Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [63]
She nodded. He bent and pressed his chest to her back. Skin on skin took her back, five years gone since anyone had touched her there. Tonight it seemed both yesterday and forever as she found her way. He drew her earlobe gently between his lips.
She gasped.
“If we’re going to do this,” Deering murmured, “we need to stay quiet.”
He slipped his hands along the sides of her breasts. Boldly, he moved his body against hers.
“If we’re going to do this,” Clare returned in a whisper, “we need . . . “
He stretched to reach the zippered pocket of his flight suit and drew out a small sealed packet.
Something went still inside her and she rolled onto her back. “Did you plan this?” she asked quietly.
Deering raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “A good scout is always prepared.”
What did it matter if he had considered the option? Hadn’t she?
Deftly, he unhooked the front clasp of her brassiere. “Admit it,” he entreated. “It would be hell to stop now.”
From outside the tent came a shout. “Blowup!”
“Goddammit!” Deering’s voice sounded vicious, like Clare’s own stab of anger. How dare fire interrupt what she’d so carefully committed to?
She and Deering dressed rapidly without looking at each other. He opened the tent flap to put on his boots. In the Mink Creek’s eerie light, his sharp profile was set as he patted his pocket for a Marlboro. In the flare of the match, she was astonished to see what looked like pain in his eyes.
Clare pulled on her boots without lacing them and scrambled out of the tent. Looking at Turret Mountain, she was shocked by the Mink Creek, driven downslope so rapidly that she could see the front moving through the treetops. Smoke mushroomed into the night sky, blotting out the peak. The back of her neck prickled beneath a brush of breeze blowing toward the fire. In minutes, she knew it would become a gale feeding the convection cell.
A hundred yards away, on the opposite bank of Howell Creek, a group of night shift hotshots wearing helmet stickers that identified them as Californians, emerged from the woods. In brisk single file, they carried shovels or Pulaskis. Bringing up the rear, the sawyers carried chain saws.
The middle-aged woman at the head of the column slogged into the creek, pulled off her hard hat, and dipped up water to pour over her short gray hair. She cupped her hands to her mouth and bellowed again, “It’s a blowup!”
A dark-haired man of considerable girth appeared. Clare recognized Hebert Patout, the spike camp commander who had greeted her and Deering earlier in the dining tent. Hebert had patted his stomach and forked up another mouthful of ribeye. “This steak, now, she is not so good. When the fire season end, you come to me and ma frere Mousson’s restaurant in New Iberia, then we feast?”
Now Hebert looked up at the burning mountain. “Mon Dieu,” he muttered, tucking his shirt into his pants.
The breeze freshened and became a steady wind, sucked toward the fire by convection. Hebert produced a small, hand-held anemometer, the three cups atop the control box rotating rapidly. It reminded Clare of a toy, but the reading of thirty-five miles per hour was no child’s play. Although the Mink Creek was over half a mile away, Clare bet it could reach the camp in less than an hour.
The woman who led the hotshots reported rapidly to Hebert. The laid-back gourmand with whom Clare and Deering had dined was transformed. “I’m calling an evacuation.” The big man clapped a hand onto Deering’s shoulder and ordered, “We need your chopper, now.”
Clare waited for Deering to say the Huey was out of commission. Instead, he took off downhill at a run.
Within a minute, someone was banging a spoon against a metal coffeepot, the universal camp signal for 4:30 reveille. By Clare’s watch, it was one-fifteen. The nylon walls flapped as if the tent were panting. Three short blasts on an airhorn sounded an alarm that could mean anything from a grizzly in camp to the approaching fire. A bullhorn added to confusion. Cutting in and out, the shrill feedback made the message sound like, “Fire . . .