Midnight Sun (Sinclair Sisters) (5 page)

“Sonofabitch!”

The smile she gave him looked downright evil. “Get used to it, Mr. Hawkins. I’m staying right here and working this claim. Accept it or move somewhere else.”

With that she turned and marched away. He tried not to notice that round behind, but his eyes refused to look anywhere else.

Sonofabitch,
he silently repeated, thinking again of Mose and the secret laugh he must be getting out of this. Call turned and started walking. He didn’t look back all the way to the house. But even if he closed his eyes, he could still see the pretty little blonde with her nice breasts and round behind.

For months, he’d been telling himself it was time to reawaken the sexual side of his life. He wasn’t a monk, even if he had been living like one. A couple of weeks ago, he’d started seeing a divorcee in Dawson named Sally Beecham, a cocktail waitress at the Yukon Saloon he had known for a couple of years. Sally was a sexy little brunette and she had made it clear he was welcome in her bed whenever he was ready. He’d been telling himself that time would be soon.

But he’d never gotten hard looking at Sally.

Not like he was right now, just thinking of Charity Sinclair.

“I don’t believe that guy.” Charity walked over to where Maude stood on the porch. “Who the hell does he think he is?”

Maude chuckled. “Call’s got a burr under his saddle, all right. At times, he can be downright cantankerous. But folks say he’s got more money than he can count and that deal he was offerin’ sounded pretty darned good. You might shoulda taken it.”

She lifted her chin. “I’m not selling. Not now or anytime in the foreseeable future.” Not for the next six months, at any rate. That was the time she had allotted herself and she wasn’t going anywhere until that time ran out.

“All right then, if that’s the way it is, I guess you and Buck had best be headin’ into town.”

Charity nodded. “I think he’s out in the equipment shed. I’ll go get him.”

With Maude there to oversee the repair work being done to the cabin, Charity and Buck drove down to Dawson, Buck behind the wheel of the Explorer, which made the trip a little less wearing on her nerves. Still, the man was gruff and surly, and she didn’t like the way he looked at her when he thought she couldn’t see.

The good news was they succeeded in their mission even better than she had expected. To her amazement and everlasting gratitude, Charity discovered that the Internet had arrived in Dawson City. There were, in fact, two tiny Internet cafes where she could send and receive e-mail from friends and family back home. Better yet, she found out through D. K. Prospecting that cell phones existed even in a rural place like Dawson.

While Buck assembled the equipment they would need, Charity signed up for cell phone service through Horizons Unlimited, tossing the bulky phone that had more power than the smaller models she was used to onto the seat of the Ford.

They were finished by late afternoon and on their way back to the cabin as dusk began to fall, the back of the Explorer filled with shovels, picks, gold pans, and miscellaneous gear, the larger equipment scheduled for delivery in the morning.

Unless, of course, the sun came out, in which case it might take a couple more days.

Charity’s sigh turned into a grin. It was different up here. There was none of the hustle and bustle of Manhattan. Her life was new and strange and she was enjoying every minute of it. Except for her trips to the outhouse, of course.

She was even enjoying her battles with Call Hawkins.

His tall image rose in her mind, his hard jaw shadowed by the morning shave he’d missed, his hair too long but a nice, shiny nut-brown color. He reminded her a little of Max Mason—rawhide tough, whipcord lean, hard as nails. As much as she disliked the man, there was something about him that intrigued her.

Something besides his height and solid, broad-shouldered build. Besides the fact that he was so obviously male.

She didn’t know exactly what it was—and she didn’t want to find out. She had better things to do than think about a guy like McCall Hawkins.

Still, the image of him standing there in his faded jeans and denim shirt was surprisingly hard to forget.

The equipment arrived on schedule—something to do with the rain, no doubt. Fortunately, even with the mud, the road up the mountain was still passable. Charity wasn’t so sure it would be by the end of the day.

