Stranded With Her Rescuer. Nikki Logan
‘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