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Cole.
Without thinking, Rachel clung tighter, pressed closer, until she heard the buzz of a small Cessna’s engine overhead and reality came crashing back.
What was she doing? “Put me down!” Rachel struggled against Cole’s rock-solid chest and her traitorous emotions. “Dammit, Cole. Put. Me. Down.”
Unceremoniously, his arms released her and Rachel stumbled, but somehow managed to regain her balance.
“This guy buggin’ you, Rachel?” Danny asked, a steadying presence at her side, even though his wiry physique was no match for Cole’s.
“No. He’s an old friend,” Rachel admitted after a moment spent unable to avoid looking at Cole. “Why don’t you get back in line, Danny. I’ll catch up with you in a minute.”
Danny moved slowly toward the chow line with a few dark looks for Cole.
Meanwhile, Cole didn’t say a word. He just stood there watching her with bright blue eyes that she’d hardly dared stare into when she was fifteen, much less now. With a linebacker’s build, a square jaw and short blond hair, he carried his age well, probably better than Rachel. He looked at peace, far different from the worried expression Rachel saw in her own reflection.
“You look like hell. I almost didn’t recognize you,” he said finally, handing her the baseball cap. “What are you doing out here?”
Rachel put the hat back on her head. His words shouldn’t hurt, but his tone implied she had no business being at a wildland fire camp miles from civilization. Rachel looked beyond Cole to the smoke-filled horizon. Things were so much easier in the air than on the ground.
“I’m contracted with the Forest Service, working the fire just like you are.” Making good money to tide her over through the lean winter months.
He frowned, taking in her appearance from head to toe. “Hot Shot?” She wasn’t wearing the Hot Shot garb that Cole was—fire-resistant drab-green slacks and a yellow button-down.
Rachel flicked her thick ponytail over her shoulder with a laugh. “Fight fires on the ground with nothing more than a shovel or a chainsaw? I’m not that foolish. I’ll leave that to you, thank you very much.” And she should leave him standing there with the question she knew he was dying to ask—How’s Missy? But Rachel’s boots seemed to have taken root in the dirt.
The disapproving expression didn’t leave his face. After a moment Cole said, “You’re not flying air tankers, are you?”
“Yep.” Rachel squared her shoulders. She was proud of the fact that she was one of the few female tanker pilots, prouder still that she was owner of her own tanker service. She flew a PB4Y2 Privateer, an airplane that had served in at least two wars. Dumping fire retardant on forty-foot-high flames on runs reminiscent of those barnstorming fighter pilots who’d come before her was Rachel’s idea of heaven. Sometimes she couldn’t believe they paid her to do it.
Cole cursed under his breath, taking Rachel by the arm. “Look, kid—”
Kid? Rachel bristled at the word. In the back of her mind, she’d always believed that Cole would approve of what she was doing, would jump at the chance to make a run with her. She’d never imagined he’d treat her as if she were still fifteen and waiting for her first kiss. Rachel shook off his touch, even though part of her trembled with the contact.
“This isn’t a game out here. You’ve always been a risk taker, but…” Cole lowered his voice and leaned closer. “I’m sure you’ve noticed how air tankers have been dropping from the sky lately.”
He was right. A lot of the old beauties weren’t able to take the stress of diving into deep valleys and pulling up to avoid the trees on the opposite side of the basin. But Rachel had rebuilt the Privateer herself and knew that its engines could withstand tremendous stress.
“Maybe there have been a few older models that haven’t held up after fifty or more years of hard service, but my plane is different.” Rachel resisted the inclination to tell him she was one of the most respected pilot mechanics in the business, something she could thank her father for. “I know what I’m doing, Cole. Why can’t you just wish me well?” Instead of making her feel two inches high, which was how she felt anyway, because she wouldn’t tell him about Jenna. And then there was Missy… Rachel had never liked hiding the truth. Yet, that seemed to be all she did nowadays. And Cole was, in part, to blame.
Rachel looked for Danny. She couldn’t last much longer without spilling her guts or losing the facade that she was a fully functioning adult.
Unexpectedly, Cole reached out and removed her sunglasses. “What happened to your freckles?”
Rachel snatched them back and thrust them into place. “I grew out of them.” If only she’d outgrown her feelings for Cole.
“And Missy?” Cole finally asked the question she’d been dreading. “How is Missy?”
