Northern Exposure (3 page)

Barb brought him all kinds of reading material on her once-a-week trips to the station. He'd told her to stop buying him these trashy newspapers, but she just kept on. Might as well read something fun once in a while, she'd say.

He grabbed the stack to take them out to the fire, and did a double take.

The edition on top was dated three weeks ago. He stared at the photo on the cover. Two men and a
woman. The shot barely disguised the fact that they were naked.

He remembered now. He'd read the tabloid article because he recognized the name of one of the men in the picture. Cat had known him, had talked about him. But it wasn't the man who concerned him, it was the woman.

That's why she looked so damned familiar!

Joe committed the tabloid headline to memory before carrying the blankets and sheets back down the hall. He paused in the doorway to the front room. His
guest
was looking at Cat's photo again. He glared at her back, the headline playing in his mind like a bad record—

New York Fashion Photographer Willa Walters Overexposed in Deadly Sex/Drug scandal.

I
f he was cool to her before, he was downright icy now.

Wendy stepped barefoot onto the wet wood deck and closed the French doors behind her. Joe stood with his back to her, gazing out at a late-night sunset whose colors looked as if they'd jumped off an artist's palette. She was tempted to go back inside and get her camera.

The rain had stopped and the sky was clearing. Dark clouds still thrashed above them but eased into violet tipped with brilliant orange near the horizon. The snowcapped peaks in the distance looked like pink snow cones from a county fair. Wendy had never seen a more beautiful sky in her life.

Or a more tightly wound man.

Aware of her approach, Joe began to pace back and forth along the length of the deck, his hand skimming the railing. He reminded her of a caged pred
ator. A very irritated caged predator. The question on her mind was
Why?

He'd dumped the sheets and blankets on the sofa bed, mumbled a good-night, then had retreated outside to the deck, seemingly to watch the sunset. She knew that wasn't the reason he was out there. He didn't know her well enough for her to have made him so angry, but apparently she had. Or something had.

At this point she didn't care. She had her own problems. She had three weeks to get those caribou photographs to the magazine. Three short weeks.

When the senior editor at
Wilderness Unlimited,
a sorority sister from college, had agreed to Wendy's proposal, she'd been ecstatic. It was the first break she'd gotten since
the incident,
since life, as she'd known it, had blown up in her face. She knew it was the only break she was likely to get, and she was determined not to waste it.

A cleansing breath of cool air laced with wet spruce cleared her head. Supper, and the nap, had bolstered her strength. She was still a bit jet-lagged from the long flight west. That, and the fact that there were about sixteen hours of daylight at this latitude this time of year, played havoc with her internal clock.

“Warden,” she said as she moved toward him across the wet deck, thinking it best to keep their communications formal.

He stopped pacing, his back to her, but didn't respond.

Unfolding a map she'd retrieved from her knapsack, she said, “There's something I want to ask you.”

He didn't even acknowledge her with a look when she joined him at the railing. “That buck today, the woodland caribou…”

“Bull,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“Caribou males are called bulls in Alaska, not bucks. I thought you would have known that, being a wildlife photographer.”

“I, uh…” He had a way of flustering her with his offhand comments. She was determined not to let him back her down. “The point is…I need to find him again.”

“Why?”

“I told you. For the magazine. My assignment.”

He turned to look at her, crossing his arms over his chest and hiking a hip onto the railing, as if settling in for a friendly chat. His eyes, however, were anything but friendly. “
Wilderness Unlimited.
So you said.”

She moved closer, spun the map around and spread it across the railing so he could see it. “I left my car here.” She pointed to a spot on the highway, then traced her finger along the route she'd taken into the reserve. “I first saw the bull here, where you—”

“How much experience do you have?”

“What?” She looked up at him.

“With wildlife photography. What other animals have you photographed?”

Besides the menagerie of pets she'd had growing up and her college's mascot, a Clydesdale, the answer was none. Well, except for some small animals she'd seen earlier today. But she wasn't about to tell
him
that. His smug expression and arched brow told her he couldn't wait to point out her shortcomings.

Blake had been like that. Always making sure she knew she wasn't good enough, wasn't experienced enough. At every opportunity, hammering it home that she was nothing without him.

