he wasn't set in his ways.
“Nonna rope you in, boy?” Ben Cortez didn't look as if he was buying whatever story Nonna had spun about her boys paying her a little summertime visit. No, he looked pissed as hell with a side of frustrated. Nonna could do that to a man, though. Wrap him around her finger without ever realizing she'd done it. She'd had old Ben dancing to her tune for years.
“Can't a man come home for a few weeks?” He slammed the door of the truck behind him. Nonna just shook her head, but she'd gotten the message.
“Sure,” Ben drawled, “but other men might be wondering why it took ten years for him to drag his sorry ass on back.”
“Ben . . .” Nonna's voice was pure warning, and Ben threw up a hand. “Apologies.” The older man grunted the word as if it hurt.
“No problem.” Jack couldn't blame the man for feeling put out that Nonna had gotten around both of them. Again. Problem was, when a man loved a woman, he didn't want to hurt her feelings. “I'm here now. You going to turn away a helping hand?”
“I'm not that stupid,” Ben muttered. “Even if some folks might think so.” He shook his head. “Come on in, then, and take a look at what we got.”
“Let the boy settle in first,” Nonna protested. “He just got here, Ben. He doesn't need to fight fires this afternoon, does he?”
“Maybe not.” Ben stumped up the stairs to the firehouse porch, the old wood protesting each step. “But, since it's what he came for, he might as well see what he's gotten into. Unless you warned him already?”
Jack shot Nonna a glance, but she was just following Ben up the steps and into the firehouse, for all the world as if she belonged there. And damned if she didn't. If it came down to it, if the town needed her, she'd board Ben's truck and ride out with the boys. Underestimating Nonna was pure mistake. He'd learned that—more than once—as a boy.
The command center was just a bulletin board with a map of the town and its environs held up with three thumbtacks. The bottom corner had escaped its pin, curling up. Low-tech. Jack didn't have a problem with low-tech, but what he was seeing was impossible. Recent fires had been flagged with pieces of colored tape and ringed with black Sharpie, drawing a clear pattern. An unnatural pattern that shouldn't have been there.
“Yeah.” Ben watched him. “That's the problem I'm seeing, son. Little fires, lots of them. Maybe they're coincidence, but it's early in the season, and we're already at last year's max, with months to go yet.”
“What's this?” Jack stabbed a finger down on the blank spot at the center of the fire marks.
“Farm.” Ben hesitated. “Lavender Creek. Lots of little fires around there.”
“The old Stillerson place?” The Stillersons had farmed that land for years, but the old man had to be close on seventy now, and farming was damned hard work.
“Not anymore.” Ben threw in another one of those little pauses that meant the man was thinking hard and Jack wasn't going to like the topic any, but he finally continued. “Stillerson sold out about a year back. Packed up and took himself down to Florida. We all worried the developers would swoop in and start building, but the farm sold as-is. She came out here a few months ago to run it herself.”
“She?”
“My niece. Lily.” Ben's steady gaze didn't let up.
Hell.
Jack had forgotten the lack of privacy in a small town. Ben—and everyone else—knew
precisely
what he and Lily Cortez had gotten up to in the Stillersons' lavender fields. “She went down to San Francisco for a while. Did some marketing work there. Now she's come back. That a problem?”
“No,” he said, focusing all his attention on the map and the message it was screaming. Most of the fires were centered around that lavender farm. “No problem at all.” Lily Cortez back in town—now he knew this was a bad idea. He and Lily Cortez had history. A history that made a California wildfire look tame.
 
“You sleeping at the house?” Nonna asked quietly when Jack finally left the firehouse. He'd read through the fire reports and asked some fine questions. Jack wasn't happy, not with her or the situation, but she knew her Jack. He'd do the right thing by them all, even if it was the last thing he wanted. Sometimes she regretted pushing him, and she figured she'd have more regrets before the summer was over. “Your room is still there, Jack. There's always a bed for you.”
She'd made sure he'd always known that, but still, he hadn't returned. She hadn't wanted to push.
But now they needed him.
Something wasn't right here in Strong, and, whatever it was, she couldn't fix it for any of them. Not this time.
“I know that,” he said, turning his head to smile at her, that familiar half grin tugging at his lips. For a moment, all she saw was the mischievous ten-year-old who had stolen her heart away. “But I'll still bunk down in the hangar, Nonna,” he replied, referring to the town's old airstrip and its weather-beaten shelter.
Jack hated walls and always had. He'd claimed they closed in on him, and she'd never had the heart to push for the reason why. He'd been a ten-year-old foster child who was decades older inside and who insisted that his real family were the two other foster boys he'd come with. That trio of boys
had
been a family—and someone else, somewhere, hadn't been. She got that, and she'd respected the unspoken boundaries. Some things were off-limits, even for the mother she'd become.
So she never asked. She'd just brought them up, taught them well—but she'd never forced them to talk about what they'd left behind to come to Strong.
Like feral puppies,
she thought fondly. She'd coaxed and cajoled, put out one bowl of food after another and then sat by it, waiting to see what happened.... They could come to her or not. They'd all come.
“You'll stop by for meals, though,” she ordered lightly.
“Yes, ma'am,” he returned, falling into their familiar routine.
That familiarity was comforting, but she wondered if it would be enough. She needed something, she admitted, as Jack bent his head and bussed her cheek, his arm wrapping around to squeeze her before letting go. He'd gone and grown up on her, the years flying past in a blink, just like the other mothers had warned her they would. He was a man now, and while she wouldn't have traded who he'd become for another day lived in the past, still, sometimes she mourned the connection she'd lost. The little boy who would never be entirely hers again. She'd watched his face when Ben had talked about Lily Cortez, had seen the shadows in Jack's eyes.
Jack had unfinished business with Lily.
She didn't need to be a rocket scientist or a mind reader to know that he'd be paying the girl a visit before too long—perhaps even before the day was over—and then things would really start heating up. She might never see sixty again, but she still remembered those days in her own youth. What it felt like to not know which end was up, only that someone else was suddenly, unexpectedly the sun, moon, and stars in your life, whether you liked it or not.
BOOK: Burning Up
11.25Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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