Men from D. K. Prospecting Supplies, Inc., unloaded the dredge and the rest of the machinery she and Buck had picked out, then headed back down the mountain before the mud got so deep they couldn’t make it. There was a workshop of sorts in one of the sheds out back and Buck had ordered the building materials he needed for the sluice box to be unloaded there.

“It’ll take a while to get everything put together,” he said, and started off in that direction, leaving Charity to examine the portable dredge the men had unloaded that would need to be assembled.

She had seen a variety of different kinds in the prospecting magazines she had been reading. A gold dredge was a piece of equipment that worked like an oversized vacuum cleaner, sucking creek water, rocks, gravel, and anything else it encountered into a long, flexible pipe at one end and dumping it into the sluice box at the other. Once the water passed through the box, it ran back into the creek, hopefully minus the gold it had been hiding.

Maude sauntered up just then. “That thing’s a real workhorse when it comes to findin’ gold, but you still gotta learn the basics. If a little rain don’t bother you, I can show you how to pan.” The sagging skin below her jaw jiggled as Maude looked down at the item in her hand, a round, green plastic gold pan, flat on the bottom with the slides sloping up. There were notches for catching gold about five inches long, maybe an inch and a half apart in one spot on the pan.

Charity grinned. “What’s a little rain when you’re lookin’ for color?” she said, using her best prospector’s accent.

“Come on, then. Let’s get to it.” They were wearing their knee-length yellow slickers, though the rain had slowed to a steady drizzle. Maude left her by the stream for a moment, returned to the cabin, and came back with the big plastic washtub they used to mop the floors.

“The gold pan is your basic minin’ tool,” she said. “But pannin’ ain’t as easy as it looks.”

Maude set the plastic tub in the sand at the edge of the water, bent down and filled Charity’s gold pan about a third full of stream gravel, then pulled a little glass vial from the pocket of her jeans.

“There’s a dozen flakes of gold in this here bottle.” She shook it, showing the flakes of gold suspended in the little tube of water. She opened the vial and dumped the gold and water into the pan. “The trick is to catch ’em.”

Maude began to demonstrate, first stirring the loose dirt and gravel into a state of suspension, then working the pan in a circular motion, slopping a little water over the brim with each rotation. “Gold is heavier than pret’ near anything else. If you use the pan just right, it’ll catch in the riffles and the gravel will slop on over.”

Sure enough, when Maude was done, the pan was empty except for the little slivers of gold in the notches. “Now you try it.”

Charity accepted the green plastic gold pan Maude gave her.

“Hold it over the tub like I did. When you’re done, we’ll count the flakes. Whatever you miss’ll wind up in the washtub and we can start all over again.”

Maude was right. It wasn’t as easy as it looked. After several tries, Charity had retrieved only a very few flakes. Then the sun broke through the clouds for a moment and when she stared into the pan, she saw a lot more gold.

“Look, Maude! There’s a whole bunch of it in here!”

Maude just shook her head. “That’s fool’s gold, honey. When the sun disappears, so will the glitter. Gold ain’t like that. That pretty yellow color stays true all the time.”

The clouds closed in again and the glitter of the fool’s gold disappeared just as Maude said. Charity kept at it. But after an hour of work, she had only caught half a dozen flakes. Her pant legs were wet, the toes of her hiking boots soaked—mental note to buy an extra pair on the next trip into Dawson—her feet freezing, and still she didn’t have the knack.

“It takes a hundred fifty, maybe two hundred pans to process a yard of gravel,” Maude said. “A good panner can manage maybe ten pans an hour, which means you can do ’bout half a yard a day, a little more if you get real good.”

Real good she wasn’t, and not real fast, either. It was backbreaking labor, but if the end product was gold …

Charity worked for another half an hour.

“Why don’t you take a rest?” Maude suggested. “Go on up to the house, warm up, and grab a bite to eat. You can try again a little later.”

