Wilde Fire (3 page)

Jake shifted the Jeep into a lower gear as we sped around a corner. He moved his hands like he knew exactly what he was doing. Like he knew just what to do with them. “That’s easy. Smokejumping is the most badass job in the whole entire world. We’re talking, the Spartans would have done this instead if it was a thing back then in ancient Greece.” He shifted it into a higher gear once we came out of the corner. I remembered him having big hands, but damn. And now I was picturing them on me, one cupped around my ass, one groping my breast, his touch as insistent as his cock driving inside of me . . .

And fuck. So much for the sake of my panties. They were a more-wet-than-damp mess.

“Are you calling yourselves modern-day Spartans?” I asked, clearing the groping . . . driving . . .
thing
from my head. At least for now. Tonight, when I was in his bed behind a closed door? Different story. I was going to force so many orgasms from my body, his bed just might buckle from my dedication.

He shook his head. “I’m saying we’re more badass than Spartans.”

I rolled my eyes. He was still a cocky bastard. That hadn’t changed. Good. If he was cocky, that meant he thought he knew what he was doing. I was looking forward to finding out.

“Okay, Spartan Shamer, what
exactly
is a smokejumper? You know, other than a badass?”

A grin stretched across his face. “Let’s see. A smokejumper puts on armor. We climb onto a plane with our fellow warriors. We fly off to some isolated spot in the middle of the wilderness, looking for a fire. When we spot said fire, we jump out of said plane.” I was scratching notes like mad, trying to keep up with the word-gold spilling from his mouth. “Our goal is to
not
impale ourselves on a branch when we land. If that is a success, then we grab our war axe. Attack the shit out of the fire. Rest. Attack the shit out of it again.” He shrugged his broad shoulders. “Then we march home the victors.”

I finished scribbling down my notes, then read what I’d gotten while chewing on the end of my pen. I noticed Jake watching me from the corner of his eyes. His jaw was all tight and rigid again. “Oh, okay. So a smokejumper is pretty much a more badass version of a Spartan.”

He laughed the same laugh I remembered from my childhood. It was the kind of laugh that held nothing back. It made something in my chest ache. “Now why didn’t I think of that?”

I waited for the laugh to wind to its end before moving on to my next question. I had hundreds of them. Some I’d ask him, some I’d ask the rest of his crew. Some I’d answer on my own. “So why did you choose smokejumping?”

He was quiet for a moment. When I looked over, I found his forehead creased as he stared out the windshield. “After four years in Iraq, experiencing the kind of action my unit saw, I couldn’t imagine coming back home, slipping into a suit and selling insurance. Or whatever guys do after.” He pointed at the smokejumper base sign as we passed it. “That’s when I started looking into smokejumping.”

“You like the danger,” I stated because this wasn’t a question. Jake had thrived on danger for as long as I could remember. How many gashes had I tended? How many bumps and bruises had I tried to tend only to be shrugged off by an
I’m fine
?

“I do,” he answered with a single nod.

“Why didn’t you stay in the Marines then?”

He was quiet again. Now this, I wasn’t used to. The quiet. I was used to the hot-headed, act-first-think-later version of Jake Wilde. Not the pensive, brooding one. “Because I couldn’t watch another friend of mine die.”

His answer hit me the same way it hit him. Losing Matt meant we’d both lost a part of ourselves. Matt was the one who’d been buried, but both Jake and I had died a little with him.

“Don’t you have to watch friends die in this type of career too?”

When he reached over to downshift, his hand brushed the side of my leg. I felt it all the way down my leg, all the way up it, ending on the very spot I’d spent too many nights touching, thinking of his face, imagining his body inside of mine.

“Not yet, but one day I’ll have to bury another friend before his time.” His voice was the exact same, like that touch hadn’t done anything to him. He probably hadn’t even noticed. Of course.

That was the theme of Jake and me. I noticed everything he did, and he noticed nothing I did.

