Northern Exposure

And damn it to hell, he had absolutely no business standing here daydreaming about the good doctor without clothes. Alaskan men had a reputation for being woman-desperate, but he was far from that. He hooked up occasionally with Janice, a cute diner waitress in Juneau, and outside of that, rounding up a date now and then wasn’t difficult. No, he wasn’t desperate and furthermore he wasn’t stupid. Even if he liked the idea of seeing her naked, that was the end of it. God save him from any more involvements, physical or otherwise, with ambitious women.

“That’s all of it.” Her no-nonsense tone snapped him out of his introspection.

“Good thing. If you’d tossed in the kitchen sink I’d have to circle back to pick you up later.”

“Or maybe I’d have to read the manual on how to fly your plane.”

He laughed at her not-so-subtle message that he was dispensable. “You’d be out of luck there, Doc. My plane doesn’t come with a manual.”

“How fortuitous then that I left the kitchen sink behind at the last moment.”

Dalton was about a hundred percent certain Dr. Skye Shanahan wasn’t thrilled to be here. He spent a lot of time hauling strangers from one destination point to another and he’d learned to read body language. Hers screamed that she was here under protest. “I’d say it’s a very good thing.” He glanced at the mountain of luggage and pushed the cart in the direction of his plane on the tarmac outside. “How long are you staying again?”

She bristled. “I didn’t want to leave something I might need.”

He skirted a group of guys who had obviously flown in on a hunting trip. They looked like hunters and the rifle cases were a dead giveaway. He’d take that assignment over transporting Dr. Holier Than Thou any day. But he was getting paid and that’s what mattered. And while she might be a pain in the ass, she was undisputably easier on the eyes than the hunters.

“I didn’t bring this much with me when I moved here,” he said, pretending to stagger under the weight of the bags.

“Then I guess you win the light packer award.”

He nodded. “I keep it on my mantel.”

“Good place for an award.”

“Missed diagnosis, Doc.” Her full lips tightened every time he called her Doc. “I keep my suitcase on the mantel.” It was actually a lightweight backpack but why let the truth stand in the way of a good story? Tall tales abounded in the Alaskan wilderness.

That seemed to catch her off-guard. “You keep your suitcase on your mantel? How …bohemian.”

“Yeah. It keeps me grounded—it reminds me that everything I really need can fit in there.”

She looked at him as if he’d belched in public and then cast a faintly mournful eye at the luggage cart. “I hope I’ve remembered everything I’m going to need.”

He held the exit door for her and then damn near lost one of her suitcases wrestling the cart over the threshold. “Doc, I bet when you leave, you won’t have used even half of what you brought with you.”

She shivered and tugged her wool jacket together over her sweater, whether from chill or apprehension he had no clue. Maybe a combination of both. She tilted her chin up at a stubborn angle. “But I’ll have it if I need it.”

“Yes, ma’am, that you definitely will.” He opened the door of the plane and started stowing her mountain of luggage. “Here we are.”

She stepped back and eyed his baby, aghast. “That’s a plane?”

There were some lines you didn’t cross. You could insult a man’s intelligence, his mother, his sister, the size of his private equipment, but you never, ever insulted a bush pilot’s plane. “Wings. Propeller. She’s not just a plane, she’s a damn fine plane.” He patted Belinda’s riveted metal side.

She narrowed her bewitching eyes at him. “Are you expecting me to get on that plane?”

At this point, it’d be easier if he took her luggage and let her hitch-hike her prissy ass to Good Riddance. But that wasn’t part of his contract. “That’s the general idea.”

“But it’s so …little.”

He was damn proud he managed to not roll his eyes at her. “You were expecting a 747?”

“There weren’t any details. I was just told I’d have a connecting flight out of Anchorage.” She shrugged and he almost felt sorry for her. She seemed so surprised. It occurred to him that she might be one of those really smart people who was long on brains but got the short end of the common-sense stick.

