The Rancher's Daughter
“Okay, so maybe you do have a few things to be scared of,” she said softly. “There’s a big, mean fire out there. Your mama’s pretty sick, and you don’t have a clue what’s going to happen to her…or to you.”
She extended her cupped hands an inch more. The fawn quivered like an aspen. From the corner of her eye, she was aware that her companion had stilled his movements so as not to frighten the fawn. Aware that he watched her with interest.
“I’m here now, though, along with this guy here,” she murmured, tipping her head slightly in his direction. “He saved my hide, and that was not without some doin’. I just met him, but I’ve got the feeling he’ll take care of you, too, just like he’s helping your mama.” Another inch forward. “We’ll get out of this, Smokey, I promise. But we’ve gotta stick together, okay?”
The fawn still had not moved, and the animal seemed to teeter on a precipice of indecision that had to be worse than his thirst. It tore Maura’s heart.
“Take a drink, sweetie, please,” she whispered. “Trust me—trust yourself, too—and take a drink.”
The velvet brown eyes grew larger, the black nose trembled. Then the fawn took a tentative step toward her. Maura remained motionless, her arms and shoulders aching with the effort. She knew she could depend upon the firefighter remaining still, but if the doe showed any signs of agitation right now, that would be it for gaining the fawn’s trust.
She met the animal’s eyes unwaveringly.
And then he took another step, then another, before stretching his neck forward—and taking a tiny lap at the water in her palm. His nose tickled, yet Maura twitched not a muscle. He drank all that she had to offer, then toddled backward and sank down next to his mother.
Relieved and happy, Maura let her arms drop to her lap.
“You got some kind of sweet-talkin’ ability there,” the firefighter said quietly.
“Which has its merits…and its faults,” she said pensively.
“What do you mean?”
The fawn had begun licking his mother’s ear in his own offering of comfort. “I had quite a bit of contact with wildlife during my fieldwork in the forestry program at the University of Montana,” Maura answered. “I learned then that animals should be afraid of us humans. We’ve done nothing to earn their trust. We’ve ruined their home, rather than taken care of it for them. The Rumor fire is proof positive of that. When it comes down to it, that’s why I became a volunteer firefighter. I know the NIFC is still investigating how the Rumor fire got started, but it’s pretty clear it was a person—”
“And so it’s only fitting that we humans risk our lives to stop it,” he finished for her.
“Right. And if we’re able to save even one of the thousands of animals who’ll die before it’s contained for good—” she lifted her chin a notch in defiance “—then I’m glad to have taken the risk.”
To her dismay, she found herself fighting tears yet again.
“Maura.”
She took her gaze off the fawn to look at him. Those gray eyes of his virtually glowed, fascinating her. How could a shade one normally thought of as cool and remote be so vibrant and compelling?
“Okay, so maybe there is a place for powder puffs on a major fire,” he murmured with such respect—albeit somewhat grudging—that she forgot to chafe under the nickname.
Yes, her fascination for him was strong. But so was her fear as his gaze dropped to her mouth in a movement that was blatantly erotic.
Maura had a sudden urge to scamper backward with as much wariness as the fawn. She didn’t, though, just lifted her chin and asked tartly, “So what’s your name—unless you want me to make up some offensive nickname to call you?”
Chapter Two
Maura’s question, oh-so-innocently posed, brought him up short. A thousand emotions assailed him in that brief moment—sharp regret, shame and dread foremost among them. But this woman wouldn’t know, didn’t need to know, his entire history.
He drew in a calming breath, then answered succinctly. “Ash.”
“Ash?” Maura repeated inanely.
“Short for Ashton. It’s an old family name.” He didn’t offer his last name, and he knew Maura had to be wondering why. It was firefighter etiquette, especially when crews were being called in from all over the nation, to lead off with your full name, where you hailed from, how long you’d been firefighting and how long on this particular fire. It gave you a sense of your own time and place in the life of the fire.
But he had an aversion to volunteering too much information, developed over ten years of hard lessons. Brutal lessons.
Still, he found himself muttering, “Been a volunteer firefighter for the past five years, mostly in Montana and Idaho. This is my first week on this fire.”