“You go ahead.” Charity whirled the pan. “I’ll be up in a minute.” As soon as she got all twelve flakes. She’d come here for gold. She had known it wouldn’t be easy. She had always been a determined sort of person. Why should learning to pan for gold be any different?

“Suit yourself,” Maude said, turning toward the cabin, ambling up the bank in her funny seesaw gait.

Charity went back to work. By the time she finally captured all twelve flakes in her pan, she couldn’t feel her feet. But relief and a sense of accomplishment gave her a fresh shot of energy. She frowned as she stared down at the last flake glittering against the green of her plastic pan and started counting again, separating each thin piece with the end of a stick.

Nine, ten, eleven, twelve.
Thirteen.
Thirteen flakes of gold!

Charity’s hands started to tremble. She looked down at the gravel Maude had scooped from the stream that now sat in the bottom of the washtub, then gazed at the bright yellow pieces wedged into the riffles of her pan. A huge grin broke across her face and she turned and started running.

“Maude! Maude, come out here and see what I found in the creek!”

Standing in front of the window in his living room, Call lowered the binoculars he’d been using, only faintly guilty for spying on his pretty next-door neighbor.

He checked the heavy chrome Rolex strapped to his wrist. Three hours and forty-seven minutes. That’s how long she’d been standing out in the drizzle, working that damned gold pan. From the water stains on her clothes, he could see that her feet and legs were wet clear past her knees. She had to be freezing out there, but she hadn’t quit.

Damn fool woman. Probably come down with pneumonia.

Still, he had to give her credit. They couldn’t have paid him enough to stand out there in the drizzle that long.

He looked through the glasses again, saw the excitement flash in her face, watched her run frantically up the bank to the house. After all that work, it looked as if she’d been rewarded—found a little color, no doubt. It wasn’t hard to do up here, but apparently that didn’t lessen her excitement.

Call hadn’t felt that kind of thrill himself in so long he couldn’t remember.

Maybe he never would again.

Setting the binoculars down on the table beneath the window, he crossed the living room and opened the door leading into the big metal building he’d added to the house last year. It held his Jeep, a Chevy pickup he used for hauling supplies, a pair of snowmobiles, a canoe, and a wall full of other miscellaneous sporting gear.

His canvas flight bag sat near the door, ready whenever he went flying again. He owned a small floatplane, moored on the river at Dawson, practically a necessity up here. It was great for a trip into the interior, or down to Whitehorse if he had to catch a long-distance airline flight somewhere. Not that he did it that often.

The part of the building closest to the house was built as an office. This was the place he worked, now that he had started again. Of course, he worked for himself these days and he did it at a leisurely pace that would have shamed him four years ago. Back then he’d been consumed with the business of business, caught up in the never-ending race to make more and more money.

And for what?

Nothing he’d gained was worth what it had cost him.

Nothing was worth the loss of his wife and three-year-old little girl.

Don’t go there,
his mind warned. There was no use torturing himself when it wouldn’t do an ounce of good.

In the past four years, at least he had learned that much. That no matter how much self-loathing he heaped on himself, no matter how much guilt he suffered, nothing could change what had happened on the road that snowy winter night a week before Christmas. Nothing could undo the fact that he had put his job—his ambition—ahead of his family, and because he had, the two people he loved most in the world were dead.

It had taken him nearly four years to accept their loss, but in the end he’d had no choice. His family was gone but he was alive, and he owed it to them to go on. It was time he continued the business of living, and in building this room he had made a start at doing just that.

Call pulled out the leather chair behind his desk, sat down at his computer and flipped on the switch, waiting with more patience than he used to have for the screen to light up and the desktop programs to appear.

The office was state-of-the-art: three computers, a laptop, and a couple of high-speed laser printers. The computer served as a fax and telephone answering machine and one computer was connected to a rain gauge, aerometer, barometer, and hydra sensor. With that equipment and what weather information he could download, he could do a better job than the weather service of predicting local weather.

