The Rancher's Daughter. Jodi O'Donnell
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to go.
“Good,” the man said. “One less thing to have to worry about.”
He removed his helmet, headlamp still on, and balanced it on a ledge about shoulder height, so that it lit the interior of the room. “Better take a reckoning of water and supplies.”
As she divested herself of her own pack, Maura seized the opportunity to get a good look at her rescuer. He looked vaguely familiar, but then everyone did after a few weeks working on a firefighting crew, even with volunteers being trucked in from across the nation. He was as sooty and begrimed as she was, his face blackened around the outline of his goggles in a kind of reverse raccoon look. He was wearing the same Forest-Service-issue brown fire-retardant Nomex pants and yellow fire shirt, which he was absently unbuttoning, but the uniform looked different on him than others. His shoulders seemed uncommonly broad, his forearms, as he rolled up the long sleeves of his shirt, were muscular, his hands wide and competent looking. He appeared the very definition of an able-bodied man, she thought, as her gaze lifted to his face again, and she was confronted with his as-thorough scrutiny of her. It was only then that she noticed his eyes: gray, they were. Almost silver, only richer. They were remote and inviting at once, and she was equally torn in two directions gazing into them. Afraid yet fascinated.
He was right in that they would be spending at least the night here together. Neither of them had radios to call for help, and even if they had, there would have been no way to pick up a frequency this deep in the mountain—or any way that rescue crews could get to them at this point, with the fire still going full force outside.
That wouldn’t stop the rest of her crew and their boss, Hal, from worrying about her, as would this man’s crew worry about him. News of their disappearance would go all the way to the command of the National Interagency Fire Commission. She hoped they wouldn’t notify her family that she was missing. The thought of her family’s concern and fear for her made her eyes sting with tears.
I’m fine, she telepathed to them. I’m safe in a cave with the firefighter who saved my life. I couldn’t be in better hands.
“I haven’t thanked you for rescuing me,” Maura said aloud, cursing the shakiness in her voice. She was battling a bout of nausea from the smoke. “I mean, I was ready to use my fire shelter, but I’ve heard firefighters say they’d rather spend a month in solitary confinement than an hour in a burnover.”
“Really.” His eyebrows lowered in sudden ferocity. “Well, as you pointed out, you’re a trained firefighter. So it stands to reason you’d’ve done what you needed to do to survive.” He’d finished unbuttoning his fire shirt, revealing the perspiration-stained T-shirt beneath, and now yanked its tail from his waistband with what occurred to her to be undue force. “Or am I wrong there, powder puff?”
“I certainly hope that, had you not come along, I would have done as I was trained,” she said with crisp enunciation. “I was simply conveying my thanks.”
She lifted her chin in Carolynesque regality. It was becoming difficult to be nice to this man, but she was determined to, precisely for the reason that he had saved her life. Still, she wasn’t about to let him get away with the jibe about her size and gender.
“And you can stop calling me powder puff any time now,” she warned mildly.
One corner of his mouth lifted almost in amusement as he looked her up and down, all five feet and two inches of her. But he said gamely enough, “All right. What’s your name, then?”
“Maura. Maura King—”
A rustle coming from one of the openings that led deeper into the cave interrupted her. The man, whose name remained a mystery to her, grabbed his helmet as he headed without hesitation down the passageway. The other animals, aside from bats, that might have taken refuge in the cave—grizzlies, cougars and wolverines among them—had Maura snatching up her own helmet to follow him, her boots slipping in the loose rock on the cave floor. She wasn’t afraid; it might turn out that he would need her help this time.
So closely was she following him that she came up against his solid back when he stopped short several yards into the tunnel.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Shh,” he admonished with a half turn of his head. He was hunched over in this part of the cave, which had a clearance closer to her height.
Curious, Maura peeked past his shoulder to see what had brought him up short: a young deer—it couldn’t have been more than a month old—and an adult mule deer that had to be its mother, lying on her side.
The doe barely lifted her head at the sound of the intruders, and Maura realized she must be injured badly.
In a trice she’d stepped around the man and knelt beside the deer. The fawn’s tiny hooves scrabbled in the dirt as it startled backward on stick legs.
“It’s okay, little one,” Maura soothed. She sat very still, waiting for the fawn to calm. She used the time to turn her headlamp upon the doe for a visual examination.
She was no veterinarian, but it didn’t look good. The deer had suffered third-degree burns in places, the fur along its side, back and haunches singed a ruddy black. The animal’s eyes were wide with fear, her breath was coming in short, labored bursts, nostrils flaring in distress and pain.
Maura swallowed back the lump that rose to her throat. “You’re okay,” she soothed. But she knew that, indeed, the doe was not okay.
The fawn, which stood quivering a few yards away, startled again when the man dropped to a crouch beside her.
“Looks pretty grim, doesn’t it?” he said softly.
She set her mouth firmly. “We’ve got some options for making her comfortable.”
He glanced sideways at her, doubt infusing every inch of his face. “You got a horse-size dose of painkiller somewhere in your fire pack? ’Cause that’s what it’ll take.”
She cocked her head to one side. “No, but do you hear that?”
He listened, and obviously detected what she had—trickling water coming from around the curve in the passage.
“An underground spring. The water’s coolness will help ease the pain of the doe’s burns, and drinking it will keep her hydrated,” the man said with a nod toward both deer.
“How to get her to it, though?” Maura watched the rapid rise and fall of the doe’s chest. “I mean, I’ve got a bottle of water in my pack but it’s full and we’ll need it ourselves. Still, even if I had an empty container to fetch water for her, she can’t lift her head to drink.”
He glanced about as if hoping to spy a solution within the confines of the cave. Then, in one fluid movement, he stood and shrugged out of his yellow fire shirt, then peeled off the T-shirt beneath it.
Maura tried not to stare. In the glow of light bouncing off the cave walls, every muscle of his arms, shoulders, chest and torso were as if carved in stone, like a Michelangelo statue.
And as perfectly built.
“Wh-what are you doing?” she croaked.
“Unless you’ve got a better idea, I’m going to soak this T-shirt in the spring, then trickle water into the doe’s mouth as I wring it out.”
She smiled. “It’s a simple solution, but it’ll probably work as well as any,” she admitted.
He disappeared around the curve of the tunnel, and when he returned he had the sopping T-shirt in his palm. He knelt again and held the shirt over the doe’s head. Squeezing gently, he dribbled water into her mouth. At first too frightened by the sensation to do anything but blow the water out with puffs of air, the doe quickly caught on and was soon lapping spasmodically at the droplets her rescuer continued to aim into her mouth.
He was concentrating on dribbling water into the doe’s mouth, so Maura gave in to the fascination of watching him. As powerful as