Wildfire at Dawn (7 page)

“It does,” she acknowledged. What kind of alone time did she want with him? Not a hard question. “Or I could cook? I have a cabin about halfway between here and your airfield.”

That stopped him. The slow smile went away, but it wasn’t replaced by a leer as she’d half expected after meeting him at the Doghouse. Instead his voice was soft. “You sure, Laura? Really sure?”

She nodded, not quite trusting her voice. This wasn’t like her. None of this was like her. But she was more sure after seeing his thoughtful reaction.

He looked up at the Lodge for a long moment.

Laura was half afraid that he was going to refuse her. It was too fast. She was being wanton or needy or—

“I wonder,” Akbar said slowly, as if testing the idea. Then he aimed that smile at her and she felt herself melt inside. “I wonder if the Lodge does take-out?”

“Don’t trust my cooking?” She tried to feel offended, but take-out sounded wonderful.

“Don’t want to waste one moment of an evening with you in the kitchen.”

She smiled back at him. That too sounded wonderful.

# # #

Akbar followed her pickup about twenty minutes along the highway. It was a heavy duty with a mid-bed hitch that he bet matched a big horse trailer. At the moment it had a couple bales of hay which occasionally tossed little bits of dry grass at him in disdain of his own smaller Jeep.

The first ten miles were winding their way off the high spot where Timberline Lodge perched well up Mount Hood’s southern flank. She pulled off on a paved narrow two-lane that looked deserted, maybe used by logging trucks. A mile in, she turned up a dirt lane completely overshadowed by trees. Another hundred yards.

There sat the prettiest little log cabin he’d seen in a long time. It was built of well-chinked stout logs with a generous front porch beneath a deep eave. In all but the most slashing of northwest rains you’d be able to sit outside. A metal roof in a whimsical brass color rather than the more expected green topped off the picture. He won his own bet when he spotted the horse trailer parked alongside a tidy, steel-clad pole barn.

They climbed down and met by the steps up to the cabin’s front door, but he wasn’t ready to go in just yet.

“Mom used to guide from here, but when Dad got the job in town and she broke a hip in a bad fall, they gave it to me. We built the cabin with timber off this land,” she waved at the two-acre clearing. Some of it was a garden, but most of it was a horse paddock and the small barn.

Akbar squatted down and scooped up a handful of the dark soil, soft and damp against his palm. Good stuff. He brushed it off on his jeans.

“I winter the horses down here, summers up at the Lodge. We own twenty acres around. I’m buying a brood mare this fall if I can. Have to expand the barn next year.”

Akbar was in love. There was a small creek nearby. He didn’t see it, but he could hear it. The trees were alive with bird life. The circular clearing was so perfect that it looked as if someone had taken a cookie cutter to the forest then planted the cabin in the middle. The cabin was at the very north end of the clearing, so it would get sun much of the day from having the clearing to the south, despite the tall stands of timber that isolated it from the world.

The trees. He itched to get in here with a saw. Douglas fir always had a lot of dead lower branches that clung on for years, and Laura’s trees were no exception. To help protect the place from fire, he would start with clearing the deadwood off the trunks.

“What? Are you just going to stand there?”

“Yes! This place is amazing, Space Ace!” He could see she was pleased, but he wasn’t doing it for that reason. It was amazing. This was the kind of place you wanted to take a woman to charm the pants off them, and here he was at her place. Turnabout might be fair play, but he wasn’t so sure he was ready for it.

She led him to the front porch, raised a few steps off the ground. He could imagine her sitting here beneath the long eave on rainy afternoons with a good book. She set the take-out containers on the low table in front of a pair of Adirondack chairs just like the Lodge’s.

“I stole a couple of their old ones when they were replacing them last season.”

“Still look good to me. Shall we try them out?”

“I’ve got to shower first. Wash this day off me.”

Akbar tried to read the situation, suddenly a bit uneasy. Not a single thing today was going by any of his usual patterns and he was adrift without them. Had Laura just extended an invitation? Or did she merely want to take a shower? He didn’t know how to read her. With the women he found in town, the messages and intentions were clear. With Laura—

She took his hand and led him inside. Okay, he liked that message. Inside the cabin was as neat as outside. The front half of the interior was a comfortable living room to the left and a really serious kitchen to the right. His mom would like this kitchen, it was totally different from their one in Seattle, but it had a good feel and a serious collection of cool kitchen gadgets.

