Northern Exposure (7 page)

“You don't know anything about me or what really happened. You have no right to judge me based on a pack of lies you read, just because—” She stopped herself before she went too far.

“Because what?” He stood close to her, too close, and looked down at her, his expression now one of calm confidence. A man in control.

God, he was good-looking. That should have been the last thing on her mind, but there it was.

“Because…” Their gazes locked, and for a second she read something overtly sexual in the way those eyes of his drank her in. It scared her a little.

Which didn't say much for her experience with men. Although she'd been around lots of them, she was woefully undereducated in the romance depart
ment. Not that Joe Peterson had romance on his mind. Far from it.

She'd been close to saying that he had no business judging her just because his sister had died of a drug overdose. She was glad she'd stopped herself. He was acting like a jerk, but she didn't have it in her to twist the knife.

“Who was the guy?” he said abruptly.

“What guy?”

“The controlling bastard? The other one, I mean.”

She almost laughed, and felt the tension in her shoulders uncoil itself. He'd actually made a joke. It wasn't particularly funny, but it had diffused the situation, which, she guessed, was his intent.

“Just somebody I used to work with.”

“Oh. I thought maybe he was your husband or your ex, or somebody like that.”

She caught something else in his eyes, then. Something she couldn't quite discern.

“No, nothing like that. He was my boss.”

“Oh.” The something cooled, but didn't entirely disappear. “You were sleeping with him.”

She didn't even dignify that with a response. Turning on her heel, she started forward again, down the trail.

“Whoa!” He grabbed her arm, stopped her. “Cool your jets a minute.” She was about to bite his head off when he said, “The trail's washed out in a few places, and we'll need to hike cross-country. If you're going to lead today, you'll need this.”

He fished an object out of the pocket of his shirt and handed it to her.

“My compass!”

“It was right where you said it was, on top of the pass.”

She looked at the worn tick marks etched on the beat-up plastic bezel and remembered for a breath when it was new and her father had given it to her.

“Thanks,” she said, trying hard to conceal her delight.

“No problem.” They stood there for a long uncomfortable moment looking at each other. Then a branch snapped behind them, and Joe spun in the direction of the sound.

His hand moved lightning fast to the gun holstered at his hip. Statue still, they stood silent for nearly a minute, peering back up the trail, but nothing appeared, not even a squirrel or a bird. His gaze swept the woods on either side of them.

“What is it?” she whispered.

He shrugged, but she could tell from the tightness of his expression, from the stiff way he moved, that he knew more than he was telling. “Nothing,” he said. “Let's go.”

 

Two hours later they stopped for a drink and to refill their shared water bottle at the stream roaring down the valley beside the trail.

Wendy pointed to a small boxlike symbol on her topographic map, eight or so miles ahead of them. She knew it signified a building or other man-made structure. “What's this?”

Joe handed her the full water bottle and took the map from her. “Department of Fish and Game cabin. There're a half dozen of them in the reserve along the main trail.” He pointed to the others, which were spread out between Joe's station and where they were
now. “They're open to the public in the summer, by reservation only.”

“That's great! Any reservations this week?”

Joe gave up a huff, which was as close as she'd seen him come to a laugh all day. “Not likely. We don't get too many visitors here. Too far off the beaten path.”

“That's why you like it here, isn't it?”

“Maybe.”

There were no maybes about it in her mind.

She said, “At least we won't have to spend another night together in that tent. It was a little…crowded, don't you think?”

Joe looked at her with what she'd come to recognize as cool amusement. “Yeah, you could say that.”

She distinctly remembered waking up in the middle of the night and finding his arm around her. She'd managed to move it without waking him.

“What are we going to do about food? I only brought enough for myself for a week. And now there are two of us, and we'll be out here for two weeks.”

She glanced speculatively at the rushing water of the stream beside the trail, and wished she'd invested in a lightweight, telescoping fishing rod at the sporting goods store.

Joe read her mind. “Don't tell me you fish?”

“Of course I fish. Well, I used to.”

“Michigan again?”

“That's right.” She could tell from his expression that this new bit of information surprised him.

“Daddy teach you?”

“No.” She arched a brow at him. “I learned in Girl Scouts.”

“You were a Girl Scout?” He did laugh then. “You?”

“Yes, me. I was a Girl Scout. Six years, in fact. Is that so hard to believe?” His preconceived notions about her were becoming irritating. She plucked her camera bag from the ground and started toward the trail.

