Книга - Stranded With Her Rescuer

Stranded With Her Rescuer
Nikki Logan


His reluctant damsel in distressAdventurer Will Margrave loves working in the Canadian wilderness, with only his huskies for company. After losing his wife, he’s determined never to make himself vulnerable again. Until he rescues snowbound Kitty Callaghan, the one woman who always saw past his armour, and he can no longer deny their long-hidden attraction…Kitty’s never allowed herself to get close to anyone, handsome Will least of all! Yet as he starts to melt her defences, Kitty wonders… Is Will the missing piece of her heart she’s always been looking for?









“Careful what you wish for, Will. You might find you don’t like what you find, at all.”


Hadn’t he already said she’d changed?

He pushed to his feet, into shadows, so that she couldn’t quite find his gaze, but his earnest expression stole every bit of breath she’d managed to suck in as he stepped forward into the fire’s circle of light.

“I doubt that,” he murmured.

She wanted to answer—some terrifically witty response—but, nope, there wasn’t enough air left in her cells, let alone her lungs. All she could do was stare into the sparkling depths of his eyes and wonder what it would be like to swim strokes in the icy blue there.

As she watched, they flicked down to her parted lips and back again. “You’re an enigma to me, Kitty Callaghan. And I’ve always enjoyed puzzles.”

She wanted to warn him that she was more puzzle than he knew. She was one of those boxes with hidden mechanisms, cryptic clues and booby traps if you pressed the wrong place. She wanted to but she didn’t, because the moment he stared at her lips, all she could think about was what it would be like to kiss him. To taste him and breathe him in.

After all this time.

And in that moment, she knew that she’d been wanting that since the very first moment she met him. More than just about anything else in her life.




Stranded with Her Rescuer

Nikki Logan







www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)


NIKKI LOGAN lives on the edge of a string of wetlands in Western Australia with her partner and a menagerie of animals. She writes captivating nature-based stories full of romance in descriptive natural environments. She believes the danger and richness of wild places perfectly mirror the passion and risk of falling in love.

Nikki loves to hear from readers via www.nikkilogan.com.au (http://www.nikkilogan.com.au) or through social media. Find her on Twitter, @readnikkilogan (https://twitter.com/readnikkilogan) and Facebook, nikkiloganauthor (http://www.facebook.com/nikkiloganauthor).


For my beautiful boy, Gus.

The sonorous metronome to which I wrote my books.

How you would have loved all this snow.

“Dogs are wise. They crawl into a quiet corner and lick their wounds and do not rejoin the world until they are whole once more.”

—Agatha Christie


Contents

Cover (#u041367aa-1431-5c2f-bf07-f0ce80fd1cc4)

Introduction (#u9642a890-c9e2-58da-ada6-530ed8df5ab1)

Title Page (#u4b9c5962-eb5b-5740-b835-3c11532da39e)

About the Author (#ue22e0aa1-669e-5c57-a1a1-a9ef7b01dd7c)

Dedication (#u3950484a-173d-5a17-aed4-260f7f455546)

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

EPILOGUE

Extract (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)


PROLOGUE (#ub85cdf9a-ac47-52c5-be01-51fdd58ee0b9)

Five years ago, Pokhara, Nepal.

WILL MARGRAVE LEANED a shoulder against the rounded earthen interior wall of his villa overlooking Pokhara and peered through the window down to the terrace flats below. The topmost flat was furred with the gentle, swaying grasses native to this part of Nepal, peppered with small clusters of shrubs and fully fenced all the way around to the kennels out back of the house. The yard had to be large, to do its job housing his sixteen rescue dogs.

Maybe it was the richness of the light, or the majesty of the mountains or the mirrored reflection of Phewa Lake but everything in this environment just sat so...comfortably in it.

Including him.

Will leaned forward into the window’s curve to watch the solitary woman below mingling with his dogs. Kitty Callaghan liked to start her day early and she liked to start it outside. On her second day here, he’d spotted her halfway down the terraces, meditating under the watchful protection of the Annapurnas as the sun rose behind the mountain range, doing her best impersonation of a normal, still person. Usually she was anything but, and today she was clearly in a more active mood, jogging back and forth in the fenced-in yard, tapping the noses of one dog then the next and darting back out of reach as they joined the game, drawing a canine cluster back and forth with her as she ran, not minding how silly she might look or how much dirt they kicked up.

Dogs and dirt didn’t bother Kitty any more than the looming mountains and composting toilets did. It was one of the things he liked about her best.

Not everybody loved the silent granite sentinels that marked Nepal’s border. Mountains were dominant, powerful forces—for better or worse. Some people found them oppressive and ominous, almost claustrophobic. People like his wife. Though how Marcella could stand anywhere on this hillside under these vast, wild skies and feel closed in was a mystery to him.

Like so much about her.

That mystery had once intrigued him—back when he’d assumed her secrets would unfurl like a lotus as the months and years passed—but intrigue had a way of losing its appeal when your marriage eroded as steadily as the rock beneath your feet.

Down below, Kitty laughed as one dog got the better of her. She arched back when Quest reared up and placed his paws on her slight shoulders, her face turned up to the gentle morning light—twisted away from Quest’s errant tongue—and the magic of her laughter cascaded like water down the terraced hillside.

And like warm breath down his spine.

Ugh... Moments like this one didn’t help his resolve. Looking at those wide grey eyes in perfect pale skin and not wanting to just...dive right in to see what curiosities lay behind them. Sitting up late at night by the fire, hovering on the precipice of the kind of conversations he missed so desperately, lying to himself that he could get a handle on the feelings that had been escalating ever since she arrived ten short days ago to film her series of freelance pieces in Nepal.

Ten long days knowing that Marcella was the kind of woman he’d always wanted—glamorous, talented, creative—but beginning to fear that Kitty was the kind he actually needed.

And he didn’t want to need anything from anyone who wasn’t his wife.

