Alaskan Fire (57 page)

With Jack slowly-yet-methodically
teaching her everything he knew, and with Blaze making her best attempt to
pound her own knowledge through his mulishly hard head, and with all the
amusing playtime in the interim—after all, Alaska, in winter, could be a very
boring place—time for Blaze seemed to speed by at Mach 3.  By mid-January, it
came to the point where Blaze and Jack were shipping food and livestock
out
on every freight-trip
in
, just to keep the numbers of heritage breed
fowl, goats, and pigs under control.  Neighbors up and down the river received
turkeys, geese, and full-blown hams for Christmas, and Jack took her on a
snow-machine trip up the river to Skwentna, where they dropped off a sled-full
of fruit, half of which got frozen on the ride.

After which, Blaze had to spend
an hour over hot chocolate explaining why she had just decided, out of the
goodness of her heart, to deliver mangoes, cherries, apples, and pecans in the
dead of winter.  Nervously skirting questions of, ‘Does Costco even
sell
them at this time of year?’ and ‘Wow, these cherries are so
good
, where
did you buy them?!’, Blaze was more than happy to return home to the Sleeping
Lady to wait out the rest of the winter.

With Jack’s assistance, Blaze
managed to secure her first guests for two nights on the weekend of March 3
^rd
,
the start of the Iditarod.  Fifteen people, each paying a hundred and seventy a
night, wanting to use the Sleeping Lady as a home-base to watch the Iditarod as
it made its way up the Yentna to Nome.  It was a bustle of nerves, early
mornings, late nights, frantic cooking, dishwashing, bedmaking, and finally
cleanup, but once the final roar of the last guest’s snow-machine pulled out of
the back yard and Blaze was holding six thousand, five hundred and thirty-two
dollars in cash, checks, and tips in her hand, she felt the biggest swell of
pride she’d ever experienced in her life.

The guests, she discovered in
notes tucked under pillows or folded around the tips, really liked the food.

And, while technically she wasn’t
supposed to serve them food that hadn’t been inspected in a USDA-Approved
slaughtering and packaging facility, Blaze didn’t think she was in much danger
of them turning her in.  Jack, of course, had offered to gut any ‘panty-waist
government shit’ that tried to file a complaint, but in between the guests
raving about the citrus—she had expanded her greenhouse and ordered a variety
of lemon, lime, grapefruit, and orange trees—and moaning over the pulled pork
and roast duck, several of them had asked to take food home with them, and had
offered to pay accordingly.

Blaze, already overwhelmed with
the produce coming out of her own backyard, had been happy to send sleds-ful of
food home with them, as a complimentary gift.  Hence, she assumed, the rather
hefty tips.

“You can’t just keep sending food
out for free like that,” Jack said, his sleeves rolled up and a beer in his
hand as he relaxed in the sudden peace and quiet.  He took a swig, and she felt
the coldness along his esophagus as he swallowed.  As Blaze closed her eyes and
enjoyed that, he pointed the mouth of the bottle at her.  “People are gonna get
suspicious.”

“We just made six thousand
dollars in two nights,” Blaze said, feeling a little giddy as she returned her
attention to the money.  “It’s gonna work.  I’ll be able to pay off my loan!”

Jack grinned.  “Honey, you get
this place running full-throttle and you’ll be making ten grand a
day
,
and that’s
after
you pay your help.”  He gave her a conspiratory look. 
“Fishing’s where the big bucks are.  That’s chump change.”

Blaze sighed, still quite happy
with her six grand.  Tucking it carefully—bill by bill—into a little leather
money-satchel, she said, “Well, I guess I suppose I should thank you for not
eating any of my guests.”

Jack sprouted a little fur and
grinned fang, and she felt the painful prick of the fur piercing the skin, the
fangs growing through the roof of his mouth.  “Who, me?”  He finished off his
beer and went to the fridge for another.  Popping the cap across the kitchen
with a talon, he said, “That was actually kind of fun.  Didn’t know you could
cook like that.”  He leaned back against the fridge, watching her.

Blaze flushed, then zipped up the
money-envelope and tucked it into a drawer.  Her mother, as a diehard
Independent Woman, had refused to cook, and had insisted that cooking was the
first step to being barefoot and pregnant to some potbellied couch potato.  Blaze
swallowed down a rush of embarrassment at the wereverine’s raised eyebrow.

“Independent Woman, huh?” he
said, sipping his beer again, grinning at her.  “You mom can get fucked.  You
cook great.”

