Northern Exposure (14 page)

He also knew what he was feeling for her wasn't just sexual. And that scared the hell out of him.

“It'll do me good,” he said, grabbing the soap and his makeshift shaving kit, shaking off the foreign
feelings. “Here, keep this with you.” He laid his forty-five, which he'd retrieved from Carson's pocket, beside her on the bunk. “Just in case.”

Leaving her sitting there, he retreated outside and closed the door.

 

She waited for him, knowing what would happen when he returned. Wanting it to happen.

When the door finally opened, she tensed. He froze in the doorway, clean shaven, barefoot and bare-chested, his trousers slung low on his hips, his belt undone, his shirt balled up in his fist, dripping water.

“Oh,” he said, noticing she was still sitting there wrapped in the blanket. “You need more time. I'll just—”

“No.”

He stopped, looked at her, his gaze locking on hers like a cruise missile.

“I'm ready for you to come in. I'm…ready for you.”

He didn't say anything, just closed the door behind him, locked it, all without taking his eyes off her. He tossed his wet shirt in the corner with hers.

Wendy opened the blanket.

As he walked toward her, knelt on the floor beside the bunk, put his hand on her knee, she knew there was no going back. She also knew he was all wrong for her. Stubborn, controlling, used to getting his own way and making every decision, shouldering every consequence alone.

But watching the firelight dance in his eyes as his gaze slid like silk over her bare skin, she didn't care. She just wanted him.

“You're sure?” His hand moved up her leg, the electricity of his touch causing her breath to catch.

“No,” she whispered.

“That's okay.” He climbed into the bunk on top of her, grazed a finger along her jaw, across her parted lips. “I am.”

A
bandoning her fears, all her good sense, turning off the voice in her head telling her she was making a huge mistake, Wendy closed her eyes and kissed him.

He slid his arms beneath her, and her legs opened to receive him. Settling his weight on top of her, he deepened the kiss. His tongue was hot, but his skin was cool from the river, and the feel of his hard chest against her breasts forced her nipples to instantly harden.

He shuddered, and she gasped, fearing to open her eyes and look at him. She knew if she did, she'd be lost. He breathed her name between kisses, his hands sliding downward to cup her buttocks, his erection pressing into her through the coarse fabric of his pants.

When she felt his mouth on her breast, she cried out, throwing her head back, arching into him.
Groaning, he gripped her almost viciously, undulated against her, kissed her with a raw hunger that made her wild with need.

She responded, clawing at his back, his trousers, trying to work them off his hips. And then she made an uncalculated mistake. She opened her eyes, her gaze connecting with his, their lips a breath apart, and what she read in his face scared her.

“Wendy.” He brushed her lips with his, looking at her with eyes she'd never seen before, dark and hooded, with more than lust reflecting back at her in the firelight.

He grasped her chin, made her look at him, whispered endearments meant to calm her frenzy, slow her mounting passion so he could connect with her, engage her emotions.

“Oh, Joe.” She needed him, yes, wanted him desperately to take her mind away from the events of the past hour, the past month, to make her feel safe, to help her forget, if just for a little while, who she was and all that had happened.

Moments ago, sitting on the bunk waiting for him, she'd told herself it was just sex that she needed, a physical coupling, a release. That she could handle it, and that he could, too. But now, looking into his eyes, she knew it wasn't just sex, not for him. Not for her.

He kissed her, softly this time, rolling his hips gently into hers. “Wendy, I—”

She kissed him hard, her heart pounding, fearing the words she knew were poised on his lips. Her hand slid between his legs, and he responded, giving in to the physical, kissing, biting, groping her, pushing himself into her hand, his need intensifying.

She closed her eyes and lost herself in his touch, the feel of his bare chest against hers, the minty scent of his hair newly shampooed with her soap, dripping cool water on her heated skin.

He was rock hard and ready. So was she.

Together they eased his pants off. Seconds later he slid into her, both of them crying out with the shock of it, her legs wrapping tightly around his hips. No more thinking, no more fears. He thrust into her, over and over, giving himself up to her, and she to him, their eyes locked, their emotions laid bare.

When he slipped his hand between them, she thought she'd go mad.

He did when he watched her come apart.

 

The sound of the river took his mind away, along with the cold. Joe stretched out, naked, on a long flat slab of basalt outside the cabin and gazed at the clear night sky. A billion stars winked back at him from a field of midnight velvet.