Eleven months ago he’d given Marcella his promise along with his heart, and he was not about to betray either of those. If he had to break his word to a woman, it wasn’t going to be the one he had pledged himself to in front of God.

They could make this marriage work—he could make it work.

Will shoved the ache down deep inside as he withdrew from the window. Kitty Callaghan needed to go. She didn’t have to leave Nepal—she could finish up her work—she just had to get out of this house. This town.

This marriage.

And she needed to do it soon, before the questions her presence raised began to eat away at the foundations of his already shaky relationship.

Will balled his fingers into fists and headed for the stairs.

He wasn’t even halfway down before his heart started hardening against her.

* * *

The slow rise of her head, the easy, surprised-to-see-you smile she offered him... It was all fake. Kitty knew the precise moment Will stepped out of his house, even as she had her back to him and the massive Annapurnas towering up behind him. She didn’t need Quest’s excited stare to tell her he was approaching, either.

She could feel him.

She could always feel him; in the tickle of her neck hairs and the tightening of her belly. Some kind of primitive intuition doing its thing. Still, she gave him her brightest, most welcoming smile. Because it was something she could do. A gesture that celebrated the bond she’d formed with him, in a perfectly appropriate way. One that said she knew exactly how lucky she was to be here.

‘Morning, Will.’

‘Got a moment, Kitty?’

There was something in the hard shadow in his eyes, the stiff way he was holding himself. The same way he did when one of his dogs indicated positive on a shard of clothing during a missing-hiker search. His tension infected her, too, and Quest fell away from their game, disappointed but accepting.

‘Sure.’

Will held a courteous hand low to her back as he guided her out of the dog yard, then seemed to think better of it and tucked it down behind his own body. As if she were tainted.

‘Something wrong? Is Marcella okay?’

Because some mornings his wife really wasn’t. Those mornings she looked as if she hadn’t slept more than an hour. If at all. And not in a good, first-year-of-marriage, up-all-night kind of way.

‘Marcella’s fine. I just need to speak to you.’

Instinct told her to get ahead of this conversation, to get some control over it. She spun to face him and he nearly barrelled into her. He caught himself just before impact, then stepped back as though—again—she were infected with something nasty. He backed up a little further for good measure.

That extra step particularly hurt.

‘Something you didn’t want the dogs to hear?’ she joked, though it cost her.

‘Kitty, I...’ He glanced out at the mountains all around them for inspiration. This wasn’t like him. The two of them had had nothing but easy conversations in the ten days she’d been in Nepal. Easy, deep, fabulous talks that felt as if they were continuing old exchanges from years ago.

‘You’re making me nervous, Will. What’s going on?’

‘I need to ask you to leave,’ he blurted.

How embarrassing that her first response was to misunderstand him. She frowned and glanced back at the dogs. ‘The yard? I thought it would be okay to—’

‘Pokhara, Kitty. It’s time for you to go.’

She blinked at him. ‘No, it’s not. I have nearly three weeks before it’s time.’

And, boy, she was not looking forward to that day.

‘Marcella shouldn’t have invited you to stay the whole month. It’s...’ He gazed back at the mountains. ‘It’s too much, Kitty. Too long.’

An awful kind of humiliation washed through her. That she had presumed he would be okay with it just because his wife was. Or seemed to be.

‘You said I was welcome,’ she breathed.

In his own words, with no one twisting his arm.

‘That’s what you do say, in this situation, isn’t it?’

When someone makes a horrendous presumption, did he mean?

‘So...’ Her head spun, and not just from the altitude. ‘Was I never welcome or am I no longer welcome?’

She didn’t really want to know the answer, either way, but she absolutely wanted to hear it from his lips.

‘You’ve finished filming our rescue operation...’

Part of the heat that rushed up her throat was because, to an extent, Will was right. She’d finished the main filming for the dogs, she’d been enjoying Pokhara and getting a feel for the country since then. Imagining what a fantastic piece it was going to make, visually.

And spinning out her time with him.

‘And we’ve got too much going on—’

‘No, you don’t.’

Marcella barely painted, never went out if she could avoid it; she lurked around their property alternating between long bouts of flat melancholy and excited bursts of energy. Meanwhile, Will trained every day but he had a comfortable routine that didn’t wear the dogs out. And only two emergency calls in the ten days she’d been here.

His lips thinned as he stared at her. The first time he’d made actual eye contact.

‘Kitty—’

‘I pick up after myself. I went to the market on Monday to save Marcella the trouble.’ And—PS—paid for a carload of supplies. ‘So what’s the real issue?’

Of course, a dignified person wouldn’t ask. A dignified person would just accept that things had changed and head off to start packing. Smiling, thanking them and giving her hosts a modest gift when she went. But there was nothing dignified about the panic that Kitty was starting to feel at Will’s decree, and not just because of the humiliation. Sometime between arriving and now, she’d realised that she was the happiest she’d ever been in Pokhara. Having that taken away was terrifying.

And the thought of never seeing Will again only compounded it.

‘You can’t really want to stay,’ he urged. ‘Knowing we don’t want you here.’

Something told her that ‘we’ was actually ‘I’, because his wife had clung to her since the day she’d arrived, and Marcella was too Southern and too well brought up to renege on a promise.

‘No,’ she snorted. ‘I don’t. But I’m not leaving without knowing what I did to get myself banished.’

She had a sneaking suspicion, actually, and a whole new flood of shame went on standby, ready for his answer.

For the first time, he softened, and it was so much worse than the hardened exterior he’d presented up until now. Because it was Will, not this icy doppelgänger.

‘You must know, Kit. You’re doing it right now.’

She lost her grip on the humiliation and it flooded her face. For ten days she’d worked so hard to keep a lid on her inappropriate feelings. To pretend the emotions didn’t exist. But they had a habit of leaking out when she was with him. Any time she wasn’t totally vigilant. Talking, laughing.

Or just standing very close, like this... Peering up at him.

