That's Our Baby!

As if I don’t have enough to worry about without bad weather, she told herself as she tried to ignore the stabs of pain darting up her arm. She was chilled to the bone and wondering if she’d made the worst mistake in her life when she’d told Captain Crocker to go back to Anchorage without her.

FOUR HOURS LATER, the pain in Kerry’s finger was horrendous, but a broken finger wasn’t her worst worry. The storm was.

The cabin was engulfed in a blinding snowstorm complete with a howling wind that shook it to its foundations. Kerry huddled drowsily on the couch nursing her finger with an ice pack, her favorite goose-down pillow cradling her head. She wished she had a first-aid kit, and somewhere upstairs was one of those medical advice books. But right now she didn’t have the energy to climb the narrow ladder to the loft to get it. She was exhausted, and sometimes she felt so queasy. And if only her finger didn’t hurt so much, she’d sleep. She closed her eyes, trying to drift away, making herself think of pleasant things, of happy times…

She awoke with a start. Her finger was swollen to twice its size, and the ice she’d packed around it had melted. No telling how long she had dozed; she glanced out the window and tried to figure out if the storm was letting up. No, it was as fierce as ever.

And then she saw it—a face at the window above the couch. It wavered in the flickering light from the kerosene lamp on the table.

Kerry jumped up with a little shriek, clutching the pillow to her chest. Was she dreaming? She didn’t think so. She must be having hallucinations from the pain. There could be no other explanation for such a frightening visage.

The face was distorted in the wavy glass and encircled by a big furry hood. The eyebrows bristled white with crusted snow. The nose was red from the cold, the jaw dark with stubble, and the mouth a wide gash uttering words that she couldn’t hear for the lashing of wind-driven snow against the windowpane.

As she stared at the apparition, it moved toward the door. She was seized with sudden irrational fear. She was alone here and at the mercy of anyone who came along, and she’d thought she was protected by the surrounding wilderness, by the fact that the closest human beings lived sixty miles away. Yet here was this stranger who was now banging loudly on the door. She hadn’t bolted it when she came in earlier; she had been in pain and thought there was no need.

Whoever it was scrabbling at the latch. In a panic now, Kerry threw her full weight, all one hundred and ten pounds of it, against the door.

Too late she realized that she should have armed herself with the poker from the fireplace. As the door swung open on rusty hinges, the sound of the wind was deafening. A snow-covered figure stumbled into the storm vestibule, the wind gusting hard against its broad back. Knowing that she had to protect herself from this unwelcome intruder, Kerry summoned all her strength and socked it as hard as she possibly could—

With the pillow. Which broke open and scattered feathers everywhere.

A cry of outrage drowned out even the howl of the wind.

“Hey, don’t you know me? I’m Sam, Sam Harbeck!” The figure ripped off its hood, and Kerry’s mouth dropped open in astonishment. She forgot, for the moment, her pain.

“Sam?” she said, her voice rising on an incredulous note. The intruder couldn’t be Sam Harbeck.

But it was. In those crazily disoriented seconds, she couldn’t imagine how Doug’s best friend came to be tapping on her window here in the middle of the wilderness during a blinding snowstorm, but it was Sam, all right. How could she not have recognized his square, stubborn chin, that sharp, straight blade of a nose? Even now, with wet feathers plastered in his hair and all over his face, he couldn’t be mistaken for anyone else.

A flurry of snow billowed into the room and mingled with the floating feathers on a burst of cold that almost knocked Kerry over. She dropped what remained of the pillow and struggled to slam the door, but the wind was too strong. Sam joined her in throwing his full weight against the heavy door, and together they managed to shut out the raging storm.

In the sudden hollow silence, Sam spat feathers out of his mouth, slung his backpack into a corner and peeled off his parka.

“What kind of welcome is this? I hammered on the door and yelled until I almost froze. Or is that what you had in mind?” His piercing blue gaze swept over her, taking in her mussed hair now frosted with feathers, the worn jeans, the red wool hiking socks with a hole in one toe. She stood gaping at him, unable to speak.

“You shouldn’t have dressed up,” he said, stomping clumps of snow off his boots and making a feathery mess on the floor. He threw the parka over a peg beside Kerry’s coat and strode through a few still-fluttering feathers to the kitchen area where he helped himself to a towel from the shelf over the dry sink.

“You forgot to shave,” Kerry snapped back, picking feathers from her hair, her sweater, her jeans. She felt perilously near tears; it was because her finger hurt and her favorite pillow was ruined. Or maybe it was because she’d been foolish enough to think that Sam Harbeck had the capacity to care about anyone but himself.

“I’ve been roughing it, camping out.”

“In snow?” Kerry said, heavy on the sarcasm. She bent to pick up the pillow. Its case was wet, and feathers were still falling out.

“It wasn’t snowing when I started,” Sam said. He wiped his face with the towel and tossed it into a basket under the sink before peering into the cloudy mirror beside the back door and brushing feathers from his hair. In obvious distaste, he poked at a pot of red beans she’d left on the stove after lunch and dropped the spoon before looking her over again from head to toe.

