Heart on Fire Read online

  BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY WILLIAM MALTESE

  Anal Cousins: Case Studies in Variant Sexual Practices

  Back of the Boat Gourmet Cooking: Afloat—Pool-side—Backyard (with Bonnie Clark)

  Blood-Red Resolution: Being Excerpts from the Crypto-Coded Files of the United Courier Service: A Novel of Adventure

  Catalytic Quotes (Some Heard Through a Time Warp)

  Draqualian Silk: A Collector’s & Bibliographical Guide to the Books of William Maltese, 1969-2010

  Emerald-Silk Intrigue

  The Fag Is Not for Burning: A Mystery Novel

  From This Beloved Hour

  Gerun, the Heretic: Being Excerpts from the Clan-Missionary Chronicles

  The Gluten-Free Way: My Way (with Adrienne Z. Milligan)

  The Gomorrha Conjurations

  The “Happy” Hustler

  Heart on Fire: A Romance

  In Search of the Perfect Pinot G! (with A. B. Gayle)

  Incident at Aberlene (Spies & Lies #1)

  Incident at Brimzinsky (Spies & Lies #2)

  Jungle Quest Intrigue

  Love’s Emerald Flame

  Love’s Golden Spell

  Moon-Stone Intrigue

  Moonstone Murders: The Movie Script

  Slaves

  A Slip to Die for: A Stud Draqual Mystery

  Summer Sweat: An Erotic Anthology

  SS & M: Being Excerpts from the Nazi Death-Head Files

  Total Meltdown (with Raymond Gaynor)

  When Summer Comes

  William Maltese’s Wine Taster Diary: Spokane & Pullman, WA

  Young Cruisers

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 2007 by William Maltese

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  DEDICATION

  For all those who, like I,

  Prefer a bit of adventure with their romance,

  And a bit of romance with their adventure.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “I DO WISH YOU’D RECONSIDER this Mt. St. Helens business,” Grace Woof said to her daughter. “Who knows when it’ll explode again? You? The scientists who didn’t have a clue the first time?”

  “They’re monitoring the mountain more closely, these days,” Janine argued, for not the first time. “I’ll be fine. Besides, I need something to keep me occupied until Marine World gets refurbished after the fire. You want me hanging around here, all of the time, and making a nuisance of myself?”

  Grace shook her head at the ridiculous suggestion that her daughter would ever be a nuisance. “You know we’d love to see more of you.”

  “Look how this allows me to take advantage of your having insisted I minor in Home Economics.” Janine knew her mother’s purpose in that had really been for her daughter to prepare for married life, not so that Janine could go off and cook for some scientific team ensconced on a mountain that had already blown once and could very well blow again.

  “Janine will be fine,” her father told his wife and put his daughter’s suitcase directly to the side of the front door.

  Mack Woof was a large, well-built man who laughed easily. He’d gone to WSU on a football scholarship, and he’d led his first-string team to a number of astounding victories. He could have turned pro—had even gotten several fat-cat offers—but Grace hadn’t seen having a professional football player for a husband as any way she wanted to live. Professional football locker rooms were afloat with cocaine and steroids and other illegal drugs, and that wasn’t the ideal atmosphere for any husband of hers. In the end, Mack had agreed. Besides, he’d always loved Grace more than he’d loved knocking around other guys on the football field. He now made a good living as head of the three grocery stores Grace had inherited from her father, and he was quick to remind that had he stuck to the sport he’d probably, by now, be laid up with a bum knee, with nothing whatsoever else to show for it.

  “What if you should need a doctor for some reason?” Grace wanted Janine to answer that all-important question for her.

  “There’s a medical doctor on site, and a good one, too. Hank Heidelburg was on-call when I worked at the Department of Fisheries that one summer. There’s, also, a helicopter for emergency medical evac.”

  “A lot of people are surprised to hear you’re leaving so soon.” Grace was as prepared to wrestle with the subject as the family dog liked to wrestle a bone. “I spent weeks bragging up the fact that my youngest daughter was going to be home for the summer, and here she is, up and leaving before she’s even settled in.”