‘I...’

Really, what could she say? She knew she was feeling it, and she knew what she was feeling. She would be naïve to imagine she wasn’t showing that at all, but Will hadn’t let on before, or objected to the conversations, the shared space, the accidental body contact passing on the stairs.

She’d even begun to think he might have enjoyed it. Just a little bit.

Obviously not.

‘It’s okay, Kitty, I get it. We’ve been spending a lot of time together—’

Her heart hammered.

She wasn’t about to be condescended to like a teenager. If he’d picked up on her feelings, why had he indulged them? Why not just shut them right down?

Shame ached through her whole body.

This was him shutting them down.

‘I just think it would be better for everyone if you headed off to do your own thing,’ he said.

Get the heck off his mountain, he meant.

‘We were friends,’ she said, numb and flat. Too hurt and too confused to even put any energy behind the accusation.

His eyes darkened and swung away from her. ‘You must want to see the rest of Nepal.’

No, not really. She’d been happy here, happier than any other time in her life. It was this mountain she loved, not just any Nepalese mountain. This town. This man.

That was why she had to go.

She could not love Will Margrave, and he certainly couldn’t love her, even if he wanted to, which—judging by the enormous tension in his body—he did not.

‘I’m married, Kitty.’

Yes, to the woman who’d invited her into their home. Was this how she’d repaid Marcella’s kindness? By making her husband uncomfortable enough to ask her to leave?

She dropped her eyes to the dark, rich earth. She’d caused this. She had to be the one to fix it.

‘Okay,’ she murmured. ‘I’ll go.’

She stumbled away from Will without raising her eyes again. And she didn’t look at him as she wrestled her stuffed backpack down the stairs, or as she hugged a weeping Marcella, or as she closed the door of the aging taxi behind her.

In fact, she didn’t raise her gaze until she was safely away from that Pokhara hillside, just in case he saw something there she would never recover from. Something worse than love.

Shame.

Which made that pitying gaze out by the dogs’ yard the last of Will Margrave she would ever see. And pity the last thing he would ever feel for her.

And she promised herself, in that moment, never to drop her eyes again.


CHAPTER ONE (#ub85cdf9a-ac47-52c5-be01-51fdd58ee0b9)

Present day, Churchill, Canada.

‘YOU MUST BE KIDDING!’

Kitty Callaghan bundled herself tighter in her complimentary blanket and swapped her hand luggage into her right hand to give her left a break.

‘Sorry, ma’am,’ the polite woman said, widening her arms to usher her towards the exit. ‘Canadian federal law. No one can stay inside the airport after shutdown.’

‘But I have nowhere to go,’ she pointed out, though it was hardly necessary since this was the same official who’d been working for hours to find beds—or even sofas—for the one hundred and sixty-four passengers who’d found themselves stranded in their remote dot-on-a-map after smoke started billowing from their aircraft’s cargo hold thirty-five thousand feet over Greenland.

‘We’ve done everything we can to find accommodation for the final six of you. Three will be bunking down in the medical centre and two will be guests of the Mounties tonight in their holding cells. That’s every bed we have in town.’

Which left her sitting up all night in some waiting room.

This was the price she paid for being good at her job. Or maybe for simply doing it. Airlines had a way of not appreciating it when you captured their stuff-ups for posterity. She’d been way too busy filming the whole emergency response that had followed the pilot’s spectacular touchdown of the massive airliner on the remote, ice-patched runway to get herself higher up the queue for overnight accommodation. By the time she’d started paying attention to where she was going to spend the rest of the night, there had been no more room at the inn.

‘You don’t have a hotel here? Or even a B & B?’

The woman’s compassion wasn’t making her feel any better. ‘Actually we have nearly as many hotel rooms as residents but they’re all booked up because of bear season. And we’re out of volunteers with sofas.’

‘Bear season?’ Kitty blinked her confusion, glancing around. ‘Where are we exactly?’

Other than someplace snowy somewhere on a high arc between Zurich and Los Angeles up over the top of the planet. She’d been sleeping comfortably when the captain had made his emergency announcement and the chaos that had followed really hadn’t been the time to be pumping the flight crew with questions.

‘Churchill, Manitoba, ma’am,’ the woman said proudly. ‘Polar bear capital of the world.’

Churchill...

All the ice the A340 had come sliding in on suddenly seemed to relocate to her chest.

She’d heard of Churchill...

‘And what is bear season exactly?’ she said, tightly, to buy herself the time she needed to get her fibrillating heart under control.

The woman smiled, oblivious to the sudden extra tension in the near-empty terminal. ‘Oh, hundreds of bears migrate here to wait for Hudson Bay to freeze over, to go hunt on the ice for the winter. Numbers are at their peak right now. They’re everywhere.’

‘Maybe I could snuggle in between two of them for the night.’

The woman had a right to be disappointed at Kitty’s tone, but she had a right to be snitchy. Her plane had caught fire in mid-air. She’d endured an emergency landing then been bounced out into the bitter cold via the emergency slides with nothing but the light dress on her back, the complimentary blanket she’d been snuggled in, and her cabin bag, which she’d packed with the minimalist precision of a pro. Just her camera gear, some basic toiletries and an e-reader; none of which were going to help her out here. She had nowhere to go for the night except the heated police station waiting room because apparently this one was off-limits. And to top it all off, she’d landed in the only place on Earth she’d never planned on visiting—not because of its resident bears, but because of one human resident in particular.

Desperation set in like a low-hanging cloud. ‘What about your house?’

The woman had no reason to continue to be kind to her, but she did. God love Canada. ‘I’ve already sent two people home to my husband. Both on the sofas. Someone is on their way to get you and drive you into town, ma’am.’

‘Can’t they just keep on driving me to the nearest city? Something with beds?’

Apparently that thought was just hilarious.

The woman laughed. ‘The only way in or out of Churchill is by plane or train. And Winnipeg is a thousand miles to the south.’

