Heart on Fire Read online

  “Jenny will be just fine, come morning,” Hank predicted, having overheard Janine’s question to Roger. The room really wasn’t at all large, having to house only the twenty-plus people associated with the project, at any one sitting. “All we have to do is convince her she’s already been through the worst. I mean, after a bear and an earthquake, what else is there?”

  “Another thousand or so feet could blow off the mountain and take us all with it, for one,” Jack Ledben joked, arriving from the dispensary where he’d left Lou under enforced bed rest until Hank could determine whether her double vision was going to go away or heralded something more serious.

  “Let poor Jenny hear that, and that’ll be the last we’ll see of her,” Hank warned.

  “Nah!” Brad begged to differ. “She needs the money for college, or she would have been out of here like a shot when the bear almost took off Barry’s arm. Where’s she going to find another good-paying job like this one so far into the season?”

  “Nevertheless, I think we must avoid all mention of possible eruption around Jenny, shouldn’t we?” Hank seriously suggested. “We wouldn’t want you having to pick up the slack of one less helper in Janine’s kitchen, now, would we?”

  “No, we jolly well would not!” Brad agreed.

  Chad came in, looking more than a little run-ragged. The sun was coming up outside, and he’d really had very little rest, except for the catnap he’d caught in the early stages of the drive up. Janine had put aside a couple of hot rolls to make sure he got some, no matter what time he came trailing in. She excused herself from Roger’s table, where she’ been taking a break, and joined Chad at the back of the room.

  “Tell me I’m too late for even the leftovers, and I’ll show you a quick suicide,” he said, his wide smile doing a lot to alleviate the tiredness that had managed to creep into his face.

  “Come on, now,” Janine chided, “do you really think I’d feed the masses and leave the prince standing hungry on the sidelines?”

  “A maid of true mercy,” he whispered and his smile widened. He followed her to the counter, and she retrieved the promised rolls from the warmer. She put them and a fresh cup of coffee on his tray.

  “Could I exchange the coffee for cold milk, or is that looking a gift horse in the mouth?”

  “Are you and Brad both in training?” She reached for a clean and unbroken glass from the arrangement Brad had made, earlier, on a nearby counter top.

  “Since when does training include wolfing down butter horns?” Chad asked, evidently deducing from the crumbs left on Brad’s tray—there was certainly no other incriminating evidence remaining—that the young athlete had been off diet at least for the morning.

  Janine filled the glass with milk by raising the large chrome ball of the dispenser.

  Chad drained half the glass and eyed Janine over the rim of it.

  “Fine pick-me-up, now what’s for breakfast?” Hank called, dramatically licking each of the five fingers of his right hand.

  “Please, don’t aggravate the cook,” Roger commanded. “I’ve already let her know that, after our two weeks of something far less than Julia-Childs cuisine, she has us at a decided disadvantage.”

  “So, we’ll call this breakfast and let her get settled in,” Hank conceded graciously.

  “Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of pancakes about, oh….” Janine checked her wristwatch which had miraculously survived the quake. “…seven?”

  She was surprised by the spontaneous cheer from the group in residence.

  “You are truly a godsend, my dear.” Chad leaned to give her a kiss on the cheek.

  The group cheered again—even louder—and Janine blushed as red as the canned beets on the shelves behind her. This brought much clapping of hands.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  JANINE TOLD HERSELF that the only thing behind her whirlwind activities in the kitchen was her sense of job and doing that job as well as competently possible. However, in the back of her mind, through all the preparations of breakfast and getting it out of the way, her mind kept helplessly replaying the simple and harmless kiss Chad had placed on her cheek to the applause and cheers of all onlookers. No matter how often she reminded herself that it was a spontaneous kiss—probably as chaste as any brother pecking the cheek of a sister—she couldn’t quite shake the special way she’d felt when his lips had touched her. She’d kissed other men full on the lips and not derived anywhere nearly a similar sensation of pleasure.

