“Glad to meetcha, Nick,” she added, quickly making introductions all around. Jo felt Nick’s gaze linger on her, and she fought the urge to squirm.
Jo knew she was no Kayla. Nothing fulsome and obvious about her looks, but she had never considered herself unattractive. She had inherited her mother’s lucent green eyes and arching eyebrows, along with a shiny profusion of thick brunette hair that formed a widow’s peak on a gentle, curving brow.
But that was where the mother-daughter comparison ended.
At five-two, Jo Lofton was petite like Hazel, in sharp contrast to Diane Lofton’s leggy five-ten frame—legs just perfect for gliding with catlike grace down fashion runways in Paris and New York, as indeed Diane had until she’d married and settled down.
Long legs, Jo observed bleakly, much like Kayla’s.
“Don’t tell me we’re in danger here, Nick?” Hazel said.
“Not at the moment, Mrs. McCallum,” he replied in a polite, pleasant voice. The musician in Jo immediately recognized a perfect baritone.
“Mainly we’re in this area just to thin out a few green pockets,” he added. “There’s cheatgrass down below in the gulches that provides good tinder for airborne sparks.”
Cynically Jo thought there was cheatgrass all around in the world and not just the gulches, but she remained silent.
“We’re not really going to be invading you,” Nick continued. “I lead a twelve-man team that’s in charge of monitoring Crying Horse Canyon, and we’re using Bridger’s Summit as our staging area. But we’ll be downridge and we won’t be in your way.”
“Of course you won’t be,” Kayla said, flashing him a toothy smile wide as the Texas Panhandle. “What a neat coinkydink that we’d all end up here together.”
Coinkydink? Jo thought, groaning inwardly. That’s the way some of her sophomore female students talked.
Bonnie met Jo’s gaze and rolled her eyes in an oh, please fashion.
“In fact,” Kayla enthused, “why don’t we all have supper together this evening? We could make it pot-luck!”
“That’d be great,” Nick replied, his tone already squashing the idea, “but my team works twelve hours on, twelve hours off, and we go on duty in another hour. We work nights during the quarter of the full moon. It’s cooler.”
Kayla pouted, demurely touching her cheek with one of her elegantly polished nails. “The night shift sure ruins a guy’s social life,” she said, watching him from lazy, lidded eyes.
“We’ll be seeing each other,” Nick said, looking at Jo again with steady attention, which made her feel an inner tickle of nervous fear. “Right now you folks need time to settle in, so nice meeting you.”
“See you later,” Kayla called out behind Nick’s retreating form. “How cute is he?” she said to the others in a lower tone. “Look at that trim caboose.”
“He’s a hunka-hunka burning love, all right,” Hazel agreed, though her thoughtful gaze remained on Jo.
“Never get seduced by a firefighter,” Stella warned sternly.
“Why not?” Kayla demanded.
“Because,” Stella replied, deadpan, “every time you get hot, he’ll beat you over the head with a shovel.”
The corny joke caught everyone off guard.
They all laughed, even Kayla, whom Jo had to admit looked beautiful and confident when she laughed.
But moments later Jo’s thoughts turned to Nick, the way his eyes had settled on her and refused to look away, the way his presence seemed to draw every female gaze like a vacuum. It had been a while since she’d wondered what it would be like to be held by a man, kissed and stroked. The very thought of it sent a neon sign of warning through her mind, but she still found herself wondering about the man Hazel called a Hotshot.
She knew one thing, however. The best way not to get burned was to stay away from fire.
And that, she planned to do the entire weekend.
Two
Kayla’s great-aunt Dottie McGratten showed up only a few minutes after Nick left, both her arms filled with firewood and kindling. She had an old hickory-nut face, well seamed, under a startling profusion of snow-white hair, barely restrained by a Dallas Cowboys cap. The wife of a retired oil wildcatter and formerly from Mystery Valley, she was still as spry as Hazel and Stella.
“The old gals are going easy on us tonight,” Bonnie observed as the three younger women settled into their cabin before supper.
“Yeah, but judging from their sly grins,” Jo said, “it’s only the calm before the storm.”
“And it’s going to be some storm,” Bonnie said, busy spreading her sleeping bag over the bare springs of her bed. “Star navigating, first-aid, fishing, rafting—if we survive this we’ll get our Ranger Rick badge.”
“You keep the badge,” Kayla quipped demurely. “I’ll take Ranger Rick.”
Jo glanced around the cabin. There was an old iron stove with nickel trimmings, three metal bedsteads, one along each wall, and little else besides a few nails in the walls for hanging clothes.
Ten days, she thought. It didn’t sound very long when she agreed to this. Now it loomed before her like a period of banishment, each day an eternity.
But she owed Hazel, if not herself, a cheerful attitude. McCallum money had financed McCallum Secondary School before there was even a Montana state legislature. And recently, since the hard-pressed state budget had virtually eliminated funding for art and music education, Hazel had almost single-handedly rescued the programs—and Jo’s teaching position.
So what Hazel wanted, Hazel got, even if she had the addled notion to try to make an inept camper survive the wilderness.
“I have dibs on this,” Kayla chimed in, flopping her blond self down on the thin mattress. She carefully arranged her cosmetics on a little wooden shelf beside the bed.
Bonnie turned to Jo and said under her breath, “She’s got dibs on everything, inanimate or not.”
Jo smiled distantly and placed her backpack on the middle bed.
Next to her, Kayla picked up a compact and examined herself. Her eyes rose to meet Jo’s.
“Dottie says your momma was Miss Montana?” Kayla asked, her voice a little wistful.
There it was again, Jo thought, her mother’s fame dredged up almost immediately by a virtual stranger. She felt a fist clench in her chest as she was reminded, yet again, that she dwelled in a perpetual maternal shadow.
“Dottie says right,” Bonnie supplied when Jo refused to reply. “And she was one of the finalists for Miss America.”
“Well…Montana,” Kayla said dismissively. “I mean, that’s nothing like being Miss Texas or Miss New York.”
“Why not?” Bonnie demanded.
Kayla studied her face carefully in the compact mirror before she replied.
“Oh, you know. Big frog in a small pond. We’ve got so many pretty girls in Texas, so it’s a real competition. But y’all in Montana got such an itty-bitty population.” Kayla flashed a mouthful of stunning enamel at Jo. “Not that I’m saying your momma didn’t deserve it. Shoot, I’ve seen pretty girls up north, occasionally, though winters up here will try a girl’s complexion.”
“We