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Ice was good like that.
The timber protested underfoot as she eased herself up the frosty steps and squelched into the cabin’s boot room where she kicked her sodden purple pumps off amongst the rugged footwear already lined up there. The blanket was doing almost nothing to keep her warm, now. But the cabin beyond the boot-room door glowed with warmth and it was enough to lure her over the threshold and back into Will Margrave’s world for the first time in five years.
‘Help yourself to coffee,’ he rumbled from the shadowy back of the cabin, somehow managing to make the friendly offer about as unfriendly as it could possibly be.
‘Right,’ she said, glancing at the large coffee pot simmering on the old stove. ‘Thanks.’
She turned the steaming mug in her numb hands as Will came back into the room, his face still shielded by the fleeced hood of his coat, only adding to her tension. He passed her, wordlessly, and moved into the boot room to shrug the coat off and onto a hook.
Sense memory kicked her square in the belly.
A stranger hearing him for the first time would expect some kind of old salt of the woods. But the man who returned, bootless and coatless, seemed scarcely older than the thirty he had been in Nepal five years ago. His brown hair was messy thanks to his hood and it hung down over his eyebrows. Stubble followed the angles of his jaw up to his cheekbones. He looked as if he should be in a cologne advertisement on a billboard.
Kitty cleared her throat to clear her mind. ‘Thank you for—’
‘You still okay with dogs?’
The question finally drew his eyes to hers and she found herself as breathless as the very first time she’d ever gazed into them. Iceberg, she remembered. The ethereal, aquamariney, underwater part. An old ache spread below her skin. She had never expected to look into those eyes again.
Will tired of waiting for her answer and broke the spell by moving to the door and opening it wide. Two thick-coated dogs burst in and, behind them, a third. Before Kitty could do more than twist away from them, three more bounded into the room and immediately pounced on her. A seventh held back, lurking by the door.
‘Oh...!’
Will barked their names but Kitty was far too busy protecting herself from the onslaught of their wet noses and tongues to pay attention to who was who.
‘You keep your dogs in the house?’ she cried out of surprise as their assault finally eased off.
Those ice-blue eyes weren’t exactly defrosting as the snow on her blanket had. ‘You think that they should be out in the weather while you enjoy the comfort in here?’
Well, things were getting off to a great start!
‘No, I...it’s just that you kept them outdoors in Nepal.’
And winters there could be brutal, she was sure. She flinched as doggie claws scraped on her bare arms.
‘Churchill isn’t Nepal,’ Will grunted, then made a squeaking noise with his lips and six of the seven dogs happily mauling her immediately turned and grouped around his legs. The seventh needed some manual assistance from Will.
As he reached around the dog to pull it back, his hand brushed her thigh where her summery skirt stopped. Her skin was too cold and numb even to feel it, let alone to blush at the unexpected contact, but her imagination was in no way impeded by the cold. If anything it was doing double duty standing here in this cabin with Will.
‘You’re freezing,’ Will observed, unhelpfully. ‘Not exactly dressed for the conditions.’
A sense of injustice burbled up immediately, as strong as it had once before. Only this time she defended herself. ‘Actually, I was perfectly dressed for Zurich where I departed, and for Los Angeles where I should be stopping over by now.’
Two tiny lines appeared between his brows. ‘You don’t have anything else to put on?’
She shuffled her blanket more firmly around her and wished the fire would do its job more quickly.
‘Our luggage won’t be released until tomorrow.’ Assuming it hadn’t been damaged in the fire. As if to make his point, her body unhelpfully chose that moment to shudder from the chill.
Those glacial eyes stared needles into her but then he broke the gaze by sweeping his thick sweater up over his head and tossing it gently to her. ‘Put this on, my body heat will help warm you faster. Tuck the blanket around your legs while I get you some socks. And stay by the fire.’
The sweater he removed smelled exactly like the cologne she’d imagined him advertising before. With a healthy dose of man for good measure. Because he’d left the room again in search of emergency socks and because she could disguise it in tugging the thick sweater over her head, Kitty stole a moment to breathe his scent deeply in.
Her eyelids fluttered shut against the gorgeous pain.
