Northern Exposure (6 page)

“Okay, fine. Let's go, then.”

He stood and offered her a hand. “I'll help you.”

She would have rather burned in hell.

“I'm fine,” she managed through gritted teeth, as she struggled to her feet, her heavy pack throwing her dangerously off balance and making her feel like a pregnant turtle in a bright-blue shell.

Joe gripped her upper arm to steady her, and before she knew what she was doing she'd grabbed on to him for support. Their gazes locked, and for the barest second she thought of him sitting, bare-chested in the Adirondack chair in his bedroom, staring at the photo of his dead sister.

“Thanks,” she said quietly.

“No problem.” He let go of her, then motioned her out onto the ledgelike trail leading down into the wildlife reserve.

There was loose rock everywhere; the footing was precarious, at best. “Is this trail used often?” Wendy had done a lot of backpacking when she was a kid, but mostly in Michigan over flat terrain that was nothing like this.

“By animals, mostly. It's really just a game trail. Not too many people come in this way.”

“I can see why.” She tried not to look down as she placed one foot carefully in front of the other and made her way down the steep route.

Two switchbacks later it dawned on her. “My compass!” She stopped short, and Joe nearly ran into her.

“Whoa! What about it?”

“I left it on top, on the pass. I took it off for a minute to—”

“We'll snag it on the way back. It'll still be there.”

Taking care with her footing, she turned toward him. “You don't understand. My dad gave me that compass. It's the one thing that wasn't stolen along with the rest of my stuff. I had it in my camera bag. It's important to me. I wouldn't want anything to happen to it.”

Joe swore, then glanced at the sky, which looked as if it was about to explode. “We're almost out of daylight, and I don't like the looks of those clouds. Stay here.”

Wendy grabbed his arm. “No, I'll go.” It was her compass, and she was the one who'd left it behind.

“No,
I'll
go. Like I said, stay here.”

Before she could argue, he turned and started back up the trail. “Tyrant,” she said to his back, knowing he couldn't hear her.

A moment later, a spray of small rocks rained down from the jagged ridge line above, peppering the space Joe had just occupied. Wendy flattened herself against the rock face and protected her head with her hands. Sheesh. He wasn't kidding about those rock slides.

After a moment it stopped, and she cautiously looked up, expecting to see a marmot or maybe a bird, but saw neither. She also didn't see Joe. The trail was empty, and the notch in the rocks he'd called a pass was empty, too.

Below her everything was quiet, the wooded valley dark, the trail disappearing into shadows. There was no wind, not a breath of it, which seemed unusual to her. Checking her watch—8:00 p.m.—she realized that, if not for the storm clouds, there'd still be plenty of light.

Joe was right. They needed to get down from the pass and find somewhere to make camp before it got dark. Which didn't give them much time since it was nearly dark already.

“Joe?” she called up the trail, straining to see in the half light. “Did you find the compass?”

She could just make out the pass, and could see
he wasn't there. Where had he gone? She was beginning to get cold. Her anorak had a miniature temperature gauge hanging from the zipper. She drew it up close to her face, squinting in an attempt to read the tiny numbers. Forty-six degrees. Brrr. Summer in Alaska, what a treat.

“Joe?” she called again.

This time she got an answer.

Another shower of rocks let loose from above. A sharp-edged missile glanced off her temple, startling her. “Ow! What the—”

“Wendy!” It was Joe's voice, and she had to admit she was glad to hear it.

Covering her head with her hands, she started up the trail toward him.

“Hurry!”

The rock shower became more violent. She hunched over, using her backpack to shield her, and trudged upward. Something hot stung her right eye. She swiped at it with a hand, and her fingers came away wet.

“No, wait!” he called. “Go back! Wendy, go back!”

“What?” She hunkered down under an overhang, pressing herself close to the wall of rock on her right, and squinted up the trail. “Joe, I can't see you.”

What she did see was—

“Oh, God.”

Rock slide didn't describe it, not by a long shot.

It looked as if the whole side of the ridge had given way above her. Chunks of shale and volcanic rock pummeled the trail in a raucous staccato, bouncing and skipping off the cliff face, then the ledge, and shooting out into space.

Wendy let out a half shout, half scream, working desperately to keep her footing. She heard the tumble of rocks below her in stereo as they hit the bottom of the valley, the sound echoing off the surrounding mountains.

