Page 194 of Her Reluctant Hero
“One shift, and then you find another crew for her.”
Jen inclined her head. “We can discuss it.” She turned back to her maps. “Is that all?”
Was it? What else could he say to the woman he hadn’t seen in three years? He couldn’t let her go without a parting shot. “Give Doug my best.”
The shocked expression on her face gave him a millisecond of pleasure before he shut that down as well. “You mean it?” Her voice was breathless with hope.
He wished he could be the type of man who would mean it, but he was a bastard. “No. He already got it.”
He pivoted and strode out of the tent.
Fire season was usually hell, but damn, what had he done to deserve this? Maybe this was God’s way of telling him it was time to get out of the Forest Service. Sure, great, but after punching line for twenty years there wasn’t another job he knew as well.
He swore he wouldn’t live in a city again, so being an EMT full time was out. The only way he could bear his time in Albuquerque now was knowing that once spring arrived he’d be back in the mountains. He’d be damned if he’d sit behind some desk in the Bureau of Land Management and send kids into situations out of his control. He was a Hot Shot till the end. Nothing would take him off the line.
So God could just keep on sending those messages. Gabe Cooper was sticking it out.
Peyton Michaels—what kind of name was Peyton, anyway?—sat smugly on a picnic table, waiting for him, her pack still over one shoulder, her ponytail over the other.
He jabbed a finger at her. “If I agree to this, it’s for one shift and one shift only. You do your job without question, understood?”
Those chocolaty eyes went wide. “Yes, sir.”
“I mean it, Michaels. My crew is the best for a reason, and I’d like to keep them in one piece. The way we work is they do what I tell them to do. Got it? And you call me ‘sir’ again, the issue is off the table.” He slashed his hand through the air for emphasis.
“Of course. Gabe.” She even said his name with a smile in her voice.
He lifted his eyebrow. She had guts. Hell, how could she have anything less, walking into a fire camp and asking to go on the line with the best crew? But as a reporter for Up to the Minute weekly news magazine, she knew something about being the best too.
“I meant the part about questions. I don’t give interviews.”
She angled her head in a way that made him feel like an idiot for saying it. “I wasn’t going to ask for one. This is a look-see assignment.”
He grunted. “You have gear?”
She nodded and he could practically feel the energy, the excitement rolling off her. Her body all but quivered with anticipation but her expression remained cool.
“Let’s go,” he said through his teeth, and ignored the little skip of triumph as she followed him to gather his own gear before they met his crew at the edge of the camp.
Peyton joined the middle of the disciplined single-file group. They headed out of camp on the dusty path curving up the mountain between rocks and shrubs. They’d be walking to a remote site. While the energy pulsed through her now, she hoped to maintain her strength up on the line.
As they got farther up the mountain, the unit shifted into bunches of three and four, and made their own path through the high grass and scrub, their excitement growing as they drew closer to the fire. Other crews had been this direction; someone had pounded down the grass before them.
Peyton turned her attention to the man who held such respect from the firefighting community, his crew, yet kept himself apart, plunging through the knee-deep brush alone.
His matter-of-fact, unapologetic manner reminded her of Dan. The recognition had hit her like a blow to her chest, bruising her heart and making breathing difficult. In her mind she saw her husband standing before the brass at his last debriefing, so handsome in his dress blues, so confident as he justified his SWAT team’s decision to invade that warehouse without a search warrant to stop the drug deal. If only he’d been reprimanded, had suffered some kind of consequence, maybe he’d still be alive. Instead, he’d been applauded, rewarded, and had returned to the job that killed him a year later.
Her “In the Line of Duty” articles had quickly gained recognition and popularity. She’d gone from Coast Guard rescue cruisers to EMT crews stationed in bad neighborhoods to this mountain. But still, nothing she’d written so far had shed any light on what the job fulfilled in Dan that life hadn’t.
The story on Cooper was a departure. Her other articles focused more on the jobs than on the men and women who performed them. She’d probably lost a lot of depth taking that route, but had needed the emotional distance as she grieved for Dan. Could she afford to give it up now?
While she worked up the nerve to invade Cooper’s space—she couldn’t very well write his story from this distance—she zeroed in on a conversation between two of the men who walked with chainsaws slung over their shoulders. Her own pack was heavy with her tools, weighted with bottled water, and these guys carried the machines like they were made of Styrofoam. Sheesh. Their ability so impressed her that it took her a minute to tune in to their conversation.
“You’ve been with him long enough to know how he feels about reporters.”
They were gossiping like old women about Gabe. Calling him an old man. Please. Still, intrigued, she moved closer.
“Why would she bust his balls after, what’s it been, three years? Hell, she married someone else.”
