Rescued by Her Rival Read online

  She still didn’t know what had changed in him that had caused his mistake. Bad at teamwork and needing a rescue didn’t seem like the kind of thing to be punished for as a one-off. If it wasn’t, why had she seen over a year of praise for him?

  When he said nothing else, she wobbled on to bed.

  More questions would have to wait.

  CHAPTER SIX

  DAY THREE CAME and went in a blur of exhaustion so intense Lauren could only focus on what was before her.

  Although it had lacked another pack carry, after Beck had carried her for morning PT, they’d hit the tower twice and those jump hours—while populated by more rookies who’d moved up—had been rough and bracketed by bootcamp-style calisthenics and lots of running.

  The physical exhaustion of Day Three built on Day Two, making it easier to ignore the messy other stuff, even if she saw it there every time she looked at Beck.

  His mother. A wildfire. And whatever had pushed him into making mistakes.

  The only thing they’d discussed had been the way the fire up north continued to grow, and Treadwell’s status after Beck had gone to check on him and been told to “mind his own damned business.”

  Outside work, it seemed they’d both come to the same conclusion: yesterday had been too intimate and they needed to step back. And that was okay. They’d worked well together, pushed each other even. After hours, he’d shown her how to use the bath salts and she’d soaked her own aches away without asking for anything else.

  When Day Four brought something entirely new, both eagerly volunteered.

  Just over two hours into the day, Lauren climbed out of the bus that had carried them north to land between the large, raging fire and a subdivision that could be threatened if the winds turned. They couldn’t see flames but smoke clogged the air, turning it hazy orange with the sun filtering through, making breathing an act of endurance before they even began the prep work for a controlled burn.

  Treadwell was with them today, but looked worn out. At least with them they could keep an eye on him if he did something more physical besides bark orders and whistle too loudly.

  In short order, they were all given shovels—the least glamorous part of the job—and set about digging trenches. Digging down, past the brush and other fuel sources, set limits so they could safely section the wide field and burn the tall dry grasses in controlled patches. They started at the road with the goal of reaching the tree line in the distance.

  The hard-packed earth demanded every ounce of strength Lauren could muster after days of hard conditioning, and she was glad for the silence in which everyone else worked.

  When they made it to the end of their row, Lauren went for water, and when she looked for Beck afterward she didn’t see him. He hadn’t gone for a drink. Wasn’t resting. Hadn’t even gotten started at their next location without her.

  Suddenly, not having discussed how their partnership would work seemed like a mistake.

  One she should remedy. As soon as she found him.

  He wasn’t on the bus. Behind the bus. In the truck...

  Treadwell saw her looking and gestured far down the field toward the trees and she saw a teeny tiny figure with hands on hips, standing there.

  Looking at Treadwell again would’ve been a mistake, he might’ve had strike written all over it from their bad partnering. She grabbed her shovel, another water, and hurried downfield.

  She found him examining the tree line and stabbing the ground here and there with the blade of his shovel.

  They were far enough away that the bus and trucks appeared to perhaps have been built for ladybugs.

  Somewhere she could speak without being overheard.

  “Beck?” She called his name on approach, water in hand for him as a way to smooth over her coming critique.

  When he looked up, she joked, “We playing leapfrog, or just avoiding the stench of fourteen sweaty dudes digging?”

  “I smell smoke. We need to start down here,” he answered, not smiling at all to her joking. Also not taking the water she held out.

  “Everyone smells smoke. The air quality is flagged red today for the area.”

  “It’s stronger than it was.”

  “Okay, did you tell Treadwell or Kolinski?” As if she didn’t know the answer to that.

  “They saw me.”

  This was what Treadwell meant by bad at teamwork. “Beck, remember the partnership talk?”

  “Your point?”

  “Treadwell saw you, he told me where you were. Example of not working well with your team.”

  He didn’t roll his eyes, just looked at her long seconds, then resumed stabbing the ground with his shovel to loosen the dirt.

  “Autry, come with me to go sniff some trees,” she said in her manliest, commanding tone. “See? Easy-peasy. Then we’re still working as a pair, even if we’re ignoring the rest of our team.”

  “Fine,” he muttered, breezing over her silly impersonation to explain. “The fire will come this direction, rocket over that brush, and build too fast and hot to be controlled. Digging here will slow it down some. Controlled burns are great, but we should’ve started here.”

  She couldn’t argue with the logic, even if she knew they were only there just in case. They didn’t actually expect the fire to blow toward the subdivision. It could, but it hadn’t—there was time to take it methodically, not like if they’d been in the middle of a war.

  Things he knew. But the man seemed to only have one setting when it came to the fire. Combat Zone. And maybe that’s what it was to him...

  “I’ll let Treadwell know what we’re doing, in case he wants to send other crews down. Drink.” She threw the bottle at him, and he dropped his shovel to catch it, but did pause his digging long enough to drink it.

  This pattern was repeated twice more over the day—them finishing one task only for Beck to wander off to do something else, leaving her to track him down. By the time the afternoon sun was high and baking them all, she wanted to strangle him, or smack him on the head with her shovel.