“I'm coming down!” Joe's voice again. “Stay where you are!”

But she couldn't stay where she was. Loose scree and dust was fast filling in the crevices between the larger rocks that had caught and held on the ledge. The trail was literally disappearing around her. A minute later and she'd be trapped under the overhang.

“Joe!” She had to move. Up was out of the question. The trail was almost gone in front of her. How would he get to her? She realized he probably wouldn't, he couldn't—not in time, anyway—and that she had to do something to save herself. Now.

Down. She had to get down.

Wendy moved, or rather crawled, backward on hands and knees, the blue backpack protecting her from the worst of the rock fall. The slide wasn't as bad in this direction. Three feet felt like three miles, but she made progress.

She knew her hands were cut, and a sticky warmth she realized was blood kept trickling into her eye. Not that she could see more than a few feet in any direction, anyway. The dust was thick as smoke.

She heard Joe somewhere above her, shouting, but she couldn't make out his words. She should try to help him, but how? What could she do? She felt helpless, useless, and
that
made her mad.

The shower of debris lightened, and as the dust began to clear, Wendy crawled forward again, calling
Joe's name, toward the overhang that had sheltered her. She felt her way upward, reaching blindly ahead of her for the next handhold.

Her scraped and bloodied palm connected, at last, with something solid.

“I've got you!” he cried, and pulled her up.

“I
was fine.”

Joe zipped the two-man backpacker's tent closed and shot Wendy a hard look. “You were
not
fine.”

Even under the harsh beam of her flashlight, cut and bruised and bloodied, and as tightly wound as she'd ever seen any man, Joe Peterson looked good to her.

And that was a bad thing.

“I'd made it down, past the rock slide. I was out of danger.” She handed him the first-aid kit she'd paid $34.95 for in an Anchorage sporting goods store. “The only reason I climbed back up was to help you.”

“Help
me?
Me,” he said again, as if the notion were ridiculous.

“Yes.”

They had, in fact, helped each other. They'd crouched together under the overhang until the dan
ger was over, then Joe had used her ice ax as a makeshift shovel to clear the trail below them. A tiny flame of satisfaction burned inside her, knowing she'd been right and he'd been wrong about the tool coming in handy.

When the rock slide started, Joe had ditched his pack at the pass, and now there was no way to retrieve it. The trail above them had been completely destroyed. All they had in the way of gear were the contents of her pack. Lucky for him, for them both, she was prepared.

“Let me see that cut.” He brushed the hair away from her face and peered at the nasty incision she'd sustained during the slide.

“I can do it,” she said, and pulled away. He ignored her, pressing an iodine wipe firmly to her temple. “I said, I can—ow! That stings.”

“You'll live.” He held her chin and swabbed at the cut, then cleaned the dried blood from her face with some sterile cotton.

She let him do it. Why, she didn't know.

The look on his face as he performed the task was one of detached concentration, sprinkled with a dose of mild distaste. She felt like a stray mutt who'd been rescued by the local animal shelter.

“Oh, here, give me that.” She snatched the cotton from him when he began to inspect the cuts on her hands. “I'm perfectly capable of cleaning myself up.”

He nodded at her broken nails, the undersides of which were caked with dirt. “Manicure didn't last.”

“Very funny.” He was a real comedian, wasn't he?

She fished a couple of antiseptic wipes out of the
first-aid kit and went to work on her face and neck, then her hands and arms, managing to remove most of the dust and grit and dried blood. What she wouldn't give for a shower.

Now she knew what the phrase “hit by a Mack truck” really meant. Exhaustion warred with adrenaline, producing an almost euphoric state she suspected was mild shock.

Joe didn't look any better off, though she suspected a guy like him would go to his grave before he'd admit he was whipped. From the moment he'd grabbed her hand and had pulled her to safety under the overhang, he'd taken charge of the situation. He'd told her what to do, and she'd done it, without question.

But by the time they'd made their way to the bottom of the pass, him carrying her pack, and had moved a quarter mile into the cover of the trees, searching for a flat, protected spot in which to camp, Wendy had regained some of her strength and all of her convictions.

She'd refused to allow him to pitch her tent without her help. It was
her
tent, after all. He'd actually believed she'd just sit there, idle, and let him do it for her. After an argument about the proper way to filter water from a nearby creek, and after an awkward moment when she needed to relieve herself but he refused to allow her out of his sight, they'd settled in to their cramped quarters for the night.