Even through her embarrassment
that, yes, she had someone standing six feet away that was hearing her
thoughts
,
Blaze felt his rush of pride like a warm, happy blanket around her, and she
released herself to its embrace.  Glancing shyly at the floor, Blaze managed, “Uh…cooking
was a…hobby…of mine.  Kinda took well to the culinary arts as an elective.”

Jack grinned at her.  “And here I’ve
been teaching you construction.”  He tisked, shaking his head, and took another
long swig of beer.  “How long were you planning on holding out on me?”

Still blushing furiously, Blaze
said, “Uh, well, there hasn’t really been the occasion.”

He raised a brow. 
“Thanksgiving?  Christmas?  New Year’s?”

She narrowed her eyes.  “I fed
you turkey.  And ham.”

Jack grinned at her and said,
“You should cook more.”

“Thanks,” Blaze said, ducking her
head, overwhelmed by the pride he felt for her.  The link was…different…than
anything she’d ever experienced, and it had
readily
become apparent that
they could not maintain any sort of anger towards one another.  It
hurt
.

Their first argument, in fact,
had been over the Desert Eagle she continued to wear on her hip.  “I
can
protect myself, and I
can
do anything that a man can do,” she had
argued, when he first commented on it.  Her mother, a true believer in sexual
equality, had drummed that into her from the day Blaze was old enough to listen
to bedtime stories.

It had been, Blaze quickly
discovered, a personal affront to Jack’s pride that she wore it, and Jack had stalwartly
opposed her carrying the firearm from Day One, insisting he was fully capable
of protecting her.  Blaze, in her ignorance, had told him to fuck off.  In the
six days of emotional agony and mental turmoil that had followed, they had
finally come to an accord.  Blaze would wear the gun, and Jack would pretend it
didn’t exist.  Though Blaze could still feel the unhappiness rolling off of
him, every time his eyes caught on the pistol’s holster.

For his part, Jack was hell-bent
on staying armed, at all times.  Even then, he wore her other Desert Eagle on his
hip and two swords crossed on his back.  The guests had given him funny looks,
but he’d shrugged them off completely.  And, somehow, the utter confidence he
had in carrying those weapons, the complete indifference with which he returned
their confused looks, had left Blaze warm and fuzzy inside, and, to her own
surprise, grateful for the protection, despite all of her mother’s careful
feminist teachings and her status as an Independent Woman.

At that point, Blaze knew,
looking into Jack’s eyes, that she was no more independent from him than if she
had two bodies, two souls.  She found herself staring, overwhelmed yet again. 
Jack lowered the beer and returned it, a bashful smile on his face, contentment
rolling off of him in waves.  Then his eyes once more found the gun on her hip
and that contentment quickly morphed into anxiety and unhappiness before he
cleared his throat and looked away.  He coughed, and for a moment, Blaze felt
his urge to go downstairs and stew.

Then he turned back to her, met
her eyes, and he smiled again.  “So, uh, think we can skip the writing lesson
tonight?”  He gave her a sly grin and drew her close, pulling her up until she
could feel their mingled heartbeats, playing against one another through the
flimsy fabric of their shirts.  His arms locking around the small of her back, careful
to avoid the gun on her hip, he confessed up to her, “I mean, we
can
,
but I kinda made plans…”

Blaze grinned down at him.  “We
could probably skip a night.”  She’d been teaching him to write, nightly.  Even
during this last weekend, with guests in the house, Jack hadn’t missed his
one-hour of study-time, their naked bodies entwined as they searched for fun
new ways to add to his vocabulary.  And, in return, he had spent every spare
minute teaching her hairy-chested skills such as power-sanding, slab-pouring, drywall
finish-work, nail-pounding, and engine-repair—stuff that she could now do with
him, chatting with him about grout or metric bolts or carburetors while they
got dirty working together, enjoying the other’s enjoyment, sharing the
camaraderie of the work itself. 

In fact, once Blaze had figured
out that, while arguing with your boyfriend was annoying, arguing with your mate
was
excruciating
—and once Jack had figured out that insulting her
actually
hurt
her—time had seemed to become a blissful blur.  In fact,
only last week, her first bill from the financial institution managing her loan
had come in the mail.  Just under four thousand dollars, due April 26
^th
. 
Delayed a year, for her convenience.  And she would be able to
pay
it,
she thought, ecstatic.  With her
own money
.

