Wildfire

Mopping up certainly didn’t give him the time or the energy to sit around and brood about his creativity. Or rather his lack of it.

Only two things were bothering him. The majority of the men were holding back from him; and Shea was avoiding him.

As he stooped to pour fuel into his chainsaw he remembered the conversation he had overheard in the dark woods by the lake the very first evening he had been here. He had been sitting on the grass doing up his boots when he had heard one of the other swimmers say from behind a clump of trees, ‘Who’s the new guy?’

‘Jim Hanrahan’s brother,’ Steve had replied.

‘Don’t look like a brother of Jim’s to me. Speaks kind of funny—like he’s royalty.’

‘He’s from England,’ Steve said.

A third, derogatory voice said, ‘He’s a painter.’

‘Nothin’ wrong with that,’ the first voice responded. ‘I’ve painted a house or two in my day.’

‘Pictures, Joe,’ the third voice said. ‘Pictures that you hang on the wall.’

‘Oh,’ said Joe.

‘He did just fine on the job today,’ Steve put in. ‘You get used to the way he talks after a while.’

‘Yeah?’ Joe said dubiously. ‘Well, we’ll see how long he lasts...’

This conversation had struck a chord in Simon, who had already noticed how some of the crew were ignoring him and how he was always on the fringe of their horseplay; and the next three days merely confirmed that impression. Jim had not been much help. ‘You’re different,’ he said. ‘You’re a rich and famous artist, totally outside their experience. They don’t know what to do with you, so they act as if you’re not there. They’ll get over it.’

As he capped the fuel can, Simon wondered how many more days he’d have to spend mopping up before he was allowed to join their ranks. While it was an exclusion he understood, he could have done without it.

As for Shea, she was spending long hours water-bombing, and Michael did most of the ground crew drops. In her off-hours, whether she was eating, talking, or playing cards, she always seemed to be surrounded by men. As the lone woman in a male environment, the deft way she handled them was admirable. But he was beginning to feel like a large and hungry dog whose chain was too short to reach the feed dish.

He scrambled up the side of a hill to cut down six or seven blackened tree stumps, and half an hour later was on his way back to the base. Michael was the pilot.

Because he was far less tired now than he had been the first day, Simon headed for the command post to check on the fire’s progress. The fire boss was talking on the radio, and waved at him genially, and two other ground crew nodded at him. As he bent over the infra-red maps he heard Shea’s voice coming from the next room. It took him a moment to realise she was using the telephone.

‘No, I can’t get away—the fire’s still out of control. But I’ll be off next weekend, because I’ll be up to maximum hours by then.

‘I didn’t promise!

‘Peter, I told you when we first met that in the summer I don’t have a schedule, I just have to go where the work is. That’s the way it is.

‘I am not married to a helicopter! But this is how I earn my living. Look, there’s no point fighting about this—couldn’t we meet on Saturday as we’d planned?

‘I see. I really hate this, Peter—’

There was a sudden silence, as though the man at the other end had slammed down the phone. A few moments later Shea marched through the room, saying crisply to the fire boss, ‘Thanks for the use of the phone, Brad.’

In one swift glance Simon had seen her flushed cheeks and brilliant eyes. Not sure if it was rage or tears that had given them their sheen, he kept his eyes assiduously on the map. The door swung shut behind her, and as if in sympathy the radio crackled with static. Simon finished what he was doing and went to find his brother for a swim. He hoped it hadn’t been tears.

As always, the cool water of the lake felt like the nearest thing to heaven. Afterwards Simon hauled on a pair of clean jeans and his running shoes, relishing the breeze on his bare chest. He angled up the hill to where he had parked the truck; Jim had been roped into a poker game back at the base. Eight or nine of the ground crew were standing between him and the truck, including two men new to Simon. There was a litter of empty beer cans on the ground.

‘Who’s the blonde?’ one of the new men asked, tipping back a can to drain it.

Steve answered. ‘Name’s Shea Mallory, Everett. She’s a helicopter pilot.’

‘No kidding. She ever go swimming?’

There was a warning note in Steve’s voice. ‘She goes up at the other end of the lake, and we stay at this end.’

Everett was patently unimpressed. ‘Yeah? Now if I met her down by the lake, let me tell you what I’d do to her—’

His string of obscenities fell on Simon’s ears like live coals. Not even stopping to think, he dropped his shirt and towel on the path. In a blur of movement he seized Everett by the shirt-front, lifting him clear off the ground. ‘You listen to me,’ he snarled. ‘If I ever see you within ten feet of Shea Mallory, I’ll drive you straight into the middle of next week.’

‘I didn’t—’

‘Do you hear me?’ Simon shook the man as if he were a bundle of old rags. ‘Or do I have to show you that I mean business?’