Right. Which part of polar bear did she miss? Their trusty pilot must really have been desperate to get them out of the air to have landed them in the sub-arctic.

‘When will they send another plane, do you think?’ she asked weakly.

The woman glanced at her watch and frowned. ‘Let’s just get you sorted for tonight.’

This wasn’t the tightest spot she’d ever been in, though it was the first involving live predators, and the thought of sitting uncomfortably in some waiting room for hours scarcely appealed. Especially when there was no guarantee that she’d get on a flight tomorrow. Or the day after, or the day after.

Her lashes drifted shut.

Desperate times...

‘Does Will Margrave still live up here?’ she breathed.

He’d moved to Churchill right after the quakes in Nepal. Right after he’d lost Marcella. She’d exploited a working relationship with a clerk at the Department of Foreign Affairs to find out that he’d come home to Canada—come here—and then she’d pretended to delete the knowledge from her brain.

‘You know Will?’

She’d thought she had. Once. ‘It’s been a while.’

The airport officer moved immediately towards the phone. ‘We don’t usually ask Will because his cabin is so far out of town. Kind of isolated—’

Of course it was. Because this day wasn’t perfect enough.

‘Just try him, please,’ she urged. ‘Make sure you tell him it’s Kitty Callaghan. My full name.’

Kitty glanced out at the airport car park as the woman made her call. The sideways sleet was illuminated against the darkness of the night by floodlighting and she wondered whether the lights might serve as a beacon for any rogue bears wandering past looking for a late-night snack.

‘Any airport in a storm...’ she muttered.

The airline officer’s surprise drew Kitty’s focus back across the terminal.

‘Okay! John can take you straight there,’ she called, hurrying across the shiny floor. ‘The taxi ride is on us.’

Suddenly, the police waiting room didn’t look quite so bad. Compared to facing Will again. ‘Right now?’

The woman glanced at the clock on the wall. ‘As soon as your taxi gets here. Looks like it’s your lucky day!’

Lucky.

Right.

* * *

It wasn’t as far as the airport official had implied, as the crow flew, but no self-respecting crow would be out in this weather. The roads gouged through the hardening Boreal sog were slow going, impossible to see more than ten feet ahead of the old SUV that served as one of Churchill’s two taxis. It crept along deeper into the forest until they finally pulled up in front of a shadowy cabin with dim firelight glowing inside.

Proper Snow White territory.

‘Here we are,’ the driver chirped as a hooded figure appeared in the cabin’s entrance. He reached across Kitty to open her door and she clambered out into the bitter cold in pumps already soggy from the dash across the airport car park. Immediately her lungs started hurting with the cold.

‘Enjoy your stay,’ the driver grunted, more to himself than to her, before crunching his vehicle in every ice-topped puddle back up the long drive.

She turned and stared at the shadowy forest cabin.

‘Heat’s escaping,’ a gruff voice called from the open doorway. Then the figure turned and went back inside and only the puffs of mist where his words had been remained, backlit by the light pouring out of the cabin.

Lord...

Time had done nothing to diminish the effect of his voice on the hairs on her neck even as they gathered frost straight out of the sub-arctic air. The gruff rumble turned her insides to jelly just as much now as it had in Nepal. Fortunately, jelly couldn’t stand up to the frost in her chest any more than the frost outside it.

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 (#ub85cdf9a-ac47-52c5-be01-51fdd58ee0b9)

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.

Dexter was stoked to be released from his tether and tasked with being her bodyguard. He galumphed alongside her into the trees, breaking out in wider and wider arcs, sniffing everything he found. Kitty trod carelessly at first but then Dexter’s obsession with the Boreal floor drew her eyes downward, too, and she realised what it was she was walking on with her spanking new boots.

Living creatures.

The ground was blanketed with lichens, waterlogged plantlets and mosses, all of it jewelled with icicles. Leaves the colour of bruises poked up from between a mossy groundcover so green it was almost yellow. Something white that looked as if it belonged on a reef rather than a forest floor. Some kind of pale parasitic plant, growing happily on anything that didn’t fight back, alongside earth-toned fungi piggybacking on a tree’s circulatory system. Such a perfect natural system working in balance; crowded and chaotic and tangled, but everything was getting exactly what it needed to survive. And all of them poking above last night’s snowfall. Now and again, a rare patch of actual ground, something hard underfoot. Not the ground that was made of dirt and went down and down until it hit bedrock—this ground sat on permafrost; a layer of ice, far below, that never managed to thaw, even in summer.

Which would explain the bone-numbing cold rising up through the forest floor into her boots.

She stepped out of the thicker copse of trees to the edge of a clearing and stared into the distance. Orangey brown as far as the eye could see, everything frosted with ice, punctuated by the one-sided Tamarack trees that reached for the sky, and dotted with little swamps of frigid surface water. Really this was just one big, thriving wetland. All of it in soft focus, courtesy of the gentle fog.

She filled her lungs with the cleanest air she’d ever tasted and eased it back out again just as slowly.

It took her a moment to realise that Dexter was growling.

It started low in his long throat and then burbled up and out of his barely parted lips, his tail stiffening and vibrating minutely. He’d turned his stare straight back into the forest, the direction she would have to go to get the short distance back to the house.

Thoughts of all the things out here that could be bigger than her flashed through her mind. Bears, wolves, even caribou could do some damage if they were in the right mood. Or the wrong one. Her eyes darted around for anything with which to defend herself, then she gave up and peered deep into the empty stand of trees she’d just left, breath suspended.

Out of nowhere, a massive flash of grey bounded towards her out of the darkness. She hadn’t even seen it lurking! But before she could do more than suck in enough breath for a scream, Dexter’s tail lifted from its low, stiff position to a higher wave. Less like an accusing finger and more like a parade flag.

‘Jango!’ Will stepped out of the shadows behind his dog.

