Read Burning Up Online

Authors: Anne Marsh

Burning Up (8 page)

BOOK: Burning Up
13.81Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
“It's not over until I say so,” he said tightly. If she wanted him to take the gloves off, he would. “There is someone after you, Lily. He was right out there, watching you. I can take you to see the tracks for yourself if you want, but you're going to listen to me.”
“I don't take orders from you,” she said sweetly, putting the shears down on the porch. “Whatever Rio found up there on the ridge, it doesn't change the fundamentals, Jack. You're not in charge here.”
He squatted down beside her, putting himself on eye level with her. He was bigger and meaner, and he'd use his size to intimidate her if that was what it took to keep her safe. Yeah, but he wasn't stupid. He nudged her pruning shears out of the way and planted his hands on either side of her. “I'll say this just once.” His eyes watched her, hard and knowing. “Your ass doesn't set foot outside this house, Lily, unless one of us is with you. You got that?”
“Loud and clear,” she said bitterly.
“I mean it, Lily. I'll paddle your ass if I catch you taking risks.”
“I know how to take care of myself.” She tried to scoot backward, but he tugged her forward. Up against him. Hell, she had to feel the hard press of his erection straining against his jeans. His body was ready to move on to other things. “I lock all my doors, Jack. I carry a gun.” Her voice made it plenty clear she didn't enjoy the latter. “I think I'm pretty damned safe.”
“He got to you in San Francisco,” Jack pointed out, because it had to be said. “Whoever he is, he's not sane. He's gone out of his way to burn things that mean something to you. What makes you think he'll leave your farm alone, Lily? If he's watching you, he knows
precisely
what this place means to you. He'll take a match to it sooner or later, and I'm going to be ready for him.”
“Fine.” She smiled slowly, and he knew he wasn't going to like what came out of her mouth next. Lily Cortez thought she'd figured out a way to one-up him. He'd set her straight and enjoy every minute of it. “You want to stay here and be my own personal fireman, you do that. I'd be happy to tell you precisely what needs doing around here.”
If she thought she'd be giving him orders, she needed to rethink things real quick. He didn't take orders.
“Let me do my job, Lily, and we'll get along just fine. Right now, I'm going to clear a firebreak.” Because either he worked off some of his temper chewing through that iron-hard California soil over there, or he took Lily upstairs and showed her what she'd been missing all these years.
“Excuse me?” Those brown eyes of hers stared up at him as if he were speaking a foreign language. This time, when she inched backward, he let her go. He could wait. And she definitely needed a firebreak.
“All this”—he gestured toward the rows of purple that swooped and curved around the field fronting her property—“is kindling, pure and simple.”
“That's not kindling.” She grabbed a new bucket and a pair of lethally sharp hand shears. She could skewer a man with those. “You're looking at twelve thousand instances of extremely happy Provence lavender. You have any idea how long it takes to turn a mail-order plug into a plant that makes pretty purple flowers, Jack?”
Hell, he didn't even know what a plug was, although he suspected it had nothing to do with chewing tobacco.
“You take a little, stubby, two-inch bit of a plant.” She held up a dirt-streaked thumb and forefinger to demonstrate. “And you put it into the ground if you're feeling really lucky. Maybe you keep it holed up in a greenhouse for a couple of months while you coax it along. Then summer comes along and fries the hell out of it, while you curse the weather and the irrigation piping and anyone who comes along and tells you you're a fool for thinking you could make a going concern of a lavender farm.” The grin she shot him was pure deviltry. “Then, after you've got that cursing out of the way, you sit back and wait for the lavender to grow up and flower. It takes two years, Jack, before there's anything to cut.”
She loved the sheer, cussed stubbornness of lavender. The shrubby, woody clumps of purple and silver were so tough at heart that even the deer didn't bother them. She didn't know why she bothered some days, but there was magic in those plants. The pure heaven of the aroma had convinced her of that with the very first breath she'd sucked in. Yeah. She'd wanted acres of lavender, and that's what she'd gotten.
“I won't let you lose your farm.” His hand wrapped around her wrist. She looked down at his fingers for a moment. Maybe he understood. Maybe he didn't.
“It's not up to you,” she said. “It's up to me. I didn't plant all those plants down there, but I've got their brothers and sisters sitting in my greenhouse. I will plant them,” she said fiercely. “I'm going to be happy here.”
No missing that use of the future tense.
“I'm going to clear out some of this grass, then dig a line between your lavender and the trees.”
It would be ugly as hell, so he figured she'd protest, but it would make her farm safer, which made it the right thing to do. He'd dug line before, lots of line. The more you trained, the more you reacted correctly when you were in a fire situation. Sometimes thinking was a luxury. Sometimes a man had to go on his gut, had to trust that all the training would pay off in spades and he'd do the right thing instinctively.