Now he just looked beat. Exhausted. Not that she could tell by his actions or words, which, like everything else in Joe Peterson's world, were carefully controlled. But she could see it in his eyes and in his face when he thought she wasn't looking.

“You hungry?” he asked, and produced another of her Power Bars.

“No, just tired.”

He ripped open the foil wrapper and downed the peanut-butter-flavored energy snack in three bites. Then he unzipped her new, goose-down sleeping bag and moved out of the way so she could climb in. “Here. Get some sleep.”

Until this moment she hadn't considered the fact that there was just the one sleeping bag between them. One toothbrush, one washcloth, one everything. “What about you?”

“Don't worry about it.” He grabbed the flashlight and flipped it off.

In the close-to-claustrophobic space, even in the dark she could make out his movements. He settled down beside her, his head near the opening of the tent. She heard the crisp rustle of nylon and Gore-Tex as he pulled his jacket over himself for warmth.

She knew this was the last place on earth he wanted to be—stuck in a tent in the middle of nowhere with a woman who, for a number of reasons, some valid, some not, disgusted him. But here they were, all the same, and the last time she'd checked, the temperature gauge on her anorak had read thirty-nine degrees.

Swiveling around so they were facing the same direction, Wendy unzipped her sleeping bag all the way, and lay down next to him. “We can share it,” she said, and draped the open bag over them both.

“It's not necessary.” He pushed it aside.

“Don't be silly, it's freezing.”

He didn't protest a second time when she redistributed the bag to cover them. They lay there for a
while, awake. She could tell by his breathing and by the palpable tension between them that sleep wasn't anywhere on his radar.

She'd noticed, too, that he hadn't taken his gun off. It was still in the holster secured to his belt, and poked her in the hip when she fidgeted. She was also aware that the camping spot he'd chosen for them wasn't visible from the trail, and that he'd deliberately not built a fire.

An odd recollection gnawed at her.

Barely an hour ago, right before Joe had caught up to her on the approach to the pass, she could swear someone was following her. Not Joe, but someone else, dressed in dark clothes that blended right in to their surroundings. She'd only caught a glimpse of the person. She'd stopped and had waited to see if he would emerge onto the trail, but he didn't. She wasn't even sure if the person
was
a “he,” or if the whole thing was just her imagination.

“Joe?”

No answer.

“That rock slide…it was an accident, right?”

He stirred under the goose-down bag. “Go to sleep. Tomorrow's a long day.”

Even if Joe were carrying a communications device—which he wasn't—she knew there was no cell phone or two-way radio coverage this far from town.

They were stuck.

“We can't go back through the pass, can we?”

He didn't answer. She turned onto her side to look at him in the dark. “Joe?”

“No,” he said stiffly. “We can't go back.”

She'd studied the map and knew the gun-sight pass was the only way in or out of the reserve from the
east. Jagged, snowcapped peaks thousands of feet high surrounded them on three sides.

Tension balled in her stomach. She
had
to get those photos. She had to be back in New York in less than three weeks. “So…”

“The only way out is down the valley, past the caribou habitat, right through the middle of the reserve.” His tone made it plain he blamed their predicament entirely on her.

She refused to let him bully her. “How long?”

Another silence. She felt his anger as if it were a living, breathing thing laying in wait between them. “Two weeks. That's if you can make it at all.”

She turned her back on him and wrapped her arms around herself—not for warmth, for Joe Peterson was generating enough body heat to melt a polar ice cap—but for courage.

“I can make it,” she said.

I have to make it.

 

Joe was used to waking up in the middle of the night, but for entirely different reasons than the one shocking him into consciousness now.

Wendy Walters was cuddling him in her sleep.

He lay on his side, turned away from her, one hand resting on the weapon strapped to his hip. Wendy was curled around him like a pretzel, one arm snaked around his torso, a leg pinned snugly between his. He could feel her breasts pressed up against his back, the soft weight of them as they rose and fell with each breath.

He realized he had a hard-on the size of Texas. After adjusting his trousers, he tried, without luck, to untangle himself from her. She scooted closer as he
inched toward the side of the tent. In the end he jammed the sleeping bag down between them, so at least they weren't in direct contact.

His watch read nearly six, though he didn't need it to judge the time. Gray light bled through the thin fabric of the tent. This time of year it got dark around nine and light again around five.

