Sharing Spaces (14 page)

“You could lose that hand if you don't get it cared
for,” Senna warned, “and how, exactly, does a devout fly-fisherman fly-fish one handed?”

But the swelling was gradually going down, and in time all that would remain would be the scars. As for the sled dogs, they were hardly the worse for the experience. Two of them required stitching up, and Senna did the honors using dental floss, a curved needle and a pair of forceps, following Jack's instructions as he steadied each dog, one at a time, in his arms. They were surprisingly compliant for such tough, grizzled creatures. “They know you're trying to help them,” Jack explained.

“I honestly don't see why you'd want to keep such a savage pack of beasts,” Senna said, tying off a knot.

Jack had stroked the head of the dog he held with his bandaged hand, holding no grudge whatsoever. “They're great dogs,” he said. “Wait 'til this winter. You'll see what I mean.”

There was an awkward silence after that slip of words, Senna holding the forceps, Jack holding the dog, both acutely aware that there would be no sharing of a winter experience. There would be no winter in Labrador, no sled dogs traveling down snowy trails. In fact, in a few more days, there would be no more Labrador at all for Senna. She'd be back in Maine, running the sales department at the Inn on Christmas Cove…

Planning weddings.

Senna shifted tentatively in bed and sighed. So much could happen in the next seven days. So much had happened in the first seven. So much that she hadn't even thought about her job back in Maine for several days. Hadn't even wondered how things were going without her. She'd been too worried about Jack's hand and the
multitude of tasks that faced them before opening day. Senna tried another whole-body stretch and then lay still again, analyzing the results.

Seven more days…

 

J
ACK KINDLED A FIRE
in the guide cabin's woodstove and put the coffee water on to boil. He flexed his injured hand. It still hurt like hell but the swelling had gone down considerably and he was pleased with how quickly it had healed. Everything healed quicker in the clean outdoors. He drank his first cup of coffee sitting at the little table, jotting down the day's duty list; things that must be accomplished come hell or high water. “Charlie, time to get up,” he said, pushing to his feet and carrying the mug with him to the door, where he stood in the doorway and looked out on the morning. The dogs saw him and howled again, raising their voices together like a pack of wolves. He wondered if Senna was up yet, and if Gordina and Wavey had survived another night in the “awful scary cabin,” which was how Wavey described the remoteness of the entire place: “awful scary.”

Senna was right about Wavey. The girl was basically useless. No matter how many times she was shown how to do something, she reverted back to her own techniques the moment she was left alone, and her own techniques involved moving as slowly as she could while looking dreamily beautiful. Senna was right about Gordina, too. She was an awful cook. She might make a killer runny omelet when devastated by a bad hangover, but unfortunately the killer part of that description had been literal. She hadn't yet smoked another cigarette inside the building, but Jack was almost hoping that
she would so he could fire her, which he should have done in the first place when Senna had asked him to.

Jack threw the dregs of his coffee onto the ground and reached for his jacket on the wall peg behind him. Time to feed the dogs. “Charlie. Get up. We have a long row to hoe today.” He banged the door shut behind him, hoping the noise would roust the boy. Charlie didn't have all that much ambition, but what twelve-year-old did? Truth is, Senna'd been right about him, too. Jack had spent the better part of the past two days cutting wood, and right after breakfast he was going to have to get right back at it. Once the guests arrived he wouldn't have time to be doing chores like that. He'd be on the river, guiding dawn 'til dark, and Senna would be gone, back to her wedding planner job in Maine. Back to Tim Cromwell, the insurance salesman.

One more week and she'd be gone. Having her here had been a tremendous boon. In fact, he had to admit that without her organizational capabilities and her experience in the lodging industry, he'd have been out in left field. She'd already called all the guests in the reservation book to reconfirm their reservations, and by doing this had discovered a cancellation, which left them with an empty room they had to fill for the last week of August. She'd immediately placed a call to the Labrador office of tourism, and to every other fishing lodge in Labrador, informing them of the unexpected vacancy, and by the end of the day she'd gotten a call back from a lodge on Eagle River with a referral to a repeat guest they'd had to turn down due to being fully booked. She immediately called the client, who lived in Great Britain, and just like that they were fully booked for the summer again.