“Don't touch my lavender,” she warned. When he didn't say anything, she aimed a trowel at the nearest field. “That one's all Grosso lavender. Over there, behind the house, the previous owner put in some French plants, so I've got Hidcote Giant and Provence, as well.”
He narrowed his eyes. Maybe those clumps did have different shapes, colors. Still, lavender was lavender, wasn't it?
The plants she'd pointed out looked pretty damned scruffy to him, woody stalks where the purple blooms hadn't burst through yet. They had the prettiest names, though, and there was no denying that her face lit right on up talking about them. That was enough to keep him nodding.
He'd done more than his share of gut-churning, nausea-inducing runs. If you couldn't make the time, you were off the team. No excuses. Up there on the mountainside, when the fire was roaring all around you, you needed to know that every man jack on your team could run like hell if he had to. Fire didn't care about age or injuries or even just a bad fucking day at the races. Fire burned, and that was that.
“So go ahead and dig.” She was fussing with those bushes of hers, all her attention focused on a handful of scraggly gray-green plants poking up out of the dirt. Still, she'd stopped talking about getting him to leave, and she seemed, for the moment, to have forgotten their argument about her ability to protect herself. So he damned sure enjoyed the look of confusion on her face when he made to hand back her little Beretta.
“You certain you know how to use this?” He slid the safety into place, his fingers running over the gun with easy familiarity. A man didn't spend five years with the Marines without learning his way around firearms. “If not, I'll take you down to the range. You can get some practice rounds in.”
He offered the gun back to her, grip first, and she took it. “I know how to use it. I'm not taking any chances, Jack. That's your job.”
He just watched her. “Probably,” he acknowledged. “But I don't take unnecessary chances, baby.”
The little snort of disbelief was out before she could stop it. “Then tell me why you jump. Don't tell me you don't enjoy it.”
He wasn't a fool. He knew what the risks were. “It's a love-hate thing,” he said. Carefully stacking his tools by the fence, he vaulted over it, one-handed. “Nothing better than the jump itself, the feeling you get in the pit of your stomach as you fall through the air and you're waiting to pull the cord. But then there's the fight waiting for you down below. And it's going to be a good fight, but there are never any guarantees. We might win the battle; we might lose.” He shrugged. “But we have to fight it. We can't just let it burn, knowing what might happen to the towns and the people in the fire's way. People have moved into areas nature never intended for us to live in, and now we're paying the price. My job is to keep that price as low as possible.”
She nodded slowly, sinking down onto her heels as she pulled on leather work gloves. “But it's dangerous.”
“Men die,” he acknowledged quietly. “But it doesn't happen all that often, and I know how to jump,” he said quietly. “I know the where, the when. How to read fire signs and use the equipment. It's not voodoo. It's science. Practice, training, discipline. And experience.”
The sleepy drone of early-morning insects filled up the air around them as the critters checked out the bright orange stalks of daylilies jabbing up into the warming air behind the beds.
God.
Jack talked so matter-of-factly about death and dying, but she didn't want to imagine him facing that kind of threat. It scared her. She could admit that. Not as much as her stalker did, but enough. Jack Donovan was so very alive and confident. She couldn't imagine him caught in a burnover, all that life extinguished in a few agonizing minutes.
He must have read her thoughts on her face. “I don't plan on dying out there, Lilybell.”
“Promise?” she asked lightly, trying to move away from the dark tone of the conversation.
He smiled. “Promise. You can take that one to the bank. Besides, I don't jump every day. Today, I'm all ditch-digger.” He pulled the shirt off over his head. “We spend lots of time digging ditches. One of the best-paid occupations a man can have in the summertime. But don't romanticize it,” he warned. “Unless you'd like to.” Winking, he dropped the T-shirt onto the ground. “The goal is to pen the fire between two strips of raw dirt. In the middle of a fire, the faster you dig, the better your chances of containing it. You dig a fire line and pray the fire hasn't gone up into the crowns of the trees, where the heat and flames can flash over and just fly between treetops and screw all your efforts down there on the ground.”
Lily's head nodded in all the right places as he gave her Firefighting 101. But those eyes of hers—those eyes were all over him. He hadn't missed the flash of worry when she'd thought about him dying. That little wrinkle forming between her eyebrows assured him he was getting somewhere with her. Slowly. But he was making progress, and that was all that mattered.
He'd dug firebreaks for years, slowly pinching the vee of the line closed until the fire, trapped, had nowhere left to go but out. It was basic physics—pick your point and pick it well, and anchor the line in some unburnable bit of the landscape. Place it where there were too many rocks to burn or the groundcover had already been burned out.
But Lily Cortez had him on unfamiliar terrain, looking to fan a fire instead of put it out. If looks were anything to go by, taking off his shirt had been a damned fine start. Whistling, he picked up his shovel and got down to work.
 