It was a thorough inspection, his gaze lingering on her face before sweeping the rest of her slight frame. It unnerved her, that look. She felt as if she were standing in front of him buck naked. For something to do, she walked over to the wood box and shoved the sadly deflated pillow in between the logs. She didn’t know what else to do with it.

“Whatever brings you to this neck of the woods?” she blurted. She held her injured finger in the palm of her other hand; it was throbbing painfully. Through her pain and astonishment, she had the idea that maybe Sam was checking on her out of a feeling of obligation to Doug. At that thought she felt a kind of absurd gratitude, but it evaporated as soon as Sam opened his mouth.

“Your friend Emma told me you’d written and said you were staying on here after the last boat of the summer came through. I couldn’t believe you could be so dumb. Why are you staying here in the cabin instead of the lodge?”

“It costs too much to run the electrical generator there, and the lodge is too big to heat. Anyway, the cabin is cozy. It suits me.”

“What ever possessed you to hang on at Silverthorne with winter coming on? With winter already here,” he amended, with a meaningful look at the storm flailing outside the windows.

“I had lots of work to do. I was in the middle of painting the dining room because I was running behind schedule when the River Rover made its last run. Captain Crocker is sending his son-in-law Bert to pick me up in his plane in a couple of weeks when he flies to the Indian village on government business.” She narrowed her eyes. “The captain didn’t send you instead, did he?”

Sam’s hair was coal-black and unruly, and now he furrowed a hand through it, which only made it wilder. “Hell, no. If anyone had asked me to fly all the way over here to pick up a cheechako woman who was enough of a nitwit not to head for civilization in the face of an Alaskan winter, I would have refused.” Like Captain Crocker, he’d pronounced it “cheechaker.” “Nope, it was my own fool decision to stop here. You should have left weeks ago. And if Bert’s planning to fly to an Indian village, which one?”

“To Athinopa. Captain Crocker said Bert wouldn’t mind stopping here.”

“He wouldn’t. If he heard about you, that is.”

“Why wouldn’t he?”

“Josiah Crocker habitually tosses his captain’s hat onto his bedpost on the last day of August every year and goes on a six-month drunk, that’s why. I wouldn’t count on Joe to tell anyone anything.”

“How was I to know?” Kerry said, feeling deflated.

Sam evidently took this for a rhetorical question because he picked a few feathers from his shirt and changed the subject. “You’re too thin. Don’t you eat properly?”

“I try,” she said evenly. For the first time she noticed that Sam Harbeck looked like a cross between Harrison Ford and George Clooney, heavy on the Harrison. He seemed to take up too much space in this small room; he filled it up. Kerry tried to inhale, but found that she couldn’t breathe. She grabbed the back of a chair with her uninjured hand and closed her eyes against the bevy of black dots swarming behind her eyelids. Meanwhile her visitor was pacing like a caged animal. An agitated caged animal, who was incongruously wearing the ubiquitous Alaskan bush boots. Feathers fluttered lazily in the air like snowflakes.

“Worse September snowstorm I’ve seen in many years. I was halfway here when it hit. I ditched the plane at the bend in the river where it meets Chickaback Creek. Do you have anything to eat? Anything good?” He cast a disparaging look at the pot of beans.

“I—um, well, I made goulash yesterday out of the last of the beef and was going to heat it for dinner. Anyway, beans are very nutritious. I cooked them with wild onions and chili powder. What plane?”

“It’s an aging Cessna 185 that I agreed to ferry back to Anchorage for a friend. Against my better judgment, by the way. Last week I had one of my pilots drop me off at Vic’s camp, it’s out Tolneeka way, and indulged in a few days of fishing. Where’s the goulash?”

She ignored his question. “What happened to the Cessna?” she asked. She was still trying to figure out what Sam was doing here.

“It was an emergency landing, and the plane’s not flyable. I guess the damage could have been worse considering the conditions. Actually I didn’t land far from here, but I had to walk most of the way against the wind. Is something wrong? You look like hell.” He tucked his hands into his belt loops and scowled at her. His brows were still damp and stood out from his face; a small scar cut through the left one. His mouth turned down at the corners; it was too generous to be considered handsome. Even as she noted these irrelevant details, Kerry couldn’t help thinking that there was something overwhelmingly, reassuringly masculine about him. She told herself that under the circumstances, she should be relieved to see another human being, any human being. Even Sam Harbeck. Even when he was saying uncomplimentary things.

“I thought rule number one was never to leave the plane if you go down.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve never been much for rules. I asked you if something was wrong.”

“I think I broke my finger,” Kerry said with reluctance.

“Let’s see.” It wasn’t a request, it was a command.

Reluctantly Kerry presented her hand, and Sam enveloped it in his larger ones as he studied it. He whistled. “That’s a lovely shade of violent.”

“Violent?”

“Violet. It’s a joke, Kerry.”

“It hurts too much to laugh.”