Hot Point

Chapter 1-3

Then Carly came out the door of the kitchen and joined the others. Mickey was right. They took your breath away. That they were hanging together was a common enough phenomenon at camp, but there was no way to ever grow used to it. The noise level among the guys’ conversations fell off by half across the entire chow area.

Emily Beale, with her toddler daughter riding on her hip, was the commanding cool blonde—quite terrifying in her quiet control. Carly, MHA’s fire behavior analyst, was as tall and slender, her Nordic light hair and pale skin aglow like a shining flame—the woman was also seriously intense. Jeannie was a sharp contrast with her dark hair, black leather jacket, and black jeans. She was as splendidly figured as the first two women were trim, and yet was as casual and easygoing as the other two were completely daunting.

But it was Denise who was knocking him back tonight.

She was always around—she’d been with MHA for the last eighteen months of his four years here—but it was as if he was seeing her for the first time. She stood shorter than the others. As wonderfully built as Jeannie and with dusty blonde hair that fell well past her shoulders and offset the softest imaginable tan that came from having immensely fair skin but living most of the summer out of doors.

“Yep.” Mickey sighed. “Seeing that much female beauty in one place is a burden that a man has to bear if he works at MHA. Now that’s a serious perk.”

Vern nodded. It was. Three were married and Denise presented a bastion of pure steel to repel all boarders, but the women were amazing to look at. Far be it from him to deny himself the pleasure of enjoying what millennia of species-based conditioning had trained, nay, bred him to appreciate.

There was something about Denise though.

He squinted the way his mother had taught him when she started studying painting. The four women were in line to get their fried chicken and mashed potatoes that he could smell from where he was sitting, and it was making him so hungry because Betsy made killer fried chicken. The women looked the same when he squinted, but now he could see them differently.

MHA’s chief pilot Emily Beale was the one with the spine of steel. Her military training made every motion appear both effortless and meticulously planned. Carly was the driving force, a brilliant spark, and Jeannie the soft, steady one flustered by nothing.

But green-eyed Denise eluded him. As if she had a cloak of invisibility over her character.

“I’m hungry.” Vern started to get up, but Mickey pulled him back down. It was probably just as well. His knees felt no steadier than after the landing when he’d had to lean against the helo to remain upright. He’d lost three buddies to a mechanical failure when he was in the Guard. Thankfully he hadn’t remembered it was five years ago today until after he was on the ground.

Denise had laughed at him as his knees all but gave out when he walked away—not a sound he was used to hearing from her. But it had sounded like a kindly laugh, not a cruel one. He’d been kinda pissed, but he didn’t think there was a cruel bone in the woman. Maybe he’d missed her joke.

“Gotta finish this hand.” The other guys turned back to the game at Mickey’s prompting, but Vern had already folded. There was no money on the table anyway; they had only been killing time until dinner, not getting serious about poker. The only bets were who was buying the first round next time they went to the Doghouse Inn.

So he stayed put but still watched Denise as she moved through the line. She’d shed her work vest at the helos and revealed one of soft leather that wrapped and showcased her figure. He watched how the ends of her hair curled down the back of the dark leather, mirroring the curves of her splendid behind that invited a man to dream of…

He shook his head. Who in the world was he kidding? Getting the hots for Denise Conroy was about as useless as getting the hots for a movie star on the big screen. Sure, a guy could lust after Zoe Saldana, but that didn’t get him on the bridge of the starship Enterprise.

No way it was ever going to happen with Denise Conroy. To make it more unlikely, she’d been dating a townie for close to a year, which struck him as pretty damn serious. And her attractiveness level was off the charts. Vern usually did pretty well—occasionally very well, though those occasions always surprised him—but Denise was up at a whole other level of amazing.

Vern turned back to the game. “Come on, you losers. My stomach is grumbling.”

Mickey flashed his hole cards at Vern. Vern slapped his roommate on the back in a friendly way. It was a good thing that they were only playing for drinks. No matter what last card was turned up, Bruce was about to kick Mickey’s ass.

And boy did he ever, getting a three-drink raise before driving the hammer down.

Damning himself for a fool, Vern swung wide as he and the guys threaded their way toward the chow line. The others bucked their way in the straightest line, weaving and dodging among the tables, occasionally goosing somebody as he was about to take a drink. You could easily follow the wake of turbulence they left behind as they went.

Vern followed the line of least resistance, walking outside the perimeter of the clustered tables. A flight path that happened to pass close by where three of the four women had settled.

Carly and Denise sat with their backs to him. Denise was half a head shorter than Carly, sitting down too. But the way her hair caught the last light of day and shimmered with each tiny shift of body position, was a siren call.