A sawn-off log made for a convenient place to slowly sink down in lieu of collapse. Jango sneezed and bounded off with Dexter to explore, leaving Kitty with only Will to defend her. Even without the firearm he’d slung over his shoulder, she trusted he could do just that. Probably with his bare hands.

He was just that kind of man.

Maybe that was why she’d fallen so hard for him back in Nepal.

‘Did I wander too far?’ she asked, immediately contrite.

‘I needed to give Jango a run to see how her leg is doing, thought I might as well come this way.’

Pfff... ‘Worried about the tourist getting lost in your forest?’

‘Just worried for my dog,’ he corrected carefully.

That brought her eyes around to the hound snuffling around a distant tree. ‘What happened to her?’

‘She lost a pad to frostbite,’ he said. ‘Standing guard over an injured hiker last winter.’

Concern stained her voice. ‘And she’s still healing?’

‘She wore a mediboot all summer. It’s just come off.’

Kitty couldn’t shake the feeling that it was an excuse. Maybe he didn’t trust her outside alone. Once a rescuer, always a rescuer.

‘It’s stunning out here,’ she breathed, turning back to the open stretch where Boreal eased out into more open wetlands. ‘Is it all like this?’

‘Where it’s not tundra,’ he grunted. ‘Or Hudson Bay.’

He extended his hand to help her to her feet. It took two deep breaths before she could bring herself to slide her fingers into his. But two layers of arctic gloves muted the old zing and she only had to contend with the gentle pressure of his strong hand around hers until he released her.

‘Listen, Will...’

His back tightened immediately and he turned away from what was coming. She caught his elbow before he could spin away fully.

‘I wanted to...’ Lord, how did you start a conversation like this one? Thank you for telling me your wife died. ‘When Marcella—’

‘Sorry it was such a group announcement,’ he interrupted.

It was part of what had first drawn her to him, Will’s ability to just know what she was thinking. ‘Don’t apologise. I was so grateful to have heard after everything we’d seen on the news feeds. The quakes... I messaged you. Twice.’

She’d tried to convince her network to let her go to Nepal, to report on the recovery—desperate to see Will still breathing with her own eyes—but in the end the vast numbers of media streaming into the city had only been putting more pressure on Kathmandu’s limited resources. Instead, she’d kept herself glued to the feeds coming into her network, looking for the slightest glimpse of Will working with his rescue dogs in the capital. Even as she’d reminded herself why she shouldn’t even care. It hadn’t occurred to her that either of them faced such risk staying to help out after the first quake.

He winced, but then his gaze lifted and locked onto hers. ‘I wasn’t really in a position to chat.’

No. He’d just buried his wife.

Metaphorically.

He tugged his arm free and turned to stride away from her along the squishy Boreal floor.

Will’s eventual message had shattered her and, as she’d quietly wept, she’d known a deep kind of shame that she was crying not just out of sadness that her friend had died, but also for relief that Will had not.

‘How are you doing now?’ she risked, catching up with him.

He shrugged, and she supposed it was meant to appear easy. ‘That was two years ago.’

‘You don’t set a watch on losing someone you love. Or on a traumatic event like that.’

He stomped on in silence but finally had no real choice but to answer. ‘I’m doing okay.’

‘Long way from Nepal,’ she prompted, stumbling over a particularly thick thatch of sod grass.

He slowed a little so that she didn’t have to scamper after him like an arctic hare. ‘I was a bit over mountains. So I looked for the widest, flattest, most open space I could find where I could also work rescue.’

She could well imagine his desire to come home to Canada, too. Back to what he knew. To regroup.

Kitty scanned the distant horizon and the miles and miles of squat flat Boreal stretching all the way to it. ‘You sure found flat.’

Dexter and Jango continued to frolic, dashing around and sticking their noses into any space big enough to accommodate one. Given they spent much of their day tethered to their kennels or to a sled, working, this kind of freedom was probably a rare luxury. And sneezing seemed to be Jango’s way of celebrating.

‘What happened to your dogs in Nepal?’ she risked.

His silence was almost answer enough, but then he finally spoke. ‘I had four dogs with me in Kathmandu when the second quake hit, so they survived. I left them behind with Roshan when I left. There was still a lot of recovery work for them to do there without me.’

Only four survivors...

She’d had the privilege of filming most of Will’s sixteen dogs out hunting for lost climbers on the Annapurna Mountains, or a pair of hikers caught down in the valleys, or just training out in the field. He’d probably never imagined the horrific circumstances they’d be working in just a few years later. Or that he would lose so many of them in a single event.

‘Hard, leaving the four behind...’ she probed.

In the silent forest, his voice had no trouble drifting back to her. And when it did it was raw and thick and honest—the Will she remembered from Nepal.

‘Harder staying.’

He had suffered immeasurably. Losing his wife, the place he called home, the dogs he trained and loved. Facing death and despair every single day for weeks.

And she was asking him to relive it now.

Heat rushed up from under the collar of her parka. ‘Sorry, Will. Blame my enquiring mind...’

It took her a moment to notice that he’d fallen behind her as she picked her way through the moss. She turned. Regret stained his ice-blue eyes, then changed into something more like dark grief.

‘No. I’m sorry, Kitty. Your questions are perfectly reasonable. Under the circumstances.’

For the first time since she’d arrived in Churchill he was normal with her. Human. The old Will. The man who had made her breathless with just one look. Faint with the accidental touch of his callused fingers. It was absolutely the right time to go deeper, to wiggle her way in under his protective barriers and hunt for more of the old Will.

Except that Old Will had as little place in New Kitty’s life as he did in his own.

The past belonged in the past.

‘So, how are you settling in in Churchill?’ she asked, to give him a break.

He sighed. ‘I keep to myself for the most part. That is reason enough to get noticed up here.’

‘I would have thought the north was full of people keeping to themselves.’

‘Turns out there are rules to being an outcast. Some social niceties that even hermits are expected to deliver on.’ He glanced at her expression. ‘I may not have made quite the effort that they were expecting.’

