Northern Exposure

The bed in Joe’s room was empty, pillows askew, sheets twisted into a pile on the floor. Moonlight flooded the airy space. The room smelled like him, cool and green and unstable. Those were the impressions that had taken hold of her when she’d touched his arm, when she’d stood so close to him she’d felt his breath on her face.

With a start she realized the rifle he’d taken outside with him was propped against the wall by the bed. Without thinking, she took a step into the room, then swallowed a gasp.

Joe sat in a big Adirondack chair by a row of old-fashioned windows overlooking the deck. Clad only in jeans, his chest was bare, the muscles in his arms tight. There were no drapes on the windows. His face, reflecting some terrible pain, was bathed in the bright light of an August moon.

Her gaze followed his to the framed photo he’d moved to the antique nightstand. Wendy hadn’t even noticed it was missing from the mantel.

All at once she knew.

“She’s dead, isn’t she?”

Slowly, as if he’d known all along she was standing there, Joe turned to look at her. “Yes.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Why?”

She felt awkward all of a sudden, her tongue thick in her mouth. “I…”

“Go back to sleep, Ms. Walters.”

“I wish you’d call me Wendy.”

He rose from the chair and placed the photo facedown into a drawer. “How about Willa?”

Chapter 3

It was hard to pretend she hadn’t gotten under his skin, but he forced himself.

Joe poured Willa Walters a cup of black coffee, and while she sat at the kitchen table and drank it, he fixed them a quick breakfast.

“It’s not my real name,” she said after the silence between them stretched to a breaking point.

“Wendy?”

“No, Willa.” She shot him an irritated look. “It was made up for me.”

“By who?”

She shrugged. “A man I used to know.”

“One of the guys in that picture?”

The shock that registered on her face turned instantly to annoyance. “I didn’t know game wardens read those kinds of newspapers.”

He flashed her a look, but didn’t respond. He divided a panful of scrambled eggs between two plates, topped them with buttered toast and handed her one.

He expected her to refuse it, but she didn’t. Silently she accepted the food and began to eat. That was another thing that surprised him about her—she had one hell of an appetite for someone so petite.

“That picture isn’t what you think.” She glanced up at him as he joined her at the table. “We weren’t…you know.”

“Buck naked?”

She speared him with a nasty smirk. “The male models were wearing Speedos. I was in a strapless tank suit. The tabloid cropped the photo to make the situation seem like something it wasn’t. The whole thing was completely innocent. I was on a shoot—at a public beach, for God’s sake. Besides, that photo had nothing to do with the incident.”

He let that bit of information sink in while he watched her viciously jab a forkful of scrambled egg.

This morning she had dressed in her own clothes again, and had left Cat’s sweatshirt and jeans in a neatly folded pile on the made-up sofa bed. Her feet were bare, except for the squares of moleskin she’d applied to her blisters. She sat sideways on her chair, her legs crossed, affording him a good view of her slender ankles. Her toenails were polished, too, he noticed.

“New boots?” He nodded at her bandaged feet.

“New everything. My luggage was stolen at the airport, so I had to buy all new stuff.”

“Fairbanks or Anchorage?” That kind of thing didn’t happen too often in Alaska.

“Anchorage, when I first arrived. A guy nabbed my suitcase off the conveyor and took off with it. Thank God I had my camera bag on me. I’d never be able to afford to replace my Nikon.”

He watched her as she finished her toast. A dab of butter clung to the edge of her lip, and he caught himself wondering what it would feel like, what she would taste like, if he flicked it away with his tongue.

His attraction to her disgusted him.

He adjusted his position on the hard kitchen chair and croaked, “Tough break,” not really meaning it. Someone like her deserved what she got.

“Yeah, well…” She waved her fork in the air in a dismissive gesture. “That’s the least of my worries at this point.”

“I’ll bet.”

She shot him a cool look and continued eating.

With his back to her, as he rinsed out the coffee carafe and ground beans for another pot, he asked her about some of the things he’d read about her in the tabloid article. She immediately changed the subject.

“The only other road into the reserve is this one.” She whipped the folded map—the one she’d tried to get him to look at last night—out of her pants pocket and spread it on the table. “If I leave my car here—” she pointed to a remote spot on a little-used Jeep trail “—and walk in from the east…”

“You’re likely to get yourself killed.”

She glared up at him.

“Besides, the caribou won’t be there. They’ll be here.” He leaned over the table and jabbed a finger at another spot, more than forty miles from where she was planning on leaving her car.

“Oh.” Her expression darkened as she considered exactly what a forty-mile hike in a remote Alaskan wilderness area meant.

He felt the beginnings of a smile edge his lips. It vanished as she cleared her throat, sat up tall in her chair—those ridiculously perky breasts of hers jutting forward—and in a bright voice said, “Fine.”

He snorted. “You’re a piece of work.”

And that was the straw that finally broke the camel’s back. Her blue eyes glittered with anger. She pressed her lips tightly together and waited, as if counting to ten, then she let him have it.

“What is it with you? You’ve been rude to me from the moment we met. You read a bunch of twisted half-truths in some supermarket tabloid and you think you know everything about me. Which you don’t,” she emphasized.