‘Yeah, I hear you. I was only kidding; no need to—’

His muscles pulsing with fury, Simon grated, ‘And I don’t want you ever mentioning her name again. Have you got that, too?’

‘Sure. Sure thing.’

Feeling the sour taste of rage in his mouth, Simon shoved the man away. Everett staggered, belched, and edged himself to the very back of the small group of men. Into the small, gratified silence Steve said with genuine warmth, ‘Good move, Simon. Want a beer?’

Simon’s heart was pounding as hard as though he had indeed come across Everett mistreating Shea. But he was quite well able to recognise what the offer of a beer represented. He had been accepted. He was now one of the crew. ‘Thanks,’ he said, nodding at Steve.

The beer slid down his throat, loosening the tension in his muscles. Joe started telling a very funny story about a fire-fighter and a porcupine, then Steve described a moose in rutting season who had kept him in the branches of a pine tree for over eight hours. Simon, feeling he had to keep his end up, told them about a bad-tempered stag he had come across when he was sketching in the Scottish highlands, and finished his beer. Declining Charlie’s offer of a second, he asked if anyone wanted a drive back to the base. ‘We’re gonna finish up the beer before we head back,’ Joe said. ‘Brad don’t like us to drink in the bunkhouse. See you later, Simon.’

There was a chorus of grunts and goodbyes. Feeling as though he had won a major victory, Simon got in the truck and drove away from the lake. His headlights bounced on the ruts and potholes; the only other light came from the dull red glow of the fire on the horizon, and the far-away glitter of the stars. The trees that crowded to the ditch were blacker than the sky, he thought absently, easing the truck over a ridge of dirt baked hard as stone, and enjoying the cool air on his bare chest. He’d left his shirt and towel behind, he realised ruefully. Maybe Everett would bring them back for him. Then again, maybe he wouldn’t.

His foot suddenly found the brakes, his eyes peering through the dusty windscreen into the woods. He’d seen a flicker of white move through the trees, he’d swear he had.

It must have been a deer. They had white tails.

But the brief image Simon had glimpsed from the corner of his eye did not fit that of a deer. He let the truck jounce down the hill and round the next corner, and then came to a halt and turned off the engine. After opening the door very quietly, he slid to the ground, and pushed it shut without letting the catch click. Keeping to the grass verge, letting his eyes adjust to the dark, he rounded the corner and began creeping back up the hill the way he had come.

His trainers rustled in the grass. A bough brushed his shoulder, and a mosquito whined in his ear. The stars were dazzlingly bright. Maybe he’d imagined that flicker of movement, he thought. The fight with Everett had got his adrenalin going and his imagination had done the rest.

He stopped in the shadow of a fir tree, inhaling the tang of its resin, his fingers brushing the living green of its needles. He had seen too many dead trees the last few days, smelled too much smoke...

To his left a branch cracked and footsteps came towards him through the trees. Footsteps that were making no effort at concealment.

All the hairs rose on his neck. He stood still as a statue, scarcely breathing, and saw a slim figure emerge from the trees. It scrambled down the ditch, up the other side, and on to the road.

‘Hello, Shea,’ he said.

She gave a shriek of terror and whirled to face him. She was wearing a white shirt, a small haversack slung over one shoulder.

Quickly Simon stepped out on the road. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I didn’t mean to scare you. I saw you from the truck—or at least I saw something, I didn’t know it was you.’

‘Do you always creep up on people like that?’ she said shakily.

He came closer to her. Her eyes were wide-held and the pulse was racing at the base of her throat. ‘You were hiding in the woods,’ he said. ‘Why?’

‘No, I wasn’t!’

‘Come on, Shea.’

She swallowed, and tried again. ‘OK, so I was. I wanted to walk back to the base, that’s all. By myself.’

‘You were swimming?’ Simon asked, thinking furiously.

‘Yes. Steve gave me a ride up to the far end of the lake, but I told him I’d find my own way home.’ She looked straight at him, her eyes black like the sky. ‘I really want to be alone, Simon...it’s only a ten-minute walk.’

He said quietly, ‘You overheard Everett.’

‘No!’ She caught herself, but not quickly enough. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Are you angry with me because I interfered?’

Her eyes dropped from his face to his chest, with its tangle of dark hair over muscles hard as boards, then skidded upwards again. ‘Don’t you have a shirt?’ she said fretfully.

‘I couldn’t hold my towel, my shirt and Everett all at once,’ he said. ‘And in the excitement of the moment I left the shirt back there on the bank. Don’t change the subject.’

She shoved her hands in the pockets of her jeans, hunching her shoulders and staring past him into the dark woods. ‘Yes, I heard him.’

‘He’d had a couple of beers too many, Shea.’