He was so relaxed he didn't hear the cabin door open, or Wendy pad barefoot across a late-summer patch of wild grass to join him.

“Hey,” she said, startling him.

He sat up and saw that she was wrapped in the down sleeping bag that they'd unzipped and had used as a blanket in the bunk.

“Aren't you cold?” She eased down next to him on the rock and offered him part of it.

Smiling, he pulled her down with him, then zipped the sleeping bag around them so they were warmly cocooned. Together they stared at the sky, his arm around her, her head tucked into the crook of his
shoulder, her hand splayed across his chest, her fingers toying with his hairs.

He couldn't remember the last time he felt this good. Hell, maybe never.

By silent consent they didn't talk about Dwight Carson, or the fact that Joe had wrapped his body in a plastic tarp and stashed it in the narrow storage locker running along the outside of the DF&G cabin. It would have to stay there until he got Wendy out of the reserve and could call in the State Troopers to retrieve it.

The incident lay heavy on both their minds, but he knew for tonight they wouldn't speak of it. He'd push it from his thoughts until tomorrow, when the light of day would bring with it the reality of their situation.

He was in love with her, but she wasn't in love with him, or at least he didn't think she was.

Could he blame her? He couldn't even protect her. He'd let Carson get to her twice.

“Tell me about your boyfriends,” he said, not really wanting to know about them, but wondering why a woman like her had never married. Never even been close, he remembered her saying.

She took a breath, exhaled with a little sigh. “There's not much to tell, really. I've had a few, but none were really serious. Well, they never got the chance to be.”

“Why not?” He looked at her, and she shrugged in his arms.

“I was always working too much.”

“By choice?”

“Not really. Blake was a bit of a slave driver,
especially where I was concerned. He said I had to pay my dues.”

“And I'll bet those dues were steeper when there was a man in your life.”

“You're right, they were.” She rolled onto her back and looked at the sky. “Blake was jealous. Every time I started dating somebody new, he'd become impossible to work with.”

“He wanted you for himself.” Joe couldn't wait to get his hands on this guy.

“He did. Only, I didn't know that when I first took the job out of college. It never even crossed my mind. He was married.”

“Doesn't sound like that meant much to him.”

“No, it didn't. He was always having affairs—with women, I mean. I hadn't known about…well, you know.”

Joe didn't want to think about it.

“Blake always found a way to sabotage my relationships. I can see now that he was punishing me for refusing to sleep with him.”

“Why did you stay? There had to have been other jobs you could have taken.”

“There were. Lots of them in the beginning. But Blake was the best and kept telling me how lucky I was to be working for him, to have him as a mentor.”

“Some mentor.”

“I know.” She rolled into his arms. “I was stupid. I believed I wasn't good enough, that I was nothing without him. But that part of my life is over. I'm different, smarter. No one's ever going to manipulate or control me like that again.”

He held her, nuzzling her hair, brushing kisses
across her temple. The cut she'd sustained during the rock slide was still visible, a thin red line. The more he thought about Barrett and this guy Carson, the angrier he got.

“You gave him the caribou film.”

“Hmm?”

Joe hadn't wanted to talk about it, but needed to know. “When you gathered up the film to give to Carson, you saved the exposed roll from the loft, but were going to give him your magazine shots.”

“I had to. I figured I could sneak one roll past him if I was quick. I don't know what's on that film, but I suspect it's something more than just one of Blake's flings. Besides, that…creep was going to kill you.”

Now, when he thought back on it, he knew Carson would have done exactly that. “You would have let him…hurt you.” The thought of her allowing Carson to rape her to protect him was more than he could take.

“To save your life?” She looked at him in the starlight with wide silvery eyes. “I would have, but I knew I wouldn't have to. I knew that, together, we'd be able to stop him.”

Together.

Now that was a new concept for him, one he knew he wasn't comfortable with. He'd fully expected he would stop Carson on his own. He'd never even considered that Wendy might be able to help. But that's exactly what she'd done. In fact, if she hadn't distracted Carson, he would never have been able to subdue him without one of them getting hurt or killed.

He closed his eyes and tried to forget the fear he'd
felt when she'd walked into Carson's arms. “Come here,” he said, and rolled her on top of him. She was warm and soft and sleepy, and he never wanted to let her go.

“Make me forget.” She kissed him, rolling her hips seductively into his groin, making him instantly hard. “Make me forget everything.”

