Summer of Fire Part 22

Steve smiled.

Once more, she felt solemn. "We were together on the hose. When the roof came down, and I lived, I was afraid to show my face at the memorial service."

Steve took her hand. "What happened to Frank and Billy wasn't your fault, no matter how hard you try to take responsibility."

"Get back on that horse?"

"Right."

Sick and tired of hearing that, she withdrew her hand and lashed out. "That's great advice, but do you practice what you preach? Did you book an airline flight after your crash? Have you given any thought to remarrying?"

Steve levered off the couch and stood with his back to the piano, his gray eyes bleak.

Her ears got hot. "I'm sorry. That's none of my business . . . especially the part about marriage."

For a long moment, they faced off. Then Steve nodded with a gentleness that said he accepted her apology.

Clare wished he were still sitting next to her, but the distance of the room separated them.

Steve glanced over his shoulder toward the rest of the house. "There's only the one bedroom." A catch in his voice suggested he might be thinking of those brief moments when their bodies had pressed together in the fire shelter.

A pulse began to pound in her. "I don't want to put you out."

Extending his un-bandaged right hand, he reached to help her up. "You won't."

His palm was dry, rea.s.suring, and strong against hers. She remembered him holding her in the truck, his heart beating beneath her ear. Someone else's strength was what she craved tonight, to set aside the burden of training young men and women too briefly, before sending them to what today had been death.

She stood. Steve released her hand, but warmth lingered. They went into the hall, leaving the light from the living room behind. His touch on the small of her back almost made her turn, thinking of going into his arms.

She waited. At the archway that led into a darkened room, he left her, padding across the hardwood floor.

When he turned on the bedside lamp, it shone full force onto a picture of a blonde in a black formal dress, smiling lovingly at her photographer. She sat at the keyboard of a grand piano, her hands poised to play.

"Your wife?" Clare asked quietly. The wild pulse in her still pounded, incongruous against the feeling of being dashed with cold water.

"That's Susan," Steve agreed. He sank onto the bed with a dejected look.

Clare folded down beside him. "Why don't you tell me about her?"

"Fasten your seat belt." The pert Triworld Air attendant couldn't hold a candle to the incandescent beauty of Steve's wife, made ripe by her recent pregnancy. Susan held three-month-old Christa against her breast while he secured her seatbelt.

He'd wondered at the wisdom of traveling with Christa so young and fragile, but Susan had been off the circuit for six months. She'd badly wanted to make the concert engagement in Anchorage.

At last night's performance, she'd been at the top of her form, gracefully introducing three compositions she'd written while on sabbatical. "I call this the Suite of Life. The first movement speaks of the pa.s.sionate glory of conception, the second of the still fullness of waiting. The last celebrates birth, both as completion and a promise that is just beginning."

Steve had heard Susan play it a hundred times in the studio overlooking the Potomac, first a halting, intermittent progression of notes. Gradually, a theme emerged that was day-by-day embellished. Never had it flowed as it did in answer to the questing hush of the Anchorage audience. During the standing ovation, he'd blinked back tears.

In the morning, Susan's agent had telephoned their room at the Captain Cook Hotel. Steve took Christa and walked to the window overlooking Cook Inlet. The tide was out, exposing a half-mile of chocolate mud flat that would be covered again within hours. Ever since Susan had told him she was expecting he'd felt differently, as though he were not just a scientist observing the cycles, but finally part of life's ebb and flow.

Christa's rosebud mouth nudged his s.h.i.+rt. Her tiny face began to screw up as she gathered energy for a squall that would keep Susan from hearing the news from New York. Steve chuckled and offered his finger as a pacifier.

"Guess what?" Susan crowed, putting the phone into the cradle.

"They hated you in Peoria." He kept his face straight.

"The Times had a man here last night, happened to be on vacation." Steve heard in her voice there was only one Times and that it was in New York. "He phoned in a review of my new work that Charlie says will net me a recording contract."