‘So is that supposed to excuse him?’ she retorted.

‘Nothing excuses what he said.’

In such a low voice that he had to strain to hear her, she said, ‘He made me feel dirty all over.’

She looked heart-stoppingly vulnerable, a side of her he had never seen before. As gently as if she were a fawn he might startle with his touch, he slid his hands down her arms, cupped her elbows in his palms, and discovered that she was shivering. ‘You’re cold,’ he said, concern for her overriding the urgent need to pull her in his arms and hold her. ‘Let’s go to the truck. I’m pretty sure Jim left his jacket on the seat.’

She was now staring at his chin, and he was not sure she had even heard him. ‘I love my job!’ she burst out. ‘I already told you that—I can’t imagine doing anything else. But do you have any idea how hard it is to be the only woman in a world of men—day after day, night after night? I’m the only female pilot in the province. And you saw how many women there are in the ground crew—none. I get so sick of men sometimes!’

‘Sick of men like Everett. Joe and Brad and Steve—they wouldn’t lay a finger on you.’

‘I know that, of course I do.’ She bent her head. ‘Everett stood next to me at breakfast this morning—he looked at me as though he was undressing me; it was horrible.’

She suddenly pulled away from him, scrubbing at her eyes with her fists. ‘I loathe weepy women,’ she gulped.

‘Oh, hell,’ Simon said violently. Forgetting restraint, he took her by the shoulders, drew her to his chest and held her, rocking her back and forth. ‘I’m sorry you overheard Everett, Shea, and I swear he’ll never look at you again like that. Not if I’m anywhere in range.’

‘You did sound fairly convincing,’ she muttered.

He could feel the tiny warm puffs of her breath on his skin. Fighting to keep his head, aware through every nerve in his body how beautifully she fitted into his arms, he said, ‘And I’m more than sorry about that stupid mistake I made at the helicopter the first time I met you.’

She raised her head, looking full at him, and suddenly smiled, her mouth a generous curve. ‘I think you redeemed yourself tonight—thanks.’

His breath caught in his throat. She had smiled at him, and he wanted to kiss her so badly, he ached with the need. He said huskily, ‘You’re beautiful when you smile, Shea—it was worth waiting for.’

Her palms were resting flat on his chest, the imprint of each of her fingers burning into his skin. Her smile faded, and she suddenly pushed back from him. ‘This is crazy,’ she said breathlessly; ‘I don’t even like you!’

It was as if she had taken a knife and thrust it in his belly. His lashes flickered. She added incoherently, ‘Don’t look like that, Simon! I—’

He didn’t want her to know that she had hurt him. That he was vulnerable to a woman he scarcely knew. A woman, moreover, who could not by any stretch of the imagination be accused of leading him on. ‘Come on, I’ll drive you back to the base,’ he said, his arms dropping to his sides as he took a step back from her.

She grabbed him by the arm, giving it a little shake, and said in an impassioned rush of words, ‘What I meant was that I didn’t like you when I first met you and then there was that whole business of the letter to Jim. But I do know how hard you’ve worked since you got here and I know Everett won’t bother me again, nor any of the others very likely, and I haven’t even thanked you properly.’

He glanced down. Her nails were digging into his flesh. Her fingers were not long and tapering like Larissa’s, but shorter, and somehow capable-looking. He remembered how, all too briefly, they had lain against his chest, and in his imagination he could picture them elsewhere on his body, holding him, caressing him. His loins stirred. Very deliberately he rested his own hand over hers, holding it captive, playing with her fingers, and the whole time his gaze was trained on her face.

Her eyes widened perceptibly. Surrender, pleasure, and panic chased across her face in rapid succession, before she tugged her hand free and jammed it in her pocket. She said with the kind of rawness that bespoke complete honesty, ‘I’ve never met anyone like you before.’

He said, groping for the truth himself, ‘Maybe that’s because you’ve been waiting for me.’

‘Simon, I don’t like this conversation one bit! If the offer’s still open to drive me back to the base, let’s go. If not, I’m walking back right now.’

He could not possibly hold her here against her will, not with Everett’s words so fresh in both their minds. ‘The offer’s open. And I meant what I said.’ And, he added silently to himself, maybe I’ve been waiting for you, too.

She was staring at him so stormily that every instinct in him screamed at him to take her into his arms and kiss her until her body melted into his. Gritting his teeth, he turned away and almost ran down the hill, his trainers crunching in the gravel.

You’re a fool, Simon Greywood. It might be a week before you get her on her own again. A week. Or never.

From behind him, Shea panted, ‘Slow down! We are not—at this precise moment—on our way to a fire.’

He gave a reluctant laugh, waiting until she had come alongside him. ‘I’ve never met anyone like you before, either,’ he said.