Rachel’s throat closed as she recognized the expression in Cole’s blue eyes—hope. She’d thought she’d loved this man at one time. Later, she’d realized it had been a foolish teenager’s crush. But it was clear that he was still in love with Missy, the woman he’d slept with just hours before her marriage to another man, and then left alone to face the consequences. And then there was what he’d done five years ago.
Rachel was such a sentimental fool.
“She’s dead,” Rachel managed to tell him, holding her heart together by willpower alone as she waited for Cole to say he’d wondered why Missy hadn’t shown up on his doorstep five years ago, waited for him to explain why he’d never called to see what had become of her.
Instead Cole swayed as if he might be felled by the heartbreaking news that Rachel had been living with for what seemed like an eternity.
Rachel frowned.
“I had no idea.” His gaze wandered around, from the latrines to the chow line to the trucks rumbling out of camp. Then his attention swung back to her. “When?”
Rachel tried to hide her confusion. How could Cole have forgotten? He had to have known. “Five years ago.” Although the vibrant spark that had once been Missy had been extinguished on her wedding day and none of Rachel’s efforts had rekindled that flame. “Car accident. We lost her.” Rachel’s voice sounded distant, as if someone else was speaking, someone who hadn’t known Missy and somehow failed her.
Rachel wouldn’t fail Missy now. She wouldn’t tell Cole the secrets pressing at the back of her throat, the most pressing of which was that he’d created a beautiful little girl on the eve of Missy’s wedding to Lyle.
Rachel had made her sister a promise, and she was sticking to it.
“IF YOU LOVED ME, you’d stay with me here in Eden. I can’t leave Rachel.” Missy’s voice had been filled with an aching sadness, as if she’d known her fate was sealed if Cole left her.
What had Cole done?
“Chainsaw, you look like you’ve just seen a ghost,” Jackson observed as he parked his booted feet near Cole’s.
Cole squinted up into the sunset to find Jackson and Logan regarding him.
After hearing the devastating news, Cole had staggered over to the latrines where he’d tried to decide if he was going to puke or not. Minutes later, with his friends standing in front of him, Cole still wasn’t sure.
Missy was dead.
He wiped a hand over his face. He’d always believed she was The One—the woman he was meant to be with. All she’d had to do was touch him and he’d combusted. She’d given him an ultimatum that last morning he’d seen her, either settle down in Eden or leave her be. There was nothing for him in Eden—no family since his had moved to Idaho, and there sure as hell weren’t any jobs in the dying town. In the heat of anger, he’d told Missy he’d wait for her through her foolish marriage. He’d told Missy he’d wait until she grew up and realized they were destined to be together.
And he had waited, living as if he’d had a marriage vow to honor, knowing she’d come back to him someday.
Only to find out Missy was dead.
“I, uh…” Cole struggled to find the words to tell his friends what had blindsided him. “I just heard that…Missy is dead.”
Without a word they sat on either side of him on the hard-packed Montana earth.
Jackson put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry. How did you hear?”
“Her little sister told me a few minutes ago.” Rachel had looked just the same as the picture he carried in his wallet—a stubborn lift to her chin, wisps of long black hair escaping from her ponytail, slender as a reed, wearing cowboy boots, scruffy blue jeans and a T-shirt. If it wasn’t for the way she filled out her T-shirt, she’d have tomboy written all over her.
What Rachel didn’t have written all over her was grief, because she’d had five years to come to terms with her sister’s death. All Cole’s dreams—
“Missy’s sister?” Logan broke into Cole’s thoughts, leaning forward and looking at Jackson, then at Cole. “The little girl who rebuilt your truck engine before she had a license to drive it? The one who beat you in a bareback horse race?”
“Logan.” Jackson held up a hand in Logan’s direction.
“Yeah. She’s a tanker pilot. I should have known she’d end up doing something crazy, especially with Missy gone….” Cole stared down at his boots. Rachel was no longer a little girl. She was a woman who’d never outgrown the daredevil spirit that he’d been sure Missy would temper as they aged. Crap. He still couldn’t believe Missy was long dead. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Maybe after we finish here, we can take a run over to Wyoming and pay our respects,” Jackson suggested softly.
Cole shook his head slowly, in wonder. “You didn’t even know her.”
“No, but we know you, buddy, and even if you’re not ready to talk about it, we’ll be there for you when you are.”
“LAST RUN OF THE DAY,” Rachel said as Danny landed Fire Angel One. They’d done nothing more exciting than drop retardant around the fire all day long. The fire had died down, so that there were no flames raging out of control and no firefighters trapped and in need of rescue. Very ho-hum.