  She conducted a less-than-thorough survey of the immediate food supply and set Brad to work on a more comprehensive tallying of what was available while she roughed out menus for the next couple of days. She decided on shit-on-a-shingle (AKA chipped beef on toast) for lunch later that day, because SOS was simple. Besides which, what with pre-dawn coffee and sweet rolls, followed by pancakes and home-made sugar syrup at seven, she figured she’d get few complaints—if any. Her decision to have a simple stew for supper took care of scheduling the day, and she spent the next few minutes putting on the beef to boil and gather up the necessary vegetables for peeling. She could have called Brad to help, but she welcomed her chores with the same enthusiasm with which she’d welcomed all her self-assigned busy-work since Chad had kissed her earlier that morning.

  For not the first time, or last, she consciously thrust the kissing incident to the back of her mind, marveling instead at how she seemed so fresh and vitalized, considering all she’d been through. If anything, she should be dead on her feet from lack of sleep. She suspected she wouldn’t have to do more than let her head hit the pillow that evening before she would be off in Dreamland. She would welcome that. Going over and over Chad’s kiss, as harmless as it admittedly was, wasn’t something she would relish doing alone in the darkness of her sleeping quarters.

  “Time for you to have a break, isn’t it?” Chad asked from the door. He was with a tall brown-haired man, with brown eyes, who looked attractive in a kind of gangling sort of way. The man was wearing a khaki-green shirt, fatigue pants and combat boots. Janine couldn’t recall having seen him before. “You shouldn’t make the mistake of being too perfect at the beginning,” Chad warned her, coming farther into the room and drawing the other man along in his wake, “or we’ll too quickly forget that you rescued us from Jenny and Brad’s culinary disasters. Keep us appreciative as long as you can.”

  “I’m in the process of preparing SOS for lunch,” Janine said. “Stew for supper. Think those are pedestrian enough for starters?”

  “I like SOS,” the tall man said and followed Chad’s example to sit opposite Janine at the dining-room table she was using as a supplemental work area.

  “That from the mouth of someone probably subjected to more chipped beef on toast than anyone else you’ll find here,” Chad said and gave Janine a broad wink. He had such sexy eyes. He had such a sexy mouth, it.… “Ethan George, Janine Woof,” Chad interrupted her train of thought, and she thanked him for it. “Ethan is our resident pilot. He got a lot of expertise flying military missions in Afghanistan. Pull out that map of yours, Ethan, and show Janine the whereabouts of Troutdale as the crow or your plane flies.”

  On their drive in, before the earthquake had made small-talk impossible, Janine had mentioned to Chad, in passing, that there was an old friend of her great-grandmother in Troutdale that Janine had promised she’d try to drop by to see; the woman in question getting up in years. Janine had since forgotten having mentioned any of that and was surprised Chad had remembered.

  To take her mind off any additional thoughts of Chad, she concentrated on Ethan. She’d heard that a lot of veterans came back ill-adjusted to civilian life. Every so often, she heard of another one who went off the deep end. She searched Ethan’s brown eyes for some sign of pent-up madness waiting (like Mt. St. Helens?) to explode. His were two of the saddest eyes she’d ever seen, and she realized she’d had that impression—unformulated until then—from the very start.

  “Troutdale is here,”
Ethan said, his long but graceful index finger pinpointing a spot on the map he’d unfolded on the table in front of them. Janine got up and came around for a look that put the topography into better perspective.”

  “And we’re…?” she asked.

  “Here,” Chad obliged, his finger stabbing a spot not all that far from where Ethan’s fingertip still rested. However, Janine was familiar enough with maps to know that distances could be deceiving, especially when a person didn’t have wings. If the two spots on the map were within a few inches of one another, the only connecting roadway was one via the little town of Cougar. That was a long way, even longer when considering the likely conditions of the road after the recent earthquake.

  “No way but through Cougar?” Janine asked.

  She knew she had promised to look in on Sarah Zent, but she wouldn’t be sorry if there was some excuse why the visit wasn’t possible.

  “How about if I walk cross-country?” she suggested and hoped she sounded interested, if just because Chad had gone to such bother.