He hadn't meant to fall asleep, but there'd been no fighting it. He'd barely gotten a couple of hours the night before at the station. He'd lain there in the tent, awake, as long as he could, listening, waiting to see if they were going to have more company.

He was sure, now, that they were being tracked, followed. Not they, so much as
she.
Wendy. He was also sure that rock slide was no accident. It was meant to separate the two of them, to get her alone.

The question was, who was the guy following her and what did he want?

Joe hadn't seen anyone on top of the pass when he'd hiked back up to retrieve Wendy's compass, but he'd had a weird feeling that someone was there, hiding above them between the pinnacles of broken, snow-dusted rock. The same someone who'd made the boot print he'd seen where the wooded canyon below them met the steep approach to the pass.

After the slide had started, out of the corner of his eye he'd seen movement above them, a familiar flash of predator-gray camouflage. He would have gone after the guy if it hadn't meant leaving Wendy alone. Moreover, seconds into the slide, Joe had known the trail wouldn't hold. He had to get to her or risk being separated. And like it or not, Wendy Walters was his responsibility, it was his job to keep her safe.

That's what he made himself believe in the gray
light of dawn, her heat at his back, the scent of her on the goose-down bag covering them. He told himself that was the only reason he'd dumped his pack in a panic and had scrambled down the trail, desperate to reach her.

Wendy sighed in her sleep and snuggled closer. Joe had nowhere to go. He was trapped between her and the wall of the tent. He'd edged off his half of the inflatable pad beneath them, and now the only thing between him and the hard, frigid ground was a few millimeters of rip-stop nylon.

Twenty seconds later he was up and out of the tent.

 

It was annoyingly clear to Wendy after nearly half an hour of arguing, during which time they'd boiled water for tea using her single-burner backpacker's stove, shared a breakfast bar and repacked her gear, that Joe Peterson was never in a million years going to let her carry her own backpack while he carried nothing.

“Okay, fine,” she said at last. “You carry it.”

She pulled the old knapsack she used as a camera bag out of the blue pack, and slung it over her shoulder. Her Nikon was already strapped securely to her chest in a professional harness, loaded with film and ready to go. The snowcapped peaks surrounding the reserve were beautiful, and small wildlife was abundant. She intended to get some good shots today regardless of the weather, which looked iffy, at best.

She'd slept like the dead and felt good this morning, almost guiltily so. Joe had made it plain, not with words but with cold looks and abrupt move
ments, that he was not happy about having to spend the next two weeks with her.

Too bad. She refused to feel guilty. That slide was no more her fault than his.

“Ready?” he said, as he cinched the belt of her blue backpack tight across his hips.

“Ready.”

“Okay, I'm only going to say this once. If you want to get out of this in one piece, you'll do exactly as I say, exactly when I say it, no questions asked. Got it?”

She looked at him, conscious of the fact that her mouth was hanging open and both brows were raised to the ten-thousand-foot level.

The old Wendy, Blake Barrett's girl Friday, would have quietly nodded compliance, would have stepped into line behind him and followed his lead.

“You're kidding, right?”

The slight tic at the edge of his mouth and the intensity of his eyes, which had gone a dark hazel rimmed with gold, told her he was dead serious.

She reminded herself that, regardless of the painful similarities of character, Joe Peterson was not Blake Barrett, and even if he were, she was not the same Wendy Walters she'd been a month ago.

“You know what, Warden?” She crossed in front of him, moving onto the trail and taking the lead. “I've already had one controlling bastard try to run my life, I don't need another.”

She started down the trail and heard his heavy footfalls as he stepped into line behind her. A smile bloomed on her face.

“Did it ever occur to you that people, controlling
bastards included, sometimes do things for your own good?”

She snorted and picked up the pace.

“That maybe, just maybe, they know better than you do what to do in certain situ—”

“No,” she said, cutting him off. “I can make my own decisions.”

The trail snaked downward into the long, densely wooded valley that ran the length of the reserve. It bordered the caribou habitat some forty miles ahead of them. She had a map, supplies, and knew exactly where she was going. It was comforting to know that she didn't need Joe Peterson's help, even if he was hell-bent on her accepting it.

“Seems to me,
Willa,
some of those decisions didn't turn out to be too smart.”

The way he said her old name, the thinly veiled reference to the lies he'd read about her in the tabloids, made her stop short and turn on him.