Page 40 of Light My Fire

“Huh?” He sat next to her and took off his gloves. “I would have gone without you, so you can just stop blaming yourself. Besides, the fusee was my brilliant, stupid idea.”

“He could have killed you.”

He clasped his hands together between his knees. “Yeah, well, he is going to kill Skye if we don’t do something.” He looked over at her, his jaw tight. “We can’t just sit here and wait for help.”

Stevie shook her head. “It’ll be dark soon. And it might not look like dark, but in the woods, it can get pretty hard to see. My guess is that they’ll have a hard time finding their way, too, so I’m calling an audible, and I’m going to sleep for a couple hours.”

He stared at her, a muscle pulling in his jaw. Then he got up and opened the door to the cabin.

She knew what he’d find inside. She’d visited the McGintys a few times over the years. A simple couple, they had homesteaded here for years before they tired of the backcountry life. Jim got a job in Homer, fishing, and now they only visited on occasion.

He’d find a two-room cabin with a double bed in the tiny bedroom, a simple kitchen with a wood-burning stove, a sink with a refillable water tank above it, a small trestle table and chairs, and a sitting area with a willow rocker and a padded bench. Simple living for simple folks who kept to themselves and relied on no one.

The way she was raised.

She got up and followed Tucker inside.

He had set his PG pack on the table and was now rooting through it. Pulled out a couple protein bars and handed one to her. “I have a stash for emergencies.”

“Thanks.” She took the offering and tore it open.

He pulled out a chair, scooted up another, and set his leg on it. Blew out a breath that contained a shard of pain. Clearly, his knee was still an issue.

He opened his dinner. Sat in silence as he ate it, as if thinking.

Then, “I wanted to prove to Jed that I was worth the chance he took on me.”

Stevie glanced at him. Oh. She sank down into a chair.

He met her eyes. Dark and intense, his casual tone was clearly a front for the deep well of emotions roiling inside.

“I told you I hurt my knee snowboarding. That was…well, the Cliff’s Notes version. The detailed part included years of training to be on the Olympic snowboard cross team. I wiped out during the final tryouts.”

She made a face. “Oh, that’s rough.”

“The worst of it was that my mom…” He folded the wrapper between two fingers. Creased it. “My mom was dying of cancer and I chose to go to tryouts instead of be with her.” He didn’t look at Stevie. “I really wanted to come home and tell her I had made the team. But…I didn’t make either. She died before I could get back to Minnesota.”

“Oh, Tucker, I’m sorry.” She wanted to reach out to him, but something about his posture held her back. Maybe the way he stared at the wrapper, his jaw tight.

“I felt pretty alone. My brother died when I was fourteen—a snowboarding accident in Colorado. He was buried in an avalanche. And then my parents got divorced. I dated this girl named Colleen for a couple years, but she broke up with me during college.” He made a wry face. “That was fun. I drove all the way from Bozeman to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to see her play a big volleyball game, only to discover her new boyfriend was there.”

Stevie winced.

“So, I admit, losing my mom was sort of…well, I didn’t handle it well. I dropped out of school—it was my senior year of college, too—and started getting into trouble. Lots of trouble.”

She didn’t want to ask, but yeah, he looked like a guy who could find trouble if he wanted it. The way he’d handled himself at the bar with Nate. And today, jumping on March. Never mind the look in his eyes that said he wasn’t afraid to light a fire—and bear the consequences.

“The funny part was…I was never really that guy. Colleen, my old girlfriend, dated me because she thought I was into drugs and partying. And maybe I was for a while, but once I started snowboarding, I quit all that. I wanted to be someone I respected. Someone who could someday have the life I saw Colleen and her family having.”

He set the wrapper on the table.

“But after Mom died, I sort of let life bulldoze me. I stopped listening to my training, all the rules I’d made for myself, and just…lived without boundaries.”

He looked at his palm, ran his thumb over it. “I was already a member of Jed’s hotshot team, and I don’t know how, but he got wind of some of the trouble I’d gotten into. Nothing serious, but I knew the inside of the county jail.”

He drew his hand across his face. “I got it in my head that I wanted to be a smokejumper, and Jed was putting together this new team, so I showed up to apply.”

He said nothing more, so she finally filled in for him. “He gave you a chance.”

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