  “A system of gorges, gullies, and natural indentations run this way.” Ethan’s finger slid back and forth along a position that separated the camp from Troutdale. “It’d take you longer to walk the distance than it would to drive there via Cougar, even if you were in tip-top physical condition.” He seemed to insinuate (and probably rightly so) that he knew tip-top physical condition and didn’t see her with it. So much for Janine’s self-boasting that she was capable of successfully heading off across wilderness terrain.

  “So, I tell Great-Grandmother Woof that I at least made the effort,” Janine said, speaking her thoughts aloud.

  “And if Great-Grandma Woof asks why you didn’t have sense enough to fly?” Chad asked.

  “Great-Grandma may be old, but she’s nowhere nearly senile enough to think her great-granddaughter has wings,” Janine reminded.

  “What if you and I can persuade Ethan, here, to take you over to Troutdale in the copter?” Chad clarified.

  “I don’t think Roger is going to approve of the team copter and the project pilot being utilized to taxi me back and forth to socialize.” She wasn’t about to get on the bad side of her boss by doing something not even she was all that certain she even wanted to do.

  “How can Roger complain when Troutdale is on the way?” Chad wanted to know.

  “On the way to where?” Janine asked suspiciously.

  “On the way to several experiments I have on the North Slope. There are all sorts of geodimeters, tiltmeters, and seismometers that have to be monitored on a regular basis in the Troutdale vicinity. So, why can’t they be read while you’re visiting an old-old-old family friend?

  “I wouldn’t want anyone thinking I was being given preferential treatment,” Janine said.

  “Who’s going to complain after you’ve saved us from more of Jenny and Brad’s cooking?”

  “You thought the earthquake was bad,” Ethan said, and his grin looked as if it were exploring unfamiliar facial territory; he didn’t remind Janine of someone who smiled all that often, “Wait until you see the one that would result if Jenny and Brad ever got back to doing whatever it was they were doing in the kitchen before you arrived to save us all. I was in the service for two years, and no military cook would have ever dared serve up the stuff those two did.”

  “Ethan doesn’t lie, so help me God,” Chad said and crossed his heart with one hand. “You keep on delivering decent meals on time, and you can pretty much write your own ticket around here, even as regards gratis helicopter rides.”

  “Maybe if I can clear it with Roger,” Janine conceded. If the opportunity was there, she owed it to her great-grandmother to take advantage of it, whether Janine was enthused or not. She’d probably feel guilty as hell is she could have gone, didn’t, and Sarah Zent dropped dead before she could convey Great-Grandma Woof’s hellos.

  Besides, Janine meeting Sarah Zent just might prove a nice diversion from cooking 24/7.

  “I’ll clear it with Roger,” Chad volunteered. “You just keep rolling the good food off the assembly line in the meantime.”

  Ethan refolded the map, tucked it into his shirt pocket and asked, little-boy polite, to be excused. Before he left, Janine asked him if he wanted something to eat, positive she’d not seen him at either the pre-dawn coffee and sweet rolls, or later at breakfast. If all the team were as thin as Ethan, Janine would have genuinely believed Jenny and Brad’s cooking had been totally indigestible.

  “Thanks, but I stuffed on candy during this morning’s flight.”

  “He was up in the copter, checking the mountain, while we were digging out down here,” Chad explained.

  “I think I can hold off until lunch,” Ethan assured, “especially since, as I said, I actually like SOS.”

  Chad sat back in his chair, reflectively watching Ethan’s exit. Janine looked at all the unpeeled vegetables she had on the table in front of her. They were a good excuse to ask Chad to go. In the back of her mind, though, she knew she had plenty of time. More time if she enlisted Brad’s efforts as a peeler. There was something about being with Chad that she thoroughly enjoyed.

  “Ethan is a really nice guy,” Chad said, something in his voice insinuating the need for Janine to question his definition of nice.

  “He certainly seemed that,” she said.

  “There’s a surprisingly large amount of strength inside that skinny body of his. I mean, he may look like the next wind storm is going to blow him over, but I guess he had some pretty impressive kills during his time in the military. Not that he’d ever admit to it.”