  Janine shifted her position to see a portion of the backyard through the open verandah doors.

  She spotted Dr. (“Please, call me Chad!”) Samuels. He had this positively marvelous mane of lion’s-gold hair that made him hard to miss in the sea of predominantly Italian family-Woof. There was something aesthetically pleasing about any blond, male or female, who tanned well, probably because light-haired people were so much more likely to turn lobster red and peel.

  Janine wondered to where “Lou” had gotten off. Luella (Lou) Gessler, an old friend and college roommate, was the one who’d recommended Janine for kitchen supervisor when the job had unexpectedly become available on the mountain.

  Janine hadn’t expected Lou to have Dr. Samuels— Chad—in tow when Lou had turned up with him that afternoon on the Woof doorstep. According to Lou, Chad had been in Spokane on personal business and had needed a ride back to the mountain.

  “Be sure to say good-bye to your Great-Grandma Woof,” Grace reminded Janine and interrupted her daughter’s train of thought. “She’s ninety-one, after all, and none of us know just long she’s going to be with us.”

  The insinuation was that Great-Grandma Woof was most likely going to drop dead while Janine was off on the mountain.

  “Of course, I will.” Janine had hoped to just fade away and not undergo the last-minute scrutiny Great-Grandma Woof would provide as regarded the man suddenly joining Janine and Lou in their ride up the assumedly dreaded Washington-state volcano.

  She headed in Chad’s direction and was intercepted by Uncle Joseph who wanted her to have a hamburger. She didn’t want one, thank you.

  “Here, try my new recipe for bread-and-butter pickles!” insisted Aunt Betty who’d apparently brought some of her own food to supplement the overflowing supply Grace had balanced precariously on every conceivable flat surface.

  “Delicious,” Janine complimented, escaping with her mouthful.

  At this rate, neither she, nor Lou, nor poor Dr. (Chad) Samuels would make it out the door before the next morning.

  “Off to Mt. St. Helens, I hear,” said brother-in-law Gerald. He’d been a line-backer at Idaho State, and there was no way Janine was going to get by him without a good deal of clever faking and footwork. Luckily, little Trent-Talbot chose that particular moment to spill 7-Up on Aunt Gloria, and daddy Gerald had to go play referee.

  “Sorry about all of this,” Janine managed, rather breathlessly, when she miraculously, finally, arrived at her intended destination.

  Dr. Chad Samuels’s eyes, whose glance meet hers, were the color of rich amber that had petrified from prehistoric pitch, and there were sunbursts of jet exploding outward from the shade-dilated pupil of each one.

  His hair, and tan, dimples, eyes, nose, and full mouth with its faint crinkles at its corners, all just went perfectly together.

  Lou was dark-complexioned and less noticeable in her chair directly next to her fellow scientist.

  “We can leave any time, you guys,” Janine said, then added upon noticing that her mother was noticing, “just as soon as I say my official good-bye to the family matriarch.”

  “She’s holding court in the pavilion,” Lou said. Having roomed with Ja
nine in school, she’d been subjected to several of these large family gatherings and was less at sea in this one than Chad so obviously was.

  Chad took another bite of the heaping pile of potato salad earlier forced upon him by one Janine’s aunts, or cousins; he couldn’t remember who, except that the woman had an exceptional head of ebony-black hair.

  “This should only take a minute,” Janine blatantly lied and headed off toward Great-Grandma Woof.

  “Scientists make a good deal of money, do they?” Great-Grandma Woof greeted Janine from her rocking chair, first unceremoniously shooing off an assortment of grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and the like. “I only ask, because I don’t see scientist you living in any mansion at the moment and riding around in a Mercedes-Benz.”

  Janine knew Great-Grandma Woof’s comment had little to do with Janine, a lot to do with Dr. Chad Samuels.

  “Lou says he has a very large trust fund.” Janine wondered if that would meet with the old lady’s approval, or….

  “He’s suspiciously too handsome to be a scientist,” observed Great-Grandma Woof. “He’s suspiciously too handsome to be a man. Do you think he’s gay?”