All the progress she’d imagined she’d made in the years since Nepal evaporated into nothing as Will’s scent filled the spaces between her cells. She’d come to believe she’d fabricated her memory of that smell, but here it was—live and warm and heady—exactly as she remembered.
Except better for the passage of five years.
Like a good wine.
‘Folk at the airport must be in quite a spin,’ he grunted, returning to the room.
She abandoned the blanket for as long as it took her to tug the large socks on and pull them almost to her knees. Between their heat from below, Will’s body heat soaking into her torso and the fire at her back, she finally started to feel the frigidity abating.
From her skin, anyway.
‘Not a sight they’ve probably had before, I guess. The plane was bigger than the entire terminal.’
‘Oh, it’s happened before,’ Will said, easing himself down onto the edge of his dining table, across the small space. About as far back from her as he could be without leaving the room again. ‘Courtesy of being the best piece of concrete for a thousand miles.’
Talking about airfields was a close second to talking about the weather. Awkwardness clunked between them like a bit of wood broken loose in the stove.
‘I’m grateful you can give me a bed,’ she finally said. ‘And that you remembered me.’
Those eyes came up. ‘You thought I wouldn’t?’
She swallowed against their blazing focus. ‘Wouldn’t remember me? Or wouldn’t help me out?’
‘Either.’
Thought. Feared. Potato/potahto. ‘I wasn’t sure whether you’d say yes.’
His grunt sounded much like one of the six dogs that had settled down into every available corner of the room. ‘And leave you to the bears?’
She glanced back at him, though he seemed as far away now as Nepal was from this place. The only sounds in the cabin were the crackling of the wood stove and the wide yawn of one of his canine brood. Neither did much to head off her sleepiness.
‘So, where should I...?’
That seemed to snap him back to the present from whatever faraway place he’d gone. Remembering Marcella, she imagined.
Sudden sympathy diluted her own tension.
Will had lost so much.
‘Second door on the right,’ he said, standing aside to unblock her way. ‘Bathroom is across the hall. Go easy on the water use—I truck it in.’
The irony of that in a region practically mired in water most of the time—
She picked her way carefully through supine dogs but stopped just as her hand found the doorknob. ‘Seriously, Will. Thank you. I wasn’t looking forward to sleeping in a waiting room.’
‘I’m better than that, at least,’ he murmured, holding her gaze.
No ‘you’re welcome’. Because she probably wasn’t—again. No ‘it’s lovely to see you again, Kit’, because it almost certainly wasn’t.
Had she really expected open arms after the last conversation they’d ever had?
* * *
Will sagged against the door the moment his unexpected guest closed it quietly behind her. How far did you have to go to outrun the past? Clearly, the top of the world still wasn’t far enough.
Five years...
Five long years and that time had compressed into nothing the moment Kitty Callaghan had stepped through his front door. The moment he’d answered his phone. His heart hadn’t stopped hammering since then. Maybe he should have just let it ring, but he’d recognised the number and he knew that the airport wouldn’t have called him at this time of night without very good reason.
It had never occurred to him that the reason would be her.
‘Shove up, Dexter,’ he murmured nudging the big brown male blocking access to his favourite chair. The dog grumbled but shifted, only to whomp down with exaggerated drama a few feet away, and Will sank down into his pre-loved rocker.
Old man’s chair, the woman who’d sold it to him had joked.
Yup. And if he had his way he’d still be rocking gently in it by a roasting fire when he’d been in the north long enough to earn that title.
Just him and his dogs... As it was supposed to be.
Last time he’d seen Kitty, she’d been hurriedly tossing her belongings into the back of a dodgy Nepalese taxi and scrambling in after them. Couldn’t get off their hillside fast enough. Marcella had wept as her favourite new distraction had departed only ten days into her month-long stay, but he’d kept a careful distance—his heart beating, then, at least as hard as it was now—relieved to see the last of her, certain that Kitty’s departure was going to make things with Marcella right again.
He’d worked on their relationship for three more years and it had never been right again.
Which made having Kitty here an extra problem. A man didn’t move halfway around the world to escape his past only to invite it right back into his front room. Especially not given how they’d left things.
But... Polar bears.
‘It’s bigger than it looks back there,’ a soft voice suddenly said behind him.
