Barrett Cole Read online

  “Did I sigh too loudly?” she asked, realizing she had made at least one such noise in contemplating her baby sister.

  “It was barely audible,” he grinned. “There’s TV and more than enough bandwidth on the Wi-Fi if you want to watch videos or something.”

  Seeing Barrett’s grin and the crinkle around his eyes, she couldn’t help but smile back.

  “It wasn’t boredom. I was just thinking how I should move my accounts locally and change a few things online.”

  His grin stretched bigger.

  “That’s a great idea.”

  Funny, she thought. Just looking at Barrett made her happy. Made her feel safe, too.

  “When is Sutton coming by?”

  He glanced at his computer. “About an hour.”

  Sutton was the only brother Barrett hadn’t told her about the night before, except when he mentioned him having a purple heart. Barrett had suggested Sutton meet Quinn today so she wouldn’t feel like she had a total stranger staying with her overnight if Barrett had another fire to put out.

  “So, is he a rancher or a timber guy or a smokejumper like you?”

  The grin disappeared at her question.

  “The Army medically discharged him last year.” Barrett pushed a few things around, lining the stapler up at the edge of his desk then sliding the pen holder next to it, a finger’s width separating them, everything placed just so before he continued talking.

  “Enemy fire took out his parachute during a mission. He broke too many bones on his landing to return to active duty. No more twenty-mile ruck marches or fitness tests for him. No more jumps, either.”

  “Oh,” she squeaked. “Last year was…”

  She frowned. He didn’t need a reminder that he’d lost his father and sister or that his brother had lost his profession.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “It was. But we had each other. Sometimes it’s easy to forget what family really means. Then something like last year hits you and you’re reminded that family is everything.”

  Quinn nodded at the sentiment while ignoring her private reality. She wanted to live in a world where family was everything, but her world had a crazy mother and an even crazier half-sister. Naomi was exactly the offspring science would predict when an over-the-top narcissist got knocked up by a hyperactive paranoid.

  “Sutton is taking some time off to decide if he wants to get a degree and for what,” Barrett continued. “He’s doing some repair work in the meantime, something he’s always done.”

  “Like repairing other people’s cars?”

  “I wish,” he grumbled. “He certainly knows how, but changing oil and doing tune-ups would bore him to death and he doesn’t have a lift or a pit for a lot of the work that would actually interest him. He will do a little bit of car repair, especially buying something that only needs a little fixing and selling it after. But he knows his way around electronics at least as well as he does around engines and he can solder and stuff sitting on his couch with his leg up.”

  Closing the lid on his laptop, he came out of his bedroom office and sat on the corner of the love seat close to her.

  “Have you been to college?”

  Her cheeks warmed and she mumbled something about a four-year scholarship to an art school on the east coast. She didn’t tell him how it had been the best four years of her life or how it all seemed like a distant memory or maybe a movie she had watched and tricked herself into believing she had lived instead.

  “Art is a funny thing,” Barrett said, his face suddenly flat and serious. “Take this guy in Vegas I saw on TV. He paints things like dice and martini glasses, poker chips, stuff like that. He’s a millionaire dozens of times over from it. Then there’s Jester with all the things he could do with wood.”

  “What?” Quinn asked. “Do you mean like sculptures?”

  Barrett nodded. “There were always a lot of carvings at his place that he’d done. He made some beautiful totems, but the fire took them. I guess, if you ever wonder where the talent comes from, now you know part of it is in your blood.”

  Quinn shrugged. If it was in her blood, it was diluted to the point of pointlessness.

  “I decided I would be a starving receptionist instead of a starving artist,” she told Barrett. “At least receptionists don’t have to buy their phones and cover the telecom bill on top of barely getting paid.”

  “Well,” he said, folding his arms and cocking a brow, his smile only minimally contained despite her gloomy tone. “Once the land is yours, you won’t have to worry so much about meeting basic expenses, at least not for a while.”

