Chasing Fire

closer.
    “Give it a minute.”
    “We’ve got to get started.”
    “Yeah, yeah. Where’s my coffee, woman?”
    “Very funny.” Actually, it did make her lips twitch. “Back off.”
    “You’ll note I’m the one still in his assigned space, and you’re the one who scooted over and wrapped around me. But am I complaining?”
    “I guess I got cold.”
    He turned his head to kiss the top of hers. “You feel plenty warm to me.”
    “You know, Gull, this isn’t some romantic camping trip in the mountains. We’ve got a full day’s mop-up ahead of us.”
    “Which I’m happy to put off for another couple minutes while I fantasize we’re about to have wake-up sex on our romantic camping trip in the mountains. After which you’ll make me coffee and fry me up some bacon and eggs, while wearing Daisy Duke shorts and one of those really skinny tank jobs. After that I have to wrestle the bear that lumbers into camp. Naturally, I dispatch him after a brutal battle. And after that you tenderly nurse my wounds, and after that , we have more sex.”
    She didn’t snuggle, Rowan thought, and charm cut no ice with her. So why was she snuggling, and why was she charmed? “That’s an active fantasy life you’ve got there.”
    “Don’t leave home without it.”
    “What kind of bear?”
    “It has to be a grizzly or what’s the point?”
    “And I suppose I’m wearing stilettos with my Daisy Dukes.”
    “Again, what would be the point otherwise?”
    “Well, all that sex and cooking and tending your wounds made me hungry.” She pushed away, sat up. “Twenty minutes in a hot, bubbling Jacuzzi, followed by a hot stone massage. That’s my morning fantasy.”
    Rowan dug into her pack for an energy bar. Devoured it while she studied him. He’d scrubbed some of the dirt off his face, but there was plenty left, and his hair looked like he’d used it to mop the basement floor.
    Then she looked away, to the mountains, the forest, shimmering away under the bright yellow sun. Who needed fantasies, she thought, when you could wake up here?
    “Get moving, rook.” She gave him a light slap on the leg. “The morning’s wasting.”
    Gull helped break out some of the paracargo so he could get to a breakfast MRE—and more importantly, the coffee. He dropped down next to Dobie.
    “How’d it go for you?”
    “Son, it was the hardest day of my young life.” Dobie drenched his hash browns and bacon with Tabasco before shoveling them in as if they were about to be banned. “And maybe the best. You think you know,” he added, wagging the bacon, “but you don’t. You can’t know till you do.”
    “She gave you a few kisses.”
    Dobie reached up to rub the burns on the back of his neck. “Yeah, she got in a couple licks. I thought when she started raining fire we might be cooked. Just for a minute. But we beat her back down. You ought to see Trigger. Piece of wood blew back off a snag he was taking down. Got him right here.” Dobie tapped a finger to the side of his throat. “When he yanked it out, the hole it left looked like he’d been stabbed with a jackknife.”
    “I didn’t hear about that.”
    “It happened after your team hightailed it toward the spot on the ridge. Blood all over. So he slaps some cotton on it, tapes it up and hits the next snag. It made me think, if I got cooked, I’d be cooked with the best there is.”
    “And now we get to sit here and eat breakfast with this view.”
    “Can’t knock it with a hammer,” Dobie said, and grabbed another MRE. “What’re you going to do about that woman?”
    He didn’t have to ask what woman, and glanced over in Rowan’s direction. “All I can.”
    “Better pick up the pace, son.” Dobie shook his ever-present bottle of Tabasco. “Summer don’t last forever.”
     
     
    GULL THOUGHT about that as he worked, sweating through the morning and into the afternoon. He’d approached her along the lines he might have if they’d met outside—where time was abundant, as were opportunities to go to dinner, or the movies, a long drive, a day at the beach. This world and that didn’t have much crossover when you came down to it.
    Maybe it was time to approach her as he did the work. Nothing wrong with champagne picnics, but there were times a situation required a less . . . elegant approach.
    By the time they packed out, Gull figured all he wanted in the world was to feel clean again, to enjoy a real mattress under him for eight straight.
    Hardly a