He lurched upright in his chair.
For so long the only voices other than his in this place had been canine. But, somehow, the walls of his cabin absorbed the soft, feminine tones. As if her words were cedar oil and his timber walls were parched.
He struggled for something resembling conversation.
‘Plenty of prefabs in town, but I wanted something a little more personal.’
‘And private,’ she remarked, glancing out of the window. ‘It’s very isolated.’
Yep, it was. Just how he liked it.
‘A mile’s a long way in the Boreal. But I have neighbours up the creek and Churchill’s only ten minutes away if you know the roads.’
Twenty-five if you didn’t.
Did he imagine it, or did her eyes get a shade more anxious at the seclusion? Maybe she, too, was remembering the electricity they’d whipped up between them back in Nepal.
He didn’t whip up much of anything these days. No matter who was asking.
It just wasn’t worth the risk.
‘So... I think I’ll head to bed,’ she said and, again, it somehow had the same tone as the crackling fire behind him. ‘In case they get the plane back in the air early.’
That wasn’t going to happen. Churchill was set up for small aircraft—twenty-to-thirty-seaters coming and going across the vast Canadian North like winged buses—and its apron was barely big enough to turn a colossal jet around, let alone get it airborne without a support team. Someone was going to have to fly engineers and safety inspectors up here to help prep the plane for its return flight. And no way were they going to pack a wounded jet full of passengers. Not after they’d taken such risks to get everyone down safely.
But it was two in the morning and Kitty was almost grey with fatigue, so he wasn’t about to put that thought in her head.
Time enough for her to find out tomorrow.
‘I’ll be up at dawn,’ he said, instead. ‘I’ll check on the status for you and wake you in plenty of time.’
‘Okay, see you in the morning.’
He turned back to the fire.
‘And, Will...?’
Seriously...what was it about a female voice here? His skin was puckering up as if he’d never heard one before.
‘Thank you. Truly. I really appreciate the sanctuary.’
Sanctuary. That was exactly what this place had been when he’d bought it. Still was.
Though not so much since his past had stepped foot so confidently in it.
CHAPTER TWO
WILL SQUATTED IN his navy parka and clipped a final boisterous canine to its long chain in the expansive yard, their happy breathing and his murmured words taking form as puffs of mist in the frigid mid-morning air. It hadn’t taken Kitty long to track him back there—she just had to follow the excited barks and yips.
Where Will went there were always excited yips. And there were always dogs.
She’d woken pretty late after the adventures of the night before and found two pairs of thermal leggings, a vest, new socks, a scarf, gloves and a pair of military patterned snow boots sitting on the chair just inside the guest-room door. With no idea what she’d find outside, she’d put on all the thermals under her Zurich sundress, the socks and boots, and Will’s sweater over the top of the lot. But she’d only had to open the door to the cabin before realising that wasn’t going to be quite enough. A spare coat pilfered from Will’s boot room helped seal all the heat inside.
Kitty tugged the scarf more tightly around her throat and curled her gloved fingers into the ample sleeves of Will’s coat.
Outside the toasty cedar cabin, the air cut into her lungs like glass—even worse than the night before. The temperature had dropped overnight until it was too cold even to sleet, and her throat and lungs burned with her first breaths outside the warm cabin.
Despite the ache, every breath she took seemed to invigorate her. She felt awake and alert and...attuned, though that made no sense. Standing out on Will’s front steps cleared her mind in a way that only yoga had before. Except here, she was getting it without the sweating.
The creak of the bottom step last night was more an icy crack this morning, twitching every ear in the place in her direction, before seven sets of pale eyes turned towards her.
‘No run for them today?’ she called across the open yard.
Will took a while to turn to glance at her. ‘Later, maybe.’
He straightened from his crouch and plunged one hand into the big coat pocket in front of him and rummaged there for a moment. Then he withdrew it, and set about scooping out a generous serving of mixed kibble into each of seven identical bowls recessed into the top of seven identical kennels. As soon as he gave the visual signal, six of the seven dogs leapt nimbly up onto their roof and got stuck into their breakfast.
His left hand found its way back into its pocket and stayed there.
‘How did you sleep?’ he asked without looking at her.