  She stared, questioning. Winter was in her future. There was no structure on the land for her to live in. She didn’t think she could survive in a tent.

  “No, seriously,” he smiled. “There’s a lease with the cellular company that’s worth about a hundred dollars a month, more if they want to move the tower and put up a bigger one now that the fire took it down. There’s no better place in the area for that than on your property.”

  Quinn nodded. She had more than enough experience in how to fill her cupboard and her gas tank on a hundred a month, then there was the money from the book cover site. But she would still need transportation—there was no corner store to walk to and, even if there was, the costs at a convenience store would quickly burn through a hundred dollars a month.

  Add to that car insurance, health insurance, and her cell phone. Plus, by the time the property was hers, she would probably have pushed her credit cards to their limit.

  She needed to come up with about eight hundred a month beyond the lease payment and book covers.

  Barrett rubbed at his chin for a second then hooked her gaze. “I didn’t want to mention it because I’m not sure exactly which trees survived the fire, even though I know the path it took. But there are some great burls out there. We just need Walker to go look at what’s left.”

  “Burls? Is that a type of tree?”

  “Nope, it’s something you can find on any kind of tree, but they’re rare. Basically, it’s a tumor on the tree. The wood is harder and more interesting for design purposes,” he explained. “One burl can be worth more than the whole tree without it. Sometimes worth more than a hundred trees. And Jester wouldn’t part with any of his burls no matter how much Walker begged to let him harvest just one.”

  She smiled, imagining a man she still hadn’t seen, not even in a photograph.

  “Did he plan on carving them all himself?”

  Laughing, Barrett nodded. “Exactly so. Jester would say he could see the figure in each one waiting for him. He had names for the trees like Clutching Eagle, Devouring Serpent…”

  Quinn closed her eyes, imagining what her granduncle saw.

  “You carve?” Barrett asked.

  “Never tried. My major was painting and drawing.”

  “But you don’t do it now?”

  She shook her head.

  “Not even to pass the time?”

  Quinn shook her head a little harder, a familiar tightness spreading in her chest at the mere idea of taking up a brush again. Pushing things around in Photoshop and adding pretty fonts was as artistic as she got anymore.

  “I had a gallery showing scheduled. My first real one,” she told him. “Someone burned the place down.”

  “That’s bad luck, but—”

  “No,” she interrupted. “They took one of the paintings with them, slashed it up and left it on my car in front of my apartment.”

  Barrett was silent for a minute then leaned across to gently squeeze Quinn’s arm.

  “That kind of crazy won’t follow you here,” he promised. “If it does, you just point me in their direction.”

  A knock on the door ended the moment. Sutton had arrived. He brought with him a report that the repairs on the cell tower should be finished within a week, his resource being one of the technicians doing the actual work.

  He stayed maybe thirty minutes, long enough for Quinn to get comfort
able with the idea he might have to babysit her up in the woods.

  He was lean and handsome, not as tall as Barrett or as personally appealing to Quinn as his older brother, but he had a genuine smile and kind eyes. He was everything she expected from a man raised by Lindy Turk.

  * * *

  Barrett cooked dinner for the two of them around five o’clock. Nice juicy burgers with asparagus tips and an ice-cold beer to wash everything down.

  They had used Barrett’s truck at his suggestion. Anything to cut down on the rental’s mileage made her happy and she had already let him drive her vehicle.

  “There’s one,” he said as they turned a bend on the dirt road leading to their campsite.

  Stopping, he put the truck in park and turned it off. Quinn looked around, not certain what “one” was.

  “A burl,” he clarified, stepping out.

  Unhooking her seat belt, she followed him over to a twenty-foot or so tree covered in needles that were a pale blue-green and bark that was almost purplish.

  “Wow,” she said, seeing the large bulge growing out of the tree. It started about three feet off the ground and was about three feet high and nearly as wide. “So this is a burl in a pine tree.”