Well, here's a news flash: Blake was wrong.

It had taken her a long time to see it. Weeks of getting over the shock of what had happened in New York, lying in the dark on the twin bed in her old room in her parents' house, thinking about her life—what she wanted, what she was, what she could be.

Her new life started now. And she wasn't going to let any man, particularly one who didn't even know her, tell her she wasn't capable of handling it.

“Moose,” she said. The lie came easy. “Deer, wolves, humpback whales, penguins. You name it, I've photographed it.”

“Really?” He perked right up, seeming to believe her. She felt good all of a sudden. Better than she had all evening. “Where'd you shoot the penguins? Antarctica?”

She supposed she shouldn't make up anything that seemed too farfetched. If you're going to lie, stick as close to the truth as possible. She'd read that once in a detective novel.

“No,” she said. “Right here in Alaska. In the, uh, arctic.”

“No kidding?” Joe smiled, his eyes glittering appreciatively in the last of the light. It was the first smile she'd seen from him, and a little shiver raced through her. Things were back on track.

“Anyway, about that bull…” She pushed the map toward him again.

“You must be pretty famous, then.”

“Who, me? No, not at all. I'm just another pho
tographer.” She pointed to the spot on the map where they'd last seen the bull, but Joe Peterson wasn't looking at the map. He was looking at her.

“I'll have to disagree with you,
Wendy.
” He said her name as if it were a foreign word. “It would take one hell of a photographer, wildlife or otherwise, to shoot pictures of penguins in Alaska.”

Why was he so antagonistic? What did he care if she had or hadn't photographed—

“Because,
Wendy
—” there it was again “—there aren't any penguins in Alaska.”

“There…aren't?”

“They're a southern hemisphere species. Any wildlife photographer would know that.” He pushed away from the deck and started back inside.

She followed him. “All right, I lied. So what? I still need to get those photos for the magazine, and to do that I'll need to find that buck or bull or whatever it is again, or another one like it.”

He marched into the kitchen and started washing their supper dishes as if she wasn't even there, banging plates around, sloshing water out of the sink.

She muscled in beside him and spread the map out on the dish drainer. “You're right. I don't know anything about penguins, okay? But I do know that there are only a handful of woodland caribou in Alaska. They're rare, elusive, completely unlike the native species that roams the tundra. No one has ever photographed them before.”

“There's a reason for that,” he said, and plopped the dish he was working on back in the water. “It's dangerous. The males are rogues. They're skittish as hell and thrive in cliff settings just like the one you nearly got us both killed on.”

She couldn't think about that. “I need those pictures. It's important. I'm not asking you to help me, I'm simply asking you to show me on this map where I might find more caribou, bulls especially.”

He snorted and went back to his dishwashing. She noticed how strong his hands were, how tanned they looked against the white plastic plates. For a millisecond she recalled them on her body that afternoon. In a blood-heating thought that had nothing to do with photography, she wondered what the contrast would be like of his bronze hands against her bare white skin.

“It doesn't matter,” he said, and grabbed a towel. “That bull we saw today, along with any others in the area, will have bolted to the other side of the reserve. You can't drive there. You'd have to go on foot.” He gave her a once-over, his eyes lingering for a second on her mouth. “A woman like you would never make it.”

She knew it was Joe Peterson, game warden, standing before her, saying the words, but it was Blake Barrett's voice she heard in her head.

“Oh, really?” She stormed out of the kitchen, slapped the map on the coffee table—which, earlier, she'd moved out of the way—and proceeded to make up the sofa bed with the sheets he'd delivered.

Joe leaned in the door frame and watched her. The longer he looked at her, the angrier she got. What was it about men that they assumed—
assumed
without even knowing her—that she wasn't up to the task at hand, no matter what that task happened to be?

From something as simple as carting out the garbage to something as complex as managing a runway shoot, or as challenging as finding a couple of cari
bou in the mountains—guys like Blake Barrett, and now Joe Peterson, thought she was helpless.

Well, hide and watch, boys.

She snapped the crisp white sheet over the foam mattress.

Hide and watch.

 

Joe thrashed around in bed until the top sheet was twisted around his legs like a rope. He ripped it from his body and tossed it aside, then punched up the pillows, ramming his head into them like a Dall sheep in full rut.