As the 737 taxied for takeoff in Anchorage, he looked at the barren earth beside the runway and thought how impossibly rich his life was.

Steve realized that although Clare studied him with steady eyes, tears ran down her cheeks.

They sat opposite each other on his bed, crossed-legged like children in a reading circle, but he couldn't read her.

He'd told her about screaming metal and fire. How he did not remember Susan and Christa's funeral because he had attended in a wheelchair, doped to the gills. He'd been lucky, they told him, that he'd taken the impact there and not broken his neck.

How many times in those early days had he wished he had?

"After it happened, I was stationed at Park Service Headquarters," he said. "I'd drive to work on the George Was.h.i.+ngton Parkway. Planes were always taking off and landing at National, flying low over the Potomac."

"How did you come to Yellowstone?"

"Everyone knew I was having a rough time." He swallowed. "My boss thought that if I had a fresh start someplace I could get back into research . . ." He looked at her squarely. "It was a kindness. And a move to get a problem drinker off their hands."

She nodded. "Do you miss the booze? Crave it?"

"Some days are better than others."

He didn't tell her that sometimes he thought he would die for a drink. What had kept him going so far was waking each morning with a clear head and a load of unfamiliar energy. It was then that he realized he wasn't getting old like he'd thought.

"Has there been anyone else?" Clare picked at a loose thread on his bedspread.

"No." Steve eased back and propped himself on an elbow. He hadn't felt this comfortable with somebody in years. "Living in Mammoth makes it tough. Few single women winter in and the summer staff are transients." He felt her cool appraisal of his excuses. "And, of course, what you said. I'm shy of taking a risk again."

He focused on Clare. "And you?"

"Since my divorce I've just tried getting Devon grown up. That hasn't worked so well either."

They kept talking, words tumbling over each other. He shared confidences he would not have imagined telling anyone, a subst.i.tute for what he wanted . . . to take Clare in his arms.

How many times on Mount Washburn had he caught himself spinning a scenario like this? Wondering how they might end up alone. Now he sat not three feet from her on his bed, for G.o.d's sake.

What stopped him was Susan's loving gaze from the nightstand.

The phone beside the photo rang, the sound jarring. Steve jumped. Rolling over and reaching for the receiver, he groused, "Yeah?" The bedside clock said two-fifteen.

"Is Clare there?" a male voice inquired.

Wordlessly, Steve handed her the receiver and walked out of his room.

"You said you needed to get to Jackson Hole Airport tomorrow to pick up your daughter," Deering said. "Sorry, I mean today."

Clare jumped to her feet beside Steve's bed. "How did you know I'd be here?"

"Lucky guess?"

While she considered hanging up, he said, "How are you getting down south tomorrow?"

"With Steve's truck burned, he'll requisition another, or I'll hitch a ride with someone from the fire cache here at Mammoth. Get my car at Old Faithful."

"The south entrance is going to be closed all day," Deering urged.

That meant going over through Idaho, a hundred miles out of the way.

"Come on. If Steve is going to drive you, I'm helping him out. It would be an all day job."

She didn't care to listen to Deering pretend to be nice to Steve, but what she absolutely did not want to be was late picking up her daughter. Devon must be feeling rejected by Jay's taking off to Greece with Elyssa.

Clare decided. "Her plane gets in at two."

"I'll be there first thing in the morning."

As she placed the phone back in the cradle, Steve called from down the hall, "I'll bed down on the sofa." The hard note in his voice said the evening was over.

With a sigh, she picked up the picture of his wife. When Clare was ten, her mother had insisted on piano lessons. Although Miss Bryan had been diligent at teaching the perfect arch and placement of the hands, Clare had never really had any talent.

Susan Sandlin Haywood's sinewy fingers looked perfect.

In the corner of the frame was a miniature of a newborn, the kind they took in hospitals. Christa's tiny pink face crinkled, her mouth open in a yawn.