“How many badges you get?”

“What?” She tried to tune him out.

“You know, badges. Fire building, cooking, hiking, first aid, the works. There're about fifty different ones, right?”

She glanced back at him, but kept walking. “How do you know about stuff like that?” He didn't answer, and then it dawned on her. “Was Cat a Girl Scout?”

They walked another twenty yards before he answered. “She was, for a year or so, but it wasn't really her thing.”

“You were the outdoor type, but she wasn't.”

“Something like that.”

He didn't say any more about it, and she thought it best to change the subject. “So, what are we going to do for food?” She had visions of using dental floss as fishing line, and of him shooting squirrels with his revolver.

“I keep a stash of emergency supplies locked up in each of the cabins along the trail. Just in case.”

“In case you get stuck hiking a hundred miles with a wildlife photographer who only brought enough Power Bars and beef jerky to last a week?”

“Yeah. Happens all the time out here.”

She smiled, despite her determination not to like him. She'd kill to know what he was thinking, and was tempted to look back at him, but didn't.

As they made their way down the valley, storm clouds darkening the sky above them, the scent of spruce infusing the cold air, spurring her onward, Wendy had to admit she was glad Joe Peterson was with her.

S
he reacted as if they'd just checked into a suite at the Captain Cook, Anchorage's best hotel.

“This is great!”

Joe grunted, closed the door of the rustic A-frame cabin behind them and eased out of Wendy's backpack, which he'd carried for the past twelve miles. It wasn't that he wasn't in shape, it was just that the pack was too small for him. His back and shoulders ached like hell.

“It has everything!” Wendy swept the beam of her flashlight across the spartan interior of the Department of Fish and Game cabin. “Potbelly stove, two sets of bunk beds, firewood, a snow shovel, the works! Look, there's even a loft.”

“Yeah, it's plush, all right.” Joe dug in his pants pocket for a set of keys. Wendy watched as he opened the locked closet that ran the length of the cabin's far wall.

“Blankets!” she said.

“And food and clothes. Even some cooking gear.” A razor, too, he thought, running a hand over the two-day growth of stubble on his chin. And my own damned toothbrush. He'd borrowed hers that morning.

He pulled the unisex toiletries kit from the closet and tossed it to her. She handed him the flashlight, and he rummaged around inside the closet until he found what he was looking for.

“Propane lantern?”

“Yeah. I'll just fire it up and we can—”

“I'll do it.” Wendy snatched it out of his hand. A minute later she had it going.

“Don't tell me,” he said. “Girl Scouts.”

“What? Oh, no…the, uh, directions are printed right on it. See?” She pointed at the white enamel lettering on the side of the lantern.

Standing there smiling, fists bunched on slim hips, she looked so fresh and alive and…spunky was the word he was looking for, as if they'd just been for a Sunday stroll in the park instead of a twelve-mile hike through a remote wilderness.

He had a hard time reconciling this Wendy Walters with the woman portrayed in that tabloid. He had an even harder time convincing himself he wasn't attracted to her.

“Hungry?”

“Hmm? Oh, yeah. Starved.”

She pulled a foil-wrapped, freeze-dried dinner from the backpack. “Chicken à la king. Perfect. I'll cook.”

He built a fire in the stove, then rolled out her sleeping bag on one of the wooden bunks. On the
opposite bunk, for himself, he tossed a set of old blankets from the closet. There'd be no snuggling tonight.

He watched as Wendy set up her backpacker's stove on the floor between the bunks. There wasn't a table in this particular cabin. There wasn't room.

Her ingenuity surprised him. In addition to the chicken à la king, which required only boiling water to prepare, she managed to make biscuits on the potbelly stove, out of what had to be year-old old Bisquick she found in a sealed tin in the closet, a metal pan and an improvised oven she constructed out of tents of tin foil.

Joe was impressed.

When they sat down to eat, cross-legged on a blanket on the floor in front of the stove, he asked the question he'd been wanting to ask for two days.

“This…guy, your boss. Barrett or whatever his name is.”

Wendy put her fork down. “How do you know his name? I never mentioned it.”

“It was in the article.” Which was true. Blake Barrett had been mentioned in the tabloid article, but only as an aside. Joe wouldn't have put two and two together if Wendy's editor at the magazine hadn't mentioned him, too.

That snake didn't even have the decency to speak to the police on her behalf.

“He wouldn't be out here looking for you, by any chance, would he?”