Kitty slid him a sideways glance. ‘You shock me.’

On anyone else, that slight twisting of his lips might have been a smile. On Will, it never paid to assume. But her heart flip-flopped regardless. ‘Still, the airport lady seemed to think well enough of you.’

‘I’m working on it. So what was in Zurich?’ he asked, artfully moving the conversation on. ‘A story or a man?’

There was nothing in the impassive question to give her pause, yet it did. Maybe it was the irony of this man asking her about other men. Will Margrave was precisely the reason she’d had no meaningful relationships since the last time she’d seen him. She’d thrown herself into her work for the twelve months after being so rudely ejected from Pokhara, and soon she’d been way too busy escalating her career to entertain more than the most casual of relationships. Too caught up globetrotting and network-hopping and hunting down the big stories.

She’d gone to Nepal in search of a powerful story, not a powerful attraction. Regardless, afterwards she’d struggled to find a man who could reach the very high bar Will had set.

Perhaps she should thank him for her successful career. He’d given her the shove she needed to be great. Greater.

‘I was in Zurich shooting a story about Switzerland’s textile industry. Tax haven meets innovation.’

‘Industry?’ He frowned. ‘Doesn’t seem like your kind of thing.’

He would say that. The woman he’d met five years ago was into human-interest stories and spectacular natural places, not commercial ventures and tax law.

She pressed her lips together. ‘We all change.’

Especially when you were as highly motivated as she had been. Focusing on your career to the exclusion of anything else. ‘I’m a foreign correspondent for a Chinese TV network now, CNTV. Their business programmes. Based in LA.’

If by ‘based’ you meant a postage stamp of an apartment that she rarely ever returned to because she was on the road so much. The world’s most expensive storage facility.

‘Foreign correspondent makes a little more sense, I guess.’

Was that a compliment or a criticism? It was impossible to tell from Will.

‘Nothing wrong with ambition,’ she huffed. ‘And I go where the stories are.’

Certainly, her career had gone where the promotions were. Hopping from network to network as opportunities presented themselves. The closest she came, these days, to the hobo-like habits of her past.

Lord how she missed the hobo days, sometimes. When her boss’s boss was hammering them for a particular angle or cutting a deadline by days it was hard not to long for the freedom she used to enjoy creating her own stories, following her nose, rolling with her instincts.

But she’d traded all that for a steady income and a bigger font on her credit.

‘Plenty of stories to be found up here,’ Will murmured. ‘Maybe you can knock off a few while you wait for your airlift out. Though you might struggle to find something to interest the business set.’

‘You don’t think cashed-up people want to see polar bears?’

‘I know they do. I’ve escorted some of them around the district. Though I am curious why you don’t seem to want to. Most people would have started nagging hours ago.’

Didn’t want to? Was that what he thought? The truth was so much more complicated. If she saw a polar bear, how would she stop wanting to see polar bears? Or eagles. Or manatees. Or deserts.

She’d gone for a clean break—and for corporate stories—for a reason.

‘I’d like to see a bear,’ she breathed on a puff of mist before hurriedly adding, ‘Though not out here.’

Again that tiny mouth twist. ‘So take a few days to look around.’

Easy for him to say. It wasn’t Will’s heart aching at the potential of this place. It wasn’t his soul trilling to be standing here, knee-deep in lichens and moss. It wasn’t his lungs aching with so much more than the coldness of the air around them.

Will wasn’t the one who had to leave Churchill the moment her number came up.

She’d already felt what it was like to be banished from somewhere that had rapidly started feeling like her soul home. Why would she set herself up for that again?

‘I’m on deadline for the Zurich piece. If I’m not back in the studio within a few days, this story is going to get cut and aired without me.’

And then who knew what angle it would take? There was no shortage of producers who would love to steal the feature slot she’d fought for. A slot that was scheduled just eight days from now.

Will frowned. ‘There’s every chance you won’t be, Kitty. You need to be prepared for that.’

She chewed her lip. ‘Maybe I can cut a rough from here on my laptop, and file that as a starter...’

‘I have the best comms outside of the Port because of my rescue work,’ Will went on. ‘There’s a satellite set up out back of the cabin. If you need to be talking to your network in China or sending them rough cuts this is the place to do it from. Mi data es su data.’

The man certainly knew how to appeal to a woman’s sense of duty... But it didn’t stop her chewing her lip.

‘Or shoot something entirely else.’

‘I’m not sure the business types at CNTV will be queuing up for an exposé on the hidden delights of the fifty-eighth parallel.’

‘So don’t do it for them, do it for you. Call it research if you truly can’t bring yourself to just relax and enjoy a few days of downtime.’

Relax? No, not while Will was around. She wouldn’t be making that mistake again.

Old Kitty would have chased whatever story excited her and would have told it in whatever way she wanted and then sold it to whoever had the most sympathetic vision. And if no one wanted to buy it she would have whacked it online, free, for the world to enjoy. Because the story was king back then. Money came much further down the list. Back in her idealistic, self-determined, passionate freelance days. Back before she was employed by particular networks to tell particular kinds of stories with particular kinds of agendas for particular kinds of audiences...

Back before New Kitty was born.

But wasn’t there some saying about making hay while the sun shone? Or the snow fell, in Churchill’s case. She was in the sub-arctic, cut off from the rest of the world, forced to take some time off from her competitive, all-consuming career. If there was a better opportunity to take a few days out of being Action Kitty to just remember how it felt to be Hobo Kitty she really couldn’t imagine it.

And keeping busy...now that definitely held a heap of appeal. But she made a last-ditch effort to say no.

‘Your plane practically fell from the sky, Kit. As excuses go that one is both solid and on public record. You’re stuck here for days, and insurance is picking up the tab...’

Kit.

Time had done nothing to dispel the fluttering of her heart when he used the diminutive form of her name. A presumption he’d made five years ago and she’d never been inclined to correct. She’d come to like it. Wait for it, even.

