Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
They made the rest of the drive into the harsh smoke and falling ash in silence. The flames flickered on both sides of them now. The air was hot; Lyndie’s mood somber. She was sure Griffin felt just as somber.
Despite the coyote incident, he had one hand sure and easy on the wheel, the other on the gearshift, and used both with a confidence and skill she could admire.
Given how distraught he’d been yesterday, he seemed to be holding up just fine now as they drove into the fire. That was if she didn’t acknowledge the way his jaw kept bunching, or how his tan seemed faded the closer they got. But then again, she already knew he was tough, and a true survivor.
She imagined his training had had a good deal to do with that, and his character, as well. He was a save-the-world sort of guy…which meant his terrible losses, the ones he’d started to tell her about, would have been taken doubly as hard.
She’d known he’d dealt with something big, something horrific in his past, but she hadn’t imagined the truth, that people had died, his people. The raw emotion she’d glimpsed in his eyes when he’d said that would have brought her to her knees if she’d been standing.
Is that what made him so serious? So intense? Is that what made him fight the attraction between them, what made him want to push her away at every turn? In that case, on a much different scale, she supposed she understood. She’d lost people in her life too.
They were nearly there, surrounded by fire, when her cell phone vibrated in her pocket. Sam. “Yes,” she said when she answered. “I’m still on the clock. Your clock.”
“So you did stay to translate.” There was a smile in Sam Logan’s voice. There was always a smile in Sam’s voice.
“Nina wasn’t up for it.” She squinted into the smoke. “If I hadn’t stayed, your man here would have been pretty much stuck.”
“And so you jumped right in. You keep trying to tell me this is just a job for you, Lyndie, and you know what? I don’t buy it.”
“It’s the bottom line. Don’t forget, you’re paying me by the hour while I’m here dreaming of a fun, easy flight to Catalina, and I’m not as cheap as Nina.”
He laughed. “Bill me.”
“I always do, Sam, I always do.”
“Yeah, just come back in one piece.”
She knew Sam Logan ran Hope International on pure adrenaline and love. He paid his pilots, but the various experts they flew all volunteered their time and went unpaid. Sam felt they made enough money on their own time, and mostly, he was right.
What he wasn’t quite right about, however, was that while his heart might be big enough for the entire world, not everyone felt the same excitement for their job as he did.
Because for some, like Lyndie, this was just a job.
Yes, she got to help people, and that made her feel good, but she also got to fly for a living, and picked when and where she went.
Not many had that freedom, and she was grateful, but at the moment, she was also just a little resentful at having to stay when she’d wanted, needed, to be alone.
Resentful at all the feelings that surfaced when she thought about possibly losing San Robledo, or the feelings that Griffin seemed to cause within her.
“Take good care of that firefighter too,” Sam said. “Maybe we can get him back sometime.”
Lyndie glanced at Griffin. His body was tense, his expression growing more and more unnerved as they pulled off the main road. The fire had progressed even farther toward town than she’d imagined.
Would this weekend help him forget…or remember? “I don’t know about a repeat on this one, Sam.”
“Hey, once they get a taste of the philanthropist lifestyle, they love it. We don’t have anyone as skilled as he in what he does. You can talk him into it.”
Griffin turned his head toward her.
She met his eyes and thought…no one talked this man into anything he didn’t want to do.
And yet his brother had. “Prepare yourself for a very large bill from me. Bye, Sam.” She disconnected while he was still chuckling.
“Your boss?”
She shoved her hair out of her face, only to have it fly right back in it. “He wants me to talk you into doing this again sometime.”
The sound that escaped him might have been a laugh, or a tortured groan.
“That’s what I thought,” she said.
“Hey, you’re no more thrilled to be here than I am.”
“I just wanted some alone time.”
“You like that? Being alone?”
It was what she was used to. “Doesn’t everyone?”
He considered that. “It’s new for me. But being alone right now would be better than…”
“Being here?”
“Yeah.”
She’d gotten that loud and clear from him, so why it felt hurtful to hear made no sense at all. The engine roared up the road, as did a sudden wind, and the noise of that and of the fire seemed as loud as thunder.
Griffin parked next to the water trucks and tossed her a bandanna. “Tie it over your mouth.” He turned off the engine. “You have your inhaler?”
“And a spare.”
They got out of the Jeep, with Griffin looking more and more distant as they moved toward a group of men who had just gotten there themselves.