He grabbed his T-shirt and rose to his feet. “I’ll go soak this in water again and bathe the doe’s burns as best I can. There’s not much else we can do.”
If Maura was puzzled by the abrupt change of subject, she didn’t show it. She bit her lower lip in thought, which only made her look ten times more earnest—and naive—than she already did. And ten times as irresistible.
He couldn’t believe she was old enough to have graduated college, much less have been in the Forest Service long enough to work a couple of big fires. She barely came up to his shoulder, and with that schoolgirlish braid of red hair trailing over her shoulder and those innocent blue eyes, he’d have guessed her age closer to sixteen than twenty-something.
Except for when she stretched behind her for her helmet and one had a glimpse of the curve of a full, womanly breast and nipped-in waist.
She set the helmet so its headlamp shed better light onto the doe’s injuries. “I’ll take the first turn at bathing her burns, if you like. If we keep it up through the night, it’ll ease her discomfort until we can get her proper veterinary care, don’t you think?”
Ash simply stared at her. She had to know the animal wouldn’t make it to morning. He wasn’t going to clarify the point, however, not when Maura was looking up at him with her big blue eyes as if he could turn the world on its axis.
“Why not, I guess,” Ash said, curbing the cynicism in his voice. “Let me take first crack at it, though, while you set up camp in the chamber where we left our gear.”
She smiled, and it was like the sun breaking over the horizon. “Thanks, Ash.”
She disappeared down the passage while Ash soaked and resoaked the T-shirt, being careful not to touch the doe’s burns with it as he ran water over them. Her breathing did seem less labored, but that might be because she was barely clinging to life. He gave her another drink of water and tried to coax the fawn into taking one and failed.
Of course, ministering to the downtrodden and discouraged was Maura’s specialty. That and her seemingly unrelenting optimism.
Ash sat back on his heels. Optimism. Now there was a word he’d long forgotten the meaning of. And a state of mind he hadn’t been able to revive in himself since…well, since forever, it seemed.
But today he’d experienced the whiff of a remembrance, like a familiar scent from childhood drifting on the wind, of a time when he hadn’t been skeptical of every hope that lifted its wings being dashed to pieces when it inevitably fell to earth. A time when every small taste of sweetness didn’t come with a castor-oil dose of bitterness. A time when he wasn’t constantly wary, could be open with his heart and know how to keep another’s heart in trust.
And he supposed he had Maura to thank for that— or should he curse her instead? Because she had only underscored how difficult, if not hopeless, was his journey toward redemption. Toward regaining such trust, in others as well as in himself.
With a shake of his head, Ash roused himself from his contemplation. Well, he only had to make it through the night with Maura and her hopefulness. And kindness. And honesty. And tantalizing appeal. He could keep her at a distance until the morning. Then, with any luck, he could say goodbye and return to reality.
Placing his hands on his thighs, Ash hauled himself to his feet and went to see how he could help her.
Maura glanced around as Ash entered the chamber, where she’d made inroads to getting organized for the night.
His gray eyes turned abruptly stormy as they took in the results of her efforts.
“What the hell is this?” he asked.
“I discovered the space blanket in your fire pack,” she explained. “I laid it out next to the one I had, you know, so we could share our b-body heat.” She couldn’t believe she was stammering and blushing like a girl. “It’ll help us keep warm.”
“Really,” Ash said in that one-word commentary she was coming to learn had a lot of different meanings. Such as right now, with how he’d slipped his fire shirt back on but hadn’t buttoned it, as if oblivious to the cool temperature in the cave. He was also back to being remote, it seemed, and she wondered why.
“I also have a bunch of water purification tabs in case we need to go that route,” she prattled on almost nervously, “but with a combined total of four bottles of water, we should be good for a few days, if needed. And we both have compasses, duct tape and first aid kits, as well as some pretty complete rations.”
She spread her hands, indicating the food she’d assembled on their space blankets. “Your three power bars along with my MRE,” she said, referring to the ready-made meals that were available for firefighters to take with them when it seemed likely they might not make it back to fire camp that night.