  The fire never arrived, despite shifting winds blowing smoke their direction. Around three, they lit the first section of field and took turns with shovels and hoses, ready to extinguish any escaping cinders. One section cleared, they moved on to the next. Methodical. Even kind of relaxing, once the shoulder-torturing digging was done. She didn’t even have to chase Ellison down once the fire started, it fixated everyone’s attention.

  Which was how Treadwell collapsed without anyone immediately noticing.

  She was the first to see when she handed her shovel off to get another drink, and saw the man stretched out on the ground, matting down tall, brown grasses.

  “Chief!”

  Her call, no match for the roaring fire, still managed to find Beck’s ear. She ran for the downed leader’s side, grabbing one arm to check his pulse as she did so, and Beck was right behind her.

  “It’s beating,” Treadwell rasped regarding his heart, but he’d gone a terrible gray, and between the irregular, rapid fluttering beat of his heart and the speed of his breathing, she knew two things: this wasn’t because of the heat, and he needed some clean oxygen fast.

  Beck made it there just behind her, and dug out his cellphone to call 911.

  “Don’t make me give you mouth-to-mouth.” Beck hadn’t so much as smiled at her or anyone else all day, but he attempted levity with the chief.

  “First year, maybe you would’ve. Not now,” Treadwell gasped from the ground, his voice holding no fond humor in response, just rebuke. “Autry would still be chasing you down if we hadn’t lit the field. You’d never know.”

  “Quiet. Conserve oxygen.” She squeezed Treadwell’s hand, then looked up at Beck. “He needs oxygen.”

  “He never listens anymore.” Treadwell kept going, sounding more like a disappointed fathe
r than an angry chief. But his speech was so broken, she really wished he’d shut up. “Maybe if he hears it from a dying man.”

  She chanced a glance at Beck to find any spark of humor gone, and worry in his eyes that bordered on grief.

  “You’re not dying,” Beck said, voice a little hoarse, and hung up on the call. He disappeared directly into the supply truck and came out a moment later with a stretcher and portable oxygen.

  She grabbed a bag with tubing and ripped into it to hook the nasal cannula over his ears and direct the oxygen up his nose. “No face mask?”

  Beck shook his head. “We weren’t packed for work. It’s a camp bus.”

  She held the cannula to Treadwell’s nose to make sure it was all going where it should be. “Breathe slow and deep.”

  “Can’t,” he panted. “Truck parked on my chest...”

  “We’re far from the road, the lane’s blocked by the bus and trucks,” Beck said, kneeling to count Treadwell’s pulse. “Too fast.”

  “Tachycardic,” she whispered. “Maybe in some kind of fibrillation. Why don’t we have more equipment?”

  “I don’t know,” he muttered. “We’re carrying him to the street to meet the crew.”

  An order. A request. Progress, even if he kind of had to ask for it.

  She helped Beck transfer the chief to the stretcher along with his oxygen bottle, and inside sixty seconds they had him strapped in and were hurrying over uneven terrain for the main road.

  Medical personnel usually made the worst patients, and Treadwell kept up the tradition. He wouldn’t stop giving Beck hell the whole time they carried him. Even when he could barely get enough air to speak. Even when he gripped his own chest and stuttered with the pain of it.

  Sirens sounded, and behind them the rest of the crew had resumed tending the fire under Kolinski’s command—it couldn’t be abandoned, even if the chief was mid–heart attack, which was what seemed to be happening.

  The ambulance arrived about the same time they did, and took over, lifting their carried stretcher onto their wheeled one and strapping it in.

  Lauren and Beck stood back, but if she thought the team would get into gear, they didn’t. One of them seemed young. The other seemed frustrated, but he climbed into the ambulance for supplies.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Beck barked out when the younger one fumbled with the chief’s suit too tentatively to get it open. Without waiting for an answer, he stepped over and grabbed the zipper, jerking it down, then ripping through the T-shirt beneath to bare his chest. As soon as the seasoned EMT stepped over, Lauren grabbed the pack of electrodes and began applying them. She wasn’t a trained paramedic, but she knew how to do that.

  “What are you two doing?” Treadwell asked.

  Lauren ignored him, reaching for the monitor to pull leads, which Beck took over applying with the experienced EMT. To the younger, who stood there doing nothing, she ordered, “Get him a face mask, he needs a higher oxygen concentration. Are you the driver?”

  He nodded.

  “Then you,” she ordered the elder, “get a line in him and we’ll do this. With the four of us, it’ll go faster.”

  “Three,” Beck muttered.

  Whatever, she was charitable enough to include Skippy the Baby Paramedic in the count if he brought a danged mask.

  It wasn’t long before they could only stand back and watch the squiggling line track across the monitor. Worry tracked across Beck’s face.

  “Do you want us to come with you, Chief?” Lauren asked, and when rebuffed got all the details from the EMT about which hospital they’d be going to, then let them work.