The reality was she was stuck here until tomorrow, if not later. Given how much work she yet had to do on the footage still on her hard drive, she’d be spending most of it in her room, tinkering on her laptop. If she stayed another day—or, God forbid, days—she could fill the time with research for a future story. That would keep her busy and out of Will’s way.

‘I guess that does open up a certain opportunity.’

‘And accommodation is free,’ he added.

‘Not if I find somewhere else to stay.’ Which she would, because he wouldn’t want her here any more than he had in Nepal. Will was just doing what was expected when a jet liner fell out of the sky in your back yard.

He turned in front of her and stopped her progress. ‘You won’t find anywhere, not for a few days. Besides you don’t need to relocate. You’re welcome to stay in my spare room as long as you need it.’

She stiffened her spine and locked gazes. ‘I was “welcome” in your home once before, remember?’

And there it was—streaking up his jaw out from under his scrappy beard—a subtle flash of red. The first real evidence that he remembered how they’d parted all those years ago.

Which meant he’d probably be on the lookout for repeats. Which meant she’d be on eggshells for ever, trying to give him nothing.

Everything in her screamed caution not to set herself up for more hurt. A single night was one thing...

‘I really don’t want to be a bother.’

His lips twisted. ‘I’m sure we can give each other plenty of room in a forest this big.’

No, Kitty. You’re no bother.

It’s fine, Kitty. No trouble.

Relax, Kitty, it’s out of your control.

On the scale of denials, Will’s effort was non-existent. Still...maybe picking up after herself and keeping out of his way would be adequate repayment for his dubious hospitality. And her story would get filed. And she’d have some fun reliving the old hobo days.

Win-win.

‘Okay. I guess it wouldn’t hurt for me to see a few things while I’m here.’ She watched him, carefully. ‘You know...research.’

The look he gave her then was uncomfortable in the way only Will could make it. As if he saw right through her flimsy excuses. As if he knew exactly how he made her feel and how she would feel until she collapsed, emotionally wrung out, into a plane seat and flew far from here.

As if he knew her better than she knew herself.

Pfff. This was Nepal all over again.


CHAPTER THREE (#ub85cdf9a-ac47-52c5-be01-51fdd58ee0b9)

A DAY LATER, Kitty clung desperately to the back of Will’s jacket as his quad bike flew them out to the local weir that dammed Churchill River. Will was the closest resident to it, which, apparently, made checking on activity at the weir his responsibility.

‘I go out dawn and dusk,’ he’d told her as he’d whipped the cover off the quad and hauled it out of the little shelter that kept it frost-free. ‘Put the flag up and then lower it again. Check on conditions. I take a different dog each time.’

This morning it was Bose’s turn. He’d seemed to know exactly what was happening and his excitement levels were off the chart waiting for them to get moving. Once they got under way, the golden retriever ran full tilt alongside the quad, breaking away to thunder through not quite frozen pools before veering back in to run hard up against Will’s left foot.

The quad bounced and slid along the snow-dusted track, crunching through the surface ice formed on puddles and practically flying over every dip and mound. Before long, gripping the back of Will’s jacket wasn’t enough to keep her firmly in her seat and the wind chill made her gloved fingers ache. So she slid her arms around his waist and dipped her head against the whipping snow and hoped to heaven that he didn’t mind the intimacy. Or wouldn’t read into it.

Warmer and more secure. And totally necessary.

Yeah, you keep telling yourself that.

The lie got harder to buy every time she breathed a lungful of him in.

As they came up over the final bend, Bose took off ahead of them and bolted down the long strait as fast as his legs could carry him, towards a watchtower overlooking the river.

‘Churchill Weir,’ Will called back. ‘Two hundred thousand cubic metres of rock piled up across the river to control water flow and create a reservoir for boating and fishing.’

Though obviously not so much in the frigid weeks leading up to winter. It was an impressive—but utterly vacant—facility about a mile up from where the Churchill River opened out into Hudson Bay. A mini-marina with boathouse, pontoon berths, first-aid facilities, fire pits, and the three-storey watchtower that served double duty as a lookout for tourists. The steel tower was fully caged in, in the event of a bear-related emergency, presumably. The massive structure could hold fifty people at a pinch.

Just two people and one dog was a pure luxury.

Kitty climbed to the top of the tower while Will checked over the marina and raised a wind-shredded Canadian flag for the day. Bose dived right into the icy river, splashing around like a kid in summer. He found a stick and chased it, tossing it up and letting it drift away on the current before crunching through the ice on the edge of the shore and diving back in after it.

Eventually, man and dog joined her at the bottom of the watchtower.

Around them, the river water churned and surged in the gusty, cold air. Icicles clung to the exposed leaves where it whipped up into a froth amongst the water sedge and polar grass. All around were banks of the rich red stick willow that grew so abundantly up here. Kitty pulled her woollen beanie down more firmly against the icy wind that buffeted her face with invisible needles. Even the gentle snowflakes felt like blades when they were tossed against her wind-whipped skin.

‘Bear!’

She gasped and crouched, pointing to the far side of the weir where a polar bear was in the process of hauling itself out of the river and up onto the bank. It did a full body shake that rippled its massive loose skin, then sauntered out into the middle of the parking area before pausing to think about the world.

It took barely a moment to find them with its beady black eyes once it had turned its nose to the air.

‘Inside,’ Will ordered, tugging her back into the towering metal lookout. The door closed behind the three of them with a reassuringly heavy clang. They were safe, as long as the bear didn’t decide to curl up out there for a nap. People had frozen in less time. Even with two layers of thermals and borrowed down jackets. And even in late autumn.

‘Can it smell us?’ she whispered.

‘No question,’ Will said. ‘But we won’t smell lardy enough to seriously interest it.’

She looked at him quizzically.

‘Bears hunt seals for their blubber, not their flesh,’ he explained.