Wendy looked at him hard. “What makes you say that?”

He shrugged. “No reason.” He didn't see any point in scaring her.

If Barrett was the guy following them—and Joe was one hundred percent sure
someone
was following them, though there'd been no sign of their camo-clad escort since the incident at the pass—he would deal with him himself. That rock slide could have killed all three of them.

Wendy looked at him suspiciously, her brows pinched together as if she were trying to read his thoughts. “Is there something you're not telling me?”

“No.” He shoveled another forkful of the chicken à la king into his mouth. “Not bad for freeze-dried.”

She scrutinized him for a moment, and while he knew she didn't take his answer at face value, her shoulders finally relaxed and she continued eating. He noticed, not for the first time, how delicate her features were. Small face, pointed chin. A mouth like a piece of ripe fruit.

He liked her eyes, they were big, almost too big for her face, and were framed by a fringe of dark lashes. They lent her an air of innocence he knew was only an illusion, but that he found damned attractive all the same.

He wondered if her blunt-cut blond hair had come out of a bottle. He didn't think so, but you never knew these days. It was mind-blowing what women did to themselves in the name of fashion. His sister used to spend hours in the bathroom styling her hair and doing her makeup. Then again, fashion had been Cat's business. An ugly business. It had been Wendy Walters's chosen career, too, he reminded himself.

He watched her as she set her plate aside and grabbed her Nikon off the bunk where she'd placed it when they'd come in. Throughout the day she'd
stopped along the trail to take pictures. At first he'd protested, because he thought they'd fall behind and not make the first cabin by dark. But Wendy had proved for the third day running that she was a fit hiker in damned good shape.

He'd let her lead today, not because she'd forced the issue and he'd given in, but because he wanted to watch her back, keep an eye out for the guy tracking them. He didn't want her to fall behind, not that there seemed much chance of that given her fitness level.

“What do you do, jog or something, back in New York?” He'd seen a dozen movies where urban types ran for exercise, through Central Park and around some cemented-in reservoir.

“Hmm?” She glanced up from her camera, a roll of spent film in one hand, and caught him looking at her legs.

“You're in pretty good shape. What do you do to stay fit?”

“Oh.” A blush washed her cheeks. “Yeah, I try to run every day. Well…on days when I'm not hiking across miles of Alaskan wilderness.” She smiled at him, and it struck him how pretty she really was, in a Meg Ryan, girl-next-door sort of way. Which, again, didn't fit.

She loaded a fresh roll of film into her camera with an economy of motion that told him she'd done it thousands of times, could do it in her sleep. She tossed the spent roll into a deep pocket of the ratty green knapsack she used as a camera bag.

“All set for tomorrow,” she said, then grabbed her map.

They studied it together, which required him to
move closer to her. He could smell the faint scent of shampoo—his shampoo from the station—in her hair. There was something about her using his shampoo, his soap, taking a shower in his house, sleeping there, that he liked.

And that bothered him.

“We probably should get some sleep,” she said, aware of his eyes on her.

“Yeah.” Shaking off her effect on him, he jumped up and cleared away their supper dishes.

Twenty minutes later, after they'd made a final trip outside to the outhouse the DF&G had installed the previous year, and after he'd secured the cabin, Joe stoked the fire in the potbelly stove and left its cast-iron door hanging open for warmth. Wendy killed the lantern, and the room was at once bathed in a soft orange light.

Settling in on the bunk opposite hers, Joe looked away as she shimmied out of her khaki trousers. He listened to her wrestling with her clothes for another minute, then, unable to stop himself, he sneaked a peek, and caught her sitting there in nothing but her long-sleeved shirt. He glimpsed a flash of white panties as she swung bare legs onto the bunk, then noticed her bra folded neatly on top of her pants on the floor.

“Good night,” she said, oblivious to his spying, and burrowed down inside her sleeping bag.

Pulling the emergency stash of blankets over himself, he watched the firelight dance off the cabin's rustic beams. “G'night.”

Later, drowsy and at the edge of sleep, Joe heard the swoosh of nylon as Wendy turned in her bag.

“Just for the record,” she said. “Blake and I…we weren't lovers.”

 

The next day the weather was clear, but it had rained hard overnight and the trail was muddy and slick, completely washed-out in some places. Wendy noticed that the stream rushing beside them grew wider and more violent, more like a river, the farther they hiked down the valley into the reserve.

