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to the next section in silence. He was starting to recognize that she did that. She thought about things a lot. Saw things, things that others didn’t. He began to wonder just how rare it was that he’d gotten past her defenses by asking if she was TJ’s daughter. Pretty damned rare would be his guess.
    He pulled the wrenches out of his back pocket. He hadn’t even remembered grabbing them while he was in the truck. Training paid off, made some motions automatic, even though he’d been distracted by the extra drones in the black boxes.
    She tightened the bolts nicely. Really good hands. Strong, but with that impossibly feminine slenderness. Long, strong fingers. Like she’d been born to play the guitar or something. Again, he started to picture her in some rock and roll… no, country band. She’d be the quiet, total knockout of a bass player. Not the showman, or rather showgirl, that got all the attention as he’d been imagining yesterday. Even in an all-girls’ country band, she’d be the one he’d be watching.
    They finished assembling the drone’s retrieval tower in silence, thirty feet of pipe upward and an arm sticking out ten feet to the side. He cranked it up into position until it towered three stories above them.
    Just stay focused on the job.
    That was going to be his best bet.
    By the way she looked at him yesterday, Carly had already made it clear that any headway he’d made rescuing TJ had been totally offset by his question about her family.

Chapter 6
    Carly looked up at the fragile rig she’d just helped assemble. A tall pole with a sideways extension sticking out of the top and a couple of thin guy wires for support. From the tip of the extension, a rope dangled down. Steve—“Merks” was just silly, though the nickname did kind of fit him when he’d rappelled out of the helicopter to save TJ’s life—moved with a speed borne of confidence as he set up the equipment. Not just born of practice, but of innate skill. She’d bet that whatever he did, he’d do it well.
    â€œWhat does this do?” He clearly wasn’t going to talk about his leg and how he’d injured it. And she didn’t want to talk about how scared she’d been by TJ’s accident and how chaotic her emotions had been all yesterday. She’d come out to help him this morning as an apology for the total shit she’d been to him yesterday, newbie or not. Apparently not.
    She hadn’t pinned him as a smokie, though she should have. Only a smokie would have jumped the fire in a light shirt and jeans to rescue TJ. Only a first-class smokejumper would be so driven to overachieve.
    Steve attached a couple of heavy shock cords to the lower end of the rope and attached those to the trailer, drawing the rope taut.
    â€œIt’s how I land the drone. I fly it into the rope. The rope slides along the wing and gets caught on the wingtip. Sort of snags it out of the sky.”
    â€œAnd if you miss?”
    Steve stood up from finishing the attachment on the trailer. He aimed his ridiculous smile at her. She’d thought it ridiculous the first time she’d seen it. It started on the left side of his face, a quirk of the corner of his lips, then a sideways slide that would have been a leer on most men’s faces, but his dark eyes joined in and softened it.
    â€œI never miss.”
    â€œYeah, right.” What else could she say to a line like that?
    â€œIf I ever did, I’d fly it around and come back at it again. In an emergency, I could aim for a clump of bushes or a field of corn, maybe. But then I’d have a lot of repair work to do and MHA wouldn’t appreciate the spare-parts bill.”
    She looked up at the rope again and tried to ignore how he looked at her. She’d long since learned that guys couldn’t stop looking at her and that it meant absolutely nothing.
    But somehow with Steve it was different.