4
Jess had tried to burn her out on the hike up. He wasn’t completely sure of his own motivations. It wasn’t as if there would be any easy way to evacuate her if she reached the fire line and then wanted to go home. The only crews who worked farther from base on a fire than the hotshots were the smokejumpers. The smokies went where there were no roads at all. The hotshots drove to the end of the road and then hiked in with nothing but the saws and axes on their backs. The fact that now they were only a half mile from a forest road was the closest they’d been to civilization in five days, having started well to the west.
But every time he glanced back to check on her, Jill Conway-Jones was still there behind him. Sometimes closer, sometimes farther back, and once stopped and turned to sta