“An MRE, huh?” He picked up the retort pouch the meal had come in and scrutinized it as if it were vermin. “‘Hearty Beef Stew.’ The problem is, it could say chicken or pasta or veggie delight on here, and it wouldn’t matter. It all has the taste and texture of corrugated cardboard.”
“How on earth did you get to be such a sourpuss!” she finally burst out, half teasing, half serious. “I think we can count ourselves lucky to have any kind of nourishment at all. And that we’re in here, relatively safe and sound, instead of being the ones getting eaten alive by that fire out there!”
He looked at her strangely for a long moment, then shrugged. “You’re right. Let’s eat.”
They settled into their spare meal, Maura sitting cross-legged across from Ash, who was doing the same. After her previous nausea, she was surprised to find herself as hungry as a bear, and it was difficult not to bolt her food. The MRE had come with a helping of apple crisp, and despite Ash’s dearth of expectations, the dessert tasted as close to ambrosia as Maura could imagine.
Ash ate methodically and without enthusiasm, as if in the past he had indeed had to eat corrugated cardboard and like it. She couldn’t help but be curious about his history, but she had a feeling they weren’t going to pass the evening chummily sharing their life stories. Although it would be nice to know his last name, for crying out loud.
She was about to ask when he said, “It’s true, you know.”
“What is?” Maura asked.
“That the fire is alive. That it has a purpose. That it’s vengeful. And it will swallow you up, just like the whale did Jonah.”
She glanced sharply at him, wondering again at this change of mood. “You can’t think about it that way. You know that. That’s one of the first rules of firefighting. You make the fire too real and you lose your ability to combat it. And it’ll consume you.”
“Exactly.” He continued eating methodically, musingly. “Either you’re consumed with combating it, or it’ll consume you. Either way, you lose something of yourself.”
Was he right? Maura asked herself. Her thoughts turned to the fire that had been scorching the countryside for more than eight weeks since it started just outside of her hometown of Rumor. It had steadily marched, like a plague of locusts, south-southeast into the Custer National Forest, one of the most diverse and spectacular pieces of forestland in the state of Montana. Already the fire had torched more than 250,000 acres, leaving nothing in its wake, the soil charred so badly it was as hard as her plastic helmet.
And the fire didn’t seem to be letting up. It did seem possessed, in fact, with its own vicious temper and capricious moods that were as unpredictable as that of a wild man, making the damage it did that much more senseless.
Maura set her dessert aside, no longer hungry. “Maybe you’re right,” she admitted. “But even if I try to be objective about forest fires, the truth is, I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t care about a lot of things having to do with the land.”
She gave a rueful shake of her head. “It’s the main reason I got a degree in forestry and natural resources management, because I love this state—love it like it’s a part of me. This fire…well, you know how it goes. Its effects will reverberate throughout the whole ecosystem. The jackrabbits, sage grouse and ground squirrels lose food, shelter and nesting cover with the cheatgrass and sagebrush gone. With those animals dying off, there’s nothing for raptors and snakes to prey on. And it goes on and on from there.”
“It’s called survival of the fittest,” Ash murmured. He had set his meal aside, too. The dank, depressing smell in the cave seemed worse all of a sudden.
“Is it? Or is it not getting the God-given right to thrive and have a normal existence, like Smokey and his mother?”
He gazed at her calmly. “No one’s ever said that life was fair.”
She gestured around her, rather urgently, she realized. “And we’re not to try and do our best to make it a little more fair?”
Was she trying to convince Ash? Or herself? She only knew she had to try.
She leaned forward intently, forearms on her knees. “You know how you have dreams you want so badly to make happen you can nearly taste it?”
“I guess.” He was wary, watching her.
“Well, I have a dream. Someday I want to have a ranch. It wouldn’t have to be big, maybe just a few dozen acres. I’d invite all kinds of disadvantaged children there—children from broken homes, or who’ve had some behavioral problems, or who just need a place to go after school instead of a dark, empty house.” She clasped her hands in front of her. “I’d teach them how they can be a part of taking care of the land. I’d show them how we need to be good stewards and protect and preserve our environment and wildlife. And maybe by doing that, the children will learn how to be responsible and helpful and purposeful. And they’ll feel safe and secure themselves. And happy.”
