From Out Of The Blue

“I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?”

“What do you mean?”

“Something wrong with your sandwich?”

“I told you I wasn’t hungry.”

“You said you wanted to talk, but this is a mighty one-sided conversation.”

She averted her eyes, heart thumping painfully. “I’m enjoying listening to you describe your life here.” She gave him a faint smile. “Your place sounds nice, except for the bears. Maybe you’d give me a tour while I’m here. I love log cabins.”

His eyes narrowed and he sat back in his chair. “Sure. Just say when.”

Kate had spent her childhood dreaming about what she was going to be when she grew up. Once she’d grown up, she’d spent every moment striving to make that dream come true, and every step of the way there had been men standing in her path, blocking her, trying to trip her up and hoping she’d fail and make a fool of herself.

Getting pregnant had been the worst setback of her career. Getting pregnant had validated all those chauvinistic remarks and those sexist attitudes. For four months she’d had to give up flying. Four whole months she’d been grounded because she’d done just what they’d expected her to do. She’d gone out and gotten herself pregnant, just like a woman.

This man had been a major player in tripping her up and almost causing her to fail, yet now she was sitting in this deli listening to him talk and his words were making her feel all warm and fuzzy inside and she caught herself thinking, Wow, for the past four years, I could have had a man in my life that I actually liked to talk to, listen to and, yes, make love with. There was no denying the magnetism that had made him so impossible to resist the first time they met. It was still there. She could still feel it. Just one touch and she’d succumb again, one touch and he’d destroy all her defenses and start another fire, one neither of them could put out. Would that be such a bad thing at this stage of her life?

What was the matter with her? She must be sicker than she thought to be having such crazy ideas. She didn’t need a man. She’d never needed one. She was happy being single. In fact, she preferred it. Nobody had to worry about Captain K. C. Jones. She could take care of herself. Always had and always would.

Always?

Ha! Funny how facing you own mortality cast a harsh light on everything and illuminated truths that had been so easily hidden beneath alternating layers of bravado and pride. Funny how it humbled…

“I have a confession to make,” she said. “I never read the letter you sent. I threw it off the edge of the flight deck, unopened, and I’m sorry.”

MITCH DIDN’T KNOW quite how to take this. All he knew was that it stung. He’d spent countless hours agonizing over each and every word, just to have her fling it off the edge of the flight deck, unopened? The letter he’d written to K. C. Jones four and a half years ago, give or take a few months, was the only one he’d ever penned to a woman. It encompassed weeks of laborious beginnings that went nowhere and awkward revisions that only made the content more stilted. He’d finally mailed it off in a kind of fatalistic coup de grâce.

“That explains why you never answered it,” he said. “But why are you sorry about it now?”

“Because I think maybe I should have read it. I was so angry then. So mad at you and at myself. I know it doesn’t make much sense and I’m sorry about that, too.”

Mitch didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. Why would she have been angry at him? Were all women born irrational?

Probably.

Even if she didn’t give a damn about him, she should have read his letter and had the decency to put him out of his misery with a proper “Dear John” response, instead of leaving him wondering why she’d snuck away as she had. And now here she was, sitting across from him at his favorite deli, having told him she wanted to talk. But about what? Obviously not the fact that she’d missed him.

After watching her shred her paper napkin into smaller and smaller pieces, he finally reached out his hand to pull the remnants away. “Okay,” he said, balling them up and dropping them into the center of the table. “If you’re not so mad anymore, then I guess the two of us have some catching up to do.”

She nodded, and a faint flush colored her cheeks. “Maybe you could take me back to your place and give me the tour. We could talk there.”

“You bet.” He paused in the act of rising out of his chair. “Did I mention my cabin had no indoor plumbing or electricity?”

“That seems appropriate for a cabin.”

“And you’re sure you want to talk there?”

She nodded again.

“Good enough.” He took her uneaten sandwich, wrapped it in several napkins and stuffed it in his jacket pocket in the hopes she’d eat it later. If she didn’t, Thor would. In the center of the table he left a pile of bills, enough to cover the tab and a good-sized tip, and then he escorted Kate back out to his truck and wondered if maybe, just maybe, his day hadn’t just taken a big-time turn for the better.

CHEMOTHERAPY, as defined by her doctors, was the use of drugs or chemicals, often in combinations, to kill or damage cancer cells in the body. These drugs targeted not just cancer cells, but all cells that divided quickly, including those responsible for hair growth. They had been administered intravenously via a small plastic needle inserted in her forearm, delivering a mixed bag of anticancer agents into her bloodstream, a potent cocktail of life and death, of nausea and pain, of hair loss and fatigue and above all else, hope.

