The Rancher's Daughter

There was no way he could protect her now.

Around her, trees were literally exploding where they were rooted. The sound was like so many dying screams for mercy.

With a choking cry, Maura made the agonizing decision to pull out her fire shelter and take refuge under it. Survival using the shelter was not a certainty. One breath of superheated air would kill her, if she didn’t die of sheer terror before the fire passed over her. But it was her only hope.

Then, just as she slowed, her heart like a melon in her throat, Maura felt herself swept forward from behind.

“Come on,” a masculine voice rasped into her ear. “There’s got to be cover along that mountain slope that’ll be safer than out in the open under nothin’ but a flimsy tent.”

She hadn’t the presence of mind—or desire—to argue as the man, a fellow firefighter, although she didn’t know exactly who, cut to the left at an angle, half carrying her. Her feet glanced the ground as she ran beside him, the black canvas fire pack containing her water bottles, rations and other essential supplies bouncing against her lower back. Her own effort was nearly useless; his long strides ate up territory as if he himself was the fire and wind rolled into one.

They reached the face of the mountain in less than a minute. Barely slowing his pace, he groped feverishly with the gloved hand of his free arm at the outcroppings, overhangs and ledges in the craggy gray limestone.

“There’s got to be some kind of decent shelter here, damn it!” he shouted over the roar of the wildfire. She dared a moment’s pause to shoot a glance at him and could see only grim eyes behind his goggles, his own fire mask and yellow helmet obscuring any other features.

The ground was rougher here, punctuated with rocks and boulders surrounded by sprigs of parched wheat and needlegrass. In college, she’d studied the geology of every major forest and mountain range in Montana and knew he was right. Caves were not unusual in this kind of sedimentary rock. But who knew where one might appear or if it would be deep enough to provide adequate shelter from the fire?

Perspiration from the exertion, heat and fear ran in rivulets down every vertical plane of her body. Her eyes smarting from the smoke, Maura’s gaze searched the mountainside as desperately as that of the firefighter who’d come to her rescue. Maybe he hadn’t rescued her, though. Maybe he’d sealed his death warrant by coming to her aid.

For the fire had again caught up to them, and here, along the slope, there was no place to go to escape it.

Her legs like jelly, Maura tripped over a rock and stumbled to her knees, and he lost his grip on her waist.

“Leave me!” she gasped when he turned back to her. “Save yourself.”

He said nothing, just grabbed her by her upper arm and yanked her up. She staggered to her feet and against his side.

As soon as she did, a flaming fifty-foot-tall pine came crashing down behind them, directly across the spot where she’d knelt a second before. Maura screamed reflexively as the firefighter shoved her behind him, protecting her from the billow of sparks with his own body. She fell again, this time backward into a clump of bone-dry sagebrush sprouting horizontally from the mountain’s side. But she didn’t stop there; she continued falling, plunging through the shrubbery. She cracked the back of her helmet on the ground and for a moment believed she’d lost consciousness when everything went dim. Then Maura realized that, miraculously, she was lying at the lip of a cave.

She sobbed her relief. “A ca—” Her cry was cut off by a cough that felt as if she’d dislodged a piece of lung. Maura struggled to sit up and batted madly at the prickly dry sagebrush to part it. Sucking in a desperate breath, she shouted, “It’s a cave!”

But the firefighter had already comprehended her discovery. He reached down to give her a boost to her feet, then led the way into the dark, unknown interior of the cave, pausing only to flick on the headlamp strapped to the front of his helmet.

The difference in temperature and noise was day and night. Still sucking air through a raw windpipe and smarting where she’d jarred her head, Maura turned on her own headlamp and, although she could see not much more than the back of the firefighter’s head and shoulders, she knew they’d lucked out. She’d lucked out for the second time in only a few precious minutes, the first being this man’s rescue of her.

Now that she was out of the thick of it, the closeness of the tragedy they’d both barely escaped dropped full-blown on her consciousness like a cougar from a tree.

“Wait!” she gasped, slumping against the rough wall and tugging her mask down to draw in a much-needed draught of cool air.

The man stopped and turned. “What’s the holdup?” he asked tersely.

She lifted her forearm to shade her eyes from the beam of his headlamp. It didn’t help. She could see nothing, just the bright, white light. Coming out of the encompassing blackness behind him, the glow seemed otherworldly, and it set her nerves jangling even more.

“We almost got killed out there!” Her voice wobbled revealingly. “I…just need a moment to catch my b-breath.”

“Really.” There was a moment of silence, then he said, “I know this fire is some kind of wicked, but I didn’t think the NIFC was so desperate for bodies to fight it they’d started letting powder puffs onto Type Two crews.”

That got her spine straightening, as well as adding a precious half inch to her five-foot-two height. “I passed the work capacity pack test, just like everyone else, hiking three miles in forty-five minutes carrying a forty-five-pound payload.” She drew in another breath. “I made it with time to spare, too, I’ll have you know! And I held my own on both the Deadwood and Durango fires last year.”

He cocked his head to one side, sending his headlamp’s beam in another direction and out of her eyes, and she got an impression of sardonic eyes a color she still couldn’t make out.