“You think that will do it?” Ash asked. His voice wasn’t skeptical so much as carefully neutral. “Spending some time on your ranch is gonna turn these kids’ lives around, and it won’t matter what they have to go back home to each evening?”
“I think it will help, at least a little, or maybe just enough.” She dropped her chin, studying the sooty toes of her lug-soled boots. “I get frustrated, though, knowing that there are so many children and animals who are going without that help every day, every single day.”
She gave a huff of frustration, and again she couldn’t have said with whom she was frustrated.
“You can’t save the world, Maura,” Ash said, and it was now as if he were trying to convince her of something that meant a great deal to him.
She wouldn’t go there. She couldn’t go there.
“If I help rescue just one soul,” Maura said stubbornly, “it’d be worth it. I mean, don’t you feel your life has been given new purpose by saving mine?”
He didn’t answer, only gazed at her with that same wariness.
She rose, needing to move, and went to stand at the entrance to the passage that led to the outside. Even from several yards in, the sound of the wind was like getting up close and personal with a volcano. The worst of the fire would have passed by now, but the danger—and the fury—were not over. They would never be over, for there would always be forest fires. There would always be the suffering of the innocent. It was a law of nature.
Panic again fought its way upward in her chest.
Distracting herself, Maura passed a palm across the back of her neck. “Heavens, I feel grubby. I’d give anything for a nice hot shower.”
“I’d suggest freshening up in the spring,” Ash said from behind her, “but it’s just a little spit of water, and the pool it flows into isn’t something you’d give your dog a bath in, much less yourself.”
She turned to regard him. He had exhibited little reaction to her diatribe, except for his eyes returning to that cool silver that created enough distance between them you could have inserted the Grand Canyon with room to spare. She knew she hadn’t changed his mind a bit. Of course, she knew what he believed; he’d said it outright.
“Just a spit of water, eh?” She elevated her chin an inch. “Not exactly my idea of clean, but better than nothing.”
She found the bar of Ivory she always kept in her pack and took it and her helmet with her as she headed stalwartly down the tunnel. She wasn’t going to let Ash Whatever-his-last-name-was get her down.
She gave the doe a quick check on the way by. Smokey was still glued to his mother’s side. Maura stooped to soothe a hand down the bridge of the doe’s nose. She barely responded. She seemed to be resting better, though. Maura would take the next turn bathing the burns after her own abbreviated ablution.
The spring, she discovered, was the trifling affair Ash had warned it would be, barely a trickle down the side of one wall into a small muddy pool at the bottom. She sighed. It would have to do.
Wedging her helmet into a crevice in the opposite wall, she removed her fire shirt, then hesitated with her hands on the hem of her T-shirt, listening. The only sounds were that of the spring echoing in the chamber. Not that Ash would peek; she knew that without asking. She drew the T-shirt over her head, reveling in the feel of fresh, albeit cold, air on her skin, and impulsively removed her bra as well. She used the red bandanna she’d had tied around her throat to catch the meager stream from the spring, soaped the dampened area and washed herself as best she could, shivering a little in the cool of the cave. Meager as it was, the bath did revive her spirit.
She didn’t know why she cared, anyway—about what Ash thought or if he had the disposition of a badger and an outlook so gloomy it would take a trip to the far side of the sun to brighten it up a bit. But she had to wonder what had made him that way: wary, secretive, cynical.
Something flitted past her ear, ruffling her hair. Maura knew it was a bat—she knew it—but she couldn’t stifle a startled cry.
She gave another when barely three seconds later Ash appeared around the corner, his Pulaski gripped in his hand, his eyes wide with concern, his features taut. His stance that of knight ready to do battle.
Except that there was nothing to do battle with. And that’s when Maura realized why, actually, his expression was so strained: Ash’s headlamp had zeroed in like a spotlight on her naked torso. She felt like Gypsy Rose Lee on stage at the burlesque.
Maura gave yet another screech, this one of embarrassment, as she stooped, fumbling for her fire shirt to cover herself.