For Kate, those weeks spent in the hospital undergoing intensive chemotherapy had been hell. She’d kept Hayden’s picture pinned to the wall by her bed, a bright icon to gaze upon in her darkest hours, and she’d requested several pieces of exercise equipment be scrubbed, sanitized and delivered to her room so she could keep fit while undergoing the most difficult physical and mental challenge of her life. She was still biking four miles each morning when her hair started to fall out, first by the strand, then by the handful. All her long, dark hair disappeared while she pedaled, and she prayed that, in the end, her love of life and for her son would triumph and prevail.

Rosa would bring Hayden to the hospital, and the medical staff would dress them both in sterile gowns and allow them into her room. The first time was hard. Hayden didn’t understand why she couldn’t come home. The second time was even harder. He cried when it was time for him to leave. The third time, her hair was coming out and as she tried to explain it to him he took a handful of it in his little fist and pressed it to the side of his face. “I take it for you, Mumma,” he said. “Now can you come home?”

Kate clung to his precious existence and drew sustenance and strength from it. What else was there to hold on to in a life that measured everything by the yardstick of military might? She had become a weak, pale woman with no hair, retching into a toilet bowl while a nurse said soothingly from behind, “It’s all right.” What was all right about it? She was young and she didn’t see the sense or reason in her illness. She didn’t smoke or drink or do drugs. She ate a healthy diet. She jogged five miles each and every morning, rain or shine. She didn’t understand how or why she’d gotten this sick and she never would, so how could she expect her son to understand when she told him she couldn’t come home?

Yet somehow, Hayden did come to understand. During that first month of her treatment he came to accept her stay in the hospital and her struggle with leukemia with an optimism and resiliency that both humbled and inspired her, and made her more determined than ever to win the fight. She had to be there for him. She had to survive this for Hayden.

After her second month-long chemotherapy session at the cancer research hospital in Seattle, she’d been scheduled for two months of “rest and recovery,” during which time her doctors were hoping a blood match would be found, allowing them to schedule a bone marrow transplant. Her leukemia was an aggressive type, and she’d been told the odds of finding a match were worse than the average of one in fifty thousand because of the native blood on her mother’s side of the family, but the doctors seemed confident that a donor would appear. It had been her mother’s suggestion to spend those two months building up her strength at the family home in Montana, far from the large population centers Ruth was sure would compromise her daughter’s weakened immune system. Her arguments were convincing, especially since Kate had just resigned her Navy commission…or tried to.

Why not go home? Her parents were there, and it would be good for both her and Hayden to be in the old ranch house in the foothills of the Rockies surrounded by millions of acres of wilderness.

Instead, she was here in Alaska, a land whose rugged beauty proved more than equal to that of Montana, sitting in the cab of a rusty old truck next to a man she didn’t know anything about beyond the memories of one passionate night. A man who’d been an officer when she’d met him but was no longer in the military. A man who flew a broken-down plane and barely earned enough to survive on. A man she had to get to know as fast as possible in order to be able to decide if he’d be a fit parent for Hayden because he could end up being the only parent Hayden had.

So, how to begin?

Kate folded her hands in her lap and composed her thoughts while she studied the dramatic scenery as the truck headed north. “Tell me about the court-martial,” she said, reasoning that she might as well get the worst part over with.

He drove a few moments more in silence, then blew out a breath and glanced sideways. “You really didn’t read that letter?” She shook her head and he focused on the road. “I was brought up on charges of conduct unbecoming an officer, dereliction of duty and being absent without leave.”

“What did you do?”

“I spent a night off base with the hottest Navy pilot in the fleet.”

Kate stiffened with shock. She kept her eyes forward while waiting for her heart rate to steady. She had been the reason for his being brought up on court-martial charges? “You can’t be serious.”

“Remember Skidder?”

“The mechanic in phase dock?”

“When I didn’t return that night he told my CO, who was convinced I was having an affair with his wife. That’s all it took. He called me into his office two days after the blizzard blew itself out, threw the charges at me and said, ‘Major McCray, you have just made a dire mistake and I’m going to make sure you pay for it in spades.’”

“How is it that I never heard anything about this through the liaison officer? Wouldn’t Skidder have mentioned my involvement?”

“Oh, he tried. Skidder would do anything to weasel his way up the ladder.” He flashed her a brash grin. “But in the end, all the prosecutor could prove was that I got stuck off base in a blizzard after delivering you to the officers’ quarters.”

“But you didn’t deliver me there until the next morning.”

“They couldn’t prove that, either. The blizzard’s whiteout conditions and the power outage helped out there.”

“What about the owner of the saloon?”

“He testified that he locked the Mad Dog up when the power went out and went home.”