Rescued by Her Rival Read online

  “Three strikes?” Lauren asked beside him, sounding a little better.

  “Yes.” Treadwell then nodded toward the mess hall, where several kitchen workers in white with large trolleys loaded with brown sack breakfasts were plowing in their direction. “After breakfast, announce the partnerships. Partners and cabin-mates. Trainers Ying and Olivera are leading at the tower. Then the pack carry.”

  In one day? He held his tongue. “Are Ying and Olivera leading the pack carry?”

  “You are.”

  Treadwell walked off toward the cabins before Beck could ask if he needed an arm to lean on.

  As much as he sucked at teamwork, his failure tended to go in one direction: he could help others, but had never been able to accept help in return. He could help his chief, even wanted to, despite everything.

  Treadwell’s stride wasn’t steady. He wobbled almost as badly as Lauren had.

  The ever-powerful leader stooped, as if he didn’t have the strength to hold himself to his usual shoulder-squaring attention.

  Because of the warning in his head, he didn’t look away until Treadwell had slogged up the wooden stairs to the cabins and disappeared.

  Lauren’s voice came softly from beside him. “Did he say how he was feeling?”

  “Just that he needed to sleep.”

  “Last time I saw someone that color, it was heart-related.”

  “Me too,” Beck muttered. “But I’m going to let him rest, see if that helps, before I start prodding.”

  Clearly, she wasn’t onboard with letting the chief go while looking somewhat corpse-like. “Worried about his pride?”

  “Respectful of him as a person.” Beck looked at her then, and turned fully, what had nearly gone down earlier before she’d carried him coming back to his mind. “I owe you an apology.”

  He didn’t get to the apology before she’d completely frozen, staring up at him, her breath quickening again.

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t take you at your word when you said you could do it. Neither did Treadwell. But no one questioned anyone else carrying their partner.” Beck drew a deep breath, pausing to make sure he selected the correct words since even simply acknowledging the mistake affected her. “To be clear, I questioned because of concern you’d get hurt because you felt the need to prove yourself. Like it or not, you are smaller than any of us. But you did it. I don’t know that I won’t make that mistake again, but I’m aware of it now. I’ll try.”

  She nodded quickly, a small, shaking acknowledgment of his words, eyes glassier than they had been, and he knew how much it meant to her to hear it. Despite the emotional reaction, he was glad for having said it. He might be an active disappointment to the chief, but he could be a good guy sometimes.

  She took a moment, and had to clear her throat before she asked in a voice that was a little froggy, “What are we doing?”

  He finally looked at the clipboard. “Using the buddy system, apparently. Partnering up, on the field and off.”

  A list, in Treadwell’s bold slashing script, of eight sets of names.

  Ellison and Autry

  Top of the list. Partnered. Sharing a cabin after all the reasons they shouldn’t had become clear to him.

  Still, the simple thought summoned myriad images of Lauren and beds, and every part of his body erupted with some kind of excited dread. There was no other way for him to qualify it. Excitement because there was no way around excitement at being alone with a woman he was attracted to, and dread because he didn’t know what would spiral out of it. He already felt protective of her, wherever that came from. If it was about her gender, her stature, or who she was.

  Dangerous. He didn’t even need to wonder how she’d respond to his protective feelings. She’d be pissed. Probably kick him in the junk just to prove she could.

  “We’re together.” He forced himself to stick to the topic, then waved a hand to her to follow him toward the group. “Breakfast now. Tower. Lunch after. Then the pack carry. Going to be a rough day.”

  “How’s the fire?” someone called.

  What was the man’s name? She’d introduced them yesterday.

  Alvarez.

  “Bad.”

  “Are they going back out?”

  “I don’t think anyone but Treadwell came back today. And he’ll probably go back later. I didn’t ask,” he said, and cast aside his own concerns about whether or not the chief should go back out. Respect his wishes, and be there to help if the chief was wrong about his limits. That’s what Treadwell had done for him on that mountain last season. Right up until Beck had smacked face-first into his limits.

  “Focus on what’s before you. Tower training with Wang and Olivera. I’ll explain the rules on the pack after lunch.”

  Lots of talking. Lots of talking he didn’t want to do, but having seen the chief it was something small he could offer.

  “Chow time. Eat hardy. Protein first. Drink a lot.”

  Lauren stayed at his side, though she looked as unsettled as he felt—strange in light of yesterday’s invitation to share a cabin. Did it feel somehow like being fixed up to her too?

  “Do you want me to announce the names?” she asked, the look she topped her words with clear enough for anyone to read. I have your back. Hearing them wouldn’t have made the sentiment any clearer than what he could see there in her eyes. She understood and had his back. Not pushing him to change, not joking about his issues, just backing him up. It was a small matter, but made even clearer what his own words had meant to her.

  “There are eight pairs. They can read,” he said softly, then handed the clipboard off to the nearest warm body. “Check your assignments. Work out who will be moving tonight, but not before the pack carry. Don’t spend the energy. You’ll need it later.”

