Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [67]
They’d mopped up all day; turning ashes with their Pulaskis and putting out hot spots with the backpack tanks known as piss pumps. Grueling and demanding, but not dangerous. At the end of it, the press had been on hand while she provided first aid for minor burns and the usual foot maintenance.
Two days since she’d done the same at the Mink Creek spike camp and gone to bed in the same turquoise pants and bra, washed out last night in her cabin’s small sink.
She wanted to despise Deering, but it was like he’d said. Not that simple.
It wasn’t like her to jump into . . . a sleeping bag with a man she knew no better than she did him. At the time, though, it had seemed an inevitable, impulsive part of summer. It was as though she’d left behind her sense of stability, the self who wanted to keep things set for her daughter.
If Devon moved out when she turned eighteen, what would Clare have to focus on? Not two months ago, she’d have answered without hesitation that the Houston Fire Department would receive her undivided attention. Now she wasn’t sure about anything.
What would she do when she saw Deering again? Cut him dead, or let his eyes entreat her? Just thinking of his long torso sliding over her back started heat coursing in her. If not for the blowup, she would have turned over beneath him.
If only Deering hadn’t lied.
Looking at the filtered stars, she remembered Steve Haywood’s love for the night sky over Yellowstone. In a way, the simple touch of his hand had been more moving than Deering’s sensual overtures. In Steve, she felt the same deep and lonely melancholy that often overtook her late at night.
Clare took a deliberate breath and closed her eyes. Against the backdrop of her eyelids, she saw the endless undulation of flames.
Atop the Washburn lookout, Steve turned the pages of an interview with a Nez Perce warrior. The man related seeing his mother trampled to death by a white man driving a wagon through her property. The interloper had been cutting wood for fence posts when she challenged him.
Steve knew about seeing your loved ones die. With Susan and Christa gone, he was a man without an anchor. He lifted his mug and grimaced at the acrid bite of cold decaf.
He pushed aside the kerosene lamp he preferred over harsher battery-operated lights and stepped out onto the walkway surrounding the lookout. Over the rail went the last of his coffee and he set the mug down. When the long summer twilight of the Northern Rockies gave way to velvet darkness, he found that substituting decaf or sipping at water did not satisfy his habit of having a glass in his hand. He still wanted a drink.
A check of his watch said he had read long into the night. Three o’clock and all seemed well, but to the northeast, the Clover-Mist illuminated the underside of smoke clouds. Overhead were the stars, but even with a new moon, the Milky Way’s trail was muted. He remembered it that way from when he was stationed at Interior in D.C.
There, his future had been laid out like Washington’s street system, wide smooth thoroughfares to success. A house with a green lawn that sloped to the Potomac, the start of Christa’s college fund, a recent promotion that came with a government car.
Life was narrower now and rough as a wilderness trail.
The reddish sky reminded him how Clare said the Houston lights also washed out the stars.
Where was she tonight? When she’d come to the mountain, the sight of her had set off a bubbling simmer of well-being that he hadn’t felt in a long time. She’d touched his hand.
At the rate things were going, she’d go back to Texas and he’d never see her again. That was probably just as well, but the prospect left a little aching void in his chest.
Due north, a light flickered in the sky as though a switch had been thrown and quickly extinguished. A gust hit the tower and the window glass shuddered. Steve’s cup leaped off the rail to shatter against the deck.
He sniffed the air. There was no hint of humidity, but maybe this storm would be the one to