“Yeah,” Jack said, grinning. 
“You’re on your way, tootz.”  He reached around her to drop his empty bottle
into the bin in the kitchen marked Glass Only.  His grin grew sly and she felt
a little thrill in her stomach when he grew a little fang and said, “Now
whaddaya say we go celebrate?”

* * *

“This,” Jack’s voice said, close
to her face, “has got to stop.”

Blaze swam out of her dark, foggy
delirium to open her eyes and peer up at him.  “Huh?”  She’d stayed up late the
night before reading a fantasy novel, and hadn’t gone to bed until 4:00 that
morning.

Jack held up a five gallon bucket
of eggs.  “You got any ideas what to do with these?  I already fed the pigs a
couple buckets, ate my fill, and I think those poor birds out there have eaten
so many scrambled eggs they’re getting the wrong idea.  That’s what’s
leftover.”  He made a disgusted gesture at the bucket.  “Do you
know
how
long it took for me to sniff out all their nests?  I’m thinking about doing a
roundup here tomorrow and sending a lot of them off to birdy heaven.  I’m sure
as
fuck
not letting them hatch any more.  Oh, and…”  He bent down,
grinning, and planted a kiss on her forehead.  “Good morning, sugar.”

Grinning back up at him, feeling
the warm happy glow of his contentment, Blaze sat up.  “And you want twenty
square miles of this?”

“‘Course I do,” he said, breaking
out into a predatory smile.  “Never ate this good in my life.”  He lowered the
bucket to the bed beside her.  Its contents were a jumble of brown, peach,
white, greenish, and almost black eggs of all different sizes.  And, indeed,
this close, Blaze could feel the contentment of a full stomach rolling off of
him like a satisfying fog.

Still groggy, Blaze glanced at
the bucket.  “You offered any to the neighbors?” she suggested.

“Only like six dozen apiece,”
Jack said.  “Oh, speaking of that…”  He pulled something from his pocket and tossed
it at her.  “Miss Kendall, upriver, insisted on paying.”

Blaze glanced down at the ten
dollar bill that fell in her lap and mentally added another ten bucks to the
money she could send off to a nice, friendly, out-of-state banking
conglomerate.  “The money bag is upstairs,” she said, still feeling as if she’d
been run over by a Mack truck.  She ran a palm over her face.  “You couldn’t
let me sleep in?”  She glanced at the window.  “And why was Hannah here that
early?”

“‘Cause Breakup’s on its way, baby,”
Jack said.  “Gotta use the snow-machine trails in the morning, before the sun
has a chance to turn ‘em into slush-puddles.”  He gestured at the sunlight that
was even then glaring through the window at 10:00am.  “Hell, give it another
week or two, and nobody’s gonna be able to use the river ‘til the ice goes out.” 
He raised a brow at her pointedly.  “On that note, you got any mail you need sent
out, now’s the time.”

Blaze thought again to her bill
on her loan, but said nothing.  She’d take care of it in April, once she took
the money to the bank to get it deposited.  After all, she couldn’t send them
four thousand in
cash
.  She also needed to start work on taxes and take
a look at the budget for the summer fishing season.  Oh, and figure out the
advertising situation. 
Alaska Magazine
and
Fish Alaska
were both
a good place to start, and she should’ve done it months ago, but just didn’t
have the cash.  So many things to do, so little
time
…

“Also, some more good news,” Jack
went on.  “That agent we hired in Florida.  Sounds like he just did a tour
through the South and then spent a couple weeks over in Europe, took our
brochure to every sportsman’s show in the civilized world.  Anyway, got a
really good call this morning.  He’s already got you booked for a group of six
people for a week in June for king season, then eight more for silvers in July,
mostly couples, about four to five days apiece.”

Blaze tempered her thrill that
followed with a businesswoman’s logic.  “We don’t have a guide.”

Jack grinned and she felt the
rush of pride down the link as he opened his mouth to say, “We’ve got
me
. 
I’ll
guide them.”

It took Blaze a moment to realize
that was not what he said.

“Excuse me?” she asked, blinking
in confusion.  “What?”

“You’d make a great guide,” Jack repeated,
still flooding her with pride.  “You’re nice enough, you don’t have the
unfortunate habit of growing teeth and breaking arms when they give you a funny
look, you can tell a good story, and you’re smart.  That’s all it really
takes.”  He frowned at her.  “Why are you looking at me like that?”