  “I haven’t a clue.” Janine could only hope Chad Samuels wasn’t gay. Leave it to Great-Grandma Woof to taint Janine’s delight in having, for the first time, in a very long time, finally found a truly good-looking male of the species.

  “Handsome men can be truly charming, but ugly men make the best husbands,” Great-Grandma Woof observed. “Keep that in mind while you’re off impressing him with your cooking.”

  Speaking of impressive, Great-Grandma Woof was certainly that. She sat ramrod straight, bedecked in a conservatively cut dress of blue-black cotton and lace that looked nonetheless in fashion for having been homespun and home-sewn over half a century before. Her once-black hair, long gone pure white, was dyed black, but there was still a lot of it, all tucked precisely into a large bun atop her head and held there by massive hair pins.

  She didn’t look nearly as old as she was, although her porcelain skin was finally beginning to show wrinkles that resembled the crackling on fine China.

  “Did he say his family was from Sweden, or Norway?”

  Janine didn’t have a clue.

  Great-Grandma Woof’s eyes were the same bright blue as they’d been when she’d first spotted Brigham Woof across the lawn of another party so many years before.

  “It might be every interesting to see what kind of children would result from his blond good looks and your dark complexion.”

  “Dr. Samuels is an associate, Great-Grandma,” Janine chided. “Not even that, really. This project will see me stuck in the kitchen and likely not even seeing him except at meals.”

  “You do know that this mountain of yours could catastrophically burn down the rest of itself just as easily as that other place you worked?”

  Janine could still shudder at what had happened at Marine World. Namu-Six, their popular killer whale, had been caught in a small holding tank when the fire broke out. Staff and fire fighters had tried to open the gate to the sea, but the winch had malfunctioned. After which, Namu-Six had come to the surface once too often into blast-furnace conditions. Environmentalists were still up in arms.

  “You expecting to find a replacement orca for Namu-Six up on that mountain?” Great-Grandma Woof asked, the twinkle increasing in her blue eyes. “You are a fish biologist, isn’t that what your mother told me? If Namu-Six got fried in a little fire, what do you think happened to all of those poor little fishes in all of those mountain streams and lakes when St. Helens blew its whole top?”

  “Whatever, it’ll be the concern of Lou and Dr. Samuels and the other scientists, while I peel their potatoes and boil their water.”

  “You’re a good cook, are you? Men do like women who can cook.” Great-Grandma settled back in her chair and pulled her shawl closer around her in spite of the warmth of the afternoon. “Men like women who are attractive. You’re certainly that.”

  Janine had a thick mane of Woof black hair (there wasn’t mention of a bald Woof in the annals of Woof genealogy—which was traced back to Charlemagne on her father’s side and to Cimabue on her mother’s side). She had nicely shaped eyebrows over a pair of striking, wide-set blue eyes. In fact, her eyes were probably her best feature, although more than one boyfriend had commented on her “cute” nose.

  Her lips and body were full and, to Great-Grandma’s notion, a mite too sensuous, in that they reminded the matriarch of Lady Abitha de Woof whose only surviving image was a miniature painted on a now-antique ivory broach kept secured with several other family heirlooms in a safety deposit box at the Dishman branch of the Washington Trust Bank. Lady Abitha’s affairs, political and otherwise, in the court of England’s King Henry VIII, were some of several skeletons found rattling in the Woof closet. By Janine’s age, Lady Abitha had gone through four husbands, three dead by mysterious circumstances, and had given birth to three bastards. By contrast, Janine seemed destined to reach old age without giving marriage or childbirth even one go-round.

  “So, just why aren’t you married?” asked Great-Grandma for not the first time. “I forget.”

  Janine shrugged. It was the easiest line of self-defense. She didn’t know why, except that there just hadn’t been anyone for her like there had been for just about everyone else in the family.

  “You know where Troutdale is up on that mountain of yours?” Great-Grandma asked. “Really close to this camp of yours, as I understand it.”

  “Really close as the crow flies,” Janine reminded. Distances in wilderness areas were deceptive.