It was no good.

He'd been lying there for the past hour and a half, wide awake. The bright-green numbers on the digital clock by the bed read just past two in the morning. After their conversation on the deck, which had turned into an argument in the kitchen, he'd left his overnight guest to fend for herself and had retreated to the bedroom to sleep.

Only sleep hadn't come. He'd reread the tabloid article he'd found in the back bedroom, paying particular attention to the reporter's assessment of Willa Walters—the woman who was sleeping on his sofa bed. He knew these kinds of newspapers twisted the facts to suit their story and sensationalized every tidbit. All the same, he couldn't get the sordid details out of his mind. He couldn't shrug it off and let it go.

The other thing he couldn't let go of was the idea that the two of them weren't alone out here. He'd definitely seen a man in the woods that afternoon. On the hike back to the station earlier that evening, he could have sworn that someone was following
them. It could be a poacher, as he'd first suspected, or maybe a lost tourist. Hell, for all he knew it could be a tabloid reporter following the Walters story all the way to Alaska, though he didn't think it very likely.

He rolled onto his stomach into a sprawl, working to get comfortable, forcing all thoughts of mystery men and lying photographers from his mind. He willed himself to sleep. A few minutes later, relaxed at last, he was almost there, hovering on the edge.

Then he heard it, the faint creak of board outside on the deck.

A second later he was up, pulling on jeans and a shirt in the dark, scrambling for his boots, taking care to be as quiet as possible. He realized his heart was beating fast, much faster than normal, but it wasn't because he feared what was out there.

He'd run into all kinds of things in the night out here—hikers, department personnel on reconnaissance, even wildlife photographers. Most of the time it was animals: a disoriented grizzly, groggy from hibernation, ambling onto the deck, raccoons digging in his trash bin, the odd moose or mountain lion. None of them were dangerous if you respected their space.

No, the reason for his accelerated heart rate wasn't that he feared for his own safety. He did, however, fear for the safety of the woman sleeping in his front room. More accurately, he feared she'd wake up and do something stupid that would land her in trouble.

That creaking board wasn't a figment of his imagination.

Joe stepped lightly down the darkened hallway, peering into the bathroom and kitchen, and out the
kitchen windows before slipping silently into the front room.

His house guest was asleep, the covers pulled over her head. Everything was quiet except for the nighttime sounds of crickets and a light wind breezing through the trees. Joe moved to the window and looked out.

He stood, frozen in place, for a full minute, his gaze sweeping the deck, the steps leading up to it, and the forest beyond. A sliver of moon poked through the clouds, casting an eerie light on the trees, painting every surface ghostly gray.

Light exploded from the room's overhead fixture.

Joe whirled toward the switch.

“What's up?” Wendy leaned sleepily against the wall flanking him, squinting against the light, her hand still on the switch.

In a lightning-fast move, he flicked it off, grabbed her around the waist and backed them away from the window.

“Hey, what the—”

“Quiet!” Setting her on her feet, he looked at her hard, his eyes readjusting to the dark, and made a sign for her to be still.

“What's wrong?” she whispered.

He didn't answer. Pushing her back into the shadow of the door frame, he moved to the corner of the room by the fireplace and plucked his rifle from where it stood upright next to a jumble of snowshoes and skis.

He knew it was loaded, but checked it anyway, then listened hard for a moment to the ordinary sounds of the night. Wendy stood stock-still in the door frame, listening, too, moonlight bathing her face
in a soft pearl wash. Her hair shone silver and swished lightly against her neck as she turned toward him.

It suddenly struck him how beautiful she was, standing there in nothing more than the old T-shirt he'd loaned her to sleep in. His T-shirt. It looked entirely different on her than it did on him.

Of course it did, doofus.

The fire in the hearth had died, and the room was cold. Her nipples stood out against the fabric of the thin shirt. She pushed off suddenly, from bare foot to bare foot, as if the floor were icy. His gaze was drawn to her small feet, upward along lithe, toned legs to the hem of the T-shirt. For a long moment he thought about what was under that T-shirt.

“Is something out there?” She looked pointedly at the rifle in his hands.