He did, sliding her down onto his shaft, suckling her breasts as she began to move in a rhythm that made his blood burn through his veins, that caused the sky to spin above their heads at warp speed.

She threw her head back, grinding into him, and a burst of color shimmered on the horizon, an eerie green he saw reflected in her eyes.

“Northern lights,” she whispered, seeing them, too, then gave herself up to the rising wave of pleasure neither of them could hold back, even if they'd wanted to.

Holding her hips in place, he thrust harder, flashing on the fact that they hadn't used a condom either time. He wondered if she'd get pregnant. The thought of it made him wild, like an animal.

He drove himself inside her.

 

The next morning the reality of their situation settled into her bones like the icy fog blanketing the valley for the second day in a row. Wendy shuddered as Joe secured the cabin and checked, for the dozenth time, the padlock on the outside storage locker.

“He's in there,” she said, knowing all along that's where Joe had put the body. It was the only suitable place, protected from animals and from discovery by other hikers—not that there
were
any other hikers.

“It's cold enough that…well, you know.”

So that the body would keep until the State Troopers arrived. A chill wriggled up her spine.

“Cold?” He put an arm around her shoulder.

“No, just…anxious. We should get a move on.”

“Yeah. It's sixty-two miles to the station from here. Four days if we move fast.”

“Three if we hike dawn-to-dusk.” They were both in good shape, and the trail was nearly all downhill from here on out.

As he guided her onto the path, she glanced back at the cabin where she'd spent both the worst and the best night of her life.

A man was dead because of a roll of film, and the man who'd killed him and who walked beside her now was both everything she wanted and everything she feared.

“There was something I wanted to say last night but didn't.”

She heard him, but kept walking, moving out from under his arm, ahead of him onto the trail. She wasn't ready for this. Or maybe she was, and that's what scared her the most.

“Thanks,” he said, surprising her.

She turned to look at him, thinking how foolish she was. She'd thought he was going to tell her that he— Oh, hell. “For what?”

“For what you did last night.”

She thought of their lovemaking, and how that second time she'd been a bit bold, but knew from the gravity of his expression that wasn't what he meant.

“With Carson. What you did took guts. I just wanted to say thanks.”

She smiled at him. “It was a team effort, if I remember correctly.”

“Yeah,” he said, not returning her smile. “A team.”

They walked in silence the rest of the morning, each absorbed in their own thoughts, conscious of each other in the way that only new lovers are. Except, for her it was different.

She'd never felt like this before, and for that reason she kept her pace brisk, avoiding letting him follow too closely behind her. A couple of times while they were walking, he touched her, toyed with her hair, and she had to stop herself from turning and going into his arms.

The farther they got from the cabin, the more she resisted him emotionally, steeling herself for the moment they'd reach the station and she'd be connected again to the world she was going back to and was intent on making a life in.

She reminded herself that Joe Peterson was out here in the middle of nowhere for a reason. He'd narrowed his own world into one he could control, or one he thought he could. She didn't have to remind herself that he was all wrong for her. He did that himself at every turn, his take-charge attitude escalating in direct proportion to her emotional distance.

They stopped rarely, only to discuss the trail or the fog, which hung on like a long winter. The river was with them the whole way, its rushing waters drowning out all other sounds. At a blind turn in the trail, Joe stepped in front of her, making it clear he was going first.

She knew what had happened with Carson last night had scared the hell out of him. Her, too. They'd almost gotten killed. He was just being extra careful
today. Still, the brusque way he'd sidestepped her, without so much as an explanation, irritated her.

He charged around the corner, one hand absently resting on his holstered gun. Wendy was right behind him, her dander up. Seconds later they got the shock of their lives.

“Jesus!” Joe pulled up short.

They'd been moving so fast she lost her footing trying not to run into him from behind. The next thing she knew she was facedown in the dirt, sprawled at his feet.

“Doctor Livingstone, I presume!”

Wendy looked up to see Barb Maguire's beaming smile fixed on Joe, her black springy curls twisted to Shirley Temple proportions in the fog.

A big, beefy guy with bright-blue eyes and an identical smile stood beside her, a gargantuan pack on his back. Before Wendy could react, he offered her a paw the size of a small ham. “And, uh, Mrs. Livingstone?”

Wendy grabbed his hand at the same time Joe took hold of her upper arm, and together the two men hauled her to her feet. She was still wiping the mud off her clothes when introductions were made.

“This is the old ball and chain,” Barb said.