Around noon they took a break, with barely four miles under their belts. Downed trees and thick undergrowth had made for slow going, and she'd stopped at several places along the way to take photographs. Mostly birds and small game. They hadn't seen any bears or moose or any of the larger animals that lived in the reserve. And, to her disappointment, there'd been no sign of the elusive woodland caribou.

Joe had insisted on walking behind her, and she noticed that
he
noticed and reacted to everything with caution—every sound, every print in the muddy trail—as if he was expecting to see something, or someone. She hadn't had that weird feeling, as she'd had the day before yesterday, that someone was following them. But Joe had it. She could tell.

“Want your jacket?” he asked, as he slipped out of the blue backpack and propped it against a tree.

Despite her protests, he'd taken the pack apart that morning and had widened the adjustable frame to fit him. She'd argued that, since the pack fit
her,
as is, she should carry it. Naturally, he hadn't agreed. In the end she'd made him promise to readjust it again before they parted ways.

“Sure,” she said, taking her anorak from him. “Thanks.”

Though blue sky was visible through the thick
canopy of spruce above them, the temperature was only in the low fifties—typical for an Alaskan summer—and Wendy felt chilled. Everything around them was wet, and icy water dripped from the trees. She donned the waterproof anorak and instantly felt warmer.

Over the past day they'd settled into a polite but cool sort of camaraderie, resigned to the fact that they were going to be spending the better part of the next two weeks together, twenty-four seven.

Wendy watched as Joe stripped off his department-issue shirt, then dug around in the pack for what she suspected was the thermal undershirt he'd salvaged from the emergency supply closet at the cabin they'd slept in last night.

When he found it, he set it aside and pulled his T-shirt off over his head. Standing there in the woods, sun filtering through the trees, catching in the tawny-gold hair of his chest and highlighting the sculpted muscles of his arms and back, he looked like a primeval man.

The calm stoic features of his face, that strong jawline and long straight nose moved through alternating bands of shadow and light as he wrestled himself into the thermal.

Before Wendy realized what she was doing, she'd popped the lens cover off her Nikon and had snapped some photos in quick succession.

“What the—” He pulled the shirt down over his torso, and flashed cold green eyes at her. “What do you think you're doing?”

“I—” Her reaction had been pure instinct. She was a photographer, for God's sake. A men's fashion
photographer. Or at least she had been, and old habits die hard. “I was just taking your picture. The trees, the light, it was all so perfect. I wasn't thinking, I was just—”

“I'm not one of your boy-toy models.” He snatched his green overshirt from where he'd set it and threw it on, misbuttoning it, then he restuffed items into the backpack.

“I know you're not. I didn't mean it that way. It was just that you looked so—”

“What?”

For the barest second she remembered him sneaking a look at her last night when she was half-undressed. He hadn't known she was aware of him, that she'd deliberately let him look. Her attraction to him scared her. She didn't need this, not now, not with a guy like him.

“Oh, hell, why am I explaining myself to you?” She snapped the lens cover back on the camera and grabbed her knapsack.

She was done with explaining, with feeling guilty or sorry or suffering angst over the million little things she'd been made to feel were her fault in her seven years as Blake's assistant. She was also done with reactive, domineering alpha males.

“There's a bridge up ahead we have to cross,” he said icily. “No telling what condition it'll be in after these storms. Let's roll.”

“Fine.” She moved in front of him and started down the trail, determined not to let Joe Peterson get to her, then promptly lost her footing in the mud.

Joe grabbed her elbow. “Slow down, the trail's slick.”

“I don't need your help.”

“Suit yourself, then.” He let her go, and again she nearly lost her footing.

“Wh-which way?” Clumsily she righted herself, working to keep her anger in check.

There was a fork in the trail. One spur led down to the river, which had grown to a raging torrent. The other snaked up the side of the heavily wooded valley.

“Up there. See it?” Joe pointed.

“See what?” She started up the trail, not waiting for him to answer.

A few minutes of hard hiking later, during which she lost her footing no fewer than four times in the slippery, rock-laced mud, she saw what Joe had been pointing at.

“This is the bridge?” Wendy felt her eyes widen to saucer size.

“Yeah, this is it.” He moved up behind her and poked her in the back. “Let's go.”

“You're kidding, right?” He had to be. What she was staring at, openmouthed now, like a trout, was
not
a bridge. At least not her definition of a bridge. It was a serviceable catwalk, maybe, or a prop from a Tarzan movie, but a bridge it was not.