‘And they can smell it?’

‘Two kilometres away, yep.’

‘And they don’t eat anything but seals?’

‘They can, but protein is not what they’re hungry for. People are way too stringy for them, as a rule.’

Kitty looked at the rangy bear. Its legs were like tree trunks, but its pristine coat hung loose around its frame where body mass was supposed to be.

‘He does look hungry,’ she said, softly. ‘How long since he’s eaten?’

‘Hard to know. The fact he’s swum upriver might be a sign he’s got energy from a recent feed, or it might be a sign he’s getting desperate. Ranging more widely.’

And every week the ice didn’t come was a week longer this bear had to go hungry.

‘He looks pretty relaxed.’

‘Polar bears love their alone time,’ Will murmured. ‘They can be social but they like nothing better than striking out alone on the ice and hunting.’

Kitty stole a glance at him.

‘What?’ he said when he caught the direction of her stare.

‘I was thinking that it takes one to know one.’

‘Nothing wrong with keeping to yourself,’ he said, somewhat defensively.

She went back to staring at the bear from their high position. As her first polar bear went, it wasn’t quite what she’d been expecting.

‘Why isn’t it white?’

‘Blubber again,’ he said.

She turned from the bear to him.

‘High oil content of their winter diet,’ he expanded. ‘The seal fat stains their coat from the inside out.’

She huffed out her disappointment. ‘Seal-fat-yellow. Wouldn’t that be a good name for a paint swatch?’

‘Give him time.’ Will chuckled. ‘This fella looks scrappy now but when his moult is finished and he starts feeding up he’ll be absolutely breathtaking. You expecting him to tap dance?’

‘Skinny and lipid yellow was not what I imagined my first bear would be like.’

‘A wild polar bear just hauled himself out of the river right in front of you. Have you really changed that much?’

The criticism bit as sharply as the wind still whipping around them. The implication that nature wasn’t good enough for her now.

‘It’s hard to buy into the wild part when he’s stretched out in the middle of a marina car park,’ she improvised to shift his focus. ‘Maybe I should try and see one somewhere a bit less manmade.’

There was a time she’d have gone crazy for a first sighting like that. Back when life was still an adventure. Before everything got so very...structured.

Will snorted. ‘I’ll take you out there if we get a chance.’

Kitty hopped from foot to foot to stay warm and turned to look at Bose, who had finally ceased his busy laps up and down the stairs and lingered on the metal platform, whimpering piteously.

‘Is he upset by the bear?’ Kitty frowned.

‘His feet hurt on the frozen metal,’ Will murmured, bending down to the agitated dog. A moment later he cursed. ‘I need your lip balm, Kitty. His feet were wet from his swim. His pads are freezing to the structure.’

The cold must have been affecting her brain; she wasn’t usually this slow to connect the dots.

‘Your lip balm,’ he repeated, more urgently. ‘Come on, city girl, you had it out earlier. I know you have it on you somewhere.’

She rifled in the pocket of Will’s jacket and produced the little squeeze tube of mint lip jelly. The one arctic-useful thing she’d had on the plane with her.

Will folded himself right down and squeezed a slimy trail of jelly around each of Bose’s bonded paws.

He massaged the balm into each pad, loosening the ice’s hold on the dog’s feet and preventing them from rebonding. Without waiting, Will hoisted him up onto his shoulders. Bose didn’t look thrilled to be so awkwardly positioned but it was clearly preferable to being stuck to the watchtower, suffering.

Across the clearing, the bear took offence at all the commotion and hauled itself onto massive feet before wandering off into the distant trees.

‘Sorry, big fella,’ Will murmured as it departed.

He took his time clanking noisily down the three levels of steel watchtower, balancing the dog precariously over his shoulders and giving the bear enough time and motivation to get well clear, before standing aside so Kitty could unlatch the heavy steel safety gate. As soon as they were out, Will relinquished Bose to the snow-protected ground, and he immediately sprinted over to where the bear had been lying to discover its scent. None the worse for his misadventure.

The surreality of the whole morning caught up with her as they got back to the quad bike and she took a moment to just stare at Will.

‘Two days ago I was in one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Europe at a posh product launch,’ she said, over the wind. ‘It was all suits, caviar, and networking. Now I’m stranded a thousand miles from anywhere with Grizzly bloody Adams, a pack of domesticated wolves and a bear.’ She lifted her eyes to him. ‘And there’s dog hair in my lip balm.’

‘Welcome to the north.’

Will’s easy grin warmed her even as the wind cut bitterly across her face. She stared at the mangled, near-empty little tube of lip balm.

‘Maybe you can claim it on insurance,’ he chuckled.

But when she continued to blink at him silently he laughed outright, the first time she’d heard that particular aphrodisiac in five long years.

‘Could be worse, Kit. Be grateful I didn’t ask you to pee on his paws.’

* * *

Had half a decade changed him as much as it had changed her?

Will tethered the last of his dogs after their early afternoon run. Around him their tongues lolled like happy tentacles. All but Starsky, who was still on puppy-guarding duty.

The Kitty Callaghan who’d stepped off that crippled aircraft was highly strung, driven, and more concerned with what her employers wanted than what she did. Half falling out of the sky didn’t seem to bother her anywhere near as much as possibly missing a deadline.

Who was she?

The woman he remembered was a free spirit, endlessly passionate, full of creativity and curiosity. Nothing had deterred her from pursuing her dream—right up until that last morning, anyway.

She’d blown into Nepal chasing a story about the world’s oldest woman and come across his canine rescue unit on her way through. Like the rest of the world, she’d assumed that all alpine rescue in the Himalayas was done by helicopter or by Sherpas with yaks, and she’d assumed that Everest was the only mountain worth falling off. The beautiful Annapurna range—and the team of dogs he ran on them recovering hikers in trouble—were a revelation to her. Just like that, her plans flipped from a week-long visit to a full-month stay.





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