  “Hemlock,” he corrected and patted the center of the bulge. “Jester called this one Bear Belly.”

  “Beer Belly?”

  He laughed. “That’s what I thought the first time he said it. But, no, like a grizzly bear.”

  He pointed to a few more hemlock trees, none of them sporting any burls.

  “Hemlock doesn’t have any commercial value, unless it’s got a burl on it. If you get title to the property and let Walker harvest it, you’ll see the inside of the burl is a real nice red with lots of darker swirls in it.”

  “You learned this from your brother?” she asked.

  Quinn expected a fireman who jumped out of planes to know how fast a tree would catch, which trees were tougher to chop down—things like that. Not what their polished insides looked like.

  “Learned it from Jester,” he answered. “I came here at least once a year every year from the time I was eight through last year. Great fishing.” Extending his arm, he pointed at the ridge. “I shot my first elk when I was twelve near the stream on the west side of the mountain. Lots of rabbit around here, too. Get you a nice little small game rifle, you won’t need to buy meat if you’re not squeamish about skinning and stuff. Can sell them, too, meat and fur. Again, if you’re not squeamish about it.”

  Her mouth warped into a squiggly line. “I guess I’ll find out if I am.”

  Throwing Quinn a wink, he walked toward the truck. She followed after him.

  “I have a little surprise up top,” he said as she slid her seatbelt on. “Buddy of mine won’t be hunting for a while and…”

  His pause stretched all the way to the top of the mountain.

  “That’s so cute!” she squealed, seeing the small teardrop trailer, its bottom third painted hot pink, the rest of it white. “Wait, he takes that hunting with him? Shouldn’t it be camouflaged or something?”

  “He bought it used. He’s a little cheap and doesn’t believe in working harder than he has to, but don’t tell him I said that.”

  Turning in her seat, Quinn beamed a grin at the man. “You mean, like keep it a secret or let’s not mention it?”

  “Hoisted on my own petard,” Barrett groaned.

  “Oh, Hamlet, eh?”

  He shrugged. “Mama taught high school English until the twins came along and she decided it was better to give the job to someone who needed it. But she still made sure we all learned the classics.”

  “The library at your mom’s house is awesome.” Quinn hopped out of the truck, continuing to chatter as she walked over to the little trailer. “It looks like something an English teacher would have—the library, I mean. This cutie pie definitely belonged to a He-Man hunter once upon a time.”

  Reaching the door, she stopped and looked over her shoulder to catch Barrett standing like a little kid in a candy shop as he stared at her.

  Wishful thinking, Wool-for-Brains, she scolded.

  “Is it locked?”

  “Hope not,” he laughed. “Key to the door is probably inside.”

  She pressed the handle down and pulled lightly. The door opened. Sticking her head inside, she was struck by how clean everything smelled. Hardly what she’d expect from a hunter. The colors were light and airy, too.

  “His daughter just joined the Air Force,” Barrett explained. “She would use it for hanging out in with her girlfriends when he didn’t need it for hunting. It’s purely for staying dry and warm and for slightly more comfortable sleep than the ground.”

  “It’s amazing,” she insisted, standing on tiptoe and kissing his cheek.

  “Uh, one more thing,” he said, coughing as he opened up a block of space between them. “Not as adorable…not at all adorable, but a step in the right direction.”

  Following behind him, Quinn saw a blue plastic container about as tall and wide as a phone booth. It even had a door on it. The bottom had a lip and someone had driven stakes through the plastic to hold the structure down.

  “Oh, is that the outhouse?”

  She had noted the debris that morning on her hunt for a cluster of trees to pee behind before they left the site and headed to Barrett’s house.

  “Yep.” He opened the door to reveal a clean bench seat with a hole and a toilet lid. Someone had even left toilet paper.

  She gave his shoulder a light tap with her fist. “This was all done while we were at your place?”

  “I had Sutton supervise it for me. He texted while I was cooking the burgers to say it was all done.”