Meanwhile she was a dynamo putting the lodge together, making sure everything worked and everything was in sync. The guest rooms were beginning to look like actual guest rooms with all the amenities, including baskets of soaps and shampoo in the bathrooms which she insisted on. “Little touches make a big difference,” she argued when he objected to the additional cost. “Just because we're in the middle of the wilderness doesn't mean we can't have some luxuries.”

There were fresh flower arrangements each morning on the dining-room table, there being an abundance of wildflowers blooming on the slope below the main lodge. She organized the registration area, sold him on the idea of turning an extra wardrobe into a dry bar, kitty-cornered into the living room, where guests could mix their own drinks and help themselves to bar snacks. When he brought up the cost she shot him down again.

“The cost should be built into your rates. These folks don't want to be nickeled and dimed as they go. They want an all-inclusive package. They want the experience of a lifetime, and they want to share those experiences, especially their fishing stories, in front of the fireplace with a good glass of scotch. Are you going to be the bartender? I don't think so. You'll be comatose by 8:00 p.m. every night, trying to get enough sleep to make it through the next day. We'll set up a good bar, keep it stocked, and let them help themselves from it.”

She tried to enhance Gordina's culinary skills by diplomatically offering to do different tasks in the kitchen, hoping to show by example how to put an excellent meal together, but Gordina was not to be swayed from her belief that she was already an outstanding cook and pointedly ignored Senna's suggestions. Senna
organized the laundry room and had Jack string a clothesline in back of the lodge. “No point in using the gas dryer if the sun's shining, especially with that nice breeze. Every little bit of fuel we conserve is a little less we have to barge up the river. Besides, sheets dried in the sunshine smell sweeter than anything on earth.”

Jack doubted they would smell sweeter than Senna's hair, which made him want to turn and follow after her every time their paths crossed during the course of the day. And in truth, it wasn't just the smell of her hair. He was beginning to get a little addicted to everything about her. The way she moved, the way she laughed, the way she argued constantly with him, even the way she defended Charlie's crackie when Jack discovered it was Ula who was digging under the fence and eating Goody's coopies. In three days the dozen that had originally been crated in had dwindled to a count of nine. Jack caught the little black dog quite by accident on the fourth night, when, making a trip to the outhouse behind the guides' cabin, he heard a hen squawking.

Flashlight in hand, he burst into the chicken coop and there she was, the bright-eyed black crackie, with one of Goody's coopies dangling in her jaws, about to duck back through the fresh hole she'd dug beneath the fence. He'd let out a roar that brought both Charlie from the cabin and Senna from the lodge at a dead run. In his rage at the dog and at the long, hard and frustrating day he turned on Charlie.

“A hunting dog that kills chickens is worse than useless. You should've kept her tied, like I told you to!”

“She hates being tied,” Charlie cried out, his face taut with emotion, fingers curled through the dog's collar. “She wants to be with me.”

“Well, she wasn't with you just now, was she? She was in here, killing Goody's coopies!”

Senna grabbed his arm and forced him to look at her. “Jack, calm down.”

“A dog that kills chickens is no good,” Jack said, shrugging off Senna's grip. “She'll have to go. Leave her with your kin in North West River, Charlie, or get rid of her, if you can find a home for a dog that kills domestic livestock.”

“Stop this talk!” Senna demanded, pushing between him and Charlie, her eyes flashing and her body rigid with anger. “If the dog couldn't get into the coop, she wouldn't kill the chickens, would she? You made a poor job of that fencing, John Hanson. That's
your
fault, not Ula's. Are you telling me your sled dogs wouldn't be under that fence and eating those coopies if they got loose? Ha! Feathers would be flying. They'd kill them all for the sheer joy of it in the time it took for you to get out here, but would you get rid of them if they did? A dog is just a dog, but a man should be able to do a job right from the beginning. Fix that fence properly, and there'll be no more problems with Goody's coopies being killed.”