‘Great actually. The darkness out here is very...’
Enveloping. Subsuming. Reassuring.
‘Dark?’
She laughed. ‘It’s very sleep-promoting.’
‘That’s the forest breathing out,’ he replied. ‘And low pollution because we’re so remote. You’ll get used to the extra O2.’
In Nepal, everything had been just a smidge harder because of the reduced oxygen levels in the high-altitude Kathmandu Valley. Did that mean everything would be a bit easier here in the low, flat, sub-arctic forest?
When would ‘easy’ start, then?
‘Shouldn’t that make me sleep less, not more?’
‘You sleepy now?’
Now? With him crouching there, looking all...good morning? Nope, not one bit.
But she wasn’t about to admit that. ‘Thank you for the clothes. Just happen to have them lying around?’
Or was she wearing the clothes of some...special friend?
‘The supply store opened up early on account of the emergency landing. I headed in there at dawn before it got picked clean by your fellow passengers and got you a few basics. I’ll take you in again later if you like, so you can pick out your own gear.’
This kindness from Will...given how they’d left things... She didn’t know quite what to do with it.
‘I don’t really plan on being here long enough to need more.’
The look he gave her then was far too close to the last one he’d ever looked at her with. An amalgam of pity and disappointment.
‘They’re not going to put you back on a faulty plane,’ he warned. ‘They’ll have to send a replacement, or squeeze you onto the regional services we usually get.’
He returned the kibble tub to the ramshackle shed that held all his tools and equipment, but as soon as his hands were free again back they went...into his pockets. Only, this time, he caught the direction of her gaze.
‘Curious?’ he asked, a half-smile on his lips.
Yes... But she was no more entitled to be curious about what was below Will Margrave’s pockets now than she was five years ago.
He reached in and drew out a tiny, dark handful of fuzz.
‘Oh, my gosh!’
‘Starsky’s,’ he murmured. ‘One of three.’
‘How old is it?’ she asked, staring at the tiny pup. Two slits in its squished little face peered around. Beneath, she got a momentary flash of electric-blue eyes.
Sled-dog eyes.
‘Born day before yesterday.’
Two days! ‘Should it be away from its mother this soon?’
‘Won’t be for long,’ he murmured. ‘Helps to forge a bond with the pup from the get-go. Reinforces dominance and trust with the mother.’
Trust. Yes—that he could just take a newborn pup from its mother even for a few minutes... That she would let him...
‘It can’t see or hear yet but it has all its other senses,’ he said, stroking it gently with his work-roughened thumb. It curled towards him in response. ‘And emotional awareness. It will come to know my smell, my voice. The beat of my heart. Knows it’s safe with me from its earliest days.’
He did have that kind of voice. All rumbly and reassuring. And that kind of smell. She took a step back against the urge to take in another lungful like last night.
Will returned the pup to its mother’s kennel and buried it in under her alongside its two littermates—another black one, and one that was white as the snow all around them with subtle grey mottling.
‘So no departing flight this morning, I take it?’ she asked as he straightened.
He turned and faced her. ‘Let me explain something about bear season...’
‘I know, I know... They come for the ice—’
‘Not just them,’ he interrupted. ‘Tourists. Hundreds of them arriving and leaving every day. For eight weeks we’re overrun and then we go back to being the sleepy little outpost we usually are. You should be prepared for this to go on for days. Maybe longer.’
Days? Days of this careful eggshells? Of not talking about Marcella or the quakes? Of not mentioning what happened between them five years ago?
‘I’ll look for somewhere else to stay, then.’
He slashed her that look of his. The one she remembered, the one that used to give her pulse a kick. The aware one. As if he saw right through her. And suddenly she regretted the extra layer of thermals. Heat billowed up from nowhere.
‘If there was nothing available last night there’ll be nothing today. No one else can leave either.’
‘Unless someone got eaten by a bear,’ she joked.
He didn’t dignify that with a comment. But his glare spoke volumes.
Kitty scanned the dog yard carved in amongst the thick Boreal forest and the chains tethering each animal to their cosy little doghouse. That would stop the dogs running wild but it would also stop them running for their lives if a bear happened along.
