Stranded With Her Rescuer. Nikki Logan
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.
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.