“Really,” he repeated, and this time the word was loaded with skepticism. “Then this oughta be a piece of cake.”

And he headed farther into the mountain again, with Maura, now more vexed than scared, scrambling to keep up.

Powder puff, indeed! She supposed he had some right to be annoyed at having to come to her rescue, but some aspects of firefighting had not so much to do with speed and strength and everything to do with intuition and luck.

The passage was narrow and low, but navigable. The cave floor sloped gently downward, and very quickly became wet and slick, as did the walls striated in golds and reds and browns.

They had gone what Maura estimated to be about a hundred feet when the cave opened up into a large chamber. Its ceiling rose ten feet above them, and she simply stood there flatfooted and openmouthed as her headlamp made a sweep of the rock formations: glowing yellow stalactites jutted from the ceiling like jagged sharks’ teeth. The walls were both smoother and rougher looking than in the passageway, with humps of smooth flowstone and ragged “popcorn,” the cauliflower-shaped clusters on the cave walls that she knew could be sharp as coral.

Though she’d studied caves in college, she’d never been much of a spelunker, and the sight of this one took her breath away.

“It’s beautiful,” she breathed, her recent fear receding as quickly as the heat, noise and threat of the fire had in the cool confines of the cave. It had the still, musty smell of condensation and earth, which was just fine with Maura, since any air movement might bring the smoke into the cave and suffocate them. Mingled with the smell was a pungency she knew had to be coming from the guano that littered the cave floor.

“Bats,” she guessed aloud. They were notorious cave dwellers, along with other wild animals.

The man noted the direction of her gaze and nodded. “It’s also our home, at least for the night,” he said, tugging off his gloves and tucking them into his belt. He removed his own face mask and goggles, letting them dangle around his neck.

Undoing the straps to his fire pack, he examined the cave room with a much more critical eye. “It looks like it goes on, who knows how much deeper into the mountain. I’ll take a look in a sec. Are you injured at all?”

“Incredibly, no. My throat is sandpapery from inhaling some smoke, but otherwise I’m fine.” She felt for her eyebrows and found them both intact. They were usually the first to go.

“Good,” the man said. “One less thing to have to worry about.”

He removed his helmet, headlamp still on, and balanced it on a ledge about shoulder height, so that it lit the interior of the room. “Better take a reckoning of water and supplies.”

As she divested herself of her own pack, Maura seized the opportunity to get a good look at her rescuer. He looked vaguely familiar, but then everyone did after a few weeks working on a firefighting crew, even with volunteers being trucked in from across the nation. He was as sooty and begrimed as she was, his face blackened around the outline of his goggles in a kind of reverse raccoon look. He was wearing the same Forest-Service-issue brown fire-retardant Nomex pants and yellow fire shirt, which he was absently unbuttoning, but the uniform looked different on him than others. His shoulders seemed uncommonly broad, his forearms, as he rolled up the long sleeves of his shirt, were muscular, his hands wide and competent looking. He appeared the very definition of an able-bodied man, she thought, as her gaze lifted to his face again, and she was confronted with his as-thorough scrutiny of her. It was only then that she noticed his eyes: gray, they were. Almost silver, only richer. They were remote and inviting at once, and she was equally torn in two directions gazing into them. Afraid yet fascinated.

He was right in that they would be spending at least the night here together. Neither of them had radios to call for help, and even if they had, there would have been no way to pick up a frequency this deep in the mountain—or any way that rescue crews could get to them at this point, with the fire still going full force outside.

That wouldn’t stop the rest of her crew and their boss, Hal, from worrying about her, as would this man’s crew worry about him. News of their disappearance would go all the way to the command of the National Interagency Fire Commission. She hoped they wouldn’t notify her family that she was missing. The thought of her family’s concern and fear for her made her eyes sting with tears.

I’m fine, she telepathed to them. I’m safe in a cave with the firefighter who saved my life. I couldn’t be in better hands.

“I haven’t thanked you for rescuing me,” Maura said aloud, cursing the shakiness in her voice. She was battling a bout of nausea from the smoke. “I mean, I was ready to use my fire shelter, but I’ve heard firefighters say they’d rather spend a month in solitary confinement than an hour in a burnover.”

“Really.” His eyebrows lowered in sudden ferocity. “Well, as you pointed out, you’re a trained firefighter. So it stands to reason you’d’ve done what you needed to do to survive.” He’d finished unbuttoning his fire shirt, revealing the perspiration-stained T-shirt beneath, and now yanked its tail from his waistband with what occurred to her to be undue force. “Or am I wrong there, powder puff?”

“I certainly hope that, had you not come along, I would have done as I was trained,” she said with crisp enunciation. “I was simply conveying my thanks.”

She lifted her chin in Carolynesque regality. It was becoming difficult to be nice to this man, but she was determined to, precisely for the reason that he had saved her life. Still, she wasn’t about to let him get away with the jibe about her size and gender.

“And you can stop calling me powder puff any time now,” she warned mildly.

One corner of his mouth lifted almost in amusement as he looked her up and down, all five feet and two inches of her. But he said gamely enough, “All right. What’s your name, then?”

“Maura. Maura King—”