Page 12 of Some Like It Hot
She wasn’t that kind of girl. Not really. Had never been.
But a part of her wanted to be if it meant holding onto Riley a little longer.
Oh, when had she turned into such a weak-hearted mess? Hello—she’d had men leave for the front lines before. Men she cared about. Men she lost.
And she wasn’t weak.
She needed to get her head in the game and stop thinking about those devastating brown eyes, the way he looked at her as he’d leaned down—
“Larke!”
Her father’s voice turned her. He was heading toward his chopper. “Riley radioed. I need to make another run in with reinforcements. There’s a meadow not far from the drop point.”
She turned around, walking backward. “The fire is really close to the Salmon place.” She hadn’t realized how close until she saw the smoke, until they’d soared over the acreage of fire. “I’m going to check on Alicia. She’s due soon.”
“Okay. I’ll keep you posted about the fire, but keep an eye out.”
She shot a glance at the thickening black on the horizon.Stay alive. “Yep.”
She headed toward the barn for her four-wheeler. Poor Alicia’s husband currently sat in the Copper County lockup for some traffic violation. Bad timing—Alicia hoped he was out by the time the baby was born.
Larke had tried calling her on the CB before they took off, but no answer.
It had the medic inside her worrying.
Alicia lived on a dirt road off the highway, just south of the park border in the thick of the wilderness in an A-frame cabin. No phone. No internet. No electricity. Completely off-grid.
Not uncommon up here where people came to hide—or be left alone to fight their own demons.
Larke loaded up the four-wheeler with supplies—stethoscope, blood pressure cuff, thermometer, fetoscope—just in case Alicia was in labor—please, no!—and grabbed her radio. Alicia planned to birth her baby at the hospital down in Copper Mountain, but life didn’t always cooperate, did it?
And every time it didn’t, Larke lost a little piece of her faith. Her soul. No wonder she’d returned home from Afghanistan riddled with holes.
She hopped on the four-wheeler. The shortcut as-the-crow-flies route would take her an hour, maybe more.
If Alicia got into big trouble, she might call Orion, her closest neighbor, although she would have to be desperate. Larke knew enough about Orion Starr—his parents had a real sense of humor—to know he probably wanted to be left alone.
She’d first heard the rumors while on base in Bagram. A local who’d joined the Air Force and become a Pararescue soldier, Orion had lost half his team in an ambush in the mountains of the Kunar Province. She didn’t know details, but she had heard about the attack that killed two SEALs, took two hostages to be tortured and killed by the Taliban, and left four more seriously injured. The PJs had deployed to bring the wounded home and suffered an ambush. They’d lost their chopper too.
Somehow Orion, another PJ, and the four SEALs made it back to base.
She had no doubt that Orion spent most of his nights sleepless too.
She remembered him as a few years older than she, the kind of guy who knew the wilderness, trapped, and dogsledded. Occasionally his family had joined hers for projects. Since returning from Afghanistan, he’d kept to himself, tended the family homestead, and led treks up Denali as a guide.
Truth was, Alaska could be an excellent place to run. Regroup. She could hide forever under the shadow of Denali with its jagged peaks, the lush foothills filled with green alder, white and black spruce, willow, and black crowberry bushes, the boreal meadows rich with tufts of blue joint grass, lingonberry, and wild chives with their purple-headed cotton, tender white narcissus anemone.
Up here, only the pine-scented wind found her, and aside from the occasional elk, moose, or bear, she was alone with her thoughts.
Her grief.
Today is the third anniversary of my dad’s death in Afghanistan.
She didn’t know quite what to do with that admission from Riley. Or the story of his friend.
Apparently, she didn’t have the corner on grief. But she could see right through Riley McCord, thank you. Running into danger didn’t heal anything. It only kept the grief from catching up.
Maybe that’s why she’d sunk into his embrace, let herself talk about Freeman. Because with Riley she had nothing to lose.