Northern Exposure

A piece of the fir tree sticking out of her hair offset her haughty embarrassment. By rights, he should’ve let her greet the inhabitants of Good Riddance sprouting an evergreen. However, he simply couldn’t. He reached over to pluck it from her hair. “Hold on a moment.”

It turned out the piece of tree wasn’t caught up in her hair but in the clip. Her hair tumbled down in a red cascade, settling below her shoulders. She gasped and he simply stood there, transfixed, at a loss for words.

All thoughts of haughtiness and wrong choices flew out of his head. She was, quite simply, stunning, standing in a meadow ringed by trees, with the glinting sun picking out radiant strands of gold in her red hair, her eyes taking on the hue and depth of magnificent glacier ice that had spent millenniums forming.

For one millisecond or it could’ve been a lifetime, Dalton was lost. Lost in those eyes and that hair and …well, lost in her. For one crazy moment in time he wanted to bridge the short physical distance separating them. He wanted to kiss her gorgeous mouth, bury his hands in the living fire of her hair, peel away the layers of her clothes and connect all her freckles with a trail of kisses. Then he wanted to make slow, sweet love to this prickly pear of a woman who, although she was standing less than a foot from him, was nonetheless worlds apart from him. He wanted to lay her down in the grass of an untainted meadow, with only the sun and sky and the occasional soaring bird of prey as witness to their union.

In short, he wanted Dr. Skye Shanahan like he’d never wanted anything.

Her eyes widened and for a moment he thought he saw an answering need. And then she slammed the proverbial door.

“What are you doing, Saunders?”

He realized he was holding on to the twig, which still had her clip attached. He held it up the way hunters displayed trophy kills. “This was in your hair. I didn’t think you wanted to show up with an evergreen branch sticking out of your head.”

“No, I didn’t. But it would’ve been nice if you hadn’t destroyed my hairdo in the meantime.”

Yet again, he wanted to kiss her, but this time for yanking him back to reality with her shrewish tongue. “Do you hear that, Shanahan?”

She narrowed her eyes and cocked her head to one side, a flash of panic shadowing her features. “What? I don’t hear anything. Is it a bear?”

“No. I thought I heard a faint and distant thank-you, one without any recriminations behind it. I guess it was just wishful thinking on my part.”

“Have you considered that had you not been hot-dogging, I wouldn’t have gotten sick? And if I hadn’t gotten sick, I wouldn’t have needed to hike into the wilderness and clean up in an ice-cold river? And I wouldn’t have had to worry about getting branches in my hair?”

This was rich. “So, the fact that a doctor can’t diagnose and properly treat her own motion sickness or at least acknowledge it and give her pilot a heads up is my fault?”

“You could use some sensitivity training, Saunders. And I’ve never, ever had an issue with motion sickness before.”

So far, in the course of less than an hour, she’d managed to paint him a felon, an incompetent pilot and insult the hell out of his plane. He’d had enough. “Any chance you’re knocked up, Doc? Wait. No man could get past that barbed tongue of yours to get the job done.” He foolishly, dangerously thought that under different circumstances he’d be at the front of the line to give it a try. But then again, Dalton had never been able to resist a challenge.

A blush definitely stained her face. “Saunders, do you think you could pretend to be a professional and get me to Good Riddance without further mishap?”

“Doc, it’s my raison d’être. By the way, I learned that phrase in prison.” She’d been so quick to decide he must have a checkered past. He wasn’t too damned sure Dr. Stick Up Her Ass would understand the concept of a metaphorical prison, so he’d let her roll with what she wanted to think. He’d been imprisoned in the corporate culture, the rat race, but he didn’t think she’d get that. Although he’d bet Belinda, his trusty plane, that Shanahan was doing the same time he’d been doing.

She strode toward the plane, her back ramrod straight. But her hair and eyes had told him a different story. She had passion.

“Just get me there, Saunders. I thought I’d never hear myself say it, but I’m ready to be in Good Riddance.”

3

“YOU MUST BE THE NEW relief doc,” said a sixtyish woman with blond hair who stepped forward to greet Skye. Every eye in the room had trained on Skye the moment she’d walked through the door of Good Riddance Air Field/Restaurant/Bed and Breakfast. “I’m Merrilee Danville Weatherspoon, founder and mayor.”

Ms. Weatherspoon had a melodic, distinctly Southern voice which somehow fit with the fact that the woman’s flannel shirt had lace trim around the collar and down the front and lace-trimmed flannel curtains hung at the windows of the log building. Skye liked her immediately.

“Dr. Skye Shanahan. Nice to meet you.”

“On behalf of the town, I’d like to welcome you to Good Riddance, Alaska, where you get to leave behind whatever troubles you.”

Two older men sporting caps and beards sat in rocking chairs across the room next to a pot-bellied stove, a chess table between them. On the multicolored, braided rug at their feet, a couple of thickly furred huskies lay curled in tight balls. Both dogs looked at her and then closed their eyes again. In one corner, a TV played a soap opera that no one was watching.

A very attractive man, obviously of native heritage given his skin-tone, short dark hair and flat-broad cheekbones, sat propped on the edge of the desk that held neat stacks of paperwork and two-way radio equipment, a schedule clasped in his hands. He stepped forward and offered a brief handshake. “Clint Sisnuket. Pleased to meet you.”

