Wildfire Smokejumper Trilogy

Chapter 5-1

Chapter 5

Laura marveled at their routine. A month had gone by and they were borderline domestic. Another aspect of that surprised the living daylights out of her about Johnny. She’d liked using his first name since their very first night together. It somehow fit him better, as if it made him more who he really was rather than Mister “The Great” Smokejumper.

On that second night she’d returned from the Lodge late because of the paperwork around the accident. As Johnny had predicted, Grayson Masterson had inexplicably left a large tip, a very large one—it was amazing how well he knew people. She was already past half way to owning her brood mare.

She’d arrived at her cabin at dusk, debating during the entire drive from the Lodge if she should call him, or if that was too forward. When she arrived, there he’d been, sitting in that same chair. Clothed this time. Quiet. Waiting.

“From an hour before sunset until dawn,” he’d said when she’d come to stand in front of him, “they can’t call us out because we can’t jump at night. I hope it’s okay that I’m here.”

Laura hadn’t said a word. There were none in her. Instead, she’d taken his hand and led him to her bed. Not a single other word had passed between them until the dawn light once again took him from her arms.

Now they had a routine. If he was called to a blaze, he’d send her a text with the name of the fire so that she could follow the news. If it was a long fire, he’d send a simple Sleep on his return. That way she knew he was safe, though he always slept off a blaze at the MHA base camp. She’d offered to pick him up so that he wouldn’t have to drive but he’d refused, pointing out that half the time they got called to another fire directly from their bunks. It was a hot and dry season and there were more fires than people to fight them.

On her own side, she’d text him news of the day: what outing she was leading, a good joke someone had told, a snapshot of a black squirrel no bigger than her palm that had insisted on sharing her lunch.

The one time she’d gone out on a three-day trail ride and forgotten to tell him, she’d returned to find he’d almost launched a full Search-and-Rescue effort before Bess had talked him down. After that Laura made sure that he knew when she wouldn’t make it back to the cabin at night.

She constantly reminded herself not to expect too much, but it was hard to remember when he made it so clear how much he enjoyed being with her.

Laura was slowly adapting to the constant surprise of a willing and attentive lover. It had its up moments and its down ones, which only made the relationship feel all the more real. Though there were fewer of the down moments than any relationship she’d ever had before.

But now she sat in her truck, halfway up her narrow driveway through the woods to her cabin. It was as far as she could get. The afternoon sun shone on vehicles of every shape and size cluttered along her one-lane track. There were a good dozen vehicles, most of them one form or another of pickup, though a rusty clunker Chevy Cavalier and a sparkling red Corvette were in the collection.

What the hell was going on?

This was her hideaway from the world. Not her parents, not…

Johnny. Johnny Akbar Jepps was about to get his a*s kicked but hard. This was not some goddamn party pad. He was welcome in her bed, in her home, but this was too much.

Her immediate progress was blocked by a massive Dodge Ram pickup with rear dualies that looked even more hard-used than her own Ford 150.

She parked and locked her truck. Whoever they were, none of them could leave until she decided to let them out. It had been a long and harrowing morning. She’d led her first group since Grayson Masterson up onto the ice and snow. Everything had gone as perfectly as it had in the fifty jaunts she’d led before, but her nerves were a wreck. She needed a glass of beer and some quiet time on the porch. She did not need a god damn smokie convention.

She had hoped that Johnny might be around, maybe he’d be willing to cook because she was tapped out. And no one delivered take-out a half hour drive out of town.

Now she was hoping he was around so that she could kill him, slowly and painfully in front of all his friends.

She stalked up the driveway, kicked his Jeep’s tire for good measure when she passed it. Then she registered the sounds which were echoing through her forest.

Chainsaws, plural.

And the biting roar of a wood chipper.

She broke into a run. This was her land. No one was supposed to be logging here, ever. They—

The spectacle at the end of the drive brought her to a stumbling standstill. Twenty feet of chip truck was parked at the head of her driveway. It was painted glossy black with brilliant red-orange flames climbing the sides. It was the Mount Hood Aviation paint job. Behind it, an equally well-maintained and brightly-painted chipper was shooting a steady arc into the back of the truck.

Three people in hardhats and wearing heavy gloves were feeding in dead branches. She turned to the trees to see a half-dozen of them had people up them. Those trees, actually all of the trees for three-quarters of the way around her property no longer had any of their lower dead branches. The people in them were working so fast that the branches appeared to be falling in a continuous cascade.

“Pretty great, huh?”

“s**t!” Laura about jumped out of her skin when Johnny put his hand on her waist from behind. He wore a hardhat, climbing harness around his waist, and had a chainsaw slung over his shoulder as if it was the most normal thing on the planet.

“What the hell, Johnny?” She waved a hand helplessly at the trees and fended off his attempt to kiss her. He was covered in sawdust.

“Your place is a fire trap, Space Ace. Been making me crazy since the first time I came out here. In a fire all that dead wood cooks off,” he snapped his gloved fingers. Then he pulled off the glove and tried again with better results. “Massive amounts of fuel just begging for a fire to rip right through it. We had a promised dark day today, so I invited the crew out to do a little fire mitigation in exchange for pizza.”

“Did you think about asking first?”

His brow furrowed for a moment, then he shrugged off the idea. “Can’t say that I did. Doesn’t matter. I wanted you to be safer. This was something I could take care of for you.”

She turned back to inspect what was happening. There were six sawyers in the trees. Another six or eight were dragging branches over to the chipper—swampers he’d called them when explaining how a crew fought fire.

This was his specialty. There probably weren’t all that many people who knew more about protecting residences from fire than Johnny.

“We okay with this?” he sounded a little worried. Clearly he was starting to rethink his initiative.

She kept her back to him to hide her smile. It was hard not to feel charmed that he’d recruited all of his smokejumper friends on their day off to help protect his girlfriend.

“Space Ace?”

Laura let him suffer a little longer, but could barely keep the smile out of her voice as she let him off the hook. “You said something about pizza?”

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see him pointing upward.

Masked by the sound of the chainsaws, a small black helicopter—with the inevitable red-flame-on-black paint job—was slowing to a stop overhead and then began descending toward the center of the presently unoccupied corral—the only space big enough for a chopper to land.

The man was having pizza delivered by helicopter? She could get very used to this, but didn’t want to let it show quite how much he was sweeping her feet out from under her.

“Did you get Hawaiian?” she took the quarter step back to slip her arm around his shoulders despite the dirt and sawdust that coated him. The chopper touched down and began cycling down its engines.

“Got an extra one. Knew it was your favorite.”

Laura couldn’t help herself. She turned to kiss him. A cheer and a round of applause from around the clearing accompanied the heat of Johnny’s hand holding her ever so tightly against him.