Somehow she'd turned the whole massacre into his fault, heaping the deaths of four laying hens on his conscience, and the next morning he'd spent two hours resetting the wire fence a good foot below ground level and stacking rocks around the perimeter. Charlie helped without being prodded, and no more of Goody's precious coopies had disappeared.

What if Senna hadn't been here for that? Jack rubbed the sleep from his face as he walked toward the dog yard carrying a bucket of kibble and then stopped abruptly,
blinking with astonishment at the sight of Senna crouched beside his lead dog, Quinn, holding him steady while she checked on the five stitches she'd used to pull that nasty gash in his shoulder back together. He felt a sudden kick of gladness at how his day was starting. She rose to her feet as he approached. “Quinn's healing up nicely,” she said, shoving her hands into her jacket pockets. “So are you, judging by the way you're holding that bucket with a hand that not too long ago would have passed for hamburger.”

Jack grinned. “Good as new. You're up pretty early for someone who nearly passed out at the supper table last night.”

“That was a combination of Gordina's cooking and the heat from the fireplace,” she said. “It's amazing what a good night's sleep can do. That, and a handful of aspirin. I'll help feed the dogs, if you want.”

“Glad to know I'm not the only one who considers aspirin one of the major food groups. Here, dish this food out and I'll water. I've been thinking about that funny vibration in that hood vent in the kitchen. I should pull it apart and have a look before we open, the noise is pretty obnoxious, we don't want to wake our guests at 5:00 a.m. with the breakfast start-up. I'll probably finish cutting wood today if I get right after it. Charlie said he'd start splitting it and Wavey's supposed to be altering the bed skirts. I don't know how the measurements got that screwed up and to be honest I'm not even sure Wavey can sew but she's Goody's niece and I promised Goody when she agreed to be our cook that Wavey could spend the summer here helping her out, so even though Goody never came, it looks like we're stuck with…”

“Jack?”

He stopped in the act of pouring water into a can attached to a dog house and glanced up questioningly. Senna had finished dishing out kibble and was standing in the middle of the dog yard, holding the empty food bucket with an unfathomable expression on her face. “Are you and Wavey involved? I know it's none of my business, but from a guest's perspective, we have to think about how things might appear. I mean, she's very young.”

Jack stood in shocked silence for several long moments, realizing that the morning, which had started out so full of promise, had suddenly turned sour on him. “Did I hear you right?” he said, speaking calmly in spite of the surge of anger that boiled through him. “You think I'm
involved
with Wavey?”

At least Senna had the grace to blush. “I didn't mean to pry, I only asked because… Well, the truth is, I'm just concerned that… It's just that I don't want anyone, any of our guests, that is, to think that… I mean, Wavey's
very
young, and I just think…”

“That your business partner is playing around with a very cute and very young housekeeper,” he said, nodding slowly. “You're absolutely right to be concerned, and you're absolutely right that it's none of your business. We may be temporary partners in this enterprise, but my private life is none of your concern.”

Senna's color deepened. “I'm sorry if I offended you, but—”

“And you know what?” His voice was hard. “Because I'm such a damned decent guy, I'm going to tell you right here and now that there's nothing going on between Wavey and me. She's here only because she's
Goody's niece. Oh, excuse me,
grand
-niece. But we're not
involved
, as you so delicately put it.”

“I said I was sorry,” she repeated. “Maybe I was out of line to mention it. But regardless, we have just seven more days to get this lodge up and running, so instead of standing here and bickering, let's just get to work, shall we?”

She dropped the empty kibble bucket at his feet and swept past him without another word, behaving as if he'd been the one who'd started this foolish conversation about Wavey. He watched her go, confounded by how she always managed to turn things around, then lashed out at the bucket with his foot and cursed in such a manner that the sled dogs all watched him with cautious eyes and flattened ears.