‘How often are dogs attacked by bears?’
The glare redoubled.
‘Bears don’t kill dogs,’ he said irritably. ‘Dogs kill dogs.’
She glanced at his pack, so carefully tethered out of reach of each other. But then she remembered how they’d all piled in together last night quite happily.
‘The Boreal wolves are much more likely to attack for territorial reasons. We have a few around here.’
And wolves were mostly nocturnal.
Understanding flooded in. ‘That’s why you brought them all into the house last night.’
‘Most dogs up here live, grow old and die tethered up outside unless they’re working. But I lost a young male to a wolf a few weeks back.’ He dropped his eyes away from hers. ‘He did a good job defending the pack—’
Better than me, she thought she heard him say under his breath as he turned partly away to coil up a length of rope.
‘—but his injuries were too severe.’
‘The wolf killed him?’
‘I killed him,’ Will said, his movements sharp. ‘The wolf just started it.’
Kitty blinked. He’d had to put his dog down by his own hand?
‘I’m sorry, Will. That’s rough.’
He shrugged, but it wasn’t anywhere near as careless as he probably wanted her to believe. ‘The vet flies up from Winnipeg once a month. In between, we have to DIY.’
‘Still. You’re more about saving lives than taking them.’ He’d been rescuing people in need since he was a boy. It was in his blood. He’d been raised by a second-generation search-and-rescue man.
She thought she saw him wince, but he masked it in the turn of his body back towards the cabin.
‘Breakfast?’ he said, as brightly as his gruff manner allowed.
‘You haven’t eaten?’
‘I don’t generally eat before noon,’ he said. ‘But the fridge is stocked up. Help yourself.’
‘Really? You were all about the big breakfast in Nepal,’ she murmured, turning to follow him. Then it hit her... Could he not bring himself to have that without his wife?
‘Breakfast was Marcella’s thing,’ he said. ‘It meant something to her. Family starting the day together.’
And he’d loved her enough to indulge it.
Sorrow soaked through her. And something else, something closer to...envy. Which pretty much made her the worst person alive. Still hankering for another woman’s man, even though that woman was dead.
‘Will, I’m so sorry about—’
‘Stay as long as you need to,’ he said brusquely, gathering up his tools. His words couldn’t have been colder if she’d found them lying scattered in the snow. ‘You have a fire and food and the best Internet in town.’
‘I don’t want to be an inconvenience.’
‘I’m not planning on being your entertainment,’ Will said, gruffly. ‘I have work to get on with. There’s no inconvenience.’
‘No,’ she muttered as he turned to wander off. She felt about as welcome as that time in Nepal. ‘Of course.’
But as she went to follow him inside, her foot hit a patch of ice and she scrabbled out for the most stable thing she could find.
Will.
He twisted and caught her under one elbow and one armpit—all terribly graceful—and steadied her back onto her feet. The last time he’d been this close she’d stumbled, too. Down some steps in Nepal. That time when Will had caught her hard up against his body, she’d clung to him just as she clung now, and her pulse had rioted in exactly the same way. He’d set her back on her feet, turned and simply walked away, but not before his jaw had clamped in a way that had made her think he’d felt the zing too.
Now, he dropped his hands away from her the moment she was back in charge of her legs, but his eyes fell to her lips and were the last part of him to turn away.
Five years had changed nothing, it seemed.
She still wasn’t welcome in Will Callaghan’s life.
And his body still said otherwise.
* * *
‘Take Dexter,’ Will called as she headed outside that afternoon all rugged-up. ‘If he growls, head back in immediately.’
She paused on the second step and looked down at him working on the motor of a quad bike. ‘Why? What will it be?’
‘Something bigger than you.’
She’d spent all day indoors—too afraid to go further than dash distance from the phone in case her flight was suddenly scheduled—but by late that afternoon she’d gone a little stir-crazy. Will, good to his word, had busied himself all day and left her to her own devices. She’d poked around the cabin and browsed through his books but there was only so much reading a girl could do. Especially one who usually filled her days to overflowing with to-do-list. It didn’t take long for the tiny cabin surrounded by all these trees to start closing in on her. Enough that she’d temporarily forgotten how wild this place really was despite its modern comforts.