  “Close enough for you to visit, I would think, yes? In that, I’ve this old friend of mine presently living there, Sarah Zent, and I’d like you to stop by and say hello as soon as you can squeeze in a minute or two of your time, between peeling all of those potatoes and boiling all of that water.”

  “Sure, I can do that,” Janine assured. In reality, what with three meals to be served, each and every day, she didn’t think she’d have many spare moments, but she wasn’t about to tell Great-Grandma Woof that.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “SO, ALL OF THOSE REALLY WERE Woofs?” Chad asked; Lou steered the car left on Sprague Avenue and headed them for the ramp accessing the freeway.

  “Or married to Woofs, or descended from Woofs, or related to Woofs,” Janine elucidated. “There was more than a fair representation of mom’s side of the family, too.”

  “That would be the Farnwells,” Lou said and eyed Chad in the rearview mirror; he’d taken advantage of the extra leg room in the back seat, both women in front.

  They drove in silence for a couple of minutes, Lou changing to an outside lane to pass an Idaho-licensed camper before announcing, “You do know, Chad, that all of those Woofs and Farnwells are hot to find out why this particular Miss Woof, riding with us here, is so long in linking up with some Mr. Right.”

  Janine’s blush made her cheeks go pink. “I really doubt Chad is interested in any of that.”

  “Why wouldn’t he be interested?” Lou provided a wide smile. If she caught the daggers Janine’s eyes were throwing, she chose to ignore them.

  “You just pay more attention to the road, please,” Janine insisted.

  “Lou,” injected Chad, “is just so happy about Jack and her relationship, these days, that she seems intent upon pairing up just about everybody else.” He tried to shift to a more comfortable position.

  “Jack?” Janine didn’t miss her cue.

  “Jack Ledben,” Chad obliged. “Don’t tell me Lou hasn’t mentioned him to you. He’s our team geochemist to whom, we all suspect, Lou has been giving a crash course in advanced biology.”

  “Tacky!” Lou accused.

  “And why is this the first time I’ve heard anything about this Jack?” Janine wanted to know.

  “Probably because telling you would have made what I have going with him seem way too serious,” Lou confessed. “Besides, I
was going to tell you—after you got settled in on the mountain.”

  “Then, it’s not serious between you and him, huh?” Chad carried on. “You could have fooled me and everyone else.”

  “Jack and I have agreed to keep our relationship light,” Lou explained.

  “As opposed to what?” Chad wanted to know. “Heavy?”

  Janine was glad he was keeping the conversation moving so she didn’t have to.

  “Jack and I are going to play it by ear,” Lou added.

  “Hmmmmmm.” Chad sounded dubious.

  “Enough!” Lou insisted. “I don’t want you to give Janine the wrong impression.”

  “Or the right impression,” Chad mused under his breath.

  “I’ll fill you in on Jack later, Janine, promise.” Lou smiled. “You’ll like him.”

  If Lou had finally found someone, Janine was happy for her. Lou had been looking as long as Janine, except for Lou’s unfortunate four-month relationship with Jeff Potter when they were all in their junior year at WSU. Janine hadn’t liked Jeff. Before that mess was over, Lou had found him out, too, and didn’t like him any more than Janine did. There had been some pretty scary tightrope walking there for awhile. Janine had wondered, more than once, at the time, if her and her roommate’s friendship was going to survive it. Luckily, it had only grown stronger.

  On the other hand, if Lou had found someone, Janine couldn’t help being a little jealous. Certainly, there remained no one special on Janine’s immediate horizon. Maybe she was destined to be an old maid after all.

  “You know?” Chad said a few minutes later, leaning his forearms up on the front seat between Lou and Janine. His face was so close to Janine, she could smell the tartness of his lime-based cologne. “I’m a little envious of Janine and all her aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews, brothers, and sisters. I used to fantasize being part of a big family.”

  “I always knew you had to be an only child.” Lou welcomed the shift in conversation. “You have that air of one-and-only about you.”

  “Have you been in Spokane, then, visiting your parents, Chad?” Janine asked, interested in what had brought him down from the mountain.