  * * *

  All through breakfast, Lauren worked at putting the idea of the tower out of her mind because of Beck. She was still warm all over from his heartfelt apology. He was a man of few words, but when he started using them, he could even distract her from all the imminent tower-shaped doom looming before her.

  If she’d known how freaking attractive he could become just by saying the right thing, in the right way, at the right time, she’d have put as much distance between the two of them as possible, no matter the things she might be able to learn from him to get better at her job simply through proximity.

  Now, with her protein-dense breakfast burrito in her stomach, heading for the place where her accidental lie might be discovered, she was forced to consider the more imminent source of danger to her. If she failed or fumbled through this, they’d know, and she’d be out of there so fast she’d be glad she hadn’t unpacked.

  Provided she survived the tower without looking like an incompetent fool, she could look forward to dealing with her hormonal reaction to a handsome, skilled man treating her fairly later. Some way that made distance possible. Maybe by making a long list of things she didn’t like about him instead of focusing on the things she did.

  The morning’s laughing meatheads underscored what she already knew: she had to be twice as good for all the men to take her seriously. And how important it was she not put a toe out of line, let alone her lips.

  Hormones would have to bow to the wily ways of logic.

  Workplace romances weren’t smart, even when you weren’t one of three women in a group of seventy-six. Having a boyfriend in her workplace meant yet another voice telling her to be careful, to not go to this job or that, not to overestimate herself. Blah-blah-blah.

  At least Beck hadn’t said anything like that yet. He’d said the opposite, which elevated her passing appreciation with his attractiveness to something that made her heart quicken enough to rival the tower of concrete and cables now suddenly before her.

  Beck walked behind her, and she was momentarily sad to not have him the
re being beefy and distracting. Several stories tall, it had a sideways launch platform to mimic jumping from a plane, and lines running down at slow-floating angles to the ground, designed to simulate the start and stop of a jump, from launch to landing with little drift in between.

  Tilting her head back to stare at the top, her inner gyroscope wobbled off center. With how hard her palms sweated, it was good she wouldn’t need her hands to stay in the harness.

  “You all right?” Beck’s question came from right behind her and she stopped to look back at him.

  However stupid she felt for having missed the window to correct her application before it got this far, she’d kept taking a pass on making the correction because it could’ve been used against her, and history had taught her that when it came to her job, people in authority weren’t much inclined to give her a fair shake. She hated thinking that way, so she’d avoided dealing with it, banking on her own skills bailing her out. Back when her skills had just been something in her mind, not something that she had to actually pull off in the flesh.

  “I didn’t realize how empty the camp was until just now.” She’d said the first thing that came to mind, and a look around confirmed that it was only the sixteen rookies and a couple of trainers. “We’d be doing this with all three groups if the others weren’t on a jump, right?”

  He nodded. “Classroom stuff is universal, reinforcing the basics and more advanced stuff if it’s especially beneficial.”

  The two trainers called them to attention, and began discussing the equipment worn during a jump. She paid complete attention, even though this was all information she actually felt confident in. Hearing what she already knew helped her relax some. Focusing made her feel like she was doing what she was supposed to be doing.

  Too soon, the trainers sorted the group, calling only three names. Ellison. Alvarez. Autry.

  “You three are with me. Suit up and climb the tower. Everyone else is with Ying.”

  One look toward the other group and she saw Ying leading them all to the three-foot platforms that she recognized from all the instruction she had completed before her classes had been derailed by family.

  Her stomach bottomed out. They’d put her into the advanced group. Beck had jumped before. She’d wager Alvarez had also, unless he’d also had great plans and had answered on behalf of his future self when filling out the application.

  Olivera hustled them to the tower. “We’re testing technique to see how rusty you are, and if you need to be bumped back. I’ll watch from the ground. If you panic and don’t jump, you get bumped back. If you swing too much when you jump, you get bumped back. If you don your gear wrong, you get bumped back. Don’t be sloppy.”

  They stepped into the room at the base of the tower and were directed to get into the jumpsuits and the packs they’d have to strap into. She’d also done this before, or the civilian versions of it, and had trained enough to fumble through.

  As she pulled the last strap tight, she caught Beck looking at her again.

  “What?”

  “You’re white as smoke,” he whispered.

  Crap.

  “Breakfast isn’t sitting well.”

  Not why she was white, but still true. Lord, she hated all this lying, she just didn’t know how to fix it.

  She hurried back out to let Olivera check her equipment. He gave the straps a sharp jerk. “Okay, up the tower, don’t jump until I signal.”

  Verdict: not sloppy. She’d passed that.

  Two more tests.

  She could do this. She might even be able to make the partner and roommate situation work for her by asking Beck for fire-specific jump pointers—talk work, not anything personal.

  For all her worries, by the time she made it from pack inspection up miles of stairs to the elevated platform the pit in her stomach was gone and everything seemed much more doable.

  She had done a lot of simulations.

  She did have the gumption to jump out of a plane over a blazing inferno.