Realizing where the beam of his headlamp was trained, Ash whipped his helmet off his head and shoved it under his arm with military precision, so that the light now fell in a pool at his feet.
“Are you okay?” he asked belatedly. He had obviously been ready to come to her rescue for the second time that day. It wasn’t the fact that she was standing there virtually half-naked that a thrill of goose bumps swept over her.
It was immediately followed by a thoroughly warming blush at the spark that leaped to his eyes, remote no more.
“A…a bat startled me,” Maura stammered, clutching her shirt at her throat with one hand while holding it spread over her breasts with the other. “I’m fine…just embarrassed, is all. That I screamed, I mean, and made you come running. I must have scared the life out of you.”
He finally averted his eyes, obviously nearly as embarrassed as she was.
“I didn’t know if—or what—had happened.” He actually shuffled his feet. “You know, if you’d seen a spider or if there was some kind of animal you’d come across that was threatening you…”
He shoved a hand through his dark hair. “Oh, hell.”
Maura broke out into a smile. How sweet of him, just when she was about to give up on him. As much as he might pretend he was a hard case, she had a feeling Ash might be in the same league of softie as her father.
“I’m fine,” Maura said, suddenly lighthearted, where a few moments ago she’d been ready to throw in the towel. “Really. I’m used to spiders and bats and most everything else. But thank you for coming to my rescue—again.”
He mumbled something not quite sounding like “You’re welcome,” and stormed back down the passage without so much as a by-your-leave.
Maura’s smile only widened. He couldn’t have seemed more uncomfortable than if she’d caught him in a lie.
And maybe she had.
Ash stalked—as best as one could hunched over and boot soles slip-sliding on a damp, uneven cave floor—back to the chamber where he and Maura had set up camp. Once there, he drew in half a dozen bracing breaths through clenched teeth.
He needed to get a grip on himself. He was taking this rescue business way too far. Maura was no shrinking violet who needed him to stomp on bugs or chase away critters. That had been clear from the start. It had been the whole point of calling her a powder puff. She had a degree in forestry, for Pete’s sake, had probably spent more time braving the wilds of Montana than he had.
But, damn, it felt good to have her look at him with those big, blue eyes as if he was her own personal hero. And damn, but seeing her standing there, her skin wet and glowing, that red braid of hair, itself alive as the fire outside, spilling over one breast—it had been like glimpsing heaven.
A heaven he didn’t even dare dream about.
And tonight was going to be hell, confined here in this cave with her. Ash swore, vividly and succinctly. He would almost rather have fought a thousand forest fires.
He looked around as he heard her return to the chamber.
“I can’t tell you how much better I feel,” she said cheerily and without a bit of her earlier embarrassment. He had to admire her gumption. But then, she hadn’t heard his next bit of news.
“Well, if you’re done for the night, I’m thinkin’ we’d better get some sleep.” More brusquely than he meant to, he continued, “It’s best if we shut off the headlamps to conserve our batteries. Chances are we’ll make it out tomorrow, but we’ve actually got no idea how long we might have to hole up here before we can get out or someone else can get in.”
He paused, then decided he might as well give it to her straight. “Once we turn out the light, it’ll be black as six feet under in here, just to let you know. It could be kind of spooky.”
She looked at him strangely before nodding. “I’ll be fine.”
“Then I’ll let you get settled.”
He headed back down to the spring for his own quick swab off. Ten minutes later he came back to find her on her side, her back to him, her space blanket wrapped around her, with her hard hat for a pillow. The small mound she made lying there looked not much bigger than a bag of feed.
Well, he may as well get this over with.
He dropped to his own space blanket. “Ready for me to turn off the headlamp?” Ash asked without preamble.
“Yes—oh, wait,” Maura said, pushing back the blanket and half sitting up. “I forgot to take my turn at bathing the doe’s burns.”
Making a show of rustling around to get comfortable, he mumbled, “You don’t have to. I…I checked on her while I was washing up.”
“How is she doing?”
This was the worst news of all, and he’d have given his right arm not to have to tell it to her. But he owed her the truth.
“Maura, she died,” Ash said.
Her eyes widened in shock, then closed as her mouth tightened into a thin line.