They all greeted each other somberly, and Griffin pulled out his Garmin, bringing up the screen of the map.
He pointed to the lines he’d drawn in yesterday, indicating the fire’s perimeter.
Two men came forward and pointed to where they were now, indicating how much the fire had grown.
Griffin let out a long breath, then made adjustments to the map accordingly. He looked at his weather kit, then started talking. He talked slowly and clearly, and always waited for Lyndie to translate before moving on to the next point in his plan of action.
And he did have a plan of action, one that he’d clearly thought out meticulously and precisely.
“As yesterday, we’ll use the river as one line of defense,” he said, pointing to the waterline. “The sheer rock wall as a second. But we’ll have to start digging new lines, from here.” He pointed to the area just south of them, above the town. “The fire is strong here.”
Everyone nodded. They understood.
“Long, hot, hard day,” he said quietly to Lyndie. “I had Tom load the back of the Jeep with gallons of drinking water, along with more shovels and gear. He’s also hunting up more men. Now that they know what I need, we can make do if you want to go back.”
“Go back?”
“Seriously, Lyndie. This is incredibly exhausting work. Almost all of it will be manual labor clearing lines. You don’t want to do that again.”
She hadn’t met many men as tough and rugged as this man, who were also gallant. Why that felt like a plus, she had no idea. She didn’t want a tough and rugged and gallant man in her life.
She didn’t want any man in her life, at least not for more than a night, maybe two. And she especially didn’t want one who thought he knew best for her. “How do you know what I want?”
He stared at her, let his broad shoulders sag. “This is not a good time to go all stubborn on me.”
“Because you know best?”
A gust of wind hit them, plastering his shirt to his torso, emphasizing hard muscle. He was big, solid, and quickly becoming far too familiar.
She pulled him around the side of the first truck, away from the eyes of the others. “Look, I know this is just some misguided sense of responsibility. You’re afraid I’m going to get hurt.”
“Hell, yeah, I’m afraid you’re going to get hurt.” He gently touched a bruise on her jaw, courtesy of their fall from yesterday. “I’m afraid you’re going to get dead. Can’t you just listen to me and go the hell away?”
She was pretty much a stranger to him, and yet he cared, deeply. Not many felt that way about a person they didn’t know, but he did. Another plus about him, if she’d been counting pluses. She hadn’t.
She’d been counting minuses and she would continue to do so. One, he was pigheaded. Two, he was single-minded to the point of making her blood boil, and three—the biggest minus of all—he apparently wasn’t capable of mindless sex. Damn him.
Then, totally disarming all her thoughts, he gripped one of her hips in his hand. The other cupped her face, stroking her skin with his thumb, the look in his eyes haunting and melting all at once. “Please, Lyndie. Go back.”
She covered his hand with her own. She understood he needed her to go, but she couldn’t. “I’m sorry.”
He stared at her, then dropped his hands from her. “You’re not going to listen to me.”
“No. But hopefully you’ll listen to me, because I’m only going to have this out with you once. I’m not going back. I’m not going anywhere but up that hill with a shovel in my hand.”
“You aren’t trained.”
“And neither are more than half the men waiting for you to help them fight this fire. You know that from yesterday, I’m here, I’m staying. So…” She gave him her toughest smile. “Lead the way, boss. Let’s do this.”
Turning his head, he studied the trail they were going to take, the men waiting for him to lead, and closed his eyes for a moment. Then he opened them, kissed her once, hard, and nodded grimly. “Just stay safe.”
“I intend to.”
“Okay. Let’s do this.”
No reason to point out that he looked as if he’d rather face an execution squad, and when he didn’t move, she merely gently nudged him along to face the day ahead.
Brody sat in the living room in South Carolina, where once upon a time he’d leapt from couch to couch like a wild puppy, where he’d kissed his first girl at age thirteen and had gotten caught by his grinning brother…
where he’d told his parents one year ago that Griffin was gone and no one knew where.
He let out a careful breath and smiled, because finally he had good news. “I found him.”
A gasp shuddered out of his mother, and she reached blindly for his father’s hand, clenching it tight. “You found—” her voice broke. “You found Griffin?”
“The one and only.” His parents sat side by side, Phyllis and Ray Moore, his father in his “retired” clothes of stiff jeans and a cardigan sweater his mother had probably insisted he wear, his mother in her fashionable capri pants and carefully ironed blouse.