  She wanted to kiss Barrett again but his reaction to the first kiss made her wary. He hadn’t seemed to welcome it. Had even appeared put off by the act. Quinn sighed on the inside. So much for assigning any optimism over his earlier blushes and occasionally penetrating stares.

  “We’ve got just enough daylight left to gather up some small branches to start the fire,” he said, turning toward his truck. “If we go down the west side, you’ll be able to see the stream.”

  Barrett pulled a canvas strap and a hand axe from the box of his truck. He looped the strap over his shoulder and pointed west with the axe’s head. They walked side by side. When they had enough branches to start a bundle, he secured the pieces with the strap and then they looked for more.

  The path of devastation was clear on this side of the mountain.

  “Fires are necessary,” Barrett said, reading her expression as she stopped and stared in dismay at the ashy carnage. “Older trees can choke a forest, suck up all the nutrients. Takes a long time when a tree falls for those nutrients to make it back into the ground—unless the tree is turned to ashes.”

  She nodded, her mouth refusing to uncurl from the frown that anchored its edges.

  “Sucks for the animals and people,” he acknowledged. “Lives are lost or forever altered, property is damaged, but the forest needs to burn every now and then, otherwise the whole thing dies off. So does every creature that depends on it.”

  He waved his arm over the once green ruins then hooked her gaze. “Wait until you see this in three years.”

  “Thanks to you, I’ll be here to see it.”

  His head bobbed, the gesture looking more like a retreat than an acceptance of her gratitude.

  “We wait any longer we’ll be using the flashlights to get back to camp,” he warned.

  “Okay, but I wasn’t paying much attention to our route as I should have. I guess that’s another thing I have to learn.”

  “Yeah, never count on the other person to be able to lead you out of the woods. They could get hurt and need you to make it back to the road or campsite then back to them again. This time, it’s all good.”

  Quinn walked beside Barrett, neither of them talking. She wondered if his brain was spinning in as many circles as hers and at the same speed. Probab
ly not, he was probably just thinking about how he was helping a friend of the family once removed.

  He was a smokejumper, after all. He probably had at least a little bit of a hero complex.

  Reaching the campsite, Barrett had Quinn get the branches out of the bundle while he grabbed one of the big logs he’d brought from home and the bag of sawdust. He showed her how to arrange the branches around the log and discussed a different arrangement if she didn’t have any large, dry pieces.

  “Of course, I’ll make sure you have all the dry logs you need.”

  Once the fire was going, he hauled his sleeping bag out and set the small tent up again. They sat in their chairs, roasting marshmallows on the end of twigs, their fingers sweet and sticky by the time the clock passed ten p.m.

  “I guess I’ve been officially counted for the night.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The fresh air and the fire’s heat seemed to have a sedative effect on Quinn. Once again she was nodding off and yawning.

  Some of it was the anxiety, too. Her reaction to stress was often sleep—a drowsiness she couldn’t control. She’d thought about joining the Army or Air Force but realized she would have been dead meat going through basic training. Drill Sergeant screams at her, she yawns in his face.

  Boot meet backside.

  “You stay out here much longer, I’m going to have to carry you into the trailer.”

  Quinn wanted to ask if that would be such a bad thing. Him picking her up, cradling her. But she didn’t ask, just shrugged.

  “I feel bad you sleeping on the ground again.”

  Barrett laughed. “You’d feel worse if you found out my Mama spanked me, old as I am, for sleeping inside the trailer.”

  She turned her face from the fire, seeking camouflage in the shadows.

  “I wasn’t suggesting…”

  The words sounded hollow leaving her so she let them hang in the air between them. She had only meant sleeping, not anything else. And she was pretty sure Barrett knew that.

  “Even if I was,” she picked back up. “You haven’t been…uh…celibate…your whole life.”

  Turning to look at him, Quinn caught a slow grin as it spread up the handsome face, that dark green gaze of his glowing like fairy lights as it reflected the fire’s dancing flames.