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