Loading up the car and heading into town turned out to be harder than it should have been.
Lily had left Jack shirtless, cutting away at the grass ringing her lavender fields. Man was a walking fantasy, always had been. That was the problem.
 
His truck had been an old, growly beast of a machine, even then.
Beat-up but faithful,
she'd heard him tell one of his brothers. The paint peeled because he'd put his time and his money where it counted—beneath her hood. That motor purred when he turned the key, and she'd never let him down.
Even at sixteen, she'd been offended at his talk of Betsey, knowing he was talking about far more than trucks. Even then, it was obvious he lumped all females together, as objects to be used, then abandoned if they no longer served his purpose.
When the truck had rattled up to the swimming hole that night, she'd known exactly who'd just arrived to put a crimp in her plans. That late in the summer, the sun stayed up half the evening, but twilight was finally wrapping around the trees surrounding the pond where the local kids swam sometimes. The spot was a popular hangout on the weekends. Up until then, though, she'd had the place to herself.
She'd always loved the pond, even though it was nothing out of the ordinary. Just a swimming hole with ice-cold water and a rope swing for anyone foolhardy enough to launch themselves into the chilly depths. Some years ago, her classmates had liberated a battered picnic table from the school grounds. Part prank and part necessity, the table had become the place for picnic lunches and stolen sips of beer.
The picnic table was also the place for stolen kisses and, after the kisses, hand-carved memorials. That table was the living record of all the couples who'd come here, kissed and cuddled, and moved on.
And now, here came Jack Donovan, right on target to find her here. So she'd been for a swim. Alone. It was no big deal, she told herself. He'd come down here for whatever reason, but that reason wasn't her.
BOOK: Burning Up
13.81Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The last lecture by Randy Pausch
Night of the Wolves by Heather Graham
Ghost Killer by Robin D. Owens
The Genocides by Thomas M. Disch
Beneath London by James P. Blaylock
Part of the Pride by Kevin Richardson
Ghosting by Jonathan Kemp
Avenger by Frederick Forsyth
Just Grace Goes Green by Charise Mericle Harper