Northern Exposure. Debra Lee Brown
to lie, stick as close to the truth as possible. She’d read that once in a detective novel.
“No,” she said. “Right here in Alaska. In the, uh, arctic.”
“No kidding?” Joe smiled, his eyes glittering appreciatively in the last of the light. It was the first smile she’d seen from him, and a little shiver raced through her. Things were back on track.
“Anyway, about that bull…” She pushed the map toward him again.
“You must be pretty famous, then.”
“Who, me? No, not at all. I’m just another photographer.” She pointed to the spot on the map where they’d last seen the bull, but Joe Peterson wasn’t looking at the map. He was looking at her.
“I’ll have to disagree with you, Wendy.” He said her name as if it were a foreign word. “It would take one hell of a photographer, wildlife or otherwise, to shoot pictures of penguins in Alaska.”
Why was he so antagonistic? What did he care if she had or hadn’t photographed—
“Because, Wendy—” there it was again “—there aren’t any penguins in Alaska.”
“There…aren’t?”
“They’re a southern hemisphere species. Any wildlife photographer would know that.” He pushed away from the deck and started back inside.
She followed him. “All right, I lied. So what? I still need to get those photos for the magazine, and to do that I’ll need to find that buck or bull or whatever it is again, or another one like it.”
He marched into the kitchen and started washing their supper dishes as if she wasn’t even there, banging plates around, sloshing water out of the sink.
She muscled in beside him and spread the map out on the dish drainer. “You’re right. I don’t know anything about penguins, okay? But I do know that there are only a handful of woodland caribou in Alaska. They’re rare, elusive, completely unlike the native species that roams the tundra. No one has ever photographed them before.”
“There’s a reason for that,” he said, and plopped the dish he was working on back in the water. “It’s dangerous. The males are rogues. They’re skittish as hell and thrive in cliff settings just like the one you nearly got us both killed on.”
She couldn’t think about that. “I need those pictures. It’s important. I’m not asking you to help me, I’m simply asking you to show me on this map where I might find more caribou, bulls especially.”
He snorted and went back to his dishwashing. She noticed how strong his hands were, how tanned they looked against the white plastic plates. For a millisecond she recalled them on her body that afternoon. In a blood-heating thought that had nothing to do with photography, she wondered what the contrast would be like of his bronze hands against her bare white skin.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, and grabbed a towel. “That bull we saw today, along with any others in the area, will have bolted to the other side of the reserve. You can’t drive there. You’d have to go on foot.” He gave her a once-over, his eyes lingering for a second on her mouth. “A woman like you would never make it.”
She knew it was Joe Peterson, game warden, standing before her, saying the words, but it was Blake Barrett’s voice she heard in her head.
“Oh, really?” She stormed out of the kitchen, slapped the map on the coffee table—which, earlier, she’d moved out of the way—and proceeded to make up the sofa bed with the sheets he’d delivered.
Joe leaned in the door frame and watched her. The longer he looked at her, the angrier she got. What was it about men that they assumed—assumed without even knowing her—that she wasn’t up to the task at hand, no matter what that task happened to be?
From something as simple as carting out the garbage to something as complex as managing a runway shoot, or as challenging as finding a couple of caribou in the mountains—guys like Blake Barrett, and now Joe Peterson, thought she was helpless.
Well, hide and watch, boys.
She snapped the crisp white sheet over the foam mattress.
Hide and watch.
Joe thrashed around in bed until the top sheet was twisted around his legs like a rope. He ripped it from his body and tossed it aside, then punched up the pillows, ramming his head into them like a Dall sheep in full rut.
It was no good.
He’d been lying there for the past hour and a half, wide awake. The bright-green numbers on the digital clock by the bed read just past two in the morning. After their conversation on the deck, which had turned into an argument in the kitchen, he’d left his overnight guest to fend for herself and had retreated to the bedroom to sleep.
Only sleep hadn’t come. He’d reread the tabloid article he’d found in the back bedroom, paying particular attention to the reporter’s assessment of Willa Walters—the woman who was sleeping on his sofa bed. He knew these kinds of newspapers twisted the facts to suit their story and sensationalized every tidbit. All the same, he couldn’t get the sordid details out of his mind. He couldn’t shrug it off and let it go.
The other thing he couldn’t let go of was the idea that the two of them weren’t alone out here. He’d definitely seen a man in the woods that afternoon. On the hike back to the station earlier that evening, he could have sworn that someone was following them. It could be a poacher, as he’d first suspected, or maybe a lost tourist. Hell, for all he knew it could be a tabloid reporter following the Walters story all the way to Alaska, though he didn’t think it very likely.
He rolled onto his stomach into a sprawl, working to get comfortable, forcing all thoughts of mystery men and lying photographers from his mind. He willed himself to sleep. A few minutes later, relaxed at last, he was almost there, hovering on the edge.
Then he heard it, the faint creak of board outside on the deck.
A second later he was up, pulling on jeans and a shirt in the dark, scrambling for his boots, taking care to be as quiet as possible. He realized his heart was beating fast, much faster than normal, but it wasn’t because he feared what was out there.
He’d run into all kinds of things in the night out here—hikers, department personnel on reconnaissance, even wildlife photographers. Most of the time it was animals: a disoriented grizzly, groggy from hibernation, ambling onto the deck, raccoons digging in his trash bin, the odd moose or mountain lion. None of them were dangerous if you respected their space.
No, the reason for his accelerated heart rate wasn’t that he feared for his own safety. He did, however, fear for the safety of the woman sleeping in his front room. More accurately, he feared she’d wake up and do something stupid that would land her in trouble.
That creaking board wasn’t a figment of his imagination.
Joe stepped lightly down the darkened hallway, peering into the bathroom and kitchen, and out the kitchen windows before slipping silently into the front room.
His house guest was asleep, the covers pulled over her head. Everything was quiet except for the nighttime sounds of crickets and a light wind breezing through the trees. Joe moved to the window and looked out.
He stood, frozen in place, for a full minute, his gaze sweeping the deck, the steps leading up to it, and the forest beyond. A sliver of moon poked through the clouds, casting an eerie light on the trees, painting every surface ghostly gray.
Light exploded from the room’s overhead fixture.
Joe whirled toward the switch.
“What’s up?” Wendy leaned sleepily against the wall flanking him, squinting against the light, her hand still on the switch.
In a lightning-fast move, he flicked it off, grabbed her around the waist and backed them away from the window.
“Hey,