Tears p.r.i.c.ked Clare's eyelids. Here she'd been thinking of going to Steve, when he wasn't over the loss of his wife. Wasn't that her d.a.m.ned luck this summer? Coming to Yellowstone had seemed a grand escape; fight the big fires that made the national news while clearing her head. Instead, she'd screwed up big time. Tried to lead the troops and ended up in a tiny silver shelter fighting for her life.

She climbed into Steve's bed and reluctantly admitted that had things been different she might have shared it with him.

Tossing until three, she fell into a sleep tormented by crimson light, the strobe effect of the flapping shelter, and the charred smell of burnt flesh.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE.

September 5 Clare awoke with the fear she'd already missed Devon's plane. She dressed and hurried down the hall to find rose light coming in the window over Steve's kitchen sink.

He stood barefoot at the counter in a faded cotton s.h.i.+rt and jeans, putting coffee beans into a grinder. His sleep-tossed hair looked somehow intimate. He gave her a glance and bent to his task, pressing a b.u.t.ton and sending up a delicious aroma of fresh ground. The high-pitched whine prevented her from speaking.

When he released the control, silence fell.

"Morning already," she ventured.

He dumped the grounds into a gla.s.s pot without ceremony.

After all that had happened between them, she'd been hoping he'd be over Deering's middle-of-the-night call.

The copper kettle on the stove whistled.

Turning his back, Steve poured boiling water. The kettle went back on the stove with a clank. When he moved the coffee pot on the tile-topped counter, it clinked. She wondered if he'd cracked it.

Last night his coughing from the smoke he'd inhaled had interrupted her fitful sleep. Knowing he was awake had made it worse, the two of them separated by fifteen feet and the infinite gulf that Susan's picture and Deering's call had created.

Steve finally looked at her. Leaning back against the counter, he folded his arms across his chest. "What did he want?"

Quick anger shot through her. She'd left Deering to come home with Steve. She'd gone to his bedroom, her heart beating hard . . . and found a dead woman with the power to keep them apart.

Clare crossed her arms over her own yellow-s.h.i.+rted chest. "I told you I have to be in Jackson to meet Devon. The south entrance is closed, so he's flying me down."

"I could have driven you through Idaho." His voice rose.

"I'm not sure we could make it on time," Clare excused. "He'll be here in a few minutes." Now that she knew Steve was this upset, she wished she could change her mind and let him take her.

He slammed his fist on the tiles. "Dammit, Clare, he's a married man."

Her face went hot and the ancient linoleum seemed to tilt.

What else have you lied to me about? Deering had not answered when she'd asked that at West Yellowstone Airport. "If he is . . . "

"Count on it."

"I was going to ask . . . " She controlled herself with an effort. "What business is it of yours? Last night you preferred to sleep with your memories."

He crossed to her in three swift steps and his hands came down hard on her shoulders. "What business of mine? Nothing, except that I was a d.a.m.ned fool . . . sitting on that mountain dreaming. And all the time that s...o...b.. was on the make, married or not."

A faint 'whump whump' came through the open kitchen window.

Steve let her go and busied himself pulling down a single mug. He pressed the filter plunger to hold the grounds in the pot and poured. He sipped, deliberately.

She searched his face. If she left now, they'd probably never see each other again. That wasn't what she wanted, but the set of his jaw and the rising sound of rotors said it was time to go.

With the clothes on her back and her wallet that had survived the firestorm in her hip pocket, she turned and rushed across the living room. After a struggle with the turn bolt, she stepped into the yard and scanned the sky.

With typical brashness, Deering ignored Mammoth's helicopter pad down the road. The Huey came in low over the picnic tables across the street and hovered above the old Fort Yellowstone parade ground. Deering's sungla.s.ses s.h.i.+elded his face, the rising sun reflecting on the winds.h.i.+eld.

Clare looked back at Steve's house. He stood on the porch watching her, his ire mixed with a look of longing that almost made her turn back.

The Huey set down. When she looked again, Steve was gone.

She ran, warmed by anger at both men. Wrestling open the chopper door, she stretched to get into the left seat.