Blaze realized that she was
staring, her mouth hanging open.  Very slowly, so as to make
sure
she
wasn’t misunderstanding him, Blaze said, “Did you just say you thought
I
should be a guide?”

“Sure,” Jack said.  “It’ll be a
damn shame to lose that kind of cooking, but hell, sounds like you’d be happier
out there on the water, anyway.  We’ll just have to get your guiding license
this spring.  I think you got enough hours on the river last summer to qualify,
and if you didn’t…”  He shrugged.  “We can fudge it.”

Still unable to comprehend the
words that were coming out of his mouth, contrasting with the
pride
she
was feeling from him, Blaze said, “I’m sorry, I must be hearing things.  Did
you just tell me I can guide for us this year
and
compliment my
cooking?”

“What,” Jack snorted, “You think
I
could guide those fat, lazy, money-bloated, upper-crust snots?”  He chuckled. 
“In your
dreams
, sister.  Last time I tried to do that, I ripped the
engine off the boat, threw it into the river, and made them swim home.  Pretty
sure some of them told stories to their grandkids about this creepy guy on the
river who sprouted fur and fangs back in the seventies, too, but never really
stayed in touch.”  Jack gave her a wary look and she felt his alarm.  “Are you
all right?  Need more sleep or something?”

Blaze realized she was staring,
again.  She consciously closed her mouth and cleared her throat.  “Uh, no.”

But Jack was grinning at her. 
“You look gorgeous this morning, babe.”  And Blaze felt the
truth
in his
words, bed-head and all, and had to clear her throat and look away, because two
more seconds and she knew she would have launched herself at him and they wouldn’t
get anything done for another couple hours. 

“Thanks,” she said to the bucket
of eggs.  She was pretty sure he’d figured out—the sly little weasel—that
complimenting her made her feel good, which in turn made
him
feel good,
and had been doing a
lot
of it lately. 

“Just say it ‘cause it’s true,”
Jack said, reaching up, running a rough, callused finger upon her jaw.

Blaze shivered with their sudden
combined need and quickly struggled to return the conversation to something
productive, before they spent another day lounging in each other’s embrace. 
Such diversions were blissful, yes, but were not conducive to a
fully-operational, functioning fishing lodge come June.  And Jack, as
productive as he was when he was on a job, was also
very
easily
distracted.  “So, uh,” she said desperately, as Jack’s heart started to pound
and his masculine fingers started tracing towards her collarbone, “I can’t
start a boat.  Not reliably, anyway.  Not those big engines.”

Jack hesitated a moment and she
saw the desire in his eyes, felt it as her own, and she knew that he was about
to take her anyway.  For a breathtaking moment, he continued to trace her. 
Then, heaving a big sigh, he dropped his hand.  “Always business.”

“I’m a Business major,” she said
weakly, still shuddering, trying desperately to recover from the desire he had
invoked in her.

Jack grinned, and she got a
thrill at the predatory surge within him.  “Ya know, one of these days, I’m not
gonna let you distract me, and I’ll just pin you down and take ya anyway.”

Blaze’s heart hammered at the
very real potential of that, rolling off of him, and sure enough, he reached
for her again.  “Boats,” she managed.

Jack rumbled a predatory growl,
but dropped his hand.  This time, he heaved a
huge
sigh and said, “I’ve
already been working on a quick-start system for your boat.  It’s a little
battery-operated deal with a key and an ignition switch like mine.  Means you
won’t have to fumble around and throw out your shoulder yankin the cord.”

“You know there isn’t a female
guide on the whole river,” Blaze said.

Jack’s brow creased, and she felt
his irritation like a blast of cold air.  “So?”

“You never wondered
why
that was?” Blaze asked.

The wereverine gave her a long,
hard look.  “You tryin to tell me you can’t do it?”

Blaze frowned at him.  “Of course
I can do it.”

“Then do it, and stop whining and
pussyfootin around,” Jack said.  “You wanna do somethin other than cook and
make babies?  Fine.  Not that I’m against cookin’ and makin’ babies, but if you
feel you gotta get out and prove you can do manual labor and swim with the
sharks, by all means,
do
it, and stop whingeing about it.”  He gestured
at the lodge.  “We could really use a guide, and you’d be perfect for it. 
Hell, I’ll roll up my sleeves and cook for a couple weeks, if I gotta.  Ain’t
too bad at it, neither.  Had enough damn practice.”  The rest he said with a
grumpy huff, and he crossed his arms disgustedly and nudged the bucket of eggs
with a toe.