  She knew how to jump and tuck her head and arms, how long to count before grabbing the chute to steer it in.

  And she would go first. A female trainer she hadn’t met before sat at the top of the tower, whose very presence bolstered Lauren’s confidence further. It took no time to strap her into the harness and when the signal came, she took a deep breath and jumped.

  A short fall of a couple of meters, then the harness jerked hard enough to rattle her teeth, but she followed through the steps perfectly. Less than a minute later she landed at the levee and was helped to unhitch so she could run back and do it again.

  Today wouldn’t be her only instruction before she got to the point of jumping to a fire. The service was known for safety and they’d work their way up, practice at the tower first, then move to a number of low-altitude jumps free from danger, getting skills polished before they worked their way up to jumping near fires. That’s how it always went. They’d hold that, even with early burns.

  Everything would be okay.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  EVEN WITH GENERALLY keeping his distance, Beck knew one thing about smokejumpers and soldiers—everyone’s rookie training was the worst in history. Bragging about something bad was cool if it proved how tough you were.

  Even with their embellishments, he’d never heard of a Day Two that had gone quite so hardcore as this year. His own first experience with Hell Week hadn’t got this hard this quickly. And even today, his today, didn’t compare to Lauren’s. He’d never been asked to carry anyone so much larger and heavier than he was, and that was the start of a day already asking for one hundred and ten percent of everyone else.

  With only three of them jumping from the tower, it was a two-hour cycle of physical punishment. Jumping, being released at the end, and running back across the long field to climb another twenty-some stories to the top to hurl themselves out again.

  The jump and glide weren’t even relaxing. As easy as they were by comparison to a real jump, it was still very hard on the body. That initial jerk of the harness hurt, and going through it over and over did its own kind of damage. He’d made seven jumps in two hours, and had felt it in his shoulders and back even before carrying that person-sized pack through the wooded trail and twice around the old dirt track.

  Hard day.

  Now, standing in line for chow in a mostly empty mess hall, he didn’t see her anywhere. Everyone else was there except her.

  Had she already been and gone?

  Sometime between them joking around after she’d carried him this morning and the tower, she’d gone from chatty and cheerful, if struggling with the aftermath of a hard slog, so far to the other extreme he had to wonder if something else had happened that he’d missed. Another jerk getting mouthy? Something worse than the horror of being assigned his partner?

  After Treadwell’s little bombshell, they needed to talk about whatever that meant. What she expected, what he needed to work on. He’d spent the past two hours mentally composing ground rules to go over with her, but where the devil was she?

  It was possible she’d finished far enough ahead of him to have already eaten and gone, especially considering how much she liked being first at everything. He’d just assumed he’d been behind, doing what he did: conserving energy.

  But she’d definitely had less energy at the start of the pack carry to conserve than he’d had. If she’d pushed hard down the wooded track...

  No, she wouldn’t have made that. The body could only do so much.

  His watch confirmed an hour left before dinner ended—time to look for her.

  Decision made, he headed back out.

  Cabin first, and if she wasn’t there, the woods. Then figure out some argument to make on her behalf so she didn’t get booted for failing the time requirements.

  Just as he reached the door, it opened and a dirty, sweat
y, red-faced Autry shuffled in. Her hair, which had been neatly braided at the start of the day, now stuck out all around her face like a disheveled lion’s mane.

  She met his gaze, then lifted one arm and flopped it in a kind of half circle through the air, the sloppiest, most exhausted rendition of a wave he’d ever seen.

  “You look like death.”

  A statement like that always merited an eye-roll. She only managed the verbal equivalent—a dry, hollow, “Thanks.”

  Before she could get around him, he grabbed her shoulders and spun her around to shove her right back out of the mess hall.

  “I’m hungry,” she said, but didn’t physically resist. Didn’t look like she even had the energy to walk, let alone put up a struggle.

  “I’ll bring it,” he grunted, though his own hunger was suddenly gone. He steered her far enough in the direction of the cabin to make the order clear, but a roll of his stomach made him ask, “Did you finish in ninety?”

  “Eighty-nine,” she breathed, then stopped long enough to look over her shoulder. “Food?”

  “I’ll bring two dinners. Go.”

  “You showered already?”

  He’d turned to head back inside, but the pang of defeat in her voice stopped him.

  Even conserving energy, he was used to hauling that pack around and it had taken him less time than it had two years ago. “Yeah.”

  The defeat in her eyes twisted into something else, something more bitter. Something more like what he’d been avoiding feeling about himself since last season. The transparency of her emotions didn’t do anything to make him comfortable with her ability to hold it together when things got hairy, but how hard she pushed herself made him want to root for her.

  She didn’t say anything else, just resumed scuffing her feet across the field to the wooden stairs and the cabins above. Treadwell had moved with about the same amount of energy, but her exhausted, splotchy pink didn’t worry him like Treadwell’s pallor. Autry’s ills could be helped with rest and a little TLC. Not that he’d be doing any of that, but he could bring dinner.