“Last run of the season,” Danny corrected wistfully as he taxied the Privateer to the retardant base.
Despite the shift in winds this afternoon, the dragon appeared to be contained, and they’d been ordered to drop one last load of slurry on the steep eastern slope near the road before refueling and heading home to Wyoming. A season of flying was over.
Rachel sighed. At least she wouldn’t have to see Cole again.
In their passes over the fire, she’d caught glimpses of the crews below, bolstering the last of the fire lines before this beast burned itself out. She couldn’t help but wonder if Cole was one of them, if he looked to the sky as she flew over. How was Cole handling the news about Missy? Rachel had dreaded meeting Cole again. She had so much to blame him for. Even though she’d idolized him all those years ago, Cole Hudson never looked before he leaped, and that had contributed to Missy’s downward spiral and death. After so much time, Rachel had thought he’d shrug, offer his condolences and move on, but he’d appeared shaken.
Beside a shed on the edge of the runway, boots in puddles of red muck, the ground crew stood ready with hoses that would pump another twenty-five hundred gallons of fire-smothering slurry into the belly of the Privateer. Originally a long-range Navy patrol bomber built for World War II, Fire Angel One had been stripped clean to make room for the massive tank that had been riveted within the plane’s belly.
Without waiting for Danny to cut the engines, the ground crew approached, each dragging a hose and looking like aliens from the red planet, because their clothing, hats, goggles, gloves and masks were covered with a sticky glaze of crimson slurry. It would take them only a few minutes to fill the tank to capacity.
“My turn to fly.” Rachel faced the old bomber pilot, raising her voice over the whoosh and splash of slurry pouring into the Privateer. “How much do you want to bet this is the most boring run of the season?”
“I’ll pass on that bet.” Danny turned his cap backward and pushed his sunglasses firmly onto the bridge of his crooked nose. “It’s back to the boob tube for me and engine rebuilds for you.”
“At least I’ve got something to do this winter.” Rachel had an engine to rebuild on an old C119 warplane for a collector in Nevada. Danny would have to wait until spring to pick up work.
Danny laughed, rising to switch seats. “Yeah. Better make this last run stellar, then, kid. Are you up for barnstorming the camp?” Danny was always suggesting risky deeds, probably because as a fighter pilot in Korea and Vietnam, he’d cheated death more than his share of times.
“Are you up for having your pilot’s license revoked?” Rachel groused as she climbed behind the pilot’s controls, wondering why she was so somber. Was it because she’d reawakened her grief over Missy’s death through telling Cole? Or was it that Cole’s shocked reaction wasn’t at all what she’d expected?
The slurry hoses quieted. The tank was sealed back up. With a wave, the men in red retreated to wait for the next plane.
Unaware of Rachel’s mood, Danny grinned, shoving his mirrored glasses on. “Where’s your sense of adventure? Life is meant to be lived. Let’s take to the air, kid!”
“WHO’S READY?” Jackson yelled at the other eighteen Silver Bend Hot Shots packing their gear in base camp.
Doc and O’Reilly, among the youngest of the crew, already had their iPod earphones on and were oblivious to Jackson’s question.
The Silver Bend Hot Shots had been given marching orders. The fire was almost at the mop-up stage. That meant that less-skilled crews with lower hourly rates could be utilized. And since Silver Bend wasn’t a Montana crew, they were among the first to be released and sent home. States took care of their own.
Their duffels were stuffed with dirty clothes and reeked of smoke. They’d been fed and assured their paychecks were in the mail. All that was left to do was to pack up, load up, gas up and head for Idaho. Still, they weren’t in their civvy gear yet. There was always a chance when you were on a fire that you’d be called back into the thick of things. And this fire had created its own weather almost every afternoon since they’d been here, wreaking havoc with predictions and putting lives in danger when the winds whipped flames to dangerous heights.
Even now Cole could feel the wind pick up and change direction.
At the roar of an airplane overhead, Cole looked up. It was one of those antique planes that the Forest Service kept threatening to ground because of performance issues, planes so old they had a high likelihood of crashing. Cole had no way of knowing if it was Rachel or not, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the plane. In some weird way, she was the only thing he had left of Missy. The sisters hadn’t looked alike, and they were as different as milk to wine, but it was a link Cole was reluctant to break now that he’d found Rachel again.
WITH A SIGH Rachel took out her camera and snapped a quick shot of the base camp as they flew overhead. She tucked the camera back into her utility vest pocket. When Rachel got home, she and Jenna would sit together in front of the computer and look at her pictures from the season. This year she’d got some spectacular shots from above of other tankers dumping their payloads on hot targets. Jenna always seemed to enjoy looking at her pictures.