She stood stock-still in the middle of the road, her hands on her hips. ‘I can think of any number of fascinating topics of discussion, Simon. The weather. The safety regulations for ground crew. The flight operational directives for water drops, section seven of the provincial government manual. Even, God forbid, Everett. What we don’t have to talk about is you and me. Us. There isn’t any us!’

‘I don’t believe that,’ Simon said flatly.

‘You’d better! Because it’s true.’

‘Close your eyes,’ he said affably, ‘and I’ll prove you wrong.’

Her nostrils flared. ‘I wasn’t born yesterday.’

‘If there’s no us, you’ve got nothing to be afraid of. I’m not Everett, Shea.’

‘You’re a lot more dangerous than Everett,’ she said tightly.

‘Am I now? But if there’s one thing I’m sure about, it’s that you’re no coward, Shea Mallory. Close your eyes.’

She said obliquely, ‘The phone call that I assume you overheard this evening, there being no such thing as privacy at the base camp, signalled the end of yet another relationship in my life. My job comes first in the summer, and men don’t like that.’

‘To quote a woman I know, I don’t like being one of the crowd. Close your eyes.’

‘I never could resist a dare...’ With a loud sigh she scrunched her eyes shut. Very softly Simon stepped closer. Cupping her face in his hands, he leaned forward and kissed her on the mouth.

He felt the shock run through her body. With exquisite gentleness he moved his lips against hers, warming them, wanting only to give her pleasure. He sensed her yielding, then, as heat spread through his limbs, her first, tentative response.

It slammed through his body. One of his hands moved to the back of her head, burying itself in the luxuriant mass of her hair, still damp from the lake. His kiss deepened, fierce in its demand. And for a few heart-stopping moments Shea met him in that new place, looping her arms around his neck and opening to him with a generosity that made his senses swim.

Through her thin shirt her breasts were pressed against his naked torso. He remembered her nude form rising from the lake, sunlight dancing on her wet skin, and with his tongue sought out the sweetness of her mouth.

She wrenched free of him, and over the clamour of blood in his veins he heard her quickened breathing. ‘Simon, I—we can’t do this!’

He said roughly, ‘Kissing you feels more right than anything I’ve done in the last ten years,’ and knew his words for the simple truth.

‘Please...take me home.’

‘At least admit there’s something between us, Shea!’

‘I’m twenty-nine years old, not nineteen, and I know about sex,’ she said wildly. ‘You’re an attractive man and it’s a beautiful night and we’re alone...what happened is perfectly natural. Plus it’s a very long time since I’ve been to bed with anyone.’

Discovering that he liked that last piece of information quite a lot, Simon said, ‘The same is true for me.’

‘There you are, then,’ she said.

‘It wouldn’t matter if I’d taken a dozen women to bed in the last forty-eight hours,’ he said in exasperation. ‘This isn’t just about sex.’

‘For me it is.’

‘You’ve got to be the most argumentative, stubborn and cantankerous woman I’ve ever come across!’

‘Good. Then you’ll keep away from me from now on—because I’d sure appreciate it if you did.’

Furious with her, yet simultaneously lanced by a pain out of all proportion that she could say such a thing, Simon said levelly, ‘You don’t really mean that.’

She raised her chin defiantly. ‘Yes, I do.’

‘For God’s sake give us half a chance!’

Each word falling like a stone to the ground, she said, ‘I don’t want to. And I’ve already told you there’s no such thing as us. There’s just a separate you and a separate me—do you get it?’

Her voice had risen. ‘You’re dead wrong,’ Simon said harshly. ‘We could make something—’

‘No! Because I don’t want to. Don’t you understand basic English, Simon Greywood?’

‘You’re making a huge mistake.’

‘You’re just not used to a woman saying no.’

As he winced at her accuracy, she added with a satisfaction that lacerated his nerves, ‘See, I was right.’ Spacing her words, she finished, ‘I want you to leave me alone. That’s all. It doesn’t seem like a very difficult concept.’

Simon looked at her in silence. She meant every word she had said, he thought heavily. According to her, she was deprived sexually, she found him physically attractive, and the velvet darkness of the night had done the rest. So she had also been telling the truth earlier, when she had said she didn’t like him. Liking, he had often thought, was at least as important as that elusive emotion called love.

Unable to tolerate her physical closeness, hating the seethe of emotion red-hot in his chest, he rapped, ‘The truck’s parked round the corner—let’s go.’ Without waiting to see if she was following, he set off down the road.

When he climbed in and turned on the ignition she was only moments behind him. He drove back to the base as fast as was safe, pulled up behind Brad’s car, and got out. ‘I’m going to watch the poker game for a while,’ he said. ‘Goodnight.’

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