Wildfire on the Skagit (Firehawks Book 9) by M. L. Buchman Read Free Book Online Page A

split.
    By the time they hit Day Five on the Deerness Fire in northern California, he’d been running at full tilt for over two weeks without a break; they all had. The Deerness finally laid down around midnight. Everyone had dropped where they stood and slept.
    Now it was just coming up dawn. Clear of smoke, the pines of the Shasta-Trinity National Forest were a soft wonderland. The Black ranged across three ridges, but already deer and squirrel were nosing around the edges. A Steller’s jay cocked its black crested crown at him to see if he had any food, then flitted off with a high-pitched skreeka! of disgust when he didn’t make some offering.
    “Tell me,” Akbar waved him over to help ready the gear for pickup.
    “Tell you what?” Evan knew exactly what, but he really didn’t want to talk about it.
    “Tell me why you’re trying to kill yourself on the fire or I’ll yank your rookie ass off the line. I can’t have you endangering the team.”
    That shocked Evan upright. Not just off the team. Not just away from Krista.
    But a danger to the team?
    God, no!
    That went against all his training both as a soldier and a firefighter.
    “Fuck!” he dropped down to sit on a boulder at the edge of the stream where they’d been rolling up hoses—getting ready for the helicopter to airlift them back to the local airfield. Not again!
    Akbar sat down beside him. He was a little man, a head shorter than Evan, but there was no question who ruled on a fire. There were jokes that he was a direct descendant of Agni, the Hindu god of fire. And knowing Akbar, he’d been the one to start the rumors because what did a bunch of Oregon smokies know from Hindu gods.
    “You started clean,” Akbar told him. “Damn good on the fire up by Mt. Rainier. Something happened there. You got even better, but you also got crazier. Now I know from crazy, jumped fire with TJ who wouldn’t quit until a tree almost took him out after forty years as a smokie…and still he wanted back in. But you got some other-level shit going on.”
    Evan stared down at his blackened hands; soot ingrained in every pore and knuckle line despite wearing gloves. He felt sick to his stomach and cold with a sudden sweat that he’d be the one to put the team at risk.
    “You aren’t gone scary yet, Evan. But you gotta ease back. You keep driving like you are and you’re gonna hurt yourself.”
    If he hurt himself, that would take others off the fire to assist him. If he hurt someone else in the process…
    Unacceptable, soldier!
    “I’ll…” what? “Fix it, Akbar. Sorry to spook you.”
    “Long way from spooking me, Rookie,” Akbar slapped his shoulder cheerfully. “Just consider this my early warning system. For spooky you gotta meet my wife,” his laugh was always easy and twice his size. He went back to rolling hose.
    “Unpredictable?” Evan struggled to catch his breath, to focus on something other than his one fear.
    “Duh! Woman married me of all damn fool things to do.” Akbar picked up the sixty-pound Mark III water pump as if it weighed nothing. He carried it to the stack of gear they’d been mounding near the helispot where an MHA helicopter would land to clear all of their equipment off the hillside. “She got me to stop dead in my tracks and never look back. If that ain’t some kinda spooky magic, nothing is.”
    That wasn’t the kind of problem Evan was having. He wasn’t fighting his attraction to Krista. He was in pitched battle against bringing his shit into her world. That first taste of her had turned an idle curiosity into a heap of need that was fast burning up his insides.
    Well, hiding sure as hell wasn’t working. It was like he’d forgotten his training. Green Berets don’t hide from problems, they fix ‘em.
    Time to fix this, Ev.
    # # #
    Krista sat on the floor, slouching against the rear bulkhead of the DC-3, and tried to let her body unwind. The return flight from the Deerness Fire to MHA’s base up at Mount Hood