  Beck, as grim as she’d ever seen him, simply stood to the side, waiting. Watching. She could almost see the chief’s gasped and panted tirade getting through to the man she’d spent all day not getting through to.

  Treadwell wanted the old Beck back. First-year Beck.

  Whatever had happened, it had happened last season. People didn’t fall apart because they needed to be rescued once. There was something else, and if they were going to survive as partners, or survive in general, he needed to face it. Whatever it was.

  * * *

  The burning was the quickest part of their day. Not long after carrying the chief to the road, it was done.

  The local fire department sent a crew to keep an eye on the smoldering remains, and the exhausted rookies settled in for a long ride back to camp.

  Although Lauren had avoided Beck on the ride up, for the ride back she climbed aboard the bus and headed straight to him.

  He sat sideways, his back against the metal wall, legs on the seat, eyes closed.

  With water in her hands, she hooked a foot behind his legs and shoved them off the padded green cushion to make room.

  “What the...?” He started to swear, but when he saw her, the words stopped.

  He didn’t immediately turn to sit properly, and she could see him considering ways to make her move.

  Shove her off. Toss her over the seatback in front of them.

  Escalation was standard operating procedure in man conflict world, throwing punches were communication tactics. But he didn’t do any of those things. He took his time, but eventually swiveled to face forward. “There are other seats.”

  “I know.” She handed him the water she’d brought as a peace offering.

  As much as she wanted to check on him in the wake of Treadwell’s tirade, she’d also reached the point where she couldn’t just wait for him to deal with whatever anymore. Like it or not, his problems were her problems.

  She didn’t immediately launch in, just enjoyed some water and waited until they were on the freeway, where open windows and six big tires rushing over asphalt created a sound barrier to keep their conversation private.

  “Treadwell’s been your chief since you started?” she asked, turning just slightly on the seat so she could watch him.

  His nod confirmed it, as did the tilt of his head away from the window. His gaze bored into the top seam of the evergreen seatback in front of them. He wasn’t talking, but he was listening.

  And he wasn’t okay. Upset, and not just because he was worried for the chief—still clearly thinking about the chief’s words, a man who truly cared about him but didn’t understand what was going on with him either.

  Check on him first. Be kind. Make him talk.

  “Have you noticed anything up with him before this week? Slowing down? Getting winded easily?”

  “Haven’t seen him much the past several months. Like I said, in the off-season I wear a different uniform. Clear trails. Remove brush from the forest. Perform small burns.”

  The forest ranger part of the job. “You like it?”

  He nodded again, but his eyes took on a kind of unfocused quality that told her he was thinking about something specifically.

  “What?”

  “Maybe Treadwell did have something going on that day he called me in to give me the talk.”

  The talk. This wasn’t birds-and-bees territory, even if Treadwell was starting to feel strangely like Beck’s surrogate father. He meant the probation talk.

  “Because you’re not good at teamwork.”

  “Don’t try gentle criticism, Autry,” he grunted, using her last name again, but telling her his frustration was pointed inward. “I know I screwed up.”

  “Okay.” She capped the remaining half of her water, focusing all her attention on the conversation. “So why do you do it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t believe you. You’re too solitary a creature not to be introspective. Everyone has a reason for the decisions they make, even if the reason is stupid. Even if the reason is like... executive function issues.”

  “Executive function...?”

  “My middle brother has ADHD, and they call it executiv
e function disorder or something. He has trouble with impulsivity, which basically stems from not understanding why he does the things he does, or that he’s being driven to make decisions by his emotions. Like why he shouldn’t trade in a car he’s had for three months and buy another...”

  “He’s a firefighter?”

  “He’s really good at things when he’s super-interested in them, and he is at his job. He hears everything, notices everything. If you’re with him in a burn, he’ll know something bad is about to happen before you do. It’s almost creepy, really. It’s the rest of his life that he has trouble with.” She paused, realizing she was going off at a tangent, defending someone Beck didn’t even know. “Point is, I think you know why you do what you do. You have reasons. And if you don’t know, you don’t want to know.”

  Beck had a tendency to take his time with any words he parceled out, and he took his time again now.

  He didn’t have the profile of a man searching his soul. He looked like a man who hated what he already knew about himself.

  She interrupted, trying to prompt speech. “How do you see fire, Beck?”

  “That’s a stupid question. I see it as fire.”

  “You see it as something more than just fire.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Fine, what do you see fire as?”

  She hadn’t really thought about how to describe the difference she saw in her own feelings about fire and his.

  It took a moment to summon the imagery, and although it felt stupid to correlate fire with water, she said it anyway.

  “I see it like the deep end of a swimming pool, and I’m a lifeguard who’s relegated to the shallows. I can see people drowning, but every time I try to help, someone important side-eyes me, hands me water wings and tells me to mind the kiddie pool.”

  And as soon as she put it into words, the mental images kept coming.

  “Or a dance I’ve been invited to, but only so I can serve the refreshments.”

  “I get it.” He cut her off and turned back to the window in silence.

  Was he thinking or shutting her out? Probably the latter, but if she was going to get any kind of answer, she had to give him at least a little time to think.