He might have crashed right up on those rocks if Jeannie hadn’t been facing him from across their table.

She watched him, puzzled for only a moment, then offered him a knowing smile.

Shit!

The woman was too smart for his own good. Well, hopefully she’d have the common decency to keep her mouth shut or he literally would be crashing on the rocks.

He cut farther to the outside to get clear. That had him passing close to Mark, Emily, and their daughter. Tonight their island nation was slightly isolated to one side from the rest of the group.

He passed behind them just as Emily spoke softly to her husband.

“Honduras?”

Vern suppressed a shiver across his shoulders and paused at their table. “Honduras? If you’re thinking of a vacation now that the fire season is nearly over, you can do way better than Honduras.”

Emily closed a folder that was sitting on the table before they both turned to look at him. “You know Honduras?”

“I do.”

Tessa sat at the end of the table beside Emily, beating on a small bite of chicken with the back of her spoon and the enthusiasm of a two-year-old.

He circled around and sat next to her, starting the airplane game with a small French fry to get her to eat it while he spoke to her parents. She was a bright, shining girl who looked much like her mother.

“In 2009, I was serving on the Coast Guard cutter Bertholf. We were coming out of San Diego as the Honduras coup d’état of that year was kicking into full gear. Five months of political train wreck.”

He managed to land the French fry that Tessa began cheerfully chewing away on. He selected a bit of beaten chicken for the next flight.

“The Navy felt that they didn’t have enough assets in the area, so they called us. Full steam south. Mine was one of the two MH-65C Dolphin helicopters they had on board. I had search-and-rescue gear, but they had an airborne use-of-force package ready for me if I needed to arm up. We were on constant patrols, stuck offshore from June through September. Back a year later for flood relief following Hurricane Paula. Honduras sucks. Highest murder rate in the world there as a bonus. Try Belize or Costa Rica. Much friendlier.”

The flight of the chicken was a crash and burn. As soon as the bit of food in question finally made a soft landing on the plate, it was beaten once more with a spoon to ensure its complete suppression.

After they chatted for a few minutes and another successful French fry landing, he headed to the line for his own meal. Glancing back at the table, he saw that Emily had managed to fly some chicken in safe, but her attention wasn’t on the task.

She and Mark had reopened the folder and both were studying its contents.

It was full dark outside as Denise sat in the pilot’s seat of Firehawk Oh-Three and cycled down the hydraulic pumps. Everything checked out. As long as she was here, she turned on the Health and Usage Monitoring System and checked the readouts.

The HUMS tracked most of the problems and worked as a fair predictive tool for maintenance. It didn’t like surprises though, and it took her a few minutes to convince the computer that the line failure had been fixed. The HUMS was quite certain that the pressure drop and subsequent return to normal was a problem, not able to compute external service done by a human it knew nothing about.

Then it convinced itself that due to the pressure loss, the rotor was on the verge of imminent failure though they were sitting on the ground and the engines were off. She didn’t start the twin turbine engines or let them have any fuel, but she started the Auxiliary Power Unit and let the APU cycle the engines once. That cleared its miniscule computer brain. She shut down the power. The HUMS, well, hummed at her, happily green across the entire screen. She shut that system down as well.

The large LCD screens across the control panel went dark, and now the only light was the soft glow beside the few mechanical instruments that were there in case the electronics were blown. Beyond the windshield, night had fallen. There were still a few lights over at tables across the runway and small groups gathered around them.

Denise threw the last switch. The lights died, and now she sat alone in the dar—

“How’s it going?”

She yelped. She didn’t mean to, but she did. A totally girly sound of surprise.

“Sorry, sorry.” Though she couldn’t see him, Vern’s voice was close outside the open pilot’s door, not more than a foot from her elbow. For an instant he rested a steadying hand on her arm.

“Vern, you jerk. First you break my new helicopter, then you sneak up to scare the daylights out of me? What’s up with that?”

“Sorry.” His deep voice did sound contrite. He was long, lean, and had a voice to soothe wild animals. The man should not be allowed to run around loose.

“You owe me!” He did. A new heart. Because her present one was cranking at liftoff speed and still might fly away without her at any moment.

His silhouette crossed in front of the camp lights outside the windscreen as he did that lazy mosey thing that pilots did so well and circled around the helo’s nose to the copilot’s seat.

She didn’t leave, didn’t gather her tablet computer with its checklists, didn’t… She simply waited until he’d climbed aboard beside her and then leaned back against the seat. The seats were comfortable enough—they had to be for the pilots to fly the hours they did every day—but they weren’t loungers. They kept the pilot upright and facing forward.