Afternoon sunlight filtered in and lit the stout plank flooring and throw rugs. Two bedrooms toward the back with a bathroom between.

He slowed her down. He wasn’t about to ask if she was sure again; he wasn’t a total idiot. Gorgeous brunette drags you into her house, you don’t complain. But she was being a little manic, a little too intense—even for him. And he’d been with some pretty wild and wound up ladies.

“Whoa for a second, Space Ace. Just whoa.”

Still not speaking, she tugged on his hand again as he came to a stop.

He used that grasp to pull her back toward him. Her eyes were too wide, her breathing too fast. She was going shocky, now, an hour or more after it was all said and done. How tightly wound was her control?

Unsure what to do about it, he slowly pulled her up against him, then wrapped his hands around her back and simply held her.

At first she tried to turn it into something more. His libido was getting majorly upset with his ignoring her actions, but he forced himself to just hold her, nothing more. Hold her and wait.

Sure enough, the shakes set in. He usually didn’t hang around for this kind of shit, but to see Laura’s strength cracking under the strain was so wrong. Still at a loss, he waited.

She wrapped her arms around his neck and leaned her face down on his shoulder. Her breathing got worse before it got better.

“Oh god. I almost lost them. I came that close. If you hadn’t been there—”

“You’d have found a way, Space Ace. You were magnificent.”

“But—”

“But nothing. Mr. Hoity Masterson might have gotten a bit more bunged up, nothing less that he deserved, but he only had a few more feet to fall. Tiffany and her dad dug in the same time we did. You’d have managed fine.”

After a moment more, she nodded against his shoulder. She didn’t let go, but the shakes began to recede.

It took a good and experienced person to assess what had happened, learn the lesson, and acknowledge that. That she did it as fast as any firefighter was pretty damn impressive. And he had to admit, his body was convinced it was a serious turn on. That, and how she melted against him as the shakes went away.

“Now, about that shower…” Because if he didn’t get this woman naked soon he was going to whimper or do something else equally lame.

She nodded, but clung on a while longer. He didn’t complain then, or later when she led him into the bathroom.

# # #

Laura had never brought anyone here to the cabin; she’d finished building it post-Elgin. She’d certainly never stripped in her bathroom with a man only inches away. Nor ever been so intensely aware of the man in question.

She couldn’t stop herself from turning her back as she pulled her shirt off over her head.

At his sharp hiss, she looked over her shoulder at him.

He was looking down at her waist. His touch was light, but it stung where he slid a fingertip over her skin. He turned her slowly around, looking at her belly, not her sports bra. She looked down as well. The line above her hip bones was abraded a bright, road-rash red.

It took her a moment to figure it out. “The harness. Mr. Jerk was heavy.”

“Are you hurt anywhere else?”

She flexed her shoulders, which weren’t bad, just incredibly sore. And one of her knees had been kind of sticking to her jeans in a pretty uncomfortable fashion.

“Uh,” she felt old, weary, and banged up. “I’m a mess.” He was going to beg off. She could tell. He was too decent a guy and he’d beg off. Or he was a jerk who didn’t want to deal with a damaged woman. Either way, he was about to be gone.

She didn’t want him to go. Not after the way it felt when he’d held her. She’d never felt so safe before, not even when they’d been up on the mountain and he’d been clipped in beside her. And definitely not after the way he’d kissed her this morning.

Perhaps reading her mood, he stepped back enough to pull off his own shirt then gave her an up and down look complete with an overdone leer.

“If you look this good when you’re a mess, Space Ace, I can’t wait to see you when you aren’t.”

“Stick around, Fire Boy.”

“I just might do that, Space Ace.”

Then they finished undressing each other.

Laura had seen her fair share of fit men, but Johnny Akbar Jepps really was the Great. His chest and arms were well-muscled, not like a weight-lifter, but like a top athlete. And his legs, no wonder he’d been able to run the way he had. They looked piston strong. He wasn’t merely fit, he was practically carved. Muscles shifted in ripples beneath smooth skin. He actually took her breath away.