Blaze was so completely
flabbergasted that she could only say, “You’d cook?”

“Sure,” he said, “But I’d want
serving wenches.”

Immediately, Blaze felt her face
darken.  “What?”

“Wenches,” he repeated. 
“Barmaids.  Waitresses.  You know.  A
wench
?”  He gestured upstairs,
towards the kitchen.  “I ain’t washin all those dishes by myself.  If you’re
gonna be off entertainin, then we’ll need to hire some kitchen help.”

And kitchen help, Blaze knew, was
a hell of a lot cheaper than hiring a guide.  Guides got paid between a hundred
and three hundred dollars a day, depending on how much experience they had, and
how well-known they were for producing fish.  Hell, there was a whole culture
of young men living in the Bush who made all the money they needed to survive
the brutal Alaskan winter on just a few weeks of fishing season in the summer. 
Between wages, tips, and the Permanent Fund Dividend, those that were
money-savvy could afford to spend the winter crafting, tinkering on mechanics,
or working on their cabins.

“You’ve already been working on a
starting system?” Blaze asked, suspicious. 

“Been thinkin ‘bout it for
months, now,” Jack said with a shrug.  “Figured I didn’t really wanna bring it
up early, seein how you’re so sensitive about the subject.”

Immediately, Blaze’s eyes
narrowed.  “What subject?”

“The manly subject,” Jack said. 
His eyes dropped to the Desert Eagle holster on her dresser and she felt
another wave of unhappy irritation.

Flushing, she said, “I’m not
sensitive.  You’re just an
in
sensitive boor.”

“All right, tootz,” Jack said, sighing,
“Fine.  We’ll find someone else to guide those guests.  There’s a guy upriver,
Kyle Chelson—”

“I’ll do it,” Blaze growled. 
“Never said I wouldn’t.”

“Never said you
would
,
either,” Jack retorted, “and gave me the general impression that it would be unseemly
for you to be out there rubbing elbows with the big boys.  This Kyle guy’s had
his license five years, now.  Works freelance.  Real good with guests.”

“Jack,” Blaze said carefully, “if
you try to hire this Kyle guy to spare me the manly behavior of driving guests
around on the Yentna, I will drag your stuff outside into a nice, big pile in the
backyard and set it on fire.”  She gave him a sweet smile.  “Thanks to you, I
know where the gasoline is.”

Jack paused, frowning at her so
long that she began to wonder if she’d caught a nosebleed or something. 
Finally, the wereverine said, “Six thousand years, and I will never understand
women.”

Blaze sniffed and glanced down at
the eggs in the bucket.  “You got breakfast ready?”

Looking a little ruffled, a wave
of guilt and irritation riding down their link, Jack muttered, “It’s ten in the
morning.”

Which meant, no, he’d just come
to wake her up because he was tired of her sleeping.  But, now that Blaze
understood
just how much Jack enjoyed the company, and how hard it was for him—who
only had to sleep two or three hours a night—to leave her alone for
eight
,
she found she couldn’t really get mad at him.  Crawling out of bed, Blaze went
to start her day. 

Breakfast, for Blaze, was a fruit
medley consisting of mango, citrus, grapes, cherries, and apples, all fresh,
all picked and eaten as she toured her two-thousand-square-foot greenhouse.  As
part of the ‘repairs’ he’d been financing, Jack had shipped in a few hundred
enormous, glass windows, and he still was refusing to tell her how much they
cost.

Probably more than the damn
lodge,
Blaze thought, looking up at the crystal blue sky through the
triple-paned glass.  She sat down on a bench under her twenty-foot mango tree,
watching the Jersey Giant chickens—some of the larger roosters of which had to
be twenty-plus pounds—as they strutted around inside the greenhouse,
dust-bathing and seeking out bugs.  Out in the yard behind the barn, she could
hear the snuffles and grunts of pigs, and heard goats playing on the huge
boulder she had uncovered while bulldozing the barn’s footprint. 

As she sat there, one of the rare
white Jersey Giants wandered up to her and, with the friendly, big-dog syndrome
the breed was known for, jumped up onto the bench and eyed her mango, then
Blaze, then her mango.  Giggling, Blaze held it out for him.  The rooster
proceeded to peck gooey orange chunks from the pit until it had downed a good
quarter of the fruit, then settled down on the bench beside her and puffed out
his feathers in contented sleep.