I mean, shit, my body was tingling in a very sensitive area from a simple touch, and he was shifting gears like nothing had happened.

“But here, you know who your enemy is, ya know?” he continued, whipping up the road that led to the smokejumper base. “You can see it. Feel it. Over there, where Matt and I were, no one has a goddamned clue who the enemy is. It could be the guy you’ve been buying coffee from every morning. It could be the pregnant woman waving at you from the side of the road. The enemy is everywhere and anywhere over there. Here, it’s that raging, roaring, big orange thing. Eats forests for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Obliterates everything in its path. See that’s an enemy I can respect. That’s an enemy I can fight.”

I was making notes at lightning speed again, barely able to keep up. “Why is the danger so appealing to you, Jake?” I asked, stabbing a period at the end of my sentence.

His broad shoulders lifted. “I guess I don’t really feel alive unless I’m flirting with death. You know?”

“Is that your way of saying you like playing with fire?” I asked, quirking a brow at him.

His eyes were still hidden behind his glasses, but I was pretty sure he was checking me out again. Good. Checking out meant attraction. Attraction meant desire. Desire meant fucking. Fucking meant running. At least, that’s the way it worked in Jake Wilde’s world.

“That’s my way of saying I
love
playing with fire,” he said.

“Good.” I bit the end of my pen again. “I do too.”

HE WAS BACK to acting strange around me again. I didn’t know how exactly. I just knew he was behaving differently than before. He didn’t seem as relaxed—he was more on edge. He seemed to be choosing every word carefully instead of just saying whatever the hell he wanted like he used to.

I wondered if this had to do with Matt. Probably. He felt guilty that he came home and Matt didn’t. He felt guilty that he couldn’t keep my promise. Having me here was probably ripping up a bunch of wounds he’d managed to close up the past seven years.

Maybe I shouldn’t have come. Maybe I should have let another reporter take the assignment. Maybe I should have been content to just fuck myself every night and pretend it was him doing those things to my body instead.

Maybe I’d been selfish coming here. Maybe what I was planning to do was selfish too.

But when I caught him looking at me the way he was now—when he didn’t think I was looking—I felt certain he was looking at me not as the girl I’d been, but as the woman I was now.

“How many guys am I meeting?” I asked after he parked the Jeep outside of the smokejumper base. There were a handful of other trucks and Jeeps staggered around, but it was hard to tell just how many people were inside.

“You’re not meeting
any
guys.” He threw open his door and crawled out.

“Um, I’m an investigative reporter. My job is to investigate.” I closed the door behind me and came around the front of the Jeep where he was waiting. He was so tall. I didn’t remember him being this massive.

That could have been because the context in which I considered his size was different now. The little girl had seen a big brother who could stand up to a bully. The woman saw a man who could hold her in his arms while he screwed her.

“You can ask me all of the questions you need to. I’ll give you the tour and everything later on. When they’re all gone or asleep.” He leaned into his Jeep and crossed his arms.

“A good reporter has multiple sources.”

“No. All you need is one good source.”

I sighed and clamped my teeth down on my pen again. His forehead creased again, like before. Was he worried about my pen? The integrity of my teeth?

“No, I’d need a really,
really
great source, so until that happens, I’ll keep to the multiple source way of doing things.”

His smile crept into place. “You have no clue how really, really great my
source
is.”

Was he making a lewd joke? An innuendo? With me? God knew I’d heard him and Matt go back and forth like a couple of one-track-minded cavemen, but he’d never been so forward with me.

I liked it. I
really
liked it.

Two could play at this game though.

“Just how great is your source?” I lifted an eyebrow, my gaze dipping to his belt region.

He shoved off of his Jeep and moved closer. “Astoundingly great.”

I chewed the inside of my cheek to keep from smiling. “Does your ‘source’ get the job done?”

He smiled down at the ground and kept moving closer. I hoped he wouldn’t stop until he crashed into me and pinned me up against the wall behind me. “I’ve never heard any complaints.”

