Wildfire on the Skagit (Firehawks Book 9) Read Free Page A

extra paranoid, but it served him well as a Special Forces Green Beret and so far it had served him well as a smokie.
    Krista was not his usual type; not at all. He typically went for the long and slender ones who populated the smokejumper bars and the Special Forces bars before that.
    But he’d practically blushed when checking Krista’s parachute harness just above those big breasts visible even through the jumpsuit. He couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to wrestle with that much woman, both her confidence and her body.
    And his body’s reaction to those thoughts inside full jump gear was decidedly uncomfortable—the material too thick and the jump harness too tight to let him rearrange anything from the outside.
    The next to last stick jumped. He took one last look out the window before scooting up behind Ox.
    Krista had floated down to land dead center in the deep hole among the trees. Tuck and roll, then she popped back to her feet and was standing on Akbar’s collapsed chute as if counting coup.
    Damn but she could fly.
    # # #
    Krista stood at the edge of the jump spot and watched them coming in. It was the sort of place to have a picnic, green, unspoiled, and it would be sunny and warm once the sun was high enough.
    It was hard to believe that two hundred feet north through thick trees and thicker undergrowth, a fire raged leaving behind only scorched earth and blackened stumps.
    When Tim Harada had left to take over the lead slot for the Alaska Fire Service—after falling in love with his Alaska hometown sweetheart, real damn sad—Akbar had tagged Krista as his Number Two. Which in her mind meant that it was now up to her to uphold the advantages of singlehood for the rest of the crew.
    The lead men were such total saps, both Tim and Akbar falling in love like that. She wouldn’t have bet on it lasting a season for either of them—hell, she wouldn’t have bet it was even possible…not until she’d met the women. They made it easy to imagine the marriages lasting a lifetime. Just too weird.
    Not in her future; not while she was jumping. Probably not after, but that thought didn’t bother her as much as it used to.
    The only smokies who remained stable in relationships were single or dead—marriage for wildland firefighters was nuts, plain and simple. Smokies spent all summer and fall gone to fire; and lately—with MHA’s taste for southern hemisphere contracts—winters as well.
    In addition to upholding bachelorette-hood, it also fell to her to make sure everyone was up to snuff and safe. She now assessed each one of them coming in as she jammed her chute into a stuff sack. First jump of the season was always especially worrisome.
    The DC-3, painted gloss black with red-and-orange flames tracing down its length, made multiple passes, dropping only one stick at a time. The winds were too chaotic for two sticks to jump and all have a good chance of hitting the drop zone.
    She could see that Axe and the Jackal—last name Jackson and could howl like a coyote—were jumping clean.
    Ant-man caught a bad downdraft and plummeted the moment he crossed the edge of the clearing.
    Krista held her breath.
    His real name was Lee, but on his second-ever fire he’d slept next to an anthill and been forced to constantly beat them out of his food bag for the rest of the fire. At least he wasn’t Fire-ant-man.
    A little hard maneuvering and he managed to save it, slamming through the treetops and snagging his chute about a hundred feet up. His curses were plenty audible down on the ground as he dug his let-down rope out of the thigh-pocket of his jumpsuit. Ant-man’s curses grew even louder when his jump partner, Nick the Greek—who was neither named Nick nor was he Greek, but had made an injudicious remark a couple years back about wanting to nail Nikki and her big breasts in My Big Fat Greek Wedding— hit his landing dead on.
    Others came in more or less clean, two treed in the towering branches of an