‘You heard me—you’re trespassing.’
In a single lithe movement that brought a frown to his face, so familiar did it seem, she jumped to the ground. ‘I’m not in the mood for jokes,’ she said. ‘What do you want?’
‘I came here to tell the pilot that four of us need transport out to the south flank of the fire—’
‘OK,’ she said impatiently, ‘you’ve told her. We can—’
‘You’re the pilot,’ Simon said blankly.
‘I’m the pilot,’ she repeated, unsmiling. ‘I’m not in the mood for chauvinist remarks, either.’
He had not been about to make any. Although his assumption that a pilot had to be a man was about as chauvinistic as he could get.
For a moment Simon regarded her in silence. She looked tired and dirty and hot. While her hair, tawny-blonde, was pulled back into a ribbon, wisps of it stuck to her face; there were shadows like bruises under the level grey eyes. Her nose had an interesting bump in it, and her mouth was too generous for true beauty. He wanted very badly to make that mouth smile.
He said straightforwardly, ‘I’m sorry. I should never have assumed that you had to be a man.’
She gave him the briefest of nods. ‘OK. We can leave in about half an hour. I have to refuel first.’
Turning away from him, she knelt down to unlatch the cargo pod in the belly of the helicopter. Plainly he was dismissed. Yet something in the way she moved, in her slimness and the curve of her back, made Simon say with a gaucheness rare to him, ‘I don’t know your name.’
She was hauling a fuel pump from the pod. Resting it on the ground by one of the skids, she brushed her hands down her trousers and stood up. She was tall, perhaps five feet nine. He liked tall women. ‘Shea Mallory,’ she said.
Shea...he could not have come across two women named Shea in the space of three weeks. He croaked, ‘Do you have a cabin on Maynard’s Lake?’
She frowned at him. ‘Yes,’ she said in a clipped voice. ‘How do you know that? I’ve never laid eyes on you before.’
She had not laid eyes on him. But he most certainly had laid eyes on her. Although his heart was banging against his ribs, at another level Simon was not even surprised to learn her identity, for every movement she had made in the last few minutes had told him who she was. Feeling colour creep up his neck, fighting to keep his voice casual, he said, ‘I’m Simon Greywood. Jim Hanrahan’s brother.’ He held out his hand.
Shea took it with noticeable reluctance and gave it the lightest of pressures before releasing it. ‘The one from England,’ she said. ‘The artist.’
‘That’s right,’ he said, smiling at her in a way a number of women in London would have recognised. ‘I’m here for the summer.’
She did not smile back. Instead she gave his spanking-new T-shirt a derisive glance. ‘Aren’t you afraid you’ll get your hands dirty?’
He felt his temper rise. ‘I did apologise for my mistake.’
‘I wasn’t referring to that particular mistake.’
‘So what have you got against me, Shea Mallory?’
‘I’ll tell you,’ she answered, scowling at him as she thrust her hands in the pockets of her trousers. ‘I helped Jim write that first letter to you, so I know how much it meant to him. His parents didn’t tell him he was adopted until he turned twenty-five...once he discovered he had an older brother, he wanted to get in touch with you right away. So he wrote to you. And for six weeks you didn’t even bother to write back.’
‘That’s true,’ Simon said shortly. ‘But—’
‘With all the money you’ve got, I would have thought you could have picked up the phone—seeing that you were too busy painting rich people to write a letter.’
‘This is really none of your business—it’s between Jim and me, and nothing to do with you.’
She raised her voice over the growl of an approaching truck. ‘He and I went canoeing four weeks after he wrote to you. He was really upset—and he’s my friend. In my book that makes it my business.’ She glanced to her right. ‘Now you’ll have to excuse me, that’s the truck with the oil drums. Be back here at quarter-past nine.’
The truck lurched down the track and came to a stop three feet from where Simon was standing. The driver gave Shea a cheery hello and climbed out. Simon, knowing he had definitely got the worst of that round, strode up the hill to find his brother.
Jim was standing by a pile of gear chatting to two other men, whom he introduced as Charlie and Steve. Simon said, ‘We leave at nine-fifteen.’
‘We’ve got time for a coffee, then,’ Steve said, and headed for the kitchen, Charlie hard on his heels.
‘Jim, why the devil didn’t you tell me Shea was the pilot?’ Simon demanded.
Jim blinked. ‘For one thing, I didn’t know...there are seven or eight different pilots. For another, I didn’t want to engineer any kind of an introduction and be accused of matchmaking.’
‘You don’t have to worry—she can’t stand the sight of me.’
‘Whyever not?’
‘She thinks I should have picked up the telephone the minute I got your letter.’
‘That’s not exactly her business,’ Jim said thoughtfully.
‘That’s what I told her. Which didn’t endear me to her.’
‘Oh, well, I suspected she might not be the woman for you,’ Jim said with a dismissiveness that grated on Simon’s nerves. ‘Why don’t we grab a coffee and a doughnut before we go? It’s going to be a long day.’
Simon subdued various replies, making a manful effort to pull his mind off an encounter that had left him as stirred up as an adolescent. ‘Won’t we need gear out there?’ he asked.
‘The Bell—the big helicopter—took it out half an hour ago along with another crew. This isn’t a bad fire, as forest fires go...a good way for you to get your feet wet.’
The fire was not foremost in Simon’s mind. He had now seen two sides of the woman called Shea: the laughing creature playing in the water, and the cold-eyed pilot of a government helicopter. Although he was still smarting from her rebuff, this did not in any way diminish his desire to find out more about her. Both sides of her had got under his skin. Nor, he was sure, were these two facets of her personality the whole woman.
Besides which, he was determined to make her smile.
At him.
* * *
At nine-fifteen the four men headed towards the helicopter, Simon now arrayed in his orange overalls and carrying his hard hat and ear protectors. The sharp tang of smoke filled the air.
Shea