“You didn’t find it strange that the pilot was going to be waiting for you?”

Again, despite her haughtiness, there was a vulnerability about her that surprised him. “Sometimes doctors get preferential treatment. It’s not as if I expect it or demand it, but it just happens sometimes. So I really hadn’t thought too much about it. I was more concerned with the lack of information available about Good Riddance on the Internet.”

He might’ve been living the simpler life for almost a decade but he still recognized all the trappings of money and privilege. The matching designer luggage. A fine-worsted wool suit. Real gold earrings. Dr. Skye Shanahan had packed and dressed this way for her foray into the Alaskan wilderness? He reconsidered his previous opinion about preferring to take the hunting party in the terminal instead of her. Watching the good doctor get her comeuppance might prove to be fine entertainment for the next few weeks.

He bit back a smirk and offered his hand to help her aboard.

“Haven’t you heard, Doc? We’re Alaska’s best-kept secret.”

2

“YOU CAN OPEN YOUR EYES now.” Mr. Saunders’s voice came through the headset he’d given her to put on before they’d started taxiing down the runway in the tin-can he was passing off as a reputable mode of travel.

She’d worked too damn hard to get through medical school and residency to die now. If they crashed, she just hoped she had time to throttle him with her bare hands before they bit the dust.

But right now, she had a bigger problem. If she regurgitated her lunch, and it had been a distinct possibility hurtling down the runway in this rust bucket—which was why she’d squeezed her eyes shut and imagined herself in the E.R. attending a messy gunshot wound, just to ground and stabilize herself—if she threw up, she’d have to kill him from abject humiliation alone.

From his smug tone, Mr. Saunders clearly had no idea how close he was skirting death, one way or another. Still, if she went ahead and killed him she’d no longer be plagued by this attraction to him, she thought darkly. That was one way to handle it.

“Relax, Doc. I haven’t lost a passenger …yet.”

She opened her eyes and blinked at the fast-fading outlay of Anchorage and the splendor of the mountains. “Very amusing, Mr. Saunders. A competent pilot and a comic.”

“I throw the comedy in for free.” He pointed to the snow-capped slope. “That’s Mt. Hood.”

She resented him anew. It was just wrong that while barely holding on to her lunch, she was hit with an incredible awareness of Dalton Saunders. It was as if he filled all the space around her with this broad shoulders, his scent, and simply his presence. She didn’t like it or her reaction to him worth a damn.

He was just the type of man who’d get her into all types of trouble. She’d come to Good Riddance to do a job, to get her mother off her case, to try to live up to those impossibly high Shanahan expectations that had been shoved down her throat since birth. What wasn’t on the agenda was getting into trouble. So the best thing to do was ignore the man in the seat next to her.

“Very nice. I rented a National Geographic video. We’re too far west to fly past the Wrangell St. Elias Mountain Range, right?”

He shot her a quick glance and she read a mixture of admiration and surprise in his look. “Right.”

“I did as much homework as I could, Mr. Saunders. However, I have next to nothing in the way of information on Good Riddance. Can you fill me in?”

“It was founded by Merrilee Danville Weatherspoon twenty-plus years ago. In that time, the population has exploded to about seven hundred and fifty, give or take a few.”

Oh God, it was even worse than she’d imagined. There were more than seven hundred and fifty employees in the medical high-rise that housed her office back home. “I’m afraid to ask, but what kind of amenities are we talking about?”

“Pretty much everything. That’s the way it is out here. If we don’t have it, then you don’t need it. You cut through a lot of crap and clutter that way.”

She really disliked people who presumed to know how everyone should live. “One man’s clutter may well be another man’s necessity.” She ran through a quick mental checklist of everything she’d packed. Thank goodness she’d brought it all with her.

He shrugged those impossibly broad shoulders which seemed equally impossibly close in the confines of the winged go-cart he was guiding through the sky. “We have a bar/restaurant right next to Merrilee’s place. It makes it easier when the snow’s on the ground outside.”