They didn’t make love in the shower. But they learned a lot about each other’s bodies. The soap was a good excuse for that. More than once she forgot how to breathe as he did miraculous things with a washcloth. She’d never been with a man who felt so good. And when he kissed her, with the water sluicing down over them, they could have been standing under a hot springs waterfall for how romantic it felt. Not once did he grab and squeeze, or forget and rub his hands too hard over where the harness had abraded her.

Having someone towel her off like he was buffing the final sheen into a marble statue left her skin tingling and alive. She wanted to drag him straight into the bedroom.

Instead, leaving their clothes on the floor, he led her back out onto the porch. She protested at the door, but he dragged her stumbling across the threshold and out into the open air. The late afternoon sunlight slanted warmly onto porch. The to-go containers still sat on the small table.

“I need clothes,” she once again tried to go inside, but he closed the front door.

“You don’t get to cover one inch of that glorious skin. It’s just begging to be admired.”

He conducted her to her chair as if he were a maître d’hôtel, and she wasn’t buck naked and bruised. Of course your average maître d’ probably didn’t serve with manners befitting a better than decent restaurant while sporting an impressive arousal. He dished out skewers of organic beef with peppers, mushrooms, and caramelized onions over wild rice onto paper plates.

Succumbing to self consciousness and a need to cover herself, she placed a napkin over her lap and did her best to stomp down on a desire to giggle at the ridiculous situation. But Akbar didn’t stare at her breasts, well, not much. Just enough to make her think they might be very pleasing to his eye. Mostly he looked at her face and her nerves settled slowly.

“So,” she had to say something. “Tell me about Fire Boy.”

“I’d rather know about Judy Jenson.”

“Nope. You already got enough of that from my mom.” Had she really just mentioned her mom while sitting naked on her front porch?

“No I didn’t.”

She crossed her arms over her bare breasts, making it clear he wasn’t going to get to look at them again until he answered.

He slapped a hand to his chest as if mortally wounded. “Okay, you win.”

“That was way too easy,” she complained.

“No. Your breasts are that magnificent. I have no power against them.”

“Yet we’re out here eating instead of curled up in bed together, which was my idea.”

Foregoing his fork, Akbar ate a piece of the beef right off his skewer, taking the meat neatly between his teeth and then pulled the skewer out to the side. “I’m a practical guy. I think we need fuel for stamina.”

“Are you feeling weak, oh Johnny the Great?”

“Only when I look at you.”

“Far too corny,” she declared and folded her arms over her breasts again. And once more he slapped his hand to his heart as if slain.

“Okay, I give. I give.” He sat back in the chair, holding his plate and crossing his ankle over his knee. He appeared so comfortable in his own skin.

She wanted to ask how he did that. She leaned back against the chair, but the wood felt cool and bumpy against her back. It made her want to shiver even though the sun was warm against her front.

“Little Johnny Jepps always wanted to be an astronaut.”

“What went wrong? Afraid of heights?”

He rolled his eyes at her, then offered a knowing wink.

Oh right, he jumped out of airplanes for a living.

“Then he wanted to fly jets. For a brief while he considered being a pioneer in a covered wagon, but he kept getting cast as the Indian.” He made pretend feathers behind his head. “Wrong kind of Indian.”

She served herself another skewer. A deer wandered into the clearing and stared at her nakedness. She squinched her nose at it and it looked away, but took its time crossing the grassy yard past her fenced garden as if it was window shopping.

“Mahatma Gandhi was ancient history, so not much to aspire to in the world-changing department. Besides, I grew up in Seattle where the oppression has mainly to do with parental curfews and finishing my meals. Mom was pretty big on table manners as well. Dad teaches English at University of Washington and writes odd bits of literary tales that do exactly what odd bits of literary tales are supposed to do, go forth and not sell. Mom always hoped I’d follow in Dad’s footsteps.”

“A writer?”

“Not that. Dad was five-eleven and married a very nice Indian girl who was five-foot two. I took after her side of the family which is a crime I only forgive her at Christmas and holidays because it cheers her up, poor thing. All her life, stuck with a tall husband, a short son, and a very nice little Indian restaurant of her own right outside the University District.”