  “He seemed calm enough.” There had been something about him, though, similar to a too-tightly coiled spring, that Janine thought she might not like to see come suddenly unwound.

  “I guess his best friend in Afghanistan got blown away,” Chad said. “He’s never gone into specifics, and I’ve never had the guts to press him about it.”

  Janine felt pretty lucky she’d been as little affected by all of the wars of the world as she might have been, especially considering she had six brothers. Glen had even served in the Army but had never ended up anywhere dangerous. He’d been in Korea but only long after the Korean War (or Conflict, or whatever). He’d finished up his enlistment at a Portland, Oregon, enlistment and examination station. Her brother Johnny had been in and out of the Navy, between wars, married and had three kids. Bob had been discharged from the Army, had married Stella, a little Bobby on the way before U.S. troops started being seriously shipped to the Middle East. Brewster had somehow finagled a deferment by some hook or crook (just prior to his marriage to wife one) that still wasn’t considered a subject for polite family conversation. Carl and Darrel had gotten college deferments; Carl had been closest to going but had ended up spending all of his time at Fort Ord, California.

  Only cousin Granger, the son of Uncle Tal and Wendy, on Janine’s mother’s side of the family, had been killed on duty (in Iraq). Another cousin, again on Janine’s mother’s side, had been wounded, but Janine hadn’t known him very well. Even in families as close as hers, it was difficult to be all that close to everyone. Cliques and friendships, some stronger than others, were always forming and breaking down.

  “A penny for your thoughts.” Chad brought her out of her reverie. As trite as his interruption might have been, it seemed charming. Even in the light from the industrial neon tubes overhead, the look in his eyes was purely magical.

  “I was thinking about how wars affect so many lives,” she said.

  He fished into the watch pocket of his jeans (did anyone ever put a watch there, anymore?), and retrieved a penny which he placed on the table. She took the coin and found it still sensuously warm from his body.

  “A lot of Woofs and Farnwells die in wars?” he asked and reached for a small carrot which he began to eat. He had even, white teeth.

  “Surprisingly, no,” Janine admitted, “especially considering how many of them could have ended up dead.”
r />   There was the distracting sound of the walk-in freezer door swinging open. Brad emerged with steaming breath and clapping his gloved hands to warm them.

  “Ink in my pen froze up.” He pushed the door closed behind him. “That’s for sure a job that requires a pencil.” He pulled his inventory clipboard from underneath one arm and dropped it on a nearby counter.

  “I’ll help you with that later, Brad, if you help me peel these vegetables, now, for evening stew,” Janine promised. She was giving Chad his cue to leave, and he took it gracefully, promising to see them both later.

  When he was gone, Janine immediately missed him and wished he were back.

  She looked up to realize Brad was smiling at her from across the table. Somehow, he had not only inserted himself into the spot just vacated by Chad, but he had already peeled several potatoes and deposited them in the pan next to his right elbow. The way Janine’s kitchen activity had come to a mysterious stop upon Chad’s departure hadn’t gone unnoticed by Brad.

  “Like him, do you?” Brad intuited.

  “Who?” Janine replied innocently, knowing she was beginning to blush despite all efforts not to. “Oh, you mean, Chad?”

  “Did you see anyone else just here, chatting up our head cook?”

  “Actually, he stopped by to tell me he thought he might be able to arrange transportation for me to visit a family friend in Troutdale.”

  “Right.” Brad didn’t sound as if he believed her.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “BUSY?” CHAD ASKED, appearing tired but nonetheless handsome.

  Janine certainly looked busy, having just made pie-crust dough for the bacon quiches she had scheduled for the next morning. She was as covered with flour as Brad had been when she’d spotted him earlier sorting dented pots and pans on the recently earthquaked kitchen floor.

  “I thought we could both break for a walk,” Chad suggested.

  She checked her wristwatch after first having to wipe its crystal clear of flour. It was almost ten o’clock at night. She hadn’t realized it was so late.