“Hearing complaints would indicate you were still around to hear them, but we both know you’re the in-and-out type of guy.”

He kept moving closer. “How would we both know that?”

I shrugged. “The high school rumor mill. It’s prolific. And all-encompassing.”

“And since when have you ever put any stock in rumors?” He pressed his hand against the wall behind me, his arm braced between me and the door.

“Since never. But let’s just say if this was an investigative article on the conquests of Jake Wilde, I’d have no shortage of conquests to consult.” I tried to bite back the bitterness in my voice, but it was difficult. Thinking about another woman—
all
of those other women—giving pleasure to and taking pleasure from his body, made me violent. In a hair-pulling, I’ll-cut-a-bitch type of way.

God, I was here to leave him in the rearview. Not to bolster my unhealthy possessiveness when it came to Jake.

“I thought we were talking about sources,” he said, sounding a little pissed.

“No you didn’t.” I shoved off the wall and slipped out from beneath his arm. I pulled the door open in his face. “You knew we were talking about your undiscerning cock.”

I’d shut him up. Good. I was halfway down the hall before I heard his footsteps echoing behind me. “What the hell, Bree?”

“What the hell, Jake.” I yawned when he caught up to me.

This was the key. The chase. I should have known. All guys loved it. Alphas like Jake thrived on it. The hard-to-get, cold-shoulder act would drive him up a wall. It would curl him right up in my palm so when I decided the time was right, he’d be so hot for me he probably wouldn’t last five thrusts.

“My cock’s discerning, for your information. And when the hell did you start talking all foul-mouthed?”

I huffed and kept marching down the hall. “Yeah, your cock’s discerning alright. As long as it’s warm and wet, you’ll take a dip.”

“Bree—” When he grabbed my arm, I snapped it out of his hold and kept going.

“And if you don’t like my ‘foul mouth,’ you can just put me over your knee and teach me a lesson.” I waved over my shoulder and kept going in the direction of the voices I could hear coming from a room at the end of the hall. “But payback’s a bitch, Jake. Don’t dish out anything you can’t take having dealt right back.”

I was smiling to myself when I broke into the room. I had him. The sweet, innocent act wasn’t going to work on the likes of Jake Wilde. He was a hunter. It wasn’t much sport to chase the mewling timid lamb. But game on when the prey was a sleek, powerful leopard.

The room looked like a big rec room, where the smokejumpers probably did everything from eat meals to watch movies to play board games. Right now, most of them were stuffed around a table playing what looked like poker. When they saw me, they lowered their cards to the table and diverted their attention.

“We weren’t expecting the
Playboy
centerfold visit until next month,” the pretty blond one with perfect white teeth piped up first, rising from his chair. “But I’ve always been a fan of surprises.”

I kept the eye-roll to myself. No need to offend anyone in the first minute I was here. I usually saved that for day two. “I’m Bree Chase. I’m here to write an article on the smokejumpers of Alaska.”

Blondie’s brows came together, like I’d just spoken gibberish. A few of the younger guys were too mesmerized by my rack to hear anything, and the rest were kind of just staring at me like I was going to be their next spank girl.

I’d changed into something more conservative than what I’d showed up in to Jake’s place, but most of them were still looking at me like I was standing in front of them naked, stroking my clit with one hand and my breasts with the other.

Guys.

I should have been used to it by now, but it still surprised me how much power women had in this world. We could have totally ruled it if we wanted to. But we were too smart for that.

One of the older guys stood up and moved toward me. He was staring at my face, possibly the only one in the room doing so. For as flat as I’d been in high school, the fairy godmother of Venus waved her wand my direction the summer after graduation. My boobs had swollen to the point that jogging was just too uncomfortable to do with any regularity, and my ass had popped too. It made clothes shopping a nightmare, and made being introduced to a guy and having him look me in the eye an impossibility.