Chasing Fire by Nora Roberts

sadly yet, Jim’s killed during a jump which the ensuing investigation determines was his error—but the cook blamed his jump partner, which would be you, and tried to stab you with a kitchen knife.”
    “She didn’t exactly try to stab me.” The hell of it was, Rowan thought, she couldn’t figure out why she kept defending the lunatic Dolly on that score. “Or didn’t have time to because Marg yanked the knife away from her almost as soon as she’d picked it up.”
    “Points for Marg.” He watched her face as he spoke, cat eyes steady and patient. “Grief takes a lot of forms, and a lot of those are twisted and ugly. But blaming you, or anyone on that load, for Jim’s accident is just stupid. Continuing to is mean and stupid, and self-defeating.”
    She didn’t want to talk about this. Why was she? She couldn’t seem to help it, she realized, with him watching her intently, speaking so calmly.
    “How do you know she still blames me?”
    The sunlight picked out the gold in his brown hair as he drank down more water. “To wind it up, the cook takes off, and finds religion—or so she claims and maybe even believes. Not enough grace and faith to tell the father’s grieving family about the baby, until she comes back to base looking for work. So I call bullshit on the God factor.”
    “Okay.” Maybe she couldn’t help it because he’d laid it out flat, and in exactly the way she saw it. “Wow.”
    “Not quite finished. You seek out the cook, engage her in private conversation. Though, of course, privacy is slim pickings around here. During the not-so-private conversation, the cook becomes very steamed, does a lot of snarling and pointing, then storms off. Which leads me to conclude finding religion didn’t include finding forgiveness, charity or good sense.”
    “How did you get all this? And I do mean all.”
    “I’m a good listener. If you care, the general consensus on base is she had Jim’s kid—and Matt’s niece—so she should get some support. In fact, Cards is taking donations for a college fund in Jim’s name.”
    “Yeah,” Rowan replied. “He’d think of that. He’s just built that way.”
    “The consensus continues that if she gives you grief or talks trash about you, she gets one warning. Second time, we meet with L.B., lay it out and she goes. You’ve got no say in it.”
    “I—”
    “None.” The single syllable remained calm, and absolutely final. “Everybody pretty much wants her to keep her job. And nobody’s going to let her keep it if she causes trouble. So if you don’t agree with that, you’re outvoted. You might as well stop being pissed off and depressed because it’s not going to do you any good.”
    “I guess I don’t agree because it’s me. If it was somebody else, I’d be right there.”
    “I get that.”
    “Leaving out a lot of stuff I’m not in the mood to talk about, my mother died when I was twelve.”
    “That’s hard.”
    “They weren’t together, and . . . that’s the lot of stuff I’m not in the mood to talk about. My father raised me, with his parents taking a lot of the weight during the season when he was still jumping. What I’m saying is, I know it’s not easy to be a single parent, even with help and support. I’m willing to cut her some slack.”
    “She’s getting slack already, Rowan. She’s working in the kitchen. It’ll be up to her if she stays.”
    They’d walked back while they talked. Now he gestured toward the gym. “Feel like lifting?”
    “Yeah. Can I use this?” She tapped his MP3 player. “I want to check out your playlist.”
    “Working out without the tunes is a sacrifice.” He pulled it off, handed it to her. “Consider that when you’re lining up the reasons to sleep with me.”
    “I’ll put it at the top of the list.”
    “Nice. So . . . what did it bump down?”
    She laughed and walked inside ahead of him.
    Once she finished her daily PT, cleaned up, she hiked to the cookhouse to fuel up on