Living this far out of town, getting on-line had posed a challenge at first, but satellite technology had come a long way, allowing him lightning-speed downloads, and more recent improvements now gave him uploading capabilities as well.

Mostly, he used the computer to keep track of his investments, to buy and sell stock, and do a little consulting. He wasn’t interested in more than that. If he’d learned one thing from his mistakes, it was not to let ambition get in the way of what was important in life.

Things like watching a sunset, or feeling the glide of a canoe through the pure blue waters of a lake.

Or absorbing the warmth of a woman as she took him deep inside her.

Call’s whole body tightened. Where the hell had that come from? But he only had to think of the woman in the yellow slicker working out in the rain and he knew. Damn, he wanted his life back to normal, or as normal as it ever would be. Some satisfying, no-strings sex was definitely on his agenda—with Sally Beecham, not his irritating next-door neighbor.

Call clicked his mouse and brought up his calendar, relatively empty now compared to four years ago when meetings and appointments filled his days, often lasting until well past midnight.

Between a scheduled call to Peter Held, a young chemist involved in an innovative hard-drive storage program Call had been working on, and one to Arthur Whitcomb, Chairman of Inner Dimensions, the software game company that had been his original avenue to success, he wrote himself a reminder to phone Sally and ask her out on Saturday night.

He would take her to dinner and afterward he would take her to bed.

He was going to start living again if it killed him.

Sally Beecham was a good place to start.

God, it was beautiful here. Unlike anyplace Charity had ever seen. And yet … in the oddest way, the country seemed familiar. The trees and the mountains, the rivers and the streams, all felt rooted in some inner part of her, somewhere deep in her cells. Perhaps it was the books she had read, for certainly she had read a lot of them. Whatever it was, it felt exactly right to be here.

This morning while Maude cleaned up the breakfast dishes, she decided to go for a walk, take a look at the piece of property she had purchased. Promising Maude she wouldn’t go far, she found a winding path that led up the hill behind the house, affording her a view of the creek and the narrow valley the meandering stream cut through.

Across the valley, wispy white tendrils of low-hanging clouds clung to the sides of the mountains, and the air was so crisp and clear she could see for miles around her. The real estate man, Boomer Smith, had told her the property backed up to millions of acres of forest, and looking at it now, it was easy to believe. The trees, mountains, and sky seemed to go on forever.

Inhaling an invigorating breath, thinking of her promise to Maude not to go too far and imagining the sort of wildlife that must occupy such a vast area of uninhabited mountains and woods, she reluctantly started back down the trail.

She had nearly reached the bottom when she heard a noise on the path in front of her. An animal appeared—a coyote, she thought at first, but it seemed bigger than the few she had seen on TV and its fur wasn’t yellow and brown, but gray and silver.

The hair on the back of her neck went up as the animal paused on the trail, his pale gray-blue eyes focusing on her with sudden interest. The beast was taller at the shoulders than a dog or a coyote, lean through the chest, and long-legged, built for power and speed.
Wolf,
she thought with a sudden chill, trying to recall how dangerous they were and what she should do if she ran across one. But her mind remained blank and completely uncooperative.

She stayed stock-still, frozen in place, hoping the animal would wander away, but it remained exactly where it stood, watching her with keen, intelligent eyes that kicked her already-racing heart into first gear. Her legs were shaking. She glanced down the hill to the house. Shouting for help crossed her mind, but she wasn’t sure they could hear her with the generator running.

The wolf’s mouth opened, showing a set of dangerous-looking teeth. Running might be good, but the animal was standing in the middle of the path, blocking her escape, and she couldn’t figure out how to get around it. Scaring it away seemed her only option. Reaching down, she fumbled for a heavy piece of wood she spotted at the edge of the path, figuring if he didn’t run and decided to attack, she would at least have a chance to defend herself.

Unfortunately, the moment she lifted the length of wood and hefted it against her shoulder, holding it like a baseball bat, the wolf began to snarl and the hackles at the back of his neck went up.