Voices crackled urgently in her headset.
“Did you hear that?” Rachel shouted over the roar of the four prop engines.
“You heard right.” Danny grinned. “Wind’s shifted. There’s a crew that might be trapped if they don’t get help soon. This is no longer a milk run, kid.”
Rachel banked and brought the plane into a new trajectory. They were minutes away from the location—a deep slope in a narrow part of the valley. As approaches went, it would be easy. They’d have to fly as low as they could over the canopy of trees. It was the climb out that was going to be tricky. Not impossible for Danny and Rachel, but it would by no means be a cake walk.
Rachel flew over the drop site once, taking in the fire racing after the fleeing men and women in yellow shirts before losing them in thick plumes of smoke, examining the seamless horizon broken only by a lone pine towering forty feet above the main tree line.
“Not much time,” Rachel noted as she prayed that wasn’t Cole down there running for his life. As Rachel angled around for a final approach, she rejected the feeling of guilt for keeping the truth about Jenna from Cole.
“Don’t need much time if your aim’s good,” Danny said, always fearless.
“We’ve got to watch out for that granddaddy pine as we come out,” Rachel observed, scanning the gauges for any sign of stress in the Privateer. Everything looked normal.
She spared a quick glance at her latest picture of Jenna and Matt. Jenna smiled with the unworried expression of a preteen who hadn’t yet discovered boys. Matt’s grin had been known to melt the hearts of ice-cream store clerks.
Coming out of the turn, Rachel leveled out the plane before pushing it into a steep dive through the thickening smoke. Down, down, down they plummeted toward the flaming treetops. Rachel flew as if she had no fear. Part of her reveled when her stomach dropped at their rapid descent. Part of her worried about Jenna and Matt, orphaned back at home if Rachel ever miscalculated.
She wouldn’t disappoint her kids.
“Slow down. Don’t lose them in the smoke.” The voice of the attack boss, circling high overhead in a small Cessna, crackled through the airwaves. “You’re coming in pretty damn fast.”
“Don’t listen to him. He’s never flown a bird like this in his life,” Danny yelled, leaning forward as if that would help him see better through the smoke. “We need speed. More speed.”
Rachel agreed with Danny. They had to come in fast and slingshot out, even if they were breaking a few safety regulations by flying in near-blind conditions. She gave it more throttle.
The plane shuddered with anticipation. The air seemed thick with the heavy threat of danger, making it hard to breathe. Usually Rachel imagined a young Cole was there at her side on adrenaline-pumping runs like this, egging her on, past the fear and into a zone where she operated on instinct.
She couldn’t find that Cole today, couldn’t bring the image of the object of her teenage affections to mind. But Rachel didn’t let the fear hold her back or keep her from diving into the shrouded air space over the retreating crew, who might be consumed by flame if she didn’t slow the fire and create a path to safety.
Visibility dropped as smoke wrapped around them. Rachel craned her neck as she tried to see out. She had no time to acknowledge the fear that clenched her heart, no time for more than a fleeting thought of home.
Pockets appeared in the smoke, showing her the way, then disappeared and teased just at the edge of her vision. Common sense screamed for her to pull up, get out, but Rachel had a job to do.
She kept her hands steady. There’d be time to let the shakes and the what-ifs take over later.
“Almost there. Don’t let up.” Danny wouldn’t back off either. “And…now!”
With economy of motion, Rachel punched the button on the steering yoke and felt the first three drop doors shudder open. At their rate and angle of descent, the red slurry would fall at a ninety-degree angle. She’d planned this run to catch the front flank of the fire with her first drop, hoping it would slow, if not halt completely, the raging head of the beast.
“Right on target, kid. Hit it again,” Danny cried, peering down at the flaming forest.
Rachel released the final three doors, catching sight of some of the fleeing crew as she did so, hoping this drop would provide a safe escape route for them.
The Privateer was long gone by the time the slurry hit the ground.
The smoke ahead was dense and dark. Visibility dimmed as she entered the plume, then cleared, then dimmed again as Rachel threw the flaps to bank, forcing the plane into a blind move against their momentum, against gravity. The Privateer bucked and groaned in complaint. The cockpit was dim, the air ahead of them impenetrable to the eye.
The attack boss cursed over the airwaves. “Can’t see a damn thing. Where are you, Fire Angel?”