She returned the greeting. Disconcertingly, his touch didn’t send a little shiver down her spine the way Saunders’s had …did …whatever.

Everyone offered up a hello. But it was the where you get to leave behind whatever troubles you that stuck with Skye. That was rich in irony as what troubled Skye specifically was being in Good Riddance in the first place. However, even she possessed enough common sense and social skills, although she’d sometimes been accused of lacking both, not to say so. “I’m pleased to be here.”

See, she could tell a white lie as well as the next person. And it wasn’t too much of a stretch to admit that she was glad to be back on terra firma—and doubly glad to be out of Dalton Saunders’s company.

Speaking of the devil …Saunders strolled in at that moment. “Afternoon, Merrilee. Where do you want the Doc’s bags? She’s got one or two.”

He could save his sarcasm for someone else. She wasn’t amused. Well, perhaps she might be amused if he was someone else. But he got her back up.

“Just put them in the back of your pickup, Dalton. We’ve had a little complication, resulting in a change of plan.”

“Complication?” Saunders said.

“Change of plan?” Skye had a bad feeling.

“The roof caved in on the guest rooms upstairs.” Merrilee shook her head. “It’s just as well Scat Murphy left town when he did or I’d have kicked him out anyway for substandard work.” One could only surmise that Scat—and why would anyone trust someone whose name, given or otherwise, was equated with excrement—had done some roofing or sheetrocking. “Bull—” another name right up there with Scat, she thought “—is doing a patch job now but it’s going to take nearly a week to get it done right.” The mayor patted Skye on the shoulder. “Don’t you worry, though. We’re going to put you up in Irene Marbut’s cabin out at Shadow Lake.”

At least she had a nice normal name. “Ms. Marbut won’t mind a stranger barging in?”

“Well, dear, Irene died a few months ago so I think she’ll be fine with it. Gus went out a few hours ago with Luellen Sisnuket, Clint’s cousin,” she said, nodding to the dark-haired man at the desk’s edge, “and got the place ready for you. Well, as ready as they could in such a short time. It was the darnedest thing. I was about to go upstairs this morning to put fresh linens on your bed.” She leaned forward in a confiding manner. “Bull says it’s procrastination but I always wait until the morning of a new arrival to change the sheets so they’re as fresh as possible.” She straightened. “Anyhow, I was on my way upstairs when I heard a huge bang. If I’d been two minutes earlier, I’d have been in a world of hurt.”

“Then I’m glad you waited.” She didn’t know what else to say. Now she was staying in a dead woman’s cabin “out on” a lake. Skye didn’t miss that nuance. Good Riddance was already off the beaten path in every sense of the word. She couldn’t imagine what would qualify as “out” for these people. And though she was familiar with the dead, she didn’t, as a matter of course, sleep in their beds. It was a little creepy.

Merrilee offered another shoulder pat. “Yes, ma’am. All’s well that ends well. We’ve got you fixed right up, honey. Dalton here can give you a ride in to work every morning and drop you off in the evenings, seeing as how you’re going to be his neighbor. He took good care of Ms. Irene until she passed and he’ll take good care of you while you’re here. Isn’t that right, Dalton?”

“Dalton?” she echoed, her voice sounding weak even to her own ears. “Neighbor?” This situation was going from bad to worse. “What about other people in the area?” she asked, a sick feeling, dread rather than nausea, gathering in the pit of her empty stomach.

“There’s nobody else, dear. You’ll have all the privacy you want. Out at Shadow Lake, you can get away from the hustle and bustle of Good Riddance.”

How much hustle and bustle could there be in a town that didn’t appear to even have a traffic light? She stifled rising hysteria. It was bad enough to be sent to this God-forsaken town, but now she was about to be stuck in a dead woman’s cabin on the edge of some lake, solely dependent on an ex-convict. Somebody just take a gun and shoot her. Wait, in this area, someone might be all too willing. “It sounds lovely,” she said, her voice faint.

“You can really indulge your inner pioneer spirit,” Merrilee said with a wide smile.

“My inner pioneer spirit?” Skye repeated and mustered a weak smile. She didn’t possess a single ounce of pioneer spirit. Nope. None. “Um …there is running water, isn’t there?”

“No worries, Doc,” Saunders said with what might appear to be a friendly smile to the rest of the room but which she knew to be an evil smirk. “It’s not that far to carry the bucket to the lake. And I’ll show you how to rub the flint together to start a fire. Just think of all that Girl Scout training you can put to use.”

“A bucket to the lake? Flint?” She surreptitiously pinched herself just to make sure she hadn’t fallen into a nightmare even worse than the recurring one she often had, where she showed up at a medical conference naked.

“Hush, Dalton.” Merrilee waved a hand at the bush pilot. “You’re scaring her to death. Don’t pay him any attention, honey. He’s just joshing you. Irene put in running water at the same time Dalton did. And the electricity might be iffy sometimes, but we all use matches instead of flint. I’ll send you out with a pack just in case.”

Skye said nothing because she wasn’t so sure she could muster anything outside of a wail.

But it didn’t really matter because Ms. Merrilee Danville Weatherspoon filled what was almost a conversational gap.